Of Dragons and Dinosaurs 1990-2004-2018
Listen to the story here.
This year I am revisiting a post of Christmas Past. When I first wrote this, Little
Foot and friends were making plans to free themselves from the Sharp Tooth once
and for all. The scene was from the Don Bluth film, The Land Before Time, in
which a band of odd young dinosaurs trek in search of the Great Valley while
escaping the ravenous T-Rex, “Sharp Tooth.” It is, as the narrator explains, a journey towards life
itself.
The dinosaur that year was Nick (at age 2.7) and it
echoed a similar dinosauria with Jack 14 years before. A fascination that
continued forward another 14 years with Jordan (now age 10.) As the photos
above testify, all the boys, sooner or later, spend time in the dinosaur
persona. Not insignificantly, they
equally relish the role of the Sharp Tooth and, by so doing, remind me that
however cute the weak vegetarians are, we ultimately are more kin with the
villainous predator. Perhaps more
than kin and less than kind. The
photo of Jack on the left is from Halloween in 1990 (age 3.3), Nick roars on
center as Christmas approached in 2004, and Jordan rides his beast on the right
this past Halloween, 2018. Among
other things, the photos illustrate that I have learned a few things over the
years about fitting the dinosaur to the man and the man to the dinosaur. My first attempt with Jack yielded an
unwieldy head that he graciously suffered to wear for the sake of the
photograph. I am pleased to report
that he has grown into the head-of-unwieldy-weight with an impressive academic
record, a deep regard for ideas, a quick wit and a loving smile. Nick’s head,
likewise, is keeping well apace of any enclosure that seeks to subdue him.
Jordan happily handles whatever confronts him. His is a head-for-all-seasons.
This Christmastide will again be
dragon-haunted. So I turn to the
tale of St. George and the Dragon.
A favorite for Christmas mummers plays, the pageant is a faux-Christian
allegory of the triumph of good over evil, and may have an historical reference
to some actual English triumph (the Welsh dragon?) but certainly has
pre-Christian roots. St. George
appears to have come from Green George, a tree and nature spirit who is still
present with us in Asheville in the form of the local craft brewery, Green Man
Ales, which can be enjoyed at the local pub, Jack of The Wood.
Green George played a role in the spring fertility rites as
the male principle bringing new life to the land. Perhaps the tale of the
dragon-slaying has to do with the New Year battling the Old, Spring against
Winter, Life against Death. The
western dragon is viewed variously as symbolic of the devil or of death. The
image of the dragon hoarding gold and treasure and keeping damsels in constant
distress is familiar. In that
sense, the battle is between Greed and Generosity, Covetousness and Charity,
Taking and Giving, Holding On and Letting Go, Stifling and Creating…you get the
idea.
But unlike our all-too-often seen
habit of pitting good against evil and light against dark, the contest is
really a kind of dance between interdependent forces. If we want heroes we must
accommodate villains, and Rebirth necessitates Death. The dragon, therefore,
may be too much maligned. He is, after all, a necessary and popular part of the
pageant. Indeed, he may be an eternal and ineluctable part of ourselves.
And what about dinosaurs? One of
Nick’s video programs on dinosaurs went to great lengths to distinguish between
dinosaurs as actual creatures and dragons as mythical ones. But surely the
dragon comes from our earliest encounters with dinosaurs, if not living ones,
then certainly the readily viewable and dramatic remains. Certainly in the Gobi
Desert, dinosaur remains must have been seen by early peoples and could well
have influenced the traditions of the Chinese dragons. Likewise the dinosaurs
of the American west may have influenced Native American dragon/monster stories
such as the Illini Piasa. Why, then, could not the dragons of one era simply be
the Iguanodons and Allosaurs of another? Though the language of science has
separated factual dinosaurs from mythical dragons, it has not removed the sense
of wonder both inspire. To a great degree, the fact of dinosaurs encourages the
fantasy of dragons; for the tangible fossil record affirms the possibility of
dragons, while it’s fragmentary nature commands imagination. The conception of dragons has been attributed to many causes including explosive methane clouds in ancient burial mounds (treasure hording, fire-breathing, dragons?) and the inchoate dream-making habits of our psychic nether-realm, the collective unconscious. The most compelling thinking about dragons I have come across is found in the Electric Universe, suggesting that dragons are largely inspired by lightning and its kin in plasma physics. This group meets in a medial realm, triangulated from science and myth, to conceive of the possibilities both direct our attention to: dramatic events observed and embedded in a flash of archetypal visioning, telling a story in myth that continues to resonate to the present day. (Check out Discourses on an Alien Sky.)
Dinosaurs and dragons occupy the
same medial realm. That realm is a hunting ground for the spirit. For it is in
the place of mediation between opposites that, if we’re lucky, we discover
early on and, if we’re wise, we continue to explore throughout life’s journey.
At some point in childhood we discover that the world is not strictly
dichotomous, although binary organization will remain useful as a cognitive
tool. We discover that in fact there is a third point not on the same line as
our simple polarities: that is the place of color that exists in a triangular
relationship with black and white. Now and Then are mediated by
Might-Have-Been. Child mediates Mother and Father. Though “mediation” suggests
a mid-point along a straight line, such as gray halfway between black and
white, it can also be something more than a dimming of one extreme or a
brightening of another. The navigational art of triangulation uses two known
points to determine the location of a third and it teaches us that two opposing
points can still orient us to a third possible direction. Like Zeno’s arrow,
never reaching its’ target because the space between is infinitely divisible;
just so, the medial realm is infinitely possible. The imagination abhors a vacuum
and where one is found, the medial realm supplies rich possibilities. If there
is Life and Death, could there also be Not-Life and Not-Death? If so, what
might that look like? Ghosts? Vampires? Angels? Similarly, if there is Good and
Evil, might there also be Not-Good and Not-Evil? What might that be? Enter the
Benign Dragon and the Dissembling Saint. Now that offers much more room for
possibility, adventure and whimsy than stark opposites!
So it is that I have chosen again
for this season’s story, the wonderfully whimsical and curiously poignant tale
of The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame. Grahame’s writing has long been a
big influence on my own imagination and sense of story telling and so his story
leapt to the fore as I contemplated the boyhood immersions in dinosauria. Here
is a tale that invites us into the medial realm where possibility feeds the
soul’s hunger for something other than the Known and the Unknowable. In so
doing it reveals to us some useful lessons by way of allegory. First, that dragons
need not be seen as all bad.
Second, that there may be some sense in connecting the possibility of
dragons with the impulse to poesy. Third, that the role of the Saint may have
something other to do than the mere vanquishing of objectionable nature, and
that something may be reconciliation.
The dragon that Mr. Grahame gives
us is a poet and a gentleman. Yet he is also a dragon, big as “four cart
horses,” and therefore an established enemy of humankind. What is the solution? Make a show of
subduing him in order that he may “go into society,” and thereby become a
source of enrichment for us all. How like the problem of the Artist is the
problem of the Reluctant Dragon. Here is a source of great power, which we
eliminate to our own great loss, but which we dare not allow to roam freely
among us unchecked and unmanaged. Without dragons our lives are stale and
mechanical. With them our lives are filled with wonder and possibility and the
rich imaginative stuff that allows for the notion of something eternal, loving
and universal in our nature. But dragons need friends to mediate foes. Enter
the Intuitive Artist and the Instinctive Scientist, the dragon-dreamer and the
dinosaur-hunter. These fellows among us keep the soul fires burning hot as
dragon’s breath. I do not mean to suggest that dragons are without danger.
Indeed, their dangerous nature is part and parcel of their special potency.
Rather, what we need are people willing to engage with dragons, and saints
ready to accommodate them. So Mr. Grahame gives us a boy. Additionally he gives
us a girl and a boy whose tracing of dragon tracks in the snow conjures up the
entire tale to begin with. Of the
two, the girl, Charlotte, makes the most telling remark, saying, “a little
dragon would be nice to have. He might scratch and spit, but he couldn’t do anything really.” So saying, she informs us that we
must embrace our dragons while they are small, before they are too hot to
handle.
So here we are in the season of
the birth of a savior with a story of a saint who allows for the conversion of
a most talented dragon through the wise intervention of a well-read boy. I
invite you into the story and ask you to wander up the road with a most
rewarding threesome of Dragon, Saint, and Boy, like three ships sailing; a holy
trinity on Christmas Day.
David Novak, Christmas, 2004 &
2018.
