Tag Archives: stories

Notes on Truth, June edition

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The Washington Post reports that Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, has assembled a team with expertise in fields ranging from constitutional law to money laundering. This suggests that the just-announced criminal probe of the president for obstruction of justice may be only the beginning.

This is clearly bad news for the president, a congenital liar, and the GOP, which has risen to power by enabling him. Too bad their mothers never told them what mine did – that lies eventually get found out. My mother was not into philosophical subtleties with the truth. When she asked if I’d pulled the head off my sisters doll, I couldn’t duck the question by citing “alternate facts.”

It’s still a tossup whether our Liar in Chief and his minions will manage their corporatist takeover of the government, or whether our constitutional protections will bring them down first.

This effort means much more than simply removing a malignant leader from the helm of our once-great nation. It will be even harder to restore a respect for Truth in the public sphere. Politicians have always lied and voters have always know it it, but in a culture which values truth more than greed, liars are punished when discovered.

The natural world doesn’t care about our opinions. “Truth will out,” as Shakespeare said. Melting glaciers, rising seas, extreme storms, fires, and droughts don’t listen to climate change deniers.

This idea – that natural law wins in the end – brought to mind songs and stories from many traditions that echo that theme. I have only a vague recollection of most of them, but I am motivated to go on a search for two key reasons:

First, the old stories and songs reflect our collective experience, shaped by the wisdom of generations. They are comforting, like stones worn smooth, and it’s good to remind ourselves of what our ancestors knew for generations – lying doesn’t work in the end.

My second reason for digging into these stories is that it is likely a healthier pastime than checking social media morning and night to see what fresh outrage the Republican party has done.

I already have in mind a first example, one of my favorite old ballads that Garrison Keeler once called, one of the gloomiest songs ever written. That makes it just right for one of the darkest times our nation has ever endured.

The Goat Speaks

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A wise goat indeed!  Such great news in a season where that has grown rare.

Histories and Mysteries

white-goat-pd

Oh, you silly, silly humans. Why all the nail biting, my dears? Clearly, at the beginning of this World Series, I promised you I would lift the curse.  I signed the agreement with my hoof print, did I not?

Now, a goat such as myself may possess a good deal of deceptive qualities. But one thing I guarantee is my sincerity!  A promise is a promise and I, Murphy the Billy Goat, namesake of the Billy Goat Tavern and former pet of Mr. William Sianis, am as good as my word.

The question of the Cubs winning was never in doubt.

What’s that you say? The rain? Yes, of course I sent the rain! And with it I brought a seventeen minute game delay.

rainout

There was a method to this madness, for it allowed the players to contemplate their fate. They regained their bearings and therefore could more fully…

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The Devil’s Sooty Brothers

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Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, 1855. Painting by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann

Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, 1855. Painting by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann

“People think stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way round.” – Terry Pratchett

“The Devil’s Sooty Brother” is the catchiest name among a group of tales from the Brothers Grimm about career soldiers who are discharged when they are wounded, or peace breaks out, or for no given reason. They find themselves on the road, with a loaf of bread and a few coins if they’re lucky, and no clear path to making their way in the world.

Most of the best known Grimm tales feature young people – a lad or a maiden, just starting out in the world. In contrast, we imagine these soldiers as middle aged career men, whose services are no longer needed. I thought of these stories when I heard that Oreo, “America’s favorite cookie,” will now be produced in Mexico, where Nabisco expects to save $130 million a year. Six hundred people join the hundreds of thousands before them whose working lives have been disrupted by technical, financial, and social changes that continue to accelerate in speed.

Do the old stories have anything practical to say to 21st century people when the world turns upside down?  Maybe…

These stories have elements in common:

  1. The protagonists are combat veterans. They’ve been around the block.
  2. They take up with shady, trickster-like characters, who take them underground, into the darkness, or other trials.
  3. They either are, or must learn to be, trickier than their tricky benefactors. In modern terms, they need to think outside the box, and there, if anywhere, is the relevance for us now. Circumstances may change, but the value of seeing the world afresh, free from habit and preconception, is probably even more vital now than in the “simpler” times when these tales emerged.

I will consider two of the tales of discharged soldiers that depend on wit. I’ll skip several others that hinge more on religious piety and luck. Piety and luck may pay off in real life, but they aren’t satisfying story elements.

German mercenary pikeman. Wikimedia Commons

German mercenary pikeman. Wikimedia Commons

In our title story, The Devil’s Sooty Brother, (Grimm Tale #100), Hans, a hungry and penniless out of work soldier, meets the Devil in the woods. This Devil is a dark trickster and initiator rather than a personification of evil. If the soldier agrees to the terms of a seven-year contract, he’ll be set for life.  If he violates the terms, he will die, and presumably, be stuck in hell. Continue reading →

Where did this come from?

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notebook

A few days ago, looking for a piece of scratch paper, I picked up a 5″ x 8″ spiral notebook from a desk in the back room. I flipped it open to some curious notes on fairytales – and I cannot remember where they came from. Not from any book I possess, nor from any lecture I remember. Did they come from a blog post? And if so, why did I take the time to jot down two pages of notes without bookmarking the post?

The words were those of a writer who said, “I am eager to show what fairytale techniques have done for my writing and what they can do for yours.”  This is curious, because most of what followed – the “four elements of traditional fairytales” that he or she discussed violate the usual advice given in writing books and seminars.  Here the four elements as I recorded them.

1) Flatness – flat characters (no psychological depth), which allows depth in the reader’s response. Eg., the child who escapes monsters does not grow up to be a neurotic adult. Also, few fairytale characters are named.

2) Abstract –  Few details given. Fairytales tell, they seldom show.

3) Intuitive logic –  “nonsensical sense”  This happened then that. Causality not shown. Events may not be connected except by narrative proximity. But inside that disconnect resides a story that enters and haunts you deeply. Details of fairytales exist apart from “plot” and are a “violation of the rule that things must make sense.” Dreamlike.

4) Normalized magic:  breaks the notion that the more realistic a story element, the more valuable.

All four of these points are accurate statements of fairytale characteristics. The idea that they hook the listener’s imagination to “fill in the blanks” may help explain why fairytales make far better oral narratives than literary fiction.

At the same time, I can’t think of any published fiction that follows such a structure, least of all modern fairytale retellings. For one thing, since the 19th century, psychologizing has been a favorite pastime for almost all lovers of folklore.

The unknown author of these notes made a few more statements I wrote down:

“Every since I was a child, I have been happiest living in the sphere of story.”  ( me too!!!)

“Trickery is the instinct to know when something is wrong.”

“I will end by saying that story is what makes us human.”

Whoever the unknown author is, you have my thanks (a second time) for your most stimulating thoughts on a genre I love!

Notes on an archaeology of our selves

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Lego Indiana Jones by Tim Norris, 2009, Creative Commons

Lego Indiana Jones by Tim Norris, 2009, Creative Commons

Clear out your living space and you clear out your mind. And vice versa. I don’t remember where or when I picked up that bit of wisdom, but over the years, it has proven to be true. I’m back in the de-cluttering mode, a task I started in the spring, and continued in fits and starts since then.

Most of the stuff I’ve collected over the years is made of paper: countless boxes of books, piles of notebooks and journals, file boxes of essays composed during various academic forays, and a few portfolios of drawings. Layers of artifacts. One trunk is even filled with genealogical lore. My mother was into that. I am not, and yet I don’t quite know what to do with these small black and white prints carefully pasted into albums nearly 100 years ago. I recognize very few of these aunts, uncles, and distant cousins. I’ve lost track of anyone who might value the prints, and yet, there they are, my ancestors. It doesn’t feel right to just pitch them into the trash. So they’ll sit a while longer in the garage, taking up space.

I believe this is a good analogy to some of what clutters the mind – there is much we are attached to that no longer serves any purpose. It just takes up space. What we need is the wisdom and will to make a clean cut, an energy shown in traditional images of Manjushri, the Buddha of Wisdom, whose right hand holds a flaming sword which can cut through our knots of confusion.

manjushri

While sorting through old books, journals, and papers, I find that most have lost their meaning. A few mark important phases of life, and I hang onto them like graduation or wedding photos, or a favorite old coffee cup. Only a very small minority of items seem current. A rare find was this personal statement I included in a brochure for a local storytelling festival in 2001. It would fit this blog today.

“I believe we all tell ourselves stories almost all of the time, largely unnoticed interior narratives of what we are like and what the world is like. Telling or listening to stories in a “formal” setting, besides being pure fun, can invite us to re-imagine our own lives. Our lives may not be so different from the lives of the characters of Story. Anywhere can be the crossroads, and any voice can be the helpful creature by the side of the path, and the Water of Life may be nearer than we think.”

Archaeologists uncover pot shards and skulls and try to figure out what vanished people were like. I periodically sift through these relics and find myself wondering what my vanished selves were really like. There are threads of continuity, of course, but I think they’re a lot more subtle than I ordinarily imagine, like a fluttering movement, glimpsed at the corner of the eyes.

In the end, I really believe that these day-to-day selves come down to a matter of just which stories we favor and tell ourselves over and over. Which papers, books, and pot shards we keep nearby.

I think it’s a lot like the movie, Secondhand Lions, which is all about stories, when Hub (Robert Duvall) says, “If you want to believe in something, believe in it. Doesn’t matter if it isn’t true. You believe in it anyway.”

Another note on tricksters

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Groucho

I want to argue a paradox…that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on. – Lewis Hyde

It has always made sense to me that the 1920s, 30s and 40s, when times were hard for so many, gave birth to our great movie tricksters: Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, The Marx Brothers, and The Three Stooges. Their send ups of the 1%, among other things, are still hilarious. Where are their equivalents today?

My self-imposed moratorium on negative blog themes has passed. As I caught up on news I had kept at arms length, I found myself thinking often of trickster stories. In part because they are funny, and most of the news is not. And partly because the folly of tricksters has a sacred dimension while the folly of our headline makers is often just foolish.  If you invite the Three Stooges to lunch and serve pie, the outcome is fairly certain. I read that the Georgia legislature voted to allow patrons to carry guns into bars; the result is likely to be just as predictable, but without the catharsis of laughter.

stooges pies

In his introduction to Trickster Makes This World (1998), Lewis Hyde emphasized several key points:

1) Tricksters both make and violate boundaries and live in relationship to them. Where there are no boundaries, trickster creates them, as in several Native American creation myths where Coyote makes the land and separates it from the sea. Where there are cultural boundaries, tricksters blur or invert the distinctions: right and wrong, friend or foe, male or female, living or dead.

2) Tricksters are usually on the road, and this makes them outsiders.
Through most of human history, solitary travelers have been rare. Until the last century, most people lived and died close to the area where they were born. Nomadic people travelled as tribes or clans, but Hyde says trickster is “the spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of town. He is the spirit of the road of dusk,” who may pass through city and town but only to “enliven it with his mischief.”

charlie chaplin and dog

Hyde points out that although there is an abundance of clever women who know how to be deceptive in world mythology, they are seldom full-time tricksters. Once the evil is vanquished, the curse lifted, they tend to settle down. Coyote and Loki do not domesticate, and the older cultures who gave us these stories would have had trouble imagining a woman who opted for a solo life on the road.

3) Tricksters are liars and thieves, but they are not petty criminals.
Tricksters steal things like fire and cattle, and according to Hyde, are often honored as creators of civilization. “They are imagined not only to have stolen certain essential goods from heaven and given them to the race but to have gone on and helped shape this world so as to make it a hospitable place for human life.”

We cannot be too doctrinaire about these things, for there is a distinction between “large” stories, like creation myths, and “small” folktales, where trickster sometimes steals cattle for himself. When he does so, however, in tales like “The Little Peasant” from Grimm, it is usually a case of swindling a swindler, or people who are dishonest and greedy to start with.

For obvious reasons, trickster isn’t welcome in corporate boardrooms. Like Robin Hood, he is into redistribution of wealth. He’s the patron of whistle blowers everywhere, and will gladly gum up the machine when it is no longer serving the greater good.

Perhaps that is why we need him now more than ever. We don’t even have to do anything. Hermes travels as fast as thought. For good and for ill, trickster is already here.

Chaplin modern times

The wishing tree revisited

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I spent a lot of time this week staring at a blank screen while trying to sum up two recent posts (No discouraging words 1 and 2). The ways in which thought/stories create reality is a massive topic. Not only has it been central to eastern thought for thousands of years, but I wrote several chapters along those lines in a master’s thesis in psych. So that particular screen is going to stay blank.

I did, however re-read one of my early posts where I discussed an Indian story that centers on the creative power of mind. The story itself provides a nice summary. “The Wish Fulfilling Tree” is recorded in Hindu scripture as a story Shiva told Parvati. I quoted a version written by Paramahansa Yogananda which I like for its clarity:

Embed from Getty Images

In their kindness toward spiritual seekers, the gods placed certain “wish fulfilling trees” in remote Himalayan regions so pilgrims could refresh themselves. Once a young man with mixed aspirations climbed to the heights in search of one of these trees. At last, out of food and seemingly out of luck, he spied a solitary tree at the center of a small valley, and hurried toward it.

Under it’s branches he wished for a meal, and instantly, servants appeared and set out a feast before him. After his hunger was satisfied, he wished for wine and music, and then dancing girls, and all of his thoughts materialized. Enjoying himself immensely, he wished for a castle, with fruit trees, fountains, and soldiers to defend it.

By then he was tired and sought out the lush master bedroom for a rest. As he closed his eyes, he noticed a jungle not far away and felt a prickling of danger. “There are no bars on the window to keep jungle beasts out. A tiger could easily leap into this room.” Sadly, that was the last thought he ever had.

In his commentary, Yogananda said everyone spends their life beneath a wish fulfilling tree. Fortunately, ours don’t work as fast as the one in the story, but in the end, inexorably, they manifest what we hold steady in our minds. The name of this tree is imagination, and it is important to realize its power and be mindful of how we use it. it.

Help wanted, heroes and heroines: must be civil and adroit

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This unusual job description comes from the opening lines of a Grimm’s fairy tale I recently read for the first time.  Fairy tale characters never get more than a word or two of description, and most of the time, tags like “clever fox” and “evil stepmother” are so familiar they don’t make us stop and think.  The opening of “The Glass Coffin,” was different enough to catch my attention:

“A civil, adroit tailor’s apprentice once went out traveling, and came into a great forest, and as he did not know the way, he lost himself.”

Civil and adroit are good terms for key attributes of successful folklore protagonists.  Though the words may sound quaint to us now, the traits they describe are as relevant to our own world as they are to travelers in Faerie.

The Glass Coffin

The Glass Coffin

The virtue of civility:

Some of the Grimm Brothers’ stories seem to locate these attributes along gender lines, implying a world of civil females and adroit males.  But if we review a number of tales, much of the time we find both characteristic needed by men and women alike.

Girls who are rude or mean may wind up dead or have their eyes pecked out like Cinderella’s step sisters.  Toads may jump from their mouths when they try to speak.  Feminists point to such story features as efforts to domesticate young women and make them docile.  Yet for many youngest sons, success also hinges on civility, often to seemingly insignificant creatures.  It’s a dwarf who offers council in  The Water of Life.  When the worldly-wise older brothers mouth off to the little man, they end up imprisoned in stone.  The youngest brother, who is respectful and heeds (most of) the dwarf’s advice, wins his heart’s desire and more.

In many of these stories, motives are greater than simple expediency.  The hero of The White Snake shows genuine compassion.

The White Snake by Arthur Rackham

The White Snake by Arthur Rackham

Through a bit of (adroit) trickery, a king’s servant gains the power to understand the speech of animals. He goes traveling and saves three different kinds of “lowly” creatures – fish, ants, and baby ravens.  Kind heartedness rather than self-interest drives him, for though the creatures promise to help him, they only do so after he sets them free.  There were no strings attached to his generosity.

The story is not just a simple call to spare the lives of all creatures, for the servant kills his horse to feed the ravens.  It would take another post to explore this detail, but to the extent that these stories dwell on  compassion, their theme is both ancient and timely.  The Dalai Lama put it in simple terms:  “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.  If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

The virtue of being adroit:  

The dictionary defines adroit as “skillful in a physical or mental way; clever; expert.”  In fairy tales, this sometimes means knowing when to kill your horse to feed the ravens.  At other times, it means cunning, trickery, and lies.  In stories, we often imagine these as men’s attributes, perhaps because traditional full time tricksters, from Hermes to Coyote, are usually male.  Yet in Grimm’s stories, young women need to understand and master deceit as often as men.  In Bluebeard-type tales, and notably a frightening story called “Fitcher’s Bird,” it’s a matter of life and death.

Part of being adroit is the intuitive sense of when someone or something feels wrong; when civility is not in order.  In fairy tales, women often do this better than men.  Typically, in three-brother stories, the youngest prince will trust his older brothers, even after the dwarf has warned him not to.  Cinderella and girls like her know better than to be fooled by older siblings.

Instinctively knowing when something is off has new relevance in the 21st century.  Interviews with 9/11 survivors adds to research suggesting our brains are not very good at processing radical changes or threats.  People on the upper floors of the South Tower had just over 16 minutes before the second airplane hit; those who left survived and those who waited did not.  On average, people took 1o minutes to choose.  In times of radical change, we need that cunning, adroit part of our ourselves to cut through the illusion that things will right themselves and return to “normal.”  It can be a matter of life or death.

***

Few things in fairy tales are certain, and the first story in the Grimm’s collection, The Frog King, is an exception that proves the rule proposed by this post.  The princess is neither civil nor adroit.  She’s a petulant brat, who gets what she wants by hurling the frog against a wall (the kiss only comes in later versions).  To our sensibilities, she doesn’t deserve the prince who appears when her act of violence breaks the spell.

There’s an irony in the original “Frog King,” however.  When the transformed prince reunites with his faithful servant, Heinrich, he almost seems more delighted than he is with his new bride.  At least one illustrator, Walter Crane (1845-1915) implies that the princess won’t have everything to her liking.  Who does the prince have eyes for in the closing scene, and how does the princess appear to react?  Does this story end with a twist that the Brother’s Grimm shied away from?

The princess, the prince, and Heinrich in Walter Crane's 1874 illustration.

The princess, the prince, and Heinrich in Walter Crane’s 1874 illustration.

Experienced explorers warn us that the way through Faerie is perilous.  Trails may shift beneath our feet, and hard-and-fast rules don’t apply.  As Joseph Campbell observed, everyone must find their own way through the forest.

My latest exploration leads me to wonder if “adroit” is another word for “street smarts,” something we need in our own world as well as in dark imaginal forests and castles frozen in time.  And isn’t “civil” an attitude that understands that our own wellbeing, even in the most practical terms, must include the welfare of others?

The old stories may offer no certain answers, but with careful reading, they can always lead us to ask interesting questions.