I came to recognize something about where my storytelling craft currently stands and where it is moving towards. Throughout the day, as I began looking through a lot of the content in my spoken word and hip hop music, I noticed not only that a lot of the messages are mirror images of one another but that even the approach the content takes to getting to the meat of their message is the same. I think this has to do a lot with where I have been both mentally and spiritually in my life.
For a long time now I have been on this quest to identify myself, and my relationship to the world(A quest that I don't see ending anytime soon). That quest, for the past couple of years, has taken a large focus on what it means to make(as well as how to make) the decision to stand as being authentically yourself(on the inside and outside) in both this society and the larger world(whether you really know yourself or not). A by-product of this focus has been that I have come to find and explore my own voice, which may sound weird to some. But there has been more moments then I can count when something beyond me speaks through my voice. When that happens, although I know it's not me speaking, it produces this refreshing feeling of hearing my own voice speak for the first time. It's similar to the feeling that you get after holding your breath underwater for a long time and finally surfacing to grasp for air, or the feeling you get when you step out of an incredibly hot car after being in it for hours on end.
Yet, the Spirit seems(throughout this year) to have moved my craft into a new terrain. In this terrain, I have been walking on the road of authenticity in my everyday life, instead of in the surreal or abstract sense that derives from my everyday life. As I've been on this path, I've noticed a slow but steady shift(through pieces like TV Empowers Me to the most recent piece I've done titled Oppositional Attitude) towards writing out of the current real life experience. That's not to say that I won't be producing those surreal and abstract type of pieces anymore, but that even those pieces(because of how they are beginning to walk into my day to day reality) are changing, as they are being put into the whole experience of life. The reason why I often wrote and will continues to write with such fantasy was because for a time period I didn't know how to mentally deal with much of this reality without looking at it from a lens of pure imagination. It was(and still is) my way of taking the world out of it's actual setting and putting it into a fictional setting that makes the world easier to reach out to and understand.
But that is beginning to gradually change. For the world that I used to mostly only reach out to before, I now see within the presence of what's happening in my life right now. I am living the path that I would only dream or idealize about being on before. And as this living has been happening. I am more freely able to see the connection between the day to day recognition and deeper rooted insights, which gives more a grounded breath to the stories told through me.
This might be a better way to explain this. In Speak Life Storytellers(The storytelling performance group I am in) we have three types of stories that we address:
Truly Fantastic: Stories which are not necessary true/non-fiction in terms of it's literal presentation but in the core of the message/theme that it's conveying.
Fantastically True: Stories that seem so incredible that they seem unreal even through they are.
True Stories: The straightforward, honest (yet still both imaginative and creative expressed) stories of life.
The stories that I have been telling have been at large both Fantastically True and Truly Fantastic, but have been less True Stories. Yet it is the True Stories that bridge the Fantastically True with the Truly Fantastic, or at least that is what the Spirit seems to have been saying to me. So like what I have always fallen back to doing, I will follow that voice of the Spirit. It's should be interesting to see what shall be forming out of this ongoing shift in the stories being presented through my spoken word and rap. Whatever it is, it shall always remain a channel for Love and Honestly. That is something that will never change.
The Movement Continues...
- Rhetorical Artz
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