“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
Promethean Fields 