On the Origin of Stories

In his book On the Origin of Stories, Brian Boyd suggests the beginning of art and storytelling developed as a biological adaptation, an evolution through natural selection. Imagine a father cajoling his crying infant son into laughter by imitating a great ape, grunting and shuffling around on his knuckles, pounding on his chest with authority. The son laughs, and the fellow tribesman that have gathered around to watch are laughing also. The father has created a sort of play, demonstrating the first spark of imagination. It is not just the mimicry of a different species which makes it so, it is the added awareness that there is humor in it.

            I admit a lot of his argument is sound, but as I read, I felt something was unaccounted for in his theory; some magical aspect behind art and the imagination that he was failing to put into words. I’m not sure it can be put into words. I felt he was right—art was born when the imagination was born. But I feel that it is more than simply built into us and accessible, rather something within ourselves as early humans that had to be discovered and unlocked. As I read Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, I felt he captured that illusive side of art better. He suggests human imagination, which of course is the cornerstone of myth and storytelling, came about with the fear of death. Our early ancestors may have acted like animals in the way they dealt with death, thinking nothing of a family member dying, except the interesting fact that they were no longer moving. Perhaps they left them where they lay to rot, and went about their day hunting and gathering, not thinking any further into the matter.

But, as Campbell says, “The earliest evidence of anything like mythological thinking is associated with graves” (The Power of Myth, 89). A drastic transition occurred once the Neanderthal peoples began to mourn their friend’s deaths and fear their own. They began to believe their souls live on in another place and began to bury their dead with weapons, jewelry and sacrifices for their journey to that unseen place. A belief in the unknown was born, which is the first step onto the path of wisdom. Campbell says: “I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology—that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one” (The Power of Myth, 90). A new consciousness was born then, the imagination that lead to myths.

Hand in hand with the developing reverence for life, the mourning of loved ones, and the belief of an invisible existence, was the respect for the animals they killed, the belief that the souls of the animals also live on past death. Seeing the magical side of life naturally leads to seeing the divine in all things, and finding harmony for our souls in those things. Across all cultures this respect developed into rites and rituals performed upon the beginning of the hunt and upon killing an animal, and these rites vary across cultures and the world. Many early cultures viewed their main source of life as having mystical powers, offering prayers and sacrifice to the great spirit of their main hunting animal—the buffalo for Native Americans, the antelope for South Africa, the great salmon runs for the people of the Northwest. It was the recognition of a force out there that gives and takes away, and if they angered those powers, there would be no food for them. These beliefs developed into myths, and it was the power of the myth that saved them from the guilt of killing animals, which many of the cultures believed to have more power and wisdom than themselves. The myths served to pay tribute to the natural order of nature and the cyclical pattern of life. We kill the animals and live because of it, and when we die our bodies feed the earth, that in turn feed the animals—the circle of life.   

Art evolved with the evolving beauty of our own souls, and is an expression of that beauty. Boyd goes on to talk of the famous ancient cave paintings in terms of human beings depicting the animals in the world around them, and I continued to feel let down as I read. Something was missing, and it went far beyond mimicry. The way the artists used the bulges and crevices of the rock to emphasize certain parts of the animal, such as a hoof or a horn, puts into the paintings a piece of the artists own soul, his own interpretation of that animal. Not just a representation. In some of the paintings I looked at, the animals seem to bound across the sky, as if across the invisible plain, as if the sky and the ground are the same and they are etching themselves into eternity. I wonder looking at them, just the pictures of them, seeing their astounding beauty: is it an expression of the artist’s soul, an expression of the animals, or both intertwined? Is life beautiful on its own, or do we have to make it that way?

The painted caves were much more than a place for those early peoples to try their hand at representative painting. Just getting into many of the caves is a feat of itself, then to paint by the weak light of a flickering torch is a whole different matter. Why not dabble on a rock easier to get to? Because the paintings would not be preserved for 50,000 years. Those ancient artists were sending a message, creating something sacred and welding it into the gears of time. All of humanity is written into a story; through these paintings we may turn its pages. Campbell calls them “temple caves,” explaining so:

A temple is a landscape of the soul. When you walk into a cathedral, you move into a world of spiritual images. It is the mother womb of your spiritual life—mother church. All the forms around are significant of spiritual value. Now, in a cathedral, the imagery is in anthropomorphic form. God and Jesus and the saints and all are in human form. And in the caves the images are in animal form. But it’s the same thing, believe me. The form is secondary. The message is what is important… The message of the caves is of a relationship of time to eternal powers that is somehow to be experienced in that place. (The Power of Myth, 101)

            These ancient peoples were in a sense creating a story from the world they lived in. All they had back then was nature—there was no blaring of horns or internet or buildings blotting out the sun. The sharp mountains biting the sky, those were their buildings. The animals were their neighbors. In the simple things they saw the divine, and they had no science to explain to them the mysteries of the earth. You could say imagination buzzed through the air like a current. These people were closer to that whispering soul of the earth, that still, quiet side where time becomes insignificant in the shadow of eternity. The world to them was a myth, the trees and ocean all figments of their imagination.

So they decided to record, somehow, and pay tribute to the mighty animal spirits that danced in the stars and flew in the breeze. They crushed their roots and flower petals for dye, added the fat of animals , and crawled into the caves like prophets holding torches aloft. These people were writing on the rock walls the world’s first stories, telling their version of the infinite tale. Joseph Campbell says, “Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience—this is the mythological experience” (The Power of Myth, 111). The myths of our ancestors were built upon their own experience of the world, designed to lead their souls through the labyrinth of life. They are myths to us but reality to them. If we could go back in time, they would think us a myth, our clothing and the ideas we had on the way the world worked. Or they would think we were Gods. To me, they were the true scientists, for the only reality we know is one that is made up. We only know what we ourselves have come up with. We know the laws of physics and how they work, but no one can say for sure why they work that way. Astronomers estimate there could be as many as one hundred billion galaxies in our universe, and ideas in astrophysics suggest there could be an infinite amount of universes strewn out across an infinite space, each containing hundreds of billions of galaxies, and each separate universe possibly containing its own laws of physics. The universe could very well be contained with a grain of sand, and we may also just be a grain of sand upon a vast tropical beach.  

The idea behind myth is that this vastness is contained with our souls, each and every one of us. We possess the torch of freedom and the power of creation, our souls are written into the book of eternity. The mind can wander off from the harmony of our soul, the same harmony that is in nature. The myths they created were a means to keep the mind on the same path that nature follows, and to live life as nature would have it lived. This attitude can be found in most Romantic literature, once the hero ascends from whatever depths he has fallen into. It is what we strive in vain for today, in the vast confusion of modern society. There is a place we can go to find it, however. Just open a book, and step into eternity.

Dull and Boring

I read a little excerpt in the paper the other day and I saved it, because it reminded me of the displaced fairy tale thing. There is a town in Oregon named Boring, and another somewhere in Scotland named Dull, and the two are teaming up together in the dreary world; becoming sister communities. It sounded like something right out of Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I wouldn't have been surprised to read that the reporter went to the towns, only to find the people there in a sort of sleep-like state. That they had forgotten how to read, and along with that, had forgotten the names of their towns, had forgotten how they had gotten there in the first place. All they knew is that they pledged their allegiance to their king who they had never seen, located in the darker places of the world, named Kattam-Shud. The reporter left dazzled, fuzzy on why he had gone their in the first place, and how he had turned into a dusty, wandering soul.

The Power of Stories

I have three beautiful little girls whose ages are five, seven and eight, and whose names are Jaden, Trinity, and Grace, respectively. It amazes me, the endless supply of life and vitality spilling out of them, and it is a gift to be able to witness them growing from babies into little girls. I have been given a different perspective on time, watching a baby grow into a toddler, into a child, into a little girl. No longer do I fix my gaze ahead, on the path of time stretching itself beyond the horizon. I tend now to stop and look behind me, or to rest and enjoy the moment I am in. I hear my girls say thing like “when I’m older, I’ll eat all the candy I want…”, or “I’ll have a hundred pets…” I wonder sometimes if it is possible to pinpoint the time and place the change occurs, when a soul realizes the brief period in time their life encompasses, and start to look back upon childhood in reminiscence. It seems there is a paradox that occurs in this shift—the harder I try to slow down and enjoy the time I have, the more elusive that time becomes, slipping from my hands like smoke. Yet my girls seem to view time as a lifelong enemy, like something to be conquered, and a year for them inches by like an eternity.

            I have found release from this curse of swift time. It comes upon opening a book and smelling the familiar scent of ink on paper, of time bound and sealed between covers. With the opening sentence I am transported to a different realm of time and reality, whether it is “Once upon a time, in a faraway land…,” or “Call me Ishmael.” I can read a story and be taken through a hundred years of fulfilled dreams, of hopes and tragedies and endless adventures. I can witness the span of a character’s life, see them as a baby and watch them learn life’s many lessons, be there as they have children of their own and watch them as they are burdened with the troubles of life and grow weary and old, and I can try not to cry as they die and their children lay them to rest. And when the story finally ends, I come back to the place I am, and realize I have not aged with the characters I have been following. Hundreds of years have not passed by as I passed through the story with them. For that brief period of time, I was enchanted, cast into a world of illusion, and experienced those years as if they were my own. You could say I stole that time. That is just one of the gifts of a good story.

            This hunger for stories keeps growing within me, and has been doing so for many years. As a child my father read to me from the children’s Bible, stories from the Old Testament toned down for young ears. I would lay in bed and listen in rapture as Samson tore apart lions and slayed Philistines by the thousands, as Noah gathered all the animals into his ark and God sent rain for forty days and forty nights, as young David felled the giant Goliath with a single stone. I have not yet asked my father if he knew then, as he read to me every night, the great gift he was giving to me. Perhaps he was unaware that he was planting a magical seed, and the tree it grew into would bear much fruit.

            A child’s mind and heart are naturally able to receive a story as it is meant to be received, their ears tuned to the real gifts behind the words. I have been reading my girls fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm, and as I read, I feed off the spellbound look in their eyes, drinking it in like the water of life as I enchant them, changing my narrative voice dramatically to capture the souls of the characters in the stories. I do this because I know they hear something beyond what most of us can hear from these stories as adults caught up in the grind of life, burdened with too much “reality”—bills and work and never ending responsibilities. Our imagination is dulled and we are farther removed from seeing the world as an infinitely huge, magical place in which anything can happen. A world in which dragons live and fairies hide themselves from our eyes, in which animals secretly talk to each other and mermaids can be spotted with a keen eye. Do you remember believing in these things? These young, innocent little minds are not blemished with doubt and non belief; they can easily accept that a frog would talk to a princess, sing her poems, and upon winning her love, turn into a handsome prince. If I read them Hansel and Gretel, they are not skeptical of a candy house and how it could be built, but rather comment on how nice it would be to have a candy house that they could nibble on whenever they wanted. It is a beautiful thing, witnessing and being a catalyst of their growing imagination, seeing the sparkle in their eyes as they are given these pieces of information and believe them.

Every story they hear is like a piece put into the giant puzzle of life and what it means to live, and nourishes their imaginative understanding of life as one complex story manifesting itself. From these tales and stories they experience not only the magical aspects of life, but also the base aspects—they learn of villains and treachery, of failed dreams and lost loves, and they see through all of this the valiant resolution of the characters. They are in the process of learning that they are the main characters in their own story, and that their own life will hold peaks and valleys, just like that of the characters they read. “‘It is not true,’ says Nietzsche, ‘that there is some hidden thought or idea at the bottom of myth…but the myth itself is a kind of style of thinking. It imparts an idea of the universe, but does it in a sequence of events, actions, and sufferings.’ This is why we may look into it as into a mirror or fountain full of hints and prophesies, telling us what we are and how we should behave amidst the bewildering sequences of surprising events and happenings that are our common lot” (Zimmer 310). Thus my girls are learning the unpredictability of the world and the universe, the dual physical and spiritual existence making up their reality, which is a shifty thing. A strong emotional foundation coupled with an imaginative mind can get a person through the toughest of times. Looking at life in this manner will help them cope with whatever fastballs are thrown their way, help them to see the tragedies and setbacks they will surely experience as a necessary part of their own adventure.

            Another reason I love to read my daughters these stories is not only because I enjoy them myself, and don’t mind reading them over and over, but also because these archetypal stories are screaming to be read out loud. The simple language they use upon the opening lines speaks to the very idea of a story—it could go anywhere, be any kind of story that has ever been told. Infinite possibilities are laid out before the reader in the simplicity and timelessness of the language, born in the oral tradition of storytellers enchanting their audience through the power of voice combined with the power of a story. Take Rumpelstiltskin: “By the side of a wood, in a country a long way off, ran a fine stream of water; and upon the stream there stood a mill.” Immediately the time, the place, the details, are all wiped away and become inconsequential. The story exists in its own time and place, outside of this world but also encompassing it entirely. The rhythm of the words begs to be spoken, to be told, and the story itself becomes more powerful as it is spoken. A special kind of bond, a certain connection, is created between a storyteller and their audience, as if the very process of creation is awake and in the room. It is easy to imagine, reading these lines, a tenor-voiced bard speaking slowly, clearly, mystically to an instantly spellbound audience. When I read these stories to my girls, I become that bard, the enchanter, casting a spell over them and transporting them instantly into the story where anything is possible.

         Heinrich Zimmer talks about the dilettante in the first part of King and the Corpse, defining a dilettante as anyone who has taken a class under Michael Sexson, or more specifically, “What characterizes the dilettante is his delight in the always preliminary nature of his never-to-be-culminated understanding” (Kind and the Corpse  4). This person will look at life as a tapestry of riddles woven together, forming the most beautiful image that changes, like that of a Rorschach ink test, with the psychology of the perceiver. They may see stories as mirroring the eternal mystery of life and why we are here, may hear them with the ears of their ancestors and beyond, back to the first spark of creation. And this dilettante will understand that no matter how much of a grasp he thinks he has on the story, no matter how smart and concise his interpretation, it is all smoke in the wind. Written into these stories are the experiences and dreams and myths and interpretations of uncountable generations, changing not only with the patterns of the world but also with the unpredictable lives of the people reading them. Zimmer says of these immortal tales: “They are everlasting oracles of light. They have to be questioned and consulted anew, with every age, each age approaching them with its own variety of ignorance and understanding, its own set of problems, and its own inevitable questions. For the life patterns that we of today have to weave are not the same as those of any other day; the threads to be manipulated and the knots to be disentangled differ greatly from those of the past” (K.A.T.C., pg. 4). The dilettante, then, knows he takes with him into a story his own biases and emotions and stupidity which get mixed into his experience of the story, like ingredients thrown into a soup. But he will not cease taking joy in rereading texts and each time discovering something new in it, and he will know that there will never be an end, to his learning and to the great riddle of life, to beauties and discoveries lying in wait, because these things are made immortal in the characters of these stories, and in the stories themselves. Like T.S. Eliot wrote about all dilettantes in life:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

         Time is liquid, it can be dived into. We read today stories from thousands of years ago, and characters from these stories live on today, will live on for forever. How does this happen? Arthur and his knights of the round table. Were they real, or mythic? It doesn’t matter. They live on through us and our delight in reading about them. What is really interesting is, where did they come from? It is as if they came from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, so immortal are these tales, these knights. As if they have been around since the beginning of time, waiting to be discovered. Perhaps they have no author at all; perhaps they came into existence from some other place, evolved from primordial soup in the great ocean of stories. Upon reading them there is a harmony we feel within the story, as if, somehow, we are reading our own story. The story lives on separate from any author, as if it was already with us when we were born. Heinrich Zimmer says:

And yet the generations that fashioned these romances are not merely our spiritual ancestors, but to some extent our physical too. As we read, some dim ancestral ego of which we are unaware may be nodding approvingly upon hearing again its old tale, rejoicing to recognize again what once was a part of its own old wisdom. And if we heed, this inner presence may teach us, also, how to listen, how to react to these romances, how to understand them and put them to use in the world of everyday. (K.A.T.C., pgs. 97-98)           

The Power of Words

Masaru Emoto, a Japanese doctor of alternative medicine, conducted a series of tests on water, freezing samples taken from different sources and taking pictures of the crystals that form. In one of the tests conducted, he typed words or sentences filled with emotion onto pieces of paper, and taped the words to jars holding samples of water taken from the same source. He wrote words harnessing the beautiful side of life and emotion, such as “love”, “friendship”, “harmony”, etc., and words harnessing the bad, such as “hate”, “Demon”, “I want to kill you”, and other negative words. He froze the samples and took pictures of the crystals that formed, the results of which are truly amazing. All of the crystals are unique in their own way, seeming to mimic the emotion behind the word attached to it. All of the words with good intention formed symmetric, beautiful crystals which are pleasing to the eye, bringing a feeling of harmony. As if touched by the divine. The crystals formed from words with bad intention were ugly and deformed, curdling the stomach upon sight, as if drawn by an evil finger.

            How could this happen? How could the printed word have such power? The spoken word is one thing; the vibration of sound waves could plausibly alter the composition of water once passing through it, but how could shapes formed by ink on paper taped to a jar with water inside alter the composition of said water? How could words have such power?

            Water accounts for about 65% of what we are made up of. If a written word can make the composition of water harmonious and beautiful, it can actually change the composition, somehow, of our bodies. And how much more powerful to show something, than to say it. We can let the word “love” spill from our lips, or we can read a love story and experience the ups and downs behind the word, the turmoil of emotions that come along with it, and in the end, the resolution, whereupon the closure of the story brings our souls so much closer to that emotion, that spiritual side of ourselves which is love, than one word ever could. At that moment, if we were to freeze the molecules within ourselves and examine the structure of the crystals, the sight might just take our breath away.

            Experiencing the words put down on paper that come together to form a story is like taking a sip of the wine aging within that author’s soul. Just as the words we hear every day and the signifiers we attach to them affect our brain, the words an author chooses to form sentences are a direct correlation to the psychology of that author and their emotions at the time. When we read the words put down by that author we are in a sense stepping into their shoes, trying them on for size. Reading the words of another can be like a fresh perspective on life, coaxing us out of the rigid structures of perception we as individuals can become tied into. This is one of the many lessons that can be taken from Abu Kasem’s Slippers, stated metaphorically as “change your shoes.” J.R.R. Tolkien addresses this issue in his essay, On Fairy Stories:

We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness. Of all faces those of our familiares are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces. This triteness is really the penalty of “appropriation”: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.

                        (On Fairy Stories 19)

            The ultimate goal is to never cease looking at those things that are locked in our hoard, to take them out continuously and examine them in a new light. To never cease marveling at the simple things in life and the magic they hold. Whether it be folklore, myth, a fairy tale or a fictional story, they let us look at our world in a magical sense, show us there is magic in all things. Tolkien goes on to say: “It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine” (On Fairy Stories 20) Words are indeed potent, for there is no limit to the signification and history behind each. Take “stone,” for example. We could think of man’s first rudimentary tools thousands of years ago, a land of saber-toothed tigers and wooly mammoths and ice-ages. We could think of them, our ancestors, picking up a stone with a sharp edge and seeing for the first time the possibilities in it—the first steps of an infant imagination. We could think of this leading to fire and farming and civilization as we know it. Or we could pick up a stone and think of the rise and fall of mountains, the vast geological processes that stone took shape in. Pockets of molten lava cooled and crystallized, slowly crushed and melted, welded under such immense pressure of this self-cannibalizing earth. The earth tearing itself apart and diving back in. We could think of asteroids crashing into the earth from space, from our endless galaxy in an infinite universe that is expanding, that could be part of an infinite amount of universes strewn out there like the dice of the gods. We could think of the elements making up this rock as all formed from that spark of creation we call the big bang, in which every element that exists was created in fractions of a second. Who says there is no magic in this world, no mystery? It is stories we can go to to be a part of this great magic lying in wait, to get a fresh perspective and awake our minds that have so much potential. Stories are a displacement of that magic we all seek to know, to harness, and that just might have too much power for us to possess.

The Power of Words

I was just writing a bit for my paper on the power of words, so I googled
a japenese water crystal test I had read about in the past. A japenese
scientist taped words such as "love", "hate", "freindship", ect. to jars of water
taken from different sources-he even did it with holy water. He then froze the water
 and magnified it and took pictures, and the results are really amazing. The symetry and harmony withing the crystals formed from beautiful words is clearly mimicking the divine, while the
crystals formed from such words as "demon" or "I hate you" are ugly and deformed,
mimicking the the very depths of hell. You can see where I am going with this. Within
words themselves is the power of heaven and hell. We are all made up mostly of water, everything living needs water to continue doing so. Stories can truly bring us to level of the divine, the words vibrating down into the cells of our body with the harmonics of the gods, changing the makeup of not only our physical structure, but also our souls. Our thoughts and feelings change the structure of the water within ourselves- why not read stories that elevate the mind and emotion, and change the vibration of our very souls? I that way, stories actually can alter our reality. This video is short but sweet, I recommend watching.

Howard and Grace

I recently read a horrible story about two children abandoned by their parents in the woods. It makes me sick. The father, Greg Cutter, had called authorities to report his wife had died in her sleep, and that his two children were missing. Search and Rescue teams equipped with
search dogs and thermal imaging equipment teamed with local fire departments,
and combed a twenty square mile area for a week until the search was called off. The community was devastated. Local search teams were formed and continued the search efforts
with no success. Church services included the children in their prayers and
shrines were erected in various parts of the town. After a month, a large funeral
was held Howard and Grace Cutter in the park, with most of the town attending.
Five weeks after they were reported missing, the children showed up at their fathers’
house. The news spread through the town like fire. The Sheriff learned about it,
and went to the house to question the children. They told him that their mother
had abandoned them in the woods not once, but two times, and the father had
been made to go along with her plot. They said she drank a lot of whiskey and
beat their father. Greg had then burst into tears and told the sheriff about
how controlling his wife had been, and how they had no money for food, only
whiskey, and how she had called him a sissy and made him go along with leaving
them by a fire, telling them they would return. The children then confirmed
this and said they had found their way back to the house the first night only
because Howard had dropped white pebbles as the parents led them into the
woods. By these they found their way back. The mother had been furious when
they returned, and locked them in their rooms and got very drunk and bellowed
curses around the house. The second night they had been unable to find their
way home because the crumbs from the éclair Howard had dropped had been eaten
by the birds. They were lost in the woods for three days and stumbling with
starvation when a nice old lady saved them, and fed them and gave them water. They
had stayed there in her clean beds, regaining their strength while she read
them stories and kept a nice fire burning. After that she was always giving
them treats and being nice so that they would stay there with her. They had
thought her to be a lonely old lady, so they had stayed a while out of
compassion. It turned out she was a member of a satanic cult who believed that
power was gained by eating children. She had locked Howard in a cage and made Grace
feed him all sorts of fatty foods like Doritos and spam, and she would strip
down to a g-string and sing and do all sorts of wild dances around his cage.
One day she told Grace to light the big oven in the back of the house, it was
time to eat the boy. She told Grace she would have to participate in the meal.
The girl thought about this and then told the lady that she couldn’t figure out
how to light it. It was an electric start. So they old lady crawled in to look
at the switch mechanism and Grace shut the door on her, and turned on the oven.
The old lady was confirmed dead. She then she let her brother out of the cage
and they easily found their way home in the light of day. Except they had
almost been stuck when they had come to a large expanse of water, but they had
seen a duck swimming nearby, so they sang him a song so he would help them. He
ferried them across one at a time. Grace had wanted them to both jump on, but
Howard told her that was silly: the duck was clearly too small for both of
them. Other than that their trip back was uneventful.

Three Little Piggies

A song I used to love as a teenager leapt into my head today. It is a spin on the tale of Three Little Pigs written by a rock group called Green Jello. I thought it was interesting that the song came into my head, being that it is just like our assignment due next week. Their version is that the first pig is a hick who spends his time farming, chewing tobacco and dreaming of the city. One day he buys a guitar and takes up playing it in the hay above the horses. He is struck by inspiration and moves to Holloywood on a whim to find his stardom. Of course, living on the farm, he knew nothing of the city. He was square dancing at the clubs and making a fool of himself, and he built his house from straw, which is no challenge to a Big Bad Wolf. And they have a sort of Romantic feel to their song, one reason because the pigs do not physically die, only apparently. The second pig is a stoner who spends his time smoking pot on venice beach. He built his house from old pop cans and cereal boxes and other trash. One day he was smoking a joint in his house, his brother pig visiting from hollywood, when the Wolf pulled up on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. The pigs slip away without us knowing. The third pig is a rich architect student, the son of a rockstar named Pig Nugent. He drew out the plans and built a big, sturdy mansion with a custom security system. The pigs were having drinks on the roof when the Wolf showed up at the door like a vagrant. The third pig, the english student of the bunch, called 911 from his cell phone, and the cops sent out Rambo to handle the job. Rambo pumps him full of lead and the piggies live happily ever after.

Let me see if I can make this video appear here:

Happy Endings

Dr. Sexson made it clear to us in class today that our perfect romances must have happy endings, and I was thinking about this. Why does everyone have to live happily ever after? I have had romances of my own that have ended in tradegy, but they were still romances, and the women in them still hold a place in my heart. But we do not read romance to experience the same tragedies that have taken place in our own lives. A story is a sacred thing when it takes away from us our suffering, our sorrow, and what better way to do that than the happy ending? We all know they are rare in life and Frye points out that they tend to come at the cost of other's suffering and death being forgotten. They are for the survivors. But when I read a story I am exempt from guilt of being happy for the survivors. I am free from the constraints of reality, and I want the story to create for me a reality with true love and virgins and happy endings. Even though I do love a good Cormac McCarthy book. In my naive reading of a perfect romance I am whisked away with them on their adventure, I weep with them when they are in pain and I blush when they are intimate. In this state I could not bear for the story to end tragically. It would shatter the perfect world around me that the story has created. The perfect ending in this naive state of blissful reading then gets the neurons firing in such a way that is not experienced in ordinary life. Medicine for the soul. On the other end of the scope is the story that does not grab my attention because it is not well written. When reading these stories, and on the rare occasions I finish them, I tend to feel let down that the lovers do not die some terrible, creative death. But in my naive state I can appreciate everyone living happily ever after.