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Clayton Hardiman - Speech written for Mike Vogas |
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Imagine a night. A chilly night, probably a lot like last night. But a night with a different setting -- perhaps in a cave or out on an open plain. A night in the dawn of humanity.
Imagine a circle. A circle of human faces, illuminated by a glowing fire. Maybe it's the chill that makes them huddle closer to the fire. Or maybe it's the chorus of animal sounds somewhere out there in the darkness -- the bloodcurdling symphony of predator and prey.
In that human circle, in the flickering light of the fire, you can see the rising clouds of breath.
And then one of them begins to speak -- to weave together a tale of what happened that day or the previous week or maybe even the week before. A story of the hunt, perhaps, or maybe of a great hunter, one who has long since moved on to that hunting ground among the stars.
This isn't just speculation. This is our common legacy.
As a race of beings, we've been telling stories from our infancy.
Aesop? Homer? Forget about them. They're latecomers to the party.
The Greek legends? The Sumerian myths? Just latter-day additions to the database.
Before the quill, before the stylus, before the alphabet, we had
stories. Before it occurred to us to pick up a stick and draw pictographs in the sand, we were sharing our memories, terrors and dreams.
Maybe it began when the human voice box evolved enough to allow us to make one grunt distinct from another.
Personally I think it began with struggle.
I suspect it began with the daily challenge of staying alive and
keeping alive those around you. Meeting that kind of challenge demands toughness, resourcefulness and luck. And toughness, resourcefulness and luck are the stuff that stories are made of.
From the parables of the Bible to the plays of Shakespeare, from Native American legends to the diary of a young girl hiding from the Nazis, stories have shaped us. They entertain us. They inspire us. They instruct us. And if we listen hard enough, they may even nudge us into understanding.
They suggest answers to the basic questions: Who are we? Where have we been? Where are we going, and what happens next?
I believe in the power of stories. They are the keys that unlock the vault of experience. They are the swinging gate in the wall separating the individual from the universal.
Without stories, we are cut off from our past, separated from our
origins, shipwrecked in the present. With no stories, we are isolated and alone.
It's no wonder then that storytelling is basic to us. It is intrinsic to who we are. It is impossible to imagine a human existence without the existence of stories.
From the very beginning, we told each other tales. Along the way,
storytellers have run a technological gauntlet. The paintbrush, the clay tablet, the papyrus. The printing press, the typewriter, the Internet.
Just 50 years ago, we had mainframe computers capable of processing millions of instructions a second. Now we hold that much computing power in the palms of our hands. Now, instead of a stick in the sand, we step through our tales with infrared points of light.
Now we tell stories of a different hunt, and we share that story
digitally -- turning ones and zeroes into color and light and sound. We have put aside the clay tablet in favor of the compact disc. And through the magic of software, we can make remote presentations by wire or wireless -- without even leaving the office.
But it's still storytelling. The flickering light in the face of the storyteller is more likely to come from a computer monitor than a camp fire. But it's still the same art.
I believe in that art. I have been blessed to be a storyteller. I have been blessed to record and share the experiences of people and organizations in a community I cherish. I have been blessed to work with other people -- writers, photographers, camera operators and others -- whose talents I respect and admire. And the ride just keeps getting more exciting.
But most of all I have been blessed to take part in a noble profession. People place their lives and their memories into my hands, trusting that I will do them justice. It is an awesome, humbling experience. |
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