Parabola's Fall 1992 issue: The Oral Tradition We were born "trailing clouds of glory," and during our childhood that trace of the sacred has blessed the process of our opening to the world around us. Now, as we enter adulthood, unless there is a new source of nourishment, this process comes to a stop. We remain comfortable in our ignorance and isolation and satisfied with an everyday spoken language of inexact words verbalizing incomplete thoughts. Most of what we express is conveyed by means of a similarly undeveloped vocabulary of tone and body language.    But there comes a time in most of our lives when for one reason or another we face an impossible and inescapable choice. Our sense of comfort disappears and we begin to suffer our aloneness. Why are we here? How do we go on? As the poorly spoken language we have relied on until now no longer serves, we look beyond it, and find an unknown world of communication. Somewhere in that unexplored territory lies the receiving ground for the oral tradition, where a different language than the one we have become accustomed to is spoken. --from the editorial Focus Cover: Elias and Khidr at the Fountain of Life Late fifteenth-century Iranian manuscript painting from Shah-nameh (Book of Kings) by Ferdowsi. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York In this issue:

• "The Mother Tongue" by Martha Heyneman
  - The first gift
• "The Synthesis of Language" by Martin Lings
  - Richness of expression in the absence of writing
• "If One Thing Stands, Another Will Stand Beside It: An interview with Chinua Achebe"- Stories from a Nigerian childhood
• "Mahpiyato" by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
  - The moment when the story comes
• "The Call to Remember" by Arthur Amiotte
  - A Lakota boy's coming of age
• "In the Beginning" by P. L. Travers
  - The ancient source of story
• "Cowboy Poetry" by Anne Heath
  - The oral tradition of the American West
• "From Delphi: A Code for Questioners" by Roger Lipsey
  - How to ask the right question
• ARCS: "The Unifying Word"
• "To the Ones Who Would Listen" by Kaygusuz Abdal
  - Advice of a fifteenth-century ashik, translated by Sheikh Tosun Bayrak al Jerrahi
• "The Unwritten Torah" by Lawrence Fine
  - Judaism's oral teachings
• "Stillness" by Swami Chetanananda
  - What is transmitted in silence
• "Teacher, Student, Lineage" by Rosemary Jeanes Antze
  - The guru and the disciple in South Indian dance
• "Words and Their Fulfillment" by Ramesh S. Balsekar
  - Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj on how to listen
• "The Ethics of the Fathers"
  - Sayings of the sages through the centuries
• "And the Word Was Made Flesh" by Paul Jordan-Smith
  - Origins of the Christian Mass
• "The Great Liberation" by Daniel Gallik
  - Poetic experience of hearing in the Bardo state

Tangents - Reviews

• "Communicating with Light" by Richard Kostelanetz
  - The light painting of James Turrell

Epicycles - Traditional stories from around the world

• "A Dispute in Sign Language" / Jewish
• "The Man of Lore" / Irish - retold by Tom White
• "Two Baal-Shem Stories" / Jewish - retold by Martin Buber
• "A Story in Search of an Audience" / Hindu - retold by A. K. Ramanujan