An Exclusive Writing Lab asking the memoir writer to find comfort with living in the questions and the mysteries of life, plus with a prompt that taps into the “last myth.”
Welcome into Flight School:
When I was a younger woman, I worked with Joanna Macy; author, teacher, and scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology.
At an extended Macy workshop at the Land of Medicine Buddha Retreat Center, I sat with eighty or so of my fellow seekers learning and practicing exercises to break through suppressed emotions. In one exercise, we moved through history over the last hundred years and experienced, more directly, the shock of American bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the devastation of multiple ecological systems in failure, and the extermination of various species—including human beings.
Finally, Macy performed an oral rendition of The Fisher King, which she referred to as the last myth.
Some say a myth is a story that is untrue, or unprovable. Still, others call myth “ideology” below beings of science and fact. Over the years, I’ve decided to take in myth at the level of the heart. If one moves me, I get closer and use it to light up the interior realm.
I am not telling Macy’s version of The Fisher King. I am telling my version which means I heard it, incorporated it into my thinking, and then…over the years…retold it. My telling fits my thinking on writing, just as Macy’s telling fit into her thinking on deep ecology. Let’s see where it takes us.
Once upon a time, a knight in training named Percival was nearly ready to take his place at the round table of King Arthur but still needed to perform an important act of bravery (slay a dragon, save a princess, that kind of thing). Percival decided it was time to get this job done and so tossed on his chainmail and mounted his equally armored horse.
Searching for this heroic opportunity, Percival rode and rode and kept on riding until he arrived at a kingdom amid profound devastation. Fields fallow. Air fetid with death and disease. Houses were boarded and closed tight.
Percival was chilled to the core. Maybe I should move on? he thought. But then, as he approached the castle, the gates lifted. From within, all manner of folk rushed out to greet him with joy and applause.
“Finally,” they called. “Finally, you have come,” because it had long been prophesied that a man of this description would save them.
Percival was touched. These cooks and maids and stable boys were so welcoming and earnest. Okay, he thought, it’s late. I’ll stay a while.
His horse has led away to the stables and fed precious reserves of oats, grain, and sweet hay, and Percival was given the best room in the place and fed a grand meal made from more of the precious reserves of meat, cheese, bread, and wine.
Finally, Percival was taken to meet the king who lay in his bed and near death from a festering wound in his thigh. Ought to get a doctor to look at that, Percival thought, scratching his temple, but he kept such thoughts to himself. Instead, he tsk-tsked and shook his head. And that was that.
Filled up and ready for a good night of sleep in his cozy room, Percival turned in, thinking about how it sucked to be these people in this terrible place. Soon enough, he fell asleep.
The next day, Percival enjoyed another terrific meal prepared with great care, though the servants now looked a little askance at him. Feeling awkward, Percival clapped for his horse, mounted up, and rode off.
Percival had vowed not to return before performing some great and worthy feat. All the people of his kingdom knew this and so, when he trotted into town, he was given a Knight-of-the-Round-Table welcome, followed by a blowout party, and a knighting ceremony before his adoring fans. Just as the blade was being lowered to this shoulder, a voice cried out, “Wait one damn minute!”
Out from the crowd stepped an old hag with her pendulous breasts a-swinging and her wild crazed hair sticking out this way and that. The woman pointed a gnarled finger at Percival and told his entire story from start to finish.
“This man is no hero,” she said to the stunned onlookers. “He did nothing.”
(Poor Percival, I always feel sorry for him at this moment. I mean, come on, the guy hadn’t meant to be such an insensitive cad, he was merely out of his depth, and now he’d been busted in front of his fellow knights, his king, and the lovely maidens he might one day woo. This was bad…what would Percival do? But the answer is right there in the fact he is a knight-in-training.)
Percival, the good man, stepped up to the challenge as he had been taught. “All right. All right,” he said to the old woman. “What was I supposed to do?”
What a look she gave him then. It was a long, weary, pitying look as old as dust. “You needed to ask the key question,” she said, in a low and solemn voice.
“Which is?” Percival asked.
The crowd collectively inhaled and leaned that much closer to the pair.
“What ails thee, you fool,” the wise woman said. “You needed to ask ‘What ails thee?’”
There is much more but for our purposes, let’s stop because we have plenty to get started.
Writing is lonely primarily because so few people venture into these dark places within. As Carl Jung wrote…
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
And yet, the rewards are great, too. We can become masters of a lovely, whole, and healed kingdom if we keep at it.
So, what are we (as writers) trying to bring into consciousness with my version of this story? What are we trying to know that might help us better create our art? How can this key question help us?
Well, first, there is a kingdom, which is us. We are a kingdom filled with many personalities and resources. We have talents and gifts. And, we have a wound too, which is deep and festering. So much has happened in our lives, much of it out of our control, that by the time we hit adolescence, we’ve become closed off and cynical in too many ways and our bright, younger selves are a thing of history. We hurt.
In our hurt, we look for someone to save us. A brave and righteous knight, a hero, will do just fine. We want this rescue desperately. We search for our heroes everywhere. What are our elections about anyway? What about our adoration of movie stars? Billionaires? What about falling in love? “There he (or she) is,” we tell ourselves when some fake hero appears. “Our hero” we cry in near desperation. “We are saved…”
Except…wait. The hero we long for isn’t out there. The hero we need is inside. He is that part of ourselves who gets the job done, or tries, but who isn’t always quite up to the task. We all know that guy. Think about it. How many times have you seen a problem, some sorrow, or suffering in your fellow man and thought, “Dude! Sucks to be you.”
Come on. We’ve all done this.
Why?
Because we’re human because that’s our inner Percival. The knight-in-training.
That’s okay. That’s part of the gig.
And that same Percival has also partied and told folks he was better than he was because, again, that’s human.
The good news is that we’ve also got that wise old hag inside too. We do.
When you read that part of the story, something in you lights up. At least, it does for me because I know her.
I kind of don’t like her…and society HATES her. (Can anyone say Botox? Make-up tips for the older woman?) Anyway, society, as we live it now, is hell-bent on keeping the wise old hag as far away from our consciousness as possible because it has no interest in wise old women. Wise old men? You bet. Fine. Wise old men are considered handsome, dignified, and coveted by society, but wise old women? Pass. They are hags.
No, no, no. That’s not true. Not in the realm of the interior kingdom.
The wise feminine is there and she is strong. She exists beyond societal norms (and the current ruling class of old white men). The wise old woman is in you as you read this story. She’s the one who is her full self, swinging boobs and all, and doesn’t give a damn about being saved by an outer hero. She saved herself long ago! This woman is Truth!
“Ask the question,” she tells our Percival. “Ask the key question.”
What this means is that it is mightily heroic to turn to yourself, to your ailing kingdom and hurting king, and ask, “What ails thee?” Or, to be more direct, “What ails me?” Translation: What is my wound? What went wrong? What sorrow can’t I shake because it’s still there festering, unhealed, and untended?
Once you ask, with an open and earnest desire to know the Truth, it will be time to start writing in a new, open, and humble way. It is writing in the dark at times because the answer comes at a slant. The answer is never direct. The answer is rarely what you “know” about your wound. You cannot intellectualize this. It’s not a diagnosis. There are no simple fixes here…which I know is sad, but that’s good too. You’re not a problem to be solved…you’re a kingdom of riches to set right. The tools you need then can be found in the searching and humble creation of your art, through your word choices, your descriptions, and most of all, your willingness to fully surrender to the unknown.
For now, and over these days to come, let my rendition of The Fisher King work on you. Think about it for a bit and then stop thinking and do other things. Take down a few notes. Or not. Forget it and then watch what bubbles up. Maybe write down the question: What ails me? See what happens.
Mostly, I want you to slow things down and ponder. Ponder Percival, the fallow kingdom, and the deep, unhealed wound.
Share what comes up in the chat. I’d love to hear.
As for me, and attending Macy’s retreat, the day it ended a group of us gathered inside the hollow trunk of a redwood burned hollow by a lightning strike. A woman laid her phone on the ground and set a timer on the camera. A moment later, the photo taken, we all hummed a mantra we had learned. It was silly, but we did it and a second photo was taken (likely on a longer timer).
What struck us, after looking at the photographs, wasn’t that we were mostly chins and nostrils in shadows, but that the air in the first one seemed to be floating with random bits of dust. In the second photo that air had shifted to become a series of blue orbs.
Blue orbs?
What?
It was magical and strange and couldn’t be explained. Through our mantra, had we managed to manifest blue Medicine Buddha orbs? Or maybe it was a symbol of our beautiful planet refracted back to us? Or maybe it was just a trick of the light? Who knows? Who knows? I live the questions though. I live the mystery. And I’m fine with that.
I'm reading all of the posts from the beginning ... again. I am pondering 'what ails me, what deep unhealed wound?' After much seeking, counselling, learning, growing, healing - and writing about it all - asking the question still stirs something, so I will keep asking and pondering.
I will definitely keep this question in mind as I write. Like you said in your introduction, it's so common to lose sight of the reason we start writing... for ourselves, not for other people. And when we're truest to ourselves and what we need, when we work to uncover our own truths, we can be more authentic and thus move through the world in a way that helps everyone.