The Folly of Metaphor

So a few weeks ago, I was listening to a free iTunes U lecture, Penn State’s Dan Hade on children’s literature, and he referred to a book that puts forth the theory that there are only seven basic kinds of stories, which thanks to the internet, I am pretty sure was Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. I probably won’t read it, I was able to read enough reviews to realize it doesn’t do what I want it to do, (the Telegraph describes the venture as ‘procrustean’ in his disregarding deep differences between similar events in different stories; others charge him with disregarding major works of literature that don’t fit his theory.)
What a strange and sweet thing, I waver between being desperate for that grand unified theory of literature and psyche and being grateful for the universe of possibilities that don’t fit into any theory.

I remember the wonder in high school of learning about the remarkable predictive power of the periodic table of elements, to see how the elements fell into families: gasses here, metals there, fitting the pattern described by the number of electrons filling the rings, predicting perfectly the way they interacted with one another… and in college I started wishing for some systematic table of human elements, that would explain and predict how we relate to one another, how our own component parts work together or don’t. That this seemed like what the Meyers-Briggs personality inventory was aiming for, why people read their horoscopes, buy decks of tarot cards, discuss archtypes, find satisfaction in Kohlberg’s stages of moral development and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It seems like an ancient longing, for a working model of the psyche, think of Plato, and the allegory of the charioteer in Phaedrus.

Of course, I have to relate this desire for a sytem of the human soul to my parenting. Growing up Bahá’í meant being free of the original sin concept of trying to scrub your blemished soul; in fact, Bahá’í theology generally describes a more positive model of the universe, with life’s purpose being spiritual development, where evil is the absence of good, so the good is what you can describe positively, and there is no sin, per se. I don’t think this is just semantics, that instead of talking about gluttony talking about healthy restraint, instead of lust, describing chastity, instead of greed, generosity. One book I’ve found useful is The Family Virtues Guide which describes a way of calling out the virtues when you see them in your kids’ behavior, and helping them identify the ones called for in, um, those teaching moments that come up. So, instead of saying “Stop lying!” you might try “It’s important to be truthful. Can you think of some of the reasons why? I’d like you to be truthful with me now.” What I really like about this is that the stories in my kids heads of who they are can be “I’m a person working on truthfulness” rather than “I am a liar.” I like this approach enough that for my god daughter’s blessing (Christian, by they way, and not Bahá’í) I gave her a set of virtues cards, described as 52 “virtues valued by all cultures as the content of our character.”

So of course, I am thinking about the periodic table of elements and wondering if the virtues come in families: would flexibility, detachment, and humility hang out as far as possible from idealism, perseverance and determination? Would patience be a bridge between them? What wisdom do you need to decide between two virtues that appear to be opposites of one another? Does each virtue have a shadow-side: unity that should not be confused with conformity, perseverance not edging into obstinacy, flexibility not giving way to wishy-washiness?

The thing is, as paradoxical as conflicting virtues seem, I wonder if some of them fit the sort of model of the resolution of humility and confidence: that mastery of anything, doing it again and again until you trust your muscles/intuition/coordination perception of pitch happens in such a way that your focus is outside of yourself, and you know that what you’re doing is a result of some magical combination of hard work and whatever natural gifts that you can hardly take credit for, and that it’s about the doing, and not about you, and, furthermore, others before you and certainly others after you will be better than you, so there’s humility. That people who seem arrogant are often the least secure, so afraid of being seen through, worried that they’ll be seen through or found out, perpetuating a fraud.

It’s not a grand unifying theory, exactly, but I wonder if may apparent paradoxes aren’t resolved by shifting from focussing on an event to focussing on a process, that confidence at the moment of a single event, placing the bow on the strings of your violin with fifty people watching, comes with the sort of humility of Buber’s ‘thou’ addressing of the violin as a whole process, that long-term ‘process’ determination may encompass flexibility in the short term or a single event, because even the things we want most seldom come in in the form we expect them. Does event vs. process work for justice and mercy?

Oh, I’ve meandered, I waver between finding the virtues a lovely model for describing the project of being human, and wondering what simplification they gloss over. And maybe this is the result of that bifurcated longing for structure and predictability and the comprehensibility of a working model and the deep hunger for the freedom of being more than the sum of parts, of being able to soar through endless possibilities, to be surprised by perfect books that don’t fit expectations of what stories should do. That’s not paradoxical or anything, is it?