Rule of Three

Aside | Posted on by

A miracle happened today. Our family saw a movie. In a theater. All the way through.

No small feat, given that this was our two-year-old’s first movie in a theater. Bear in mind, we have only ever been able to go to the movies in pairs since my youngest son was born: usually my older son goes with me, sometimes with my wife, and on rare occasions she with me. Never before had we dared take all four at the same time.

The film? Oz the Great and Powerful from Disney Pictures and Evil Dead director Sam Raimi.

To be sure, we stacked the deck. We picked an unlisted matinée held specifically for families with young kids: lights on, talking and walking allowed, no previews. We watched the original 1939 film with him to build a familiar visual context: green witches bad, flying monkeys scary, yellow bricks good. I held him on my lap while my wife sat between me and his older brother plying both with snacks. The amazing thing is that it worked. We had so prepared for the usual baton race we run at church and family events that it never occurred to us everyone might simply sit back and enjoy the film.

We definitely were not in Kansas anymore.

And what a treat it was. Despite its flaws, Oz managed to keep all four of us in our seats, excited and occasionally giggling for more than two hours. For my wife and older son, it was an exiting fantasy adventure. For me, the Baum purist, it was a great new story that walked an impossible line of remaining almost perfectly faithful both to the back-story from Baum’s original books and the classic 1939 musical they inspired. For my youngest son, it was something fun to watch and talk about while we scarfed down popcorn and Raisinettes.

It dawned on me that we were looking at a new third act in our family life, one where the juggling of priorities between two parents and two kids might actually start to get easier, where every simple family activity wouldn’t require planning of near military precision. Where Act I was the story of becoming new parents, and Act II was about adapting to the competing demands of children of different ages and different schedules, I could now imagine an Act III consisting of the four of us walking arm in arm the same direction. Remember those “Optimistic Voices” when Dorothy’s foursome finally had the Emerald City in sight?

Yeah, something like that.

And that imaginary third act has tremendous power precisely because it is imaginary. It is compelling because it hasn’t happened, but it feels right and necessary. In storytelling, this is known as the “Rule of Three.” It’s a  simple rhetorical device stating how narrative elements are most satisfying when they recur in threes, that in fact we wait and listen expectantly for that third element to introduce itself. Whether it is friends met on the yellow brick road, or refrains in a song, or the cadenced sound bites in political speeches and corporate presentations, it just sounds right and feels best when it happens in threes. [Re-read that last sentence and you'll see what I mean]. In Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech you feel its full power: he says it nine times (three times in groups of three). Ever since Beowulf, English readers have been conditioned to look for the transcendence of the Rule of Three in the stories we tell and the lives we live: Beowulf wrestles Grendel and becomes a champion. Beowulf defeats Grendel’s mother and is made King. Beowulf dies battling the Dragon and becomes savior of the kingdom.

Looking to our own lives as stories, that Rule of Three moves us because it breaks through another storytelling motif that shapes and often traps us. This past week, in response to a DC Comics storyline in which Damien Wayne, the son of Batman and his newest Robin, was killed in action, long-time comic book writer Paul Levitz said:

A wise editor once told me that in the end, there are two great stories: good man turns bad and bad man turns good. By that token, Damian’s journey and end is one of the greater tragedies in the long Batman canon.

While Levitz is a skilled enough writer to be speaking about a more nuanced idea, his words help illustrate the dualistic simplicity we fall prey to. Catastrophe or eucatastrophe. Damnation or redemption. Dark or light. This or that. One thing or the other, and never the twain shall meet.

When applied to a life off the printed page, that kind of thinking builds cages. We were young, but now we are old. We were free, but now we are trapped. We were rich, but now we are poor. We were strong, but now we are weak.

The Rule of Three breaks through all that by showing a third act is not only possible, but necessary for the fulfillment of the story. Instead of a life lived in tragic opposites, those opposites can be combined to create something new. Life, in short, is more than just beginnings and endings. When we acknowledge the Rule of Three, if Act I is the past and Act II the present, then Act III consists of a future that is made when those two are brought together.

In other words, where our culture simply conditions us to look for sequels, we are hard-wired to look for trilogies instead. Even (perhaps especially) when they are not there. It is simply built into our storytelling mind.

As I left the theater, I realized Disney had just manufactured a trilogy with a classic film at its heart. MGM’s Wizard of Oz will of course live forever. But now it has not one but two companion films from Disney to stand around it like bookends: Oz the Great and Powerful (telling what came before) and the misunderstood Return to Oz from 1985 (telling what came after).

Neither the prequel or the sequel will ever stand on equal footing with Victor Fleming’s classic. Both are enjoyably flawed. But seen together, both wrap the author’s original vision around his most famous derivative work. For fans of the written original, that becomes a real treat. It feels all the more satisfying because we can experience something we love in the embrace of a trilogy.

I began thinking about other examples of such “found” trilogies, stories or films created independently but, because of shared elements in their universe or a common creative vision, are simply more satisfying to the audience to experience as a trilogy.

The Antarctic Horror Trilogy (Poe – Verne – Lovecraft)

"There arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure."

“There arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure.”

Imagine a trilogy of novels written by three masters of gothic horror and science fiction, spanning the bounds of madness and human life on Earth against the soul-biting backdrop of 19th Century Antarctic expeditions. Believe it or not, such a series exists, begun by none other than Edgar Allan Poe in his only complete novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Kind of a horrific precursor to Moby Dick, Poe’s tale starts as a high seas adventure before sending the characters further and further south, eventually shipwrecking them in Antarctica. There amid the frozen wastes and eerie pale birds screaming “tekeli-li” into the sky, our heroes’ narrative comes to an abrupt end, face to face with a mysterious shrouded figure in white. This enigmatic ending prompted Jules Verne to write his own sequel to the work, An Antarctic Mystery, which sent another expedition to account for the characters who disappeared in Poe’s original novel, unveiling their ultimate fate at the base of an enigmatic Ice Sphinx hidden in the Southern continent. In the 1930s, H.P. Lovecraft then took up the setting in his novella, At the Mountains of Madness, making it his own in a tale of lost underground cities built by ancient alien races in Antarctica, where their monstrous survivors still wander, devouring explorers and speaking in the forgotten language of Poe’s bird cries. Spooky as they come and, when read together, clearly comprise a shared trilogy by genre writers at the peak of their craft separated by decades.

Ridley Scott’s Replicant Trilogy

Pris the Replicant from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner

Pris the Replicant from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

Filmmaker Ridley Scott is responsible for some of the most thought-provoking and memorable science fiction brought to the screen. Although not direct sequels to one another, his classics Blade Runner, Prometheus and Alien form a dystopian yet very satisfying trilogy of sorts exploring the significance of synthetic humans known as replicants. Hunted down for bounty by a young Harrison Ford in Blade Runner’s 2019, the replicants have become a full-fledged slave race by 2089  serving aboard corporate starliners like Prometheus and Alien’s Nostromo in hazardous assignments. Typically the amoral villains of the films, they serve as a foil to the human characters’ own humanity, typically leading to catastrophic events through their literal adherence to corporate directives. When viewed as central characters uniting the three films into a shared universe, the replicants become proxies for the existential questions of the audience in gripping films that explore themes of human origins and fear of the unknown.

Ridley Scott’s Morocco Trilogy

Part of the Atlas Studios in Ouarzazate, Morocco. Used in Kingdom of Heaven. Photo by Zouavman Le Zouave

Part of the Atlas Studios in Ouarzazate, Morocco. Used in Kingdom of Heaven. Photo by Zouavman Le Zouave

Though set in other lands and centuries, three of Ridley Scott’s films made in Morocco share enough thematic unity to comprise a found trilogy, each set apart by almost precisely 1,000 years. Gladiator, set in Rome in 180 A.D. is one of my all-time favorite films, exploring the notion of honor, sacrifice and service to a Republic. More than a millennium later, in Jerusalem in 1184, Kingdom of Heaven revisits the notion of nation-building in a time when the certainty of Gladiator’s Rome has faded. Here, the fragments of Empire lead to competing military claims to the Holy Land. Both films resolve the moral conflict of the main characters in a similar way: once a kingdom corrupts, the true  general or knight will fight for its people. The 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, Somalia are dramatized in Black Hawk Down. Seen as the third installment of this military trilogy, it serves almost as a cautionary postscript to the other two films: as a highly professional elite squad sees a peacekeeping mission devolve into an international disaster, the soldiers soon find themselves fighting without a mandate, and solely for survival… at once both the highest and lowest of causes. Across this found trilogy, the civic values of Rome pass through the corrupting influence of the Crusades into the moral ambiguity of the modern world.

Star Trek Time Travel Trilogy

As a Trekkie, one of the most frustrating things about J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot film was that in changing the history of the future, it essentially wiped out every episode of every series and every motion picture released under the Star Trek banner to start fresh with a clean slate. The other most frustrating thing? How great it was. The film essentially restarts the  Star Trek timeline to reintroduce the classic characters in a visually updated setting, without any of the baggage of 40+ years of fan continuity. It did so in a gripping sci-fi adventure that was lovingly reverent of its legacy even as it cleared the foundation to build anew.

But wait! Maybe not all is lost. If the critical changes to the timeline happen in 2233, then although the rest of the 23rd and 24th Century stories no longer exist, those which happened in the past should remain (paradoxically) untouched. Which means that my two favorite original films, set in the past thanks to time travel, still count! Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home saw the Enterprise crew travel back to San Francisco in 1986 to collect a pair of Humpback Whales (extinct in their own time) to communicate with an alien menace in the future and repopulate the species. Similarly, Star Trek: First Contact saw the Next Generation cast pursue their nemesis, the Borg, back in time to the year 2063 to prevent alterations to their history (the very thing, in fact, that the new Star Trek brought about). So while the old classic adventures of Captains Kirk and Picard no longer exist in Star Trek’s future, they do remain in the past. So these three films can be viewed in chronological order as a kind of prehistory to a new Trek franchise, looking to the beginnings of Trek history in 20th Century San Francisco, on to First Contact with Vulcans in 2063 and finally the new adventures of the Starship Enterprise crew in a revised 23rd Century. I can’t wait for the new film this summer!

The beauty of the found trilogy is that it  opens closed stories to new possibilities. Old favorites can be seen in a new light, with connections to other parts of the past we never held together before. Old familiar futures can be rewritten when they no longer fit our present. Isn’t that worth the price of admission?

© Christopher W. Buckley and StoryWiseGuy, 2010-2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher W. Buckley and StoryWiseGuy with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Health de-Screening

Posted on by

As a parent, I know how hard it is to find quality advice I trust enough to act on. I also know how hard that good advice can be to follow when it goes head to head with my lifestyle. Imagine my surprise when, shortly after the birth of my first son, the American Academy of Pediatrics made a formal recommendation that television should be completely avoided for children under the age of two.

“Don’t even have the baby in the same room as a running television,” said our pediatrician. My wife and I took a moment to pick our jaws off the floor, before asking why.
As it turns out, because of critical brain development in the first two years, exposure to the fast-cut editing of broadcast video media is suspected to impact attention span later in childhood.
You may ask, “What about educational shows?” As it turns out, they seem to have no positive impact on skill development for children under two.
What were we going to do? My warm fantasy of cuddling as a new family on the couch for a family T.V. night with the sleeping baby just went out the window. At first, we put the baby to bed before watching our favorite shows. But we took a more radical step when we moved: selling the T.V., intending to buy another.
We never did. And you know what? We don’t mind.
We’ve adjusted to life on mini-screens, naturally scaling down our viewing to smaller doses of streaming content.
But more importantly, we read at the table, play board games, build legos and play trains.
One day, we may get another big screen. But not today.
Clearly, this path is not for every family.
But every family can and should think about their children’s media diet, at every age, as freely as we discuss nutrition, exercise and the risks of tobacco use.
In Media and Children, the AAP notes that excessive media use can lead to:
  • attention problems,
  • school difficulties,
  • sleep and eating disorders, and
  • obesity.
It makes the following health recommendations for families around media consumption:
  • limit total screen time to 1-2 hours/day (t.v., games, computers, cell phones), and make non-digital media available in the home (books, newspapers, board games, etc.)
  • watch television with older children and talk to them about the advertising that they see
  • establish “screen-free” zones with no televisions, computers of video games in bedrooms or at the dinner table
  • spend time outdoors and doing hobbies
  • avoid all television and video entertainment with infants and children under two

© Christopher W. Buckley and StoryWiseGuy, 2010-2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher W. Buckley and StoryWiseGuy with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Finding Mommy

Posted on by

For Mothers

Let me tell you a secret: everyone misses their mother.

It doesn’t matter who you are, how old she is, whether you live near or far away, or even how well you get along. You just do.

Shhh.

Don’t tell anyone. We’re not supposed to talk about it. Especially boys.

Our culture works hard 364 days a year to make motherhood something of a pathology. Think I’m kidding? Consider this: in order to provide new mothers the right to return to a job after the briefest of leave, the U.S. Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) had to categorize pregnancy and nursing motherhood as a kind of disability. Mother is a word we make insults out of on the playground. It is who we are teased for “running home to” when times are bad, literally and figuratively. Somehow, “mothering” connotes weakness.

All of this belies a truth we find too scandalous to tell: like it or not, human beings are social creatures, dependant upon intimacy. The simple biological fact of motherhood is proof positive that everyone, high-born or low, has only come into being through a connection to someone else. In a marketplace of people aspiring to be self-made, this makes us very nervous. We simply cannot become, all on our own.

One of the earliest psychological tasks of the developing child is to become aware of themself as something separate from the mother, literally learning  where “mother” ends and where “I” begin. That is why early bonding with a caregiver is so important during that first year: holding, nursing, singing, touching, looking into the eyes, rhyming. In today’s economy, families everywhere are challenged to find the best way to provide children sufficient access to their own mothers, as the mere 12 weeks offered by the FMLA falls woefully short. Like so many, our own family has made tremendous sacrifices so that our own two sons could benefit from their mother’s presence for as long as possible after their birth, and I will always be grateful that my wife made them the priority that she has.

Now that our youngest is two, we are entering new territory as I become the daytime caregiver for a few months while my wife tackles new consulting opportunities. Though it has been a beneficial arrangement, it takes some getting used to for all of us.

For instance, always a fan of “Little Critter,” my youngest son has suddenly settled on one book as his favorite naptime reading: Mercer Mayer’s “Just Me and My Mom.” Over and over again. Since my wife typically manages his evening bedtime routine, this gentle book offers something that he needs during the day to be reminded of his mother’s presence while relaxing with me. As anyone who has read “Little Critter” knows, the fun comes from Mayer’s playful contrast between the text and illustrations. Little readers instinctively get the difference between what Little Critter says and what he actually does, because it is often a reflection of their own thinking. “The city was very busy,” says a fearful Little Critter on his special day out with his mother. “I held Mom’s hand so she wouldn’t be scared.”

The playful, cartoonish style Mayer is best known for is very different from his early work. Another household Mayer favorite, “There’s a Nightmare in my Closet” from 1968, is so different from his work today that even adults fail to recognize they are from the same author. The prose, however, clearly comes from the same voice. If you close your eyes and listen, the funny story about the little boy frightening and befriending the monster in his closet might just as well be a Little Critter book. But instead of anthropomorphic country critters rendered in boldly inked lines, we have realistic suburban children in the detailed cross-hatching style that was typical of the day. Clearly, five years after “Where the Wild Things Are,” publishers wanted Maurice Sendak for their house style. In fact, I think I see a family resemblance. I have often wondered if Sendak’s fierce, yellow-eyed Wild Things from 1963 gave birth to the adorable Little Critter just 12 years later in Mayer’s “Just For You.”

Third Wild Thing from the right: Little Critter’s literary ancestor?

This is ironic, given the wild difference between each author’s take on childhood. Where Mayer tackles important childhood transitions with idyllic humor, Sendak famously dives into the shadowy unconscious and insecurity of childhood. The stuff mother doesn’t want to know.

In reality, childhood is deep and rich. It’s vital, mysterious and profound. I remember my own childhood vividly. I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them.

-Maurice Sendak with cartoonist Art Spiegelman in the New Yorker.

But there is more than a little wild thing in Little Critter, whose sweetness comes with a heaping dose of puckish misbehavior. And though he never idealizes childhood, Sendak’s towering mothers are always an essential force of nature: stern, unbridled love. Consider Sweet Adeline in “Bumble Ardy,” his 1970 collaboration with Jim Henson.

Even in “Wild Things,” Max’s revenge fantasy after being sent to his room without any supper may be cathartic, but after sailing back into the night of his very own room he finds his supper waiting for him “…and it was still hot.”

That firm maternal tenderness can be easy to miss in Sendak, because it is so understated, but it is what ties his Wild Things to the world of Little Critter, and all the children’s literature that follows in his wake.

After all the bedtime stories have been read, there is one theme that keeps emerging: the search for the mother as the search for the self. Typically in this type of picture book, a small animal goes searching for its lost mother, encountering one species after another until it finds someone it resembles. I first noticed it in “Are You My Mother?” a lesser known work by Dr. Seuss’ protegé, P.D. Eastman.

A baby bird looks for its mother

But there are many more. One recent example is “Little Owl Lost” by newcomer, Chris Haughton…

A baby owl looks for its mother

…again in Julia Donaldson’s “Where’s My Mom?”…

A baby monkey looks for its mother

…and of course in the greatest “Who’s Your Mommy?” book ever written, Robert McCloskey’s “Blueberries for Sal.”

A baby girl and a baby bear find each other’s mothers (and somehow avoid a fatal mauling!)

The theme is so prevalent in children’s literature, it almost goes unnoticed. Sendak even parodied it himself in his first pop-up book, “Mommy?” In it, a small child searches for his mother without fear in a spooky haunted house, until the surprise twist at the end reveals why.

A little boy looks for his lost mother, finds the Bride of Frankenstein

Now more than ever, we need books about mothers. We need our own connection restored, and we need to forge it fresh for our own children all year round, after all the Mother’s Day cards have been taken off the shelves. It takes more than Hallmark platitudes to forge character. The bleak realism of Sendak’s books is an answer to the modern cynicism that tries to segment the mother into disposable or marketable stereotypes (“soccer mom,” “tiger mom,” “working mom,” “blogger mom,” etc.) In children’s literature, “Mother” means a return to civilizing love. She is how we remember who we are and find the way home.

© Christopher W. Buckley and StoryWiseGuy, 2010-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher W. Buckley and StoryWiseGuy with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

sdc14207

Sharing a World

Posted on by

My sons absolutely adore each other. It is becoming a real problem.

Seriously.

Imagine, if you will, a typical morning:

  • 0500 hours – Beta awakens (age: 20 months). Not yet ready to start the day, we contain him in our room where our little iPad prodigy serves as a biological snooze button thanks to immersive apps from Nosy Crow and PBS Kids.
  • 0540 – Verbal coin toss (winner gets to fetch coffee, loser gets to dress first). Objective: establish one functional parental unit prior to Alpha coming online.
  • 0545 – Alpha comes online (age: 5 years). Begins infiltration of sleeping quarters. Parent on duty relatively defenseless. Orders to stand down go largely unheeded.
  • 0550 – Brotherly affection commences. Unsolicited hugging interrupts iPad engagement. Junior sibling responds to disproportionate arms with evasive maneuvers and warning sirens. Senior sibling sulks. Neighbors awaken.
  • 0555 – Shower cut short. Joint show of force from parental units needed to enforce a DMZ defined by a huggy pillow.
  • 0600 – All you need is love. Unilateral peace talks commence. Beta violates accord to pounce affectionately on Alpha. U.N. observers use humanitarian food aid to begin breakfast and diaper change cycles to restore calm.

Gearing myself up to manage sibling rivalry, I was largely unprepared for the opposite challenge: two boys who are so physically affectionate, they annoy each other. It is a different twist on “learning to share.” Sharing isn’t sharing until both people want to. Do not take a hug until it has been offered. “Helping out” can also be a way of “taking over.” Doing something “for” is not the same as doing something “with” your little brother.

Often my wife and I focus our efforts on simply getting the two to inhabit the same space. Forget playing together. Nothing is going to entertain both a five- and a two-year old for very long. When one brother decides the other is more fun to play with than Fisher-Price, hugs and kisses become shoves and tears.  This is profoundly upsetting to our oldest son, who just can’t fathom what the problem is.

“I just want to give him a hug,” is a common refrain, after he has been pushed away. “I just want to show him how to do it” he’ll say tearfully, the unwitting king of a mountain of toys annexed from his little brother. It seems that the hardest lesson in the world to learn is that a hug will come in its own time. If he just waits for it, and gives his little brother time, he will almost always be surprised with a big squeeze from behind.

Don’t get me wrong. We want them to play together. We just want them both to recognize they are playing with another person. It is less about learning to share a toy than about learning to share a world.

I look for small ways to help the older realize his brother is not merely a supporting role in his story, but has a story of his own. It’s a lesson I want them to take to heart about  humanity in general.  I have found a few picture books that help my cause.

“Good Night Gorilla“ is a special favorite of my youngest right now. Peggy Rathmann’s wordless tale of a gorilla freeing the animals in a zoo to stage an uninvited slumber party in Mr. Zookeeper’s bedroom seems custom-made to appeal to little ones struggling to sleep all night in their own bed. The absence of words makes it a highly interactive book, almost an app on paper, that is better explored than read. Our toddler flips the pages himself, making each animal’s sound. Part of the magic comes from Rathmann’s use of small background details that tell simple running stories of their own alongside the main attraction. On each page, a mouse struggles to lay claim to a banana, while a balloon set adrift on page 1 continues to drift about on the edges of the action. Taking these at first to be sight gags for the benefit of the reading parent, I have come to appreciate them as a way to introduce even the youngest reader to the concept of multiple narratives.  Sometimes we read the book to laugh at Gorilla. Sometimes, we just play “where is the balloon?”

It is a technique Rathmann uses in many of her works. In the lesser known but even more slapstick “10 Minutes Till Bedtime,” a family of tourist hamsters gives a child a welcome excuse to drag out the bedtime countdown. Amazingly, each hamster has its own character gag that can be followed independently from one page to the next. But most magical of all is the subtle reveal, about halfway through the book. When the child looks out the door upon the throngs of hamsters lining up in his front yard, silhouetted in the distant background we see the familiar “Good Night, Gorilla” menagerie marching out of the zoo and into Mr. Zookeeper’s house! When the child notices it for the first time, it can be a magical moment. “Rira!” ["Gorilla!"] my son shouts whenever he sees it now.

Not only do both books take place in the same neighborhood, but they take place simultaneously on the same fictional night. It is a highly complex idea planted with the greatest of ease for even pre-reading toddlers to enjoy: main characters in one book are the background in another, and all have their own story to tell.

If you read enough children’s literature by any one author, such playful intertextuality is everywhere. Margaret Wise Brown’s “The Runaway Bunny” visually quotes her immortal “Goodnight Moon,” with interesting metaphysical fallout. A mother bunny assures her baby that there is no place he can hide from her love:

"If you become a fish in a trout stream, I will become a fishman and I will fish for you"

Not only does the image curiously appear as a painting on the wall in her earlier book, but Goodnight Moon’s “great green room” itself appears as the final proof of the mother’s love, essentially making the entirety of “Goodnight Moon” nothing more than the final waking fantasy of the Runaway Bunny as he gently falls asleep.

Even the venerable Doctor Seuss twists his own works in on themselves this way. Last month, when visiting Whoville with the Grinch, did you think to connect it with “Horton Hears A Who“… where the entire town, Mount Crumpit and all, is located on a small speck of dust about to be boiled in Beezelnut Oil?

Worlds within worlds, and lives within lives. What affects one story, affects all others it touches. That is the essential survival truth we could all do well to learn, so where better to introduce it than children’s books? After all “a person’s a person, no matter how small.”

© Christopher W. Buckley and StoryWiseGuy, 2010-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher W. Buckley and StoryWiseGuy with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

23548804

Moo!

Posted on by

I love it when my kids rediscover long forgotten books from my own early childhood.  I don’t mean childhood favorites. I mean books I last saw before I was able to read myself. These are books of which I had no adult recollection whatsoever until accidentally re-reading them to my own kids dredged up visceral memories of a picture…

From "Old Hat New Hat" by Stan & Jan Berenstain

…or a key phrase.

"Mr. and Mrs. Whitaker didn't know when it was time to go to bed anymore and Herman didn't know when it was time to begin to prowl anymore. And as for Miss Oliver, she didn't know when she was to wake up anymore and went on sleeping. And Georgie sat up in the attic and moped. That was a fine how-do-you-do!"

It is simply amazing what reading locks away in the pre-literate mind. Encountering these books again unlocks more than the stories themselves. It unlocks the world in which they were read: the living room of my first childhood home, the color of the sofa, what was on the coffee table, my first room when I was an only child, the record player in the corner. The stories unlock memories, which in turn secure continuity.

One forgotten book that has emerged as a new standard in our house is the lesser known Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? by Dr. Seuss. This is the good doctor’s treatment of onomatopoeia, or words that act as sound effects. Mr. Brown had completely faded into my unconscious until I rediscovered it with my sons. Whether in print, or on Ocean House Media’s iPad app, rarely does a day begin without the familiar refrain:

Oh, the wonderful things

Mr. Brown can do!

He can go like a cow.

He can go Moo! Moo!

Mr. Brown can do it.

How about you?

The fun of the book is the escalating absurdity of each sound effect (my favorite: the gum-chewing hippopotamus – “Grum! Grum! Grum! Grum! Grum! Grum! Grum!”) as they combine in typically Seussian rhyme schemes. It has been especially fun to read to my son between the age of one year and eighteen months. As he develops the capacity for speech, the book is becoming an active call and response, with him offering up his own cute little version of each sound effect as we turn the pages.

Me: He can go like a cow. He can go…

Him: Moooooo! [with extra pursy little toddler lips]

It is a lot of fun for both of us.

Recently, he visited the Little Farm at the Bay Area’s terrific regional Tilden Park and got up close and personal with livestock that had until then been confined to the printed page. Sitting in his stroller, he pointed and called out noises while big brother fed them celery. The sheep (“Me-eeeeehhh!”) and pigs (we’re still working on that one) were a delight. But the cow was something else entirely. It must have seemed monstrous: a massive head poking over a towering fence to gobble up the feed my older son held out, its deep, lowing “MooooooAAAAh!” completely unlike the cartoonish Mr. Brown’s. Suffice it to say, he was startled and, as a result, now imbues the word “Moo!” with rich layers of personal meaning.

When I got home from work, and learned about his day from my wife, we were all amused to hear him regale us with his own version of the outing. Lacking sentences, he still excitedly joined in the conversation, holding his hands over his head and straining for words to encapsulate the shock and awe of it all: “Mu… dat… dah… MOOOOO!” [eyes wide] It was all he could talk about for days. In fact, it became an ongoing litany expressing… well not terror, but cautious excitement. Now each day, well beyond the events of the farm, he uses it in new contexts, whenever he encounters something that is both unsettling and amazing in his eyes: tall strangers, the stuffed lion in the library, big dogs all elicit a babbled sentence ending in a wide-eyed “Moo!” It is no longer about a cow, but an experience the cow opened him to. Perhaps the closest emotional analogue is the biblical concept of “fear” as in “fear of the LORD,” a reverential approach to a trusted yet dangerous presence surpassing all human capacities.

"MOOOOOO?"

As human beings, we approach the unfamiliar through the familiar. From stories we build stories, and from those we build the ideas which become communities and futures. According to Biblical scholar and Dead Sea Scrolls translator James A. Sanders, in fact, that’s what story (specifically the religious variety) is for.

In graduate school, long before I worked in technology public relations, I had the distinct pleasure of studying briefly under Sanders. Among his many distinctions (discovering a new psalm while preserving and translating the Dead Sea Scrolls notwithstanding), he stands out among most professors of Christian Biblical literature for having earned his doctorate at Hebrew Union College. A charming, funny and brilliant man, his lectures are laced with humor and he succeeds in slim academic volumes where others need whole tomes to fail. In his classic work of canonical criticism, Torah and Canon, Sanders observes that the essential nature of Torah is not legal text, but story:

Basically the word Torah means “instruction.” It is derived from a Semitic root meaning to cast or throw… Neither the ancient Hebrew nor Greek Old Testament manuscript traditions use the word Torah (Greek, nomos) to designate the Pentateuch… Within Old Testament usage it denotes bodies of instruction or teachings of priests, prophets and sages and even of parental advice to children.

Its essential concern is not moral regulation, but survival:

Judah was made aware of her ancient Mosaic heritage and identity in a manner so persuasive and pervasive that when the Babylonian threat to her existence materialized… her very survival was predicated on nothing more substantial than a memory, a story she carried with her to prison: “A wandering [or perishing] Aramean was my father…” (Deut. 26:5). There remained no Temple to bolster her spirits, no Jerusalem to encourage her trust, no political or social institution to which to rally.

But there was a story…

Apparently the story was quite elastic, able to include as many details as the particular occasion required but reduceable to three indispensable pivotal points – the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert, and the conquest of the land.

In a mere 100 pages, he documents the many expanded recitals of this Torah meme that make up the Hebrew Bible, illustrating how it results in a final received text that functions effectively to preserve the identity of a people in periods of exile and radical discontinuity: both for Judaism, and later for its younger sibling Christianity.

My mooing son is telling me just such a story, at least as best he can with his Mr. Brown vocabulary. Unable to describe fully what he means, he resorts to telling a story instead, one that recreates his own experience so he can share it with me. Granted, his tale is comprised of just one word, but it is enough. It is his Torah recital. With identity and language still in formation, he seeks the power of “Moo!” to create continuity out of discontinuity and to collect his family in the shared experience. We should all be so clever.

A little child can do it.

How about you?

To help you contemplate the fine art of personal torah, here are my top five favorite films in which story-telling is the key to survival.

5) Limbo

People telling stories are at the heart of every John Sayles films, but few use onscreen storytelling to create such a palpable sense of dread and anticipation as “Limbo,” his 1999 film about uncertainty and survival in a small Alaskan town. For family viewing, I also recommend his dreamy classic “The Secret of Roan Inish,” where stories unearth Irish family secrets about a lost brother taken by sea fairies. 

4) The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings

I explored in an earlier post how the strength of Tolkien’s writing is his world-building. The Lord of the Rings comes fully alive in each new reading because the characters depend entirely on a set of shared stories, epic poems and folk histories to navigate their way through the impossible… stories that the author created separately (in fictional ancient languages, no less!) to give his characters a shared culture.

3) The Usual Suspects

Stories, within stories, within lies, within the truth. One of the few thrillers that is not spoiled on repeat viewings by knowing the secret of the big reveal at the end. Granted, it is a master criminal telling the stories for his own personal survival, so it is sort of the exception that proves the rule of this post. Still, as a movie about people telling false stories about each other, it remains the greatest movie about deception ever made. Runner up: Kurosawa’s Rashomon.

2) Star Trek: The Next Generation – Darmok

Come on. Hobbits already made the list, so you knew Star Trek had to pop up eventually, right? In all seriousness, even non-Trekkies should be moved by this all-time classic episode. The captain of the Enterprise is trapped alone on a dangerous planet with a commander from an unknown race whose entire language is comprised of nothing but folk tales. But without a common culture to recognize one another’s story references, how can they ever communicate and survive? Featuring a stellar guest performance by the late Paul Winchell, this one earns bonus points for rescuing the “Epic of Gilgamesh” from freshman year reading lists.

1) A Charlie Brown Christmas

Never was there a more poignant moment of storytelling put to film. Ever. Think about it: a cartoon character is reading the King James Bible on network television without even the benefit of a soundtrack. Yet the sheer, unadorned simplicity and innocence of Linus’ moment brings millions of people to tears every year, be they believers, the unconvinced or those otherwise spoken for. Greatest story ever told.

© Christopher W. Buckley and StoryWiseGuy, 2010-2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher W. Buckley and StoryWiseGuy with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Essential Troll and Child Care

Posted on by

“I want to go with him,” my four year-old said sadly. “It’s my job to make sure he is safe.”

We had just said a bedtime prayer for his little brother who was starting a brief stay in a daycare the next day while my wife explored a part-time contract. We’ve been very lucky. After the birth of each of my children, my wife has made tremendous sacrifices to keep both kids at home and under our own care much longer than the average working family. Thanks to all the stars aligning with work flexibility, time-shifting our jobs, assistance from family, well-timed job changes, sheer dumb luck, preschool and camp schedules, we have, for the most part, remained the sole caregivers of both our children. Our intent has always been to make preschool their first introduction to being apart from us. This time however, we had no choice, and our youngest would be spending a few brief hours  in “play school” a couple of days a week.

It wasn’t our first choice. Experience has confirmed for us that children typically fare better emotionally in individual or family care settings than in group care when they are infants, feeling more secure in familiar surroundings and able to eat and nap on their preferred schedule, not the program’s. This was certainly true for our first son who benefitted greatly from being able to spend the four hours a day my wife worked at home in the care of a part-time nanny. But even that solution left us burnt after two of our three caregivers left us hanging without notice. We had neither the time nor the trust to relive the opening scenes of Mary Poppins yet again, so we managed to talk ourselves into the less-preferred scenario. I was actually rather proud that it was my first son who took the most convincing.

“What if he gets scared, and doesn’t know where we are?” he asked.

“It’s our job to keep you both safe,” I said. “We will never take you somewhere that is bad for you, and we will always come get you ourselves. Mommy and Daddy will always come back for you both.”

Realizing this was as much about him heading into kindergarten soon as for his little brother I added: “Did one of us always come pick you up from preschool?”

He nodded.

“That’s because we want you to be with us and not with anyone else. Maybe you can tell him about that so that he will feel better too”

Our older son rarely shows separation anxiety. A few minutes in a play group or a birthday party and he doesn’t even know I am saying goodbye. He navigates new groups of kids with relative ease, and we hoped for as much with his younger brother who, though a social butterfly at 16 months, was still an unknown quantity.

As a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about trolls.

Not the Internet variety, the real ones.

My favorite myths have always been the Norse variety, largely because of the trolls. Sure, Greek myths dominate Western literature and have cooler monsters. Their stories are better known and often more memorable. The Celts give us fairies and battles and tales of misty longing, but the names are unpronounceable to those of us raised with Saxon sensibilities. Native American and African stories are ripe with tricksters and animal wisdom. But when it comes to sheer Northern otherness, that sense of being vastly lost where none can be found, beyond warmth, beyond human caring, it doesn’t get any stranger and more compelling than the great trolls of Norse and Scandinavian myth. Creatures like these can only be born in imaginations surrounded by ice and unquenchable winters. Where other cultures have mythologies, the Norse have trolls: bigger than any particular tales about them, as hostile and monolithic as the mountains themselves.

Everyone probably knows something about them. They are essentially the “frost giants” or jötunn, living in vast frozen wastes, inside mountains or other isolated Northern places. Larger, uglier and frequently stupider than humans, they live wild, sleep rough or under bridges and eat what they capture. Goats are especially favored. They may have one head, six or any number in between. They come with the cold. In most stories, they have a disturbing ability to scent human (specifically Christian) blood. Resembling people, though very much not, they eat humans and can often be bested through trickery once lulled into a drunken or gluttonous stupor, especially by their captive human wives. When lured into the light of day, they are reduced to stone. Trolls are the very essence of something disturbingly not-us: bigger than winter, as unconcerned as a boulder with human affairs or beliefs, hungry as a mountain pass and twice as remote. They are a force of nature given human shape, and yet something more, which is what makes them so compelling in tales. Should you find yourself in the company of trolls, you are beyond the reach of human geography. Only guile, divine intervention or a little help from magic will see you safely home again.

One peculiar aspect of these tales is the sibling rescue. In troll tales, the central character is typically an oldest daughter or a youngest son setting out to rescue their lost siblings, and finding a husband or a fortune  along the way. When all is said and done, after the North Wind or an enchanted reindeer has carried them as far as they can go, once all the tricks have played out and magical items have been used up, it is simply the determination born of the sibling bond that sees the hero through to the happy ending. As a storytelling parent, I find this interesting for two reasons:

1) Love is more than romance - We have grown so accustomed to romantic love as the one driving concern of Western fairy tales, it is really refreshing to find stories beating with another heart entirely, one that is far more approachable to a vast majority of children. Looking for the missing brother or sister is a far more immediate concern for the pre-adolescent than looking for their one true love. What if, instead of generations of little girls and boys raised tremulously pondering “love’s first kiss” from birth, our stories instead idealized the child who “brought their brother or sister home?”

2) Blood runs thicker than grief - The stories we do typically tell about brothers or sisters seemingly spring from the presumption of rivalry. Somewhere between Cain’s “Am I my brother’s keeper” and Cinderella’s jealous stepsisters, our culture’s pervasive myth of the sibling as bully/pest was born. As they grow, my sons won’t need any help finding ways to annoy each other.  As a father, I welcome stories that offer a balancing force to bring them together.

Strangely, Scandinavian myth is a treasure trove of tales where a central, redeeming love is that of a sibling rather than a lover. In these stories, the warmth of fraternal responsibility is celebrated as a social ideal, and held up in sharp contrast to the inhuman society of trolls as the symbol of its (North) polar opposite.

 

One of the best I have read is the amazing (and sadly out of print) tale, “A Ride on the Red Mare’s Back,” an original tale convincingly styled after traditional Norse motifs, written by the science fiction great Ursula Le Guin. In it, a girl sets out to rescue a brother, taken by trolls during his first hunting trip, armed with nothing more than a warm coat and an enchanted wooden toy horse carved by her father. After following the trolls to their “high house” in the mountain, the girl sneaks through the caverns into a troll nursery, while her enchanted toy horse creates a distraction outside:

The room was huge, like a cave, and full of smoke from the torches. Around and across it children raced – troll-children, little ones and bigger ones, screaming and yelling, chasing and hitting, tripping and grabbing, throwing things, yanking things, breaking things. Under a sputtering torch, several large troll-children were twisting the arms of a smaller one to make it scream. On a pile of smashed toys and furniture one troll-child stood, bellowing, “I won! I’m king! I won!” Near the doorway two troll-babies, filthy dirty, sat shivering in a heap of wet rags, weeping in high voices. In the middle of the room a thin troll-child had made a fire of trash and was cooking something over it on a stick. And far across the room four or five troll-children were fighting over a toy of some kind, or perhaps something to eat. They were screaming and struggling and hitting one another. She looked at them and saw that one of them was not a troll-child, but her brother.

This passage in particular stands out, both for its imagery and its use of the troll. Beyond being mere winter giants, Le Guin’s trolls capture another essential aspect of the symbolism: the troll is inhuman. They stand for the opposite of human connection. Trolls use insecurity and scarcity to cultivate the selfishness and brutality needed to thrive in their wintry world. Because strength is domination, need is to be met only with neglect. In the rules of story, then, trolls are not meant to be evil. They are meant to be us. Or rather, the “us” we become when conditions are wrong. They are what every parent fears our children will become without us (or, on bad days perhaps, because of us). That is why the brother or sister is their natural opposite in these tales: not a parent, not a lover, they come to the rescue simply because they are connected. Troll tales are literally the stories that move us from bullying to brotherhood. For the modern reader, like me, who question which is truly our natural state, they offer the light of day in response. When the sun finally rises, all in the story are seen for what they are: trolls are reduced to standing stones, brothers and sisters are restored to family. Which do you choose?

Our own choice became clear soon enough. Our daycare center was playful, fun and supportive, the women who staffed it, hard-working, caring and attentive. Nothing like the troll cave above, it was still wrong for our child. Within two weeks, our happy, friendly 15-month old who liked to wave at passersby became a frightened, insecure mess who panicked into full meltdown whenever one of us left the room, even if the other was holding him. Each drop-off grew more traumatic than the last, and he needed more soothing after every pick-up. Separation anxiety grew worse each day, rather than better. Night terrors were kicking in at night. Daycare may have been making work easier, but it was also making life harder. It was time for a change.

Since then, we have brought it all home to much better effect. For now, we have to make do with a patchwork of part-time of babysitters, while my wife and I stage an intensive tag-team effort around the eldest’s kindergarten schedule. It is hard on us both, but it is easier on the family and on our kids. You may read this as an indictment of the dual-income family. If so, read it again. Since we are working parents, the truth is more complex than that.

I would point out, however, that it is not the parents in troll stories who rescue their sons and daughters. It is only other sons and daughters who both see the danger of being in the company of trolls and are moved to do something about it. Given that these are stories passed down by the descendants of Vikings, that is a surprisingly astute observation about modern family life and the myopia that working parents can exhibit when we let market dynamics or peer pressure decide what is good for our kids. If the stories are to be believed, the whole point is to free them from the “troll cave,” wherever they may experience it.

© Christopher W. Buckley and StoryWiseGuy, 2010-2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher W. Buckley and StoryWiseGuy with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Featured image © 2003 Howard Dickins, Flickr
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/