Category Archives: Culture

The best graduation speech, ever.

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It’s that time of year.  I seldom pay much attention to graduation speeches.  I can’t remember anything said at my own, nor do any quotes come to mind from celebrities whose commencement addresses get soundbytes played on the news every June.  But there is one graduation speech I’ve read and listened to many times and continues to be a source of inspiration.  You may know it.  If not, I’m happy to pass it on.

Steve Jobs at Stanford, 2005

Steve Jobs at Stanford, 2005

In 2005, Steve Jobs, whose academic career consisted of one semester of college and a few audited classes, was chosen as the graduation speaker at Stanford.  In his brief but memorable address, he spoke of finding one’s true vision, following our hearts, and not wasting our all-to-brief time walking someone else’s path.  Here are three of my favorite quotes from the speech:

“You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

About getting fired from Apple:  “It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love…the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it…keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

I invite you hear everything this visionary had to say that day, in a  text version of the speech, and / or this video clip.

The Worlds Revolve

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As I scanned reviews of The Great Gatsby, I tuned in to one comment about the visionary quality of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book:  he saw the end of the roaring 20’s in 1925, before almost anyone else.

Almost anyone else…

I’d argue that T.S. Eliot, in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), saw where our 20th century mode of life was leading even before the party began.

Here is how the title poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” begins:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

And here is how Prufrock ends:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweek red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

One of the best professors I ever had helped me engage Eliot with the visual imagination, which helped me see how radical he was compared to the literary establishment of the day.  A kind of tired, watered down romanticism was the norm before the war, so describing the sky as “a patient etherized upon the table” was shocking.  “Have you ever seen someone unconscious?” the professor asked.  “Or very sick or dead?  Eliot isn’t describing a postcard sunset.”

But perhaps my most unforgettable poetic image came from another piece in Eliot’s first book.  Regarded as a minor work, “Preludes” is even less cheery than Prufrock.  Here’s how the poem ends:

Wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

“Picture it,” the professor said, so I did.  I imagined an empty field on the outskirts of London, on a dark winter’s day.  Old women with scarves, patched sweaters and faded coats circle slowly, eyes on the ground, looking for sticks or slats from a discarded crate they can burn at home to stay warm.  Half a dozen figures or more in slow orbit.  They might as well be 100 miles apart, even though they are next to each other, doing the same thing.

Which worlds revolve like ancient women?  I’ve entertained many answers over the years, but one came up this week that helped clarify a sensation I’ve had very strongly since the November election.

The May 20, Time Magazine cover story featured our current crop of young people who are tagged as “Millennials.”

Time cover, May 30

I’ve read such generational articles since the days when they were written about me and my cohorts.  If you don’t take them too literally, they yield some interesting insights.  In this case, when author, Joel Stein, wrote “Millennials aren’t trying to take over the establishment; they’re growing up without one,” I literally jumped to my feet and ran out to brew some coffee.  I do that a lot when a light bulb goes on.

Millennials are growing up without an establishment.  Bulls-eye.  We’re all growing up without an establishment!

The worlds revolve like ancient women,
gathering fuel in vacant lots.

We’ve always had personal areas of concern, particular to our interests, our regions, and the groups that we align with, but have we ever been so lacking in the kind of national ethos and ideology that used to weld us together as one nation under one official God?

When journalists wrote about my generation, the lines were clear.  We had an ugly war which you were either for or against, yes or no, no ambiguity.  Now it’s all too inviting to forget that we’re still in a war no one believes in anymore, and maybe hasn’t for years.  In earlier days, we knew who was good and who was bad.  Now our enemies change on a regular basis.  Who is our biggest threat this month?  The worlds revolve and I can’t remember.

This week, if you live in Boston, you are concerned with the dead bomber’s burial.  In Washington, you follow the Benghazi hearings.  If you’re in congress or one of the 1%, you care about the deficit, though polls show that 92% of the rest of us do not.

If you live in Pennsylvania, you’ve got a new worry.  The legislature decided it’s probably unconstitutional to ban guns from public college campuses.  Think of armed drunken students on Friday night.  A well regulated militia, indeed.

My own new biggest concern springs from a report that our CO2 levels are higher than they have been in three million years.  I drive a hybrid car and use pumps instead of sprays, but clearly that’s not enough.  Some still say it’s a made up problem, and a few believe these are the end-times, so it’s a moot point.  What do I do if I’m not convinced?  Does anyone write to their senators anymore about anything?

No establishment means no one at the helm.  We’re on a ship without a rudder, or rather, many ships, going in circles like women gathering fuel in vacant lots.  The guy next to you at the stoplight is either talking on bluetooth or talking to himself.  You hope that if it’s the latter, he isn’t too angry and doesn’t have a gun.

House behind vacant lot, 2008, by Samuel A. Love, CC by-NC-ND 2.0

House behind vacant lot, 2008, by Samuel A. Love, CC by-NC-ND 2.0

These days some of those ancient women have concealed weapons and none have had background checks.  You spot a piece of wood at the same moment as another who narrows her eyes as if to say, “Are you feeling lucky today?  Well, are you?”

Yesterday’s paper featured an article on the current generation of survivalists, who now call themselves, “preppers,” a terrible name that sounds like a table condiment or the slacks and sweater look for high school students.  They are getting ready for the big collapse, which they say is just a matter of time.  They make a compelling point – ships without rudders run aground.  One local prepper who teaches his skills to others asks, “What would you do if you hadn’t had any water or food for three days?”

Strictly speaking, I think you die after three days without water, but it’s a good question.  I know what I hope I’d do in a crisis, though I don’t think anyone knows in advance for sure.  I recall stories of people helping each other during disasters and others doing just the opposite.  What’s scary is that I think you tend to help people you view as neighbors, and we all have fewer neighbors than ever before.

The survivalists are right about one thing – you have to plan the future you want and practice for it.  Isn’t that the real question, “the overwhelming question,” as Eliot put it? What do we want our lives to be like?  What kind of lives are worth surviving for?

What would happen if those ancient women teamed up to help each other gather fuel?  That’s so un-20th century, but now that we have no establishment, all bets are off.  That kind of future is so foreign to our current way of life that even with the best intentions and effort, many of us won’t see it in our lifetimes.  But that doesn’t really matter.

Outcomes are not as important as the questions.  What do we want our lives to be like?  How do we want to live?  Better to start asking now, lest the day come when human voices wake us and we drown.

The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

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We have all heard and read more words this week than we want or need. The ones that keep coming back to me were written in 1919, in a poem called “The Second Coming,” a haunting vision written by William Butler Yeats in the wake of the first world war.

W.B. Yeats by John Singer Sargent. Public Domain W.B. Yeats by John Singer Sargent. Public Domain

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

***

Yeats was a member of The Golden Dawn, an early 20th century occult organization centered in Britain that sought to recover lost elements of the western mystery traditions.  Their once-secret teachings are now posted online, where we can see that the group practiced the kind of visualizations that could give rise to spontaneous “images out of Spiritus Mundi,” the World Spirit, one of the Golden Dawn’s concepts.

Elsewhere we can read that the poet worked out his own concept of world cycles or “gyres” as he put it here.  We find theories of world cycles from many cultures in many times.  The Greeks said there once was a Golden Age, but now it is Iron.  We’ve all heard of the Age of Aquarius, though unfortunately astrologers now tell us it won’t begin for a few hundred years.  Eastern cultures envision vast cycles that rise and fall and rise again eternally.

In all of these visions, this is the Iron Age, the Kali Yuga, a time of degeneration, where the ceremony of innocence is drowned.  Different traditions differ on where it goes from here.

In one account, offered by Paramahansa Yogananda, the crucifixion marked the nadir of this particular world age.  Things are getting better; right now we are experiencing inertia, a last gasp of the dark ages.  Even in this hopeful account, nothing is fixed or pre-determined.  It’s up to us.  How we live our lives, what we think, and what we do, matter more than we know.  More than we can imagine.

In truth, we already know this, just as we know that despair is not an option.  It seems to me the only choice we have is to live moment by moment as if we are the people we want to be, living in the world we want to live in.  There may not be anything more important.  Isn’t it true that the sum of our collective thoughts and actions is going to shape our world and the one future generations are going to inherit?

Singing along with Merle Haggard

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In honor of a pair of local concerts Merle Haggard is set to perform the week after this, our paper ran an article and an interview with Haggard, a country music classic.  Unfortunately, I’m busy both nights he’ll be in town, so I thought I’d post an article and a couple of songs for my pleasure and hopefully yours.

Merle Haggard was born in 1937, in Oildale, CA, near Bakersfield.  He grew up wild and drew a three year term in San Quentin when he was 20.  While in prison, he decided playing music would be a better way to live, and 1967 he recorded his first number one country music song, “The Fugitive,” which remains my all time Haggard favorite:

I first heard Haggard after he released his 1969 counter-counter-cultural anthem, “Okie from Muskogee.”  Lyrics like, “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee,” made it a tongue-in-cheek favorite on hippie radio stations of the day.  Later that year, the Grateful Dead covered one of his songs, as did Joan Baez a short while later.

Haggard, who had his own battles with alcohol and drug abuse, is far less doctrinaire these days:  he built a recording studio near his home in Redding, CA where he’s currently working on a tribute album to Bob Dylan.  At 76, having also survived lung cancer, Haggard sounds grateful as well as surprised at his success and still being alive.  If you like country music, you’re sure to enjoy the article and the interview.

Haggard says country music is “pretty shallow” these days, and when you listen to his work, it’s hard not to come to the same conclusion.  Here is a country singer who shows the depths and soul that are possible in this classic American genre.

Economic imaginings

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The key aim of this blog, as stated on my “About” page, is to look at “the reality in our fantasies and the fantasy in our realities.”  The phrase was inspired by James Hillman, who used the word “fantasy” to suggest how imagination and the unconscious always elaborate “literal” facts.

These days, nothing seems more literal than “the economy.”  Its worldwide meltdown has caused and continues to cause untold suffering.  The suffering itself is not imaginary – losing a job or a house is all too real.  The fantasy, as Hillman used the term, is found in the fears that keep us up at night.  It’s lodged in the sharply differing stories we hear of what caused the crisis, who is to blame, how bad it is, and what we should do to fix it.

I want to share the best account I’ve ever heard of our impasse.  It’s a story of cause and  effect that reaches back two centuries.  It’s an account by Dr. Richard Wolff, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, who was a guest on Moyers & Company on Feb. 22.

Dr. Richard Wolff on Moyers & Company

Dr. Richard Wolff on Moyers & Company

In an earlier lecture, ca 2008, Capitalism hits the fan, Wolff presented an historical framework to allow us to understand “how big, how serious, how profound” our current crisis is.

For 150 years, from 1820 to 1970, wages increased across every decade in America.  Wolff believes this is unique in the history of the world.

America was blessed with unimaginable riches – minerals, timber, water, and millions of acres of farmland (after the native populations were killed or contained).  Immigrants poured in from all over the world to work in factories and build railroads, convinced that their sacrifice could provide a better future for their children.  For a century and a half, they were right.  This gave rise to the myth of American Exceptionalism, the conviction that we as a nation are unique and this is our birthright.

Collectively, we began to measure our worth and success by this standard, but it failed in the mid 1970’s.  Inflation adjusted wages peaked around 1973.  There are four reasons according to Wolff.

  1. Beginning in the ’70’s, computer technology began to eliminate millions of jobs.
  2. The practice of exporting jobs and entire industries began.
  3. Huge numbers of women entered the workforce.
  4. Successive waves of immigration came to America’s shores.

The combination of many more applicants for fewer jobs held wages in check and has continued to do so.  Americans tried to compensate by sending more people out of each home to work and by working longer hours.  By 2000 we were working 20% more hours than we had in 1970 (why else invent fast food, Wolff asks).  When that didn’t work well enough, we went on a borrowing binge to prop up our “standard of living,” often in the form of credit card debt, at 18% interest.

Forty years later, according to Wolff, we have a working class that’s exhausted, with collapsing personal lives and the anxiety of “a population whose average level of debt exceeds its annual income.”  

With a workforce unable to carry more debt or work any harder, “We have reached the limits of this kind of capitalism,” Wolff says.  “That’s why our current crisis is not temporary.  It’s not a blip.” 

Photo by Ann Douglas, 2010. CC by-NC-SA 2.0

Photo by Ann Douglas, 2010. CC by-NC-SA 2.0

The same period of stagnant wages saw an unprecedented bonanza for business.  Flat wages plus technology driven leaps in productivity delivered all time record profits.  Along with multi-million dollar compensation for upper management, more and more corporations got into the business of credit, and this, says Richard Wolff, is the key to understanding our economy over the last 30 years.  General Motors, for instance, made more money from interest in loaning people money to buy cars than it did making cars.

Banks and corporations began to loan workers the money they no longer paid them, and this is the system, says Wolff, that is now imploding.

Our leaders don’t know how to fix it.  Traditional economic measures, from stimulus to bailouts to regulation to austerity have been tried before.  They were tried by two administrations during the ’30’s without much success – it took a world war to end the depression.  These tactics have also been tried in Japan since 1989 with disappointing results.

What are the possible solutions?  Wolff does not propose any concrete answers but simply offers one alternative model, based on the cooperative structures pioneered by some Silicon Valley startups.  He claims such a structure offers a better hope of leading toward renewal than any other suggestions of which he’s aware.

“If we don’t take basic steps of this sort, to deal with a crisis that has built over this length of time; if we keep tinkering at the edges with our financial system, because we need to call this a financial crisis, rather than a crisis of capitalism, which is what it is, we will all be very sorry.” – Richard Wolf.

***

Work is a critical elements of our lives, one of the key factors of wellbeing or its lack.  As such, it is rife with fantasy and arouses huge passions.  Our current political climate of rancor makes that clear.  None of our other issues cause such concern.  What happens when the solutions offered by both political parties fall short?

Photo by windsordi, East Detroit, 2012. CC By-NC 2.0

Photo by windsordi, East Detroit, 2012. CC By-NC 2.0

In last week’s interview with Bill Moyers, Wolff suggested that the nation as a whole is like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights. He went on to say, “if my psychiatrist wife is right, as she usually is, what happens after that period of stasis, of shock, is a boiling over of anger, as you kind of confront what has happened. And that you were deceived and betrayed in your expectations, your hopes. And then the question is, where does that go?”

Best case, he says, we begin to ask questions about the system as a whole: “I think there’s a wonderful tradition here in the United States of people feeling that they have a right, even if they don’t exercise it a lot, to intervene, to control. There is that democratic impulse. And I put a lot of stock in the hope that if this is explained, if the conditions are presented, that the American people can and will find ways to push for the kinds of changes that can get us out of this dilemma. Even if the political leaders who’ve inherited this situation seem stymied and unable to do so.”

If he’s right, this is the place for fantasy, the place for imagination to plumb the sea of possibilities to bring up something that works in a new world in a new century.

Belated reflections on the Academy Awards

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By now, everyone who cares has read accounts of the event – the winners and losers, the fashions, and the host.  It’s tempting to add my own $0.02, but that’s not my purpose in writing this.  It would be easy to get sidetracked if I tried.

With the glaring exception of failing to nominate Ben Affleck for Best Director, I thought the Academy had a number of worthy candidates to chose from and did a credible job in selecting winners.

This year, like most others, the major awards didn’t interest me as much as the “small” ones.  Music, makeup, costumes.  Screenplays, cinematography, film editing.  The last three were tasks I learned while working on a student production in college – they are critical, difficult, and we hardly ever notice the names when the credits roll.  These awards always remind me that movies are collective efforts.  You see it especially in the memorials to those in the industry who died in the previous year – when they did their work well, it was seamless and we barely noticed.

In contrast to the production of movies, the myth of the solitary genius still lurks in our psyches.  As far as I can tell, it’s an artifact of the 18th and 19th western romantic imagination.  It has never appeared in the east at all, and the works of the Renaissance masters were mostly collective efforts.  Leonardo, Michelangelo, and all the others had workshops where apprentices stretched the canvas or mixed the pigments, and journeymen painted the drapery.  Then the master stepped in to finish the hands and the face of the virgin and child.  Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel was an exception.  I bet he would have advertised on TV it he’d had it available, like James Patterson, whose sometimes excellent novels are now collaborative efforts.

Old myths linger.  In the early part of the 20th century, when movies were young, writers dreamed of the Great American Novel.  Hollywood was a place where ill-starred authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald went to complete their fall from grace and die.  Nowadays the fantasy is to write the next Twilight or Hunger Games and get the novel optioned.

Let me be explicit.  Sometime during the last 50 or 60 years, movies became our most important artistic medium.  Never mind that there’s lots of chaff in the wheat – across the globe, movies are where most of us go, most of the time, to find inspiration and learn about ourselves and the world we live in.

With this in mind, watching the Academy Awards made me sad when I thought of the future of the medium.  During the past month, the local Board of Education announced 11 school closings.  Parents and students showed up at several meetings to protest, and with its usual flair for drama, the paper published a photo of a girl with a sign saying, “Please don’t take our music department away.”

I thought about her on Oscar night.  She probably won’t grow up to work on movie scores.  How many other potential writers, musicians, artists, technicians, and designers who will do something else because our bureaucrats limit their options in the name of pragmatism?

Pragmatism is necessary but it doesn’t nourish the soul.  I hope the next generation of dreamers continues to dream, against ever worsening odds.  I hope we never look back on this year’s Oscars and think, “Ah, those were the days…”

The Psychology of Superheroes

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superheroes

Robin Rosenberg grew up with superhero comics. Later she shared them with her children, and after becoming a clinical psychologist, she studied them through the lens of psychology and discovered that “superhero stories are about morality and loyalty, about self-doubt and conviction of beliefs. I also saw that, like any good fiction, the sagas of superheroes bring us out of ourselves and connect us with something larger than ourselves, something more universal.”

Rosenberg published “We Need a Hero” in the current Smithsonian Magazine http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Psychology-Behind-Superhero-Origin-Stories-187938991.html#ixzz2IrHHrBBI.  The article inspired me to read The Psychology of Superheroes a collection of essays that Rosenberg edited in 2008 on what makes these caped crusaders tick.

Sometimes it seems that superheroes can’t get no satisfaction, but is that accurate?  Not according to the opening essay in the collection, “The Positive Psychology of Superheroes,” by Christopher Peterson and Nansook Park.  “One of the defining features of a superhero is an over-riding mission to serve the larger world and to defend it.  In this sense, superheroes have profoundly meaningful lives.”   

Peterson and Park assert that meaning is more important than pleasure in leading a satisfying life. That’s a good thing, because with a few exceptions, superheroes are challenged on the relationship front.  I’ve always thought it’s the flaws embodied in the secret identities of Clark Kent and Peter Parker that bonds us to these characters.  In one sense, they’re just like us, and their stories suggest that we too may choose the highroad.

Though superpowers isolate them from others, sometimes superheroes band together with superior results, according to the second essay in the collection, “The Benefits of a Group,” by Dr. Wind Goodfriend. This article may shed some light on why The Justice League of America functions more efficiently than your team at work or committees at church.

Another topic discussed in the book is the question of nurture vs. nature in the development of superhero psychology.  Superman may have his powers through genetics, how did he come to use them for altruistic rather than narrow and selfish ends?  Did he inherit those qualities too, or were they a result of his wholesome upbringing on a farm in America’s heartland?  What would have happened if his pod had landed in New York City?

Good and evil are usually clearly drawn in superhero stories, but not always. In “Anti-Heroism in the Continuum of Good and Evil,” Dr. Michael Spivey and Steve Knowlton discuss the ambiguous, gray-zone nature of super anti-heroes and sympathetic villains (think of Darth Vader and Gollum).  Each of the 18 essays in The Psychology of Superheroes addresses some facet of the super-psyche that you may or may not have wondered about.

Humans have relished hero tales for millennia.  Superman joined the ranks 75 years ago, and if you’ve been to the cineplex lately, you know that his saga is going to continue this summer.  The trailer for Man of Steel 2013 zeroes in on Clark’s inner struggles to understand who he is and why he is here.  Earlier incarnations of Superman did not live in a world of such moral ambiguity and mistrust of the government, themes which place this telling squarely in the 21st century.

As The Psychology of Superheroes makes clear, what we really admire is not the superpowers but the hero, the one who overcomes their doubts and demons and then acts to make the world a better place. This book is a fascinating read in its own right and will whet your appetite for the new movie.  It will give you some new perspectives on movies you’ve seen in the past as well as the comic books that once inspired some of us to run around wearing capes made out of bedsheets.

Tales of the Dummling

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Many of Grimm’s fairytales begin with three sisters or three brothers who have a critical task to perform.  Invariably, the youngest succeeds.    In her introduction to a story called “The Golden Bird,” Maria Tatar, editor of the recently published bicentennial collection says: “If the female protagonists of fairy tales are often as good as they are beautiful, their male counterparts often appear to be as young and naive as they are stupid.”

“The Golden Bird” illustrates the point.  The youngest son is so hopeless that even his animal guide, a fox, grows frustrated, yet in the end, the boy wins “complete happiness.”

Not all youngest sons are so dense, and sometimes the stories have great depth, like “The Water of Life,” which I discussed here last March (http://wp.me/pYql4-1OC and http://wp.me/pYql4-1Pm).

According to Marie-Louise von Franz, Carl Jung’s closest colleague and author of five books on fairytales, the Brothers Grimm published  50-60 stories of dumb youngest sons.  Von Franz thought these stories were so important, individually and culturally, that she started her first book on folklore, The Interpretation of Fairytales 1970, with a detailed study of one Dummling tale, “The Three Feathers.”  The story is one of the better known Grimm stories, present in the new annotated edition as well.  What follows is a brief synopsis.  The tale isn’t long and those who wish can read it on Project Gutenberg: http://www.reelreality.com/fairy_tales/grimms_fairy_stories/index.html#dummling

“The Three Feathers” from the Project Gutenberg ebook edition of Grimm’s fairytales.

*** Synopsis of The Three Feathers ***

Once an aging king had three sons. Two were clever, but the third didn’t say much and was considered dim-witted.  People called him Dummling [or “Dummy” depending on the translation].  The king decided to test the boys to determine who should rule his kingdom when he was gone.   He told them whoever returned with the most beautiful carpet would inherit the kingdom.  Then he took them outside, blew three feathers into the air and told his sons the feathers would determine which way they should go.

One son’s feather flew east and another’s west, but Dummling’s feather flew straight ahead a few paces and fell to the ground.  The other brothers laughed and set out, but Dummling just sat down by the feather and waited.  Eventually he noticed a trapdoor nearby.  It opened onto a staircase descending into the earth.  The boy followed the stairs down to another door on which he knocked.  From inside a voice called:

“Maiden, fairest, come to me,
Make haste to ope the door,
A mortal surely you will see,
From the world above is he,
We’ll help him from our store.”

Inside was a fat toad, surrounded by many smaller toads.  The boy said he needed the world’s most beautiful carpet.  The toad called out to the younger ones to “bring the box for the boy at the door.”  Inside was a beautiful carpet.  Dummling carried it home, his father was astonished, and declared that he should be the next king.

“The Three Feathers” from the Project Gutenberg ebook edition of Grimm’s fairytales.

The two other brothers, who had simply bought pieces of linen from the first peasant women they met on the road, protested so loudly that the king decreed another test.  He sent his sons out to find the most beautiful ring.  Again one feather blew east, another west, and Dummling’s by the trapdoor.  The fat frog called for a box in which the boy found a beautiful gold ring.  The brothers brought rings they had made from  nails they had taken from cart wheels.

Again the king declared Dummling the winner, and again the older brothers protested.  The king’s third test was to bring home the most beautiful wife.  Dummling won a toad bride who became a beautiful human woman after he took her home.  The brothers, who had married the first peasant women they met, complained again so the king ordered a fourth test.  The brides were ordered to jump through a hoop suspended in air.  Naturally, Dummling’s wife, who had been a toad, easily won.  Dummling received the crown and he ruled “with great wisdom” for many years.

Jumping through the hoop by Arthur Rackham

Jumping through the hoop by Arthur Rackham

***

In The Interpretation of Fairytales, Marie-Louise von Franz devoted three chapters to an in depth analysis of this tale.  She believed Dummling stories reflect the situation of individuals, cultures, and institutions that get stuck when certain rigid patterns and ideas cut them off from sources of renewal.

The first thing she notes is that all the Dummling tales begin with a father and three sons but no wife or sisters.  The feminine element is missing and regardless of what he sets out to do, the most important achievement of the younger son will be to bring home a bride.  In abstract terms, that is bringing Eros into a situation overweighted with Logos.  Von Franz cites cultural examples like the importance of the cult of the Virgin Mary in the medieval Catholic church.  She also says that third-son stories:

“compensate the conscious attitude of a society in which patriarchal schemes and oughts and shoulds dominate.  It is ruled by rigid principles because of which the irrational, spontaneous adaptation to events is lost.  It is typical that Dummling stories are statistically more frequent in the white man’s society than in others, and it is obvious why that is so.”

Once you start thinking along these lines, many characters spring to mind from history as well as the arts.  Saint Francis, who called himself “God’s Fool,” brought flexibility and Eros to the medieval church.  A classic movie example from recent times is  Forest Gump 1994.  Tom Hanks’ Dummling character succeeded where the smart people failed.  Gump, who lived in the moment and was close to his emotions, reacted to things as they happened rather than to his own fixed ideas.  Remember the movie’s opening shot of a feather?  If nothing else, that convinces me that Forest Gump’s creators knew the Dummling stories in detail.

Tom Hanks as a modern Dummling

Tom Hanks as a modern Dummling

Von Franz amplifies the detail of the feather, saying it was a common medieval practice in many countries.  “If someone did not know where to go, if they were lost at a crossroads or had no special plan, he would take a feather, blow on it and walk in which ever direction the wind took it.  That was a very common kind of oracle by which you could be guided.”

It isn’t as apparent in this Dummling tale as it is many others that the older brothers are modern A-types.  They don’t have time to fuss with insignificant creatures like frogs, or dwarves, or old ladies, or any of those helpful beings who guide the youngest brothers on their way.  Youngest brothers have time to listen because their calendars are clear.  They sit by their feathers or walk through the forest, paying attention and waiting for new ideas to arrive.

Von Franz used the feather analogy in discussing her method of therapy.  She said when her patients were stuck, she would listen to their dreams to see which way the winds of the psyche were blowing.  When I studied psychology, one of my teachers spoke in the same vein, of the importance of listening to the little impulse, the small thoughts that are easy to ignore, like “Oh, that looks interesting,” or “Wouldn’t it be nice to take a few hours off for a walk beside the river?”  Smart older brothers, working on their MBA’s, don’t have time for things like that, which is how they get into therapy in the first place.

I’ve heard that when he was president, Harry Truman once said, “We’re going to try X, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.”  Our government might not be so stuck if politicians dared to admit that sometimes they don’t know the answers and need to see which way their feathers blow.

Sometimes being “smart” is a greater hindrance than being “dumb,” for the key thing is to be teachable.

I came upon the Dummling stories years ago, and they often come to mind when things are stuck in my own life or in what I observe around me.  “When you don’t know what to do, do nothing,” is a common and useful bit of advice.  I sometimes restate it and say, “When you don’t know what to do, sit by your feather and pay attention.”