Prospero's Books

Tyger

One of the most strikingly mythic short films I've seen in a while is Tyger, directed by Guilherme Marcondes, under a grant from the British Council in Brazil.

The film is inspired by William Blake's 1794 poem, "The Tyger," which ends:

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

(Thanks to Wired for the link.)

You need words

On Salon.com, Garrison Keillor, one of America's greatest living storytellers, argues that airports, or freeways, or stone memorials don't make the best tributes to historic figures or events. Instead, he writes, "a book is the best monument":

No writer needs a memorial. The family of E.B. White decided after he died that the farm in Maine where he wrote his books should not be turned into a museum. If you want to find him, you simply read the essay "The Death of a Pig," or "Charlotte's Web" or "Here Is New York."

In New York they are trying to figure out how to honor the men and women who went down in the twin towers. Well, the best memorial yet is a lovely book, "102 Minutes." You can visit it anywhere, and it means more than a wall of names, or a reflecting pool. Those people live on in the book, which is about large and small acts of heroism and kindness in the face of death, and you can't say that with stones or reflecting pools. You need words.

I haven't read 102 Minutes, but on Keillor's recommendation, I'm going to check it out.

Time, thou must untangle this

In his little book on Jung (see What I've Been Reading), Anthony Stevens quotes Jung on the function of time in the therapy process:

The psychoanalyst thinks he must see his patient for an hour a day for months on end; I manage in difficult cases with three or four sittings a week. As a rule I content myself with two, and once the patient has got going, he is reduced to one. . . . In addition, I break off the threatment every ten weeks or so. . . . In such a procedure time can take effect as a healing factor (132-33).

Jung's optimism about the healing power of time reminds me of the contrast between the ways Shakespeare's tragic and comic heroes view time. For Hamlet, "the time is out of joint" (Hamlet 1, 5, 206), and for Macbeth, time's arrow points only toward meaninglessness:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death (Macbeth 5, 5, 20-24).

In the comedy Twelfth Night, Viola—one of Shakespeare's delightful cross-dressing trickster heroines—takes a very different view of time:

What will become of this? As I am man,
My state is desperate for my master's love.
As I am woman (now alas the day!),
What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe?
O Time, thou must untangle this, not I;
It is too hard a knot for me t' untie (2, 2, 34-38).

A Noah's Ark on Svalbard

The government of Norway has seized on a wonderfully mythic image to describe a frozen vault that will be built to safeguard the world's crop seeds against natural disasters, nuclear war, and other catastrophes.

According to Reuters, the vault will be built "in a mountainside on the island of Svalbard 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole."

"Norway will by this contribute to the global system for ensuring the diversity of food plants. A Noah's Ark on Svalbard if you will," Norwegian Agriculture and Food Minister Terje Riis-Johansen said in a statement.

The allusion has been used before. Here in Indianapolis, Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso has written a delightful children's book, Naamah, Noah's Wife (see What I've Been Reading), about the title character's effort to save the world's plants as well as its animals.

Significant sojourners

David Leeming's lovely little book Myth: A Biography of Belief (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2002) includes a passage that ties together Campbell's monomyth (mentioned briefly in my Premise 8), the human propensity for storytelling (discussed by Robert, of the Corridors Miscellany blog, in a posting I quoted yesterday), and the concept of life as a journey:

Much of the mythology—the imagery of the soul's mystical adventure—is derived from a particular understanding of the rite of pilgrimage, a specific means by which even in the conventional religious context the individual can imitate the hero's journey. A pilgrim is a person who leaves home to travel to an important place with the intention not of staying but of bringing something of spiritual value back into his or her ordinary life. The archetypal connection between the pilgrimage and the hero adventure is clear enough: both are based on the frame of Departure, Adventure, Return, the process of threshold crossing, the achievement of higher knowledge, and even union with the Absolute.

In a sense, the defining characteristic of the human species is its pilgrimage aspect. That is, we are all significant sojourners because we live with the constantly present metaphor of a journey. Of all species, we appear to be the only one concerned with the idea of the Journey of Life. Poets from the Gilgamesh bard and Homer to John Bunyan, Robert Frost, and Jack Kerouac have always explicitly or implicitly celebrated this fact. . . .

Behind that metaphor of the Road of Life is our unique human ability to conceive of plot—mythos—of what Aristotle defined as narrative with a significant beginning, middle, and end. Ultimately we conceive of our lives that way, and that makes us, at least mentally, pilgrims on a pilgrimage (132-33).

Instinct seen from inside

Anthony Stevens's Jung: A Very Short Introduction (see What I've Been Reading) has given me a new way of thinking about archetypes and the collective unconscious.

Many people who might dismiss the concept of a collective unconscious as unscientific and "mystical" would have no problem accepting the concept of instinctive behavior in animals, including homo sapiens.

Stevens writes:

Very similar ideas to Jung's have become current in the last forty years in the relatively new science of ethology (that branch of behavioural biology which studies animals in their natural habitats). Every animal species possesses a repertoire of behaviours. This behavioural repertoire is dependent on structures which evolution has built into the the central nervous system of the species. Ethologists call these structures innate releasing mechanisms, or IRMs. Each IRM is primed to become active when an appropriate stimulus—called a sign stimulus—is encountered in the environment. When such a stimulus appears, the innate mechanism is released, and the animal responds with a characteristic pattern of behaviour which is adapted, through evolution, to the situation. Thus a mallard duck becomes amorous at the sight of the handsome green head of a mallard drake, the green head being the sign stimulus which releases in the duck's central nervous system the innate mechanism responsible for the characteristic patterns of behaviour associated with courtship in the duck.

This is very much how Jung conceived of archetypes operating in human beings, and he was aware of the comparison. An archetype, he said, is not 'an inherited idea' but rather 'an inherited mode of functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas. . . . In a sense, ethology and Jungian psychology can be viewed as two sides of the same coin: it is as if ethologists have been engaged in an extraverted exploration of the archetype and Jungians in an introverted examination of the IRM (51-52).

Or to put it another way, the collective unconscious is instinct seen from inside. And archetypes are the instinctive meanings we attach to certain signs.

Stories and systems

On his blog, Corridors Miscellany, Robert (a student of mine, I'm proud to say), builds elegantly on a concept I posted last month (and discussed in a course last semester). I quote Robert's posting in its entirety:

Not long ago, I read a passage from Alexander Argyros's A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos that has since interfered with my quiet times. Sometimes an idea is so "big" that I can't easily let it go.

In his discussion "Narrative and Chaos," Argyros makes a number of startling statements:

I propose to claim that not only is narrative a stubbornly universal manifestation of human culture, but that it constitutes one of the most remarkable and desirable inventions of biological evolution.

Argyros's claims are controversial:

I believe that a chaotic sociobiological view of human culture suggests that narrative is both a product of, and a selective pressure for, our evolution into Homo sapiens.

Argyros says that traditional narrative is "characterized by an overall causal frame, the general plot, which is itself composed of a frequently tangled hierarchy of nested plots and subplots"—a complex system. He says that humans require such a system, that "one way or another, any text will be made into narrative." He says that the human concept of time has evolved in a manner that is "essentially futural." He asks, "why else do our brains take up so much space for memory, if not to help us in the difficult work of choosing a future?"

So, we see that narrative is a dynamic system, operating in an aparently chaotic fashion, where input and output are continuously circulating and interacting. We see that humans appropriate vast arrays of information by encoding that data into narrative forms. We see humans operating in a temporal framework which is futural. With these presumptions in hand, Argyros looks further:

Our evolution into human beings undoubtedly entertained a feedback/feedforward relation to creation cosmologies and eschatologies. That is, the ability to imagine nonempirical first causes, infinite ends, and explanatory totalizing cosmologies—that is, grand narrative—requires an enormously intricate neocortex, whose gradual selection allows for even more complex cosmologies.

Those are some big ideas—definitely something to think about—and certainly the basis for a response the next time someone tells you, "Oh, I haven’t read a book since high school."

Warriors

A surprise at Ft. Defiance Indian Hospital last week was that I was asked, for the first time in more than thirty years, for my military enlistment and discharge dates.

Of course, one reason for the question may have been to satisfy Federal bureaucratic requirements in this Public Health Service hospital. But I was told that the question was asked because of the great Navajo respect for military service.

If any people have reason to hate the U.S. military, it's the Navajo. A few elder Navajo remember the first-hand stories told them as children by survivors of the Long Walk. But I was told that Navajo have a higher rate of military service than most other populations in the United States. The main reason, I was told, was that the Navajo so value their land that they are willing to fight for its protection.

Most revered of all veterans, of course, are the few surviving "code talkers." And so they should be. We are all in their debt.

A sea of air

A week at 7000 feet sent me to the ER at Ft. Defiance Indian Hospital, where I got a diagnosis of, and wonderful care for, altitude sickness.

Usually we're not aware of the air around us, until it gets very wet or moves very fast. But my experience at Ft. Defiance, and yesterday's one-vertical-mile descent into Phoenix, made me acutely aware of the sea of air in which we swim. Our bodies are complex, finely tuned systems, in constant relationship with the larger systems of which we are parts.

Desert hospitality

I saw a card this week with a proverb attributed to the Navajo:

Always assume your guest is tired, cold, and hungry, and act accordingly.

I thought of that saying today when we visited Wupatki National Monument, with its well preserved ruins of (possibly) Sinagua pueblos. The one pictured here is Wukoki Pueblo (which, by the way, figured in the film Easy Rider). On the trail from our car to the site, I was glad that Bette had brought water for us, and I thought about what it would have been like, when Wukoki was inhabited, to have arrived there without water. I hoped that the inhabitants would have assumed we were thirsty, and acted accordingly.

Arabs are also renowned for their hospitality. Does desert life inevitably give birth to this cultural value?