Other Eyes: decolonizing myth

A Story:

The Sky Woman's Basket1

The Sky Woman's Basket gives us a useful image for discussing the problem (and opportunity) of engaging with stories from other cultures, other times, and other traditions than our own. At issue is the act of looking into the basket. Consider two options and outcomes available to the man in the story. In the first, he can look into the basket and, seeing nothing there, conclude that the basket is empty and not worth any more consideration. This is indeed what he does.  In the second option, he could look into the basket and, seeing nothing there, realize that he is missing something and that the basket is worth closer consideration. The first option is the end of his relationship with the basket and his wife. The second option might be the beginning of his relationship with both of them.

Option one exemplifies the modern Western narrative about indigenous, oral traditional myths. This is the story many of us were raised on. In my youth, the teacher (usually female) would turn on a slide projector and put a record on the record player with a narrator timed to the slides. (A loud beep would signal the teacher to change slides.) The narrator (usually male) would intone his wisdom thus:

"Long ago people invented fantastic stories to explain their world because they were afraid and did not understand the forces of nature." (beep)  "Thunder, lightning, and the changing of the seasons were a mystery to them." (beep) "Today, through Science, we understand these forces of nature..." and so on.

This narrative of the inferiority of early people and their traditions continues today. Consider these remarks from Kenneth C. Davis' introduction to Don't Know Much About Mythology:

“One of the chief reasons that myths came into being was because people couldn’t provide scientific explanations for the world around them. Natural events, as well as human behavior, all came to be understood through tales of gods, goddesses, and heroes. Thunder, earthquakes, eclipses, the seasons, rain, and the success of crops were all due to the intervention of powerful gods. Human behavior was also the work of the gods…”
––– Kenneth C. Davis, Don’t Know Much About Mythology 2


I imagine our early ancestors huddled in a cave during a wild thunder storm. The child asks his father, "What is that booming? What is that flash?" The father replies, "well, my child, because I cannot provide you with a scientific explanation let me invent a story about giants doing battle with dragons in the sky..."

Davis continues:
 

“… Obviously, we now have many more scientific answers for most of our questions about the world and universe. We know why the sun rises and sets. Why the rain falls in some seasons and not in others. What makes crops grow. We have a much better understanding of where we came from. We understand illness and death – to a certain degree. And although the source of evil in the world – and why bad things happen to good people – is still a mystery, we have even begun to unravel the beginnings of the universe.

            But in earlier times, people invented stories to explain these beginnings…” 3

Essentially, Davis, in his introduction to a compendium of world mythology, is telling the reader at the start that myths are devoid of truth or validity. He is telling us that the Sky Woman's Basket is empty.
This idea about myths has long been part of the Western narrative that science, as the highest expression of Truth, is superior to myth. Has our science, in an effort to create a language of knowledge with clarity and consensus, so shaped our perception as to render it blind?

Sadly, this notion is perpetuated in the modern storytelling revival. Too often have I heard a school assembly, a classroom lesson, or a festival performance introduced with a parroting of Mr. Davis' view that myths are a product of pre-scientific ignorance and fearful imagining.

But look again at The Sky Woman's Basket. This African story tells of women stealing milk and taking it into the sky. That may seem absurdly juvenile. But we in the West also refer to the outer arm of our galaxy as "The Milky Way." We can see in the story many embedded ideas: domestication of animals for dairy, promise-keeping, marriage, and so on. Because we have never seen a "ladder from the sky" we consider the story fantasy. But we have seen lightning. We have seen tornadoes. We have seen many phenomena that could well be described as ladders from the sky.

Look Again

It is easy to look at an old story that tells of seemingly impossible characters and events and say 'that's entertaining but it is obviously not true.' Take, for example, the traditional Klamath story concerning a battle between the chiefs of the world above and the world below. The story was first recorded in writing in 1865 by a young soldier at Ft. Klamath, transcribing a Klamath elder. The story was dismissed as primitive fantasy until geologists discovered that it parallels the volcanic eruption that formed Crater Lake, OR. Native American author, theologian, historian, and activist, Vine Deloria Jr., points out in his book Red Earth, White Lies 4, that the story successfully carried the memory of the event in oral tradition for over 7,000 years.

Some Western scientists are taking a second look at oral traditions. New hybrid disciplines, such as archeoastronomy and geomythology, are forcing a reconsideration of the established narrative of Western superiority which has so long limited our appreciation of traditional stories.

"The fact that virtually all traditional knowledge keepers believe myths (and legends) to be historically true whereas nearly all scientists presume they do not represent factual historical events is a disquieting conundrum that tells us more about the biases of Western science than the nature of myth." – WB Masse et al.5  

New insights from the fields of linguistics and anthropology are helping us take a second look. Dr. Lynne Kelly in her research of primary orality observes that "Traditional peoples would not have survived had they lived, as so often portrayed, in a fog of superstition and pre-logical, irrational thinking." Kelly argues that "oral cultures use complex and sophisticated artificial memory techniques that are no longer in broad use because the advent of writing takes away our need to commit to memory the knowledge on which our lives and culture depend." 6

So why do the stories from oral cultures so often appear in our juvenile reading lists as quaint, fanciful 'pourquoi' tales? Consider our modern educational process. The early childhood curriculum teaches the basic elements considered essential for higher learning: shapes, colors, ABCs, numbers, and nursery rhymes. Why would a rhyme like Itsy Bitsy Spider be important in early childhood? It establishes the narrative elements critical to understanding our greatest literature. Like a fractal element in a complicated system, the Itsy Bitsy Spider teaches a pattern of story that will be reiterated into such epics as The Odyssey. Additionally, it describes the narrative actions seen in nature. Yet, if a foreigner to Western culture only encounters the Itsy Bitsy Spider, they are not likely to intuit the formation of The Odyssey. They are more likely to conclude that our culture is juvenile and ignorant. Now imagine that an non-literate, non-Western adventurer arrives on a university campus and demands to know what the people of the university know. Where will they start? In the early childhood classroom. Our educational system is scaffolded for the vertical alignment of knowledge. You must complete course 101 before you can complete course 201, and so on.
So it may well be that Western adventurers encountering oral cultures received the equivalent of the early childhood curriculum and concluded that the culture is ignorant.

This is not to suggest that we remove or rewrite the pourquoi stories, myths and legends, and the other material from oral cultures. We have an opportunity to look at these stories a second time and consider what role they may play in their cultural scaffold of knowledge. For example, the Cherokee story of The First Fire, is a popular and entertaining story of the animals acquiring fire for the world. At first glance it may appear fanciful and insubstantial. But at second glance, we see a cultural memory of the Pleistocene era, the end of the last Ice Age, and a catalogue of the fauna inhabiting their world. The story in literary form tells of a few select animals attempting to capture fire. Each animal is changed in  such a way that it can be clearly identified. The story in oral form can expand as a container of knowledge, introducing the hearer to a wide variety of animals and their attributes.

There is a story about Coyote's Eyes that is told by many First Nations people in North America.

The gist is that Coyote comes upon someone, usually Rabbit, singing his sacred song and performing an unusual feat: throwing his eyes out of his head and into the sky. As he sings, the eyes return to Rabbit and return to their proper places. Coyote barges in (typical, rude behavior for him) and demands to learn the secret of this skill. After much insisting, Coyote learns to throw his eyes. He goes straight away to show off his new trick in the village so the people will admire him. After over-doing his trick, his eyes fail to return. In many versions, they are caught in the high branches of a piñon pine. I think, perhaps, they simply continue into the sky and become enchanted by the stars. In any case, Coyote has thrown his eyes away. He can no longer see.

Coyote stumbles on blindly. He comes to mouse. Mouse offers to give one of his eyes to Coyote. Coyote takes Mouse's tiny eye, which rolls about in his empty eye socket. With Mouse's little eye, Coyote can only view things that are small and close up. He next comes to Buffalo. Buffalo gives an eye to Coyote. But Buffalo's eye is too big for Coyote's empty socket. Buffalo's eye sees far and wide. So Coyote wanders with one eye seeing up close and the other eye seeing far and wide. So Coyote goes, dizzy and disoriented because he has lost his own eyes. Perhaps he continues borrowing eyes not his own. In some versions of the story, the birds make new eyes for Coyote from the sap of the piñon pine. Alternatively, if you look out at Coyote in the night time, you will see him singing to his eyes, calling them back. If you look at his face, you will see starlight where his eyes once were.

However this story signifies for its culture of origin, I am inclined to see in it a parable for this discourse. Coyote strikes me as Western, scientific, culture. With Mouse eyes and Buffalo eyes, we look up close and out far, but we do not clearly see where we are. We threw away our original eyes - those eyes that were pre-scientific, pre-Christian, pre-dogmatic; our earliest, native eyes. We try to see with other people's eyes by co-opting their cultures. [Perhaps that is what I am doing by using this First Nation's story!] But if we do not inhabit their world view, we walk away with a dizzying effect rather than an insight, misconstruing the validity of their stories and reinforcing our own narrative of superiority.

Astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, writes about his experience viewing earth from space:

“I realized that the story of ourselves as told by science—our cosmology, our religion— was incomplete and likely flawed. I recognized that the Newtonian idea of separate, independent, discreet things in the universe wasn’t a fully accurate description. What was needed was a new story of who we are and what we are capable of becoming.”

–– Dr. Edgar Mitchell, The Way of The Explorer 5

In an earlier post I wrote about the language of truth. [No Knowing What: Truth Post Truth] Scientific language is one language of truth. Myth is another. Their styles might be contrasted as:

Myth = subjective lyricism  /  Science = objective accounting

"The loss of the lore of a group is also the loss of the justification for their lifestyle."
––– V.F. Cordova, How It Is 6

Conversely, then, the maintenance of the lore of a group is the maintenance of the justification for their lifestyle. By holding onto the lore of Western superiority do we promote the justification for an earth-exploiting, alienated lifestyle? Cultural Genocide removes a language and lore from a group of people in order to destroy their lifestyle and culture. Is it time to consider, if not the removal, the replacement, of our own destructive lore and language?

With what new eyes might we see the world?

1This is my adaptation of an African San story recounted in Laurens van der Post's "Heart of the Hunter." I do not claim to represent or misrepresent any indigenous oral traditional cultures, though I tell stories that trace their origins back to such peoples. I do claim to gain insights from old stories which inform my choices in telling them anew.
I and my family line are not indigenous to Africa or North America. As far as I know, my ancestors were indigenous to the Rhine valley and the mountains of eastern Bohemia. In the Middle Ages they survived the bloody Northern Crusades by converting to Christianity. I do not know for certain, but it seems entirely likely that they played part in a violent, generations-long game of 'pass on, no pass back' by transferring that trauma to the indigenous peoples they displaced when, in the 19th century, they emigrated to the western United States.

2 Davis, Kenneth C. Don't Know Much about Mythology: Everything You Need to Know about the Greatest Stories in Human History but Never Learned. Harper, 2006.

3 Ibid.

4 Deloria, Vine. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. Fulcrum Pub, 1997. 

5 Masse, W. & Barber, Elizabeth & Piccardi, Luigi & Barber, Paul. (2007). Exploring the nature of myth and its role in science. Geological Society, London, Special Publications. 273. 9-28. 10.1144/GSL.SP.2007.273.01.02.  

6 Kelly, Lynne. Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory, and the Transmission of Culture. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015.

7 Mitchell, Edgar D., and Dwight Arnan. Williams. The Way of the Explorer: an Apollo Astronauts Journey through the Material and Mystical Worlds. New Page Books, 2008.

8 Cordova, V. F., et al. How It Is: the Native American Philosophy of V.F. Cordova. University of Arizona Press, 2007.

Note: Linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf put forward the notion of a linguistic area comprised of the Romance, Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Balkan languages which they termed "Standard Average European." Furthermore, they propose that the language we speak greatly influences our world view. more

A Legacy: Nancy Yohe 1939-2019

In the summer of 1963, I was 7 years old and demon-haunted; suffering occasional petit mal seizures and throwing temper tantrums to rival a tropical depression, but not able to tell you why. My overwhelmed mother signed me up for the new Ft. Lauderdale Children's Theatre (FLCT) under the tutelage of a  recent graduate from Barry College, 24 yr old Miss Nancy Yohe.
I attended her drama school in a renovated garage behind a Winn Dixie grocery store, where we sat in neat rows of folding chairs and learned the art of becoming human.
We practiced saying "Hello" and shaking hands. We practiced stepping onto the stage, reciting poems, stepping to the side and taking a formal little bow. We expressed ourselves loud and soft and in-between, with big faces, big gestures, and feigned confidence.
More than any other teacher, Miss Yohe taught me to pay attention. To listen. And to read. Not because I was being graded or tested, but because I wanted to learn my poem, or learn my lines. She trained me in the skill of knowing something.
My demons never died, but they were yoked and harnessed to a higher power: Art.
I was her student for 12 years. She was the one constant in all those childhood years of schooling.
I rose up through the ranks, truly. My first appearance on the stage was as a soldier in Aladdin. I would graduate to the role of a guard, then a spear-carrier, and one day, a prince!
In the rarefied world of our Children's Theatre school, there were "no small parts, only small actors." Moreover, every production, every endeavor, was likened to a finely crafted quilt: if even one small patch of fabric was missing or torn, the entire quilt was ruined.
Leading players were expected to be true leaders. To be quick to lend a hand and offer encouragement. To appreciate everyone and to lead by example offstage as well as on.
Everyone was respected. Everyone was valued.
One of my proudest moments came during my tenure as a spear-carrier. I was literally carrying my spear across the room on a busy Saturday rehearsal when the theatre was filled with cast and crew and volunteering parents. Miss Yohe called the rehearsal to a halt and brought everyone's attention to me. She asked them to notice how I was carrying my spear (straight up and down, not pointed forward or back) noting that I was handling my "prop" safely and conscientiously and that they should all follow my example. I was transported!
She was spell-binding. She could command the respect and attention of 50 unruly children aged 5 to 15. And she could entertain everyone of us. But woe unto you if  you should be having a side-conversation while she was delivering notes. Her gaze, her amaze, could conjure chagrin from the most jaded and cynical adolescent.
I continued on the trajectory launched from FLCT: working with children, telling stories, writing, speaking, teaching, and making art. Alas, too often has the real world of theatre, and the entertainment industry in general, failed to meet the high standards we were held to. Too often have the prima donnas been rewarded, the modest disrespected, the earnest over-looked. Too often I felt like Diogenes, wandering with lamp held high to find the ideal theatre I was raised to expect. Here and there, brief companies of like-hearted artists came together and for a moment the old flame was rekindled.
I now know that such ideals are unrealistic in the high-diddlee-dee actor's life for me. But that's not to say they are not important - indeed essential. Nancy Yohe conjured an ideal form for us to grasp, though it be beyond our reach. For what's a heaven for?
She gave us a star to steer by and her light shines before us still.
Thank you Miss Yohe.

Telling Possibility

Telling stories is a practice in exploring possibilities. Each new story is a new scenario, a new series of choices, of causes and effects.

I had been telling old stories, and in the process discovering new ones, for several years before I became a true storyteller. The heart of storytelling did not bloom in me until just the right combination of life experiences came together. Working with educators and students to explore aesthetic literacy, my awareness grew concerning my techniques, my intentions, my skills and how I employ them. Public venues where I had a returning audience gave me incentive to invent, teaching me how to converse in my art. But the most impacting, passionate experience that affected my becoming a true storyteller came with the birth of my son, Jack.

Here came the ancient bond between father and son, between past and future. As I entered the world of caring for my child and partnering with his mother, a new sense of story began to grow. No longer was the telling of stories an instructional behavior, an entertainment, or a creative whimsy. Now it was an act of love. I learned that sharing stories with my son was a kind of caress, an exchange of emotional and intellectual energies, a mutual exploration of the possibilities of self, other, and world. My stories were prompted by my wonder as to who this child might become and how he might relate to the open and surprising world before him. Who might Jack be? Our son was named for his grandfathers on either side: John, for my father; Cabell, for his mother's father, and "Jack" for himself. We knew that in his name would be inheritance and individuality, a past and a future. 

In my own childhood, my father did not invent or tell stories. Rather, my mother was the bedtime story keeper, reading me down the yellow brick road or through the hundred acre woods. This isn't to suggest that I thought any less of my father; it was just not the culture of our household. Yet, as I traveled telling stories, I discovered that in many families, mothers were the story readers, while fathers were the story inventors. This is not a hard and fast rule, and certainly my observations were not conducted in a statistically valid manner. Still, the habit of fathers to invent and mothers to read seems consonant with traditional gender roles related to oral culture. Men top each other with confabulations about the hunt, the deal, and the fish that got away. It is a kind of verbal display behavior. So the father inventing stories is fluffing his verbal plumage while instilling in his child an acuity for wit with words. The mother, likewise, is the keeper of cultural norms and mores, which are more effectively passed on through traditional stories, which in the modern world are carried in literature. It is significant that the literary tales my mother read to me were often the result of a father's confabulation for his son: Kenneth Grahame wrote The Wind in The Willows for his son, Alastair; A.A. Milne wrote for his Christopher Robin and so on. The House at Pooh Corner, like its kindred, was from the golden age of children's literature, carrying the same loving spirit between father and son that I was to discover.

As a storyteller, I knew well that "Jack" is a fellow of legend. He is variously "Jack-the-Giant-Killer," "Jack-the-Fool," "Jack-the-Trickster," and "Jack-the-Hero." As my Jack came to the age for bedtime stories, I drew on the folkloric "Jack-who-seeks-his-Fortune." I took a few ideas from the old stories to get me started. From there, I followed my heart. I sensed that the Jack of my tales was an open and eager traveler, naive of the world but willing to discover, with an innate wit for handling problems. Oftentimes, the protagonists in stories are expected to be flawed and to push through ordeals that teach and challenge them. To some extent this was the case in our Jack Tales. But this Jack is another kind of hero; the kind that always enchanted me as a child and inspired my dreams: the good-hearted wanderer. The hero that most impressed me as a child was the young Dorothy Gale of Frank L. Baum's OZ adventures. I loved the sense that there is a world of strange and magical people to be found along a winding yellow brick road. The hero of that world might be thrown into trouble, but rarely did she cause it. She made friends easily and together they faced their situation with cleverness and sagacity. The world-wandering hero did not start with Dorothy, of course. Frank Baum was well versed in the classics, and their influence runs throughout his work.

I, too, took inspiration from the classics. The other formative fiction of my childhood was Padraic Colum's Jason and the Argonauts, The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles (1922.) This one I read to myself, without the aide of bedtime readers. Reading along with Jason, I discovered that I could pace myself to suit myself. In school, teachers worried because I was a slow reader. In truth, I was a relishing reader. I wanted to savor and enjoy every story, taking the time between chapters to daydream about the world of the tale. Such slow reading put me in the low reading group at school, but served to marinate me in the stories I read. I traveled step-by-step, inch-by-inch, with my wandering heroes.

Lying in bed at night alongside my young Jack, I let the old stories inform me as I conjured new ones. The first of these was the old story of Soldier Jack, in which Jack offers mysterious strangers his food and is rewarded with magic gifts: the looky glass and the whickety-whack sack. In our story, I think of the mysterious stranger as the old Jack, offering this new one a bit of story magic.
On down the road we went together, father, son, and Story Jack, never knowing where our wandering would lead, but ready for discovery. 

The manner of our bedtime storytelling was always more folksy than literate. By that, I mean that the stories had a kind of simple alacrity that characterizes the spoken tale. Occasionally, we might indulge in a descriptive passage or two, but rarely did we enter the realm of novelist, exploring the interior landscape, or myriad points of view. Though, at times, I could not resist the opportunity to philosophize. So it was with the Jack stories. They have the voice of the folk teller, because they were the stories that gave the folk teller his voice.  

These were always bedtime stories. As such they were designed to set the stage for sleep. But in that sleep, what dreams may come? I wanted to create a world for wandering in, with curious challenges, but not too many demons. The time of sleeping and dreaming is often a time of facing trouble and anxiety. It is not uncommon for bedtime storytellers to terrify their listeners. I think of James Whitcomb Riley's Little Orphant Annie: 'the gobble-uns'll git you ef you don't watch out!' 

I know we cannot predetermine our dreams, but we can feed the dream-bound mind with a kind of story nutrient of images, ideas, and feelings. That nutrient of story, I hoped, would help my son's soul grow strong and resilient. So I rounded every story with sleep. Each beginning, "Jack woke up..." and each ending, "Jack fell off to sleep..." The device allowed me a brief recap at the beginning of the tale as Jack would awaken and recall the previous day's adventure, and a review of the current story at the finish as he would relax into sleep mulling over the day's experience. What happened after that was entirely the province of my son's inner life.

On occasion, my son would fall off to sleep while I would be too involved with the convolutions of the unraveling tale to notice, requiring me to synopsize events the following night. Sometimes, Jack would ask me to retell a tale I no longer remembered, which would require him to guide me through the reconstruction of the lost episode. The stories took on a life of their own, insisting to be told, like the magic cooking pot that freely produces food at the command 'cook, pot, cook!' I found myself "cooking" stories throughout the day. This became a kind of mindfulness wherein I remained connected to my Jack by dwelling in the possibility of Story Jack’s next adventure. 

A few years ago, my Jack, now an adult, came to me with a proposal. He asked if I would collaborate on a play about a father telling stories to his son, based on the stories I created for him. He gave me the greatest gift I could ask for as a father when he told me those stories had a profound influence upon him as a child, helping him happily imagine his future, giving him a storied self as a guide. 

I gladly accepted his invitation and entered the new possibilities of our collaboration. For telling stories is an exercise in actively imagining possibilities. When we tell stories together, we find what is possible together.


Coda:
Jack and I wrote many scenes, never sure where the writing would lead us. Like the Jack of the stories, we wandered openly. We hoped we might create a serial for the stage, or broadcast in some other medium, allowing us the chance for a living work if art: an ongoing theatre piece in which new stories were constantly added, as old stories entered into rotating repertory. That is still my dream. Eventually, however, we decided that the only way we would get our stories to the stage was with a self-contained, single script. The result was Journeying Jack. In 2015 Asheville Creative Arts gave the play a workshop staging as part of their Incubator series. Then in 2016 the play received the Aurand Harris Memorial Playwrighting Award from New England Theatre Conference. To date, the play has not had a full staging. It remains my vision to see the serial treatment find a home on stage.

So we remain on the road of possibilities.

Waiting For Recess

Thirty years ago last week, a man opened fire on the playground of Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California.
Two months later, I made my first festival appearance at The Mariposa Storytelling Festival.
The news cycle had finished with the Cleveland story. People were saying that it was over and now it was time to move on.
As a storyteller, I could not accept that dismissal. The story was not over. Sadly, the story is not over.
I created a story in response and shared it in Mariposa.
Here it is from thirty years ago:

From Dream to Woke

Certainty is the bane of possibility. If we can admit that we do not know how deeply injustice informs our world-view, we may become unsure enough to allow for a new world-view to wake. On this MLK weekend, I take heart from signs of waking all around us. As we learn about those that have been left out from our official history, as we uncover injustice in the halls of power, as we reveal the racist implicatures embedded in our language and habits, we begin to unravel the dominant narrative making possible a new story. That is appropriate for the season. It is winter in America: the old stories are decomposing, allowing for the possibility of spring.

Here is a story re-posted from 8 years ago:

Color Town
I shared this story on opening night of the Synergy Story Slam here in Asheville. The series has been selling out and I am delighted to have been there for opening night! The theme was "changes" and it was MLK Day, so....

Sensitivity

So, while tucking Jordan (10) into bed one night recently, he complained that the tag on his pajamas was irritating. I made the comparison to Andersen's story of The Princess and The Pea. As I hoped, Jordan asked me to tell him that story. I began, but was cut short quite abruptly by my wife, who demeaned the story and did not wish to hear it. I gave Jordan a quick synopsis to explain my literary allusion and then, at his request, launched into another story: The Fisherman and His Wife.

The next morning, my wife explained that she detested the story of The Princess and The Pea because it objectifies women. Fair enough. But after revisiting the original, to be certain I recalled it correctly, I find a curious situation: the story itself defines a princess as someone with sensitivity; the objection to the story demonstrates sensitivity. Hmmmm.

Look at it this way. The Princess and The Pea is a kind of Cinderella variant (arguably another objectifying fairy tale) in which the "true" princess is concealed by outward appearances. Cinderella is an impoverished, ash-stained, serving girl; the Pea Princess arrives in a storm, bedraggled and mud-stained, and very much presenting as "lower class" so that the Queen Mother instigates her test: placing a pea beneath 20 mattresses.

Andersen claimed to have heard this story as a child, the likely variant coming from Sweden. He clearly takes poetic license in his version and is believed to have identified with the princess in his story. [Andersen felt that he was never fairly recognized by the upper social classes.]

So, yes, in a way, the story objectifies the woman inasmuch as it suggests that a true princess is frail and dainty enough to be discomforted by a tiny annoyance, undetectable by any ordinary person. Yet it could be argued that a "true" princess (or prince for that matter) is very sensitive and therefore capable of compassion, understanding, and ...?

Sensitivity can be both a desired and an undesired trait. My allusion to the story in the moment of my child's complaint could be a criticism suggesting 'you're just too sensitive, like a pampered little prince.' However, it could suggest 'you are a sensitive boy, and that makes you a real prince.'

Of course now I have to consider our conflicted relationship with royalty. The popularity of Cinderella, for example, suggests that everyone feels like unrecognized royalty. There is an innate sense that we are worthy, lurking beneath a sense that we are devalued by the world around us. But if the sense of being royal is contingent on a hierarchy wherein others are considered less than royal, we have a problem.

I rather like Buckminster Fuller's insistence that we make the world work without disadvantaging anyone:

“Make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or disadvantage of anyone.”

This can be hard to swallow if you take a Robin Hood solution to inequality and insist that we take from rich to advantage the poor. Fuller is asking that we do not disadvantage anyone, royalty included. Because, of course, we are all royalty and worthy of a place in society, a place at the table, a roof over our heads, and a mattress free of discomfort. Which, according to Bucky, is entirely achievable today, with the proper, comprehensive anticipatory design thinking.

Yet, if we are to achieve such a world in which these things are made manifest, we will need those currently enjoying the positions of princes and princesses to possess real sensitivity.

Here follows a good discussion with Diane Trautman
She writes: 
"I didn’t recall the story, so I went back to read it.

Yes, women are always being measured by their appearance, so that is objectification. But beyond the story’s moral implication that we shouldn’t assess others by appearance, I see the princess as someone who is sensitive as a result of conditioning. Having been raised in luxury, the smallest deviation is discernible and annoying. Her response identifies her as a member of the privileged class and so worthy of acceptance by her “people.” Someone of lower status may not notice the hard spot and she would be less inclined to complain about it to someone with whom she wished to ingratiate herself.

The princess may, or may not be a kind and compassionate person. I couldn’t tell from the story. It would be nice to think that her sensitivity extends to others.

I think that people are searching for that sense of worthiness, because we are disconnected from their true selves. Thus, we have celebrity worship, the desire to accumulate money and the trappings of it, and the willingness to be led by the wealthy in the hopes of rising to their level.

All of that makes it more difficult for people to focus on cooperative efforts that will improve the lives of everyone. When you believe that life is a zero sum game, you base your survival on your ability to outwit anyone you consider to be a rival. Combine that with wounded egos and pathological behaviors and you have dictators and greedy “royalty” in many spheres of endeavor. How to convince the majority of people and leaders that their ultimate success and survival depends on the betterment of all peoples is a huge challenge.

I guess that leads back to a comment I read about Buckminster Fuller on medium.com in a piece by Leila Acaroglu: “Bucky also said, that if you want to change a system, don’t fight the existing forces, design a version that makes the old one obsolete. For me this translates, as designing new normals.”

Maybe creating a new narrative is the best approach for this new year.

Getting back to your response to Jordan, I have no doubt that he is a true reflection of his sensitive, kind and caring parents. However, like many of us, he is more highly responsive to touch or sound or other sensations. Good for him that he is aware enough of his needs to acknowledge that at his age."

My repliy:

"Excellent points, thank you!
I agree that Andersen's princess does seem to be of the privileged class and more concerned with self-comfort than with sensitivity to others.
Your quote from Bucky is one of my favorites. His point that we must create a new version so compelling that the old one is simply abandoned is well demonstrated by current media determinism: invent a smart phone and the world changes its way of doing things overnight. Bucky was a firm believer in the power of technology to lead change. Language and story are cognitive technologies. The storyteller can take a cue from Bucky and discover new narratives that make the old ones obsolete.
Which brings me back to our little princess and her pea. I see the possibility that the 'true' princess reveals herself by virtue of her sensitivity to others, noticing another person's discomfort. I will give that some more consideration.
As for creating a new normal, I think we are already in the midst of conflicting new normals vying for ascendance. Normalizing tolerance and truthfulness v. normalizing intolerance and mendacity. I am encouraged, however, that efforts to rethink self-governance such as in the Occupy Movement, efforts to expose injustice and exploitation as we see in #MeToo and judicial reform, and so on, suggest that America may ultimately gain the sensitivity to stop piling up the soft mattresses and deal with the niggling pea!"

Diane:

"I believe in the power of technology, but what concerns me is the human capacity to foresee and prevent the misuse of it. As you say, technology has allowed us to share vast amounts of knowledge and engage people in social movements that are changing society at an unprecedented rate. And we can be thankful that green technologies are leading us toward greater sustainability. The downside is that tech industries will abuse their workers and use their products against us if we lack foresight and effective political leaders.

Thus, we need an educated populace to elect and empower leaders who will enact appropriate constraints. And those leaders need vision and the ability to sell that vision. The teachers and storytellers, provide the counterbalance to Fuller’s enduring faith in technology. In addition to creating an informed electorate, they might become leaders themselves or train politicians to develop compelling narratives. (Hmmm. New terrain for storytellers as consultants?)

True, we are in a struggle to establish a new normal. Had we not experienced the unmasking of intolerance, misogyny, hatred, greed and exploitation in 2016, we might have continued to accept the unacceptable niggling pea—especially if it was a greater bother to someone other than us. So cheers to the discomfort that compels us to take action!"

Thank you Diane!  

Seasons Readings: The Reluctant Dragon

 

 

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.