Group Presentation... Boundaries

For our presentation the other day, I wrote this story. It was the one that Kevin read (as Neil Armstrong) on Uranus. The version we read was a bit truncated so included the original one here,

This is the story:

"One day the great god of the sky, Uranus, left the sky. He went not low but high- through the trees, through the clouds, through the great wall of air. He went higher than any man and sat with the stars. There he sat until he felt weary of the cold and he decided to leave. The great god of the sky Uranus went into his bag of magic dust; he found his bag to be empty. Without that magic dust he was trapped in the sky.

Uranus called to his servant, crow, and said, “Oh crow can you bring me my magic dust so that I may return to the Earth?” And crow obeyed. The crow did not have to search far for the magical dust for the thing that gives the sky its power is the dirt. For without the dirt, without the ground, without the horizon, there would be no sky at all. Gathering some sand from a beautiful beach, the crow began to fly above the trees. He flew above the clouds, and when he reached the wall of sky he flew even higher. Crossing into the boundary, the crow joined the stars, and, for a brief moment, beheld their beauty. With a croak, the crow, servant of Uranus, suffocated and died. From then on, Uranus has been stuck with the stars, and all who wish to pass the wall of air must wear special clothing. "

I started this story by brainstorming with Bri and Chris. We knew that we needed a transition from the corporeal world to the spiritual and that we also wanted to represent the style of storytelling found in Kane's examples. By doing so, we hoped to simulate some of the oral normatives taught to us throughout our time in the class as well as exhibit the precepts in the chapter. Starting with Crow and Uranus, we knew the importance of the anthropormorphized animal and the god. We decided to make crow a messenger of Uranus which allowed us to add travel which, in turn, also gave us our border element. Having already decided to use outer space as the venue for our transformation, we knew that the crow would have to go to space.

Upon writing these elements down, I remembered that the sea, sand, and firmament were an evocative reminder of the border between people, the sky, and the sea. I decided to exploit this and add a bit of meat to dem bones. The death of the crow being a reasonable extrapolation from an organic being leaving the atmosphere, we were able to inject some humor into the piece, another big component to an oral discourse. Having the structure of a story, I began writing it with the trends of the Oral story in mind.

Early on, I knew I wanted to use a paratactic voice. This proved to be harder to do than expected. As it turns out, connectors and transitionary words have become totally technologized into my head. My natural impulse, however, is to proof these aspects out. So that was a challenge. Other than that though, this means of storytelling came rather easily to me. Maybe there is a bit of oral tradition in me after all.