Homer – Further Annotations

Against Narrative, works from 2023:

Posted on July 12, 2023July 12, 2023 by blablablaandgabbler

1) The Tyranny of the Tale by By Parul Sehgal: ‘Anyone in my line has every incentive to fall in step, to proclaim the supremacy of narrative, and then, modestly, to propose herself, as one professionally steeped in story, to be of some small use. Blame it on the cortisol, though: there’s no stanching the skepticism. How inconspicuously narrative winds around us, soft as fog; how efficiently it enables us to forget to look up and ask: What is it that story does not allow us to see?

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Return to storytelling’s primal scene: Scheherazade telling tales in order to live to see another dawn. Before it is anything else, a story is a way we can speak to one another without necessarily being ourselves; that is its risk and relief, its portable privacy. The fact that children ask for stories at night is used to defend the notion of storytelling as natural, deeply human—a defense against the dark. But Margaret Wise Brown, the author of “Goodnight Moon,” was convinced that children didn’t care much about plot; it was their parents who did. When children ask for stories, what they’re asking for is the presence of the adult. One wonders just whom Scheherazade was regaling in that room. When did her gaze shift from the king to the children, as it must have? What kind of armor did she think she was providing them?

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It is also a strange, inadvertent echo of Peter Pan. Peter cannot grow up, he tells Wendy, because he was never told stories: “None of the lost boys know any stories.” Without being imparted a sense of narrative, he cannot establish his own.’ [Via]

2) Letting the Story Go: Field Notes from a Brutal Time by Janet Steen: ‘I gave up on the basic elements of storytelling. Setting, plot, character, theme. When I applied them to my brother’s life, I couldn’t get things to line up. What exactly was the “rising action”? What was the beginning of the denouement? What were the salient details? “I wanted to know more about the main character,” people always say in writing workshops. Yes, I wanted to know more about the main character. I had assumed I would have years and years to learn more about him. …

Stories were a way to freeze time. And time was an illusion anyway, my various guides were telling me. And everything was constantly changing, constantly becoming something else we couldn’t possibly imagine or predict. Memories were essentially old stories. The present moment was the only place where the memories and fantasies ceased.

This change in view felt both liberating and destructive. Who are you if you aren’t your conditioning, if you’re not the product of your past? What exactly is under there?

The most radical part of this process was finding out that I could withstand an enormous amount of emotional pain. Rupert Spira’s teachings especially helped with this, or maybe I was just partial to his gentle, deeply intelligent explanations in the YouTube videos I found and devoured. He was in the nondual tradition stemming from Advaita Vedanta, and what he calls the direct path. The direct path led you straight to your essential nature, which was pure awareness and devoid of, or beyond, thought or emotional content or objective experience.

But he also talked about the tantric approach, which was about bringing feelings close, so close that it was just the raw experience—not the story, not the thought, but “the raw experience in the body.” So instead of the separate self going into flight from the experience, you were absolutely up against it, feeling it as sensation.

I tried this. I went up against the grief, the longing, the missing, the keening, the despair. I touched into it, withdrew, touched into it again. I stayed there with it for as long as I could.

If something shocking and terrible happens, you might feel that you’re going to be consumed by the feelings about it. The intensity of them threatens absolutely everything and, naturally, you don’t want to go near them. But then you do. And in doing so there is some kind of distillation. It is nothing other than what it is in its purest form. And then, although I didn’t know this for quite some time, there begins to be an alchemical change.

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In good moments I make him into a character, a mythic figure, because I can. Who is to stop me? It’s a creative act. I can make him into what I want and need him to be. He’s not a ghost. He’s a guide, a teacher, showing me the way out of darkness. He’s a doorway leading me out of a closed room.’ [Via]

3) The Movie James Franco Doesn’t Want You To See by Lola Sebastian:

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: Why Are We So Resistant to the Idea of a Modern Myth?

Posted on April 10, 2022April 10, 2022 by blablablaandgabbler

‘Experts, I fear, aren’t much help here. You can collect academic definitions for as long as your patience lasts. “The word myth,” as Northrop Frye rightly says, “is used in such a bewildering variety of contexts that anyone talking about it has to say first of all what his chosen context is.” Folklorist Liz Locke put it more bluntly in 1998: “such a state of semantic disarray and/or ambiguity is truly extraordinary.”

Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko nonetheless gives a definition that kind of sounds like what you’d expect from an expert: a myth is

a story of the gods, a religious account of the beginning of the world, the creation, fundamental events, the exemplary deeds of the gods as a result of which the world, nature and culture were created together with all parts thereof and given their order, which still obtains. A myth expresses and confirms society’s religious values and norms, it provides a pattern of behavior to be imitated, testifies to the efficacy of ritual with its practical ends and establishes the sanctity of cult.

This is a fair appraisal of how myth has often been regarded by anthropologists. But it is fraught with dangers and traps. Like the word “anthropology” itself, it seems to offer an invitation to make myth something “other”: something belonging to cultures not our own, and most probably to ones that even in the circles of liberal academics retain an air of the “primitive.” Gods, creation, ritual, cult: these are surely notions that we in the developed world have left behind and only pick up again with an air of irony. Our “gods” are not real beings or agencies but metaphorical cravings (“he worships money”) or celebrities (rock gods and sex goddesses).

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This picture is tenacious, and I suspect it accounts for much of the resistance to the notion (and there is a lot of resistance, believe me) that anything created in modern times might deserve to be called a “myth.” To accept that we have never relinquished myths and myth-making might seem to be an admission that we are not quite modern and rational. But all I am asking, with the concept of myth I use in this book, is that we accept that we have not resolved all the dilemmas of human existence, all the questions about our origins or our nature—and that, indeed, modernity has created a few more of them.

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One objection to the idea of a modern myth is that, to qualify as myth, a story must contain elements and characters that someone somewhere believes literally existed or happened. Surely myths can’t emerge from works of fiction! The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski asserted as much, saying of myth that “it is not of the nature of fiction, such as we read today in a novel, but it is a living reality, believed to have once happened in primeval times, and continuing ever since to influence the world and human destinies.”’

[Via]

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: “What The OA Tells Us About Plato and the Human Heart” by Josephine Livingstone

Posted on August 15, 2020 by blablablaandgabbler

Through its neat plays on old storylines—the OA regains her sight, rather than losing it; Homer is the blind prophet’s lover, not her creator—The OA toys with our expectations and with a rich and old narrative tradition. But it’s the OA’s ordeal that elevates these references into something deeply thoughtful. Her secret is that she and several other people (including her beloved Homer) were kept locked up in a psychopath’s basement, hewn out of bare rock.

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As with its treatment of Homer, The OA both reverses and strangely expands upon parts of Plato’s allegory. Much like Plato’s captives, the prisoners understand part of the mysteries confronting them. They can see shapes of ideas. How can they get out? Why are they here? Why does this nutty scientist care about their brains in particular? They see the answers to such questions like half-formed shadows playing against a wall. But as the show unspools, we realize that the captives can only find the truth by turning inward.