New Stories Needed

In my new essay, What Will Replace the Hero's Journey, on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog, I explore the skepticism generated by reliance on the hero's journey narrative: person goes on journey, is challenged, resolves challenges, and is transformed. I offer several examples of authentic stories that reflect the complexity and messiness of life, and that are currently being publicly shared by organizations.

An excerpt:

Familiarity can be extremely comforting. In a hero’s journey, there are definitive winners, villains, benefactors, and plot twists. It certainly accelerates message comprehension: You too—if you act similarly—can be a hero.

But familiarity can also, ultimately, breed skepticism. And if audiences are becoming skeptical of such pat storylines, what, if anything, might replace the common hero’s journey?

Click here to read the full post.

Happy Galileo's Birthday!

"There will be opened a gateway and a road to a large and excellent science into which minds more piercing than mine shall penetrate to recesses still deeper."

- Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)


[h/t: The Writer's Almanac]

Jung Slices His Brain.

An excerpt from "The Red Book (Liber Novus)" by Carl Gustav Jung (1875 - 1961):


The Cabiri:  "We forged a flashing sword for you, with which you can cut the knot that entangles you."

I:  "I take the sword firmly in my hand. I lift it for the blow."

The Cabiri:  "We also place before you the devilish, skillfully twined knot that locks and seals you. Strike, only sharpness will cut through it."

I:  "Let me see, the great knot, all wound round! Truly a masterpiece of inscrutable nature, a wily natural tangle of roots grown through one another! Only Mother Nature, the blind weaver, could work such a tangle! A great snarled ball and a thousand small knots, all artfully tied, intertwined, truly, a human brain! Am I seeing straight? What did you do? You set my brain before me! Did you give me a sword so that its flashing sharpness slices through my brain? What were you thinking of?"

The Cabiri:  "The womb of nature wove the brain, the womb of the earth gave the iron. So the Mother gave you both: entanglement and severing."

 ______
Notes: 
Jung's Red Book was the most influential unpublished book, ever. Almost a century after it was begun, it was published in 2009 in a facsimile edition, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani.
This passage appears on pp. 166-167.
The Cabiri were ancient deities.

A thought for the Labor Day weekend.

"Our Western education teaches us caution. And so we hesitate before crossing the great waters. We wouldn't want, would we, to throw ourselves away? Realizing we might have been elected President of the United States, we want somehow to settle for a life not too ignoble. Well, there's always Madison Avenue. And it needs us to keep itself going."

- from John Cage's 1961 "Lecture on Commitment" in "A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage", 1969.

What a relief!

Mark Trail has flown to safety.

Mark Trail, superhero?

Mark Trail is hiding in a closet.

You read it here first!

We "predict" that, this Saturday, Mark Trail will wind up on a secret island inhabited and controlled by nasty drug smugglers.

"... I took black coffee ..."

"For fifteen days I struggled to prove that no functions analogous to those I have since called Fuchsian functions could exist; I was then very ignorant. Every day I sat down at my work table where I spent an hour or two; I tried a great number of combinations and arrived at no result. One evening, contrary to my custom, I took black coffee; I could not go to sleep; ideas swarmed up in clouds; I sensed them clashing until, to put it so, a pair would hook together to form a stable combination. By morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those derived from the hypergeometric series. I had only to write up the results which took me a few hours."

- Jules Henri Poincaré (1854 – 1912), excerpted from "Science et Methode" (1908)

NeuroCooking goes to Hollywood!

In the 2006 crime thriller "Lucky Number Slevin", when title character Slevin Kelevra, played by Josh Harnett, says that he suffers from a condition called atarexia, he is referring to a word (Ἀταραξία) from ancient Greek philosophy that translates roughly to "tranquility", and which was used by the Epicureans to refer to "the only true happiness available to a person".

"A healthy shove ..."

Time-traveling with Mark Trail does create a sense of responsibility: If we can see the future, aren't we obligated to act upon it? Which is why we say, today, regarding tomorrow: "Look out, Mark!"

[If you get a "permission denied" message, then click on this link, and then on the "Look out..!" link above. Cookies, I guess.]

29 September 1547

Happy Birthday, Miguel de Cervantes!

Everyone Loves a Hero

The archetypical narrative of the hero’s journey – protagonist encounters a challenge, overcomes the challenge, and triumphs over negative forces -- has deep roots in the human psyche. As Steven Denning so brilliantly writes in The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling,

All of us tend to see our own life as a journey with goals and obstacles that get in the way of attaining those goals. So when we hear a story in the form of the hero’s journey, we respond from the deepest reaches of the psyche. This familiar way of looking at the world may be an illusion. True life may actually be a muddle, in which we may never get around to formulating clear goals, so we don’t set out on any journey in which, after encountering obstacles along the way, we finally attain our goal.

We become grown-ups only to find that there are no easy answers (and, to further complicate matters, we can’t let the kids see that we don’t have all the answers). The simple, reliable, and comforting structure of the hero’s journey is in fact how we make sense of the muddle of our lives, how we view our experiences in the world and the experiences of those around us, and how we retell it. The hero’s journey is how we comprehend and derive meaning from our messy lives and the vexing world surrounding us.