Friday, April 1, 2011

Stories and Dreams

Heres the story on one of the things I love best in the world: Story.

I love stories. I read like an addict.  I tell stories and I listen to them. If I were standing next to you now, I'd be learning your story.  Maybe you would tell me that you went to the store this morning.  Maybe that your Mom died last night. That you were sad. Because.

Stories are dreams in verbal context.   Stories and dreams form our reality.  There are three kinds of stories in our life: the stories we learn for future use, the stories we are living now, and the stories we leave behind, or tell.

There are 7 (or 9 or 11 or 13, depending on who is telling the story) original stories in the world. They are archetypes, original patterns for how to be human. They are known everywhere, throughout human history.  For example, Romeo and Juliet is the same as Psyche and Cupid, which is the same as Titanic, which is Tristan and Isolde, which is West Side Story, and so on. Holy books, like the Bible, are full of stories to teach good/bad, useful/ harmful,  holy /evil, right/ wrong. Most stories are about Heroes, who encourage us to do more than we think we can.

When I was a kid, my father told us stories about his life. Now, I tell my kids stories. I memorialize them, and encourage them: this has happened before, and it was survived. This is something to look forward to for yourself. This is something to beware of. Stories are big scale, or as small as the neighbor and a local event. They are truth as we know it, or truth as we dream it. The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien is an awesome story of death and memory, and what story is for. His book Going after Cacciato is one long dream, that might be reality..

To keep our spirits up, we adopt stories. Lately I've had a couple stories in my head that keep coming back, so they must have something to say to me. As a lover of mythology and Jung, I try to decode them.  One is Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell. The other is The Light Princess by George MacDonald.
How ‘bout that GTTW? The Civil War and a tough broad.

GTTW is one of those 7/9/11/13 stories. It's the told-and-told-again story of someone who survives constant losses. At the end, she has lost just about everything she can lose. Except her health, which Heroes need to hang on to in order to be Heroes.  To be a hero, it is not a pre-requisite that one must be a nice person. The criteria is: "survive, in order to encourage your closely (or loosely) related DNA to keep heading towards certain death". King Ulysses, e.g., survived 20 yrs of the Trojan War /wandering around on side adventures, before getting back to Ithaca, wife, son, and ostensibly a wiser kingliness. I don't think Penelope thought too highly of his husbandly qualities, but he wowed Ithaca.

Like GTTW, The Light Princess is a story about losing something. She, and the story’s obligatory Prince, lose themselves to find themselves. Here’s the heart of it: The solution to the dilemma [of the princess] in [the story] is death. But in the strange juxtaposition of things in MacDonald's fairy tales, to be dead is to be truly alive. And the dreamlike vision of life presented to us through his fantasy is a reflection of that eternal reality. For, to paraphrase MacDonald's favorite quote from Novalis; life is, or should be, a dream of a greater reality. 

I’ve loved these two different stories for years. But they are on my mind now for their endings. Scarlett loses something, once again,something that she felt was real and not a "dream." Will she continue to do battle, and rise again? We don’t know, because her story ends for us. We hope she kicks butt, as always, and gets Rhett to see the light. But when her story ends, we keep her in our heart, and imagine that she will, forever and ever, continue to do battle and win. So will the Man from La Mancha. The Light Princess, having faced a great loss and "died" in a sense, will as compensation forever after have her gravity--and her prince. Jesus will forever have accepted the inevitability of  his death, and inspire us all to do the same.. So will Billy Budd.  Gilgamesh.  Bambi. 

But if your story ends, you need another. As I get older--hopefully older still for awhile--my stories change along with my outlook.  Maybe like Scarlett, I finally see what is real and valuable. Maybe like the Light Princess, I recognize loss as an ultimate gain.  As an old woman, my plots and characters are shifting.

What to do when your story ends?  Find another.
So if love and passion and adventure are not in my plotline, what to do?

Ah, Scheherazade. 

1. Scherherzade  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheherazade

2. MacDonald, George.  The Light Princess. http://www.george-macdonald.com/resources/light_princess_trexler.html

3. Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With the Wind.  http://search.yahoo.com/search?p= gone+with+the+wind&ei=UTF-8&fr=hp-pvdt





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