Dream Eater

Recently I saw the film Wonder Woman, which draws on ancient Greek mythology to depict an intersection of mortal and immortal dimensions in a World War I setting.  Like Wonder Woman, Koi, the main character of this 2017 novel by my daughter’s friend, K. Bird Lincoln, brings super-human powers into the human realm.  And they both pit female power against the male deities that would control them and the rest of humanity.

Unlike Wonder Woman, Koi, a Japanese American, has grown up in the human world of contemporary Portland, Oregon.  She is only partly aware of her paranormal/supernatural/mythological ancestry and lives in fear of human touch, which triggers her power to read people’s dreams. Also, while Wonder Woman invokes Western myth, Dream Eater draws on non-Western sources--Japanese, Middle Eastern and Native American. 

Because of her fear of human touch, Koi has isolated herself, even from her family.  In an effort to build a normal life, despite the continual flashes of other people’s dreams, she begins working toward an accounting degree at Portland Community College.  One day she crosses paths with a Japanese Kitsune (fox) shape-shifter, who, she later learns is on a mission from the mythic “Council” to retrieve her father.  At about the same time, Koi bumps into a professor and reads his dreams of murder.  Later, the professor enlists Koi’s help in translating her family’s obscure Japanese dialect.  Meanwhile, Koi’s sister, Marlin, who has a real job, calls on Koi to take over temporary care of their father, who apparently suffers from Alzheimer’s, so she can get some work done.  It seems the Kitsune, Ken, has experience with elder care, so he offers to help, not revealing his ulterior motive. 

From this point on the narrative resembles an action adventure, which is played out as much in Koi’s body as in external reality.  Her proximity to Ken stirs erotic sensations while the professor arouses fear and horror.  When the professor kidnaps Marlin, Koi and Ken, with Dad in tow, are off on an adventure involving rescue, encounters with such mythological powers as the Middle Eastern Ullikemi and Native American Thunderbird, deception, multiple battles, and eventually Koi’s discovery of her own superhuman powers.  Throughout it all, we vicariously experience Koi’s psychic drama, as well as the physical action.  There is constant turmoil, made all the more chaotic by the ambiguity of just who is good and who is evil, who is the ultimate power and who is the surrogate.

Allegorically speaking, this urban fantasy can be read as a coming of age narrative, in which Koi, innocent of her full power, encounters the evil in the world, discovers her true identity and learns that she can not only read dreams but eat them, that is, take their power into herself, and, if the dreams are evil, she can use that power to fight evil.  In other words, she discovers, not only the evil in the world, but also her own capacity for evil.  The moral allegory is thus no simple tale of good vs. evil, but a complicated interrogation of power, in which good must know evil in order to defeat it. 

The novel is also a budding love story, as, parallel to the action adventure, Koi also battles her increasing attraction to and attachment to Ken.  Her journey of self-discovery becomes a sexual awakening, as well as a lesson in the power of relationships and interdependence, thus overcoming her initial isolation.  And it is not only the relationship with Ken that ultimately breaks through Koi’s isolation, for her primary motive in the action adventure is to rescue her sister and protect her father.  Thus, as her relationship with Ken develops, her family relationships are restored.  She is able to honor both her Japanese Baku (dream eater) father and her human Hawaiian mother, and thus her own hybrid nature.

What is most striking about the novel, besides the blending of non-Western mythological traditions, is, as noted earlier, the way in which so much of the action takes place in Koi’s body and psyche.  Her sensations, including physical cravings for coffee and dark chocolate; distinctive smells, especially spices; powerful images and sounds; erotic attraction; emotional turmoil; and the non-human sensations of dream fragments, dream-eating, and ultimately the wielding of dream power.  Dream-eating is paralleled by human hunger for pizza, burritos, and her father's Bi Bim Bap. All this is conveyed in a language that juxtaposes contemporary vernacular with ancient traditions, just as Koi’s human self is juxtaposed with her mythic self.

At one point Ken makes specific reference to Joseph Campbell and his book The Power of Myth, based on the PBS documentary with Bill Moyers, and its theory of universal patterns that cross the boundaries of culture and society.  Thus, Japanese Baku are paralleled by Morpheus in Western myth, Ojibwe dream catchers, Slavic Nocnitsa, and medieval succubi.  Campbell would argue that universal cross-cultural images and narratives reflect shared human experience and a common human nature. 

With the rise of postmodernism in the later 20^th century, Campbell’s theories fell out of favor.  Postmodernists highlighted difference in human experience, culture, and society, even going so far in some cases as to deny human nature.  Human belief and behavior is individual, arising out of culturally specific influences, distinct social environments, and unique individual experience. 

Rather than reducing this debate to an either-or choice, I prefer a both-and approach.  While cultural, social, and individual differences are significant, they are not necessarily definitive, and it is our shared humanity that enables cross-cultural communication and understanding.  While we are always mired, to some extent, in our own history, experience, and culture, we are capable of transcending, to some extent, those limitations in order, not only to co-exist, but also to participate in a shared human community.

Whatever cultural limitations define Wonder Woman and Dream Eater, they both serve as images, not only of female power, but also of the intersection between the human realm and that of imagination, of history and myth, of time and infinity, society and vision.  They both participate in Joseph Campbell’s universal hero myth of trial and quest.  And they both interrogate, not only female power, but all power, using power-from-within and power-with to defeat power-over.

Dreams, like myth, exist in a borderland between human reality and mysteries beyond human comprehension.  In Dream Eater dreams are the gateway to self-discovery, empowerment, connectedness, and higher consciousness.  Eating becomes a trope for fully participating in both worlds.  As Koi says in the end, "That's what people did, wasn't it?  Eat evil, battle dragons, and then go home and make sushi."  So, as K. Bird says, “Dream without fear…”  And, when back in reality, “…drink coffee without limit."

"The Maypole of Merry Mount"

I started thinking about this blog post on May Day, but life (to be specific, knee replacement surgery) intervened.  Now I’m finally getting it posted just under the May wire.

The tradition of the maypole isn’t always associated strictly with the month of May, however.  In some countries it is erected during mid-summer celebrations.  And this short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne (published 1836) is based on such an occasion in the early American colony of Mount Wollaston, a.k.a. Merry Mount, which was adjacent to the better known Plymouth colony in the 1620s.

The rivalry between the two colonies, one Puritan and one Anglican, and the historical incident in which John Endicott cut down the maypole at Merry Mount are documented by historians from both colonies.  William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation describes the Merry Mount colonists and their ringleader Thomas Morton as “licentious,” “dissolute,” and “profane.”   Their maypole is an “idol,” around which the merrymakers engage in drunken dancing, “inviting the Indian women for their consorts…frisking together like so many fairies, or furies…”  Thomas Morton, in his New English Canaan, mocks the “precise Seperatists” of Plymouth, who “make a great show of Religion but no humanity,” and their leader Captain Miles Standish as “Captain Shrimp.”

In the preface to his story Hawthorne notes that the historical facts “have wrought themselves, almost spontaneously, into a sort of allegory.”  “Jollity and gloom,” says the narrator of the story, “were contending for an empire.”

In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne offers two world views for comparison, using one to critique the other, finding fault with both, and suggesting that each could learn from the other. (See blog post Oct. 24, 2012). In “The Maypole of Merry Mount” Hawthorne uses the nominally Anglican but actually more secular/commercial colony of Merry Mount to invoke pre-Christian paganism, referencing not only the maypole itself and the American Indians, but also the “Golden Age,” “fairies and nymphs,” “ancient fable,” and “Comus,” the Greek God of immoderate pleasure, excess, revelry, and disorder.  Similar to The Scarlet Letter, 17^th century Puritanism is contrasted with excessive hedonism and untempered pleasure seeking.

In this story the Puritans emerge victorious as they cut down the maypole, punish the wrongdoers, and invite the newly married “Lord and Lady of the May” into their more sober community.  Yet the narrator, while acknowledging the historical triumph of Plymouth over Merry Mount, does not spare the Puritans.  They are “dismal wretches”—“grim,” “stern,” “darksome,” hard-hearted, and punitive.  The whipping post is their maypole.  If the merrymakers of Merry Mount indulge in excessive pleasure seeking, the Puritans seem almost to take sadistic pleasure in an excess of pain and punishment.

More than an historical allegory, the story represents a process of maturation from a child-like view of the world as playground to the inevitable encounter with evil and suffering that accompanies a “coming of age.”  Yet, the story seems to question whether the Puritan view of the world as a crucible of suffering, a “vale of tears,” is really superior. 

The newly married couple who join the Puritan community offer some hope of a healthier outlook.  Even before the Puritans arrive to cast their shadow over the mirth and merriment of Merry Mount, the young couple has a “presentiment” of future “care and sorrow and troubled joy,” thus chastening the youthful exuberance and carefree quality of their wedding celebration.  Later, their devotion to each other and their willingness to suffer, each for the other, in the face of Puritan judgment and punishment, softens the “iron man,” Endicott, who lifts a wreath of roses from the ruined maypole and throws it over their heads, thereby holding open the possibility that flowers and sunshine may mix and mingle with Puritan gloom.

As Hawthorne says elsewhere, “Life is made up of marble and mud.”  Neither youthful hedonism nor age-worn cynicism captures its complexity.  Wisdom, truth, and healthy human community lie somewhere between the two extremes.

"Rip Van Winkle"

Nathaniel Hawthorne is known for his ambiguous fiction:  Will Robin “rise in the world” without help from his Kinsman Major Molineux? “Had Young Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch meeting?”  Was it guilt, sorrow, or allegory that led Rev. Hooper to wear a black veil? Did Dimmesdale really confess to being the father of Pearl?  (See previous post on The Scarlet Letter, Oct. 2012)  However, the device of alternative explanations was not his invention. Hawthorne had to look no further than his own predecessor in American fiction, Washington Irving, perhaps our best early satirist.

Like Irving, Hawthorne was an ironist, but, unlike Irving, he was also a strong moralist.  Though a product of the Enlightenment, Hawthorne could not quite shake the influence of his Puritan upbringing.  Thus he was both a romanticist and a mock-romanticist.  Irving’s satire is more pronounced, but his famous sketches, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow“ (see next post) and “Rip Van Winkle” (1819/20) are more often adapted as straight gothic tales without much hint of satire.  The alternative explanations of Irving’s original versions are often left out.  The character of Rip Van Winkle, for example, usually emerges as a poor, hen-pecked husband, whose encounter with the ghosts of Henry Hudson and his crew playing nine pins in the Catskills conveniently and quite innocently saves him from the “yoke of matrimony” and “petticoat government.”  Irving’s references to those who winked and smirked at Van Winkle’s story and those who “insisted that Rip had been out of his head” are frequently omitted.

Based on German folktales, such as “Peter Klaus,” and the tradition of the magic mountain, Irving’s story, like the original, could also be read as a 19^th century update of an ancient mythic theme, that of identity, the loss of selfhood, and its rediscovery or reinvention.  Having slept for twenty years, Rip awakes to an unfamiliar world, no longer certain of who he is.  Conveniently, his “termagant wife” has died, and, reunited with his now married daughter, he is free to live out his days as a doting grandfather and village patriarch, spinning stories of olden days and, of course, his mountain adventure and long sleep.

Similarly, it fits the pattern of the gothic tale, as ordinary reality collides with an irrational world of ghosts, phantom bowlers on the mountain, a magic potion, and a twenty-year nap.  Part of Rip’s life is lost, but ultimately he escapes the burdens and pains of his previous life and is reborn, so to speak, into a new life of idleness and ease.

It is difficult to take the story too seriously, however, given the introduction, the Note, and the Postscript that Irving appends to the tale, in which he cites his source, Diedrich Knickerbocker, a “historian” who primarily researches local legends and reports them as “absolute fact.”  Irving acknowledges a possible source for “Rip Van Winkle” as the German “superstition about the Emperor Frederick der Rothbart, and the Kypphauser mountain,” but insists Knickerbocker is a reliable source for the truth of the story.  It is not hard to detect that Irving’s tongue is planted firmly in his cheek. 

The effect is to mock the naïve believers in myth, legend, folklore, and superstition and satirize “romance” as a literary style that allows too much license with reality and truth. 

Nevertheless, Irving is able to tap into the popular appeal of local fables and gothic tales to enhance his own literary reputation and line his own pockets, at the expense of the gullible and to the great entertainment of his more sophisticated, urbane, and enlightened readers.

Those more educated and rational readers would also have noticed the political allegory that Irving embeds in the story.  It seems that Rip has slept through the Revolutionary War.  The portrait of King George III at the local inn has been replaced by one of George Washington.  When Rip returns, not only is he free of Dame Van Winkle’s “petticoat government, “  but the country is free of British rule.  Rip is clueless of his own history but easily adjusts to his new life.  Allegorically, Rip stands for the American colonies and Dame Van Winkle for the British tyrant.  We could dismiss this as Irving’s 19^th century sexism: how ridiculous to compare a nagging wife, dependent for her well-being on an irresponsible husband, to King George III!  However, it is also possible that Irving is a Tory sympathizer, depicting the colonies as backward, clueless, gullible hicks, who had their freedom dumped in their laps, not really knowing what to do with it, and occupying themselves by telling fantastic tales of revolutionary glory.

Just as “Loyalists” and “Patriots” disagreed about British rule before the Revolution, they no doubt disagreed afterwards.  Thus while British sympathizers are enjoying Irving’s satire on newly independent Americans, patriotic Americans are delighting in the “heroic” story of Rip achieving his freedom from domestic oppression.  Similarly, while educated city-dwellers are appreciating the mockery of gullible rural folks, villagers and townspeople are enjoying a romantic fable.  And Irving benefits by receiving accolades from both audiences. 

Life of Pi

It has been years since I read this 2001 novel by Yann Martel, but the recent film seemed pretty close to my memory.  The movie left out the part about Pi, as a boy, reading manuals about how to train animals when his father owned a zoo, and I didn’t remember him being married (with children) in the book, but mostly the film fit with what I remembered.

I’ve seen it categorized as magical realism, which certainly fits, but it could also be read as traditional romantic fiction, in which an unreliable narrator tells a fantastic story, which, however incredible, embodies a powerful truth.  Even the alternative, more believable, version of the story qualifies as romance rather than realism, since it is, however credible, an amazing, extra-ordinary, improbable story in its own right. 

What is untraditional is the presentation of both stories, two different versions of the same events, one fantastic, one possible (if not probable) and the choice given to the reader to choose the better version, not only which is the better story but which is more truthful.  From a post-modern perspective, the novel presents the truth as rhetorical, rather than a matter of objective fact.  From a traditional perspective, it presents a modern version of Pascal’s wager, namely, since it is impossible to know objective truth, then bet on the one that is more imaginative and beautiful, however fantastic.  In religious terms, a world with supernatural possibilities is far preferable to a world of bare natural facts.

Another way of reading the two stories is in terms of allegory vs. realism, or internal vs. external.  One story offers an allegorical version of the internal, subjective experience, while the second story offers a “realistic” version of the external, factual experience.  In this case, both stories are equally true, one from a psychological perspective, the other from an empirically observable perspective.

To reverse the order of the stories in the novel, let’s begin with the more believable story.  After a shipwreck, the teenage Pi is trapped on a life boat with his mother, a sailor with a broken leg, and the ship’s cook.  The cook kills the sailor to use for fishing bait. When Pi’s mother objects, he threatens her and Pi.  She gets Pi to safety on a raft and is then killed by the cook.  Pi then kills the cook and, alone on the lifeboat, manages to survive until he makes landfall in Mexico.

Keep in mind that, from childhood, Pi has been a religious seeker.  Raised as a Hindu, he also follows Christianity and Islam.  Like a good Hindu, he is a vegetarian.  His father, lost in the shipwreck, was a rational, scientific man, who taught Pi the value of fact and logic.  His mother, on the other hand, believed that science could only tell you about external truth, not the truth of the human heart.  She supported Pi in his religious quest.

At the mercy of the elements and the competition for survival, Pi’s mother holds to her values, berating the cook for killing the sailor and sacrificing herself to save Pi.  Pi, however, puts his own survival first, killing the cook and becoming a carnivorous fish-eater in order to save himself.  When he tells this version of the story, he tearfully acknowledges his guilt and the “evil” within himself that made his survival possible.

In the allegorical version of the story, Pi is trapped on a lifeboat with an orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger.  The hyena kills the zebra and orangutan, and the tiger kills the hyena, leaving Pi to match his wits with the tiger’s natural predatory nature in order to survive.  Confronted with the parallels between the two stories, Pi admits that in the second version he is the tiger.  Allegorically, then, in the second version (the fantastical version that takes up the main body of the novel), the tiger represents the predator, the carnivore, and the will to survive within Pi, the religious vegetarian, who seeks to hold the tiger at bay, feeds it, keeps it alive, finally tames it, controls it, and ultimately befriends it.

 In one episode Pi and the tiger land on a mysterious island populated by meerkats for the tiger, vegetation for Pi, and fresh water for both.  At night, however, the island itself becomes carnivorous.  Pi and the meerkats survive by climbing into the trees; the tiger retreats to the lifeboat.  When Pi realizes the underlying predatory nature of the island, he takes the tiger and the lifeboat back out to sea.  This is the part I liked the least when I read the novel.  It seemed extraneous to the rest of the story and a step too far into fantasy, beyond improbable, into impossible.  When I saw the film, though, I realized the allegorical point, namely the duality of nature, which gives life by day, and takes it by night. 

Similarly, the tiger, which threatens Pi’s life, also gives Pi a sense of purpose which aids in his survival.  And Pi himself, the religious vegetarian, harbors within himself the predatory carnivore.  Human nature itself, like the island, is capable of both life-giving power and death-dealing force. Like Pi and his mother, we are capable of moral values and of religious yearning for higher life, and, like Pi and the tiger, we are capable of feeding off of other lives for our own survival.  Pi is able to survive by taming and befriending the tiger, not by denying it.  He imagines the soul of the tiger, the spiritual power behind it.

When they make landfall in Mexico, Pi is deeply disappointed and hurt when the tiger disappears into the jungle without a backward look.  Once in civilization, he can return to his vegetarianism, his moral values, and his religious quest, but not without a sense of loss in the accompanying alienation from his natural self.

Which story do you prefer?  But why choose?  Together they tell the human story in greater depth, breadth, and nuance than either one alone, just as Pi’s father’s scientific world view and his mother’s religious sensibility together offer a more complete vision of truth than either one alone.

In the traditional “coming of age” story, a youth begins in innocence, comes to experience the evil in the world, including the evil within, and then must decide how to come to terms with that discovery.  One can make one’s peace with it and advance into healthy maturity, or one can become stuck in disillusionment, bitterness, and cynicism.  Life of Pi follows that pattern.  Pi can become stuck in the “realistic” version of his story, living out a life of guilt and self-loathing, or he can make peace with his own human nature through imaginative yearning and go on to live out his aspirations for higher life.

There is herein a lesson for all of us:  Know the “evil” within yourself; do not submit to it, but recognize it, respect its power, tame it, control it and befriend it.  Know that you could not survive without it.

The Technical Appreciation of Poetry, For Example in Frost's "Design"

The last post and the Sept. 20, 2009, one on Emily Dickinson address the technical side of poetry in terms of versification, metrics, imagery, expectation, and surprise. It is tempting to choose a complex poem to illustrate all the different ways that word choice, sentence structure, imagery, figurative language and even punctuation are used by poets as rich resources of expression and suggestion. Instead I’ll choose a “simple one” to show a few examples.

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning, right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.
(“Design” by Robert Frost)

Before analyzing the color symbolism, metaphors, and nature imagery, it is worth noting how the poem begins in a familiar, almost offhand, voice, “I found,” suggesting a casual encounter on a roadside walk. Yet the language becomes increasingly formal as the poem goes on until we get to words like “kindred” and “thither” in the last few lines. Is this merely accidental or does the shift in level of language parallel the shift from casual observation to philosophical speculation in the content of the poem? And, if the latter, is it merely an unconscious fitting of language to thought or is it part of the intentional crafting of the poem? Regardless of how we answer this question, it is remarkable how word choice can create different expressive voices appropriate to what is being said.

Similarly, the sentence structure grows increasingly complex as each stanza develops. The first three lines, though tightly structured, constitute a relatively straightforward statement. But the sentence continues piling on appositives and modifiers until it becomes densely complex.

Of the three questions in the second stanza, the second is the most straightforward grammatically but uses the most formal language. The first question separates the appositive from its antecedent noun (“flower”), creating a jarring effect grammatically that parallels the seeming contradiction of describing a flower as both white and blue at the same time. The third question uses “appall” as an intransitive verb, an unconventional, if not obscure, expression, which sounds almost archaic, once again using language that reinforces ancient philosophical questions about chance and fate and longstanding religious questions about the moral goodness of nature, including human nature. Do we live in a purposeful universe of “design” or do we live in a random world of accident and chance? And, if it is orderly and purposeful, what does it mean if death and suffering are built into the design? The unstated question is “What kind of designer would design such a world 'to appall'?"

The dashes create an informal, conversational effect, but the tightly structured, highly composed sentences contradict that style, sounding more educated, formal, and complex. The tension of opposites again parallels the juxtaposition of casual observer and philosophical thinker or serious moralist.

Other examples of opposition include the irony of “assorted characters of death and blight” being “mixed ready to begin the morning, right” (emphasis added) and the white imagery in contrast with “a witches’ broth” and “dead wings.”

White is a conventional symbol of purity and innocence (at least in Western European based culture), but in this poem the white spider, flower, and moth represent “death and blight.” As Melville reminds us in “The Whiteness of the Whale” chapter of Moby Dick, white can just as easily be associated with the pallor of sickness and death or the burial shroud as with purity and innocence or the wedding gown.

“What had that flower to do with being white…?” is a question with multiple meanings. The heal-all is typically blue but occasionally white. Consider the coincidence of the rare white heal-all serving as the stage for the white spider’s predatory attack on the white moth. Is it mere chance or part of the orderly design and purpose of nature? If the latter, it is a “design of darkness” serving to “appall” our naïve sense of God’s goodness and nature’s innocence. How innocent is innocence if “death and blight” are integral to its nature? The color symbolism of white, blue, and “darkness” in their varying relationships is what gives those questions their poetic power.

Another irony is the heal-all, a flower known in folk culture for its healing power, serving as a natural death bed for the moth.

In addition to irony and symbolism, metaphor abounds. Three are obvious similes: the moth being held up “…like a piece of rigid satin cloth,” the “assorted characters…like the ingredients of a witches’ broth,” and the “dead wings carried like a paper kite.” Lest these comparisons be thought frivolous poetic flourishes, consider the association of “rigid” with death, of a satin cloth with a death shroud, of witches with evil (a more cultural than natural comparison), of a kite with playfulness (ironically contrasting with the “dead wings”). Other metaphors include the moth being “steered” and “design” governing “in a thing so small,” metaphors which suggest a hidden power with a dark purpose.

Finally, we are led by almost every technical device available to the poet to conclude that this seemingly simple poem is a dark allegory of Mother Nature who brings both life and death, of “original sin,” and of innocence that cannot be separated from evil. And if the inseparability of good and evil “govern in a thing so small,” what are the implications for human nature and for the universe at large?