A Little Help From Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirate

It’s not unusual for lines from movies to come up in conversation among my friends. Really, we pull from film, television, books and music–we’re not picky about our mediums. Most of the time things come up in jest (though I think that one guy was serious when he tried to pick me up with a line from Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Then there are the occasions when I put my knowledge of pop culture to real, helpful, use.

I’m a self-confessed movie fiend and sometimes I fall back on that when in a tight spot. Recently, I had to write a rather difficult email to someone and I found myself resorting to quoting Captain Jack Sparrow. This of course prompted a full-on Pirates of the Caribbean marathon and further thoughts on the lessons I’ve taken from the trilogy. Granted, it’s a pretty action-driven franchise, but there are a few gems that have stuck with me nonetheless. I’ll start with the quotation that I used in that difficult email I referenced.

Captain Jack Sparrow: “The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can’t do.”

A fairly simple commandment, but how often do we boil things down to their essential natures and conflicts? In general, I am a black and white thinker. I try to be objective and straightforward. These are traits that come in handy when I find myself in a sticky spot. They can help me to lead myself or someone else out of a maelstrom of emotional crap and into a place where forward motion is possible again. I don’t know if it helped the recipient of that email, but it helped me to write it. In that situation, I could pose the questions that needed answers, but I could not resolve them.

That was a line from the first film, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Now, I’ll pick something from the second film, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

Captain Jack Sparrow: “Complications arose, ensued, were overcome.”

A clever quip that has enough spark to give me pause. I think this sums up rather nicely what most complications amount to. They take up some time and make things more difficult, but your general complication is eventually overcome. Obviously, there are extreme cases that I am not trying to demean here, but think about the things that were in your way in the past and how they were overcome. Whatever is in front of you now, will share the same fate. People are resilient creatures and there is very little we can’t triumph over when we put our mind to it. Everyday life inevitably comes with complications, don’t sweat it, ride the wave.

Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow

Three movies, three quotations. Here’s a snippet of a scene from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

Elizabeth: I didn’t have a choice.
Will: You chose not to tell me.
Elizabeth: I couldn’t tell you. It wasn’t your burden to bear.
Will: But I did bear it, didn’t I? I just didn’t know what it was.

I love this exchange. This ranks as one of my favorite scenes ever. I think it speaks for itself well enough without the context. It has such an important lesson to teach. We’ve all lied about something in our lives. I imagine most people lie to protect people that they care about. Sometimes we lie to protect ourselves, but that’s the same thing. The reality is that if you have people close to you that you hide things from, they feel it. It feels like a glass wall. You can’t see it or touch it or explain easily why you know that there’s something there blocking your connection to another person, but you know it’s there. And the longer those lies stay in place, the thicker the wall becomes. As soon as you tell a lie to another person, you burden them with an illusion they can’t fight, but must live under. I wonder why it’s so easy to delude ourselves into thinking  people need protection from the truth.

Orlando Bloom as Will Turner

I don’t mean to get preachy and this isn’t directed at anyone in particular, unless it be myself. But I love movies for this reason: that they can offer these insights in underhanded and unforeseen ways. Pirates is not necessarily the place I would go looking for answers to life’s questions. That first example I adopted as a life motto as soon as I heard it, but I have a tendency to forget about the other two until I watch the films again. Here is my record that I watched, I listened, and I took heed. Wisdom comes from unlikely places sometimes. I will take it where I can get it.

Encounters with Strangers on the Upper East Side

Awe is what moves us forward. –Joseph Campbell

This is a field of play. This is a place where I explore the things in this world that amaze and inspire me. Given the dramatic and wondrous nature of this place, I never find myself short of such things. All you have to do is keep your eyes open and you’ll find plenty to wonder at. Well, at least that’s what I find to be true. So far my posts have focused on the fictional characters that I love and draw inspiration from. There are real people in the world who have just as much, if not more, to offer. Despite the fact that I am constantly surrounded by people, most of the time I get stories from the news or on TED. But every now and then I encounter a stranger who simply sits down next to me and shares an amazing story. It helps to be reminded that everyone has a story and most are worth taking the time to listen to.

The other day, I was out with my friend Ryan trying to find a drink to celebrate his birthday. We had heard about a bar on the Upper East Side that was supposed to have inexpensive happy hour martinis. It was Ryan’s birthday so I was humoring him. Martinis are not usually my friends. Anyway, we found the place easily enough but it was 3:00 and it was not going to open until 4:00. Ryan had plans for a birthday dinner and show with Trent, so we could not afford to wait. Instead, we started wandering the streets. For those who don’t know, Manhattan’s Upper East Side is not the best part of town to look for an afternoon cocktail. We‘re of a determined sort, however, so we persevered and found a place called Jacques. Past lunch and before dinner, the place was almost empty.

There was a couple at the bar when we came in, but it was not long before the female left the gentleman alone with his Cognac. Of course that meant he sought out Ryan and I for company. Now, most of the time when I find myself approached at the bar by someone a few drinks beyond me, my impulse is to get them to leave me alone as quickly as possible. This time, however, the circumstances provided the man an opening and Ryan and I found ourselves listening to the man’s life story. It did not take long for him to get our attention.

He did introduce himself, but I have forgotten his name. The rest of the story stuck with me. He was a man in his 60s, dressed in linen pants and a yellow button down shirt. There was a thin bit of grey hair on his head and an intelligent glint in his eye that was not entirely dulled by drink. Having grown up in Alabama, he moved to New York in 1968 after teaching water skiing in New Hampshire for a summer. His first interview in the city was with Esquire Magazine; he got the job. Three days later, or three days after he started, he was on a plane headed to a conference in Puerto Rico. A shy young man from Alabama just starting out, he looks for a place on the plane to sit. The only seats her finds available are next to the CEO, the CFO and the head fashion editor. Fate smiling? Maybe. Then he finds out that the fashion editor is from Alabama, too! What? Crazy.

From there, my new bar friend went on to run GQ Magazine for 20 years. He opened 17 offices around the world and started 20 magazines. He was there when Ralph Lauren got started and became famous; of course they were friends. Amazing. And he buried 9 staff members to AIDS during the 70s and 80s. Sad. We’ll just say he was a man with an interesting perspective on fashion, New York, business, success, life, etc.

Now, he and his wife have been unemployed for six months and cannot find jobs. This means they have to sell their apartment at 94th and Park Avenue with its 300-square-foot terrace that looks out over the East River and has a pond with statues and a reproducing turtle population. He didn’t get married until he was 49, so I imagine that’s why he didn’t mention children (though he did mention a nephew that works in the White House). Instead, he mentioned 6 rabbits that have the run of his place. He and his wife volunteer for the animal shelter on 110th where Ryan and Trent got Gatsby the Cat last year. He wanted Ryan and I to volunteer our time as well, to come by and walk dogs and play with cats and such. We were all for it. Too bad I don’t know anyone who could afford to take his apartment off his hands. He says it costs him $6000 a month just to wake up. Wow. Still, I picture he and his wife selling their apartment in the city to retire to some beach house in the Hamptons, or maybe Paris.

A fascinating and amazing story, even if delivered with a slight slur and distinctive odor. Of course, as most people do, he had words of wisdom to impart to us: the next generation. He seemed most worried about the danger of us spending our entire lives doing the same thing every day. It’s the most common mistake he has seen people make and he was adamant that we avoid such a trap. A worthy admonition, but not my favorite piece of his advice, nor his. What he kept coming back to and repeating was that we should surround ourselves with people who are smarter than we are. We should endeavor to go to bed every day smarter than we were when we woke up. And he told us that this is the best city in the country for doing just that. I love it. Everyone should be given this kind of advice, challenged to push their limits. Consider this post my way of paying it forward.

According to WorldAtlas.com , New York City has the world’s fifth largest population: 16.6 million people. I know I have a pretty serious ego, but even with a genius-level IQ, how many thousands of them out there are smarter than I am? Meeting this guy just made me anxious to meet all of them. I need to figure out how to find them and make sure I don’t mistakenly block them out or blow them off. Hopefully I don’t need to spend more time drinking martinis on the Upper East Side. Not the way I usually like to spend my Tuesday afternoons. But it is good to be reminded that they are out there, waiting to be discovered. I just have to be brave enough to find them and invite them to share stories with me. I certainly went to bed smarter than I woke up that day. May we all live lives that are full of such days!

New York in the Rain

Heroic Endeavors—Part Three: Return

“I certainly think Star Trek is an example of a science-fiction franchise that at its heart really possesses a sense of optimism and faith in humanity and I think those are things that are never more relevant than they are today.” –Zachary Quinto

Here we are in the final stages of the heroic journey and the problem is that we have passed the new incarnation of James Kirk. No doubt there will be more stories in this new series, but for now I will have to get creative when it comes to providing you with examples. Luckily, there are many other stories about Kirk to draw from. I’m going to use the movie Star Trek Generations to help me. Being circa 1994, it may seem outdated and those of you who have seen it will have to dig deep into your memory banks, but it has the pieces I need. I’ll be as clear as possible. These are the trickiest steps, yet. Make sure you haven’t missed Part One and Part Two of this series.

Return – 1. Refusal of the Return

Once the heroic quest has been accomplished, what remains is for the hero to return to the real world with his prize. Whether he has attained enlightenment, or has rescued the princess, or found the Holy Grail, it is then up to him to bring his trophy back and share it with the world. As in the beginning, when the hero didn’t want to leave his childhood sphere of relationships and connections, he doesn’t always want to leave the bliss found in the presence of grace. It’s a nice place and it is difficult to leave by choice.

Example: In Star Trek Generations, Kirk finds himself in a place called The Nexus. Guinan describes the Nexus to Picard as:

“Like being inside joy, as if joy was something tangible and you could wrap yourself up in it like a blanket. And never in my entire life have I ever been as content… None of us wanted to go. And I would have done anything, anything, to get back there… If you go, you’re not going to care about anything, not this ship, not Soren, not me, nothing. All you’ll want is to stay in the Nexus; you’re not going to want to come back.”

It is a place where the mind has the power to grant any desire and command time. It is the bliss place and while Kirk is there, he does not want to leave. He sees the chance to live his life over again and do everything differently. When Captain Picard seeks out his help, Kirk refuses to return to the real world with him.

Return – 2. The Magic Flight

If the hero does decide to return to the world, there are two ways it can go. One, he has the blessing of the gods. They have specifically commissioned him to take their grace back to the world and share it with humanity. In that case, his return is supported by all the supernatural forces and goes swimmingly. Or, if the hero has stolen his prize or tricked it from the grasp of the gods, then the return can look like a great chase scene. The hero tosses obstacles behind him to delay his pursuers. His allies attempt to block the path and give him a greater lead. We’ve all seen this play out. But the truth of the monomyth is this: to fulfill its promise, not human failure or superhuman success but human success is what we have to be shown.

Example: Let’s go back to the new film for a moment and consider the red matter as the divine grace our hero steals. Kirk teams up with Spock to steal the ship with the red matter and destroy the Nerada’s drill that threatens Earth. Then Spock flies off, leading the enemy ship to the Enterprise, while Kirk is rescuing Captain Pike—they all beam to safety. The Enterprise destroys the missiles aimed at Spock, he crashes the ship into the Nerada and thus a black hole is created which destroys the “supernatural” enemy. A very magic flight.

Spock In Magical Flight

Return – 3. Rescue from Without

But what happens if the hero maintains the refusal of stage one? Someone has to go get him. The journey is not complete until the hero re-enters, with his boon, “the long-forgotten atmosphere where men who are fractions imagine themselves to be complete.” He has to confront society with his elixir of enlightenment; he has to take the blow of people’s questions and resentment and inability to understand. If he refuses to do so, then the supernatural forces that have been helping him all along, will come to rescue him and set him back on his path.

Example: We’re going back to the Kirk in The Nexus (I apologize for the back and forth—I trust you can keep up). Kirk is enjoying the power of fulfilling all his desires, fixing his mistakes, healing his regrets. He doesn’t want to go back to the world where his life is coming to an end, where his glory days are past. But Picard needs his help. Picard persuades him to come back and make a difference in the world again. He persuades him to put himself at risk again to make the world a better place and save millions of lives, 230 million lives.

Kirk and Picard in The Nexus

Return – 4. The Crossing of the Return Threshold

Ah, another one of those thresholds! I’ll let Joseph explain this one:

“The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other—different as life and death, as day and night. Nevertheless—and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol—the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. There must always remain, however, from the standpoint of normal waking consciousness, a certain baffling inconsistency between the wisdom brought forth from the deep, and the prudence usually found to be effective in the light world. The boon brought from the transcendent deep becomes quickly rationalized into nonentity, and the need becomes great for another hero to refresh the word. How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind’s prudent folly? That is the hero’s ultimate difficult task. The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life. The returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world.”

I think the last few lines are the most important to understand. There have been heroes making this journey throughout time. We know of some and not of others. But they come back and try to tell us what is true about ourselves. They try to tell us that we are all capable of this journey, that we all have this potential within ourselves—and we close our ears and ignore them. Most of us cannot accept that as possible. We call it myth. We put it on a big screen and call it a movie. We put it in a book and call it fiction. And then we ignore it as irrelevant to our own lives. That is our mistake.

Example: In the film, there is an energy ribbon that travels through the universe that acts as a doorway to the Nexus. This is the threshold Picard and Kirk must cross to return to the world. The Nexus also allows them to choose which moment to return to, so they are both masters of crossing space and time.

Threshold

Return – 5. Master of the Two Worlds

The hero has been blessed with a new perspective. He has seen beyond the scope of normal human destiny and been granted an awareness of the essential nature of the cosmos. His personal fate is now only part of the fate of mankind, the fate of life, the solar system, the atom. All of this knowledge has opened to him. He transcends personal ambition and stops resisting whatever may come to pass. He accepts the truth that there is nothing to gain or fear because all things are one. If that’s hard to grasp, consider this metaphor: just as an actor is always a man, whether he puts on the costume of his role or lays it aside, so is the perfect knower of the Imperishable always the Imperishable, and nothing else. That is the hero, whether in the state of perfect enlightenment or not, he remains at one with the imperishable force. The truth is that we are all at one with that force, we just don’t know it.

Example: After successfully returning from the Nexus and saving part of the galaxy, Picard ruminates on time with his first officer.

Captain Picard: Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives, but I rather believe that time is a companion that goes with us on the journey, reminds us to cherish every moment, because they’ll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we’ve lived. After all, Number One, we’re only mortal.

Commander Riker: Speak for yourself, sir. I plan to live forever.

Return – 6. Freedom to Live

The goal of the myth is to reconcile the individual consciousness with the universal will (The Force). Once the hero has completed his journey, he is able to recognize his own relationship with the passing phenomena of time and the imperishable life that is within everything. As Joseph says:

“The Self cannot be cut nor burnt nor wetted nor withered. Eternal, all-pervading, unchanging, immovable, the Self is the same for ever. The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is.”

It is tricky to explain these last pieces. They are deeply spiritual states of being that I certainly have not achieved myself. I have not passed beyond my own attachments to this world of duality where life and death are different things. I perceive change everyday. But the hero is beyond thoughts of permanence or attachment. He does not fear change or loss. He knows that nothing retains its form forever. Nature, the great renewer, is always making up forms from forms. Nothing perishes, it simply varies and renews its form. That is the lesson.

In the broad sense, what does it mean that we have “rebooted” the series? Our vision of time and events is altered because the mythology continues to grow and change. What came before is intact for all who experienced it and it is there for anyone who wishes to experience it in the future. But the great thing about mythological heroes is that they vary and renew their forms to teach us yet again what has been taught a thousand times. We see Kirk die to this world twice in Generations. But he lives again! The lessons transcend time and space. The stories are meant to grow and change as we do. Long live Star Trek!

Our Hero

Heroic Endeavors—Part Two: Initiation

Attention, crew of the Enterprise. This is James Kirk. Mr. Spock has resigned commission and advanced me to acting captain. I know you were all expecting to regroup with the fleet but I’m ordering a pursuit course of the enemy ship to Earth. I want all departments at battle stations and ready in ten minutes. Either we’re going down or they are. Kirk out. –James T. Kirk

In my last post (Part One: Departure), I described the Departure stages of Joseph Campbell’s heroic journey theory using examples from James Kirk’s story in the latest Star Trek film. This will be part two of three in which I will cover the Initiation stages. So without further delay…

Initiation – 1. The Road of Trials

The heading for this stage should give you the basic idea. The path is fraught with danger and pain. Obstacle after obstacle must be fought and overcome. The original departure into the land of trials represented only the beginning of the long and perilous path of initiatory conquests. There will be momentary victories, glimpses of the promised land, unretainable ecstasies. Anyone who undertakes the journey into the crooked lanes of the spiritual labyrinth will find himself surrounded by symbological figures, any of which may swallow him. From Campbell:

“The psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we today must face alone, or, at best, with only tentative, impromptu, and not often very effective guidance. This is our problem as modern, ‘enlightened’ individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.”

Example: This should be a bit self-explanatory. All of the obstacles and conflicts that Kirk faces are his Road of Trials. Some moments include: the space jump onto the drill above Vulcan, Spock banishing him from the ship and exiling him on Delta Vega, provoking Spock so he could take command of the Enterprise, the fight on the Nerada to save Earth and rescue Captain Pike, etc.

Kirk's Road of Trials

Initiation – 2. Meeting with the Goddess

“She is the paragon of all paragons of beauty, the reply to all desire, the bliss-bestowing goal of every hero’s earthly and unearthly quest… She is mother, sister, mistress, bride… Incarnation of the promise of perfection… The soul’s assurance that, at the conclusion of its exile in a world of organized inadequacies, the bliss that was once known will be known again.” I think you probably get the point. The goddess in this stage is the Universal Mother, a source of desire but also a nourishing and protecting presence. But she also has a destructive aspect. Life and death are both necessary. The goddess is not meant to be greater than the hero, but she can seem to be beyond him at a certain point. She is part of what must be earned in the process of the journey. She is luring him, guiding him, motivating him to rise above his current state and achieve greatness. The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love, which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity.

Example: This is my favorite example, because it’s pure symbol. Kirk’s goddess is the Enterprise. Often, ships are referred to using feminine pronouns. Scotty refers to the Enterprise as a “well-endowed lady.” But here’s an excerpt from the novelization that illustrates this point nicely:

“He only had eyes for one of them, its markings stood out clear and sharp against the ivory-hued metal and composite skin: U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701. He remembered the first time he had set eyes on her, unfinished, skeletal, with gaping holes in her sides where her multiple outer hull had yet to be completed. She had been striking then, awkwardly balanced within a web of construction scaffolding on the hard, cold plain of central Iowa. Incomplete and out of her element she had appeared ungainly and graceless, an adolescent starship. Finished and sitting in her service dock she was a thing of beauty. He could not wait to embrace her.”

Kirk Meeting His Goddess

Initiation – 3. Woman as the Temptress

Here enters a different kind of feminine energy. This woman is all about the desire of the flesh. She keeps the hero’s focus on the physical world and the pleasures to be experienced here. Not in a good way. This temptation distracts the hero from his quest and delays his success. “Not even monastery walls, however, not even the remoteness of the desert, can defend against the female presences; for as long as the hermit’s flesh clings to his bones and pulses warm, the images of life are alert to storm his mind.” Sometimes, once the hero has broken free of the spell, there is a feeling of revulsion that’s directed toward all the acts of the flesh, the acts of life. Then woman becomes a symbol of defeat and sin instead of life and glory. But this is a diminishment of her role. The hero must find a way to balance the goddess and the temptress, love and accept both as pure and natural.

Example: Kirk is a legendary lothario. He’s well in touch with the pleasures of the flesh, a consummate flirt. I learned from the novelization that it is Kirk’s affair with Gaila, Uhura’s Orion roommate, which allows him to “cheat” on Spock’s test, thus landing him on probation. Uhura is another temptation for Kirk, but she is the unattainable one.

Kirk with His Temptress

Initiation – 4. Atonement with the Father

The son must grow in to his birthright and take his father’s place. One cannot be reliant upon a parent’s nurturing or protection, nor can one suffer their judgments or punishments. The time has come for the hero to be fully his own person. This requires accepting the dualities of the father—vengeful and merciful, arbiter of justice and wrath. For the son, the father is a sign of the future task. For the daughter, he’s a sign of the future husband. The father can’t pass along the duties of his office to a child who isn’t ready. The son must be able to rule justly without motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment. This is the moment where the hero achieves a perspective on the tragedies of life and lets go of his judgment about them.

Example: Since his real father is dead, we’ll use the moments when Kirk rescues Pike from the enemy ship and then relieves him as Captain of the Enterprise, thus taking on the role that his father assumed just before he died.

Initiation – 5. Apotheosis

Boom. Hero achieves his godlike potential. He transcends ignorance, fear, change. Pain and pleasure do not enclose him, he encloses them—and with profound repose. God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children. This is not a state that is necessarily meant to be maintained. We are still talking about a human journey. Some of us have experienced moments of illumination, moments of broadened perspective and understanding. But we don’t stay there. These moments are meant to be drawn upon later, reminders to us of what is possible to achieve. But this isn’t a way of functioning in the world on a day-to-day basis. Once the hero attains this place, the task becomes holding onto it as best he can. Reminding himself that the people he encounters are merely lost souls and that we all have this godlike potential, we’re just not all aware of it, or in the same place along the path. But the truth is that the sufferer within us is that divine being as well. We and the protecting father are one. And, that protecting father is every man that we meet. So the “hero does not abandon life—he perceives without the same ocean of being that he found within. And he is filled with compassion for the self-terrorized beings who live in fright of their own nightmare.” The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth.

Example: I’m not sure Kirk has one of these moments during the course of the film. But there are two places near the end where a more experienced and level-headed Kirk is shown. One, after escaping from the Nerada with Captain Pike, upon observing a moment between Spock and Uhura:

“The briefest of glances was exchanged between the Enterprise’s science officer and its communications chief. No one noticed it but Kirk. Varying from the sly to the snide several suitable comments took shape in his mind. Ultimately he voiced none of them. Like lightning, maturity can strike anyone unexpectedly and at the most peculiar moments.”

And then when he offers assistance to the crew of the Nerada as their ship is going down. A show of mercy. Not exactly an apotheosis, but a sign of a broader perspective. There are undoubtedly more films to come in the series. I am sure he will get there.

Initiation – 6. The Ultimate Boon

Gods and goddesses in the mythical realms are not meant to the be the end in themselves. They are guardians or bestowers of power. They have the elixirs of life, the creative fire, the grace of immortality to give the hero. What the hero seeks from them is their grace, the power of their sustaining substance. The gods can either choose to give the power to the hero who has overcome all his obstacles to reach them, or he may have to trick them in order to get it, as Prometheus did to Zeus. “When is this mood even the highest gods appear as malignant, life-hoarding ogres, and the hero who deceives, slays, or appeases them is honored as the savior of the world.”

Example: At the end of the film, James Kirk is made captain of the Enterprise by the threshold guardians—Starfleet Academy Administration—who were operating against him at the beginning. And Spock, who was his accuser, has become his friend and first officer. The Enterprise, his goddess, is under his command.

That’s it for the stages of Initiation. Think we’re done? Not yet! There’s still one phase left: The Return. I’ll continue next time…

Kirk as Captain of the Enterprise

Heroic Endeavors–Part One: Departure

Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. –Joseph Campbell

The first time I read the above quotation my brain gave a hearty and resounding YES! I have never been one for following any kind of traditionally prescribed path. The idea that most people do something in a particular way has never seemed like a valid reason for me to do it that way. Guess I haven’t grown out of my rebellious stage, yet. I will do as Robert Frost suggested and choose the less-traveled road. We don’t need no stinking path!

And yet… And yet…

For many years now I have been fascinated by Joseph Campbell’s work on the heroic journey. Once I learned how to see the underlying structure, I suddenly couldn’t help but see it everywhere. And not just in fiction or mythology either. A few years back I wrote out my best friend’s personal heroic journey using the outline. He hasn’t achieved godhood, yet, so it’s not done, but he has time and the potential. We all have the potential. That’s kind of the point. It’s a path for everyone, as well as Christ, Buddha, Shiva, Frodo Baggins, Anakin Skywalker and Harry Potter.

Anyway, as I plan to spend a good deal of time talking about Campbell’s outline here in this blog, it seems appropriate to offer a kind of beginner’s course for those of you who are unfamiliar. In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell theorized that mythologies from around the world and throughout history share a fundamental structure, which he called the monomyth. The monomyth has three main stages: Departure, Initiation, Return. Some classic examples of the monomyth that Campbell used to illustrate his ideas include the stories of Osiris, Prometheus, the Buddha, Moses, and Christ, although Campbell cites many other classic myths from many cultures which rely upon this basic structure. Here’s a snippet from his introduction:

“The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero’s passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. Therefore it is formulated in the broadest terms. The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. Who are his ogres? Those are the reflections of the unsolved enigmas of his own humanity. What are his ideals? Those are the symptoms of his grasp of life.”

Remember that myths speak in a symbolic language. They’re metaphors, not to be taken literally. I’ll be dividing this into three separate blog posts in hopes of making it accessible. And I’ll be taking my examples from James Kirk’s journey in the new Star Trek film because it’s fresh and convenient and I think it will make sense even if you haven’t seen the movie. So, we begin with the five stages of the Departure.

Departure – 1. The Call to Adventure

Fairly self-explanatory, the first step is to call the hero. Some event marks a shift in the unsuspecting hero’s life. This is the beginning of a transfiguration—a rite, or moment, of spiritual passage. When the passage is complete, it amounts to a dying and a birth. For the hero, his familiar life has been outgrown. It is time for him to let go of old patterns, beliefs, concepts, ideals, emotional connections, etc. Sometimes it appears as a blunder, apparently the merest chance, reveals another world. Other times, a herald may appear who calls the hero forth.

Example: Kirk gets into a bar fight and serendipitously runs into Captain Christopher Pike, who urges Kirk to get out of his own way and enlist in Starfleet.

Departure – 2. The Refusal of the Call

So, maybe the hero isn’t too excited about giving up everything he’s ever known in order to go on some dangerous adventure whose reward is uncertain. Joseph says: this refusal represents “an impotence to put off the infantile ego, with its sphere of emotional relationships and ideals.” But, not all who hesitate are lost. And sometimes, the refusal is about being unwilling to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the question of destiny.

Example: Kirk tells Captain Pike that he has no interest in joining Starfleet. As “the only genius-level repeat offender in the Midwest” Kirk is safe and unchallenged.

Departure – 3. Supernatural Aid

This is the wizard, hermit, shepherd, smith, Jedi, guide, teacher, ferryman, conductor of souls to the underworld. He comes along to give the hero amulets and talismans of protection so that he can complete his journey. Even to those who have apparently hardened their hearts, the ageless guardians will appear to get them on their way. Sometimes they even come along for a bit of the ride. Their purpose is to show the hero what he is capable of achieving, giving him the opportunity.

Example: Pike responds with: “Do you feel like you were meant for something better? Something special? Enlist in Starfleet… You understand what the Federation is don’t you? It’s a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada. It’s important.” Later, when Pike is leaving the ship under Spock’s command, he raises Kirk to second-in-command, helping him on his way to becoming captain of the Enterprise.

Departure – 4. The Crossing of the First Threshold

I’ll let Joseph’s words sum this stage up:

“With the personifications of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the “threshold guardian” at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. The first, or protective aspect of the threshold guardian: one had better not challenge the watcher of the established bounds. And yet—it is only by advancing beyond those bounds, provoking the destructive aspect of the same power, that the individual passes, either alive or in death, into a new zone of experience. The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown.”

Example: Kirk’s first threshold is probably leaving the Midwest via shuttlecraft to join Starfleet, thus leaving his previous life behind. But, to use an example with threshold guardians, I’ll use the example of his journey to the Enterprise. He’s on academic probation at that point, so there are forces trying to keep him on the ground. He risks a great deal by joining with Dr. McCoy in a subterfuge that gets him on board. But that is the moment that he truly leaves Earth for space, the final frontier. Space is one of our greatest unknowns. But he is the bold adventurer and he has allies. Pike is on that ship.

Departure – 5. The Belly of the Whale

This is the point where we head deep into metaphoric waters. Remember the story of Jonah being swallowed by the whale? That’s where we get our heading. The belly of the whale is a symbol of the worldwide womb, which is itself a symbol of a zone of rebirth. It is a place where one goes to realize or remember one’s true nature. A worshipper passes into a temple to be quickened by the recollection of who and what he is, dust and ashes, unless immortal. It is a form of self-annihilation. “Allegorically, then, the passage into a temple and the hero-dive through the jaws of the whale are identical adventures, both denoting, in picture language, the life-centering, life-renewing act. No creature can attain a higher grade of nature without ceasing to exist.” Many times the hero is severely physically wounded at this stage, dismembered, even slain, scattered over land and sea.

Example 1: Kirk descending into the hall for a trial in front of all of his peers. He is accused of cheating, placed on academic probation, and stripped of his privileges. He is reminded that he is under the power of the Starfleet administration.

Example 2: A slightly more interesting and provocative example of this stage might be when Spock banishes Kirk from the Enterprise and exiles him on the ice planet, Delta Vega. This is a more complete separation from his world. He is alone and threatened by the great red crab-squid from hell. He finds refuge in a cave with a wizened elder who tells him that his place is on the bridge of the Enterprise as her captain.

That’s it for the Departure stages of the monomyth. I’ll leave you with that for a few days before continuing with the Initiation stages.

Chris Pine as James T. Kirk Before Joining Starfleet

Spock: Ambassador For A Rational’s Utopia

“As a Vulcan I require no additional training to control my narcissism when making command decisions. They are and will always be invariably based on reason, logic and the facts as they exist in reality, not as we might wish them to be in order to conveniently fit some private notion of how the universe is supposed to operate.” –Spock

Make sure to file this under arrogance, not vanity. There is a difference. It is intensely gratifying to find heroic characters that are like me. It’s fun to read about people who react to things the way that I would, who think the way that I think, who say things that I would say. Honestly, it’s rare, very rare. Anaïs Nin and Ayn Rand are the only authors I’ve encountered that have come close to creating someone like me. It is similarly satisfying when I see a heroic character that I resemble in some significant way gain the love and respect of a wide audience.

The latest Star Trek film hit theaters last Friday. But even before then, the film, and Spock in particular, were getting serious media attention. As Spock has always been the quintessential rational, I have been exceedingly pleased by the praise heaped upon him. Of course, I give credit to the writers, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, as well as Zachary Quinto (yet again). Zachary was able to imbue the character with the appropriate intense stoicism that reflects Spock’s thoughtful and purposeful nature, while Kurtzman and Orci gave him the requisite material to work with. And while this incarnation is certainly more volatile and emotionally vulnerable than the Spock we have known in the past, he is still dedicated to logic. He is a hero to anyone who experiences their own nature as intensely rational. (Note that spoilers do follow—continue reading with caution if you intend to see the movie and have not done so.)

According to David Keirsey, in his book Please Understand Me II¸ in which he details the character traits of his four major personality types (Artisans, Guardians, Idealists and Rationals–in addition to the sixteen specific types), he estimates that only 5-6% of the population fall into the category of Rationals, the NTs, or intuitive-thinking types. So it’s not surprising that we don’t show up very often in film or fiction. Perhaps that’s why we stand out when we do show up.

Why is that we seem like such enigmatic creatures to the other personality types? Keirsey says we are “often criticized for being unfeeling and cold… what is taken for indifference is not indifference at all, but the thoughtful, absorbed concentration of the contemplative investigator.” He also says:

“Concerned as they are with logical investigation, they seem detached and distant from others, who conclude that this type has no interest in social reality. This conclusion is correct in the sense that when Rationals are concentrating on some complex problem they do detach themselves from their social context and remain distant until they solve the problem. At that moment they are not interested in others, but that does not mean they do not care about others. They are just as caring as any other type when they are focused on those they care about.”

I found this idea eloquently illustrated in the moment when Uhura goes to Spock to offer sympathy after the loss of his mother. When she asks what he needs, he responds with: “I need everyone to continue performing admirably.” His own pain in that moment is not sufficient reason for crucial work to halt. As a Rational, he would find comfort in an efficiently running system. Another amusing moment that illustrates the idea is when Spock says to the ship’s doctor: “I intend to assist in the effort to reestablish communication with Starfleet, however, if crew morale is better served by my roaming the halls weeping, I will gladly defer to your medical expertise.” Brilliant.

Vulcans attempt to live by reason and logic with no interference from emotion. Keirsey’s Rational category, being specifically meant to designate a human personality type, does not attempt to insinuate that we do not feel emotions. On the contrary, he goes out of his way to explain us to the other personality types and elaborates on the depth of our feelings and the reasons why we keep them under tight control. When he is a child, Sarek, Spock’s father, explains to him that “emotions run deep within our race, in many ways more deeply than in humans. Logic offers a serenity humans seldom experience, a control of feelings so that they do not control you.” This is a Rational’s philosophy.

Leonard Nimoy, the original Spock, liked the character’s logical nature, observing that the character struggles “to maintain a Vulcan attitude, a Vulcan philosophical posture and a Vulcan logic, opposing what was fighting him internally, which was human emotion.” A Rational often finds himself fighting this kind of battle. Our emotions run as deep as anyone’s, but as they tend to get in the way of getting things done, we do our best to keep them in check. When we cannot, we step aside and separate ourselves.

Spock: “I am no longer fit for duty. I hereby relinquish my command based on the fact that I have been emotionally compromised.”

I think compromised is an apt description of how it feels for a Rational when emotions get the better of us. This is in direct opposition to how feeling types perceive their emotions. Kirk = Feeling Type. How does Spock respond to Kirk-the-Feeing-Type? “I will not allow you to lecture me on the merits of emotion.” Ha! And yet, while Spock will, when necessary, put Kirk in his place—“You advocate a methodology based on assumption and emotion, not familiarity and knowledge”—he will not hesitate to acknowledge when Kirk is thinking rationally—“The cadet’s logic is sound.” Rationals will listen to anybody who has something useful to offer regarding their choice of ways and means, but they will also disregard anyone who does not. Ideas must stand on their own merits. We are compelled by our very nature to point out errors in argument. Keirsey says:

“In conversation Rationals try to avoid the irrelevant, the trivial, and the redundant. They will not waste words, and while they understand that some redundancy is necessary they still are reluctant to state the obvious, or to repeat themselves on a point, limiting their explanations and definitions because they assume that what is obvious to them is obvious to others.”

My favorite part of the Rationals chapter could be when Keirsey writes: “They will heed the demons if their ideas are fruitful, and ignore the saints if theirs are not.” Oh, so true.

Much as I might sound boastful, NTs are easily the most self-critical of the personality types. We have trouble measuring up to our own standards and are frequently haunted by a sense of teetering on the edge of failure. It is perhaps this vulnerability in particular that I feel Zachary Quinto brought so vividly to life on screen. After relinquishing his command, exposed as compromised, Spock confesses to his father that he is failing to control his anger towards the one who took his mother’s life. He feels that he should be able to control that emotion, to keep the pain in check. That he fails to do so is a source of disappointment and shame.

We prefer to appear unemotional when we communicate. We try to minimize body-language, facial expression and other non-verbals as much as possible to express ourselves in a carefully crafted manner. Sound familiar? Our intention is to be accurate, to get things straight, sort things out, so that we can avoid errors in reasoning. Logic tells us how to avoid such errors. For our own self-image, we gain self-esteem by being ingenious, self-respect by being autonomous and self-confidence by being resolute. We value being calm, trusting reason, yearning for achievement and seeking knowledge. We have an insatiable curiosity about how nature works; complexity itself intrigues us. We are also: abstract, adaptable, analytical, competent, complex, curious, efficient, exacting, experimental, farseeing, flexible, impersonal, intellectual, independent, inventive, logical, open-minded, purposeful, scientific, skeptical, theoretical, systematic, and more.

If this is you, you are not alone. If this is not you, but sounds like someone you know, let this shed some light on their inner workings. There are few who know me that would call me cold, a bit brutal at times, but not cold. To an outsider, however, I can see how I might appear so. I’ll leave you with one last classic line from Spock: “If you eliminate the impossible whatever remains however improbable must be the truth.”

In conclusion, Vulcan is a Rational’s utopia.

Zachary Quinto as Spock

*Quotation at the top taken from Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of the film Star Trek. All other Spock quotations taken directly from film, screenplay by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.

Where to Begin? With the Bones

“This book is only my first step and above all a means of acquiring a voice, of making myself heard. What I shall have to say when I acquire that voice does not need explanation… I fully realize that I am a very green, very helpless beginner who has the arrogance of embarking, single-handed, against what many call the irrevocable trend of our century… I do not know of a better way to make my entrance into the battle. I believe that man will always be an individualist, whether he knows it or not, and I want to make it my duty to make him know it.”
–Ayn Rand, in a letter to H. L. Mencken about We the Living

Many times I have seen authors interviewed and asked where they get their ideas. Some of them know the answer to the question and some don’t. Some credit a divine and mysterious source that is as elusive as it is inexplicable. As for me, I can tell you exactly when and how Slave to Virtue began. In one sense, it began 10 years ago, but as I never intended to write a book about that experience, I attribute the inspiration to an episode of the FOX show Bones.

As a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, I gave Bones a shot because of David Boreanaz who plays FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth. I kept going because I admire the Temperance Brennan character. Going back to the Keirsey temperament sorter, she would be a thinking type like me, but heavily sensation over intuition. That’s why the intuitive-feeling Booth is such a great complement to her character. But that’s a topic for another time.

In the first season of the show, in an episode called The Man in the Fallout Shelter, the cast gets quarantined in the lab over Christmas. It is here we first find out that Booth has a son that no one knew about.

“I have a kid, too. His name is Parker. He’s four years old. His mother wouldn’t marry me.”

It’s an intense and dramatic show, so my emotional reactions were heightened already, not to mention the fact that it was one of those Christmas episodes that are specifically designed to gushify the audience, but that one line had an incredible and unforeseen effect on me. One of the amazing things that fiction can do for us is to clarify issues that in our own lives are muddy and complicated. Because the feelings I have for Agent Booth are straightforward and easy, not remotely personal, I was able to react to that statement with nothing but compassion. That’s not something I had been able to do for the person in my life that could fully empathize with Booth’s feelings. Once the compassion was awake in me, it became increasingly clear that I needed to write the story of my experience. Initially, it was mostly about healing my own wounds rather than exposing them to the world. But I ended up somewhere else.

First, I spent two months writing the story. I tried to keep it focused on the simple experience of a pregnant woman who does not want to be a mother dealing with a man who wants to be a father. I had intended it to be a short story, but I am stocking up on evidence that I’m not very good at expressing myself in that format. The first draft, done in June, was more than 35,000 words, already way beyond short story, at the far end of the novella standards and well on the way to becoming a novel. Here’s a loose guideline of industry standards for those unfamiliar:

Short Story 2,000-7,000 words
Novella 7,000-40,000 words
Novel 45,000-150,000 words

I was not aware of how far I’d gotten until September. At that point I was working on my revisions and adding in an entirely new character. It was clear then that the story was going to be much longer than I had originally intended (it’s at 95,000 currently). When I went back to look at these industry word counts last fall I realized that the story had become my first book. I should mention that I was already working on a book before I started Slave to Virtue. Symphony was supposed to be my first. But somehow, even though I’ve been working on Symphony for several years—I started it before I left Colorado—I never felt like a full-fledged writer until I realized what Slave to Virtue was. Something about having a draft, a full outline, a strong purpose and well-defined theme cemented the idea for me. Perhaps it was more that the end was within sight and grasp. It was an exhilarating and frightening feeling. But there was something else that helped me at the time.

I was rereading Ayn Rand’s first novel We the Living. I’ve read both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead several times, but this was only the second time I had picked up We the Living. Here’s an excerpt from Leonard Peikoff’s Introduction to the 60^th Anniversary Edition:

“Not a single one of her stories pertained to Russia, which she hated. It was something of a paradox to her, therefore, that she set her first novel in Soviet Russia. Part of the explanation is that, having finally escaped to the United States, she had to get Russia out of her system.”

This passage resonated with me because, as I said, I had never intended to write a book about my personal background, either. In Ayn Rand’s foreword to the book she says:

“I want to say that We the Living is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write. It is not an autobiography in the literal, but only in the intellectual sense. The plot is invented; the background is not… My view of what a good autobiography should be is contained in the title that Louis H. Sullivan gave to the story of his of his life: The Autobiography of an Idea. It is only in this sense that We the Living is my autobiography and that Kira, the heroine, is me. I was born in Russia, I was educated under the Soviets, I have seen the conditions of existence that I describe. The particulars of Kira’s story were not mine; I did not study engineering, as she did—I studied history; I did not want to build bridges—I wanted to write; her physical appearance bears no resemblance to mine, neither does her family. The specific events of Kira’s life were not mine; her ideas, her convictions, her values were and are.”

I could sum up Slave to Virtue in similar sentences. This gave me a wonderful new perspective on my story and an overwhelming feeling that I was writing the perfect first novel for me. It was clear that it was the story that I needed to tell before I could tell any others. And it was tremendously satisfying to consider myself in the company of Ayn Rand. If Slave to Virtue is to be my We the Living, I will be proud and grateful.

Before I close this discussion of the story, there’s a few more things I want to say to fellow writers who are engaging in a creative discussion with their own personal history as I have done. Parts of the process are excruciating. It’s a bit like shoving a knife into a scar in an attempt to experience the original wound all over again. It’s brutal. In the end, I found it cathartic. But I also found that while my own wounds surrounding the history were healing, I could see with increasing clarity how many steps back I needed to take. Writers use the phrase “killing your babies” to describe the necessity of editing out your favorite parts for the sake of the story. I think this is even more difficult when you find yourself removing pieces of a story that’s part of your personal history. It’s a sad feeling when you cut an entire character from your story, a character based on someone important to you, a character that was a crucial part of your personal story. But these sacrifices are sometimes necessary when you respect the integrity of the story above historical accuracy. A fiction writer must have that kind of perspective.

Once the first draft was done and I felt like the necessary internal work had been done, I took several steps back and approached the story from a more objective distance. The story is the better for it. The Allyssa character remains very close to me. She shares my feelings about the situation, at the time, and also the wisdom I’ve gained from the time since. That the events of the story are not an accurate portrayal of what happened is irrelevant. The lessons learned are the same. The moral of the tale is intact and hopefully more widely accessible for people who are in similar situations. Stories benefit from a clear focus on what the core issue is. And to this day, a big part of the Slave to Virtue story is the necessity for compassion towards the father when dealing with an accidental pregnancy. And I owe that compassion to Seeley Booth.

David Boreanaz as Special Agent Seeley Booth

From Gabriel to Sylar: How to Create a Killer

“We’re all at war with ourselves—that’s what it means to be human.” –Sylar, It’s Coming

One great thing about being a writer is the imperative to create worlds to dwell in. We create characters to play with, talk to, fall in love with. The escapes that our audiences retreat to we get to experience twice; we are our own audiences first. I want to write stories about people that I think would be great to know because in the process, the characters become real parts of my life. Then I get to introduce them to the world.

Just recently, I became a fan of the NBC show Heroes. I quickly devoured all three seasons (more than once actually) and while Peter Petrelli is my favorite hero, I give Sylar the award for best part of the show. Watching that incredibly dark villain take shape was so much fun that I just kept thinking: I want one. I want to create a character who is that kind of wrong. I think playing with a character like that will be extremely fun, especially pitting them against my protagonist. There might be a sadist hidden in me somewhere.

So what does it take to create a character as dark and deeply disturbed as Sylar? We begin with Gabriel Gray, a shy, unassuming man whose apartment is filled with books. This speaks to a rich inner life, but perhaps a sense of isolation from the world. He has a talent for intuitively understanding how things work, which initially manifests itself as an ability to fix watches. In I Am Become Death, Gabriel explains: “If you can understand the complexities of a watch you can understand anything, everything, cause, effect, action, reaction.” But more than that, his “ability is not just understanding how things work, there’s a hunger that comes with it to know more, to have more. [He] couldn’t control it and it turned [him] into a killer, a monster.” The understanding alone was not enough of a power. In Six Months Ago, Gabriel tells Chandra Suresh that a part of him always wanted to be special:

“When I was a kid, I used to wish some stranger would come and tell me my family wasn’t really my family. They weren’t bad people, they were just insignificant, and I wanted to be different, special. I wanted to change, a new name, a new life. The watchmaker’s son became a watchmaker. It is so futile and I wanted to be important.”

One key moment is when Chandra responds by telling him that he is important. This is everything he wants to hear. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to be special or significant. It’s a natural human desire that most of us share. We want to be important and to make a difference in the world. For so long, Gabriel found himself powerless to break out of his mundane life spent fixing watches. Then he learns that there are people in the world with amazing abilities and his talent for understanding also gives him the power to take those abilities from them. Unfortunately, he has to kill them, fairly gruesomely, in order to do so. (I am intentionally refraining from going in to the exceptions to that rule.) In an interesting turn, the first person Gabriel meets with a special ability doesn’t want it and asks him if he can make it go away. Granted, I’m sure he would have preferred to live, but I digress. Gabriel thinks the man is “broken” for wanting the power to go away. He “fixes” it for him. This is also the first time he calls himself Sylar.

Later, when he goes to Chandra to show off his new ability—telekinesis—he says: “I’m different now. I feel I’ve been given a chance to start over—new life, new identity, new purpose.” These are all the things he said he wanted. Even so, he does not immediately become a relentless killer of people with abilities. In the episode Villains, we see that he feels intense guilt and remorse for what he’s done and attempts to take his own life. He explains, “I’ve done something unforgivable…  A man had something that I wanted, but I took it at a terrible price.” That his suicide attempt fails initially looks like providence and a second chance for him to be a good person. It’s important to recognize that his vision of himself at this point is as a victim. He says, “I have a kind of problem. I guess you could say I’m like addict. I have this overwhelming hunger; I covet the abilities of others.” That Sylar sees himself as weak, as someone with an uncontrollable power, leaves him vulnerable to the malign forces that are plotting against him. They place the prey he covets within his grasp, and he falls, unable to resist the temptation. Sadly, he repeatedly finds himself at the mercy of people who want to manipulate him and is thus unable to find any lasting redemption.

It is the victim mentality that fuels the desire for power. He can never have enough power to feel complete because all of his worth is determined by others. He exists in a state of perpetual powerlessness. An incredible neurosis for someone so supernaturally powerful. But he is never fully in control of his own destiny. All of his attempts at redemption fail because they rely on approval from an outside source. So the best he can do is to feed his homicidal urges willingly because that gives him the illusion of control and fighting against them doesn’t work. I think that makes it easier for us to pity him when he says things like “I want to be a good person.”

Chronologically, all that I’ve outlined happens before the show starts. For the first half of the first season all we see and hear of Sylar are the stories of the carnage he is leaving in his wake. He is a bogeyman, killing and disappearing into the shadows. All we know is that his modus operandi is to slice off the top of people’s heads. We are led to see him as a vicious psychopath. That’s not far off either. He’s killed almost 50 people that we know about by the end of season three. And yet, the first time we get a good look at him is in a flashback. He is sitting at his desk in his shop with his special watchmaker glasses on, looking young and innocent, charming and endearing. (It’s no accident that he’s played by the extremely attractive Zachary Quinto; we do like our bad guys sexy.) The first thing he does is fix Chandra’s watch and then refuse compensation: an act of generosity. So, despite the terror he is causing in the present, we cannot simply write him off as a monster. Zachary said of the character: “He’s definitely somebody that has been overcome by a hunger and overcome by a pursuit for power and for importance that did start a little more innocuously than it evolved into.” He has also said:

“The sad part is he’s well-intentioned. He wants to improve his life. He wants to make a difference. He wants to matter. Through the process of realizing how to do that, he gets blinded and loses himself in the pursuit of it and goes a little crazy—a ‘little’ being an understatement.”

Again, in The Hard Part, he comes to a crossroads. Sylar has a vision of the future and believes he is going to destroy half of New York City. He reaches out for help. He says, “I understood it before: the killing. I had a reason: take what others didn’t deserve. It was natural selection.” But facing an apocalypse that kills half the city in an instant, he cannot grasp a motive. “They mean nothing, they’re innocent, there’s no gain, so why would I do it? What possible reason could I have for killing so many?” His conscience is still active and he sees innocence in the world. So how monstrous is he really? Can an entirely evil character conceive of innocence? Recognize it?

In a truly heartbreaking scene, Gabriel goes to his mother looking for answers and a way out. He expresses a desire to stop himself. Here are the two lines of dialogue that mark the moment when you think everything could have changed:

Gabriel to his mother: Maybe I don’t have to be special—that’s ok to just be a normal watchmaker. Can’t you just tell me that’s enough?

Gabriel’s Mother: Why would I tell you that when I know you can be so much more? If you wanted, you could be president.

(This is like that moment in Revenge of the Sith when Yoda tells Anakin to “let go of all that he fears to lose.” Less than helpful.)

As an audience member, you wish his mother could have told him what he needed to hear. It is clear to us that the life of a watchmaker would have been preferable to the other path laid before him. His mother had the chance to save him and instead put a condition on her love, planting in his mind the belief that he has to be special to be worthy. And not just special, her mention of being president is significant. Not only is it a position of global power, but one attained by winning a popular majority. The country must judge you worthy of that position, declare you valuable. External validation is necessary. So even if he could get to the point where he considered himself special, it would not be enough. That becomes clearer as the scene continues and he tries to show his mother that he is special and that he can do extraordinary things. At first, she is enchanted, but fear quickly takes over and she runs away from him. In the episode I Am Sylar, he tells how he felt in that moment: “I wanted you to die. The way you looked at me, like I was some kind of monster. I felt so small.”

So these are our keys. My philosophy for creating a character like this is take a whole person and start hacking away at them, sort of like Gabriel fracturing himself by creating the alternate persona, Sylar. How does a person respond when they don’t get unconditional love from their parents? How does a person respond when all their attempts at achievement gain them nothing? How does a person respond to feeling powerless? Or powerful? In a world that champions celebrity, people of significance and power, how does an unremarkable person leave a mark? If a person perceives himself as a victim, how will he take his revenge upon the world? How many times will a man attempt to redeem himself when every effort fails? If you strip away everything that someone cares about, how quickly will they fall to the dark side? What is it that keeps some people in check? What happens if you take those limits away? Where is the point of no return?

Let’s also use another one of Zachary’s insights into the character: “I would say we both have a desire to be valued. My desire to be valued is manifested in cultivating relationships with my friends and family. Sylar’s desire to be valued manifests itself… well, in a murderous rampage.”

That’s an amusing statement, but I think what’s most interesting is that it reveals how closely we can brush that dark side within ourselves. How far away is it at the beginning, at that moment when the choice is made? We all have the potential for good and for bad. What happens when we find ourselves incapable of forming relationships with people that will value us? How long can a person endure that kind of isolation? That the desire has the same root is what makes it possible for us to conceive of acting out the darker aspects of ourselves, even if it is only through fiction. Perhaps, hopefully only through fiction.

We all crave love and acceptance. It is easy to believe that the only way to get those things is by being important, special, setting oneself apart, by being different. Then, in the race for power and glory we forget what we were after in the first place. If a child is brought up to believe that the world is a dangerous place, a place to be feared, that everyone is out to get them, and that they will have to fight others to get what they want, that child will become an antagonist for the world. They will see the world as an enemy, an obstacle. Not hard to imagine them judging the world as wrong and themselves as righteous. Think of an arrogance based on contempt versus self-respect.

By exposing the inner workings of Sylar, I have given myself some building blocks to work with for my own character. I think what’s important to remember is that there are many moments in the series that compel you to feel deeply for Sylar. He is conflicted and lost, clearly deeply damaged. But it’s his inner conflict that gives him his humanity. And while he has moments of vicious cruelty and almost unspeakable evil, they are tempered by these moments of attempts at redemption. I think one of the most compelling things about this character is that he is not wholly evil. He is not just a monster. And perhaps what makes him truly scary is that he is recognizable as a man.

Sylar and His Mother

*If you have stayed with me this long, I thank you. Brevity is a skill I have not yet mastered.

Playing in the Promethean Fields

“A mighty lesson we inherit:
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source”
-Lord Byron, “Prometheus”

I have recently finished drafting my first novel, so it is time for me to start putting myself out there and creating a presence. I must crawl out of my cave. This place will help me to promote my work and develop a readership as I begin trying to sell the book to agents and publishers. So, welcome to the launch!

This will not be a blog about me or my life. As a writer, I find my internal life far more interesting and worthy of circumspection. Or perhaps, more accurately, the way I internalize the things I find inspirational in my experience of the world is what’s interesting. So this will be a blog about story, the germination, the roots, the evolution, the actualization of story. I will pull apart the works that interest me so that I can forge tools for my own use.

I like the idea of using Prometheus as a metaphor for that forge. According to myth, he brought the creative fire of art and technology to mankind. He suffered Zeus’s wrath and a millennium of unspeakable torment in order to do so. Prometheus’s theft of fire signified his enlightenment of primitive men, rescuing them from the mental darkness of ignorance and savagery. That is the field on which I want to play. I want to be a participant in the creative world, one of the people who provide entertainment, escape, and sometimes insights that change people. I certainly don’t want to write anything easily forgotten. I want to create moments that will stick with my audience, as so many great writers have done for me. So this blog is going to be about how I mine the work of the people who inspire me and through a magical alchemy turn it to my own kind of gold. That’s what the tagline means by searching for the creative fire. Find it in others and it will ignite in you. What you do with it from there is entirely up to you.

I chose the name Promethean Fields because for me it invokes an image of place, a place that is a tabula rasa right now. I can fill it with anything that I want and invite others to dwell here as well. It’s a place where we can sit around the campfire and trade stories. Then what? What can we do with a story once we’ve experienced it? I will use it to fuel my own storytelling. But even more than that, I can abstract ideas and themes from stories in order to enhance my own life experience. I find science fiction and fantasy to be a virtual playground for philosophy and lessons about human natures. And the more I understand about human nature, the more able I am to create human characters that resonate. Here I can show you how to dig down into characters that ignite my imagination and show you how to use their motivations to create new characters. Not only do I use books, movies and television shows, I use the stories I hear from people I know, that I see on the news. All these things are tools and inspiration.

Something else that you will find here is an ongoing fascination with mythology and how it influences our lives and stories. In his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell talked about the universal underlying themes of myths and stories that cross the boundaries of time and culture. With his work I can wrap modern stories into a larger context and give them even broader-reaching lessons. The lessons we take from stories and apply to our own lives can help us to achieve greater things, reach higher and realize more potential within ourselves. The world-transcending deed of Prometheus follows Campbell’s nuclear unit of the monomyth: a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return. So let’s go back to him for a moment. Hesiod’s works Theogony and Works and Days depict Prometheus as a wily trickster who deserved Zeus’s wrath. Later, Aeschylus revised the myth in his play Prometheus Bound. There, Prometheus becomes a heroic rebel and savior. Zeus is a despot, an embodiment of amoral power that rules without justice or mercy. This is an amazing piece of character evolution. Suddenly, Prometheus is a champion of freedom and savior of mankind. He gave us the celestial fire and taught us the arts and skills of civilization, raising humanity from primitive savagery to a place of greater potential, narrowing the gap between gods and men. The hero’s function is redemptive: by his half-divine nature, his glorious deeds, and his relentless pursuit of immortality, the hero uplifts humanity from its dismal condition and reminds it of its godlike potential. No wonder Zeus was mad.

We’re told that Prometheus could have escaped Zeus’s punishment by simply taking his gift back. But he had a free mind, a consciousness that could distinguish between absolutes of good and evil and he would not corrupt his awareness by conforming to Zeus’s demands. That act would extinguish the light he had brought to earth. In this respect, Prometheus’s intellectual honesty—a virtue—is the quality that occasions his suffering.

Aeschylus was certainly not the last to find inspiration in the Prometheus myth. In the Romantic period, his heroic rebellion against oppressive authority ignited the imagination of a generation being reborn into a new age unleashed by the French Revolution. Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his Prometheus Unbound, saw the suffering of the Titan as an image of the human mind remaining free to explore the universe and liberation despite a physical bondage to tyrannical rulers.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To live, and bear, to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This alone is Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

Percy’s wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley gave her master work the title Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Her protagonist defies conventional moral limits in order to release the human spirit, attempting to take the power of god and create life. So what is it that we learn from all these stories that are connected to a single source? For myself, I see what power rebellion has to save us. You’ll see a healthy questioning of authority showing up as common theme in my work. I encourage everyone to question all kinds of authority. Make your own decisions about what you will accept and believe. Honoring your own truth is what will set you free.

That leads me to one final note about Prometheus and my connection to him: According to David Keirsey’s temperament sorter I am an ENTJ (though an extremely borderline extrovert.) Keirsey chose Prometheus to represent the Rationals (NTs). The Rational personality generally has little respect for authority, simply because it is authority. Our respect must be earned and we will willingly act against the majority if our internal moral compass points away from the mainstream. We question everything. I find Keirsey’s work fascinating and I think his book Please Understand Me is an invaluable tool for character development. It is so crucial to understand the different ways that people think, the different motivations people act upon, the wondrous variety of values possible in this world. Understanding others also has the added benefit of promoting tolerance. Bonus.

Gaston Bachelard, a psychologist from the University of Miami proposed to place under the name of Promethean complex all those tendencies which impel us to know as much as our fathers, more than our fathers, as much as our teachers, more than our teachers. I’m pretty sure I have that complex. And here is where I will share the treasures of my never ending search for knowledge through character deconstructions, plot analysis, drawing correlations to the monomyth, exploring personality types and more.

Finally, here’s a personal photo of Paul Manship’s sculpture of Prometheus that resides in the heart of Rockefeller Center, here in New York City. Funny thing, I had no idea this was Prometheus until I did the research for this blog. One of the great things about this city is how it can surprise you; it breathes story.

Prometheus at Rockefeller Center, New York City

*See my More Resources page for links to information about Joseph Campbell and David Keirsey.

*For more information about Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days
en.wikipedia.org/Hesiod

*For more information about Aeschylus and Prometheus Bound
en.wikipedia.org/Aeschylus

*A full copy of Lord Byron’s poem “Prometheus” is available at:
www.poetry-archive.com/b/prometheus