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Jorinda and Joringel, Part 2

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Photo by Jon Sullivan, public domain

Photo by Jon Sullivan, public domain

This post continues my discussion of Jorinda and Joringel, a fairytale from the Brothers Grimm.  If you haven’t read Part 1, I suggest you do so.  What follows will make more sense.  Here is a summary of the story:

A young couple, betrothed to be married, stray too close to the castle of a witch in a dense forest.  The witch freezes the young man, Joringel, on the spot and turns the young woman, Jorinda, into a nightingale.  She cages Jorinda and carries her into the castle where she keeps thousands of other girl-songbirds.  

The witch then frees Joringel, who wanders to a strange town and works as a shepherd for a long time.  At last he dreams of a red flower enclosing a jewel which overcomes all enchantments.  After searching for nine days, he finds such a flower with a large drop of dew inside.  He uses the flower to free Jorinda and the other girls, and strip the witch of her magical powers.  Jorinda and Joringel marry and live happily for many years.

I have referred before to the writings of Marie-Louise Von Franz, Carl Jung’s closest associate, who wrote several books on folklore from a Jungian perspective.  In approaching this story, I reread parts of her Individuation in Fairy Tales (1977).

Individuation was  Jung’s central concept.  He used the term for the ultimate goal of inner-work, the lifelong struggle to realize the Self – not the ego-self but our unique totality, the union of all our tendencies, good, bad, and ugly.  This psychic wholeness can free us from the prison of neurosis.  

Jung and Von Franz listed numerous symbols for the Self:  the divine figures of all religions; the wise old man or wise old woman; the divine child, the helpful animal, mandalas, flowers, jewels, birds, golden balls, circular towers, and almost anything else that implies wholeness or completeness in itself. 

Rose windows in the cathedrals are well known western mandalas, symbols of unity in the cosmos, while our fairytale rose, which breaks all enchantments and hides a pearl, has a similar meaning for the lovers in this story.

English stained glass by William Wailes, ca 1865. Photo by TTaylor, 2006. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Jorinda and Joringel, when they finally marry, embody another symbol of the Self in the Jungian view, the divine pair.  The mystery of the male-female union of opposites was often illustrated as a hermaphrodite in the alchemical texts that Jung studied, a western equivalent of the yin-yang symbol.

Fairytales don’t feature hermaphrodites, just normal weird being like giants and dragons, but I think we can look for this theme of “higher union” whenever a folktale ends with a wedding.  But before the happy ending, Jorinda and Joringel have to experience loss and getting stuck.

At the start of the story, they seem very young.  Young people don’t know the dark regions in the forest.  They play with golden balls, their original wholeness, but that is destined to go.  In folklore and in life, innocence makes a fall inevitable.

Everyone goes through stuck times. – the unsatisfactory job or relationship.  What once sustained us loses its flavor.  Marie-Louise Von Franz gave the example of one of her patients – a 43 year old unmarried man who lived at home and took care of his mother.  She had spells of illness whenever he talked of getting a place of his own.

Jorinda is caught in a different but similar trap.  Her transformation into a songbird is unique in my experience.  I haven’t come across this motif in any other tale.  A songbird is a pretty, entertaining, and unthreatening creature – perhaps what our culture wishes for young women and girls.  Yet to interpret the story like that amounts to projecting our modern sensibility onto earlier generations who shared this story around their hearths for hundreds of years – a risky proposition at best.

The witch is old.  Freezing people and caging them as songbirds can be seen as similar strategies for stopping time.  If we want to read this psychologically, we can imagine the witch as those places within that hate change, that cling to youth and beauty as if grasping will prevent them from slipping away.  It’s interesting that the healing flower contains a drop of dew, one of life’s more ephemeral things.

As happens when people are truly stuck, the solution doesn’t come from the characters’ ego selves – it comes from a transpersonal source, a “big dream” that leads Joringel to the magical flower.  And it doesn’t come immediately, but only after this one-time golden boy labors for a long time as a lowly shepherd.  Robert Bly has written in detail about the sobering quality of menial work in folklore.  Von Franz wrote about the value of work in helping the flighty, “eternal youth” in us get grounded.

The historical Saint Patrick was captured at 16 by Irish pirates and sold into slavery.  He worked for six years herding sheep.  He learned to pray in the wilderness and found his way to Christianity.  When the time was right, he heard a voice tell him his ship was ready, so he made his rather miraculous escape.  According to Jung and Von Franz, our inner center, the Self, does things like that.

To me, there is a beauty in these stories that equals scripture.  Faith, trust, kindness, belief in oneself and in the goodness of life, are implicit.  The heroes and heroines have to learn timing and instinct, when to trust and when to be wary, when to speak and when to be still.  They generally learn things the hard way (like us) after taking a fall – if their attention doesn’t falter in the forest, they wind up with a stepmother.  But those who listen to birds, to their own hearts, and to the voices in the wind, find a way to keep going and chose the right path.

jorinda

I don’t have any definitive answers about what the stories mean – the paths through the otherworld shift too fast for that.  I’m not sure that folklore meanings have that much meaning – I offer the ideas of Jung, Von Franz, and others as maps of where other explorers have gone.  In the end, I think it is living with these stories that matters most.  And then, as Joseph Campbell, another great explorer said, we enter the forest at the point that seems best us and watch for the birds or small creatures beside the road who can guide us.

The Secret of Getting Ahead?

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Those who are old enough to have watched “Hee-Haw” will remember a song that Tennessee Ernie, Buck Owens, and the gang sang almost every week, “Gloom, Despair, and Agony on Me.”  One of the lines was, “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”

These days, it sometimes seems like if it weren’t for bad news, we’d have no news at all, especially on the economic front.  I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately – not the economy per se, but the news, that is, the stories we tell about the economy.  I’ll have more to say about this later, but it’s increasingly clear that what we have beneath the headlines are dueling paradigms, different core assumptions of what is good and bad, what works and what doesn’t.

Here is a core assumption that never has gotten much air time:  altruism rather than self interest may be the greatest motivational force for people at work.  This is the thrust of the teaching and writing of Adam Grant, 31, the youngest tenured and highest ranked professor at the Wharton School of Business.  Sarah Dominus, a writer for the New York Times Magazine, profiled Grant in a March 27 article,  Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?.

Grant first made a name for himself in the field of economics as a 22 year old grad student in organizational psychology, when he applied himself to boosting motivation and output at a university fund raising call center, a notoriously unpopular student employment option.

Realizing that the call center helped fund scholarships, Grant invited a scholarship recipient to address the callers to give them an idea of the value of their work.  Even Grant was amazed when the next month, revenues were up 171%.  In later studies, the jump was as high as 400%.  Since then, Grant designed other studies in other fields that gave parallel and equally quantifiable results.

Grant’s work has drawn criticism as well as praise, much of it centered on the potential for abuse of the findings.  Will corporations try to use them to keep workers happy while cutting their wages and benefits?  According to Sarah Dominus, Grant is skeptical of corporate motivation as well and says his effort is to understand the mechanism, not necessarily suggest implantation.

Two weeks ago, I attended a day long retreat with Norman Fischer, a long time teacher and former abbot at the San Francisco Zen Center.  The subject of his retreat was compassion.  “Self-cherishing never makes anyone happy,” he said.  “In the long run, concern for others is very practical.  It’s our only chance for living a satisfying life.”

I started thinking of the how and why of our bad news headlines when Fischer said he remains optimistic.  Despite the chaos and breakdowns of our traditional systems, he believes that interactions based on compassionate regard for each other are the future.  “Not in my lifetime and maybe not in yours, but I think it’s coming,” he said.

That’s why I was so pleased to discover Adam Grant’s work.  I don’t often think of economics as a likely field of compassionate action, but if, as the Buddha asserted, it’s an impulse at the core of our being, we should expect to find the evidence everywhere.  Adam Grant seems to have found it at the heart of “the dismal science.”  His first book for a wide audience, Give and Take, was published on April 9.

Save the Cat Goes to the Movies by Blake Snyder: a book review

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Save the cat2

What do these movies have in common: Alien, Fatal Attraction, and Godzilla? How about these: Star Wars, The Bad News Bears, and Lord of the Rings?  The first trio belong to the genre that Blake Snyder called “Monster in the House.”  The second set are “Golden Fleece” films in Snyder’s terminology.

He assigned distinctive genre names to help us think about films in a different manner and see connections we might miss with more familiar and less specific tags.  Some of the names came from Snyder’s love of the roots of our story traditions.  The Golden Fleece, for example, was the object of Jason’s quest in the myth of the Argonauts, while Theseus and the Minotaur is a “monster in the house” tale that is thousands of years old.

Snyder described his approach in Save the Cat, where he presented his top-down approach to writing a movie script, from idea to logline to pitch to outline to finished screenplay.  He presented a model of 10 movie genres and 15 critical plot points.  Save the Cat Goes to the Movies rounds out these concepts with detailed discussions of 50 well known and well respected movies – a valuable addition.  Here’s an example:

“Monster in the House” stories have three three key elements, a monster, a house, and a sin. The monster often has seemingly “supernatural” powers: Jaws is an uber-shark, while insanity lends a lot of power to human monsters.  The house may be a literal house, a spaceship, a town, or a planet, as long as escape from the monster is not an option. The sin is often greed (closing the beaches would hurt the tourist economy) or lust in a teenage slasher film. In the case of Victor Frankenstein and the atomic tests that spawned Godzilla, it is scientific hubris.  Sometimes ignorance is the “sin.”

frankenstein1

“Golden Fleece” movies are quest stories that span the millennia between Homer’s Odyssey and Bob Hope road movies.    The elements Snyder identifies are a road, a team, and a prize.  These movies run the gamut from comic (Planes, Trains, and Automobiles) to deadly serious (Saving Private Ryan), but in every case, winning the prize is less important to the story than the lessons the (surviving) team members learn.

road movie

In my previous post, I discussed Snyder’s “Fool Triumphant” genre.  His remaining seven categories also reveal unexpected similarities between movies where we don’t expect to find them.  It is also illuminating to look for his plot points in our favorite films.  Some of them are familiar through the names he assigns – “The bad guys close in,” “All is lost,” “Dark night of the soul.”  Others require explanation, which this second book in the Cat series provides.

A map is not a territory, as an outline is not the gripping story our hearts and minds crave.  That doesn’t mean a map isn’t useful in helping us reach our destination.  Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat Goes to the Movies is a useful and stimulating map to help us navigate the wilderness of a stack of blank paper.

Skinwalkers by Tony Hillerman: A book review

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Skinwalkers

As I worked on a recent post, Favorite Fictional Detectives, I realized I didn’t remember the details of Skinwalkers, a key Tony Hillerman novel that I read soon after it was published in 1986.  I read it again and found it to be a thoroughly satisfying mystery.  I offer this brief review to encourage others who may not know Hillerman’s work to give it a look.

***

Officer Jim Chee, of the Navajo Tribal Police, tosses and turns one night in the airstream where he lives in the desert.  When his closest neighbor, a feral cat, shoots through the pet door, Chee gets up to peer out the window at what might have scared it so badly.  Probably a coyote, he thinks.  For a moment, thinks he sees a shape in the darkness.  Then the night explodes.  Three shotgun blasts tear holes in the trailer just above the bed where Chee was sleeping moments before.

In the morning, as he cleans up his trailer, Chee makes a frightening discovery.  Among the shotgun pellets that litter the floor is a small bone pellet.  Navajo witches, or skinwalkers, inject bone into the bodies of people they want to kill.  The bone produces the fatal “corpse sickness.”  This bone fragment links three apparently separate killings that Lt. Joe Leaphorn, a senior tribal detective, has been trying to solve without success.  When Leaphorn and Chee join forces, their first problem is persuading anyone to talk, when tradition holds that speaking a skinwalker’s name will attract his harmful attention.

Chee is learning to be a traditional Navajo healer.  With a background in college psychology classes, he understands his role to be restoring people to the core Navajo values of beauty and harmony.  Skinwalkers have fallen away and try to take others with them.

Leaphorn is not a believer, but he learned by hard experience that other people are.  Early in his career, when he ignored talk of witches, three murders and a suicide were the result.  As he and Chee grope through the dark, a very real menace is watching from a direction they do not expect.

This book represents fine storytelling, with characters and a setting that are outside our normal experience.  It’s one of the best mysteries I’ve read, and I suspect it will make you want to read more of Tony Hillerman’s work.

Favorite Fictional Detectives

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Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget. Public domain.

Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget. Public domain.

In literary gatherings, I usually introduce myself as part of the fantasy camp, but I’ve probably read and enjoyed just as many mysteries over the years.  In my previous post, I gave a lukewarm review to James Patterson’s latest Alex Cross thriller.  I think the real reason is that I’ve never bonded to Alex Cross the way I have to other favorite detectives.

Character is key to detective novels just as it is to other types of fiction, and this is separate from an issue that has surfaced over the last decade, the distinction between plot driven and character driven stories.

In character driven tales, some attribute of the protagonist begins and sustains the action, the way Katniss Everdeen’s sacrifice for her sister gets things moving in The Hunger Games.  Mysteries are almost always plot driven – the story begins when the first body is found.

These days, agents and editors say they’re looking for character driven tales.  Dan Brown wasn’t listening when he wrote The DaVinci Code, now one of the five best selling books of all time, a distinction shared with The Bible and Harry Potter.  Like much advice for writers, I think it misses the point.  Regardless of what moves the action, we love novels with characters we love, in worlds we’d love to visit.  Have you ever imagined yourself in Baker Street when Holmes jumps up and cries, “The game is afoot?”

If so, read on!  I’ve listed a few of my favorite detectives, not necessarily in order, for that, like everything else, is subject to change.

Sherlock Holmes:  This is obvious.  How many popular books of today will still be read and loved 100 years from now, spawning a lively stream of new presentations in all the popular media of the future?  I seldom reread mysteries – often there is no point when you know the criminal’s identity, but I still dive into Holmes for recreation.  Has there ever been a more dastardly villain than Dr. Grimesby Roylott in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band?”  And for chills up the spine, one sentence has never been beaten:  “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” 

I enjoy all the presentations of Holmes in film, but my favorite movie Holmes is still Jeremy Brett for his perfect blend of genius and madness, without the slightest trace of modesty:

Cadfael:  The Brother Cadfael mysteries were the creation of Edith Pargeter, under the pseudonym, Ellis Peters.  In early 12th century England, during a period of contention for the crown known as The Anarchy, Cadfael, a middle aged and disillusioned veteran of the crusades, becomes a Benedictine monk.  With keen powers of observation, a scientific turn of mind, and an in depth knowledge of herbalism, he solves the many murders that just happen to happen whenever he is near.

I enjoy the film versions more than the books, thanks to renowned Shakespearean actor, Derek Jacobi, who plays Cadfael.

Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple:  Most writers are lucky if they can create a single unforgettable character.  Agatha Christie gave us two.  Sometime in the early 90’s, I went on an Agatha Christie binge, and over the next few years, read all the stories of both characters I could find, some 80 novels in all.  Poirot and Miss Marple turn up often in films and on TV.  I’ve enjoyed several versions of Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.

The bad news is that Miss Marple stories are usually classed as “cozy mysteries,” a sub-genre with a distinctly unmanly name.  The good news is that  I’m too old to care.  There is no definitive movie Miss Marple, but British actor, David Suchet takes the honors for his portrayals of Hercule Poirot:

David Suchet as Hercule Poirot

David Suchet as Hercule Poirot

Wallender: To re-establish my manly credentials, I add Kurt Wallender to the list.  Wallender is sort of a Swedish, existentialist, high plains drifter, and the most angst-ridden detective in the history of the world.  The creation of Swedish novelist, Henning Mankell, Wallendar was adapted for British TV, beginning in 2008.  Episodes are show up here on PBS.

The series stars Kenneth Branagh, another great Shakespearean actor.  Branagh says Wallender is “an existentialist who is questioning what life is about and why he does what he does every day, and for whom acts of violence never become normal. There is a level of empathy with the victims of crime that is almost impossible to contain, and one of the prices he pays for that sort of empathy is a personal life that is a kind of wasteland.”  

Don’t watch this guy when you’re feeling blue!

Kenneth Branagh as Wallender

Kenneth Branagh as Wallender

Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn:  These officers in the Navajo Tribal Police star in 18 mysteries Tony Hillerman wrote between 1970 and 2006.  The grandeur of the American southwest and Navajo tribal beliefs are the background against which these unique detective stories unfold.  Chee, the younger officer, struggles to hold on to tribal traditions in 20th century America.  Leaphorn is more world weary and cynical, but he knows that where there is talk of witches and taboos, trouble erupts.

Hillerman, who died in 2008 loved the four corners and wrote about it so vividly that it’s really another character in the stories.  His books won many awards, but he always said what pleased him most was being named a Special Friend of the Navajo Nation in 1987.  Adam Beach and Wes Studi starred in three movie versions of Hillerman’s novels, including Skinwalkers, (the Navajo name for malevolent sorcerers), that is regarded as Hillerman’s breakout novel.

Amelia Peabody:  Elizabeth Peters’ 19 book series centers on the adventures and detective skills of independently wealthy and independently minded Egyptologist, Amelia Peabody and her family, which at first includes her husband Radcliff Emerson (who hates his first name and refuses to use it), and their son Ramses, who was born as stubborn as his parents.  Later Amelia and Emerson take in two wards, David, the son of a Muslim and a Christian whom they rescue from semi-slavery, and Nefret, a red headed former priestess of Isis who will eventually marry Ramses.

Set in the years between 1884 and 1923, there are rascals, rogues, adventurers, tomb robbers, mummy’s curses, and Sethos, aka, The Master Criminal.  Historical Egyptologists and archeological events are woven into the series which ends with the 1922 discovery of the tomb of King Tut.  The author has said that Amelia herself is based in part on Amelia Edwards, a Victorian novelist and Egyptologist, whose 1873 travel book, A Thousand Miles up the Nile was a best seller.

The middle east has changed since Peters began writing her novels, but they remain among my favorite beach reads of all time.  For anyone who enjoys a good mummy movie or has ever fantasized lost tombs, pith helmets, and midnight at the oasis, these are great adventure stories, ever complicated by the corpses that turn up wherever Amelia goes.

I’ve only listed detective series here because I cannot remember every good singular mystery novel I’ve read.  Please add any favorites of yours to the list.  There’s always room for more, since the game is always afoot somewhere!

Alex Cross, Run: an audiobook review

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In the 15 years since Morgan Freeman starred in the first Alex Cross movie, Kiss the Girls, I’ve enjoyed quite a few James Patterson thrillers in films, books, and audiobooks.  He knows how to keep you on the edge of your seat, whatever the medium.  Alex Cross, Run, the 20th tale in the series, is no exception.

When I’m doing a lot of driving, I often choose Patterson audiobooks – they make the miles fly, but once I started this one, I kept the earbuds plugged in while fixing breakfast, walking the dogs, and even late at night.  It wasn’t exactly pleasure that kept me listening.  It often felt like drinking coffee when nervous.

There’s an amped up quality to Alex Cross, Run that couldn’t quite hide a formulaic quality, even though Patterson created much of the formula.  Throw in enough serial killers – Alex Cross Run had three – and an author like Patterson will create plenty of tension, but I often felt manipulated.  Every book tries to manipulate an audience; successful ones do it with subtlety.  Here, elements like bad guy motives and family interludes felt somewhat perfunctory, like I might do if I started with a list of plot points and checked them off one by one.

Alex Cross, Run is not a bad book by any means.  I’d give it three and a half stars out of five.  It’s a thriller by any measure, but it adds nothing new to the series or the genre.

Perhaps it simply felt rushed compared to books I’ve read in Patterson’s other signature series, the “Women’s Murder Club.”  I find Lindsay Boxer a more rounded character, with a richer circle of friends and environment than Alex Cross.

Any reader who likes thrillers and any writer who wants to learn about tension will be rewarded by reading James Patterson, but Alex Cross, Run is not where I would advise them to start.

One Nation Under Stress

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The title of this post comes from a new book reviewed on NPR, One Nation Under Stress:  The Trouble With Stress as an Idea, by Dana Becker, PhD.

According to Dr. Becker, “stress” is a recent concept.  The first article on stress in the New York Times was published in 1976.  The first diagnoses of “nervous disorders” or “neurasthenia,” came from the work of Dr. George Beard ca 1869.  In the NPR interview, Becker says that physicians of the time considered “American nervousness” to come from outside factors, related to the increasing pace of life after the civil war.  “Stress,” as we understand it today, is the polar opposite.

Now we have internalized stress, focusing on the risks to our health and the ways we should cope with it, through diet, exercise, yoga, and so on.  Our experience of stress derives from our ideas of stress, Becker says.  The internal emphasis on health is necessary, but we let it divert us from questioning the external causes of stress.  She gives an example in the NPR interview: many articles are written to help working mothers cope with stress – far fewer are written about the need for affordable daycare.  We may eat kale and do yoga to survive the 24/7 world, but we seldom ask why this is the norm and what the alternatives are.

This argument echoes a major concern of James Hillman, who I frequently write about here.  Though he was once Director of Studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich, in 1992 he co-authored a book called We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse.  In it, he said:

“Every time we try to deal with our outrage over the freeway, our misery over the office and the lighting and the crappy furniture, and the crime in the streets, whatever – every time we try to deal with that by going to therapy with our rage and our fear, we deprive the political world of something.”

In her NPR interview, Dana Becker presented a balanced view of stress – it’s fine to treat the symptoms, which are personal, as long as we don’t gloss over the underlying causes, many of which are not.  The promise of new view of a modern ailment is enough to put One Nation Under Stress near the top of my “to read” list.

Who would you choose to write your biography?

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Although I enjoy reading and mulling over the WordPress Daily Writing Prompts, I’ve never used one as a subject before.  That changed on March 11 with a post called Ghostwriter by blogger Michelle W. who asked, “If you could have any author – living or dead – write your biography, who would you choose?”  The answer for me is Carl Jung, and it has been fruitful to remember why.

When I was in high school, a teacher who was a mentor to me said, “You should really study psychology.  Not all that behaviorist crap, but Jung.”  As a college freshman, I remembered his words when I spotted a copy of Man and His Symbols, an introduction to Jung’s ideas that he began and his close colleagues finished after his death in 1961.  After that, I read his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.  These are excellent books to get the gist of his thought.

Dr. Carl Jung, 1875-1961

In our fast-food world, where medication and brief therapy are the norms, Jungian analysis survives at the margins.  Two key exceptions, where Jung’s ideas entered the mainstream, come to mind.  The Meyer-Briggs Personality Profile is structured on his theory of psychological types; even the words, introversion and extroversion were his.  And through one of his patient’s contact with Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Jung’s insistence on the psyche’s spiritual orientation found its way to the core of 12 step programs.

More more widely known are Jung’s contributions to the study of literature and folklore.  The theory of archetypes, which found expression in areas like Joseph Campbell’s work on the hero myth, were first stated for our times by Jung.

All these credentials, however impressive, are not the reason I’d choose him as a biographer.  Here’s something he said in a lecture in London in 1939:

“We have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul – the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill – this awful, banal, grinding life in which they are ‘nothing but.’ . . . These things go pretty deep, and no wonder people get neurotic. Life is too rational; there is no symbolic existence in which I am something else, in which I am fulfilling my role, my role as one of the actors in the divine drama of life.”

When I first read these words, at about the age of 20, I recognized a kindred spirit, one who could articulate things I only felt and struggled with.  I read the words now and still feel the sense of kinship.

There’s not that much in my outer life to write about.  Any biographer I’d hire would have to be the kind of person who looks beneath the surface and understands that it’s really about the effort to find one’s role “as one of the actors in the divine drama of life.”

If you could have anyone do it, who would you pick to write your biography?