Bushtuckering and Solpersteine
Victoria Ward, Monday, November 16, 2009

I’ll end with the Solpersteine.

Let me start with a handout I’ve been writing on story practice – partly because it needs to be written and used, and partly because I’m grooving into find a book voice that I like. I discovered in writing it (writing as discovery is important for me – I rarely know what I think or feel until I’ve fumbled to find ways to express it) that I really do prize the gathering in of raw materials. Someone once introduced me to the world of bushtuckering (foraging for carrots and potatoes in the autumn ploughed fields of Suffolk in our case, so pretty safe bushtuckering). And I think that’s a bit what it’s like gathering the raw ingredients from which to stew up a story soup that will warm people. Here’s a bit of the section on gathering…

pebbles not polished gems

There’s a Danish storyteller called Svend-Erik Engh who suggests that organizational stories should be less like the buffed and polished gems of organizational case studies, and more like the driftwood, pebbles and shells you might pick up as you wander down the beach or along a river bank – something that appeals to you, that you’d like to have for a while, that you’ll eventually put back down and move on from as you comb the piece for more things.

Looking for raw materials for stories is a bit like that, and as your discernment and noticing grows you’ll be surprise how useful almost everything is. An object, a startling image, a good story told to you over a sandwich (food is a very good friend of stories), something that stuck from the last heated meeting with an environmental group, a striking and slightly unusual metaphor, a common cultural reference (childhood: Star Wars, topical:True Blood, The Wire, West Wing) or good proverb or fictional analogy that will bring something to life; a surprising sound (what does your organization sound like at work?). It’s easier than ever to catch pictures or short videos, or sound clips on your phone as you go about your working day. The found materials that can be assembled into new versions for different settings is lying everywhere in your private and professional life, in your childhood memories as much as in what you’re experiencing today.

spotting good practices and ideas

As well as foraging for your own raw materials, prick up your ears and notice good telling among friends and colleagues, but also in other places: what was it that made you stop buttering your toast and listen to the journalist when she was talking about the latest Pakistan suicide bombing; why did you get bored last way through the last Hollywood blockbuster; what is it about the keynote presentation at the last conference you were at that had you gripped; when was the turning point in a sticky meeting with an environmental groups, and was it a story that lay behind the turn; what was it that made you read on past the first sentence of the last junk email from a dying widow is some obscure African state with millions to bequeath you; the brand stories that make you want to read on. Collect everything.

And if you have 11 hours to spare (a long car journey?) give Bob Geldof’s audio CD ‘Geldof in Africa’ a go. As an example of sustained telling that draws on an extraordinary range of personal experience and passion, observation, historical research, myth, evidence, fact, it’s hard to beat.

Solpersteine

So in a spirit of noticing, but not quite knowing what to do with the noticings, I was volunteering in Highgate Cemetery this weekend. It’s heartening to have to offer nothing but some enthusiasm, a bit of time and a willingness to get wet while pulling out brambles.

The collisions and bouncings of stories were really noticeable to me. The weather, for a start, was a kind of blustery rainy kind of weather that had the trees lurching from side to side. Very cemetery. A good start to a TV story whose opening scene is a working part of volunteers in a cemetery.

Then there were the graves of course. We got lucky, finding a crack between two shifted stones, which we peered down with a torch to see a metal studded coffin six or eight feet down. The vault was a family vault, of a wife who’d died aged sixty, a son in his late 20’s and the father, a ships surgeon who’d travelled the world who lived to a ripe old age of 86 or so. He retired in his 50’s I noticed, so he had a long, and perhaps lonely retirement (or is there a whole untold story there about a housekeeper or nurse for his wife turned constant companion).

One of the volunteers had come armed with a mushroom book too, and we found huge great gilled oyster mushrooms, and something rather gorgeous, reddish and trumpet like that is apparently hallucingenic. Fungal stories then.

When we huddled into a hut for a cup of tea, all sorts of other stories slid out and warmed us. Other working party outings, people’s own stories, the volunteer leader’s reminiscences about the first cemetery management plan she proposed 35 years back (very innovative to close the cemetery and limit it to guided tours), her recent cemetery plan, huge stories about the towering personality of the chair of trustees and her tooth and nail fight to save the cemetery from redesignation or being invaded by tourists in search of a quick thrill, Audrey Nifnigger (Time Traveller’s Wife) and her research into her recent book, set there (she trained as a tour guide too).

Perhaps it was the setting, but I was more acutely aware of the thing that Mary Alice Arthur calls the story field, that magnetic field where all kinds of stories past and present, collide with each other and activate each other.

I got back with wet muddy knees, and stumbled over an article on Solpersteine, a memorial project by Gunter Demnig that’s been running since the mid 1990’s. It’s worth reading the whole article, but here’s an extract:

Each stone consists of a small brass plaque mounted on a 10×10cm cube of concrete, with the name, birthdate and fate of a victim embossed in it – by hand, because Demnig sees this personal touch as part of the process of transforming the victim back from a number, mechanically destroyed in a concentration camp, to a real person with a name and a story. Despite their name – Stolperstein means ‘stumbling block’ – the stones are mounted flush with the pavement, in front of the last place in which the victim lived, that is, the last home they chose for themselves. They’re not meant to make you literally trip over them. Rather, as a schoolboy working on the project described their purpose in an interview: ‘no, you don’t trip and fall down, you trip with your head and your heart’.

This differentiates the small, scattered markers from the large memorials in which remembrance has become ritualised, and makes the enormous scale of the atrocities easier to grasp. Ten million is an abstract number; seeing reminders throughout the city, throughout the day, shows that these were ordinary people leading ordinary lives among their friends and neighbours. The very act of bending down to read the inscriptions is a kind of reverence, a brief interruption of one’s everyday routine rather than a planned remembrance.

I really like that. The very act of bending down, and ‘no, you don’t trip and fall down, you trip with your head and your heart’.

A storyfield indeed.

Back to bushtuckering.