I am contemplating the power that older stories have when we weave them as medicine to the deeply problematic narratives of dominant culture. I LOVE myths and fairytales and feel that they invite us to interpret and reinterpret... The point (or one of the points) is perhaps to give birth to more ways of seeing, more ways of thinking, new perspectives, retelling the old in ways that cultivate new meanings. Stories are prismatic. They offer renewal. Especially the ones that have cycled with us humans for a long time.
Thank you! And yes, I’ve always felt that myths and fairy tales never give up on us, and keep trying to circle back on around till we get it, again and again …
Thank you, Sharon, for this rich reading of our culture's storytelling in action!
Thinking about metanarratives brought up for me this piece from Umberto Ecco on the myriad archetypal situations that are referenced in and woven through the film "Casablanca."
Since archetypes as well as metanarratives can be concepts difficult to grasp, I find that thinking about how these work in a film helps. And that then seeing how such a film is a carrier of our cultural story, helps me make sense of how a metanarrative lives on pinging us all in the collective unconscious.
The other reference point your excellent post brought up for me is an article from The New Yorker (sorry this is behind a paywall), but it's a surprising piece on storytelling in our culture framed around Scheherazade—maybe she can be a subject of a future fairytale salon? Anyway, I found this piece by Parul Sehgal provocative and relevant to this discussion.
It's about how the uses and misuses of storytelling and about the limitations of narrative. Parul references an amazing range of examples, from literature to corporations to governments.
So in case others find these 2 pieces helpful, here they are. Thank you again, Sharon, for connecting so many dots for us!
Can’t read the New Yorker piece as yes, you need to take out a subscription. But scheherezade is definitely on my list. I’ll move her up now, thank you!
This was amazing and everything I needed to hear, Sharon!
I love your call to action at the end about the mythical misfits (to which I believe I am one) and as I re-read this piece over and over, I'm struck by this bone-deep urgency to "get to work." I'm of the millennial generation so I feel like the time is NOW for me. It's not too late for me/my generation to do some solid work or at least set up the next generation to do the metanarrative work you're talking about here.
The "how" is the overwhelming question I face on a daily basis. I've been neck deep in the individual work alongside the community work, but it feels so little... so inconsequential compared to the magnitude of whats needed next. I am grateful for your continued work on this subject, for without your guidance and loving support and encouragement of us "misfits" -- I feel as if we might lose hope. ❤️
I think it’s in good part about understanding we can only do what we can do, and the rest is up to everyone else. None of us can save the whole world - though took me a good couple of decades to believe that! The important thing is we do what we can, based on who we are. Because we’re never going to be able to know what’s consequential or inconsequential. We have to trust that it matters.
Inspiration and accumulation! Wow! I’m a researcher (experimental film) of Na Cailleacha. I am intrigued by the poem The Lament of the Hag of Beara - particularly the specific lines of misogyny and was thinking of leaving out those lines in the translations. In film we edit, however given what you have to say about stories I’m wondering if cherry picking, that is leaving those specific lines out, is the best way to go? Of course I would acknowledge the entire translation in credits, your words however have brought the issue to the fore! Go raibh maith agat. Éireann
thank you Sharon for this thoughtful text. It reminds me what my art prof always said: a change of form is always preceded by a change in consciousness (Formwandel geht immer ein bewusstseins wandel voraus) So we need to change our consciousness - and only when that has changed will we be able to change the forms we make - in life, art, …
This is treasure indeed, Sharon. It's so useful to have the natural life of myth aired in this way. It's so affirming to hold the image of the many small flames flickering even as the main heart-fire of a culture starts to burn out. I do sense a ferment of stories rising and falling in our world at the moment, as so many of us respond to what we see happening around us. I find myself reaching back in many ways into our deeper stories (hence loving and following your work, Sharon), to find roots deep and healthy enough to feed the sprouting of new stories to steer our world into healthy, joyful ways. Maybe our culture, as well as a dying fire, is like a dying plant which is diseased and withering, yet its roots remain deep in the good earth, and new and healthy shoots are already and always sprouting.
I loved reading this Sharon and it also, inevitably, took me to Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With The Wolves, and more recently Elizabeth Lesser’s book Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are The Storytellers The Human Story Changes. Because of course we have been living, in Western culture, with a meta narrative which has been for centuries almost exclusively a male narrative, the narrative of the patriarchy. What it is to be human has been written by the male psyche and the experience of what it is to be female has been distorted, denied and deformed by that. Yet so many of the myths that live on in our bones would have been told around firesides and at pillows by women, and exist still in our bodies ready to revivify not only ourselves but the world we are living in. Alongside the fairy stories told by magic makers such as Hans Christian Anderson whose stories captured me as a girl and some of which inform my heart and soul still now as an old woman. The Snow Queen in particular - I am hugely looking forward to this afternoon’s discussion around this one.
To say thank you for the promptings feels inadequate, but there it is.
(And, by the way, I completely get your experiences with Dark Mountain, which also stirred some of my own feelings around the Deep Adaptation movement, and (male) academia per se.)
Thank you and yes: this was also four years before my own 'If Women Rose Rooted' came out (in 2016), which kicked off the reclamation of women's stories from this part of Europe, and very much picked up on and expanded the ideas I was expressing in this interview. And deals extensively with the patriarchy and their stories. 'Ripening' speaks of all the ways in which fairy tales from the oral tradition are women's stories. We're getting there! And the various 'movements' that crop up in response to all this are still mostly male-run and male-dominated. So I still have a job ahead of me in my eldering years! See you later ...
‘If Women Rose Rooted’ was hugely influential for me and for so many other women I know. It feels like it sparked a whole new wave of heart/body/mind understanding of what it is to be a woman in today’s world. An absolute classic - can’t quite believe it’s ten years since publication!
As you say we are getting there, dodging the death throw threshes of the old leviathan’s tail (tale?). Your clarity and commitment continuing at the vanguard of the resistance!
Sorry – no specific reference list I can give you I’m afraid; I researched all this a very long time ago and it was more an accumulation of many pieces of knowledge over the years than the reading of particular papers. Doing a web search might throw something up.
I love this so much! Thank you, Sharon!
I am contemplating the power that older stories have when we weave them as medicine to the deeply problematic narratives of dominant culture. I LOVE myths and fairytales and feel that they invite us to interpret and reinterpret... The point (or one of the points) is perhaps to give birth to more ways of seeing, more ways of thinking, new perspectives, retelling the old in ways that cultivate new meanings. Stories are prismatic. They offer renewal. Especially the ones that have cycled with us humans for a long time.
I really appreciate what you share!
Thank you! And yes, I’ve always felt that myths and fairy tales never give up on us, and keep trying to circle back on around till we get it, again and again …
Again and again and again ❤️❤️❤️
Thank you, Sharon, for this rich reading of our culture's storytelling in action!
Thinking about metanarratives brought up for me this piece from Umberto Ecco on the myriad archetypal situations that are referenced in and woven through the film "Casablanca."
Since archetypes as well as metanarratives can be concepts difficult to grasp, I find that thinking about how these work in a film helps. And that then seeing how such a film is a carrier of our cultural story, helps me make sense of how a metanarrative lives on pinging us all in the collective unconscious.
https://biblioklept.org/2013/05/26/casablanca-or-the-cliches-are-having-a-ball-umberto-eco/
The other reference point your excellent post brought up for me is an article from The New Yorker (sorry this is behind a paywall), but it's a surprising piece on storytelling in our culture framed around Scheherazade—maybe she can be a subject of a future fairytale salon? Anyway, I found this piece by Parul Sehgal provocative and relevant to this discussion.
It's about how the uses and misuses of storytelling and about the limitations of narrative. Parul references an amazing range of examples, from literature to corporations to governments.
So in case others find these 2 pieces helpful, here they are. Thank you again, Sharon, for connecting so many dots for us!
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/seduced-by-story-peter-brooks-bewitching-the-modern-mind-christian-salmon-the-story-paradox-jonathan-gottschall-book-review
Can’t read the New Yorker piece as yes, you need to take out a subscription. But scheherezade is definitely on my list. I’ll move her up now, thank you!
Just brilliant! Necessary truth explained so clearly. Thank you xx
This was amazing and everything I needed to hear, Sharon!
I love your call to action at the end about the mythical misfits (to which I believe I am one) and as I re-read this piece over and over, I'm struck by this bone-deep urgency to "get to work." I'm of the millennial generation so I feel like the time is NOW for me. It's not too late for me/my generation to do some solid work or at least set up the next generation to do the metanarrative work you're talking about here.
The "how" is the overwhelming question I face on a daily basis. I've been neck deep in the individual work alongside the community work, but it feels so little... so inconsequential compared to the magnitude of whats needed next. I am grateful for your continued work on this subject, for without your guidance and loving support and encouragement of us "misfits" -- I feel as if we might lose hope. ❤️
I think it’s in good part about understanding we can only do what we can do, and the rest is up to everyone else. None of us can save the whole world - though took me a good couple of decades to believe that! The important thing is we do what we can, based on who we are. Because we’re never going to be able to know what’s consequential or inconsequential. We have to trust that it matters.
Wonderful. Just what I needed today.
Inspiration and accumulation! Wow! I’m a researcher (experimental film) of Na Cailleacha. I am intrigued by the poem The Lament of the Hag of Beara - particularly the specific lines of misogyny and was thinking of leaving out those lines in the translations. In film we edit, however given what you have to say about stories I’m wondering if cherry picking, that is leaving those specific lines out, is the best way to go? Of course I would acknowledge the entire translation in credits, your words however have brought the issue to the fore! Go raibh maith agat. Éireann
thank you Sharon for this thoughtful text. It reminds me what my art prof always said: a change of form is always preceded by a change in consciousness (Formwandel geht immer ein bewusstseins wandel voraus) So we need to change our consciousness - and only when that has changed will we be able to change the forms we make - in life, art, …
Have a lovely day, all the best Sibylle
Precisely!
This is treasure indeed, Sharon. It's so useful to have the natural life of myth aired in this way. It's so affirming to hold the image of the many small flames flickering even as the main heart-fire of a culture starts to burn out. I do sense a ferment of stories rising and falling in our world at the moment, as so many of us respond to what we see happening around us. I find myself reaching back in many ways into our deeper stories (hence loving and following your work, Sharon), to find roots deep and healthy enough to feed the sprouting of new stories to steer our world into healthy, joyful ways. Maybe our culture, as well as a dying fire, is like a dying plant which is diseased and withering, yet its roots remain deep in the good earth, and new and healthy shoots are already and always sprouting.
Here's to all of us women as the new and healthy shoots!
We are, we can be!
I loved reading this Sharon and it also, inevitably, took me to Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With The Wolves, and more recently Elizabeth Lesser’s book Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are The Storytellers The Human Story Changes. Because of course we have been living, in Western culture, with a meta narrative which has been for centuries almost exclusively a male narrative, the narrative of the patriarchy. What it is to be human has been written by the male psyche and the experience of what it is to be female has been distorted, denied and deformed by that. Yet so many of the myths that live on in our bones would have been told around firesides and at pillows by women, and exist still in our bodies ready to revivify not only ourselves but the world we are living in. Alongside the fairy stories told by magic makers such as Hans Christian Anderson whose stories captured me as a girl and some of which inform my heart and soul still now as an old woman. The Snow Queen in particular - I am hugely looking forward to this afternoon’s discussion around this one.
To say thank you for the promptings feels inadequate, but there it is.
(And, by the way, I completely get your experiences with Dark Mountain, which also stirred some of my own feelings around the Deep Adaptation movement, and (male) academia per se.)
Thank you and yes: this was also four years before my own 'If Women Rose Rooted' came out (in 2016), which kicked off the reclamation of women's stories from this part of Europe, and very much picked up on and expanded the ideas I was expressing in this interview. And deals extensively with the patriarchy and their stories. 'Ripening' speaks of all the ways in which fairy tales from the oral tradition are women's stories. We're getting there! And the various 'movements' that crop up in response to all this are still mostly male-run and male-dominated. So I still have a job ahead of me in my eldering years! See you later ...
‘If Women Rose Rooted’ was hugely influential for me and for so many other women I know. It feels like it sparked a whole new wave of heart/body/mind understanding of what it is to be a woman in today’s world. An absolute classic - can’t quite believe it’s ten years since publication!
As you say we are getting there, dodging the death throw threshes of the old leviathan’s tail (tale?). Your clarity and commitment continuing at the vanguard of the resistance!
Sorry – no specific reference list I can give you I’m afraid; I researched all this a very long time ago and it was more an accumulation of many pieces of knowledge over the years than the reading of particular papers. Doing a web search might throw something up.