allanhunter.net Blog

Since I teach memoir and writing and literature people often ask me about blogging as a way forward with their writing.  I can’t answer for everyone, since we’re all different, but I’d have to say that blogging is a way of checking in with oneself and finding out if one has anything useful to say.  Usually I think I have (or I wouldn’t do it).

Of course, blogs tend to come in many shapes and forms - short is good, and some bloggers reveal all sorts of aspects of their lives that seem self-indulgent, at least to me.  No one really cares what your child’s bowel movements might be (which was a theme on a couple of blogs I ran across) unless one has a sick child - whereupon I would go to a medical professional by preference.

The point is not to produce more words, but to see if one can produce thoughts and ideas that are an authentic reflection of one’s own inner voice, and that might, in that way, lead to wisdom.

Personally I don’t blog ’short’. It takes me time and space to express myself the way I feel I need to. Oscar Wilde may have had brilliant one-liners, but I am not made that way.

That said, turning up daily at the keyboard is a wonderful way to make sure one stays in touch with one’s inner self, which seems to want to flow the moment I click onto the appropriate page.  Sometimes we write to discover what it is we feel.  Without that we might not know.

But I do more than this.  Just about each month I have columns in such on-line and print journals as Wisdom Magazine and PlanetLightWorker. Check them out if you have a chance.  There I’ll put about 1500 words at a time into a piece that I hope will convey useful thoughts and insights to others in the wider world. Each time I do so I feel I’m doing just a little bit to help move our world towards more compassion and understanding. I don’t pretend to have all the answers.  I just think I can be a useful part of the on-going dialogue. Now that seems like a good idea to me.

I also read a few blogs (since time can easily be frittered away if one reads many) and I’ve lately been reading one by Jenni Ballantyne, thecomfyplace.com, as Jenni, who writes beautifully, deals with the final stages of cancer.  If you want to read her words don’t delay.  She may not be able to wite for much longer. If you want to witness grace under pressure, you really should read her words.  Real courage is not so plentiful that we can afford to ignore it.

A few posts ago I mentioned that I was going to a Diwali party, the Hindu version of Halloween and Christmas sort of rolled together.  It’s a celebration of the arrival of winter, the shortening of the days, and hopes for the future.

The party itself was delightful.  This year the open flames in which the written wishes were to be burned were absent.  Partly this was because the prayers and messages will be kept until Tuesday (the actual day of Diwali) and then ceremonially burned, partly it was in deference to the large numbers of small children at the party, none of who we wanted to be singed!  What was remarkable to me was that this wonderfully mixed bag of people, certainly not all of whom were Hindu, accepted the rites and rituals in a spirit of real reverence.  For when people gather together in tolerance and joy everyone’s ritual becomes Holy to those present, and the barriers that separte religions collapse. So we all chanted the sanskrit peace prayers, because peace is not dominated by any one language.  And we all placed flowers petals and rice on the altar, because flowers are not confined to any one culture, and the need to eat symbolized by rice is about as universal at it gets.

The whole event reminded me very much of India as I knew it years ago.  The children were part of handing out flowers, and they moved in an out of the room, and it was all just a little bit choatic when compared to the rigid protestant church services of my youth.  But it felt so much more genuine.  Why?  Because the children were themselves, slightly restless at times, but they were also quiet, attentive, thoughtful and self controlled. I can recall being in temples in Rajasthan where some people prayed, while children and babies played in the dust beside them, their mothers nursing other babies nearby, and then a goat would wander through the whole thing, or perhaps a sparrow would swoop onto the altar for second, chirp, and fly off.  It sounds confused, but it didn’t make any of it feel even slightly less holy.  Quite the reverse.

The Holy is with us at all times, perhaps especially in the hubbub of living.  Real internal quietness is not disturbed by such things.

Thank you Ken and Laura and Seth, for another opportunity to grow our hearts.

Some absolutely fascinating correspondence has popped up in the old email box over the past few days and I only wish that I could share it in detail.  Of course, I can’t do that without violating the basic decencies of confidentiality, but some kinds of news are too important to keep to oneself, so I’ll try to be respectful and yet make sure the information doesn’t stop here.

Suz in Oregon comes to mind first.  She’d heard my New Dimensions Broadcast on Public Radio this week and felt moved to write to me.  What she sent me was remarkable because it was deeply poetic in its rhythms and resonances (and, my friends, that’s certainly not a component of the average email); it was thoughtful, exploratory, and intuitive.  Here was a person who knew she had to become a Pilgrim, again, in order to come to a completion of the self - she’d already been a Monarch in one aspect of her life and knew what the Magician’s role was, yet she could sense she still needed a few more explorations….

Another letter was from Michelle, who discovered that circumstances had thrown her back into the memory of a time of panic and despair, and she found herself an angry Orphan again, just for a while. Fortunately she knew there were other ways of being, and that the past was not going to dominate the future unless she allowed it to.  I feel honored that she chose to vent to me, because, in the poetry of the soul, we usually vent to people who, in some way we feel only in the Unconscious, will be those who can reflect back an ‘answer’. Perhaps we don’t think we want an answer.  Perhaps we can’t listen for one right now.  Yet the wisdom of the Unconscious is stronger than that. In writing to me, all she had to ask was, ‘why him?’ and the response would be not that I’m able to offer a solution, but that the wisdom of the six archetypes, which I’m always trying to understand better, truly does offer a way forward.  The human homing instinct can be surprising that way.

Then Mary Lou, my ever faithful correspondent, wrote to me about the Soul Work that is at the basis of personal writing, especially Memoir.

What does all this mean?  Well, I ended with Mary Lou because it seems to me that all the writers (and I haven’t mentioned them all) are aware that we’re doing soul work at the deepest levels we can.  Sometimes when we write to each other we may lok like we’re asking for something; yet the letter itself may well contain the answer we’ve been looking for.  And so we can, by reading our own communications, become the recipients of what we need that we thought might only exist outside ourselves.  After all, we really already know all the answers we need.  We just have to get out of our own way sometimes so that we can hear those answers, since they lie deep within us.

And sometimes we need someone else to reflect that back to us, too.

October 22nd, Home Depot - the Christmas trees are already alight and on sale, plastic ones at 6 foot and taller for something over $100 if you’re desperate.  Two months ahead of the day, yes, you can get started on the Festive Fantasy.  The mannequin figures alongside the trees were dressed as snowmen, I think, or possibly as mutant trolls with cheery red faces.  I’m not sure.  And anyway, does it matter?

The Dalai Lama suggests, as do many people involved with the spiritual world, and as do skilled therapists of almost every school, that it is important to live as fully as possible in the here and now, rather than dwelling in the past or in anticipation of the future.  Eckhart Tolle hit a nerve, too, when he wrote about the Power of Now.

But Home Depot knows better than that.  Perhaps the thing to be aware of is that we have within each of us two currents, each of which is powerful and sometimes overwhelming.  One yearns for the now; another wants to fill up that space with anticipation and memory (in this case of previous Christmases and holidays of all kinds).  Which will you choose?

On Saturday I will be going to a Diwali party.  The Hindu version of Christmas, or the Festival of Light, asks us to be present in the now, and to take our hopes and prayers for the future, write them down, pray, and then burn them.  It’s a ritual that acknowledges that anticipations are best dealt with by being acknowledged and then by being let go.  The flame of burning prayers is present, now, and will disperse very soon. The longing is felt, and released.

Perhaps we can all learn from this.

Working with my Memoir group I’ve been, once again, astonished by the courage with which writers are willing to go towards their lives and wrestle with the values that lie (perhaps the pun on ‘lie’ should be intentional) behind the facts.  One woman was writing about a sister she hadn’t seen in over 40 years (because of adoptions laws) and her narrative was one in which she approached again and again her sense that she ‘should’ feel something particular for this person, her sister, but actually she didn’t, and couldn’t, and didn’t want to.  She asked questions that had no easy answers, always returned to the gap that existed between what she wanted to be the case, what she hoped would be the case, and what actually existed when seen by the cold light of dawn.

Another woman wrote an astounding piece in which she tried to recreate the moment (at age 5) she first felt the symptoms of the disease that would so damage her body and cause so much pain for the rest of her life.  How can one remember these things, and is the memory likely to be accurate?  Or will it be pieced together later out of things that one is told?  And will that information be accurate?  And, above all, what did it feel like just before the symptoms struck, when life was, for the very last second, ordinary, normal, easy…?  How does one get to the heart of that?

Perhaps one never can.  Perhaps it’s simply the attempt to do so that matters.  Perhaps truth has its limits, its sell-by date. We can only ever give a gesture towards the complex thoughts that swirl through us at those moments.

Many years ago Virginia Woolf pioneered the idea of the stream of consciousness in writing.  This was, as many of you will know, the technique of recording a seemingly unedited stream of ideas, such as they might be if we had a tape recorder (which hadn’t been invented at that time) embedded in our brains, recording every little wayward thought.  James Joyce, of course, was famous for getting inside Molly Bloom’s head in this way.

The trouble with this approach is that thoughts move far faster than anyone’s ability to record them, so it is always a case of the edited highlights only, and the emphasis is on ‘edited’.

In my work with Memoirists, however, I think I’ve come across something even more vital than this – the sorts of narratives I’ve just tried to describe.  And that is the narrative the circles around, like a dog at a bone, trying to find truth and uncover memory, by attacking an event from different angles, over and over again.  In terms of the readability of the writing this can be a bit of a challenge if one is expecting neatly crafted sentences of clarity and poise.  The mind doesn’t work that way, although the brain can. This type of circling, sometimes repetitive, hypnotic narrative is what we see in Faulkner at times, and he was certainly worth making the effort to understand.

I suspect that this way of writing is, in fact, a new departure in writing generally.  Some of my colleagues don’t like it, don’t understand it, and urge memoirists not to write it.  They want things to be tidy and literary.

But the mind isn’t tidy and literary – at least not when it’s being authentic.

Well now, here’s another fine mess you’ve got us into, George (with apologies to Laurel and Hardy, who made that line actually sound funny).

Like so many other Americans I saved my money, invested conservatively, paid my debts, and now I discover that most of the money I had intended for that mythic time called ‘retirement’ is gone.  Ah well, that’s the market.

But wait.  I was one of the responsible ones. I was one of those who did it ‘right’ by most people’s standards.  I didn’t go for top dollar returns, I went for pretty safe long-term investments. Now they tell us there never were any safe investments anyway.  They were all horribly risky, because the mortgage crooks looted everything.

So yes, those who never saved actually did have the joy of their money, which I didn’t.  Those who saved, who paid into a social security system that is as broken as everything else, well, we won’t be getting anything in this lifetime, it seems. This is a reversal of Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper - in that tale the industrious ant does get a reward of stability, at least.

It won’t break my heart.  I’m still able to work and earn and get along.  But older folks aren’t, and some of them will wind up being cared for by their middle-aged children.  You can see where I’m going with this, I think?

Me?  I won’t bother to save from now on.  There’s no point. Not that I’ll spend a lot. I can’t get excited about the shiney junk we’re expected to care about and buy.  No, I guess I’ll be giving to charity and helping those people I know.  There are now a lot more of those, every day. And they’re going to need every cent.

And in my spare time I will devote my energy to bringing down, through political and legal means, any Republican party that shows signs of being remotely like the one we presently have.

So perhaps we should thank George Bush for turning so many of us into activists, and for giving us the chance to love our neighbors.  Thanks, George.

The BBC news is deliciously sneaky.  Last night they had a whimsical piece about a competition in England to see who could be the most economical car driver.  The rules seemed simple - factory car of your preference, unmodified, and see who could be most sympathetic towards the actual every-day road conditions during the 405 mile trip. The car in which the reporter was traveling notched up 73 miles per gallon. The winning car was noted as achieving over 80 mpg.

So why can’t we get that in the USA?

Even the Smartcar, which is finally now being imported, only gets about 50mpg here in the USA, or about the same as a hybrid.  My cousin Martin in England, who has a European model Smartcar guffaws at this.  His gets over 70 mpg - in a country where ‘highway driving’ is almost a non-existent concept.

So what’s happening here?

Well, the thinly-veiled US protectionism plan, in the name of ’safety’ and ‘emissions’ won’t allow these types of vehicles into the country without messing about with their engines, because they don’t meet their ’standards’.  Admittedly a Smartcar is small, and I wouldn’t want to drive one to Arizona.  But then I wouldn’t want to drive a checkered cab to Arizona, either, and that gets barely 10 miles to each gallon of juice. (Think about that when you hop a taxi and think you’re being kind to the earth.  You’re not.)

No, it’s the same load of garbage as always. It amounts to US protectionism of US made second rate gas guzzling junk. When I lived in England my Citroen regularly returned over 55 mpg, and that was nearly thirty years ago.

Hello?

Of course, the BBC didn’t say any of this directly.  They presented the story and left us to make the connections.  And in the background was a picture of the bridge at Ironbridge gorge - the world’s first iron constructed bridge, built in 1750, still in use, and a symbol to most historians of the actual starting point of the Industrial Revolution. Not that they were hinting anything, you understand….
Funnily enough one of the other stories on the BBC that night was the news of the Nobel prize for literature. It went to a Frenchman.  The judge’s spokesman, a Mr. Engdahl, made the comment that he did not expect the USA to win many Nobel prizes for literature in the near future, because the US literary scene was too ‘parochial’.  Interesting words.

Perhaps it’s not just our literature and our cars that are parochial and out of touch.

While the presidential candidates go about their days with town hall meetings (more about that later…) I had the distinctly more pleasurable experience on Monday of addressing the good people of the OLLI institute at UMass on the Six Archetypes of Literature.  For those of you who don’t know about it OLLI is a wonderful organization aimed at mature students - its proper name being the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute - and these people were as intelligent, and as stimulating an audience as any presenter could ever hope for.  Their wise minds, penetrating insights, and real life experience meant that I felt we developed a dialogue that enriched us all.

Alas, it was all too soon over, but I do want to thank all those involved for inviting me along, and I look forward to discussing further the proposals that were floated to run a six week course based on the archetypes.  We’re aiming for Spring 2009 for that one. I’d love to be able to do that.
One of the things we did talk about, thoughtfully, was the way the current presidential candidates (and their VPs) might fit into the concept of archetypes.  In Jungian terms one could see McCain as the old dragon ‘defending’ the young maiden (Palin, in case you haven’t been able to see her as anything like that), while Obama is the young knight supported by his faithful shield bearer, the experienced Biden.  We all know who wins that fight, and it’s not the dragon.  And, symbolically, it’s interesting to play with this because that makes Palin the damsel who gets ‘rescued’ - - if we’re slavish to the legend.  So let’s twist the legend just a little. Indeed I do think that people who identify with Palin, and who are attracted to what she projects, seriously need rescuing; and they need it now.  They need to be rescued from the seductive delusion that there’s anything in her that is remotely other than totally self-serving.  Perhaps that’s Obama’s task; to rescue us all from the delusion, fostered by the movies, that surface female glamor and soap opera cliches will save us.  They won’t.

In terms of the six archetypes, though, we pretty clearly have McCain and Palin as Orphans of the saddest kind.  Palin has no idea what she’s got herself into, and she has no idea about global issues either.  She’s the Orphan who knows she can hide behind the Republican party machine and bully others with her bizarre announcements, ones that have lately been racist.  Saying that Obama is ‘not like us Americans’ is racism.  Let’s not overlook that. Those are the words of the bully.

For his part McCain is the essential Orphan. He hid behind George Bush for years. In last night’s debate he couldn’t stop mentioning his heroes, Teddy Roosevelt got a good long series of mentions, as did Ronald Reagan (twice) and a couple of others. What sort of man harps on about his ‘heroes’? He spoke about them as if he was a kid with a baseball card collection of famous sluggers to drool over.  A man who talks like that is one who has not developed his own inner courage sufficiently. Now he has the chance to make himself look good by ‘adopting’ a young, female, governor from one of the more remote and desolate spots in the Union.  And that makes him look like less of an Orphan.  But he’s still at that stage, I’m sad to say.  After all, any homeless man on the street can find a stray dog to follow him around….

Biden is the old politician’s politician, and he looks to me like a man who has been waiting his whole life to make a bigger difference than he’s been able to so far.  He is looking forward to his possible new promotion - when he will become a Monarch, one who can work with others and strive for the common good that Obama, as a Monarch, knows is the essence of the job in hand. They are pretty well balanced in themselves, and can be balanced when working with each other.  Compare that to the wild rantings Palin’s been allowed to spout off recently.  The McCain campaign can’t seem to stop her blabbing. Not that control is everything, but when she mutters dangerous racist inanities, well, it becomes a problem…. What kind of politician allows his second in command to do as she does?  Or perhaps he’s turned her into his pawn, so she can say things he’s too scared to say?  Either way, it’s shabby stuff and it’s Orphan behavior.

We need real leaders, not Orphans such as the Republican Party is offering us. I won’t tell you which way to vote (that’s up to you), but I think you can see which way I won’t be sending my own vote.

Joseph Campbell famously said that we should ‘follow our bliss’ rather than anything else.  If we place our faith in money, he went on, we could one day lose our money, but we can never lose our bliss. It’s excellent advice, and I’ve always tried to follow it.
The stock market free for all of the past few days has made his statements even more poignant.  Most people I’ve come across have lost money from retirement funds, and are more than a little upset about it.  It will take more than a folksy bimbo like Sarah Palin winking at them during the one debate her handlers allowed her to cheer them up.

And so here’s what I see around us - levels of real stress and anxiety. The only people who seem not to be affected are my European friends (state pensions with mandatory retirement ages take the decision making out of their hands) and my students, who have no money of their own.  Some of these last named will have to withdraw from college, of course, over the next few months, as loans and actual parental money evaporate. They may yet feel the pinch.
So, where is the outrage?  I’m just waiting for someone, somewhere in Europe to protest, because, as we all know, those things don’t happen in America. The trouble is, I don’t think it’s because people are following their bliss that they’re able to rise above all this in detached serenity.  I think it’s because they have taken on all the gloom of the prisoner waiting to be hanged.

Thoreau famously lived there, and so it seemed exactly the right place to stroll around when a fellow English/American Lit chum came from England en route to a conference all about the renditions of nature in popular culture.

Walking round the pond (one has to stay close to the fenced in limits of the path, for fear of erosion) reminded us of something less than entirely rural.  The main railway line passes close to where Thoreau’s cabin would have been.  The new replica cabin is on the further side of the pond, a long way from noise of the main line, close to the road, the carpark and the bathing facilities, but not as close in distance as the original was to the water.  And therein lies a clue.  Thoreau didn’t want to go back to nature to live as some sort of Green Warrior for the countryside.  What he wanted, as he said, was ‘to live deliberately’.  He didn’t want to be alone in the wilderness.  If he had he could have gone to Wyoming fairly easily.  His friends the Emersons were nearby, as were the Alcotts, and his mother, too.  In fact, when it came time for a major laundry he carried his clothes back to her so she could boil them up in the time accustomed way.  He’d have done it himself except he didn’t have a large boiling vat, for that once-every-six-months scrub that was reckoned to be a suitable way to deal with clothes he’d normally just rinse off in the pond.

More tellingly, though, the railroad was very close by, clanging and hooting at all odd times - and reminding him of the busy activities that dominated the rest of America. He seems to have desired not an experience of nature so much as a sort of hermitage that would allow him not to have to worry too much about material things or work, other than writing and thinking. If we create Thoreau as a tree hugger, or if we romanticize what he did, we miss the point.  He wanted to think - and modern America in 1847, just like modern America today, doesn’t want to allow any of us that luxury. We do, still, live lives of ‘quiet desperation’.  We are anxious about the economy, the bailout, falling house prices… and so on.  In fact we’re so busy putting out fires we don’t have a chance to think about anything else.

Thoreau reminds us we are giving away our chance at freedom everyday.  And we can change that.

One of the things I do in my life is that I work with writers as they wrestle with writing their memoirs.  I’ve done this for twenty-five years in one way and another, and for the past six years I’ve worked with the Blue Hills Writing Institute at Curry College, Massachusetts.  When people ask me what I do I say I’m a memoir mid-wife; I help memoirs gets born.  And there’s more to it than one might think.  Ask any mother who’s just given birth to her first child, and she’ll say roughly the same thing.

This probably doesn’t sound very vital to many of you – except that when we write a memoir we’re coming to understand our lives in a new way, and so the process could be described as a process of discovery, as ‘soul work’ – absolutely vital soul work if we are to become fully alive to our lives.  It’s a term I use to my writers about half way through the process, and rarely before.  Some of them are still hoping that this writing will vindicate them in the eyes of the world and make them rich.  That’s not a bad aim, but it doesn’t always dovetail with the actual uncovering of deep truths.

So what does this soul work look like? One thing that constantly surprises me is just how regularly writers go through six archetypal stages of growth as they write.  I’ve been doing this now for so many years that I can, to some extent, predict where they are and therefore where they need to go.

This is how it works: most writers feel the desire to write a memoir, for reasons that may not be entirely clear, but which are sufficiently compelling to make them take the urge seriously.  So they sign up for one of my classes.  To some extent when they do this they are Innocents – they’ve not done this before, and they want someone to tell them what to do.  They seem to assume that I have all the answers, and that they just have to listen attentively, take notes, and color within the lines.  This is a wonderful, trusting stage, and part of my job is to let them know that no good piece of writing was ever produced by a committee.  They’re going to have to find their own voice, first

This can be puzzling for some writers.  They become Orphans, and like orphans anywhere they want someone to tell them what to do and take care of them.  Perhaps they have a favorite memoir they’ve read, so they may decide to copy that approach and style.  This isn’t a bad place to be, but it isn’t the fullness of who they could be.  Often the writer at this stage is in need of a lot of reassurance, and wants approval.  My task is to keep up the pressure on them to produce new material, usually in response to writing prompts and exercises, and so break through this Orphan way of thinking. A number of techniques can be useful here, and perhaps the best ones are those exercises that lead the writer to recognize unconscious motivations and evasions.  In this way we can gently dismantle the boundaries of the mind-constructed limitations she may have. Put another way, I also have to let the writer know that I don’t know the parts of her life that she doesn’t, as yet, know or comprehend.  I don’t know the hidden resentments and fears peculiar to each one of them - yet.  Their task is to find them so we can work with them together.

When this happens the writer has a moment of revelation.  She sees she can write this memoir however she wants, as long as it gets to the truth of who she is.  Suddenly it’s not enough to be a ‘victim’ of circumstances, or play the ‘righteous’ card, because no one is always right and no victim is always blameless if she stays in that mental place for a lifetime. It’s not about being polite, either, and smoothing over things. This is when the Pilgrim archetype emerges, and the writer decides that this memoir business may be more varied than she’d at first thought.  She sets out on a journey of discovery and is sometimes surprised by the sorts of things that emerge. For example, villains may have been nasty, but they may also have had reasons for what they did that make them seem human for the first time.  Perhaps selfish parents are seen with more compassion, too, as their neediness and frailties emerge alongside their neglect and inadvertent cruelties.

Gradually this Pilgrim writer begins to see that she’s writing in order to make sense of the confusing aspects of her life, to understand what she can do to change the way she lives now – and this is when the Warrior-Lover archetype emerges.  Writers become courageous, and are not put off by concerns about whether others ‘like’ what they say or the way they say it.  The aim of unearthing the truth requires courage and compassion in equal amounts.  Sometimes this changes the way writers relate to family members – usually because the relationship is now forced to be real as opposed to existing within defined roles. It may be uncomfortable at first to break the patterns of a lifetime, but it’s usually healthy. This is the point when one can see family members – especially parents - as flawed and difficult, and yet still love them.

As the writer becomes more aware of this Warrior-Lover archetype she also notices that the story materials are not just about herself.  There is usually a larger story that many readers can identify with, because few human experiences are absolutely unique (although the specific events of each life certainly are unique).  This leads to a different relationship to the story of one’s life.  One sees it in all its complexity and contradiction, just as a ruler might look at a functioning kingdom and see it made up of all sorts of citizens, good, bad, and indifferent, and recognize that the kingdom needs them all, every single one. That’s the Monarch archetype emerging.  This archetype is not determined to prove anything – as the Warrior-Lover might be. Instead the Monarch seeks to show things and let the reader decide.  The Monarch shows the events of a life, but does not tell us what to think, necessarily.

And when that happens we are a very short distance from the final archetype, the Magician.  The Magician has now moved into a completely different relationship to her life.  She sees it not as a series of actual events, but as a time in which she moved closer to, or further away from the true, spiritual, version of herself; loving, accepting, but not powerless.  This kind of writer has achieved real wisdom about her life and the lives of those around her.  The writing she produces has a lightness of touch, a sense of wonder, and a generosity that inspires others.  For that’s what Magicians do.  They don’t order people about (as Monarchs do) or try to please (as Orphans do). Instead they write their truths and inspire others.  What does this look like?  Well, have you ever read a poem or looked at a picture that just took your breath away?  That’s when you’ve been invited into the Magician’s spell.  Magicians don’t usually have overt morals to their tales.  They don’t declare that bad things inevitably come back to hurt bad people, or something like tat.  Instead they might show that bad actions have a way of haunting those associated with them, wreaking damage in subtle ways, perhaps…. The Magician invites us to observe the mystery, the beauty, the wonder of the world, and if we’re paying attention we will certainly be changed by it.

I see my writers going through most, if not all, of these stages.  Some come back years later and tell me that they’ve experienced the Magician stage in their writing, that they’ve felt those moments as important and transcendent, and that they want to bring more of that energy into their everyday lives.  This delights me.  For, whether the memoir sells a million copies or not is really beside the point.  What is vital is the soul work that leads each writer to peace and wisdom.

The Presidential Candidates as Archetypes? –Here’s another way to look at what they offer, and a different way to make your choice for November.

The amount of TV and radio time currently devoted to the Presidential candidates and their different pronouncements is enough to make many of us wish to turn off our electronic gadgets and never hear about them again.  Is this candidate a ‘fresh new voice’ or ‘inexperienced’? Is that one a seasoned politician or just an old hack? And how can we possibly decide? The talk commentators seem to go round and round and it’s hardly possible to come to an assessment that isn’t affected by their views.

There may be a different way to look at the candidates, however, one that can cut through the posturing and the words of the spin-doctors to shed new light on this entire situation. It may not be a way that is acceptable to all voters, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth considering.  For there are other methods of assessing the worth of a human being, and they are not far away if we want to use them.  If we choose to assess the candidates in terms of a yardstick that has gone through all of Western Civilization’s greatest writing – some three thousand years of it – then the notion of stages of personal development needs to be entertained. Western literature – including the Koran and the New Testament - shows us that there are six archetypal stages a person can pass through on his or her way to full authentic self-awareness.  The suggestion is clear – the person who has learned important life lessons and moved through specific stages of intellectual and personal growth may well be the one who is best fitted to rule.  This has nothing to do with education, money, background, or privilege.  Instead it has everything to do with who the candidates are in themselves. If we chose to see how they measure up to that yardstick we may be surprised by what we see.

The six levels, in ascending order, are Innocent, Orphan, Pilgrim, Warrior-Lover, Monarch, and Magician.  Let’s see how they appear in the candidates’ lives. Of course, we can only assess any of the candidates based upon what we have been allowed to see of their lives rather than what they may be like in private, so any assessment is likely to be flawed.  Yet it may also allow us some valuable insights.

John McCain was a military hero who spent time in Vietnam as a prisoner of war, and his courage and resilience in that difficult situation have been rightly praised. This would seem to place him as a Warrior–Lover, one who fights for and loves his country.  And that seems very likely.  He certainly seems very keen on people being patriotic. Yet what we have to ask is not what he’s done, but what direction he’s going in now.  In fact he has voted with George Bush over 90% of the time, and the rival campaign suggests that his aim is four more years of the same policies. They seek to show him as a party hack, which is what the Orphan archetype typically embodies – the desire to carry on as before because real change is too threatening.  McCain has also presented himself as a ‘maverick’ - which he uses as a term to express independence, but actually is a term from cattle farming, that can mean unpredictable and even eccentric.  The Orphan archetype has a tendency to want to say just how ‘different’ he or she is from the others, and this might be an example of that slight difference that, in their own eyes, matters so much.  This is the ‘independence’ and ‘individuality’ of the person daring to be just a little bit different.  This is not the inventive thinker, the person who has an idea of the future role of the USA in the world. He does not seem to have a convincing political vision of his own. This tends to mark him as an Orphan thinker.

The choice of Sarah Palin as a running-mate was thought of as ‘daring’, and the focus has been on her governorship of Alaska, a very underpopulated state, and her work as a small town mayor. What we have to ask is whether or not she is a leader.  The press reports that she is determined, and fights hard, and that she’s referred to by some as ‘barracuda’ because of her determination.  We also know that she hunts large mammals, fishes, and has swelled the Alaskan corridors of power with her own appointees.  It would seem as if she is unafraid, strong, and determined.  The question we must ask is whether she has any political vision.  If she has we’ve yet to hear it.  What we do know is that she is very certain of her beliefs, and that they are right.  Some might call this firmness, others would call it doctrinaire, or even rigid.  One of the marks of the Orphan archetype is that it can masquerade as the Warrior-Lover.  It looks as if the person is strong and has real beliefs.  But sometimes those beliefs are just thinly veiled prejudices, largely untested.  It looks like we have a real hero when in fact all we’ve got is a bully.

In contrast Senator Biden certainly has plenty of Senate experience, and four years ago he came close to being the Democratic nominee for President.  Does this make him a failure, or does this make him a man who can pick himself up after a defeat and carry on anyway? Given the information that his first wife and child were killed in a car crash, and that he was tempted to give up politics, but did not, we could argue that here is a man who truly does not give up easily because he believes in the value of what he is doing – and it’s not a personal value, merely. He believes he can do good for the country.  In this respect he seems to match the Warrior-Lover archetype, since he did not give up but put himself back into politics.  He eventually remarried, too, and the image we have of him is of the loving and devoted family man. It’s surprising that the McCain campaign doesn’t seem to want to stress the family in the same way. If Biden’s message would seem to be that he’s prepared to serve his country even though that might mean he’s not the high profile one.  He’s content to be vice-president if it means getting the job done.  For him this is less about ego, about Joe Biden, and more about service.  If we compare him with Senator Palin the emphasis in her campaign and the way it’s reported emphasizes how she was a glamorous former beauty queen and an energetic force who gets things done.  The emphasis is on her ego – what she got done - rather than on what she managed to persuade others to do as part of a governing team.  For governing is not just about ego and giving orders.  It’s not about force and pushing people around. Real change happens because a leader is able to motivate a sufficient number of people to take the necessary responsibility so change can happen.  We know this.  It’s fundamental to what’s happening in Iraq.  We have to support the Iraqi forces now, so they will carry on the work of keeping order after we leave.  Their hearts have to be in it, or it’ll all crumble when our troops are gone.  Senator Biden seems to have the ability to put the task of leading first, and his own glory second, and that’s the mark of a real leader. From that perspective he is a true Monarch, nurturing, developing friendships and connections, reaching out to others.

And this brings us to the rhetoric that we have heard coming from Senator Obama.  His catch-phrase is ‘together we can’ – and that is not an idle statement.  What it acknowledges is that we are all going to need to work together to make reasonable progress in the times ahead.  It also signals, loud and clear, that not working together, slipping into the old ways of one party bickering with another and blocking any initiative that’s not theirs will inevitably damage us all.  His campaign has stressed that we are not just rival parties. We are ‘not red states and blue states, but the United States of America’.  The roar of approval from the crowd when he made that often-repeated remark suggests that he had articulated what many people had been longing to hear for some time.  Obama seems to be advocating for a new way of working, and that takes courage and vision. It’s not about him, it’s about all of us and the task that needs to be done. If we want a comparison, George Bush’s ‘I’m the decider’ phrase was almost a totally opposite approach, one that put George Bush as the most important figure.  It was about him, not about the job that needed to be done.

Obama’s memoirs have been controversial in some circles, yet we could certainly choose to see them as an admission that he had to come a long way, personally and spiritually, before he arrived at his beliefs.  He was a bi-racial kid who almost got lost when he began experimenting with drugs (on his own admission).  To some extent, therefore, he was a lost Orphan who found a way forward.  He made his pilgrimage towards the big questions of life – what he could do to make things better – and then he fought for the things he believed in as a Warrior-Lover.  Now he recognizes what it truly takes to rule – reasoned consensus.  And to get that a politician has to motivate, inspire, and demonstrate real courage every day.  In the past it was almost unthinkable for any politician to admit to having made mistakes at any point – think of Bill Clinton who ‘didn’t inhale’ or of his deviousness with Monica Lewinsky – yet here we have a candidate who seems to be saying that of course we have to make mistakes, or how can we ever learn anything? Obama’s admission, even a few years ago, might have been enough to get him thrown off the ticket.  This is truly breaking the mold – but as anyone would acknowledge it was a very strange mold.  A politician who has never made a mistake is a politician who has never done anything definite. To be honest and courageous is not what we usually expect of our political figures, and Obama surprised us into seeing the depths of our own cynicism. That’s the task of a real leader.  As a Monarch he can work with others and seek to nurture all the citizens, even those he may not personally care for.

Better yet is that Obama seems to have what it takes to inspire others, to give them real hope.  This is not the bogus optimism of the tax-handback that Bush thought would make us feel that all was well in America.  This is the hope that motivates us all to roll up our sleeves and get some work done to improve things.  One volunteer is worth six conscripts any day of the week.  What Obama seems to be capable of doing is generating willing volunteers, and plenty of them.  He’s an inspiration, and at times like that he shows himself capable of being a Magician. For when we all are inspired miraculous changes can happen.

Seen from the perspective of archetypes we can make a good case for the Democratic ticket, and a rather less strong case for the Republicans.  Of course, people are more than just archetypes, and we can only go on what we are shown.  We don’t know large portions of each candidate’s life.  Yet, if we choose to see them in terms of archetypes we may just astonish ourselves at the great divide between them.  Do we want an Orphan President, one who will toe the line and bully anyone who questions?  Or do we want someone who is a Monarch and can facilitate the astonishing achievements of which we Americans are capable, when we’re given a chance?

The time is approaching when we’ll have to choose.

Don’t you just love to be able to even say a phrase like that?  I’m sure I do.

The good news in question is perhaps a bit selfish, but it has to do with the arrival of my website: www.sixarchetypes.com.  I think it looks pretty darn good, and it certainly took a lot of effort to get it into cyberspace in its intended form.

One might be excused for thinking that with all the progress and various improvements available that websiting would be easier than ever.  This, dear friends, is not the case - at least if you want something that looks a little more interesting than the standard items on offer, one that can provide links to a decent amount of content.

So it exists.  Take a look.  Tell your friends.  Buy some books. Leave some comments.  This blog will be linked in to it.  Me?  I’ll be thanking the powers that be, and Cathy my captive web-designer, that such a thing could ever make it into the world at all.

Gratitude is a wonderful thing to feel, I have to tell you.

Yes, dear readers, The Six Archetypes of Love is now available from Amazon.com and from other fine outlets, no doubt.  I prefer Amazon because Barnes and Noble charge sales tax in Massachusetts, and Amazon, who are based somewhere else, don’t. Amazon also offers a lower ‘promotional’ price on new books.

The Six Archetypes takes the whole idea of archetypes to the next stage.  It suggests that since these archetypes obviously exist we then have to ask what they exist for. The answer is alarmingly simple - - we may be here on earth in order to find out how to get along with each other in the most productive and compassionate way.  Love, in fact, at the very highest level, is what we are called upon to live. The alternative, of course, is strife, war, and misery, which we’re already very good at, and which have shown themselves to be rather hollow achievements. So we really do need to understand love a little better.

It’s already been hailed as an important book. That’s flattering, of course, but I didn’t write it to feel flattered.  I wrote it because it needed to be read.

The new website specifically for the book www.sixarchetypes.com is almost ready.  It looks lovely, but it just isn’t up and cranking yet. Obviously the universe wants me to learn about being patient.

If you’d like to check out the Six Archetypes, then the Amazon site has some good things on it, including advance reviews. If you want autographed and inscribed copies, just drop me a line saying what you want written, and you can have as many as you wish for $11 each plus mailing of $3 per copy. One lady asked me to inscribe one of my books with something extravagantly romantic, so I happily wrote ‘Dearest Darling B—, We’ll always have those memories of that wild week in Paris….’  So far her husband has not come after me with a meat ax.  So you see, you can have any inscription you wish!

John McCain has just selected a totally unknown politician with almost no experience as his running mate.  Reactions have been varied, but in Europe it’s been shock and disbelief at such an unwise choice.  McCain, at 73, has cancer and his running mate, if he is elected, would step into presidential shoes should he succumb or be incapacitated.  Sure, she’s governor of Alaska, a tiny state population wise, and she ran a town of about 6000 as mayor for a couple of years.  Fine.

Let us not forget Dan Quayle, the smiling boy idiot who was Bush’s VP.  Anyone less likley to lead a nation is hard to imagine.  He couldn’t have led a beetle out of a matchbox, although he did forever cause young folks to pause in confusion as to how they should spell ‘potato’.

Any party that selects such running mates as these is a pretty bizarre party, but not absolutely unelectable (see Quayle, above).  What it signals to many of us, though, is that this is a party that has absolute contempt for the thinking American populace.  They wanted a young, reasonably attractive female, with a son in the army and a kid who was disabled as a sort of window dressing to lend an aura of wholesomeness to a very unattractive party.

Would you vote for a party, or a candidate, that seems to be so intent upon insulting us? But then, of late years the Republicans have had only contempt for most Americans.

Why is modern literature so often a disappointment?

The Guardian First Book Award judge, Stuart Broom, put it neatly this year when he said of the short-listed entrants: “The fiction looks brilliantly varied, but once again it seems to be non-fiction that is particularly ambitious and unafraid of scaling the really big themes of history, culture, and society.” In other words, the fiction writing was narrow and uninspiring.  So why is it that so much of contemporary fiction seems to be so thin when we read it?  And why have sales of Memoir and non-fiction steadily outstripped those of novels and short stories, again, and for the past twenty years?

What, in fact, is wrong with modern fiction that it no longer appeals to modern readers?

The answer may be that readers no longer feel nourished by many of the fiction offerings that appear, since they clearly do find memoir to be more attractive. This under-nourishing aspect of modern fiction is to a large extent due to its technical virtuosity and spiritual vacuity. It doesn’t give us much to live by.  Memoir, on the other hand, is almost always about an individual’s struggle for a meaning that can be sufficient to sustain a life, and so inevitably it gives us something meaty to consider.

The difference lies in a major factor – memoir tells the story of a human being going through phases and arriving somewhere more enlightened, and it can’t really be written unless the writer has made that journey.  Of course, there are plenty of autobiographies that show us a celebrity who has remained petty-minded while being successful.  Barbara Walters’ is the most recent example most of us may have encountered. There is a life story, but no wisdom.

Whenever a human being goes on a life journey of personal growth he or she is likely to go through six archetypal stages – always six of them – the same stages that are mirrored in all great western literature since Homer.  These stages are the Innocent, the Orphan, the Pilgrim, the Warrior-Lover, the Monarch, and the Magician.  These are psychic mile-posts, if you will, and the achievement of each one involves the reflection of a series of understandings attained. In fact a writer of memoir usually may not know these stages exist in this form, but he or she will be aware that something has changed at certain points on the road to wisdom.  By contrast Fiction writers may be accomplished at their trade but simply not have lived enough real life to be able to show the path to wisdom. Readers know this, at a visceral level.

If we are to fuel ourselves with literature (and that’s what it’s for, to feed our psyches, to show us new worlds that keep us alert and alive) then we’ll have to look to see whether the archetypes appear in meaningful ways for us.  Here’s an example: Ulysses, that great literary figure that Homer produced and Joyce wanted to reintroduce us to, spends most of the Odyssey trying to get home. Lost, he has no idea as to who he truly is.  During the tale he encounters many powerful women; Circe, Nausicaa, Calypso, and he has to learn how to treat women decently, before Athena (another woman) will bless his reunion with Penelope.  At first he’s a lost Orphan, but he discovers he’s on a Pilgrimage to find meaning, and when he reaches Ithaca he has to fight, as a Warrior-Lover, for what he loves. Having done so, he has to reign with Penelope in harmony, a true Monarch.  At that point Athena appears and completes the situation, making Odysseus into a Magician of sorts. Six archetypes, all of them a step forward from the Ulysses who invented the Trojan Horse, which was after all a disgraceful trick designed to slaughter sleeping Trojans and their children. One may say that Homer redefines the notion of what a ‘hero’ is, and what it means to be an effective human. In so doing he redefines the reader’s frame of reference.  We come away from the Odyssey, with any luck, more alert and thoughtful as human beings.  We have been nourished.

There is fiction that does this – and some of it may surprise us.  J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter definitely goes through the six archetypal stages, and has to repeat them each year at a slightly higher level.  Perhaps it is this sense of development that has helped to make the books so wildly popular.  Children know all about growth and development and who’s ahead and who’s not, and so it shouldn’t surprise us that they key in at an unconscious level to issues that are vital to who they are as they grow.  There are other writers who achieve this level of awareness, also, and yet others who have no intention of doing so.

Perhaps one of the things we as readers can do is ask if the writer is taking us on any sort of journey of discovery.  If so, are we discovering simply information (“Oh wow, that’s what it feels like to be a teenage drunk!”) or are we being exposed to wisdom (“What are the things we all can learn from observing the behavior of a teenage drunk?”).
Looking for the six archetypes, though, is a pretty good litmus test.  How far has this character progressed?  It’s a reasonable question.  We’d ask it of anyone who was giving us an opinion.  We should also ask it of our authors.

There has been quite a lot of talk about education, and math and literacy, and then the MCAS, and what we should do about it.

Perhaps - just perhaps - if we reviewed education in terms not just of job skills we would make more progress.

How about this for an idea:  If we keep degrading our environment very soon it really won’t matter whether we can read or write.  And we only degrade our environment because there are so many of us on the planet that quite a few of us have no choice. Ravage the ecosystem or starve?  I know what I’d do.

Perhaps ‘education’ needs to be redefined. If we could teach people about looking after the planet, and if we could also teach them about controlling their reproduction rate, we’d have a chance.  We could put out the fire so we could salvage the house.  At the moment we’re trying to save the antique grandfather clock but no one’s called the fire service yet.

This may sound grandiose but it can be done at the most basic level.  If education was redefined so that we taught children to respect their bodies as bodies that exist in an environment (and that what they ate, what they breathed, how they exercised, and what they threw away actually mattered), we could build the sort of self esteem that asks them to use their bodies responsibly.

Massachusetts already did a small version of this.  The public schools launched a campaign against tobacco some years ago, and parents were bombaded with the things their second graders had learned.  Quite a few parents gave up tobacco, and now it is almost impossible to smoke in any building in this state.

If we could do this with tobacco, we could certainly do it with recycling, gas guzzling, resource use, etc etc, (and the limits are only in your imagination). But the big one would still be contraception.

If we don’t address that one soon, we may as well roll up the carpet.

It may seem as if everyone’s talking about the Olympics but I’ll add a few thoughts here anyway.  Much of the focus, it seems to me, is on who wins and on how many medals each country amasses.  Well, it’s a competition so I suppose the results do matter.

I’d like to consider a different aspect of these games.  When I witness a human being doing something extraordinarily well, whether it’s diving or sprinting or pole vaulting,  it is an astounding sight. To see such balance and mastery, such grace in any creature, can take my breath away.  Most of the people we see around us do not really live fully in their bodies in the way these athletes must.  We walk strangely, we run in a weird shuffle, perhaps (the joggers down my street seem to be singularly inelegant), and our minds and bodies are rarely in perfect accord with each other.  We fumble and hesitate.

The olympians can show us another way of being, where there is harmony between the mind and the muscles.  One would call it beauty, except that these days beauty tends to mean film star good looks, while I’m referring to a quality of balance and movement that can take one’s breath away.

Watch for it, whether the competitor wins or loses.  You may find it more inspiring than the human interest tales of the athletes that the press like to regale us with. you may find it more important than who wins.

Several people have asked me more about The Six Archetypes of Love, due out in a few weeks. Yahoo lost my first series of replies, so I’ll try again, and if the original responses re-appear then… we’ll get twice as much, won’t we?

What I suggest in the book is that we are born with considerable skills, namely the ability to love unconditionally and to trust entirely. These are the attributes of the Innocent. We will, perhaps, never again be able to live as wholehearted with these life skills as we are when we’re infants. Pretty soon we discover the world isn’t always friendly and we bury our loving natures.

We then are faced with a life-time of having to deal with people. We can’t avoid it, no matter how much we might prefer TV or the Xbox or video games. And we have to learn to get on with them. Our loving generous nature is then in conflict with our desire to protect ourselves. It will take most people a lifetime to learn how to get back to the Innocent loving self while not being a victim; and when that happens we can become Magicians.

Take the Dalai Lama as an example. He continues to love and act lovingly, even though he’s been forced from Tibet and many of his followers have been slaughtered. (By the Chinese. Those people whose games we are presently enjoying). He loves his enemies, but he is not stupid, so he has removed himself from their grasp. In doing so he is able to continue to be loving to his supporters, to insist in a loving way on human rights, and by avoiding his enemies, who would certainly torture and kill him if they could, he gives them a chance not to take the unloving way. That is the purity of love used intelligently. It’s the way of the Magician.

Most of us will not find ourselves in anything approaching the Dalai Lama’s plight, so our situations may need some careful thought before we can decide what the loving way forward may be. Sometimes it is loving to contain an aggressor and demand accountability from that person. That takes courage.

Courage and Love are key here, and they’re not what Hollywood wants to show us as their version - which is more correctly defined as Romance and Aggression, perhaps, or even more simply as sex and violence. So let’s leave behind what can mislead us.
Almost every night on the TV news we see scenes of death as yet another bomber strikes. We could choose to focus on the destruction. That’s what news agencies seem to want to do. Or we could note that every time a bomb goes off people, all kinds of people, run forward to help. They are being instinctively loving and compassionate. Animals tend not to do that, although there are exceptions.  The antelope herd flees and leaves the slower animals for the lions. Humans don’t seem to function that way.

Love has a way of bubbling up when we expect it least. Like grass finding its way up through the cracks in paving slabs, it can’t be kept down. Once you start paying attention you’ll see it everywhere.

Shortly I’ll be updating various aspects of the webpage – with any luck at all – and linking it to my new website www.sixarchetypes.com

This will be to coincide with the publication of my new book The Six Archetypes of Love, from Innocent to Magician.  Does the title sound familiar?  It should, since the notion of the six archetypes is at the center of Stories We Need to Know. Stories showed that the archetypes exist and are all around us, and have been for three thousand years.  The new book asks the serious question: if the archetypes are present then what are they there to tell us?  The answer is alarmingly simple.  They are there to teach us about love.

Think about that for a second. Love – most of us get it wrong most of the time. Divorce rates are evidence of that.  But also governments get it wrong pretty regularly too, and they do so by instigating wars. In each case the possibility for increasing human misery is vast.  Yet, as we look at the world, people show no signs of ceasing to fall into love, and wars bring many people to levels of caring and devotion that are remarkable. Love, like grass in desolate city blocks, has a tendency to keep on breaking through the gaps between the stones.

This book will show us how we can grow love, not discord, if we know what to look for….