Folktales for Dark Times

        One thing that it seems everyone in the world has in common these days - and yes, I like to look for things we have in common, no matter how divided we are — is that we’re all scared, and stressed out, and worried about the future.  The irony, of course, is that it’s the things some of us do to try to avert crisis that are causing what others of us see as crisis, to which they react with actions that cause even deeper crisis to those with the first perspective, and so on…  So how can we break out of this vicious fear cycle?  Well, it isn’t easy and it will take a lot of work from a lot of different directions, but one thing that can help is sharing stories.  Why?  Because stories give us hope, inspire us to be brave and persistent, spark our problem-solving creativity, and provide a little stress-reducing humor.  Not just any stories will do, though.  Stories have power, and stories about how We will crush Them are definitely not helpful.  So here, to the rescue, is folktale expert and storyteller Csenge Virág Zalka with a Storytelling Global Crisis starter kit.

        Go straight to Zalka’s blog The Multicolored Diary and check out her list of folktales for dark times: Don’t Stop Believing.  Read some for your own mental and emotional health, and then share some, because sharing multiplies the benefit.  (Actually, not all of the links go to readable stories.  Some just link to citations of books that may not be readily available.  Still, a number of them can be read on-line.)  Recurring themes are the need to keep doing the small tasks for as long as it takes without giving up, and the need to work together to solve problems and overcome threats.  So hang in there, and don’t stop telling the stories that inspire you to hope and action.

[Picture: Story Time, rubber block print by AEGN, 2003 (sold out).]

The Book of Arnold

        We recently had the opportunity to see the Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon,” which had funny moments, and dark moments, and an awful lot of obscene moments, and of course lots of entertaining song and dance…  But to my surprise it turned out to be largely about the power of story to improve the world, and that’s a message I’m always interested in exploring.  At the beginning, Elder Arnold Cunningham’s storytelling proclivities are not particularly productive, but eventually he begins to realize that his stories have the power to help people, to make them think about their experiences in new ways, to change their perspectives and their relationships, and to make their world better.  At that point, he’s no longer “lying;” he’s composing “fiction” (or perhaps “fan fic.”)  After all, most people don’t believe his stories literally; as one villager explains witheringly, “It’s a metaphor!”  Cunningham’s stories teach people, in a message LeGuin would approve, that the way things are is not inevitable.  His stories give role models for new modes of relationship, and offer the hope that creativity can be brought to bear even when all other hope seems lost.

        The stories that Cunningham tells, claiming them to be gospel, are utterly nutty mash-ups of the actual Book of Mormon with hobbits and Mordor, Darth Vader and the Death Star, the Starship Enterprise and many unfortunate frogs.  Significantly, though, they aren’t merely hilarious (or merely crude); they are made up out of a desperate desire to help desperate people, and to help those people make sense of and deal with their reality.  And that is, at its heart, one of the deepest purposes that fiction, and speculative fiction in particular, can have.

        “This book will change your life” could be true of many books.  For some people it’s The Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, for others perhaps it’s To Kill a Mockingbird or The Lorax, or The Phantom Tollbooth.  Whatever it is, if you’re a reader, you remember that feeling: that awe and wonder as your mind blossoms into bright new light and the world is never quite the same again.  The musical The Book of Mormon claims that any story that can do that is enough gospel for anyone, and while I don’t agree that any and all fiction should be equated with divine revelation, I do agree that there is a valid point here.  Story has a power - sometimes even a divine power - to change lives and to change the world.  And that’s certainly worth singing and dancing about!

[Picture: Darth Vader and Death Star, linoleum block print by Peter Santa-Maria (Image from his Etsy shop ATTACKPETER).]

It's Not Fantasy. It's Preparation.

        On May 5, Maria Devlin McNair had a piece in the Boston Globe that you need to read.  It covers a whole slew of points that I’ve discussed in this blog before, including

        - The real-world inspiration that speculative fiction can provide, in this case, to the students who survived the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and became powerful advocates for gun control.  As Anna Crean, one of the students, said, “We’ve grown up with teenagers in dystopian eras that have fixed everything and become the heroes of their city. Then they put us into a dystopian era in real life and they don’t expect us to do anything?  We can make a difference because that’s what books and movies have told us since we were little.”

        - How “children’s literature” can be as deep and complex as “serious literature” and grapple with the most profound moral issues.  As fantasy author Philip Pullman said, “There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.”

        - How, indeed, the division between children’s and adult’s literature is somewhat artificial anyway.

        - How fantasy is not mere escapism.  It helps readers figure out possibilities of how they can live their actual lives in the actual world, and in particular

        - How the vision of Good is important for developing our own moral compasses.  As MG Prezioso of the Harvard Graduate School of Education said, “When you read those kinds of books. . . it’s inevitably inspiring because you see what can be. You are given this vision and trying to figure out different ways to make that vision a reality.”

        - How important it is that we are given a vision reminding us that the world is not inevitably doomed to remain as it is now.  As Denizcan James pointed out, students are seeing their world turn into “the entire plot of [Harry Potter] book 5 where the government refuses to do anything about a deadly threat so the teenagers have to rise up and fight back.”  And as teacher Jennifer Ansbach said of fantasy, “What, you thought it was fiction? It was preparation.”

        Go read the entire article here: How Children’s Literature Became Everybody’s Literature.

[Picture: Hogwarts Castle, wood block print by Brian Reedy of WoodcutEmporium.]

Ursula LeGuin Says It Right

        Ursula K. LeGuin (1929-2018) died on Tuesday, and I have long admired her as a masterful maker of worlds, a soaringly beautiful writer, and a fierce intellect of probing questions and uncompromising logic.  While I definitely don’t agree with her on every statement she’s ever made, she undoubtedly had a way of declaring many of the ideas I’ve been working with, and of expressing them better than I do, too.  So in tribute to one who never failed to write as if her gift for writing was the tool she had for making the world a better place, let me just give you some of LeGuin’s own words.

        To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.  Fantasy and science fiction in their very conception offer alternatives to the reader’s present, actual world. Young people in general welcome this kind of story because in their vigor and eagerness for experience they welcome alternatives, possibilities, change. Having come to fear even the imagination of true change, many adults refuse all imaginative literature, priding themselves on seeing nothing beyond what they already know, or think they know.

…

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.

[Picture: Prólogo, woodcut by Erasto Cortés Juárez, 1955 (Image from Colección Blaisten).]

(Quotations from the essay “A War Without End” in The Wave in the Mind, 2004.)

Fantastic Progress?

        Here’s an interesting article by sci fi author David Brin on his definition of the difference between sci fi and fantasy.  You should probably take a few minutes and read it, because it’s obviously more detailed than my summary is going to be, but his basic gist is that fantasy stories are those in which society and the social orders remain essentially the same, whereas sci fi stories are those in which progress is possible.  According to Brin’s view, setting is irrelevant, stage sets are irrelevant, magic vs technology is irrelevant; it’s just about change - or the lack thereof.  So he would argue that a magical book, like those in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, is sci fi rather than fantasy if it involves progress.  I totally disagree with Brin’s use of the labels “sci fi” and “fantasy” for his two categories, primarily because these two labels have already been used to mean something quite different and it’s just confusing now to apply them in this new way.  That said, I think Brin has pointed out a real dichotomy between two camps of speculative fiction that had never come into focus for me before.  This is worth some serious consideration.
        First of all, it may be true that much traditional fantasy does tend to reinforce traditional social structures.  The bad usurping king must be replaced by the rightful king, the princess must be rescued from her life as a servant, and the will of the gods is inexorable fate against which mortals struggle in vain.  And perhaps sci fi has been more likely to show us progress, or the view that the future is in our hands.  But I don’t think that correlation is anything intrinsic or necessary to the two genres, but rather a side effect of fantasy’s long history and sci fi’s more recent invention as a genre during the same time that industrialization and social movements began turning people’s thoughts to progress.  Whatever the reason, I don’t think fantasy is necessarily upholding the status quo or sci fi necessarily advocating social change.  For my own definitions of the difference between sci fi and fantasy, you can read my blog post The Borders of Fantasy, but the summary is that I think sci fi explores the impact or implications of technology (so yes, the possibility if some kind of change is involved, but not necessarily change to the social order), while fantasy uses its magic as part of the framework of the world in which characters must act.  Both ask that vital question “What if?” but sci fi tends to ask it about questions of technology or specific changes to society brought about by inventions or discoveries, while fantasy tends to ask “What if” about more fundamental or personal issues such as good vs evil and the hero’s quest.  So I agree that Pratchett could be considered a sci fi writer, but that’s because in many of his books, such as his most recent Raising Steam, he deals quite specifically with issues of technological change.  But I’m getting back to a discussion of words and definitions again.  What I completely agree with in Brin’s article is that some fiction tends to give the moral lesson that the status quo must be defended or is so natural or preordained that it will always stand, while other fiction explores whether, 

why, or how we might change our universe.  I can see Brin’s point that we should be wary of those stories that tell us the status quo is sacred or inevitable.  A steady diet of that could well seep into our subconscious and become unhealthy just as a steady diet of violent “solutions” tends to make us believe that violence is a plausible solution in real life.  We certainly need to see examples of change, and that is indeed one of the important roles that speculative fiction needs to play if it’s going to make the world a better place.
        When I examine my own favorite stories I come to the conclusion that I tend to believe the author’s assurance of what our heroes’ goal should be.  If Tolkien tells me Aragorn should be king, I believe him, rather than wondering why the hobbits don’t start protesting for democracy.  Now, if Aragorn acted just like Sauron, I wouldn’t be able to take Tolkien’s word for it that he’s the Good Guy, which is why I found Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series unacceptable - I was being asked to take the goodness of the “Good Guys” on faith despite all evidence to the contrary.  But as long as the goal does indeed appear to be a noble one, I’m willing to accept it within the story, even if it doesn’t look like my view of what an actual modern society in the real world ought to look like.  This is because the part that interests me tends to be the How.  How do you solve the problem?  How do you implement the solution?  How do you find the courage, the strength, the  creativity to overcome the obstacles?  So I love many a story, including The Lord of the Rings, that David Brin would label “fantasy” and say is standing against the idea of human improvability.  I would argue that many stories in which the happy ending involves lack of fundamental social change may still be about human improvability and progress, because they explore an individual’s ability for personal change and progress.  However, I do think Brin’s point that some stories presume changelessness while others embrace change is an excellent one, and one that I hadn’t really considered before.  Think about the books you like.  Think about what underlying messages they might be offering.  Think about how your favorite stories might be helping to make the world a better place - or might be encouraging us to hold back from progress.

[Pictures: 2. Landscape with ruins, tetrahedron, and icosahedron; 

10. Landscape with ruins and cylinder segments, wood block prints from Geometria et Perspectiva by Lorenz Stör, 1567 (Images from TU.)]

World-Bettering Example 3

    Heroism Is Contagious

       I recently read about a couple of social psychology studies that left me feeling pretty I-told-you-so-ish.

        Participants were told they were taking part in a memory study.  They watched short television clips, wrote down what they remembered seeing and how the clip made them feel, and were paid for their participation.  After they thought the study was over, they were asked if they'd volunteer to help with an unpaid study.  Another, similar study ended with participants being asked to "help out" an experimenter with some dull extra task.  In both cases, participants who had watched a television clip celebrating virtuous behavior were considerably more likely to volunteer for extra service than those who had watched a neutral clip.  In other words, exposure to the example of heroism makes people more heroic.

        The experimenters are not sure exactly how this effect works.  Do the "warm fuzzies" change something in the brain?  Do people who have just stated on an assessment that they're feeling inspired feel compelled to live up to those claims?  What exactly is going on here?  Well, obviously the social psychologists are interested in studying the causes further, but I'm more interested in pointing out the implications of the results.

        If we know that people really do respond to the examples in their lives, that incidents of goodness really do fuel further goodness, that learning about heroes can make heroes of the rest of us…  If we know, in short, that virtue can be contagious, this is just one more confirmation of the power of stories to make the world a better place.  This is exactly why it's so important to hold up high ideals in the books we read and write.  It means that when people of all ages read books about characters with courage and integrity, they will be more likely to try to follow those examples.  It means that when we're shown worlds in which characters work to Do the Right Thing, we are more likely to try to be those characters in our own world.  So make sure that the next book you read is a heroic book, and help make the world a better place!

[Picture: The Enormous Turnip, rubber block print by AEGN, 2008.]

(I read about these studies at the Psycho Babble blog.)

World-Bettering Example 2

    Inspired Inventions

        Last post I mentioned Neal Stephenson's claim that it's the job of speculative fiction writers to inspire scientists and inventors.  He wasn't making up the connection out of thin air.  Throughout history there have been any number of real-life inventions that have been presaged by fiction, but I want to focus on the ones that didn't merely follow in fiction's footsteps but that can be explicitly attributed to inspiration from a specific fictional source.  Other people have made lists of technologies from sci-fi, and you can see Smithsonian's list here.  But I narrowed down all these proposed technologies based on two criteria.  1. The inventor acknowledged direct inspiration from a sci-fi source, and  2. The invention makes the world a better place.  That meant I am inclined to leave out of my collection a number of inventions used exclusively or primarily for killing people.

        Take the example of atomic power, pioneered by Leo Szilard after he read H.G. Wells's The World Set Free.  I know people often argue that the ability to kill lots of those people makes the world better for our people, but I find this much too problematic in my celebration of how the world can be bettered.  However, Wells did not inspire Szilard to work only on the science.  His book also inspired Szilard to campaign for arms control and the peaceful use of nuclear power.  Technology is the proverbial genie which, once set free, is difficult to control.  This is why helping people envision a variety of possible outcomes is crucial if we are to learn to use new technologies responsibly.  (D and I fall into this discussion from time to time - how much should science be reined in because of the probability that some new discovery or invention will be applied to unscrupulous or downright evil purposes?)  Still, just because something has been used for evil doesn't mean it can't also be used for good, so I have left a few ambivalent inventions on my list.

        Jules Verne is probably the place to begin.  He wrote, "Anything that one man can imagine, another man can make real."  This idea was taken to heart by Igor Sikorsky, who invented the modern helicopter under the inspiration of a Verne book called Clipper of the Clouds.

        Verne, with his Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, also gets credit as the inspiration behind "father of the modern submarine," Simon Lake.  Indeed, when Lake's Argonaut became the first submarine to work successfully in the open ocean, Jules Verne sent him a note of congratulation.

        "Star Trek" and its nifty communicators was the inspiration for Motorola's development of the mobile telephone.  The director of research and development Martin Cooper said, "That was not fantasy to us.  That was an objective."

        "Star Trek" is a great example of a sci-fi future in which technology has been a positive force, and I'm sure it's inspired more than just a few people.  It was "The Next Generation" that inspired Steve Perlman's idea for Apple QuickTime.

        Arthur C. Clark is the sci-fi writer who portrayed satellites being used for mass communication.  In a list of technology inspired by sci-fi, Robert Rea proposes this as the inspiration behind the launch of satellites in the following decade.  But although this seems plausible, Rea offers nothing concrete to back up his assertion, so I just don't know.  There are an awful lot of inventions in the "I'm not sure about the inspiration" category.  Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy envisions something very like a modern e-reader, but again, I don't have any evidence that the inventors of e-readers were responding to the inspiration of Adams's idea.

        At least we do know that The Hitchhiker's Guide influenced the developers of AltaVista's web translation software.  I assume that the importance of translation is pretty obvious to a lot of people without any need for particular inspiration from science fiction.  However, the team that named the program were obviously sci-fi fans, because they called their software Babel Fish.  (Of course, Douglas Adams's Babel Fish is not technology, but a miraculously improbable alien species…)

        This may be a similar case to that of the Taser.  Invented by Jack Cover as a non-lethal alternative to guns, the Taser's name was originally the acronym TSER, after a fictional invention, the Tom Swift Electric Rifle.  The long-running Tom Swift series was written under the collective pseudonym Victor Appleton and featured myriad inventions.  Certainly Cover found the sci-fi series inspirational in a general way, but whether his invention is directly attributable to the specific idea in the book I don't know.

        Tom Swift also gets credit for inspiring Apple founder Steve Wozniak to become a scientist.  Wozniak said that the Tom Swift books made him feel "that engineers can save the world from all sorts of conflict and evil."

        But I can't neglect to mention the most iconic sci-fi technology of all, space flight itself.  Robert Goddard, who built the first liquid-fueled rocket, attributed his fascination with spaceflight to H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds.

        Finally, here's some inspiration in progress.  NASA's web site has an article called From Inspirations to Inventions, mentioning some of the fictional inspirations behind the modern space program.  It ends with a brief analysis of some "Star Trek" technologies, such as warp drive, that are under study and development by scientists now.

        So just remember (to paraphrase Verne and Wozniak), Anything that one person can imagine, another person can make real… and then use to save the world from evil.  Now get out there and get inspired!

[Pictures: "The clipper of the clouds," illustration by Léon Benett from The Clipper of the Clouds by Jules Verne, 1887;

Cover of Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle: or, Daring Adventures in Elephant Land by Victor Appleton, 1911.]

World-Bettering Example 1

    Less Dystopia, Please

        I've said it before and I'll say it again: one of the roles I think speculative fiction can play in society is to help make the world a better place.  Another thing I'm always going on about is my dislike of unrelieved doom and gloom in fiction.  Of course it's always nice to find someone who agrees with me, and in this case I've found (somewhat unexpectedly) science fiction superstar Neal Stephenson.  Stephenson has been arguing that recent science fiction is too much about nihilism and apocalypse.  This is a bad thing because such negative scenarios aren't inspiring, and without the inspiration of imaginary hopeful futures, people (by which he means specifically scientists) will be less likely to work toward solutions to the problems of today.

        Admittedly, the only book of Stephenson's that I've ever read is Snow Crash (recommended to me by D because of the linguistics connection).  The world as depicted in Snow Crash is hardly "The Jetsons," and indeed philosopher Richard Rorty wrote in 1998 that "the problem with Snow Crash is… that it isn't inspirational."  But perhaps it was criticisms like this that turned Stephenson's thoughts to the lack of hopeful sci-fi visions of the future.  According to a recent article in Smithsonian, Stephenson went to a futurist conference in 2011 and found that the audience was blaming sci-fi authors for the slow pace of real-life technological innovation.

        Smithsonian cites Denise Caruso of Carnegie Mellon University as saying that "science fiction helps [scientists] think about how the work they're doing might eventually turn out."  And that "worldbuilding, she says, helps people anticipate how innovations might be used for good or ill in daily life."

        Neal Stephenson's response is the Hieroglyph project, intended to inspire writers to inspire scientists.  He hopes that if writers start infusing sci-fi with more optimism, "young engineers and scientists will absorb ideas from the stories and think, 'If I start working on this right now, by the time I retire it might exist.'"

        Will it work?  Who knows, but I'm all for it!  Stay tuned for some concrete examples of fictional inspiration in the next couple of posts.

        You can read Smithsonian's entire article here.

[Pictures: The World that Was, wood block print by Fritz Eichenberg, c 1975-9.]

How Juvenile Fantasy Will Save the Earth

        All stories have some level of social agenda, (even if that agenda is merely to cater to the latest fad in the hope of making the author rich.)  From Gilgamesh to Twilight, the stories we tell and the stories we love to hear tell us about who we are, how we want the world to be, and what we believe to be true.   But what we believe to be true is often only the merest sliver of the truth that the world really holds.

        So-called realistic fiction is bound hand and foot by the “you couldn’t put it in a book” phenomenon.  Let a story stretch even an inch beyond the critics’ current narrow definition of what’s realistic and it will be condemned.   (That those conventions are not as “true” as we assume while we’re in the midst of them can be shown by the way the fashions of such conventions shift over time.  That would be a fascinating topic for a thesis that I don’t intend to write.  If you happen to be looking for a thesis idea, be my guest – and send me a copy when you’re done!)

        I first ran up against this when I was a kid and Judy Blume books were all the rage.  Judy Blume’s books were, I was assured, realistic.  They explored the issues that were, I was assured, vital to me as a child and a young adult, reflecting what I cared about in my school and my family, telling me what a “normal” child experiences…  There was just one problem.  I didn’t relate to Judy Blume’s characters, I wasn’t particularly concerned with her issues, I didn’t find her scenarios reflective of my life, and to the extent that they were, I didn’t care.  So, how realistic were those books to me, really?

        (I had to smile when I saw the phenomenon all over again last year.  My daughter T was in first grade and addicted to Rainbow Magic books.  My daughter’s teacher said in our conference that she was trying to encourage T to read more realistic books that had more to do with her own life – books, Ms. S. said, like Junie B. Jones.  Now, Rainbow Magic books, let me say right away, are not great literature, nor do they add anything to any discussion of morality.  They are merely harmless fluff.  But they are truly no less realistic than Junie B. Jones, with her kindergarten love affairs and her exaggerated misunderstandings, her thoughts and actions that are at least as foreign to my daughter’s six-year-old life as the idea of trying to help rainbow fairies in trouble.)

        Perhaps you loved Judy Blume, and that’s fine.  Her enduring popularity attests to the fact that clearly plenty of kids are finding something there that I did not.  My point, however, is that so-called realistic books can be constrained by the necessity of fitting a conventional view of likely scenarios and “hot” issues.  This is where Fantasy swoops in to save the day.  Fantasy (and I include under this umbrella some sci-fi and other related speculative genres) has an extremely powerful and subversive ability to slip behind our defenses while we are willingly suspending our disbelief.    Because readers of fantasy are less likely to object, “But that could never happen!” fantasy can show us visions not only of nifty things like fairies, dragons, and magic, but also visions of individuals and societies functioning in ways that we would otherwise reject as impossible.

        An obvious example here is that it was the original Star Trek that was able to show a barrier-breaking interracial kiss on TV, albeit a grudging kiss both from the point of view of the characters in the plot and the point of view of the network.  Still, it broke a barrier.  Perhaps Star Trek was a more important agent for social change simply by modelling a future in which men and women, Russians and United Statesians, worked together with respect and cooperation.  Totally unrealistic!  (In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit here that I never particularly liked Star Trek.  I am only a partial geek at best, but I am married to one, so a certain amount of osmosis inevitably takes place.)  Another example of a vision of justice in fantasy is the basic fact that in fairy tales virtue lives happily ever after and wicked stepmothers are punished.  Nowadays happy endings are considered unrealistic and are practically banned from serious realistic fiction, but in juvenile fantasy we are still allowed to hold up an image of justice without being condemned as unrealistically saccharine.  Only in fantasy are we permitted to imagine what might happen, instead of following mindlessly the pre-laid tracks of what convention agrees does happen.

        So, fantasy, particularly juvenile fantasy, is a genre uniquely positioned to explore important social issues, and to me that makes it one of the most interesting genres both to read and to write.  Take the Harry Potter series, with its messages about making choices, about the strength and limits of loyalty, about good and evil and imperfection.  These are profoundly moral books.  Or take Terry Pratchett’s handling of huge issues including prejudice, freedom, and war, all while being so silly that we never raise our defenses against being lectured.  It’s this ability that fantasy has to hold up new ways of thinking before us – in a way we’re actually willing to stop and consider – that just might save the Earth.

        Of course, as Spiderman’s Uncle Ben said, with great power comes great responsibility, and the idea that the messages of, say, Twilight, are also slipping in under the defenses of large numbers of the female population is pretty scary.  And some other time perhaps I’ll share my rant about why Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is one of the worst things I’ve ever read - but even these negative examples only serve to prove the power that fantasy has.

        As a reader, those arching themes of love and courage and morality are far more interesting than the angst about parties, drugs, shopping, and weight loss that are supposedly a realistic portrayal of my life and the issues I’m supposed to relate to.  As a writer I try not to hit anybody over the head with a moral, and I hope I’m not overly pedantic, but all the same, I believe that I wouldn’t be writing the truth if I didn’t use fantasy to show my vision of what a world – any world, even our world – might actually be like if people made different choices.  What might really happen if people faced conflict by trying to reach understanding instead of hitting first and wondering afterwards why everyone’s always fighting?  What might really happen if people tried to live thoughtfully and creatively and kindly even in the face of brutal injustice?  Is that pure fantasy?  Perhaps.  Is it True?  I think so.  And that’s my social agenda.  I hope it slips under a few defenses and helps to save the Earth!

[Pictures: Intertwined, rubber block print by AEGN, 2003 (sold out);

Holy Mountain, rubber block print by AEGN, 2007.]