Breakfast with Pandora

The practical power of stories

While working on the Nausicaa Lesson of my myth course this week, I stumbled upon a wonderful example of the practical power of stories.

Princess Nausicaa is that famous teenage hero from the Odyssey, Books 6-8, who saves Odysseus' life. Athena prompts her to go on an outing with a bunch of girlfriends to the mouth of a river, next to the sea, where Odysseus is sleeping, shipwrecked and brine-encrusted. She gives Odysseus food, drink, and directions to her mom's house, where he will find hospitality and a ride home.

In the lesson, I noted that ancient Greek women didn't usually have the freedom to go unaccompanied "far from the city," as Nausicaa and her friends did.

I also asked my students in a sidebar how much freedom they had. Did their parents watch their every move?

Parents are more wary nowadays, to the point that this spring, when a columnist for the New York Sun newspaper allowed her 9-year old son to go home alone on the subway and bus from the Bloomingdale's Department Store, a little blaze of controversy flared up.

Lenore Skenazy sounds like a real pistol on the Talk of the Nation NPR show where they interviewed her. I immediately had a huge crush. She argued that we are doing a disservice to children by sheltering them so thoroughly from the world that they don't have a sense of independence, of striking out into the world on their own.

I happen to agree with Lady Lenore's stance. I wrote a column about it myself when I was a suburban dad print columnist long ago. Baby boomers remember well that the neighborhoods, the buses, and town in general was our oyster, way back when. Parents didn't know where we were, and mostly didn't care.

But all that can be the point of another post. What especially knocked my socks off about the NPR interview was Lenore's contention that when we allow our children freedom, they develop memories of independence that stay with them forever.

One man called in to tell the story of how, when he was nine, he took the train and the subway from Newark, New Jersey, to Brooklyn, to see the 1956 Dodgers play in Ebbets Field.

"I packed myself a lunch," he said, "wrote my mother a note, got on the bus, took the Hudson Tubes, took the Brighton Beach local and got off at the Ebbets Field station with everybody else."

It didn't matter to Lenore Skenazy's thesis that this man's mother freaked out, and "literally called out the National Guard" even though she had told him quite clearly earlier that year that he could go to a game "sometime."

"See?" Lenore shrieked. The value of going to the game by himself was that this man had created a memory that would stay with him the rest of his life, and that he could call with pride to a radio show and recount that memory. His heart must have been full.

"It's better than a Bar Mitzvah," she said about these memories of independence. Neil Conan, the host, was more interested in showcasing his knowledge of New York trivia than in this comment, but it was extremely perceptive.

Bar Mitzvahs are about coming of age, about becoming an adult and joining the adult religious community. Lenore's point is that these moments of independence are also rites of passage, turning points in one's life.

I believe in the power of retelling this type of experience. I believe that we build ourselves up by building up our own history, our worthwhile narratives, the myths, the traditional "good stories" of our lives. I believe that when we suppress the events of our lives and do not recount them, parts of us are destroyed, never to return.

You can always tell a healthy family, for example, by the amount of stories it tells on itself.

So it may be true that we are doing a disservice to our children by not allowing them to go on their Funky Little Adventures (more on that sometime. Very funny story). But more generally, it's very important that we give children the opportunity to have the experiences to create their own good stories.

After all, as any self-trained mythologist knows, the best stories are the ones with a little excitement in them.

Wall-E: Noah for the 28th century

To say I was on the verge of suicide after watching Wall-E wouldn't have been accurate.

I did, however, walk outside the movie theater, take in the breathtaking, post-storm sky with its gray-blue-gold thunderheads on the horizon, and wonder if the world wouldn't be better off without me.

My viewing companion expressed irritation. "It was a hopeful movie!" He said, more than a little of the scold in his voice. "Everything was going to be all right."

Yeah. I know. There were a couple of three-year olds in the row right behind us who may have contributed to my doomsaying mood by kicking the back of my seat intermittently throughout the picture. Was this supposed to be a feel-gooder for them? It was rated G, after all. No, it was just too dark with its early apocalyptic vision, its middle rot-at-the-top plot, and its late, too-easy optimism.

I felt as if the little green plant that was the McGuffin of the movie, that tender thing that gets thrown around a lot and still lives, could be symbolic of the premise of the movie. Fragile, violently abused, and yet still somehow surviving at the end.

It doesn't give too much away to say that the human race, 800 years into the future, is a big underdog in Wall-E. Having trashed the planet in AD 2100, escaped in a Noah's Ark spaceship, and turned amnesiac about their former world, human beings are big doughboys now, victims of loss of bone mass caused by extended space travel.

Is there any way this once-proud race can reclaim its planet, especially when the only living thing left on it is a green sprout and a cockroach?

There's a bah humbug in here somewhere.

Which is not to say, not at all, that I didn't like the movie. I did. I especially liked the character of Eve, the snow-white egg robot with the feathery blue eyes and the quick draw on the plasma cannon. Disney has created many memorable female chracters, from Ariel to Snow White to Belle, and Pixar has given us Jesse from Toy Story and that car from Cars, among others. But this one has femininity down to its essence. Eve is so minimalist, and yet so unmistakably a woman. She is maternal and sexy and strong and girl-giggly, all without lips, nose, cheeks, eyeballs, or any female-specific parts, and only the most approximate of female voices. Congratulations, Pixar.

And Wall-E himself? A tour de force for sure. He and Eve are the It couple of 2008 for me. The sparks are flying.

But back to Noah, briefly. Maybe the thing missing for me was the animals. There aren't any in the movie except for the cockroach, and I can't imagine a New Earth without dogs, cats, horses and elephants. That's what makes Noah's story compelling for me-- the idea that life on earth does not equal only humans, but all living creatures that crawl upon the earth, or swim in the seas, or fly through the air.

Check the self-immolation bit. Maybe I should get a dog.

It's official...

Neuroscience has confirmed that human beings love stories.

I confess that our household subscribes to only one magazine, Bark, which (another confession) we read only for the dog pictures. But a friend of mine passed along a Harper's recently, so I could read a mess of an article on the Episcopal Church and homosexuality.

My eyes straying away from the church article, I latched on to one commenting on the recent discoveries about the brain. The author, Gary Greenberg, quotes author David Linden from his book The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams and God:

Our brains have become particularly adapted to creating coherent, gap-free stories... This propensity for narrative creation is part of what predisposes humans to religious thought.

Greenberg, paraphrasing Linden, writes,

The narrative drive is so powerful that it cannot be shut off, even during sleep-- which is why, according to Linden, the fragmented and illogical is spun into story in our dreams. In dreaming, he argues, our brains learn 'to make the cognitive leaps that underlie nonnaturalistic thought." Applying this lesson to the mysteries of existence, the left cortex comes up with religious explanation."

Aha, I thought as I read these words. We have located mythology and God in the left cortex of the brain. Good going, scientists.

(Also, for those of you still interested in making sense of the fragmented and the illogical, you will want to tell me why I recently dreamed about a pair of twins, women, who told me their names were "May" and "Lightning." BTW, they denied they were twins when I asked them if they were.)

Greenberg goes on to point out, reasonably, that finding mythology and God in the brain does not necessarily mean that mythology and God exist only in our minds. Some scientists seem hell-bent (no pun intended) to prove the nonexistence of God, when they know there is no way of proving the negative.

My reaction first to a discovery such as this is pride. I love this idea that the narrative drive is so powerful it cannot be shut off. It is one thing that makes us as humans unique, and as someone who loves stories-- loves to write them, read them, take them apart, use them for edification, it makes my heart swell to think I am human to such a degree.

As I have gotten older, I have become both more skeptical about religious narrative, and more superstitious. When I was younger I hung onto an idea of my life as a coherent story that was moving towards a triumphant climax and denouement, of which God was the screenwriter. But life does not conform to our "propensity for narrative creation," and I spent much time considering the possibility that life is a set of random occurrences with no meaning at all. In fact, I still do.

At the same time, I have never felt stronger the idea that there is an architecture to our world, a secret history, if you will, whose key is not accessible in this life. That we have a propensity to searching for a story that makes sense because, in fact, there is one.

Sentimental, I know. But human. And that's all I ever wanted to be.