On Saturday I was fortunate enough to see writer Robert Macfarlane and singer Johnny Flynn’s Lost in the Cedar Wood live show. It is still echoing with me a week later. Not only was it a joyous performance and celebration of folk music, but the evening had me reflecting on the nature and enduring power of stories and storytelling.
The pair wrote the album Lost in the Cedar Wood during the first lockdown and then recorded it once restrictions eased. Partly inspired by what we were all experiencing in those strange early months of the pandemic, the album also drew influence from The Epic of Gilgamesh.
The live performance at Union Chapel – the last night of a week-long tour - saw Macfarlane and Flynn tell not only the Gilgamesh story itself, but also of its creation, loss and finally rediscovery in the 1850s. This storytelling was punctuated by Flynn’s powerful performances of songs from the album.
Macfarlane and Flynn found our own present day situation echoing what is told in Gilgamesh, the eldest surviving work of literature. Enduring the trials of sadness and grief, the destruction that the arrogance of humankind brings to the world we live in – all these themes can be found in the four-thousand-year-old poem. But Gilgamesh also tells of mortality understood, wisdom gained and the idea that we can walk a different path to the one we have set out for ourselves.
These contrasting themes – hopelessness and hope, destruction and creation, foolishness and wisdom – run throughout Lost in the Cedar Wood. If this all sounds overly dense and threatens to put you off listening to the album, then don’t let it. The music sounds great without any knowledge of how it was created or what inspired it. Flynn’s voice – as strong and weathered as ancient oak – and talented musicianship combine with Macfarlane’s quicksilver pen to produce a superb modern folk album.
At the same time, however, your experience is only enhanced if you know the story behind Lost in the Cedar Wood’s creation. Lyrics take on new meanings. Alternate understandings of the songs reveal themselves. The album, like the poem which helped to inspire it, becomes many-formed. It can be approached from different angles, yielding new things each time.
The ability of music, and stories, to offer myriad meanings and to take on new forms is of course not unique to Lost in the Cedar Wood. But, for me, what Saturday’s show reinforced was the particular ability of stories to endure and reinvent themselves. What it also showed me was the power of good storytelling; the magic tricks that it can bring about. The fact that almost a week later, I still feel buoyed up by the show, filled with a kind of energy I cannot quite explain, is testament to this magic. There are two things in particular that grew upon me as I listened on Saturday, and as I thought in the days that followed.
The first is this. Despite the Union Chapel, and everyone who was in it, being separated by great stretches of time and distance and language from those who would have heard the Gilgamesh story in ancient Babylonia and Assyria, we were not really that far from them at all. The thread of the story tied itself around them thousands of years ago, and around us now. It pulled us together as Flynn sang and Macfarlane spoke. The story came alive for us as it came alive for those long-ago listeners. It lived now as it lived then. And so by that re-living we come closer to them, and things like time hardly seemed to matter at all.
That was the more immediate feeling. I experienced it as I listened, and then began to reflect on and understand it once the listening was done.
The other thing is this.
That a story told aloud, to people, is never the same thing twice.
The broad details might be the same, the plot similar, but the story will not be told in quite the same way. Each of Macfarlane and Flynn’s shows would have been unique, even if the words they spoke each time were from a script. But the way they said them, and the way those words were received would have not been the same. They would have been shaped by the unique relationship between teller and listener, each one reacting to the other, creating a kind of duet which were it to take a physical form would be sinuous. Each telling creates something that exists only once in its first form and then vanishes forever.
But what that telling does is spark other stories in its turn. Somebody might have gone home and told their own version of Gilgamesh to somebody else. I am telling the story of how the show made me feel and what it made me think. And that is how the likes of Gilgamesh endure. Because they have that ability to be retold, the power to provoke thought. That is what stories told aloud can do.
This leads me to one last, brief, point.
In Britain, we do not tell each other enough stories.
By this I do not mean plays or audiobooks or films or TV shows. What I mean is something you probably don’t experience unless you are a parent or a young child: the telling of stories aloud. Perhaps we consider it embarrassing, or childish, and so we turn to the list of things above instead, so that we can feel grown up.
But telling stories is not childish. It is simply human. It has a great power – one that Flynn and Macfarlane showed us in the Union Chapel, with their story-song. A power we do not utilise enough.
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