True Stories Told Live at AWF 17

The 18th Auckland Writers Festival has sailed into town, bigger and richer than ever: more than the ocean liner it felt like to me last year, an entire flotilla experience. Books, songs, lunches, salons in the square, a street festival, and the clincher, a sail around the Hauraki Gulf.

I'm going to say that the barge of beaten gold with purple sails in the flotilla has to be the Gala Night with its True Stories Told Live, for whose story is synonymous with applying a smidgin of artistry to your truth if not Cleopatra? For those unfamiliar with the format, the gala features eight writers telling a seven minute true story, or mostly true story, on a theme; this year the theme was "The heart of the matter".

"The heart is the first organ in the human embryo to form. It starts from two small blood-filled tubes and ties itself into an elaborate four-chambered knot. It gives rise to the first cadence we ever hear and the last." These were the first lines of the evening's first story, told by that rare soul, poet and medical doctor Glenn Colquhoun. Then it turned into poetry, a mix of English poetry and the Maori poetic tradition, two small blood-filled tubes which he wanted to tie together "to give rise to a new life". The story-poem was for his great-great-great-grandmother Mary, who had given away her out-of-wedlock baby to a woman who married into the Colquhoun family in Scotland. "I have come 200 years to wake you from your sleep", he distilled for us from the te reo which, following tradition, he sang.

I found myself wishing I could have seen his performance without the glaring, gigantic, electronic image on the big screen which hung above him. He needed to be in his real dimension only, a man, a vast empty stage, something happening that was akin to sacred.

You might be getting the impression that Glenn Colquhoun was the storyteller who most impressed me, and you'd be right. But they were all wonderful.

Glenn Colquhoun

The Irish writer Anne Enright, known for her intelligent, unflinching novels, the 2007 Booker Prize winner The Gathering for one, was rounder (no, I don't mean plump, I mean not angular), funnier and more mischievous than I had imagined her. Her haircut was positively Tin Tin like (a compliment) and her story came from a place in her past, a headland north of Dublin where her family had a house, "some said chalet, more of a shack", and which also housed a lunatic asylum.

Anne Enright

Esteemed theologian and NZ treasure Lloyd Geering (Pip Muir's announcement in her introduction that he was 99 years old was met with a round of applause-- lesson to myself: if you want to be reassured about not losing cachet with age, hang out at writers festivals) told a wonderful story about a trip from Beirut to Baghdad by bus, back when Iraq was still called Mesopotamia. I couldn't stop looking at his limpid eyes behind the glasses, as guileless as children's, and thinking of what Bruce Chatwin said: only the very young and the very old should be allowed to tell their dreams.

Lloyd Geering (photo W. Nichol)

Fijian Kiwi Gina Cole was greeted with a grand round of applause, to my especial pleasure. Gina won the first creative writing contest we ran with Alternative Bindings for the Auckland Pride Festival, and now her first published book of stories, Black ice, is in our collection and was also an Auckland Libraries Top 100 choice for 2016. Her story was about even longer ago than that, her first year at Auckland Uni, a story of misadventure and friendship, wry and warm, impeccably told.

Gina Cole

James Shapiro, Shakespeare scholar from Brooklyn, was the funniest storyteller, as the Brooklyn in his bio might have suggested, as might also the topic, his "harrible" (as they say in Brooklyn) early experiences with Shakespearean productions, studies, and one particular professor.

James Shapiro (photo Mary Cregan)

Ivan Coyote! Shout out to Ivan Coyote! Shiny as a Swiss knife, as an old manager of mine used to say (not about me). An important story and a wonderful story, as are all the stories in The tomboy survival guide, which I'm reading right now, told by a pro. A true pro, I mean: as well as being a writer, Ivan has long been using storytelling to explore gender and identity. Also a person in a notable state of true being, I also mean, after having met them at the Gala Night After Party. Go see Ivan Coyote!

Ivan Coyote (photo J Tymkov)

Mpho Tutu van Furth told a beguiling story about the three princes in her life. The first was "Red rental shoes" who gave her her first real kiss, the second was an English boyfriend of the so very English ways, so odd for apartheid-era South Africa, especially considering that they included cutting the grass in her family's front garden in Soweto, prompting the neighbours to say "Trust the Tutus to be the only family with a white gardener!", and the third, why, "The third was when I fell on one knee to ask Marcelline to marry me".

Inspector Rebus's Ian Rankin closed with a story which started with a poetry contest in high school and the book he got from the library (silent cheer from me) and ended with this wisdom worthy of a writer, a writer of mysteries, no less: "Fiction has to be credible, the real world does not."

Sir Lloyd Geering at AWRF 2013: "How Humans Made God"

There aren't a lot of attractions which can inspire me to make an exception to my Never-Early-on-Sunday rule, but Lloyd Geering delivering the AWRF's Michael King Memorial Lecture, introduced by Brian Boyd, is one of them. How could I miss the chance to hear the theologian who's been called "the devil incarnate" and "the new Galileo" for saying "Of course, Man has no immortal soul"?

My notes say there were 1200 people present; although I didn't note how I knew. I wasn't counting, and I can't believe that Brian Boyd, who introduced the lecture, would have been reciting the latest capted tweets about the session as some AWRF presenters were doing. What I do know is that -- and I can't swear it was the only time this happened at the festival, because of course I couldn't be at all sessions, but it was certainly the only occasion on which I witnessed it -- the applause which started up with the last line of Prof. Boyd's introduction didn't just increase, but doubled, when Lloyd Geering emerged from the wings and stepped up to the lectern.

"The assertion that humans made God is one that only a century ago most people would have found blasphemous and even now most people consider silly and absurd," he began, by way of leading into a discussion of the notable thinkers from the mid-nineteenth century and beyond who have been his inspiration for just such an assertion.

He took us from Hegel ("the first philosopher to say God is dead was not Nietzsche but Hegel, and he did this by introducing to the Western mind the notion of historical development, thus preparing the way for evolution") to Karl Marx, who saw man moving towards the classless society, and then on to David Strauss, who revolutionised the study of the New Testament, in particular the historical investigation of Jesus, and, finally and above all, to Ludwig Feuerbach, "the first theologian to assert we humans made God".

Geering's three revolutionaries:  Copernicus in cosmology, who revolutionised our idea of the Cosmos; Darwin in biology, who revolutionised our idea of our origins; and Feuerbach in theology, who "revolutionised our understanding of religion by turning religion upside down".

Feuerbach said that man created God as an idea in the human mind. It was a creation was made possible by the evolution of language. "Language above all differentiates us from the apes," says Geering. "Language enables people to construct a thought world, a world that can be passed on to future generations. We call it 'culture'."

"This world evolved and is still evolving in tandem with the world of language. Language began 50,000 years ago, by naming objects. Things which could not be seen but only felt took longer to name."

"It's misleading to use the terms 'religion' and 'science' in speaking of the primitive world. Gods were as much a creation of primitive science as of primitive religion in that they explained the mysteries of the natural world."

"The cultural age of the gods lasted a very long time, but a time arrived when the gods ceased to be the most convincing way of explaining the world." Geering dates the birth of God to 500 BC, the era of the Jewish prophets, the first appearance of the commandment  'Thou shalt have no other gods but me'. "It is here that their word for God assumed the status of a proper name."

I liked his take on the Origin Story. "In the old days, a thesis didn't have to be proved, it just had to make sense. And this story made eminent sense."

Religion, Geering postulates, is really anthropology, or, as he quotes Feuerbach, "We project onto God all the talents we would like to possess".

God played a powerful role in taking us to the modern world. "The idea of God is great", Geering says, "and it enabled people to believe that they lived in a universe and not a multiverse. Feuerbach said it allows us to live life to the fullest by learning how to embody our highest values."

"I say," says this intrepid 95-year-old, possibly the only person I've known of in a developed country to have faced a charge of heresy (not quite "The Spanish Inquisition!" but certainly suggestive, nonetheless...), "the idea of God has done its work and it's up to us to shoulder the responsibilities we once expected a heavenly parent to bear".

AWRF 2012: The God Matter

This was a Tri-Professor event, with Tom Bishop, Professor of English at the University of Auckland (where one of his regular courses is "Stages of Religion"), chairing a discussion between visiting US Prof. Lawrence Krauss, author of A Universe from Nothing, and Lloyd Geering, Emeritus Professor at Victoria University and author of Wrestling with God, on the need for God in the 21st century and beyond. Jonny from Central City Library reports:
 
During this session Krauss and Geering debated the role that religion has played in the development of science. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, currently a Professor of Physics at Arizona State University, argued that religion had only ever been an impediment to science, and that it was immaterial that many great scientists had held Christian beliefs.
Geering argued that the Christian concept of ‘unity’ of the universe was essential to the development of scientific thought. Geering also believes that Christian tradition plays in an important role in providing a foundation for modern society’s moral structures.

Although Geering in his writings has departed from a concept of a Christian god, he still believes that Christian values and a ‘modern’ concept of god are essential to Society’s existence, and that the meaning and morals of life can be found in the teachings of the Bible. He drew attention to the ‘wisdom’ of the Book of Ecclesiastes. His idea of God seems to consist of the idea of unity in nature and the universe.

Krauss dismissed any idea of the value of the Bible outright. Through science, rational thought will lead us to meaning in life and provide us with the tools we need to survive as a species. Science, Krauss believes, can lead civilisation into a ‘post-religious’ world. It is in this world that rationalism and empiricism will provide humanity with structure and meaning.

Although the two speakers fundamentally agreed that Christian concepts of God and spirituality are out of date, there was no agreement between them on the ongoing value of Christian or any type of religious belief systems.