"Room in the Bag of Stars" - Ursula K Le Guin
art by Byam Shaw
This week has been very busy and so will be the coming week. I need to catch up on some details in my life and today's post will mainly be a link to an essay about fiction and how the forms it takes or doesn't take, influence our thinking and the world around us. The hero, the quest, the mundane, the magical, the tragic, the crooked little path...all are pieces of our shared human experience gathered, explored, and understood, through stories. I had this essay come up this past week, and it made me think about the type of fiction I have always valued. Ursula K LeGuin wrote this essay about a theory of Elizabeth Fisher's, The Carrier Bag Theory of Human Evolution. If you are interested I've provided the link. I am still thinking about it, and other things that are particular to my carrier bag at the moment, so I have no insights to offer. There is some interesting and poetic writing in this essay and I recommend it. It takes a feminist perspective on the origins of genre, and compares the hero's story to the seed gatherer's story. Where do we place our value in the stories we read? What can we learn from thinking about that? Where would we be without our stories? It is a very deep layer of connection between us, and the platform for our growth as humans. Who are we, and what are we, and where are we going and why.... Story is medicine and solace. AA is effective to a large degree because of the power of the shared story.
I like to use stories in teaching. Getting students to visualize and think about what we are learning. It is always a problem with time management with me, I struggle with that. But, I feel it is very important with the kind of student I have, to flesh things out, to look at google images, and hear the song, and look at the diagrams, and let them wear the top hat. Many of my students struggle with reading. They come from homes where English is not spoken, so their vocabulary is not as developed as the school district expects it to be, therefore they struggle in comprehension as it is presented in our current system of teaching. They are also on the economically disadvantaged side, poor, and therefore lack the background knowledge that trips to zoos, museums, libraries, movies, bring into a child's life, again affecting their comprehension scores as measured by the system. Another weak link is that the opening up of the world that occurs in a child's life from experiencing things like vacations, restaurants, films, museums, is enhanced through discussion while experiencing them, which consequently does not happen. Discussing and writing about their thinking is, therefore, another weak link for my students when evaluated by the system. It is depressing. We do what we can. We think about how we can bring the world into our classrooms through stories and experiences. So, in the spirit of appreciating the medicinal and joy-giving properties of fiction in all its varieties, I offer this excellent piece of writing, today:
"'When she was planning the book that ended up as Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf wrote a heading in her notebook, "Glossary"; she had thought of reinventing English according to a new plan, in order to tell a different story. One of the entries in this glossary is heroism, defined as "botulism." And hero, in Woolf's dictionary, is "bottle." The hero as bottle, a stringent reevaluation. I now propose the bottle as hero. Not just the bottle of gin or wine, but bottle in its older sense of container in general, a thing that holds something else."
image from the web
~Oldgirl
I've bookmarked that piece thank you. What you say about teaching & the value of story & the value of lived experience really chimes with me too.
ReplyDeleteIt's a fascinating set of perspectives to conjure with. I can quickly see I'll need to take it in a series of passes, in part because it's going to require some side-trips to check if I know what I casually think I know about anthropology and human evolution, and also to see if whatever that is is true, but it will be worth it. The journey to become something better and more capable is most of the heroic journey I'm really interested in.
ReplyDeleteI was largely raised by women, and pop culture elements that resonated with me, so I've been largely outside of the cultural mainstream on quite a few things. The violent, kill or be killed aspects of the hero's journey, is one of the things that's foreign to me on a visceral level. I not only don't genuinely feel it, but I have a horror of doing damage to anything that I don't have the power to undo.
A hypocritical carnivore, as and adult I've often and increasingly noticed that were I not in such a developed, compartmentalized society and had to more directly be involved in harvesting the food I eat, I'm not sure how rarely I'd be eating meat, nor what animal it would come from. Familiarity may breed contempt when it comes to dealing with some humans, but with pretty much every other living thing it tends to take me to places of empathy and compassion.
Sure, I like to see damaging, oppressive, limiting evil defeated and effectively destroyed, but I didn't grow up with a love of zero sum games. Of competitive sports and war movies. My ideal outcome sees the evil perspectives changed, characters redeeming themselves even if only in the sincere attempt, rather than an irredeemable personification of evil - an over-the-top parody of a person - put in the ground.
Related to all this, the one scene that's stuck most deeply with me over the years from The Magnificent Seven (1960) is the exchange between one of the boys from the village, most of whom have moved to attend members of the mercenary band hired to protect the village from bandits, and Bernardo O'Reilly (played by Charles Bronson):
Village Boy 2: "We're ashamed to live here. Our fathers are cowards."
O'Reilly: "Don't you ever say that again about your fathers! Because they are not cowards!
You think I am brave because I carry a gun? Well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until, finally, it buries them under the ground.
And there's nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery. That's why I never even started anything like that... that's why I never will."
Anyway, if I can manage to make it successfully through the next nine days, and (with some help) win myself a new era of peace. this is one of the topics I'll be trying to make time for.
Thanks for putting this out there for us.
You are welcome. I have loved her stories for a long time, and found her essay fascinating. I feel the same way you do about diet, I'd be vegetarian if I had to hunt and butcher the meat I eat, and also about the importance of character development in making a story or a film. I can appreciate the absurd, as well. Story of my life, haha!
DeleteBest wishes on your next 9 days, and thanks for commenting.