So I'm back several months later (this one is worth rereading) and want to wrestle a bit with something that bugged me the first time around:
"In every single case I’ve named in this article so far, including those bands and books and films I would personally be uncomfortable with a youngster in my charge hearing or seeing or reading, the concerns behind the censorious impulses (including my own) are not just entirely misguided, they are contrary to the maintenance of a healthy mind and culture."
I'll admit I was bugged by this, a tickling at the back of the brain. On re-read I think I two other parts clarified what that tickle was.
First off I hate dismissing those tickles which you admit to ("including my own"), but I still struggle to explain them. But I think I can get there by analogy.
I really like jazz but that came from a deliberate choice. When I was in HS (sophomore year I think) I decided I wanted to be into jazz. I'd been around some in band but the real drive was "cool" and "intellectual" people were into jazz (even in 1983 I was stuck in 1963). So I went to the mall and at the record store bought my first two jazz albums. The first was the pretty mainstream jazz fusion (both were jazz fusion, actually) Freetime by Spyro Gyra.
The second, though, was "I Sing the Body Electric" by Weather Report. To say that was a jump off the deep end is an understatement. I listened to it once and didn't take it out of the sleeve for a long time.
But I listened to Freetime a lot and wound up buying more jazz albums (although it would be over a decade before I bought most people's starter, "Kind of Blue"). By 1985 I had even bought more Weather Report. To this day unlike most people my age I don't associate D&D with heavy metal but with the album "Night Passage" by Weather Report due to many nights after work as a senior putting it on and reading Dragon or working on D&D campaigns.
So what does that have to do with keeping books out of the hand of children we are responsible for?
Would I still being putting on "Night Passage" if I'd only bought "I Sing the Body Electric"?
Probably not. I would have been too lost in a musical space I lacked the reference points to navigate.
And making sure children under your care have the reference points to navigate a symbolic space isn't unreasonable.
Now, is it a huge danger if they try? Maybe but more often than not probably not. I doubt I was ready for LotR or Dune my first foray but I came to understand them. So, I doubt I'd worry too much although (and here we get to the first clarification) if they get that ideologically blinded state I saw some people get reading Marx or Rand I might want to say "let's finish that latter after we read this first" and get them a prep text.
But other things if I didn't think they'd been exposed to the basic symbols in a more digestible form I don't think preventative intervention (again, with a "this first") is wrong. Is the average thirteen year old ready to process "The 120 Days of Sodom"? (hell, am I). Probably not although perhaps if they'd spent as much time with the Old Testament as you, maybe. Still, depending on the reason for interest I suspect I'd point them different directions initially.
And I think understand that is a real and valid concern helps explain something else you said:
"The moralists, the traditionalists, the theologians, and the priests attach themselves to the dream. They parasitize it, because its power is vast, and then they try to conquer it so that nobody else can legitimately wield that vast power. "
I think this concern we naturally have, to want to see people listen to Spyro Gyra before Weather Report so they have the grounding to actually process the later, is what the moralist hijack. They appeal to the sense of "not yet" and "how about this first" which is aimed at building a tool set (you might say to get people to 30 hammers) before tackling things things that will need all those tools while quietly substituting "not ever" and "only this".
"It is thus no coincidence that, in our society, it is the luminaries (the artists, the entrepreneurs, the politicians, the shadowy financiers) who, for both good and ill, still know how to dream and are all familiar with the ancient symbols and thought-forms (i.e. the occult)"
I am reminded of the priest character in the Illuminatus trilogy who remarked all religions have their mystics, even the Catholics who keep theirs locked up in insane asylums euphemistically called monasteries.
"No book about Jesus is going to make your child a Christian."
I need to think on this one. While a book alone won't work (as you point out in your footnote) it is stories that engender faith. As a non-apostate GenXer I look back and realize the core of my faith was built not so much on church or doctrine (although questions on the latter led to a trip from very conservative Baptist/Presbyterian mix through Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy) but on a series of Bible story records my grandmother bought one a week at the grocery store. They were less an occasional read and more a constant backdrop (along with similar Star Trek, Space:1999, HG Wells, and Jules Verne records) to my life as they were used to help focus.
What is interesting is they probably let the stories soak in so they are part of my dream states in a way books do not.
Robert Anton Wilson was a very perceptive dude. Also very weird. The two often go together.
Christianity is an odd duck where dreaming is concerned. It has very little mythology of its own--the entire New Testament is either midrash/mimesis (The Gospels) or theology/church discipline. The exceptions are Acts, the actual Passion narratives (which tell full stories, even though they are using the midrashing/mimetic form), and Revelation. With the exception of the Passion, and the Apocalypse, the great "Christian" myths all come from the Hebrew tradition, This lack-of-mythos is one of Christianity's great strengths, ironically, as it allows it to sit easily impose itself atop other mythic traditions as a theological/interpretive layer. Missionaries use this feature of Christianity regularly, as it allows them to easily re-write (perhaps "edit" is a better word) a culture's existing mythos to emphasize the importance of stories of divine sacrifice and mercy, showing these stories to be pointers towards the universal gospel.
As for what make people Christian, there are two things, I think.
The first is that, coming from a Christian culture, they find the values in the Passion narrative and the epistles to be sensible and worthwhile. C.S. Lewis was this type.
The other is that the social connections and conduits through which the theology and the stories beneath it arrive are meaningful, and give it meaning. Tolkien was this type, becoming a devout catholic as the result of his relationship with his mentor, a priest, who took care of him after he was orphaned. I was this sort, and it sounds like your positive experiences with faith came through the conduit of your connection with your grandmother.
In my case I wound up getting too interested in theology and mythology--ironically in pursuit of a closer relationship with God--and learned things you can't un-learn, and I simply lost the ability to believe, regardless of how much I wanted to. This, in turn, is partly because the context in which I acquired my faith, and the relationships through which it was mediated, valued veridical truth and epistemic integrity above all else, and these were values I latched on to with a vengeance.
I hear you on the audiobooks and radio dramas. I'm seriously dyslexic, so when I've got a book in audio I will often listen hundreds of times, and it really soaks in. Books I only read also soak in, but they have to be REALLY good to stick.
"Dreamscape" puts me very much in mind of the novels of Tolkien's fellow Inkling, Charles Williams. They all revolve around either the eternal forms intruding into our corporeal world, or we straying across the boundary into theirs. Are you familiar with them, at all?
With the Inklings? Yeah. Never could get into Williams's work. My studies in mythopoetics and shamanism, as well as history and politics, have convinced me that platonism is a cancer that poisons what it touches through over-rationalizing mysticism.
I think the Dreamscape is much less an eternal world of Forms, or a separate dimension containing other beings that we can touch, than it is the most primitive and basic sensemaking layer of our consciousness, which we have access to through dreams themselves, through psychedelics, through music, through hypnosis (prayer, symbolic visual arts, dance, etc.), and through narrative--and I am very much of the view that all three of these latter are doing basically the same thing to us neurologically as one another.
A lot of these things are *really* uncomfortable for me to talk about, as I am, by nature, a rationalist/empiricist with a *very* rigid view of epistemic ethics, but as I've studied these things I've come around to the notion that Spock in Star Trek VI was almost exactly backwards when he said "Logic is the beginning of wisdom."
Rather, I think that logic and rationality are the final layer on the reasoning layer-cake, and they're built atop a series of other reasoning modalities, all arising ultimately from our basic nature of self-reflective and relational biological beings (and as socially-dependent predators). The beginning of wisdom is thus the recognition of the contingent nature of one's own understanding, and the path of wisdom involves seeking for harmony of reasoning at all the different layers of that stack (instead of suppressing, choking off, demonizing, etc. those parts we are uncertain of). The truth may not always set us free (whether the truth of what goes on in ourselves, or the truth of the wider world), but the inability to grapple with that truth makes us very imprisonable indeed. The value of the dreaming, whether undertaken by the shamen (the artists and poets and visionaries) or participated in by the masses (who gather together to experience the visions, the stories, and the struggles won from the dreamscape) is that these symbolic journeys give us the vocabulary to understand the very confusing, high-conflict world that rages within each of us, and between all of us. In the struggle for that understanding, we find meaning, and a person who has meaning that they are sure of is *remarkably* difficult to re-program and push around. This is why all cult indoctrination begins with weaponized deconstruction--if you force a person to distrust their own capabilities or sense of self (a vital first step on any growth journey) and then cut off the experience before they can take the journey to build/rebuild their confidence, they will grab for *any* safe harbor they can, and they will sell their souls in order not to feel lost.
Sorry for prattling on so long. It's a rich topic area.
If you haven't read Humphrey Carpenter's "The Inklings" (which has transcribed minutes from the meetings, and is fascinating), I highly recommend it.
Thank you for the recommendation. I have not read that one, although I did read his book about Evelyn Waugh and his crowd many years ago during an infatuation with their literary output. (I was unreasonably proud of myself for having made it through all the volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time.)
So I'm back several months later (this one is worth rereading) and want to wrestle a bit with something that bugged me the first time around:
"In every single case I’ve named in this article so far, including those bands and books and films I would personally be uncomfortable with a youngster in my charge hearing or seeing or reading, the concerns behind the censorious impulses (including my own) are not just entirely misguided, they are contrary to the maintenance of a healthy mind and culture."
I'll admit I was bugged by this, a tickling at the back of the brain. On re-read I think I two other parts clarified what that tickle was.
First off I hate dismissing those tickles which you admit to ("including my own"), but I still struggle to explain them. But I think I can get there by analogy.
I really like jazz but that came from a deliberate choice. When I was in HS (sophomore year I think) I decided I wanted to be into jazz. I'd been around some in band but the real drive was "cool" and "intellectual" people were into jazz (even in 1983 I was stuck in 1963). So I went to the mall and at the record store bought my first two jazz albums. The first was the pretty mainstream jazz fusion (both were jazz fusion, actually) Freetime by Spyro Gyra.
The second, though, was "I Sing the Body Electric" by Weather Report. To say that was a jump off the deep end is an understatement. I listened to it once and didn't take it out of the sleeve for a long time.
But I listened to Freetime a lot and wound up buying more jazz albums (although it would be over a decade before I bought most people's starter, "Kind of Blue"). By 1985 I had even bought more Weather Report. To this day unlike most people my age I don't associate D&D with heavy metal but with the album "Night Passage" by Weather Report due to many nights after work as a senior putting it on and reading Dragon or working on D&D campaigns.
So what does that have to do with keeping books out of the hand of children we are responsible for?
Would I still being putting on "Night Passage" if I'd only bought "I Sing the Body Electric"?
Probably not. I would have been too lost in a musical space I lacked the reference points to navigate.
And making sure children under your care have the reference points to navigate a symbolic space isn't unreasonable.
Now, is it a huge danger if they try? Maybe but more often than not probably not. I doubt I was ready for LotR or Dune my first foray but I came to understand them. So, I doubt I'd worry too much although (and here we get to the first clarification) if they get that ideologically blinded state I saw some people get reading Marx or Rand I might want to say "let's finish that latter after we read this first" and get them a prep text.
But other things if I didn't think they'd been exposed to the basic symbols in a more digestible form I don't think preventative intervention (again, with a "this first") is wrong. Is the average thirteen year old ready to process "The 120 Days of Sodom"? (hell, am I). Probably not although perhaps if they'd spent as much time with the Old Testament as you, maybe. Still, depending on the reason for interest I suspect I'd point them different directions initially.
And I think understand that is a real and valid concern helps explain something else you said:
"The moralists, the traditionalists, the theologians, and the priests attach themselves to the dream. They parasitize it, because its power is vast, and then they try to conquer it so that nobody else can legitimately wield that vast power. "
I think this concern we naturally have, to want to see people listen to Spyro Gyra before Weather Report so they have the grounding to actually process the later, is what the moralist hijack. They appeal to the sense of "not yet" and "how about this first" which is aimed at building a tool set (you might say to get people to 30 hammers) before tackling things things that will need all those tools while quietly substituting "not ever" and "only this".
"It is thus no coincidence that, in our society, it is the luminaries (the artists, the entrepreneurs, the politicians, the shadowy financiers) who, for both good and ill, still know how to dream and are all familiar with the ancient symbols and thought-forms (i.e. the occult)"
I am reminded of the priest character in the Illuminatus trilogy who remarked all religions have their mystics, even the Catholics who keep theirs locked up in insane asylums euphemistically called monasteries.
"No book about Jesus is going to make your child a Christian."
I need to think on this one. While a book alone won't work (as you point out in your footnote) it is stories that engender faith. As a non-apostate GenXer I look back and realize the core of my faith was built not so much on church or doctrine (although questions on the latter led to a trip from very conservative Baptist/Presbyterian mix through Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy) but on a series of Bible story records my grandmother bought one a week at the grocery store. They were less an occasional read and more a constant backdrop (along with similar Star Trek, Space:1999, HG Wells, and Jules Verne records) to my life as they were used to help focus.
What is interesting is they probably let the stories soak in so they are part of my dream states in a way books do not.
Robert Anton Wilson was a very perceptive dude. Also very weird. The two often go together.
Christianity is an odd duck where dreaming is concerned. It has very little mythology of its own--the entire New Testament is either midrash/mimesis (The Gospels) or theology/church discipline. The exceptions are Acts, the actual Passion narratives (which tell full stories, even though they are using the midrashing/mimetic form), and Revelation. With the exception of the Passion, and the Apocalypse, the great "Christian" myths all come from the Hebrew tradition, This lack-of-mythos is one of Christianity's great strengths, ironically, as it allows it to sit easily impose itself atop other mythic traditions as a theological/interpretive layer. Missionaries use this feature of Christianity regularly, as it allows them to easily re-write (perhaps "edit" is a better word) a culture's existing mythos to emphasize the importance of stories of divine sacrifice and mercy, showing these stories to be pointers towards the universal gospel.
As for what make people Christian, there are two things, I think.
The first is that, coming from a Christian culture, they find the values in the Passion narrative and the epistles to be sensible and worthwhile. C.S. Lewis was this type.
The other is that the social connections and conduits through which the theology and the stories beneath it arrive are meaningful, and give it meaning. Tolkien was this type, becoming a devout catholic as the result of his relationship with his mentor, a priest, who took care of him after he was orphaned. I was this sort, and it sounds like your positive experiences with faith came through the conduit of your connection with your grandmother.
In my case I wound up getting too interested in theology and mythology--ironically in pursuit of a closer relationship with God--and learned things you can't un-learn, and I simply lost the ability to believe, regardless of how much I wanted to. This, in turn, is partly because the context in which I acquired my faith, and the relationships through which it was mediated, valued veridical truth and epistemic integrity above all else, and these were values I latched on to with a vengeance.
I hear you on the audiobooks and radio dramas. I'm seriously dyslexic, so when I've got a book in audio I will often listen hundreds of times, and it really soaks in. Books I only read also soak in, but they have to be REALLY good to stick.
I find myself saving another one of your excellent essays. You’re right, we do need to dream again!
"Dreamscape" puts me very much in mind of the novels of Tolkien's fellow Inkling, Charles Williams. They all revolve around either the eternal forms intruding into our corporeal world, or we straying across the boundary into theirs. Are you familiar with them, at all?
With the Inklings? Yeah. Never could get into Williams's work. My studies in mythopoetics and shamanism, as well as history and politics, have convinced me that platonism is a cancer that poisons what it touches through over-rationalizing mysticism.
I think the Dreamscape is much less an eternal world of Forms, or a separate dimension containing other beings that we can touch, than it is the most primitive and basic sensemaking layer of our consciousness, which we have access to through dreams themselves, through psychedelics, through music, through hypnosis (prayer, symbolic visual arts, dance, etc.), and through narrative--and I am very much of the view that all three of these latter are doing basically the same thing to us neurologically as one another.
A lot of these things are *really* uncomfortable for me to talk about, as I am, by nature, a rationalist/empiricist with a *very* rigid view of epistemic ethics, but as I've studied these things I've come around to the notion that Spock in Star Trek VI was almost exactly backwards when he said "Logic is the beginning of wisdom."
Rather, I think that logic and rationality are the final layer on the reasoning layer-cake, and they're built atop a series of other reasoning modalities, all arising ultimately from our basic nature of self-reflective and relational biological beings (and as socially-dependent predators). The beginning of wisdom is thus the recognition of the contingent nature of one's own understanding, and the path of wisdom involves seeking for harmony of reasoning at all the different layers of that stack (instead of suppressing, choking off, demonizing, etc. those parts we are uncertain of). The truth may not always set us free (whether the truth of what goes on in ourselves, or the truth of the wider world), but the inability to grapple with that truth makes us very imprisonable indeed. The value of the dreaming, whether undertaken by the shamen (the artists and poets and visionaries) or participated in by the masses (who gather together to experience the visions, the stories, and the struggles won from the dreamscape) is that these symbolic journeys give us the vocabulary to understand the very confusing, high-conflict world that rages within each of us, and between all of us. In the struggle for that understanding, we find meaning, and a person who has meaning that they are sure of is *remarkably* difficult to re-program and push around. This is why all cult indoctrination begins with weaponized deconstruction--if you force a person to distrust their own capabilities or sense of self (a vital first step on any growth journey) and then cut off the experience before they can take the journey to build/rebuild their confidence, they will grab for *any* safe harbor they can, and they will sell their souls in order not to feel lost.
Sorry for prattling on so long. It's a rich topic area.
If you haven't read Humphrey Carpenter's "The Inklings" (which has transcribed minutes from the meetings, and is fascinating), I highly recommend it.
Thank you for the recommendation. I have not read that one, although I did read his book about Evelyn Waugh and his crowd many years ago during an infatuation with their literary output. (I was unreasonably proud of myself for having made it through all the volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time.)