Tag Archives: imagination

RIP Maurice Sendak

Posted on by
4

If you haven’t heard, Maurice died today of a stroke, at age 83.  Here is a nice five minute interview he gave in 2002 that ran on the PBS Newshour tonight.  It’s illuminating to hear him say, “I don’t know how to write for children.  I don’t think anyone knows how to write for children, and those that say they do are frauds.”

He goes on to say, “I write for me,” and adds that it isn’t always easy to be driven by something internally that is “riotous and strange.” What a great gift he gave to riotous strangers!

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june12/wildthings_05-08.html

Google Glasses, Anyone?

Posted on by
6

A video released by Google earlier this month serves as an introduction to their Project Glass, which aims at putting smartphone apps on a pair of voice controlled glasses.  You can watch the clip now or at the end of this post.  I suggest you invest the 2 1/2 minutes  upfront, since the clip is kind of wild and provides the context for the rest of the article.

I discovered Project Glass in a New York Times op ed piece, “The Man With the Google Glasses,” by Ross Douthat, published April 14. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-man-with-the-google-glasses.html?_r=4

Douthat says that regardless of whether the project comes to fruition, this video speaks volumes about our collective condition – a mix of unbelievable technical expertise and ever-deeper alienation.  As a writer, I couldn’t construct a better illustration of this than the final scene in the youTube clip.  Our protagonist can video chat and share a gorgeous sunset with his girlfriend, and he has to – she’s nowhere near the apartment where he lives.  In a digital world, “sharing a sunset” has more than one meaning!

Douthat quotes an NYU sociologist who says that more Americans now live alone than in nuclear families.  Similar stats tell us similar things that we already know or sense.  Douthat presents both optimistic and pessimistic assessments of the impact of online media on our social connections or lack thereof.

He also adds a note of caution about the political ramifications of the trend.  He quotes sociologist, Robert Nisbet who believed that “in eras of intense individualism and weak communal ties, the human need for belonging tends to empower central governments as never before.”  Douthat suggests that old time totalitarianism is not a likely prospect, but says that “what the blogger James Poulos has dubbed “the pink police state” which is officially tolerant while scrutinizing your every move — remains a live possibility.”  

This reminded me of a piece in February on MSNBC concerning Samsung’s new generation HDTV’s, with internally wired cameras, microphones, and options for 3d party apps, which could allow someone to peer into your living room.  “Samsung has not released a privacy policy clarifying what data it is collecting and sharing with regard to the new TV sets…Samsung has only stated that it “assumes no responsibility, and shall not be liable” in the event that a product or service is not “appropriate.” http://richardbrenneman.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/in-america-television-watches-you/

In truth, I’m not too paranoid on that score, since the average evening at our house is so quiet the spies would go to sleep.

What stays with me from the video is the sense that the Google glasses turn the entire world into a version of my computer screen, where the world “out there” is wallpaper for the applications I’m running.  The phrase these days is “virtualization,” though in one sense, it’s nothing new.

Various artists, philosophers, and spiritual masters have told us “reality” is more like a dream than we know.  Physicists teach nothing is really solid.  Biologists explains that we don’t see rocks or trees “out there.”  What we see are photons striking the rods and cones in our retinas.  Behavioral psychologists have established that at a certain level, our brains do not know the difference between  “real” and imagined events.  As James Hillman put it, “Every experience has to begin as a psychic event in order to happen at all.”  In this sense, the human mind and senses perform the fundamental act of virtualization and have done so for millennia.

Does this mean I’m going to sign up for a pair of smart glasses when they hit the market?  Nope.  They’re a bit far along the nerd scale, even for me, and actually, the prototype is more than a little creepy.  It’s not hard to imagine surreal scenes on the street with smart-glassed pedestrians trying to navigate around each other, and even worse, smart-glassed drivers reading and responding to their emails.

All kidding aside, once this idea hits the streets in some refined, future incarnation, it will likely be one more seductive technological tool/toy to learn to use in a way that serves us and not the other way around.

Imagine by Jonah Lehrer: A Book Review

Posted on by
9

Update, July 31, 2012.

On July 30, author Jonah Lehrer admitted fabricating quotes in Imagine. He resigned his position as staff writer for The New Yorker, and Houghton Mifflin suspended sales of the book. You can read my full post on the topic here, which contains a link to the newspaper story. http://wp.me/pYql4-2hg

It is with much sadness that I’ve decided to remove the text of my review. Some of Lehrer’s observations on creativity remain insightful. At the same time, I think it is vital to stand up for ethics wherever we can find it in public life.

The Muppets Get Their Star

Posted on by
4

On March 20, the first day of spring, The Muppets received the 2466th star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.  The cast, which has charmed TV and movie viewers for 50 years, now joins a select group of “fictional” stars, which includes Mickey Mouse, Godzilla, Shrek, and The Simpsons.  Miss Piggy pointed out during the news conference, however, that all movie stars are fictional.

Photo by Frazer Harrison / Getty Images

Lisa Henson, CEO of Jim Henson Enterprises remarked that The Muppet’s star, in front of the El Capitan Theater, is very close to her father’s.  Henson created Muppet prototypes in 1955, for a show called Sam and Friends, which ran for six years on WRC-TV in Washington, DC.

Jim and Jane Henson with the cast of "Sam and Friends"

Henson died in 1990, at the age of 53, of complications from a severe strep throat infection.  Associates and family say he was so busy working, he didn’t seek medical help until it was too late.

During the last year of his life, Henson negotiated to sell the Muppets to Disney. The sale was finalized in 2004. The latest Muppet movie was released to DVD yesterday too, a seemingly successful effort to revitalize the cast and introduce Walter, a new character, who was present at the dedication ceremony.

Kermit received his own Walk of Fame star in 2002, but Henson’s little frog would be the first to say The Muppets are a group effort. The group finally has the recognition it deserves.

The Water of Life, Part 2

Posted on by
Reply

If you have not already done so, please read the first part of this article in the preceding post.

The Water of Life by Rogasky and Hyman, 1991.

Marie-Louise von Franz, a close colleague of Carl Jung, wrote extensively of fairytales.  She believed that these “simple” stories reveal the core of the psyche better than the great myths and sagas, shaped by poets and spiritual thinkers.  Reading these tales with the same respect the young brother shows the dwarf can reward us with nuggets of wisdom shaped by generations of storytellers sitting beside the hearth fire.

The opening of The Water of Life reminds us that when we don’t know the way, it pays to admit it, at least to ourselves.  We need to pay attention to everything, listen to everything, for we don’t know the shape of the messenger who may show us how to proceed.  Here is the rest of the story:

The dwarf told the third son where to find the castle where The Water of Life flowed.  He gave the prince an iron wand to open the gates, and two loaves of bread to appease the lions who guarded the entrance.

The third son throws the loaves to the lions

In the great hall, he found men turned into stone.  As he left the hall, he spotted a sword and another loaf of bread and picked them up.  Venturing on, he met a beautiful woman who welcomed him.  She said he had set her free. “This realm will be yours and all the enchantments broken if you return in a year to marry me.”

The woman directed him to the Fountain of Life and urged him to leave with the water before the clock struck noon, when the gates would close again. The young man hurried on until he came to a room with a freshly made bed.  Realizing how tired he was, he settled down for a nap.  He woke at quarter to twelve, and just had time to find the fountain, fill a cup with The Water of Life, and race back to the gate.  As it swung closed, it sliced off a piece of his heel.

The dwarf was waiting and told him the sword would defeat any army, and the loaf would feed any multitude and never be diminished.  The young prince then begged the dwarf to free his brothers.  The little man said to forget them, his brothers would only betray him, but he gave in at last to the younger brother’s pleading.

On the way home, the brothers passed through three kingdoms plagued by war and famine, and the youngest used his sword and loaf to save them.  At the same time, he told his older brothers about his success and his betrothal to the Lady of the Fountain.  Before he could give his father the Water of Life, the older brothers swapped it for sea water, which made the king worse.  The older pair then gave the king the true healing draught and claimed the young brother had given him poison.  The king ordered a huntsman to kill his youngest son in the forest, but the huntsman could not bring himself to do it.

The kingdoms the young prince had saved sent riches by way of thanks, and the king began to reconsider.  As the year drew to a close, the Lady of the Water had the road to her castle paved with gold.  She ordered her servants to chase off anyone who walked up the side of the road but welcome the one who strode up the center.  The two older brothers, anxious not to scuff the precious metal, walked beside it and were driven away.  The young prince, able to think of nothing but his love, had no care for gold and walked up the middle of the road.  

The Lady of the Fountain. Detail of an English tapestry

The Lady ran out to meet him.  He became Lord of her realm, freed all the frozen men, and reconciled with his father.  The two older brothers sailed away and were never seen again.

***

If the start of the tale presents a fairly clear dynamic, what follows is more obscure.  The question of how and when to interpret folklore goes far beyond the scope of one or two blog posts.  Folktales may be more primal than myths, as Marie-Louise von Franz suggests, but they leave more open questions.  I tend to follow James Hillman’s advice – “stick with the image.”  When scenes in movies and books, or events in our lives leave us puzzled, we may turn them over in memory and imagination for years without rushing to ask what they “mean.”  In doing so, we let them nourish us without draining their power by settling for simple answers.

For instance, the Lady of the Water of Life gives the youngest son clear instructions to find what he came for and get back through the gates before noon.  So what does he do?  Hits the sack when he spots a bed.  Strange behavior for a lad who has gotten as far as he has through doing what he’s been told.

I’ve come to believe the bed is another trial on the way to the Water of Life.  It took warrior courage and dwarf tricks to get by the lions guarding the gates.  Here the trial is staying awake – not always easy in life.  At the wrong time, if you “look neither right nor left,” you miss the chance of renewal.  At the right time, it’s essential.  If the prince hadn’t made it out by noon, I believe he would have turned to stone like the others in the courtyard.  There is nothing in this text to support this a view; my opinions are based on other stories.  One is a fuller account of stone people in a tale from The Arabian Nights.  The other is a trial-by-bed that Sir Gawain undergoes on a mysterious “Isle of Women.”  When he succeeds, he too becomes the champion of the Otherworld queen.

Such hunches are tentative and subject to change.  It isn’t answers but wrestling with the questions that draws my imagination again and again to this kind of story.

*** 

Two decades have passed since I found The Water of Life, and since then, “Look for the dwarf by the side of the road,” has become something I tell myself every time I’m stuck.  Such renewal is open to everyone – it’s our birthright, though certain attitudes, embodied in the older brothers, will chase inspiration away.  Older brothers pretty much run the world:  they are the movers and shakers, the ones who get things done, which means they keep going even as the walls close in.

That’s one reason I love blogging.  It’s an excuse to discover and celebrate people who talk with dwarves:  those who build little libraries.  Those who buck the trend and open small bookstores.  Those who publish their own books, in the grand tradition of Walt Whitman, who initially sold his poems door-to-door.  People, in other words, who try to occupy their own lives, which is what this story is really about.

A world where the Water of Life flows is filled with individual acts of courage.  A world where the waters are choked off looks very different, for as Michael Meade observes:

“There is something incurable in this world that makes the soul long for the healing and beauty of the otherworld.  Each visit to the other realm requires stopping the business and busy-ness of the daily world in order to listen to the questions being asked from the inner-under-other sides of life…Unless the inner voice and the little people are heard from again, the world will continue to drain of meaning and will keep turning a cold heart to the immensity of human suffering.”

The Water of Life

Posted on by
9

“Amidst a world increasingly disoriented and at war with itself, each person carries with them the seeds of a unique and valuable story trying to unfold. The youngest part of each psyche still longs to find the holy waters that can ease the pain of living and make life whole and meaningful again.” – Michael Meade

The Water of Life is a German folktale collected by the Brothers Grimm.  It shares a pattern with stories found all over the world:  the youngest brother or youngest sister, the one whom everyone else regards as incompetent, succeeds in a task or quest where the “wise” siblings fail.  In doing so, they bring new life to themselves and to the land.

Carl Jung analyzed The Water of Life in detail because it so neatly aligns with his theory of the four functions – thinking, feeling, intuition, and sensation – which are known to many through the Myer-Briggs Personality Profile.  Jung believed that at critical points in our life, renewal comes through “the inferior function,” the one that is least developed.  This “least competent sibling” lives closest to the unconscious where the healing waters lie.

The story has been a favorite of those who write about folklore from a psychological perspective.  One of these is Michael Meade, who wrote, Men and the Water of Life: Initiation and the Tempering of Men in 1994.  The original version, which analyzed six classic folktales, was based on the work he did hosting large men’s gatherings with James Hillman and Robert Bly.  In 2006, he revised the book and renamed it, The Water of Life:  Initiation and the Tempering of the Soul in an effort to broaden the scope to include both genders.  One more update preceded Meade’s release of an ebook last year.

A new urgency informs the latest version in light of the economic and ecological crises we face.  All along, Meade emphasized that the story speaks to cultures as well as individuals, for both can become rigid and stuck.

So let’s look at the story.  Here is the whole text for those who wish to pursue it: http://www.authorama.com/grimms-fairy-tales-51.html).

A king lies dying.  He calls his three sons and tells them only the Water of Life can save him.  The oldest sets out, looking neither right nor left and soon passes a dwarf by the side of the road.

“Where are you riding so fast, looking neither right nor left?” asks the little man.

“What’s it to you, runt?” asks the prince.

The dwarf is furious.  He speaks a few words, and before long, the oldest son finds the valley walls closing in on him.  He keeps going, looking neither right nor left, until he and his horse are wedged in the rocks unable to move forward or back.

The second son sets out, disrespects the dwarf, and soon he too is stuck.

When neither of his older brothers returns, the youngest begs permission to go on the quest.  Figuring his last son, who has  reputation for being odd, has no chance if the clever brothers are lost, the king is reluctant.  At last the third son wears him down and wins permission to venture forth.

When the dwarf asks where he is going, the youngest son gets off his horse and says, “I seek the Water of Life for my father who is dying.”

“Do you know where to look?” asks the dwarf.

“No,” say the prince.  “I have no idea.”

Because the youngest son is humble and shows him respect, the dwarf points out the road and gives him magical implements he will need to win the Water of Life.

The dwarf helps the youngest son

Others have written long chapters about this part of the story.  I could do the same but I don’t think I need to.  People who live with stories – most readers of this blog, in other words – are going to pick up the gist pretty fast.  Still, a few points that others have made bear repeating.

  • Jung used the dying king to illustrate the changes that come at midlife.  The energy that propels us into the world through our first three of four decades is often exhausted and in need of renewal.  Everyone knows the cliche of the business exec who turns 40 and buys a corvette and a trophy wife.  Most people are wiser than that, but it is the time when renewal comes from the parts of ourselves that we have ignored or suppressed while looking neither right nor left.  As Michael Mead put it, “Only when we are at the end of our wits do we turn to the deeper wit of the youngest brother.”
  • Students of folklore know that success most often hinges on finding a magical ally, and in many stories, the older and “wiser” brothers and sisters blow it as they do here, with arrogance.  It makes little difference whether we understand the dwarf as an archetype of the deep psyche or as our ancestors did, as a creature of the Otherworld which is never far away.  Respect is essential.  The unconscious can bring inspiration or neurosis; magical beings can bless or curse.
  • Meade calls the first two brothers, “the ego brothers.”  These are the “well adapted” parts of ourselves, the inner movers and shakers who get things done.  There are plenty of times in the modern world when you don’t want to look right or left, when you need to charge ahead.  But when our best ideas get us stuck, as they eventually will, we need the humility of the younger brother.  Free of ego, the first step he takes toward healing, both for himself and his father, is to admit, “I do not know the way.”

I read Michael Meade’s first version of this book in the early ’90’s, and it came to mind very powerfully last summer, when our government ground to a halt – as stuck as the brothers pinned between the rocks.  Wouldn’t it have been refreshing to hear even one of our leaders speak the truth and confess, “I don’t know which way to go?”  Unfortunately, no one gets re-elected that way; our leaders are still charging ahead, looking neither right nor left.

Intuitively we know there are times when business as usual no longer works.  As Meade puts it,“Once it has been lost, the Water of Life can only be found by wandering off the beaten path.”

To Be Continued


King of Morning, Queen of Day by Ian McDonald: An Appreciation

Posted on by
2

My recent discussion of unlikely mentors and guardians http://wp.me/pYql4-1J8 reminded me of Tireseas and Gonzaga, two “mystical vagabonds” (book jacket description) in one of the best fantasy novels I’ve ever read.

Ian McDonald, a visionary author who lives in Belfast, published  King of Morning, Queen of Day in 1991.  I still pick it up to read certain passages or a random chapter, to study and enjoy the ideas, the writing, and characters.

The narrative follows three women of three generations who are alternately attracted and attacked by creatures of the Mygmus, a technical name for the infinitely overlapping worlds of Faerie.

“The Mygmus may be viewed not so much as a place, a spatio-temporal relationship, a quasi-Euclidean geometrical domain, but as a state.  The concept is a familiar one in modern quantum physics, in which time is not considered a dynamic process, but a succession of recurring states eternally coexistent.  Such thinking liberates us from our essentially linear concepts of time, with past, present, and future.”  So reads a manuscript given to one of the women by a strange group of deformed, “Midnight Children.”

The first of the women, romantic, Edwardian Emily, dreams of a faerie lover and seeks him out.  First her rapes her, and then she disappears.

Gonzaga and Tireseas help Emily’s daughter, Jessica, battle free of the otherworld threat, which is personified by her mother, who has become a demonic force.

Jessica’s daughter, Enye, modern young woman in Dublin, battles Otherworld manifestations at night with martial arts swords.  Gonzaga and Tireseas charge her blades with high tech wizardry as well as ancient charms that allows her to win her way into Faerie, redeem her grandmother, Emily, and return to modern day Dublin.  The author gives the ending a contemporary twist that I won’t reveal here.

McDonald’s characters are among the most vivid in any novel I can remember, painted with a sure touch both in broad stroke and detail.  Every December, for instance, I reread “Enye’s soliloquy” – my name for it, with a nod to Molly Bloom.  It’s her internal monologue, in response to the question, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have Christmas all year long?”  It’s a long single sentence paragraph – not quite as long as the one that ends Joyce’s Ulysses, but then Joyce doesn’t make me laugh out loud.  I’ll quote the whole thing next December.

With his first book, Desolation Road, 1988, Ian McDonald won critical acclaim, and an Arthur C. Clarke award nomination.  Like other cyberpunk authors at the time, his vision of the impact of  technology at the birth of the internet age continues to amaze.  As a quick aside in King of Morning, Queen of Day, McDonald throws out a challenge to fantasy writers that has largely remained unanswered in the 21 years since it was written.  In the same manuscript that defined the Mygmus, Enye reads:

“I have this dread that…somehow we have lost the power to generate new mythologies for a technological age.  We are withdrawing into another age’s mythotypes, an age when the issues were so much simpler…and could be solved with one stroke of a sword called something like Durththane.  We have created a comfortable, sanitized pseudo feudal world of trolls and orcs and mages and swords and sorcery, big-breasted women in scanty armor and dungeon masters; a world where evil is a host of angry goblins threatening to take over Hobbitland and not starvation in the Horn of Africa, child slavery in Filipino sweatshops, Colombian drug squirarchs, unbridled free market forces, secret police, the destruction of the ozone layer, child pornography, snuff videos, the death of whales, and the desecration of the rain forests.

Where is the mythic archetype who will save us from ecological catastrophe, or credit card debt…where are the Translators who can shape our dreams and dreads, our hopes and fears, into the heroes and villains of the Oil Age?”

Ian McDonald

I haven’t kept up with the work of Ian McDonald in the two decades since I first read King of Morning but returning to the book via the characters of Tireseas and Gonzaga reminded me to do so. McDonald published Planesrunner, his first YA fantasy, in December, 2011. Here’s the blurb:

“When Everett Singh’s scientist father is kidnapped from the streets of London, he leaves young Everett a mysterious app on his computer. Suddenly, this teenager has become the owner of the most valuable object in the multiverse—the Infundibulum—the map of all the parallel earths, and there are dark forces in the Ten Known Worlds who will stop at nothing to get it.”

I don’t know about anyone else, but this is my very next read.

Hugo: A Movie Review

Posted on by
4

I had wanted to see Hugo ever since it came out in November, but things kept coming up, as they will during the holidays.  Now the movie is at the end of its run, disappearing from theaters, but if you haven’t yet seen it, I urge you to look in the discount cinemas or catch it on DVD. Let me put it like this:  I have been working on a year end, “Best of / worst of” blog post and having trouble coming up with “best” things in 2011.  Hugo is one of them.  This movie is a first on several counts for Martin Scorcsese:  his first family film, his first fantasy, and his first venture into 3D.  It is his love song to movies as a theater of dreams.

In 1931 Paris, Hugo lives with his father, a master clockmaker.  The two are working to restore a broken automaton, a mechanical figure who writes with a pen.  Hugo’s father also takes him to see movies, and speaks of his love for pioneer filmmaker, Georges Melies.  When Hugo’s father dies in a fire, his drunken uncle takes him to live inside the walls of a railway station where he learns to maintain the clocks.  The uncle disappears, but Hugo keeps the clocks running, steals food in the station to live, and does his best to restore the automaton, which he believes hides a message from his father.

When a toymaker in the station catches Hugo trying to steal a mechanical mouse for its parts, he takes the notebook Hugo’s father left him, filled with drawings depicting the workings of the automaton.  Hugo follows the toymaker home, begging for the notebook, and meets the man’s goddaughter, Isabelle.  They become friends, and the mystery deepens when they discover that Isabelle has the heart-shaped key that can bring the automaton to life.  When they turn it on, the mechanical figure draws a famous scene from one of Melies’ movies – the one Hugo’s father always talked about.

Ben Kingsley (the toymaker) and Asa Butterfield (Hugo)

By then, we have plenty of story questions, several engaging subplots, and adversaries in the form of the toymaker and a station guard with a doberman, determined to  capture Hugo the thief.  But the magic in this movie is far greater than the sum of these parts.

Recently one of the bloggers I follow talked about one of his “all time favorite” books, and I started thinking of what makes a book or movie truly memorable.  It’s more than simply the elements of craft – structure, plot, character, tension, and so on.  These are necessary supports and can create a page turner, or a movie that has you gripping your seat without really touching your heart.  When I read The DaVinci Code, for example, I couldn’t put it down, but now I have to google to remember the professor’s name.  I don’t have to google to remember the name of the hobbit who carried the ring. What special elements make a book or movie unforgettable? It’s one of those things you can’t quite define but you know when you see it.

Chloe Grace Moretz (Isabelle), Asa Butterfied (Hugo), and director, Martin Scorcese

The books and movies I really love seem to have a few things in common:

Characters I want to hang out with are first on the list.   Regardless of what they are doing, they become more close and real than many people I interact with in the daylight world.  I didn’t read all the Harry Potter books to see what Voldemort was going do to next.  I wanted to spend time with Harry, Ron, and Hermione.  And Snape, Dumbledore, Luna, and all the rest.  Imaginary friends in the best sense of the word.

Compelling worlds are next on my list, worlds you want to visit even if dangers lurk in the shadows.  Since reading the Narnia books, I’ve never been able to open a wardrobe without a secret thrill.  An actual pilgrimage to 221B Baker Street caused only a slight adjustment to the 19th century inner London where I travel with Sherlock Holmes.

And finally, it almost goes without saying that these are books and movies I can and want to enjoy more than once.  If I bought them in paperback, my favorite books have scotch tape on their covers.  I have several old VHS tapes I need to replace with DVD’s.

Will Hugo find its place among my all time favorite movies?  I can’t really say with the experience this fresh.  The characters are compelling, their mysterious world shines with a golden light, and the movie is a celebration of the imagination in all of us – all in all, a pretty good bet to become a film I will remember, value, and probably enjoy again.