Category Archives: Psychology

A Dilettante Among Symbols

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Heinrich Zimmer (1890-1943), was a scholar of eastern art and folklore, a friend of Carl Jung, a mentor to Joseph Campbell, and the author of a classic book on the psychological interpretation of folktales.  In The King and the Corpse, 1948, Zimmer included an introduction he called “A Dilettante Among Symbols,” a name he chose to sum up his approach.  Dilettante, from the Italian verb, dilettare, means “one who takes delight in something.”  Zimmer explained that his book was for “those who take delight in symbols, like conversing with them, and enjoy living with them continually in mind.”

I discussed The King and the Corpse on this blog in December, 2011 (http://wp.me/pYql4-1vt), but I focused then on the title story rather than Zimmer’s methods of interpretation.  That is what I want to consider here.

Zimmer analyzed stories from the perspective of psychology without ever falling into psychobabble.  Jung’s theories inform his work, but knowledge of those theories is never required to understand him.  Readers of Joseph Campbell will recognize the similarity in both men’s approach, and there’s good reason for this.

In 1938, the nazi’s dismissed Zimmer from the University of Heidelberg.  He migrated to England and taught at Oxford until 1940 when he moved to New York and found a teaching position at Columbia.  Joseph Campbell attended his lectures and the two became close friends.  After Zimmer died in 1943 of pneumonia, Campbell spent the next 12 years compiling Zimmer’s lecture notes into four books, including The King and the Corpse, which Bollingen Press published in 1948.

Heinrich Zimmer, 1933 (public domain)

The King and the Corpse features Zimmer’s discussion of stories from India, from the middle-east, from Ireland, Wales, and England.  Whether in Baghdad, Camelot, or an Indian cremation ground, his tone is one of engaged curiosity.  He insisted that all attempts to systematize the living reality of symbols are doomed: “Whenever we refuse to be knocked of our feet…by some telling new conception precipitated from the depths of our imagination by the impact of an ageless symbol, we are cheating ourselves of the fruit of an encounter with the wisdom of the millenniums…the boon of converse with the gods is denied us.”

I discovered Heinrich Zimmer during my freshman year in college.  The King and the Corpse introduced me to a number of marvelous stories, and gave me a way of approaching them, with head and heart, that I rely on to the present day.

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.”

We have met the enemy…

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The Colorado shootings will forever cast a pall over the opening day of the latest Batman movie, the kind of action-adventure fantasy many of us were looking forward to as an escape from all the other bad news that fills the papers these days.

I cannot add anything to the expressions of grief and outrage that the people of Colorado have and will make, but I heard one thing this morning that gave me pause.

The governor of Colorado said, “This is the act of a very deranged mind.”  It’s a natural thing to say, and we hear the same words after every similar tragedy.  The Texas Tower.  Oklahoma City.  Columbine.  The first thing we try to do is assure ourself that the crime was the work of a nut or monster.  The last thing we want to hear are comments now emerging from people who knew the suspect and say he seemed “really smart,” and “a nice guy.”  It’s terrifying to think that an “ordinary person” or a neighbor could do something like this.

Thich Nhat Hahn, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who Martin Luther King nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, was versed both in Buddhist and western psychology.  His teachings gave me the concept of “store consciousness.”

Thich Nhat Hahn

This is the part of our unconscious psyche where all possible tendencies reside, like seeds, waiting to germinate.  The ones we water with our attention, thought, and action are the ones that grow.  Like all Buddhists, Thich Nhat Hahn believes that we cannot know for sure which seeds we have watered in previous lives, but our proclivities in this life, for good or ill, give a strong hint.

Metaphysics aside, we can recognize the truth of the core concept – the seed tendencies we water are the ones that grow.  The only memorial we can make to the people who died in that theater is to stand beside those like Thich Nhat Hahn, Martin Luther King, and all men and women of goodwill of the present and past.  We can join with them in trying to give the water of attention to qualities like compassion, patience, and non-violence – the seeds we want to grow.

Those who follow this blog know how often I quote Walt Kelley’s comic strip character, Pogo, who said, “We has met the enemy and he is us.”  It doesn’t have to be that way.

Holy Pathology, Batman!

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Batman, originally Bat-man or The Batman, first appeared in Detective Comics #27, in May, 1939, the creation of artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger. Popular from the start, Batman had his own comic by 1940.

The Caped Crusader joined the screen actor’s guild in the 60’s, with a campy TV show that altered some of my speech patterns forever (Observe the title of this post, Robin).

When the show ended, so did much of Batman’s popularity. In 1969,writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams tried to return Batman to his roots as  “grim avenger of the night.”  Beginning with Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, several big budget movie series have portrayed Bruce Wayne’s alter-ego in a dark and dangerous world – it’s always night in Gotham City.

Batman Begins, 2005

As if this intrepid crime fighter didn’t have enough on his plate, some are raising questions about his mental health.  And when you think about it – what’s with the addiction to danger, the cape, the muscle suit, and probably lifts in the shoes? His car says size matters, but he can’t hang onto a girlfriend. His deepest relationship is with his butler.  He’s certainly stuck in black and white thinking – people are good or bad, nowhere a shade of gray.  Maybe he hasn’t worked through all of his childhood issues. Maybe he should ask his doctor about anti-depressants.  Or viagra.  Join an online dating service and settle down as a hedge-fund manager, like a respectable member of the 1%.

But no, says psychologist, Robin Rosenberg, author of What’s the Matter with Batman?  The boy’s all right.

In a recent NPR interview, Rosenberg, who blogs about superheroes for Psychology Today, said: “Bruce Wayne is a really clever man who has both high intelligence and high EQ, emotional quotient.” http://tinyurl.com/6npy226.

Rosenberg turns the spotlight on us, asking why we assume there is something wrong with Batman.  “People who are truly selfless, who have given so much of themselves, are confusing to most of us. And I think some of us, in cynical moments, say, ‘There must be something the matter with someone who would do that.'”

I’d modify her words to say that nowadays, we think a selfless billionaire is weird.  Nothing new about this sentiment.  In 1939, the year Batman emerged, Woody Guthrie wrote “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd.”

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

Change “fountain pen” to “computer” and the statement rings as true as it did 73 years ago.  The biggest difference now, as the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, comes out this Friday, is that most of us probably find it even harder to believe a super-rich man could be our friend.

In a post on the Psychology Today superhero blog, Robin Rosenberg wrote:  “The stories of superheroes and heroes resonate with us because they tap into some essential truths about human nature, about our yearnings and aspirations, our demons and dilemmas, our fears and our frustrations.”  http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superheroes.

Superheroes are archetypes.  They’ve been present in our stories for millennia – only the outfits and details change.  Heracles didn’t need to change clothes in a phone booth, because he didn’t work at The Daily Planet.

Heroes and superheroes are a secular expression of something everyone knows when they wake at the hour of the wolf – without a Higher Power, or higher powers, we’re screwed.  There’s nothing accidental about the number of superhero movies so far this year.  And some of them are a lot of fun!

Enjoy this new incarnation of The Caped Crusader!

Notes on Imagination and James Hillman

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Here’s my dilemma:  it’s impossible for me to write about imagination without mentioning James Hillman.  Yet every time I’ve started a post on Hillman, I’ve given it up because the scope of his thought and writing, over almost 50 years, is just too vast.  Hillman died last October at 85 and a two volume work on his life and thought is underway.  Two volumes might not be enough.  So what can a blog post accomplish?  We are about to find out.

James Hillman

Three days after Hillman’s funeral, his friend, Thomas Moore, wrote, “James’s many books and essays, in my view, represent the best and most original thought of our times. I expect that it will take many decades before he is truly discovered and appreciated.  He changed my life by being more than a mentor and a steady, caring friend. If I had to sum up his life, I would say that he lived in the lofty realm of thought and yet also like one of the animals he loved so much. He was always close to his passions and appetites and lived with a fullness of vitality I have never seen elsewhere. To me, he taught more in his lifestyle and in his conversation than in his writing, and yet his books and articles are the most precious objects I have around me.”

Hillman, who served as Director of Studies at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, will be remembered with Freud and Jung as one of the most original psychological thinkers of the 20th century, yet his appeal may be greater outside that discipline than it is with traditionalists in it.  He never pulled his punches.  In 1992 he co-authored, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse.  In an interview published a year earlier, he said:

“By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets – the sickness is out there. … The world has become toxic. … There is a decline in political sense. No sensitivity to the real issues. Why are the intelligent people – at least among the white middle class – so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy! …Every time we try to deal with our outrage … by going to therapy with our rage and fear, we’re depriving the political world of something. And therapy, in its crazy way, by emphasizing the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the decline of the actual world.”

Let me say it again:  those statements were made in 1991.

During the late 80’s, Hillman joined Robert Bly and Michael Meade in presenting a series of conferences exploring the myths and archetypes of the male psyche.  Bly’s, Iron John came out of that work, as did Hillman’s and  Meade’s concern with the genius within, (see my previous post).  This was the subject of Hillman’s, The Soul’s Code, 1997, the first and only one of his books to become a bestseller.  In it, he suggested we come into the world with a calling or destiny, the way an acorn carries the pattern of a mature oak.  Our mission in life is to realize this deeper purpose.

***

An editor once rejected an articles of Hillman’s, saying it would set psychology back three-hundred years.  Hillman said that was exactly what he was trying to do.  Soul and soul-making were his constant concerns, but not as the words are used in modern terms.  He often quoted Keats who said, “Call the world if you please, ‘The vale of Soul-making.’  Then you will find out the use of the world…”  He also repeated a fragment of Heraclitus, “You could not discover the limits of the soul, even if you traveled every road to do so; such is the depth of it’s meaning.”

Hillman did more than offer poetic metaphor; his goal was nothing less than a return to an earlier, three part formulation  of the human person, embraced by the ancients but lost to modernity.  People in earlier times conceived of soul as an intermediate faculty that inhabits an imaginal realm between the physical world of body and the disembodied heights of pure spirit.  Imaginal not imaginary, a disparaging term which suggests that soul, vision, dream, and myth are not real.  In his key work, Revisioning Psychology, 1975, he said:

“First, ‘soul’ refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death.  And third, by ‘soul’ I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy – that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.”    

Another key point Hillman makes is the primacy of image in the life of the psyche:  Speaking of Jung he says:

“He considered the fantasy images that run through our daydreams and night dreams, which are present unconsciously in all our consciousness, to be the primary data of the psyche.  Everything we know and feel and every statement we make are all fantasy-based, that is, they derive from psychic images….Every notion in our minds, each perception of the world and sensation in ourselves must go through a psychic organization in order to ‘happen’ at all.  Every single feeling or observation occurs as a psychic event by first forming a fantasy-image.” 

***

At the start of this post, I wondered what I could say in a brief article about a prolific and protean thinker like James Hillman.  Inspire someone to learn more, I hope.  A good place to begin is A Blue Fire, a collection of key writings, edited by his friend, Thomas Moore.

Here are some noteworthy links:

The New York Times obituary:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/health/james-hillman-therapist-in-mens-movement-dies-at-85.html?_r=1

“On Soul, Character, and Calling” by Scott Landon, published in The Sun, July, 2012: http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/hillman.html

A tribute by his friend, Michael Ventura, a journalist, who asks, “What do you say about an intellectual genius who learned to tap dance in his 60s?”   http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2012-01-13/letters-at-3am-james-hillman-1926-2011/

A remembrance by Thomas Moore: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-moore/james-hillman-death_b_1067046.html

I have more to say, but this is enough for now.  I’ll end with a message Hillman sent to his friends during the last few weeks of his life, when he finally became too ill to work:   

“I am dying, yet in fact, I could not be more engaged in living. One thing I’m learning is how impossible it is to lay out a border between so-called ‘living’ and ‘dying’.” 

I think Moore is right – it will take decades to fully appreciate the scope of Hillman’s life and work, but there’s no reason not to begin right now.

The Serious Business of Play

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As I worked on the previous post and began to envision a series of articles on imagination, the July-August issue of the Smithsonian Magazine arrived with a piece that fit the theme.  In “Why Play is Serious,” Alison Gopnik, a leading researcher in cognitive development, says play is “a crucial part of what makes all humans so smart.”

Alison Gopnik

Many of us intuitively know that play matters, but Gopnik and her colleagues at UC Berkeley have new theories and research on why it’s so important.  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Let-the-Children-Play-Its-Good-for-Them.html

How is it that very young children learn so much so quickly?  Gopnik’s research focuses on pretending, which she calls “counterfactual” thinking.  She gives the example of Einstein wondering what would happen on a train traveling at the speed of light.

Gopnik found that “Children who were better at pretending could reason better about counterfactuals – they were better at thinking about different possibilities.  And thinking about possibilities plays a crucial role in the latest understanding about how children learn.”

Photo by Don Bergquist, licensed by Creative Commons

Ms Gopnik is concerned about policymakers who “try to make preschools more like schools.”  In hard times, “frivolous” programs are always the first to go – disciplines like the arts, music and humanities – the very ones that stretch imagination and encourage us to envision new possibilities.

public-domain-image.com

By the time we are adults, we’ve learned how to sideline play in order to get down to business.  Even – or perhaps especially – in the creative realm, it’s no simple matter to let go of goal-oriented behavior when competition in the marketplace is so stiff.  Working for concrete or pre-defined results is the antithesis of the kind of free experimentation that opens up new vistas.

Some sort of strategy is usually needed for us to approach the unselfconscious freedom of children at play, but it doesn’t need to be anything dramatic.  At the end of his life, Joseph Campbell said an hour a day in a quiet room with a favorite book or a journal is enough for us to step into sacred space where the real hero’s journey always takes place.

Simple but never easy.  In a recent post on his own blog, Michael Meade quoted these marvelous lines penned by E.E. Cummings:

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day,
to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any
human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”

The fact that the battle is hard is all the more reason why we cannot afford to forget how to play.

Ship of Fools

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Ship of Fools, German woodcut, 1549

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.

The Secret Life of Pronouns

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Who knew that pronouns can predict romantic compatibility, reveal power dynamics, lying, and who will recover from trauma?  James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin has been tracking the truth of pronouns for 20 years.

James Pennebaker

He includes them in the group he calls “function words,” necessary parts of speech that are invisible to us in conversation:  the, this, though, I, and, an, there, that, he, she, where, when.  Pennebaker contrasts these with “content words,” which carry meaning and evoke images in our minds, words like, school, family, life, friends.

In a recent NPR interview, Pennebaker related that he and his students studied couples’ compatibility in the context of speed dating, http://tinyurl.com/7skcgf4.  Computers proved an essential tool for analyzing results, since try as we might, we really don’t hear function words.  By entering both the transcript and the speed dating outcomes, Pennebaker’s team discovered a strong correlation between matching function word usage and the decision to get together after the first meeting.  The computer predicted who would hit it off more accurately than the couples themselves.

This is not because similar people are attracted to each other, Pennebaker says; people can be very different. It’s that when we are around people that we have a genuine interest in, our language subtly shifts.

“When two people are paying close attention, they use language in the same way,” he says. “And it’s one of these things that humans do automatically.  They aren’t aware of it, but if you look closely at their language, count up their use of ‘I, and, the,’… you can see it. It’s right there.”

The other discovery Pennebaker discussed in the interview centers on power dynamics.  When two people with different status or power interact, the subordinate uses “I” much more frequently.  Pennebaker suggests self consciousness is the cause, concern about how we’ll be perceived.

Finally, Pennebaker weighed in on the My Fair Lady question:  if we change our language, do we change?  After 20 years of research, Pennebaker says no.  Change who you are and your language will change, but not vice-versa.

What’s interesting is that several people I respect claim that changing your handwriting changes personality.  Organize your penmanship, for instance, and other aspects of your life will follow.  This suggests the added visceral dimension makes the difference.  Makes you wonder – The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.  Probably doesn’t work as well on a keyboard…

You can read about Pennebaker’s research in The Secret Life of Pronouns, 2011: