What the World Needs: A Circle of “Active Disenchanters”

Saturday, November 14 at 3pm Andy is moderating a NEST Fest on-line panel on “Using Storytelling for Social Justice (https://www.nestorytelling.org/using-storytelling-for-social-justice/). What follows are his ruminations on framing that discussion.

In times like these it seems inevitable for creatively engaged humans to look inward, to scrutinize why we do what we do. Are the tools I wield and the ends I pursue what the world needs right now?

The 20th century theologian Howard Thurman said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.” I’ve wrestled with that quote. I love it, but…but how can we not ask what the world needs? Thurman was a wise and strategic civil rights activist. He was one of those most responsible for bringing Gandhian nonviolence to the Black Freedom Movement in this country. He can’t really have meant for us not to ask what the world needs, can he?

Remembering that he was a theologian helps break the cipher. By “what makes you come alive,” he was getting at what most connects you to the “Life Force” in capital letters, the generative power at the heart of all we know. If storytelling is what makes you come alive, you might resonate with our ancestor Brother Blue’s response when asked once to define storytelling. He said “It’s God speaking to God about God.”

But we’re not talking here about solitary mysticism. Someone once said that the artist must draw out of their soul the correct image of the world, and use this image to band their brothers and sisters together. It’s about bringing our siblings into the circle.

But not just our contemporaries, even. Rhode Island teller Valerie Tutson has a seminal story that has stuck with me for years about her student days at Brown. One of her professors was George Houston Bass, the playwright and director who also happened to be literary executor to Langston Hughes. During one class Professor Bass wanted to make a point about bringing the ancestors into the circle, so he pulled up another chair, carefully removed an urn from his bag, and gave it the empty seat: Langston Hughes’s mortal remains! The great poet eventually found a more settled resting place, in Harlem, beneath a cosmogram in the tiles of the polished terrazzo floor of the atrium of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Another circle.

This week, I was rereading a chapter of Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World, and a phrase jumped out at me. He was referring to Frederick Douglass’s transformation from someone who was merely free and merely literate to the iconic, magic-making, transformational figure he became. Hyde writes that Douglass had to be willing to speak and write in public, which enabled him to become “the active disenchanter of his master’s world.”

“Active disenchanters.” That is what we can aspire to be. But we disenchant by weaving a different spell, enthralling our audiences with the possibility of centering the world on other values, those of our forebears, heroes personal, historical and folkloric. Values that center the earth and non-human creatures, and our children’s children’s children, who are waiting to take their part in the great eternal becoming.

Magic this powerful begins by tracing a circle, widening it, and drawing the people in.

Andy Davis has entertained audiences as far afield as Paris, Bamako, and San Diego. He lives with his wife and daughter at the foot of Mt. Chocorua, in the southeastern corner of the White Mountains, where he co-directs the World Fellowship Center, a peace and justice oriented camp and retreat center. His most treasured possessions are his bicycle and his tenor ukulele.

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