Post-Apocalyptic Mythology Part 1: What is worth holding onto in the vast wasteland?

When the world ends our trash will become treasures. Things that seem so important to daily life will no longer be of value, and things that we forgot or threw away will be gold. So when the world is over what is important? The film "The book of Eli" attempts to answer that question. The main character has a pack that he refuses to part with, and perhaps on the surface level that pack is important because of the titular book it holds. However, that pack is important for many more reasons beyond the book. Eli's livelihood is within that pack. Every character has objects that are of extreme importance in this post-apocalyptic world. So what would you need?

Of the three characters who remember the world before their needs vary greatly. The villain needs weapons, of all types. He is a collector of gasoline, armored cars, and fast vehicles. He has his own army well equip with bullets which are exceedingly rare, and has a town at his disposable trapped by his hidden water cache (which is what is most desired by all people). But despite all this power and wealth, he is desperately looking for the one weapon which he needs most. The female from the before times only needs her daughter's safety. Finally, Eli has a few possessions which he treats with religious devotion. First is his iPod, which seems to be the only way he sleeps at night. Second, his machete which is cleaned and sharpened with the same care one gives a lover. And lastly, of course, is his book, the sole reason for his existence.

This is a culture stores that puts the highest price on things like soaps, lip balm, and shampoo. Lighters are a dime a dozen, but nice clothing is hard to get. Guns are carried without bullets and most people travel by foot as gas is only for the powerful. Everything is hoarded with the hopes of a good trade, if for nothing else, for water. However, the two main characters who were not from the before time require less tangible things. The main henchman just wants a woman, and the main girl desires anything more than she has. It is not things she needs but ideas. Her hopeless world is too empty for her.

This post-apocalyptic world is complex and interesting. It shows the human interactions in the trade, theft, and gifting of possessions, which may not be necessary for life, but are for living.

I give the entire tale a 4 out of 5.

Holding tightly onto her beloved book,
J.R. West the Raccoon

Well, that is unfortunate.

Today an interesting new report came out on the website http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8206280.stm. A British mathematician has published research on zombie outbreaks, and it does not look good for humanity. However, it is not the results that interest me as much as the research itself.

As a fellow researcher and theorist, I often have to defend the use of my research. However, when scientists look into the likelihood of humanity surviving a zombie attack, the news makes sure to report it. Zombies, while scary as all get out, are not the most pressing concern of humanity, and I wonder the usefulness at this research (as I have yet to see a zombie). It does not have initially apparent uses; however as a culture, zombie-ism is an important issue. It is a fear that has been in western culture for centuries. The dead walking is a basic human horror and it is possible that the research could help. Except of course, that this study shows that the zombies could easily win. Nevertheless, even this seemingly useless study relates to outbreaks of rapidly spreading diseases that could infect large numbers of people. The algorithms used to track the spread of zombies, could also be used to track the spread of flues.

Power to the researchers who got funding for zombie research; I hope that the information does more than just amuse the masses.

Researching something other than Zombies,
J.R. West the Raccoon

Fuzzy Imps

I live with a large number of fuzzy imps both lazy worshiped imps and hard working imps. When I drive home the working imps welcome me with the hope of attention and love. All the while, the indoor imps snubbed me. What are these imps? They are cats. I live with two indoor cats and about eight farm cats, mousers. Though, most cats are like the indoor cats, lazy and royal, the mousers are important to the health of the farm. Without the mousers killing on the farm everything falls apart. Yet, I see the mousers, and I want to lavish them with all the love possible. The indoor cats snub such love, unless they demand it. So why do I, and many other people, love these odd creatures. They love the stealing, snubbing, and typically lazy creatures. I bet when I mentioned working cats, there was a pause. Outside of farming communities, I cannot think of another place where cats work except T.V. And this is nothing new.

Ancient Egyptian worshiped cats, the Goddess Bast had a feline form. Ancient cats were no less snubbing back then. In fact, we have domesticated cats, long after the now obedient dogs, and it shows. Still, many houses give way to cats, and serve cats as if they were Kings and Queens. The Jade Emperor forbade cats from Heaven because of their lazy nature.

Why do we love these creatures so?

Questioning,
J.R. West the Raccoon

Time to Create a Mammoth?

According to an issue of The New York Times from this week, geneticists have now decoded the genome for an extinct mammoth, and if given a $10 million grant, they now have the ability to recreate a mammoth:

There are talks on how to modify the DNA in an elephant’s egg so that after each round of changes it would progressively resemble the DNA in a mammoth egg. The final-stage egg could then be brought to term in an elephant mother, and mammoths might once again roam the Siberian steppes.


I post this here because this is wondrous, fascinating, and certainly shouldn't be ignored. The mammoth has long held a special place in the Western imagination. Larger than any living elephant, with tusks arcing toward an ice age sky, and reeking of pine and spruce.... The thought of these animals lumbering across a winterland brings to mind all of our past century's hero myths about the cave man triumphing over adverse nature in a world without city lights or roads.

But what would it mean, to engineer things so that an elephant mother birthed a mammoth infant? Would this be a beautiful thing? A horrific thing? Playing God? A gift to the earth, bringing back something it had lost? A means of restitution for our extermination of so many species, a potential key to turning back the clock on the demise of biodiversity? An ecological absurdity? A triumph? What are your thoughts?

Additional food for thought: according to The New York Times, the same genetic procedure is theoretically possible -- indeed imminently possible -- with the Neanderthal. As the Times columnist remarks dryly:

...but there would be several ethical issues in modifying modern human DNA to that of another human species.

No kidding.

That said, what would it mean, to be able to bring back another human species out of extinction? They are gone. Completely. Never did we or anyone we can remember have the chance to converse with one of them.

Suppose geneticists did bring back the Neanderthals. What kind of world would they have, to live in? What would it be like for a human mother to raise a neanderthal child?

This boggles the mind. My own thought is that it is far, far too big for us, and that some things -- such as extinctions -- cannot ever be truly undone, without causing greater wreck. But I may be entirely wrong. The thought of where genetics could take us in the 21st century is indeed too big for my mind to grasp. Someone else here must unriddle this mystery.

Crimson Tide in McCain's Concession Speech

First, my apologies in advance to any of our readers who may be allergic to politics. But this post is less about politics than about storytelling and mythmaking. I was fascinated by the choices of music for each candidate in the U.S. presidential election last night during the acceptance and concession speeches - particularly by McCain's. Each choice of music appeared chosen to reinforce the story of that candidate. President-elect Barack Obama's choice was fairly straightforward: he ended his speech to the theme from The Patriot. The theme is from a film scene that reaches its crescendo when an American steps into a crisis moment and lifts the flag and starts running toward victory, by his sheer energy and patriotism convincing many others to do so, changing the tide of events in a moment.

McCain's choice was more complicated. He stepped down from the podium to the battle hymn from Crimson Tide. On the one hand, the choice is obvious enough: McCain's campaign has been telling the story of an old, grizzled war hero returning for one last time of service to his country. In the same way, one of the protagonists from Crimson Tide is an old-school submarine captain (Gene Hackman) on his last tour of service who stops at nothing in the defense of his country. But here's where the choice gets complicated. Because Crimson Tide has 2 protagonists. One is the old, grizzled war hero (who happens to be white). The other is a younger officer on the submarine (who happens to be black, and is played by Denzel Washington), who lacks the years of experience of the old captain but has a clear head and the ability to cut through a difficult crisis to identify what needs to be done. In the film, these two confront a major crisis of national security and arrive at two very different responses. At the end after a bitterly fought battle between the two, the old white captain concedes to the young black officer, You were right, I was wrong, and they part on peaceable terms. Both are commended by the Navy for having pulled out all stops in their service to their country, in the finest tradition of American patriots.

So why music from Crimson Tide at McCain's concession speech? It seems almost to fit better with the story of the Obama campaign than with the story of the McCain campaign. Was this an honorable, bipartisan gesture? Or did someone on the campaign not think through the implications of the music they chose as a final salute to their candidate? What do you think?

One reason that this fascinates me is because I believe that elections are won or lost on the strength of the stories the candidates tell. This time around, Obama's story -- of change achieved together through clear reasoning and an understanding of history -- proved compelling to more voters than McCain's story of a man grown old in his country's service returning for one last stint. The skill with which each campaign told that story contributed to their victory or loss in the election -- and this disparity is visible in the critical choice of patriotic themes for the music of the acceptance and concession speeches.

Before anyone gets infuriated at this post, let me note that though I did not give him my vote, I have the highest respect for Senator John McCain. I agree with the president elect in commending this man who has sacrificed for his country in ways that "most of us cannot even imagine." Nor can I even begin to express the respect I have for a man who, when interred in a POW torture camp, refused to be released prior to soldiers who had been there longer.

So I invite thoughtful responses to this post and the questions it poises about the stories campaigns tell and how skillfully they tell them ... but if you are tempted to flame in the comments, please remember that many brave men and women have laid down their lives so that you and I would each have the right to vote based on our own conscience and our own assessment of who would be right for the job. This post is meant to invite comment not on political views but on the way that we tell the stories of our national leaders.

Daniel
Editor, Dante's Heart

The Yearning of History for Prophets, Heroes

I find myself both deeply moved and deeply troubled by this brief prose piece from Christopher Howell's book, Memory and Heaven (1996). I have trouble saying why, but here it is:

The News

Before Confucius said "No" it was Chinese custom to immolate living dog, servants, concubines and wife along with the wide-eyed and carefully painted corpse of the nobleman. The Other World was thought to be far away and glittering with necessities only a peasant or an eunuch or a woman would go forth to all alone, like a fish battling great rivers on the way to death.

It was widely reported that sacrificed women wept exclusively for the dearly dead, never for that savagery death had ignited all around them. Even the dogs and horses, it was said, mooned only for the master sent alarmingly off ahead of them, and so, with the wisdom of good beasts, were anxious for the flames to scorch apart the veil dividing flesh from light and let them down, free, on the eternal paths of servitude and love.

As fire crept up the racks of [wood], chewing faster and faster like a famished menace, some claimed figures in the blaze kowtowed, smiling bodhisatvah-like into their last earthly moments or clapping with expectation. Actually, Confucius tells us, they screamed, like nothing else but creatures burning in the ruins of their lives, so that no amount of mourning brought relief to those who heard them, everyone shuddering for terrible death, desperately, as today we shudder at the small starving faces brought to us in the evening as we eat. And those watchers long ago, before Confucius, said finally there is nothing we can do until a wise man comes to tell us, "This is unseemly. This is mad."

Christopher Howell, Memory and Heaven

Aside from the piece's subtler-than-most orientalism, I am disturbed (though greatly compelled by) its message: that we wait more often than not passively for the arrival of our next prophet, our next folk hero who will stand in for us on the stage of the world and right the wrongs that we recognize. That we at heart tend to be passive rather than active readers of our world.

When does our celebration of folk heroes and of historic figures whom we have translated into folk heroes galvanize us to action and inspire us to imitation...and when does the telling allow us an outlet, a way to pass the buck, to say "It's ok, there are prophets out there who make the world better. There are people fighting so that things won't get too bad. There are saints to feed the hungry. There are superheroes to stop wars. I needn't do anything. They have it covered." How do our evolving folk legends reinforce or break apart our conviction that "there is nothing we can do"?

I have added a thread on our message board for discussion of this question. If you have a thought, a remark, a question, or a similar passage to share, come add your comment: we'll get a fierce and invigorating conversation going, with any luck. Casey Jones and Paul Bunyan and Davy Crockett are as past to us as Confucius. Who ARE our contemporary folk heroes? Who do we look up to when we think of people of quasi-mythical status who have that unique ability - whether through strength, trickery, or sheer charisma - to save us from ourselves?

Kumari and the innocence of children

I post the news frequently here because myth and fantasy is not about escape. The study of myth, fairy tale, folklore, and fantasy has several very practical aims. One is to learn to recognize the wonder of the moment, the daily wonders that we overlook because we get caught up in a fast-car cubicle world, or because we spend too much time tripping over the cluttered furniture of our own minds. Seeing a dragon snuggled on a violently red autumn leaf, we might be reminded to glance outside and see the autumn beauty that we have been ignoring.

The other practical aim is to become more aware of the stories – the underlying myths as well as the folktales of the moment – that we hear or tell to explain what is going on around and inside us. Myth is the language through which we interpret the world. 9/11 has become a mythic moment for us, complete with iconic and immediately recognizable images, its villains and its cellphone-equipped heroes. Columbine as well. If we allow ourselves to be defined by our myths without thinking about them and without retelling them in more deliberate ways, then we become twigs hurled down the river that is made up of our stories. We lose the chance to tell new stories that will transform and renew us. We lose the chance to change our world by changing how we look at it and how we talk about it.

Folklorists and fantasists are called to be fully engaged in the current scene, and Dante’s Heart is a venue for gathering to discuss the fantasy of the everyday, not the fantasy of escape. For this reason I keep posting news.

Here is today’s clipping.

Recent news of the retirement of Nepal’s current kumari (or “living goddess”) has brought a lot of international discussion and much protest to the tradition of kumari-puja, or virgin worship. Human rights activists within Nepal are petitioning to end the tradition, which requires the deification of a young girl as kumari until the age of puberty. The current kumari is retiring at eleven years of age, during which eleven years she has been worshipped by supplicants in Nepal as a goddess, an incarnation of Kali. As kumari, she becomes a focus for devotion and hope for an entire people; critics of kumari-puja point out that the creation of a child goddess denies that child a normal life and the chance for a full adulthood – effectively crippling the child psychologically.

The Nepalese kumari is not the world’s only example of the sacred child. Consider another extreme – the Vestal Virgins of Rome, revered by the people but buried alive if, upon reaching puberty, they were caught pregnant or in flagrante delicto.

How do we balance the beauty of a myth and tradition that heals and renews an impoverished people with the future suffering of a human being who must learn that she is not divine? And how do we, if angered at such traditions, manage to ignore our own? Do we do a lesser kind of this same thing in our sheltering of our own children, in mainstream American culture? Is the celebration of innocence a kind of deifying of the child at the expense of a normal life? We do not practice such extremes as the nineteenth century (consider the numbers of young Victorian girls who went to their marriage beds knowing nothing about sex), but how many youths in our culture are thrown into the world bereft of either a rite of passage or preparatory training for adulthood? How much do we attempt to hide from our children, and for how long? After all, ours is the culture that wrote Peter Pan, the celebration of the boy who never grows up, the boy who lives as a semi-divine and eternally innocent Pan amid a world of dangerous adults. A thing worth thinking about.

We act shocked at another culture’s kumari prevented from growing up on time (and I know that it is an equally terrible thing when one grows up too fast), but do we stop to think about our own culture’s kumari traditions and conventions, which are often invisible to us because they are of lesser degree and because they are ours? Think about the anguish of prolonged adolescence (the very concept of adolescence is unknown in many cultures) over the course of years, because we hold stubbornly to the idea that the innocence of the child is sacred. Think of the difficulty parents face in our culture in letting children go – think of the long struggle between parents and teenagers, think of the teen pregnancies, deaths by DUI, and torn families created by our culture’s inability to define the line of demarcation between innocent child and adult man- or woman-of-the-world, and its frequent inability to train future adults or to allow children to grow and develop. In our culture’s way of thinking, there is something divine and sacred in the innocence of the child, and in so many ways we define ourselves by our myth of the loss of innocence, and the guilts and nostalgias that myth demands. In what cases do we, too, no less than another culture in the Himalayas, carry this myth too far?

If there were a way to quantify the cost of such a myth, the cost of protecting children from the pain of growing up, what would we see? If we could count the dollars spent on therapy, or on divorce lawyers, or on varied means of self-medication?

Slamming into the Moon

The news this morning tells us that NASA is planning to drive two spacecraft into the moon's southern pole, hoping the impact will reveal whether there is hidden water ice there. The idea is cheap, fast, and well-designed. Speaking as a friend to engineers, I don't think the small impact is likely to do any more actual damage than a couple of meteorites would: and the moon is already covered with craters. And as Tony Colaprete at NASA's Ames Research Center was quoted as saying, this is a thoroughly "economical" solution. I played engineer's advocate with our art editor this morning and received for a response:

I still think hurting the moon is no-no. She is the symbol for our lady (call her what you will: Mary, Isis, Hera).

And I have to admit, speaking as a poet and student of folklore rather than as a friend to engineers, I'm appalled at the symbolism of the act. It's actually rather a barbaric and typically-NASA/white-male-engineer notion. If you think about it, slamming a long metal phallic object into our lady's vulnerable place sounds an awful lot like a rape. So much for kindly orbiting and courting the moon prior to a gentle thrust through the thin barrier of her barely detectable atmosphere. I don't like the symbolism of this new trend in space exploration. Consider how much our cultural consciousness was defined by past symbolic acts of astronomical exploration - Armstrong's one small step, for instance. We cannot pretend ignorance to the effect that our symbols have on our minds and hearts. To quote Gene Wolfe, author of The Book of the New Sun:

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.

So it was with the symbolic action of that one small first step onto the moon - with Armstrong's words conveying both the humility of that one step and the pride in the achievements of a race. Now, as we struggle to come to terms with the way we are using and misusing our natural environment, what will be the eventual cultural penalty of a more symbolically violent act?

My intent here is not to sensationalize (the media has already done that well enough) - merely to recognize that the moon is a central folkloric and mythic figure, remaining so even today, and therefore the way in which we interact with the moon will have rippling effect on our understanding of ourselves and of the inter-relationship of ourselves and our world. I'd be curious to hear responses from both poets and astronomers, who after all are sisters, and both in love with the moon. And also from everyone else...

Unnerved by the Toadstool Farm

I rarely write negative reviews, and I don't mean this to be one - only a question. Occasionally I will google "fairy" just to see what comes up (it's like tossing a crabpot out into the fjord). Today, "My Fairy Baby" came up. It is one of the services/products offered by the Toadstool Farm: they will photograph (or paint) your baby with attached fairy wings, gauze, etc. I have to ask: is anyone else as disturbed by this as I am? This isn't celebrating an aspect of the baby, it's using the baby - like dressing a cat as Little Bo Peep. Except this isn't a cat.


Today I simply cannot put my finger on what is unnerving to me about this. And it may be that My Fairy Baby is actually cute and adorable, and I am missing the point somewhere. Interestingly, I find myself not unnerved by the advertised pictures of twelve-year old children with wings, but for some reason the baby troubles me. I thought I would ask for comments so that I can question this particular application of fairy tale in our culture, and gather the perspectives of others.