Breakfast with Pandora

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.

Click on this

If you haven't already read, it's fun:

Odysseus' journey dated by solar eclipse

A Kansas City kind of week

Before I came to Kansas City this week to read AP exams, I was like Socrates: I knew nothing about the Midwest, and knew I knew nothing. According to Socrates, this is wisdom.

I still know nothing, but now I have impressions, and am going to share them. This is known as stupidity.

On the morning we teachers arrived, the archetype of the Midwest oil man/rancher/hail-fellow-well-met type drove us by bus to the hotel, and gave us a cheerful FYI of some of the basic attractions of the city.

"On this side've the river is Kansas City, Missouri. And on t'other side is Kansas City, Kansas."

"Which one's the nicer city?" one of us asked.

"Well, Kansas City, Missouri is bigger. And that's as far as I'll go on that."

We laughed.

The border between the state of Missouri and the state of Kansas bisects the KC metropolitan area, so that one of the streets near it is called Bi-State Drive.

And the border seems to be largely symbolic. Kansas City, Missouri gives the impression of awareness of and pride in its Kansan name through its celebration of all things Wizard of Oz and of the era when the movie of the same name came out.

It's big things and little things that stamped this thought on my brain: first, that the Kansas City MLS soccer team is called the Wizards. That when you listen to native KCers speak, they sound like the Scarecrow or the Tin Man or Dorothy herself.

That there was a print of a painting of ruby slippers in my hotel bathroom.

That the company who did the plumbing in the KC convention center is called TOTO.

That when a tornado is pureeing the landscape somewhere near the city, the sky and horizon and clouds and the whole world take on a bilious grey-green hue that matches exactly the black-and-white portion of The Wizard of Oz movie.

In Kansas City, Missouri, you are not in Kansas anymore. You are in a Depression-era cinemascape that seems to have been carefully cultivated and maintained.

Downtown Kansas City architecture loves its early twentieth-century heritage. The old Music Hall is a sandstone coal car without the wheels, stamped with Art Deco figures from Greek Mythology, and with an inscription that decades of tornado-driven rain plumes have begun to wear away.

The Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral (diocese of Western Missouri) sports a wrought-iron Tiffany rude screen, and a Tiffany window above the choir loft.

Above the Convention Center, a huge, newish-looking complex where we read our exams, there is a curious set of towers with lightning rods affixed, all in different arrays, looking like those electrical thingie-ma-bobs in the mad scientist movies of the thirties, starring Lon Chaney. When you watch a thunderstorm from your hotel room and those stacks light up, you may feel you are back in the times when modernism was threatening, and exhilirating, and optimistic all at the same time.

Our visit to the Art Museum started with the 20-foot tall shuttlecock on the front lawn, which our docent told us was controversial. "The artist envisioned the museum as the net," she told us. Suburban leisure activity as art.

After the tour, we raced around looking for the museum's other masterpieces, one of which was Thomas Hart Benton's Persephone (1939, hyperlink = http://xroads.virginia.edu/~am482_04/am_scene/bentonimages.html-- cut and paste). In it, a raven-haired nude stretches out next to a river, on a bed of moss or grass, her picnic basket full of red roses and tiger lily, her pumps pointy-toed and black (not ruby, but close enough), with a China blue-and-white handkerchief or pair of underwear draped nearby.

Hades is a pushbroom-mustached oldster who has an ox-cart nearby, ready to abduct his bride, if only he can get over his astonishment at seeing this gorgeous treasure laid out so near him.

Could I help it if I saw Dorothy in that model, all grown up and full of worldly knowledge?

But enough.

On the days when the sky was not painted for a tornado, we got beautiful westerly breezes and mellow, cream-soda head floats of clouds. Then, it was as if Kansas City was a Main Street of the Gods, and the floats were parading by, serene, and the gods themselves had set up their lawn chairs, entertained in the timeless moment that is a parade, when there is no past or future, but only the next one rolling down the line.

"That there, that brick building there," our driver told us, "that's the Folgers Coffee Company. You see that truck? That's unloading coffee beans. If you're in downtown between midnight and 4 AM, the whole city smells like roasted coffee beans."

"The city smells like coffee beans?" someone said.

"Yes, ma'am," said the driver. "But only between midnight and 4 AM. That's when they roast the beans."

I feel as if I have been here only between midnight and 4 AM, and have picked up something that only a first-time tourist sees. Maybe someday I will see Kansas City in the light, as it really is, and I will wake up and smell something other than coffee.

I'll sleep when...

I've written my 200,000 words? It's tracking that way. Still, it's mucho exciting. I just finished the Lesson on Persephone and incorporated my cut pomegranate photo. I feel somewhat like I've descended into the Underworld as well, with the only light being the glow from my computer screen.

And how are y'all doing?

I have issues

I am having issues with Typepad's new Compose Editor interface. I can compose using the HTML mode, but not the rich text mode. Anyone else having this problem?

If this issue is not resolved, I will take out a Help Ticket!

If you want to read a really good post, go to Kelly's blog here, where she had a conversation I would have loved to be in on concerning the object of Indiana Jones' next quest (after this Crystal Skull thingie, whatever it is).

The myth course is being written. Much honest sweat is being shed. Details later.

Le Guin writes Lavinia

It's not often that one of my favorite writers collides with one of my favorite stories, but that's exactly what's happened with Lavinia, the new novel by Ursula Le Guin.

Lavinia's title heroine is the princess of Latium-- stomping grounds of the most ancient Romans-- who is the prize in an ancient civil war, subject of the Roman poet Vergil's Aeneid.

Aeneas, survivor of the Trojan War, lands in Italy years after the fall of Troy with the remnant of his people. Aeneas is fated to become the father of the Roman race, and as a widower he can only become the father of the race if he has a new wife.

Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, has been betrothed to Turnus, native son of the neighboring Rutulian tribe. But when Latinus finds out about the Aeneas prophecy, he is more than happy to re-gift his daughter to a genuine war hero and legend in the making.

Juno, goddess who hates the Trojans, tries to derail the marriage by inciting Turnus and his mother Amata against the Trojan/Latin alliance.

It's war, and in all the action we never find out much about Lavinia. She is a symbol and a plot device more than a person. Lavinia

The last I read of Le Guin was the Earthsea trilogy, which I loved and which I should read again, as I have a feeling it will help the writing of Healing Knowledge.

If you read the book, let me know what you think. I will, and I will.

Light breakfast for the summer

Writing for the myth course is now in full swing, which means generating about 5,000 new words a week or so. How that will affect my blogging is anyone's guess for now, but I suspect I won't be posting as much.

What you might get is brainstorming around a topic, or something completely unrelated to Greek Mythology, as I seek to retain my sanity.

Yesterday I saw a friend whom I hadn't seen in quite a while, and I mentioned Mount Athos, about which I blogged some time ago.

"Didn't I read that in your blog?" she said.

I had no idea she was keeping up.

Thanks to all readers: those I know, and those I don't.

Choices that make a difference, maybe

I am now hard at work on that Teenage Heroes in Greek Myth course for 5th to 7th graders, and considering all the possibilities thereunto pertaining. The editor wants me to make sure there is a theoretical base for all the content, which will mean grouping lessons into units with universal titles, such as The Hero, Hope, and such like.

Photo: The goddess Iris pays a visit to suburbia.

So I have been kicking around universal titles for units, and one that popped out today was Choices and Responsibility.

Well, I thought. That might work.

The first lesson in that unit pairs Achilles and Paris, gigantic presences in the Trojan War, the former on the Greek side, the latter on the Trojan. They both play pivotal roles in the lives of many both in the Iliad and in the story of the Trojan War writ large. And they construct the conditions for those roles in their teenage years.

Achilles begins his life in the court of his father, King Peleus of Phthia (don't try to pronounce it). He is the son of Peleus and the sea-goddess Thetis. His mom knows that Achilles is destined to die in a great war, and so she hides him as a young teen in the women's quarters of a household. While in that household Achilles manages to have a son, Neoptolemus, so he isn't exactly playing the woman's role to the hilt. But he grows up in a situation that is just the opposite of a normal ancient Greek teen boy's life. And when he is given the choice (that word) as to whether he wants to live a long and quiet life or a short and glorious one, he chooses glory.

And that means not only death at Troy, but death for a huge number of people he kills, plus the death of his best friend Patroclus.

Paris, for his part, begins life without knowing who he is. His mother, Queen Hecuba of Troy, has a dream while pregnant with Paris that she gives birth to a torch that destroys the city. So she sends Paris away as a baby, and he is raised by a shepherd. As a young man, before he takes a wife and has any responsibility (that word) for a household, the god Hermes comes to him with a choice (the first word again).

Here's a golden apple. Give it to one of the three goddesses who appears most beautiful to you.

Paris' choice of Aphrodite, who rewards him with Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, triggers a firestorm. All the hundreds of Greek chiefs who were after her before she was married to Menelaus agreed to go after any guy who took her away from Menny.

So the adolescent choices of these heroes affect the lives of thousands upon thousands.

That's the short version. So, okay. Will it be an exciting thing for gifted 5th to 7th graders to see that the choices one makes when young can radiate out with unimaginable consequences?

Or will it just seem like another preachy adult telling them to stay off drugs, booze, and sex?

I showed the summary of a lesson to my son, who has a level head on his shoulders about these things. He asked, "What grade level is this going to be for?"

"5th to 7th graders," I said, hoping against hope that he would say it was appropriate and would be interesting.

"Good," he said. "Seems like, once you get up to eighth or ninth grade, no one wants to read anymore. I mean, I know a guy who said he has one book in his room. One."

I would say God help the younger generation. But I think God needs to do something about the neurotic teachers first.

At dinner tonight...

Over chili and coleslaw, son was talking about a homework assignment for Romeo and Juliet. Read up to Act 3, scene iii, and write a letter to one of the characters who had shown two sides.

"There's Romeo," I said. "Tender and tough."

"Did you teach Romeo and Juliet?" he asked.

"Yes, to ninth graders just like you."

"Did you teach the Odyssey?"

"Yes, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Animal Farm."

"What's Animal Farm?" chimed in daughter, the sixth grader who let Dad help her with her algebra homework that afternoon.

"It's an allegory," I said. "Do you know what an allegory is?"

"A book by Al Gore?" she guessed.