From: SL500000@brownvm.brown.edu (Robert Mathiesen)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Grandmother Stories (Was Re: Ritualistic Questions)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 17:32:03 EST
Organization: Brown University - Providence, Rhode Island  USA
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In article <1iq66hINN2i3@gaia.ucs.orst.edu>, cassp@ucs.orst.edu (Penny Cass)
said:
>>
>>No one can *ever* say for certain what was what in the distant or immediate
>>past.  Nor can two people even get the same story when they see an
>>accident.  I just think the past is worth considering as it may give some
>>enlightenment on the present.
>
>I am sure that the past holds much for us.  Whether or not we can ever
>discover what my ancient relatives on the isle of South Uist did prior
>to the introduction of christianity is doubtful.  I can provide grand-
>mother stories, which nobody wants to hear because she never wrote
>anything down.  Besides she would have described herself as a christian
>though I doubt that many modern evangalistic reactionary christian types
>would consider her one.  Even so, her religion was more magical and
>nature oriented than many pagans I have met.>
>

Actually, to speak just for myself, I am rather fond of hearing
grandmother stories, even though I may critique them.  What we are doing
when we tell them is creating usable pasts for ourselves.  In addition
to the real past, which is so rich and so complicated that no story (and
no history text) can ever do more than select and rarrange a small part
of its reality, there is also the usable past which each of us must
construct for ourselves if we wish to become fully human.  The trick is
to bring the two into the best possible working alignment.  A critique
of one's efforts by a friendly outsider can be helpful -- even outright
skepticism can be helpful -- if it doesn't demoralize one, but leads one
to growth.

It's a bit like becoming a writer, I suppose.  Most of the writers who
have become great had a period when their work was severely criticized,
before they hit their stride or found their voice.  Some, surely, lost
heart and gave up; but without the process of criticism the ones that
continued to write wouldn't have become such good writers.

So cherish your grandmothers, and tell stories about them; I do so, too.
Just keep on working on the stories that you tell, so they don't
ossify.  Besides, the stories that your grandmothers or their daughters
told you were originally part of their own efforts to create useable
pasts for themselves, a generation or two ago; and the same was true of
the stories *they* had heard in the first instance from their own
grandmothers and great grandmothers as these more distant foremothers,
in their turn, were creating their own usable pasts in long bygone
years.  The process reaches as far back as our written records of anything
go, and it is one of the more important things each new person does as
he or she grows in wisdom and stature.  Someday we too will be the
subject of such stories; and could we hear them now, we would surely
say, "But it wasn't *anything* like that at all!"  We would be both
wrong and right as we said this.  -- Robert

Robert Mathiesen, Brown University, SL500000@BROWNVM