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!

Thinking of Woody Guthrie, and Listening too.

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Woody was born 100 years ago today, on July 14, 1912. This may be his best known song, one that is cherished around the world.

And here’s something that’s not as well known, but great to listen to. Woody left behind thousands of complete lyrics to songs that were never set to music. After she heard him perform a tribute concert for her father, Nora Guthrie, hired British musician, Billy Bragg, and the American band, Wilco, to set the songs to music. In 1998 they released a first album called Mermaid Avenue, and a second in 2000.

Here’s one of my favorite cuts from the first Mermaid Avenue, called “California Stars.”

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.

Michael Meade on Imagination and Being Ourselves

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If you ask people to name the problems facing our country today, you get a fairly uniform set of answers:  economic stagnation and political stalemate are likely to head the list.  If you ask the cause of these challenges, agreement is likely to end.  Very few people will answer, as Michael Meade does, that we suffer from a poverty of imagination.  In a recent blog article on The Huffington Post, Meade says:

“Stagnation in the economy and “stalemation” in the political system stem from a collapse of imagination and increasing blindness about what a culture is supposed to cultivate and what a civil society is truly about…The problem is not simply a lack of work or a paucity of jobs. The problem is that genuine solutions to persistent problems require the kind of vision that transcends single-minded ideologies, rigid belief systems, and exaggerated self-interest.”  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-meade-dhl/be-yourself_b_1640162.html

Meade reminds us that while any job may look good if we don’t have one, it’s not enough to satisfy the soul.  What we really want is to find our unique calling, in an atmosphere that now seems especially toxic to such a search.

This post is another in Meade’s ongoing series on the theme of our inner genius and how we might learn to listen and see what it wants.  He doesn’t offer simple or short term answers, but he does remind us of how much the quality of our lives depend on the quest:

“To become nobody but yourself, to struggle against the tide of sameness and the false security of simply fitting in — that is a fight worth having. To become oneself by finding a way to contribute one’s god-given talents and natural genius to this troubled world; that is the job to keep applying for. The real work in this life is not simply to succeed and “become somebody”; the real issue is to become one’s intended self.”

I encourage you to read this article and some of Meade’s other posts on becoming ourselves.

Bill Moyers on “The Cowardly Lions of Free Speech”

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Here is Bill Moyers’ response to the recent Supreme Court decision not to revisit Citizen’s United.  Check out the full clip, which only runs 6 1/2 minutes.

Three things don’t go together: Money. Secrecy. Democracy. And that’s the nub of the matter. This is all a sham for invalidating democracy in the name of democracy. It’s the trick authoritarians always use to hide their real intention — in this case absolute power over our public life and institutions: the privatization of everything. The Supreme Court is pointing the way. Instead of mitigating the worst excesses of both the state and the private sector, the Court has taken sides. Saying to the massed wealth of the one percent: America is yours for the taking, for the buying.
 http://billmoyers.com/

There really is nothing to add to something so shameful and tragic.

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.

The Neverending Story: A Movie Review

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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.

Happy Belated Birthday!

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June 28 was the second anniversary of this blog, and I forgot about it until yesterday.  I’ve been preoccupied with offline things.

An out of town series of Tibetan teachings involves a lot of driving as well as study and practice.  The special needs of a very elderly dog (who is doing better for now) takes time and energy.  A neighbor and I were splitting large tree trunks when the rented splitter conked out, and we have to get back to it this week.  Most recently, Mary and I have been discussing a possible trip to Iceland (that’s Iceland not Ireland), with a small group of storytellers in late September.  You’re sure to hear more if it pans out.

A year ago, I appear to have been a more contentious blogger.  I wrote a summary of my experiences at the one year anniversary that made Freshly Pressed: http://wp.me/pYql4-10O.  One thing I mentioned then still happens – I post something and get up thinking,”That’s it.  I’ve run out of things to say.  It was a nice run while it lasted.”

On other occasions, I’ll read an older post and wonder, “What on earthwas I thinking?”

My rule of thumb for such moments is, “Don’t sweat it.”  A few days go by, and I get caught up in another idea.  Now I even know what my mission statement is, though I give myself permission to ignore it when necessary:

“To explore the reality in all fantasies and the fantasy in realities.”

One more thing hasn’t changed – readers keep me going.  People who visit and leave a comment, who point out a flaw or something they like, make it all worthwhile and keep me going.

Thank you very much!!!