tradition

I was visiting cousins last weekend. My wife taught them to play Cat's Cradle with a spool of yarn. Then, they taught her to play Chinese jump-rope (known in Britain as elastics), which is like hopscotch with string. Aside from the basics of four-square, I have no capacity for these games. I'm horribly uncoordinated, and I can't remember the order of the moves for the life of me.

As I watched, I wondered: How can a game be the same in different countries? How do people remember all these moves? It's as if there was a hard-drive out there, with all these wild bits of information. But it's not out there, it's in us. It seems like people have an amazing capacity to remember complicated moves, and to pass the order along to friends and family members. We carry it forward and move the information along.

That seems to be how the Bible (and the Talmud, the Vedas and the Gospels) got to us. It was a group memory, like the sequences of Cat's Cradle or a family recipe. First re-told as campfire songs in the desert, it became elaborated, recited and turned into a massive ritual, hundreds of thousands of verses long. How did people remember so much, you must think. How could they not? People can still hold on to the bizarre moves of Cat's Cradle, even with all the modern distractions: the Internet, cellphones, fast cars and music videos. In a time before electronics, people had a lot more "bandwidth" to store great stories.

Remember, humans are built for stories. We thrive on narrative. Thousands of years ago, the narratives that formed the core of the Bible helped us to make order of the world, and listening to them around a fire helped us to cope with the fears that inevitably come in the coldness and the silence of the desert. Then, something changed. We moved to towns and cities, and lost our memory. We had to write down what we knew because our lives were shifting. It's no wonder that the Talmud, millions of lines of Jewish oral law and legend, was written down as Jews migrated and urbanized. It's harder to hold on to memories in cities. There are more distractions.

A funny things happens when humans write down these oral memories. We start to forget them. That was the experience of anthropologists trying to catalog Yugoslavian epics in the twentieth century. Even as the scientists tried to copy out the epics, the story-tellers began to forget them. And these were tellers who remembered hundreds of thousands of verses by heart. On another side, writing things down seems to take away the personality of the story-telling. There's less vitality and originality, because the subtle variations of the individual teller are ironed out of the story. Think about a joke that gets written down into an email. It may be good on screen, but it lacks the punch of a gifted comedian.

Singers and other musicians know this already. Fela Kuti, the great African pop musician, refused to play songs again once he had recorded them onto albums. Spontaneity in concert wouldn't make sense at that point. An audience wouldn't be able to hear his songs freshly, but would expect the album version. I wonder if that's happened with Scripture. Have we lost something vital about the religious experience now that the words are frozen on a page? What's happening to other human knowledge, now that it's being stored on Wikipedia? Will we forget our traditions and our ways? Now you can find instructions for Cat's Cradle on the Internet.