I Am Just Dog Tired.

I love writing, especially if I feel that I can both learn and teach in the same post. The demons that I am wrestling with go back into a deep place, deep in all of our psyches. The forces are mammoth because they have stretched across generations. Much of the work that needs to be done to access these places is tiresome or difficult because they are shrouded in the mists of time. A friend of mine recently read the originally noted works of the brothers Grimm, of fairy tale fame. She commented on several interesting and so it seemed to her, twisted themes that she had noted. First off, when a man turned evil, his hair almost immediately fell out. I guess this is part of many of the stories. Also, she said, young girls in the stories frequently ran off with strange men from far off lands. She also said that there seemed to be a lot of sexual abuse instances and rapes. I wonder if the men who were charged with collecting and transcribing the stories were bald? I also wonder if the old women whose stories they were collecting felt a bit violated. Back in those days if you made it past fifty you were very old, so perhaps men of balding age were a little on the devil may care side of standard decorum. I'm pretty sure that if a gent came along who wanted to know the stories that you told your children they might be considered a bit suspect from the start. ( I would hope that even in today's day and age, it would raise a few eyebrows) I imagine that in the late middle ages, at the time these stories were continuously told down through the ages, you pretty much knew what your destiny was from the start. There was no such thing as social mobility. Whatever was in the village is all you would ever have. Gambling for a future, whether it might be better or worse might only be possible by taking flight with a random stranger. Keep in mind, there were virtually no books. There had never been any and to keep one's culture alive, you had to have storytellers who could pass along important knowledge in an entertaining way.

please forgive my jarring perspective. I have been Disnified all week. I have seen enough princesses to last some cultures millennea. I had to have something to hold onto so I wouldn't drown in schmaltz. The source material for most of what Walt Disney peddled has always been, for me, at least as compelling as his movies. The interplay between the old way thinking, where traditions were carried on orally around the hearth with mammas talking to their children dates back to cave people days. Codifying it into symbol language and standardizing the genre was the antithesis of storytelling. The memes of the day have always been living stories, much like the ones referenced in the end passages of Fahrenheit 451. Each person having their "book" to translate important ideas that continued culture across the ages. Now that such a vast part of our folk lore has been standardized, I worry that our mothers are not relaying the important messages of our time to their children. When the stories themselves were committed to memory and their functionality as parable kept certain knowledge alive, it seemed that evolution would be easy. Once a story is committed to a movie, only our perspective with relationship to it can change. In days of old, generation to generation the stories got tweaked, mis-remembered or different parts were embellished or downplayed. Sometimes telling to telling they would change.

The current process for passing on our culture through stories has become having to have people like me, instead of the mothers and grandmothers telling living stories. In addition to load-in and load out of a nine truck show, we also ran the show eight times between Wednesday and Sunday. If all goes well, this is the exact same story they will hear from Sao Paulo to Helsinki and from Japan to Mexico. Children all around the world love mickey mouse. This is an annual occurrence for me and I never quite get over the fact that even with all the joy that the Disney versions of these ancient stories give to children of all ages, the parent material for the inspiration came from two guys traveling around asking old ladies what do you tell your children at night after dinner as you sit around the hearth?