Recently, I become acquainted with a storyteller named Haalda.
This storyteller uses the same coworking space as me, where she attracts a fair amount of attention, because of her beauty (she is blonde-haired and very thin), and the way she dresses. She pays a lot of attention to fashion trends. She attempts to emulate them, and she is capable of discussing these attempts with other young women who are similarly fashion-conscious. Observing her, I’ve realized that a certain amount of standoffishness can be self-protective, because she’s somebody who a lot of people would want to know, and if she was too open then people would just waste her time constantly, and she’d never get any work done.
In her case, she just seems unfriendly. She doesn’t ask people about their lives, doesn’t try to remember their names, doesn’t attend the weekly kaffeeklatch, and wears her headphones constantly.
But I am obnoxious, and we sit near each other at this coworking space where I go every day. So I ask about her project. She’s trying to write a novel, for which she already has a book deal. The novel seems fine (it’s about a demonic ingenue). Probably it’ll be a huge hit.
Anyway, with me and Haalda there was a year-long process of me learning to breach her layer of reserve. I don’t want to give the impression that she would just spill her secrets to anyone who asked.
I should mention that Haalda is a demon (it’s really not uncommon to meet demons in San Francisco).
And back in Hell, she was a famous storyteller. She knew a lot of stories of all kinds. Stories about angels and demons and mythic heroes, but also many tales about real people who’d actually existed. She was a fiend for tales. And this was Hell—they didn’t have phones or the internet or even TV—so people spent a lot of time telling each other stories. And she was really good at it. She could hold a room’s attention from an early age.
“It’s not hard,” she told me.
“Isn’t it?” I said.
“No…” she said. “Why would it be hard? Think about high school musicals—Have you ever been to a high school theater production that really bombed?”
“No…” I said.
“Because why would it?” she said. “If people try really hard to entertain their community and repay two hours of their time—why would they fail?”
“But people do fail. Like with stand-up comedy, people fail.”
“It’s not hard to make people laugh,” she said. “We all know people who are really funny in real life. People tell jokes to their friends all the time, and everybody laughs.”
“Okay, but…surely your craft was more complicated than you’re letting on,” I said.
“No,” she said. And now she got a really dreamy, wistful expression on her face. “It’d be just like this. Somebody would come to me, and they’d say, I just want to know what you do? And what I do is no different from what anyone else does. The only complication is that if you’re telling a story to men, then you need to take precautions. Because men have power. So you need to be careful where you tell stories. Hopefully you do it in public, in a hall where there’s also women. And you create some emotional distance between your story and the man’s ego. That’s the most complicated part, just learning how to tell stories in a way that won’t get you killed.”
“Because you offended someone?” I said.
“Yeah, because if some powerful person feels like you insulted them, then that could be really bad.”
“How do you avoid that?”
“It’s surprisingly difficult to avoid being offensive,” she said. “I never intended to create controversy. My perspective is that I just want to give people whatever they’ll most enjoy. But what they secretly want is to be titillated. And then they’re upset about their own desires, and they take it out on you.”
“So your choice was to just be boring or…yeah I see what you mean.”
“Do you?” she said.
“No not really,” I said. “Couldn’t you just tell them a story about a brave prince who was virile and rampaged through their enemies or whatever?”
“No!” she said. “That would get me killed. Because if I told that kind of story, most of these princes—who were sensitive about their record in combat—would think I was insulting them.”
“I still don’t quite understand,” I said.
“Okay fine. But you’re just asking me to construct a story purely so you’ll get it. Let’s say that in our world, there is a poem about the son of Lucifer. And this kid really loves his father, and he wants Lucifer to achieve his aim to defeat God and conquer Heaven. So out of filial devotion, this son studies all the arts of war and becomes an unstoppable killing machine. It’s a very beautiful poem, so haunting. In the olden days, there were court poets who could recite this story, and we’re told that they could hold audiences spellbound. But Lucifer himself hates this story.”
“Why?”
“I think you know why.”
“Well, I’ve never heard the poem,” I said. “But I can imagine he thinks the poem is making fun of him.”
“He would never pay someone to recite this story,” she said. “But he would love if somebody composed an equally powerful story that he didn’t hate.”
“And you can’t do that?” I said.
“Sure, I could. If we were in a room together, I could tell Lucifer a story that he liked way better than this old poem.”
“How?” I said.
“I would get a read on him,” she said. “If we were in the same room. But I’d never do that. I’d never put myself in a room with Lucifer, because fuck that guy. He’s already inspired many great stories, by being such a hero. He is person from stories. You don’t tell stories to someone like that. What would be the point? Like, who cares what stories Charlemagne liked? Or what stories Alexander the Great liked?”
“But you’re saying you could’ve entertained Charlemagne if you wanted to?” I said.
“Yes!” she said. “Charlemagne was illiterate, right? I don’t know much about your history. But he was a powerful warrior. And he understood that he ought to patronize learning. But if he himself wanted to be entertained, he didn’t want to listen to The Aeneid. He’d probably want to listen to some story about a trickster who gets the better of powerful people. But you’d need to make it just unreal enough that he doesn’t feel offended. Like you’d need to say this was some story you’ve heard about, from some far off land. Or the distant past. Even in Hell, people still have nannies and wet-nurses. So demonic princes, when they were little, got entertained by all kinds of fables that their nannies told them. And if you know their history, then you kind of understand what sorts of stories they’re likely to know, so you repurpose those same stories.”
“Okay, so show me what you did,” I said.
“You had to know them,” she said. “You had to flatter them. It’s like anything else. You had to know your audience. But okay…” She took a breath. “My main client was a duke named Asmoneus. And he maintained his own court, where he patronized art and literature. But I wasn’t the kind of literature that he subsidized.”
“He didn’t subsidize you?”
“Not really,” she said. “Yes, I was a storyteller, but the implication was that he really enjoyed…something different about me. Something more personal. In reality, it wasn’t like that, and he never asked me for anything I wasn’t willing to give. But he needed to appear like he didn’t actually enjoy this supposedly-lower form of art that I did.
“So he’d ask you to tell stories to the court,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“And they would…what? It put you in a tough position. They assumed you were his mistress, and that you were reciting stories to them as a way of keeping them in line and embarrassing them.”
“They didn’t like me,” she said. “But they clapped because they were supposed to.”
“So…so what stories did you tell?”
“You wouldn’t get it,” she said. “I remember some elements. But it really wouldn’t translate. Basically, I’d tell fairy tales, but they’d be different enough that it wasn’t readily apparent what I was doing. I needed it to be different enough to avoid people making fun of him. Basically they were listening to fairy tales, and enjoying them, but if he’d been a Prince who publicly listened to fairy tales, people would’ve laughed.”
“So…okay,” I said. “I still wish that I could understand what you were doing. Like, what about your performance was bringing this demonic prince to his knees?”
“I was just the best,” she said. “Whatever his nanny had done that kept him enraptured when he was six, I did the same thing now, but it was incomparably harder because now he had fewer illusions, so it was harder for him to lose himself in the dream of the story and imagine himself as a hero. He couldn’t do that with this Son of Lucifer poem, because he understood that he wasn’t an ideal warrior-prince. But with my stories, it was different, because whatever I was talking about, whatever ideal I expounded, was something he could still achieve. So each time, during my stories, there’d be a moment where we’d make eye contact, and he would see a vision of himself as someone truly excellent, truly wise, who embodied the best of whatever it was possible to be.”
“So how did it end?” I said.
“Well, you know…this poem about Lucifer’s son. This beautiful, haunting poem. There’s a man who is excellent at reciting this poem. And Asmoneous kept this man at our court. Each year, we’d hear a recitation. With this poem the power comes from the tragedy. Lucifer‘s son was so inspired by his father’s colossal, world-beating selfishness. So the son, out of love for that example, just wanted to give his father everything he wanted. But it was never enough to win the father’s love, precisely because the father was such a self-absorbed asshole. You know, it’s a very powerful poem, but it’s old. The language is old. And it’s hard for contemporary listeners to feel its power. But there was a man named Torvinn who had worked to master the art of making it new again. And he gave a performance, once a year, that was attended by all the court, including by Asmoneous. It was in a fine hall, and the recitation took several hours, and when it was over, there was applause. He did do an excellent job, and I was genuinely moved to tears by the performance. It was truly awe-inspiring. But it was old. It was from a previous time. And I knew Asmoneous—I knew that this performance didn’t really touch him. And that was fine. He was just another prince, patronizing a performance he didn’t really get. But then he did something. He raised his hand.”
“And what happened?” I said.
“Asmoneous asked for an encore,” she said. “He wanted to close out the evening with a story. And he gave me the floor.”
“Oh my god,” I said. “And what story did you tell?”
“I told a story about Lucifer’s bastard son, a minor character in this epic. This bastard son is the villain of the epic, but the genius of the original epic is that this bastard son is exactly like Lucifer. He’s so petty and aggrieved. I told a story about Lucifer’s bastard son being forced to sit through a performance he didn’t really enjoy, about this fucking hero, the main son, and how great he was. Oh my god, and then, in my story, Lucifer’s bastard son finds a cunning way of putting Lucifer’s legitimate son on trial. Then, during the trial, the bastard son cross-examines him, using his moment in court to explain how the main son is so terrible and such a fake. But the ending of my story was really the best, and to understand the ending you need to know the original poem. And in this poem the implication is that Lucifer really prefers the bastard son and doesn’t like the main son, but isn’t allowed to show it. Anyway, in my story, Lucifer is the judge in this trial. He’s being asked to choose between his two sons, he mercilessly berates the bastard son, picking apart all of the boy’s faults. But when he pronounces the sentence of exile, he closes the judgment with a smile. And uses the exact same words that God had used to condemn Lucifer in the original poem, You are unfit to serve.”
She paused for a second, smiling at the memory. “When Torvinn had recited those words an hour ago, there was no response—just the same old rote formula, something we’d heard before—but now when I spoke the same words, the hall was dead silent. You could hear a pin drop, and the silence spanned ten full seconds. Just nobody saying anything, while I stood there, alone in the circle of light. Asmoneous was about to stand and signal them to applaud, but I made eye contact with him, and he waited. And then, this woman in the corner, the mistress of a very minor court official, just stood up. She was shaking, and she stood up, applauding furiously. And then they all began to stand, all these little, minor people in the audience, who had no power in that fucking court. And then Asmoneous stood, and all the rest of them too. But the acclamation continued for many minutes, far outlasting anything they’d given Torvinn. And I knew it was genuine. I knew.”
“How?” I said.
“Because it was obvious. The energy was palpably different. Torvinn was so offended. Afterword he started a ruckus, claiming that my retelling was blasphemous and was an insult to the Hellish caste system. He said that my ‘low’ art was an incitement to rebellion, while his ‘high’ art brought people into contact with the music of the spheres. But he knew better. He knew that this Son of Lucifer poem, which was composed by anonymous storytellers in the distant past, was created by a living impulse that Torvinn had never felt. And that the living impulse, the life force, had been transferred to me. Most people didn’t understand that, but Torvinn understood. He just didn’t like the implication that he wasn’t a real artist.”
“So what happened?”
“The controversy got so big that Asmoneous issued a proclamation stating that my storytelling was an insult to his court and to the majesty of his position.
“The duke didn’t like the story you told?”
“He ended the proclamation by saying that I was unfit to serve.”
