Folklore

[sdi]

I dreamed that I was a senior in high school and I showed up at some nearby after-school type of program, held I assume in the basement of a church or community center or something. When I got there, it turned out that I was much older than all the other kids, who were all seventh- or eighth-graders. "Oh, I'm sorry," the person running the program said, "while the program is meant for both junior-high and high-school, we only really have junior-high kids this year." "It's no problem," I said, "I'll stick around anyway; I brought my laptop and I'd only be reading at home, anyway, so the change of scenery is nice." I sat at a nearby table and started reading some book of mythology or other.

Now, one entire wall of the room was a great, big bookshelf, filled with all kinds of books. I overheard one of the other kids, who looked like she was of Pacific Islander extraction, complaining, "Why do people only print stupid European books? I don't care about knights or princesses, I want to hear about my people's history!" The other kids shrugged at her. I looked up at her and asked where her people were from. "Hawaii," she said. I said I knew just the book and asked the teacher if I could hook up my laptop to the projector they had on the ceiling, and a few minutes later I was reading a book about Pele to everyone, which I had borrowed from the Internet Archive, while I put the pictures up on the wall. After the story was over, we had an impromptu discussion about folklore and why it matters.

I asked everyone, "At what times do we affect the population?" The kids inclined to answering called out, "When we're born and when we die." "Good," I said, "but you missed a time: now, in this very moment, in an ongoing manner." I emphasized that without an ongoing existence between birth and death, there's nothing to connect the two, nothing making a count at any point in time meaningful. That meaning has to come from somewhere: maybe God sustains your existence, or maybe your community sustains your existence, or maybe your existence is self-sustaining, or something, but if there's no reason for you to exist, then who cares? What's the point?

"That something which provides meaning," I said, "is called folklore. And that's why you," I pointed to the Hawaiian girl, "want stories that provide meaning to you. These aren't dead stories, after all: you take them into you, and you grow them and change them within you, and eventually you'll give new versions of those stories out again with your own meaning. For some people, your ancestry is where you find that source. I don't care much about mine, but I find meaning in the old Greek myths. But where you find meaning doesn't matter: what matters is that you do, and that you share it."

After the discussion, the person organizing the program asked me to come back the next week and read another story.

When I woke up, I laughed to myself, "Oh, dream-me is so much more eloquent than I am!" The above is my best recollection of what I said, but of course it feels pale indeed compared to whatever I said in the dream.