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Archive Number 3605 | ||
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Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004 08:53:21 EST
MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable I think this conversation is stimulating and fascinating. Thank you all! I'm a little behind on the list, but I read Christopher's post last night an= d=20 had to send it on to Bobby Avstreih. He hasn't been on the list for a long=20 time, but I pass on bits that I know he might have a passionate response to=20= and=20 I know he has been thinking about restorative justice and stories. Those of=20 you who remember his posts know that he can respond strongly and even offend= =20 some people. He invited me to censor or rewrite this, but I didn't. I know y= ou=20 all are secure enough in your own thinking and values to hear differing=20 opinions, or will simply dismiss and delete what you don't wish to engage. If you want to reply directly to Bobby, his email is=20 storyflute@hotmail.com In a separate post, I will also send another piece Bobby wrote on restorativ= e=20 justice. Gail Bobby's reply: As the non-resident Ancient Greek scholar of the group, let me add some=20 clarification to Christopher's touching on Oedipus and his lusty cohorts.=20 Greece is a 3-season country. The "winter" is maybe a bit warmer than=20 London, but just as chill, damp and dreary. Imagine living in the conditions= =20 of 2,000 years ago, with no distractions all winter but tending goats and=20 staring at the other members of your family for interminable hours every=20 day. Want to have sex with a parent? Want to tear your teenager apart in a=20 sexual frenzy, or kill your babies, or visit endless fantasies of revenge?=20 The plays were produced to coincide with the return of spring and the=20 outside self. It was a great community coming-out party, and the=20 spring-cleaning was psychic as well as dusting blankets and pillows.=20 Everyone in the audience was healthy enough to identify with the urges of=20 the characters. They didn't need the famous poem by Thich Nhat Hahn "Call Me= =20 By My True Names". They were not afraid to see themselves over and over=20 again. Their horrors didn't frighten them. Their horrors were part of what=20 made them human beings. We moderns take these stories much too seriously, as we treat so much of our= =20 precious inner world. In the original days of these plays, the most=20 delicious part is that after the tragedy was presented, and each on-looker=20 mourned or stared in the identifying mirror of the tragedy ("the sins of the= =20 fathers visited upon the sons for generations"), the plays were reframed as=20 Satyr plays enacted by satyrs carrying 6-foot bright pink phalluses and=20 nymphs with huge "goddess" buttocks. Imagine the famous confrontation=20 between Oedipus and his father in the narrow pass, only instead of swords,=20 this time they are knocking at each other with massive erections. And, can=20 you picture how randy his mom must have acted when, sexually frustrated by=20 her husbands absence, this lusty young stud, so very well-endowed, rides=20 into town brandishing his scepter for all to see. Pity our poor modern, sensitive society. All we have left are sneaking dirty= =20 jokes and the non-stop cursing of stand-up comics who are still at the=20 "dirty word" level of 8 year old shock humor. Is this part of Christianity's= =20 curse: our loss of our sense of humor about ourselves. Can we please have=20 back the dirty, nasty old gods, or at least David and Bathsheba and Solomon=20 and Sheba and drunken old Noah and those lying, cheating patriarchs and some= =20 real human beings instead of the insufferable power-play of that=20 control-freak, Paul? As long as I'm ranting, please consider some of the Native American=20 traditions. In many special stories the abuser (father, uncle, husband,=20 neighbor) is NOT punished, or even named publicly. The "victim" recognizes=20 that he/she has achieved a special gift, a special connection to the natural= =20 world and thus to the tribal community, because of the suffering. The=20 "perpetrator" is seen as the instigator of the gift-receiving journey.=20 Without the action of the "perpetrator", the "victim" would not be opened to= =20 the gift. Unlike our modern thinking, there is neither "victim" nor=20 "perpetrator". The perpetrator is merely the instigator. In this reframing=20 'he' already loses much of his power to hurt or terrorize. I don't know if=20 French existentialism is appropriate in understanding Native American=20 stories, but Satre's "Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."=20 seems to fit pretty well in my mind. Maybe the theme of this discussion=20 should be "Paths to Freedom" instead. Of course, the other key in looking at this from a Native American=20 perspective, is that there is a special place in the community for the=20 return of the one who has suffered (there is no denial of the suffering ...=20 only of the concept of "victim"). Restoration of balance, restorative=20 justice, provides a community place for both victim and perpetrator. Healing= =20 cannot proceed without the community context. This is also true in some of=20 our present concepts of "restorative justice". The more we ourselves live without a messy but integrated community of work=20 and ritual and play, and the more our community is made up of friends we=20 only see and touch electronically, or only on special occaisions with=20 special appointments made to fit our financial schedules, the more=20 "precious" and "unique" our inner worlds become, and the more powerful we=20 imagine our common-as-mud images and hidden thoughts and bad fantasies. Our=20 modern world of as-if intimacy is causing us to regress to the ego-centric=20 world of young children, afraid of our bad thoughts because they may come=20 true. And, if Ancient Greece is too high-falutin' for you, and Native American too= =20 'sacred' to mess with, then consider the Thai national trickster Sri=20 Thanonchai. In his opening story he neatly eviscerates and boils his baby=20 brother so he will be neat and clean and quiet when his parents return from=20 a day in the fields. And what can they say against him? After all, he was just=20 following orders. Any parents out there want to testify to forbidden desires to throw their=20 squalling babies out the window or in the closet? Any testimonies about=20 "accidents" older kids suffered on their younger siblings? I know most of=20 you women out there never really laughed or cheered at John Wayne Bobbit=20 jokes? But how about fantasizing about remaking "Thelma and Louise" as=20 "Dirty Harry"? Am I the only person with really bad thoughts out here? Victims are "good". "Innocent". Then how can you be "good" and still want to= =20 shoot a rapists balls off? If you can't at least recognize in yourself the=20 power trip of the perpetrator, how can you really help the victim do=20 anything but split off from the experience. I certainly wouldn't believe=20 you. I'd feel you were just trying to put on a band-aid and whisper the=20 wound to go away. "Just kiss it and make it better" therapy. And, anyway,= =20 only the community can restore balance. If there is no place in the=20 community for the wounded, then there can be no healing. That's where the=20 focus "should" be. The ancient Greek "heroes" placed themselves outside=20 common humanity. That is why they suffered so terribly. That is why we=20 suffer. Not because bad things happen, but because we lack a container, a=20 context, in which to heal. I find this statement particularly strange. ">I certainly agree that it is=20 hard to hear/feel/see such outcomes as moving out from the family, or even=20 dying as a fitting end for a tale worth telling." I am no more a general storytelling expert than a Native American or Thai=20 one, but in most, if not all, of the folk tales I've read the banished=20 daughter or rejected-as-worthless youngest son returns to claim the kingdom=20 AFTER the old king is dead. Cordelia's return for a teary farewell=20 reconcilliation is about as good as it gets. My father and I definitely had=20 a very real, nurturing reconcilliation. Its just that it was the traditional= =20 form, not modern "touchy-feely" or "with eye contact". It happened=20 separately for each of us. I didn't even know about it from his side until=20 he had been dead for 6 months. But that does not in any way change or=20 diminish the power of the transformations for each of us. Because it fit and= =20 made sense within my family context. Healing, like scars, doesn't mean "pretty". Why do some of you storytellers=20 reject story tradition in search for Chicken Soup answers? The coffin that=20 the Grimm brothers built to contain our passionate humanity (with all its=20 violent excess ... isn't that what passion is?) is being nailed shut by cans= =20 of Chicken Soup psychology. Its burying us alive. Wounds heal, but scars remain. In our modern society there is no place for=20 scars. Every part of our body, inside and out, can and 'must' be made over,=20 with titanium and botox and nutritional suppliments and tooth whiteners and=20 endless exercise and diets and sex "how-to" articles, etc etc. Meanwhile,=20 our popular culture in movies, biographies and fiction are filled with the=20 most inhuman characters, from Hannibal Lechter and The Godfather to books=20 about being raised in immigrant desperate poverty or by crazed, alcoholic=20 and terribly abusive parents. Its as if our entertainment industry is "The=20 Picture of Dorian Grey", Wilde's story of a man who maintained beautiful=20 youth while his secret portrait became more and more hideous. And have you=20 talked to any born-again fundamentalists lately. Man, are those "good"=20 people revved-up for a "worse than the Holocaust" blood-letting. They can't=20 wait to be saved while the rest of us burn in our "Left-Behind"=20 hell-on-earth. I know the bad folks out there are really bad, one-on-one. But Lord save us=20 from the folks who "know" they are good. They're the ones who will destroy=20 the world. This sad societal schizophrenia colors all our thinking. Maybe the first=20 thing we have to heal is our own connection between our good selves and our= =20 passionate selves. Yes, indeed, Christopher, here's to healing our=20 dichotomies! (or at least whacking at them with giant bright pink phalluses=20 once in a while.) Smiles, Bobby In a message dated 1/18/04 12:16:12 PM, christopher@MOVING-STORIES.COM write= s: << I appreciate the sense of panic as we look to find literary examples (if not examples from our lives) of people who respond "well" (with virtue?" to the harsh family stories that rain down upon them. Whether the stories rain down upon us in being enacted around us or virtually enacted as they are told to us, we hope to know "=E1 quoi bon?" - to what good? What is the sense of this suffering of trying to be faithful to family, to love ones, to those who claim us, when they have more pain than they know how to handle alone? I have an odd alternative. What if we weren't trying to "win" at life? What if we weren't searching for examples of lemonade made out of the lemons - positive tasty products that prove that the dark, the painful, the abusive can be transformed by our creative efforts into something opposite - light, pleasant, correctly or well-used. What then? I certainly agree that it is hard to hear/feel/see such outcomes as moving out from the family, or even dying as a fitting end for a tale worth telling. Aristotle wrestled mightily with that question in his Poetics as he could see without a doubt that his community gained something powerful and perhaps even necessary, VITAL (that's a curious word in consider stories that end in death) from seeing/undergoing tragedy. That empathically undergoing the fate of Oedipus led to catharsis - a vital movement of the soul that gave it paradoxically more life! Think of the Oedipus Trilogy or the Orestia, or the Shakespearean tragedies. Not English literature majors but the entire community of the polis, the general public, thronged to hear such tragedies told again and again. I guess I speak up here to remind us that audiences haven't always demanded to have "postive outcomes" to justify the worth of undergoing difficult stories. There is something beyond the rational mind that I trust finds meaning and value in such stories. "Though lovers be lost, Love shall not" says Dylan Thomas, "And death shall have no dominion." Christopher Maier Afterthoughts: And certainly I am not suggesting that it is "better" - more virtuous to stay than to leave if one is feeling abused by certain tellings of tales. By all means leave if one must. Perhaps I am hoping to split the apparent dichotomy of the two choices that we gravitate towards seeing as the only choices: either be abused by the harsh stories or else make "good" use of them. The leap of faith is a letting go, letting life happen, sitting in the fire itself. That's one time that miracles happen. And miracles cannot be coerced to happen! >> Gail Rosen, storyteller 410-486-3551 721 Howard Rd. Pikesville MD 21208 NEW website: www.GailRosen.com Check out the Healing Story Alliance website: www.HealingStory.org Burnout prevention workshops for hospice: www.HealThy-Self.net ------------------------------- To Unsubscribe from Healingstory send the message: unsubscribe healingstory to: listserv@maelstrom.stjohns.edu ------------------------------- | ||