The view out my window is Skalholt Cathedal and this reconstructed chapel which is part of an archeological dig at one of Iceland’s key historical sites. On the horizon behind the chapel likes Hekla, one of Iceland’s most active volcanoes. In the middle ages, Europeans called it the Gateway to Hell. Hekla last erupted in February, 2000, but with luck, it will continue to sleep through the rest of the week.
Mary and I are here for a different type of archeology – a dig into an ancient tradition of story. We are here with three other storytellers to explore Njal’s Saga, the account of a feud with tragic consequences, not unlike the American tale of the Hatfields and the McCoys. In both cases, events are based in history; we’re visiting some of the key locations mentioned in the saga. Njal was shaped by an anonymous author into the masterpiece of a unique tradition that influenced Tolkien, among others.
Meeting of the continents: the North American tectonic plate (left) meets the Euro-Asian plate at Thingvellir, Iceland.
This week of the equinox, the temperature drops to freezing at night, but the guesthouse where we are staying is warmed by geothermal energy, by water bubbling up from hot springs that is shipped through pipes to cities and settlements throughout the island. Iceland is 99% energy independent.
I’ll have more to reflect on in future posts, but meanwhile it is seven hours later than west coast time – tomorrow is almost here, so it’s time to log out. Please enjoy your week and stay tuned for future posts.
When you look at our culture, it seems like fairytales have never been more popular. “Grimm” and “Once Upon a Time” are starting their second television season. Earlier this year, we had two movie versions of Sleeping Beauty. Young adult paranormal stories remain popular with readers of all ages, and I’m currently reading a 1994 collection of classic fairytales retold by some of the best modern fantasy authors. The book, Black Thorn, White Rose, by editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, was reissued as a kindle edition and features challenging tales by authors like Nancy Kress, Patricia Wrede, and Jane Yolen.
Snow White begs for mercy. From an 1852 Icelandic version. Public doman.
The old stories call out to us with their promise of depth as the stuff and fluff of modern life fails to satisfy the yearnings of the soul. Yet according to Wolfgang Mieder, professor of German and folklore at the University of Vermont, we’re missing a critical element that earlier generations possessed, and the loss is related to the flood of tales we have today. “Everybody reads different stories and we no longer know the same fairytales. The connecting element is lost,” says Mieder. He is optimistic about the survival of fairytales, but questions the way we now receive them.
Mieder, a German-American, won the 2012 European Fairytale Prize and has studied the social significance of fairytales for more than 40 years. After high school, he traveled to the US from Germany to study mathematics, but a seminar in German folklore changed his life’s direction. Folklore became very personal for him. He recalls that in Germany, “In the 1950s you used to be given a colorful picture as a gift when you bought margarine, which I made a lot of effort to collect and paste in my album. With the album I got to know the world of fairytales.”
Wolfgang Mieder. CC-by-SA-3.0
Mieder, who has authored 200 publications and 500 articles, want his students to find the same personal connection to the old stories. This can be hampered by the sheer volume of folklore appearing on TV, movies, and the internet. Will the glut of information detract from the impact of stories that generations of people heard aloud in the flickering firelight? Mieder is hopeful – he has observed a new interest in oral telling of old stories.
This is something I have experienced, both as a story teller and listener. All over the world, it was largely during the dark months when the stories were told, and now we have a world-wide celebration of stories each November.
In 1988, J.G. Pinkerton, of the Connecticut Storytelling Center, imagined a night of storytelling, which he called Tellebration, to build community support for storytelling. That year stories were told in six locations throughout the state. By 1997, there were Tellebration events on every continent except Antarctica.
Tellebration is held on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, November 17 this year. You can search for events near you – or even organize and register your own – at this site, hosted by the National Storytelling Network: http://www.tellabration.org/index.html
And finally, to see a wonderful site devoted to fairytales and folklore – the place where I found the Wieder article – visit the “Sur La Lune Fairy Tales Blog,” listed on my blogroll.
And finally-finally, as in really finally, I’ll be devoting next week to exploring some old stories and oral tradition. I’ll be largely or entirely unwired for the duration, but I promise you will hear more about this in upcoming posts.
Twenty-five years ago, Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell filmed a groundbreaking series that opened the world of myth, story, and folklore to a large audience. The Power of Myth series was completed in 1987, shortly before Campbell died at the age of 83. It aired the following year on PBS, and you still sometimes find it replayed during pledge drives. The companion DVD set and book are still in print.
If you’ve never seen this series – or even if you have – grab some popcorn and fire it up on your largest monitor. This wonderful introduction to key stories from around the world was filmed at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. Lucas was a serious student of Campbell, who structured the first Starwars trilogy around the hero myth.
Almost anything I have to say about myth and folklore is influenced by Campbell. In these final interviews, he distills a lifetime of study into a clear but powerful series of tales and observations that forever changes one’s view of the great stories of humankind.
On monday morning, I woke around 3:00am with a sense of dread far out of proportion to the rather mundane dream I’d been having. A thunderstorm rolling by increased the sense of menace at this darkest hour of the night.
The hour of the wolf is the phrase I’ve always used for such moments. “It’s always darkest right before dawn,” we tell ourselves by daylight. “It’s always darkest just before it goes pitch black,” says a demotivational poster you can find on despair.com. That is the hour of the wolf (though despair.com is a funny website).
When I was an undergrad, we used to say, “Wherever two or more are gathered, they’ll start a film society.” College film societies of the time loved Ingmar Bergman, and I did too, so I knew his 1968, The Hour of the Wolf, but it wasn’t one of my favorites from his surrealistic period. The best definition I know came from dialog in the “Hour of the Wolf” episode of Babylon 5, in 1996:
“Have you ever heard of the hour of the wolf? … It’s the time between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning. You can’t sleep, and all you can see is the troubles and the problems and the ways that your life should’ve gone but didn’t. All you can hear is the sound of your own heart.” – Michael J. Straczynski, writer, Babylonian Productions.
Since I couldn’t sleep, I tried to remember what I knew of the phrase. A long time ago, I read that it was coined in medieval Paris. The gates of the city were shut at night, but during the winter, wolves sometimes slipped through at dusk. At the darkest hour of the night, they would glide through the streets like shadows to prey on the poor unfortunates who were sleeping alone on the streets. “Hour of the wolf” was the phrase coined by those who encountered the grisly remains in the morning.
Hint: thinking of wolves chewing corpses doesn’t help you get back to sleep.
I knew by then what was keeping me up. Some of it had to do with the Colorado shootings. It’s hard to sleep easy after such an event, but that was not the heart of it. On sunday, I’d listened to Chris Hedges, a guest on Moyers & Company, in a segment called, “Capitalism’s ‘Sacrifice Zones.'”
Hedges is a journalist who worked for the New York Times until he was “pushed out” for outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq. The interview is important and very depressing, like much honest reporting these days (when you can find it).
It’s hard to know what to do with this kind of unpleasant truth. One good thing that came out of this post is that I learned the source of the phrase, “live with the questions.” Therapists, especially Jungians, like to quote it, but it was Rainer Maria Rilke who first penned it. In 1903, in Letters to a Young Poet, he said:
“…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Several people had wonderful things to say in response to preceding birthday post, where I restated what has become the mission statement of this blog: to look for the fantasy in all realities and the reality in all fantasy. The comments were almost too kind – but not quite – and they prompted me to begin several posts on people and things that have shaped my thinking about imagination. What jumps to mind first is movie released in 1984.
The Neverending Story, 1979, a fantasy novel by German author, Michael Ende, was translated into English in 1983. A film was released the following year, which I saw in the early ’90’s, after one of my psych professors said, “It’s a story about our culture’s war on imagination.”
A lonely boy named Bastian loves to read. One morning on the way to school, he ducks into a bookstore to escape pursuing bullies. He asks the grumpy store owner about an intriguing book called, The Neverending Story. “It isn’t safe,” the owner says. At an opportune moment, Bastian “borrows” the book and carries it into the school attic to read.
The book relates how the kingdom of Fantasia is under attack by the Nothing, a dark void that consumes everything it touches. The creatures of Fantasia appeal to their ruler, The Childlike Empress, but the Nothing has made her ill. She summons Atreyu, a warrior of Bastian’s age, to conquer The Nothing, and gives him a magical talisman, the AURYN to guide him on the quest. The force behind The Nothing summons Gmork, a wolf-like beast who craves power, to kill Atreyu.
The AURYN. Stephen Spielberg keeps the original prop in his office
Nowadays we’d call this a middle-grade book, but 33 years ago, when The Neverending Story was written, that label didn’t exist. Most books written for young people, then and now, focus on personal issues. Bastian is lonely and has trouble at school, but this is just the inciting action, not the real subject of the story. The book and movie are unique in presenting a very adult theme – imagination and the forces arrayed against it – in fiction for this age group.
Atreyu finds no clues concerning the Nothing, so he risks the Swamps of Saddness to find the wisest being in Fantasia. Those who succumb to the sadness sink into the swamp and are lost. This is the fate of Atreyu’s beloved horse, Artax.
The wise being cannot help, but directs Atreyu to the Southern Oracle, 10,000 miles away. While trudging through the swamp with Gmork on his trail and little chance of success,Atreyu begins to sink into despair. A Luckdragon named Falkor rescues him and carries him most of the way to the oracle.
Atreyu and Falkor
The oracle tells Atreyu that the only way to save Fantasia is for a human child, who lives beyond the borders of the realm, to give the Childlike Empress a new name. Then the oracle crumbles, a victim of the Nothing.
Falkor and Atreyu seek the border, and find the Nothing, which has become incredibly strong. Atreyu encounters Gmork who explains that Fantasia is “humanity’s hopes and dreams,” while the Nothing is “human apathy, cynicism, and the denial of childish dreams.”
Atreyu kills Gmork but is wounded and nearly falls victim to the Nothing. He is rescued once again by Falkor, but when he regains consciousness, only fragments of Fantasia remain, floating in the void. The two make their way to the Ivory Tower, where Atreyu tells the Empress he has failed.
She says no, he has succeeded. His quest was the only way to draw the attention of the human child, who is listening to them as they speak. Bastian realizes she is talking of him. As the Nothing begins to consume the Tower, the Empress begs him to say her name. Bastian races to the attic window, and cries, “Moonchild!” into the face of an approaching storm. He finds himself face to face with the Empress, who reveals that the Nothing has consumed all of Fantasia but a single grain of sand.
The Empress gives Bastian the last grain of sand of Fantasia
The Empress tells Bastian that his imagination and wishes have the power to restore the land to its former glory. In the final scene, we see Bastian soaring on Falkor through skies in Fantasia and his own world. I wasn’t crazy about the ending. There’s a Disney quality though out, since in the days before digital animation, films like this relied on animated models and actors in costumes, but that was not necessarily a liability. Jim Henson pulled it off without missing a beat in Dark Crystal, 1982.
In the last scene of The Neverending Story, I’m aware of watching a children’s movie, which disappoints, since most of the film was greater than any such category. Even so, in the 20 years that have passed since I saw the movie, I’ve never forgotten the chords it struck concerning imagination. Please take a look at this clip of Atreyu meeting Gmork to get a sense of the movie’s scope:
In succeeding posts, we’ll look at some views of Depth Psychology and certain spiritual traditions. For both of them, literalism is the enemy of living with soul and imagination. The Neverending Story tells us this is a battle we each must fight in our own hearts and minds. The world of practical affairs and the marketplace have never had much use for the world’s dreamers. Can we still manage to hear the cries of the Otherworld beings who fade into nothing at our lack of attention? “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane is the dying cry of someone who lost Fantasia.
The Neverending Story echoes world folklore in showing the need otherworld creatures have for humans. Irish and Scottish fairies steal mortal children. The fairy queen sought out Thomas the Rhymer to be his consort for seven years, the same length of time the sea nymph, Calypso, held onto Odysseus in ancient Greece. Why do such beings need us for redemption?
These are just some of the questions this apparently simple “children’s movie” raises. They are far to complex to answer here, but I plan to take some additional forays into imaginal realms in the next few posts, so please stay tuned.
While sitting with friends the other day, I heard a woman describe her extended family as “all about issues.” At holidays and picnics, arguments erupt over politics, gender, economics, and all the social concerns du jour – right-to-life vs. right-to-choose, and who can and should get married. The woman shook her head and said, “I think I want to live a life without issues.”
That phrase really clicked with me, and the more I thought about it, the more it explained certain “issue oriented” posts that I started recently but never finished. I’d wondered if it was summer laziness, or if I needed a break from blogging, but no – I saw it in a flash – I need a break from issues! Not an ostrich move, but an issue fast.
A voice in my head objected – “But…but…but…now that the presidential race is really on, aren’t these issues more important than ever? Doesn’t the future of the Republic and who knows what else hang in the balance?” One thought led to another, and the phrase, “ship of fools” came to mind. I found myself humming The Grateful Dead’s, “Ship of Fools.” I cranked it up when I got home and logged in to explore the theme. What follows is just a hint of the history of the image and its vast metaphoric possibilities.
And yes, there’s a nice Grateful Dead clip at the end of the post you can listen to while you read…
Hieronymus Bosh, “Ship of Fools,” c. 1490-1500, detail
Wikipedia says, “The ship of fools is an allegory that has long been a fixture in Western literature and art. The allegory depicts a vessel populated by human inhabitants who are deranged, frivolous, or oblivious passengers aboard a ship without a pilot, and seemingly ignorant of their own direction.“
It’s surprising that the Ship of Fools/Ship of State analogy has yet to be picked up this year, with its “deranged, frivolous, or oblivious passengers,” but there’s more than allegory bound up with the phrase. The same Wikipedia entry details the origin of the image:
“Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then ‘knew’, had an affinity for each other. Thus, ‘Ship of Fools’ crisscrossed the sea and canals of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse, or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors.” – Jose Barchilon’s introduction to Madness and Civilization, by Michel Foucault.
On the literal level, this “delightful, yet horrible” custom is not entirely a thing of the past. We can think of New York City in 2009, with it’s offer to homeless people of free one-way tickets to anywhere else. The same thing happens here, when overworked neighboring social service agencies “dump” their homeless in Sacramento county.
As an imaginal image, The Fool still evokes powerful responses of fear and fascination in the Western psyche. The Fool is the first card of the Major Arcana in the Tarot, evoking “beginner’s mind,” that mix of wisdom and naiveté with which we begin the spiritual path, or depending on your belief system, each new incarnation in the world (or both).
From his studies of Irish folklore, Yeats learned that among the fairies, the Queen and the Fool each share tremendous power. A mortal may survive a “stroke” given by one of the other fairies, but nothing in heaven or earth can save you if you get on the wrong side of the Fool or the Queen.
While Europeans consigned them to ships, and later to institutions like Bedlam, some native American tribes considered their “fools” as sacred, for they had clearly been touched by the spirits. I’m reminded of Theodore Roethke’s poem, In a Dark Time, when he says, “What’s madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?”
The image of the Ship of Fools turns up in movies, music and books, most recently in Ship of Fools, 2009, by Fintan O’Toole, an Irish journalist who uses the metaphor to describe “the Irish political establishment and their self-deception regarding the economic situation in the country.”
This wanders into dangerous territory for someone on an issue-fast – it cuts too close to certain Americans seeking office – “deranged, frivolous, or oblivious passengers aboard a ship without a pilot, and seemingly ignorant of their own direction.”
So let’s adjourn to the Grateful Dead! “Ship of Fools,” by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, was first performed in 1974. Here is an excellent clip from the 1989 summer solstice show at Shoreline Amphitheater. Enjoy!
Went to see the captain strangest I could find Laid my proposition down Laid it on the line; I won’t slave for beggar’s pay likewise gold and jewels but I would slave to learn the way to sink your ship of fools.
Years ago I had a friend I sometimes looked to for counsel. He was a few years older than me and had already blazed the trail from hippie to the not-really-expected condition of being a family man with a mortgage and responsibilities. Holding to his ideals even as he cut his hair and put on a suit, he got a masters in psychology and became director of a drug and alcohol treatment center in northern California.
From the many discussions we had, I remember most clearly his phrase, “the seemingly bad.” He meant that we cannot really evaluate events as they unfold, and we waste a lot of energy trying.
Years later I came upon a Chinese folktale that serves as a parable of the point. It goes by various names, such as “An Old Man Finds a Horse.” An illustrated children’s version of the tale was published by Ed Young and Tracey Adams in 1998 as, The Lost Horse.
Here is the gist of the story.
Once a wise old man lived on the steppes. One day his prize mare ran away. The neighbors said, “How terrible. What a loss!” The old man said, “Perhaps.”
A few weeks later, the mare returned, along with a fine stallion. The neighbors said, “What great good fortune for you!” The old man said, “Perhaps.”
When the man’s son tried to ride the stallion, the horse threw him and he suffered a badly broken leg. The neighbors said, “You’re only son is crippled. What a terrible blow!” The old man said, “Perhaps.”
A short time later a regiment marched through the valley, pressing all the young men into military service – except the old man’s son, who was unable to serve in the infantry because of his leg. The other young men who marched to war never came home.
I had my own experience of “the seemingly bad” in the early ’80’s. I worked as a part-time community college art instructor and wanted a full time position. Shasta College, in Weed, CA, right at the foot of Mt. Shasta, had an opening, and based on an application and phone interview, I was invited to visit the school as one of five candidates for a second interview.
Everything looked good. My portfolio was strong, and I got a glowing recommendation from the chairman of the art department where I had studied, who had also taught the hiring professor at Shasta. Mary and I drove up on the kind of fall weekend that makes you glad to be alive. The interview went well, and that night we celebrated with dinner at a restaurant that featured a balcony overlooking a creek. While watching a golden sunset, we talked about where to live and what to do in our new home.
Guess what?
They promoted one of their own part-timers. I’m sure they intended this all along, and the interviews were just a formality to satisfy labor regulations. I was crushed. I forgot my old friend’s lesson, that this might just be seemingly bad.
A year later, in the face of recession and severe budget cuts, the position I had applied for was cut, along with a number of other teaching jobs. If I had been hired, we would have been stuck in a small town with severe unemployment.
This story and the concept of “seemingly bad” came to mind recently when I thought of people I’ve met who are desperate to get published – not just working hard to achieve the goal, but desperate, piling all their hopes and sense of worth on that increasingly shaky endeavor. What happens to the many who will never achieve that goal?
Hopefully, something along the lines of what happened after Shasta College turned me down. Feeling at first like a sell-out, I went to work in computer graphics. In retrospect, it was a great move. What seemed bad turned me down a different road that allowed me to make a good living while exploring a different kind of creativity.
I’m not suggesting that bad things don’t happen, or every cloud has a silver lining. The seemingly bad can be awfully hard to weather. I am suggesting that it’s hard to anticipate outcomes from the middle of the trenches. The more I thought about it, the better it seemed to pass on my old friend’s advice. The seemingly good and seemingly bad are often not what they seem.
Joseph Campbell’s groundbreaking series, “The Power of Myth,” broadcast on PBS in 1988, sparked a tremendous interest in myth and folklore. A number of fine studies followed during the next few years. One of my favorites was a series of books on fairytales by Allan B. Chinen, a San Francisco psychiatrist. In his second book, Once Upon a Midlife, 1992, Chinen discusses stories about the problems and tasks that face us in middle age, “when the Prince goes bald and the Princess has a midlife crisis.”
Of the 5,000 fairytales from around the world that Chinen reviewed, 90% were “youth tales,” aimed at young people trying to find their place in the world. The protagonists leave home, struggle to find their courage, fall love, find a treasure, and come into their kingdom or find a job. Chinen calls the other 10%, “middle tales.” The focus is middle-aged men and women, “juggling the demands of family and work, grappling with self-doubt and disillusionment, and ultimately finding deep new meaning in life.”
Allan Chinen
The first of the middle tale themes Chinen explores is “the loss of magic,” embodied in the German tale of “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” Youthful protagonists thrive when they locate a source of magic; they lose it only if they are mean or greedy. In middle tales, the magic fades in the course of living. At some point, we realize we’re not going to write the Great American Novel; we don’t have an unlimited number of do-overs left; we don’t have the skill or the energy to realize all of our youthful dreams. What is left? If we listen to the stories, Chinen says, we begin to see other roads between the extremes of naiveté and despair, roads that leads toward renewal.
The next theme is “reversals,” often involving men and women dropping traditional gender roles. The headline in this week’s newspaper Arts & Entertainment section was, “The Era of the Empowered Princess.” That may be the theme in Hollywood, but not in traditional “youth tales.” Where the emphasis is socialization, stories all over the world praise traditional roles. Things change in middle tales. Men sometimes say, “To hell with work,” or quit the army, while women grow more assertive and often save the day, as in “The Wife Who Became King,” a story from China.
The third middle tale theme is a new awareness of death and evil. Youth stories don’t dwell on either one; bad things happen to others, “out there.” Dragons die, bad sorcerers die, and sometimes evil step-mothers, but never the hero or heroine, and neither of them are evil. In middle tales mortality gets personal. Evil gets personal too; no longer does it simply lie “out there.” The expansiveness of youth gives way to the psyche’s need for wholeness, which means we have to “confront the shadow,” the darkness we carry within. The best stories, honed by generations of telling, lead us to realizations by the path of wisdom and by the path of humor. In “The Tell Tale,” a Japanese story, a woodcutter spies his wife in the arms of a pawnbroker. At first he is seized by a murderous rage. Rather than kill his wife and her lover, he concocts a ridiculous story and uses it to trick his wife, humiliate the pawnbroker, and makes enough money to live with his wife in comfort – and fidelity – for the rest of their days. There is far more of the trickster than the knight-in-shining-armor in these stories.
The final middle tale theme in Once Upon a Midlife is renewal, which in these stories, most often involves descent to the underworld.
“Stripped of all their defenses, individuals come face-to-face with the core of their being. There they find a primordial source of life, beyond conventional notions of good and evil, male and female. Whether understood as the inner Self, or God, or the life force, this primal source helps men and women reforge their lives…[they] emerge from their suffering with deep healing – and the ability to heal others.”
To anyone interested in the interpretation of folklore, I recommend this page which lists all of Allan Chinen’s books.
The First Gates 