Left-brain thinking is responsible for the abundance of material goods we have, but the value added now is right-brain directed design.  Electric lighting, for example, is ubiquitous:  but that has not stopped a candle business from booming because the right-brain aesthetic calls for the unrivaled beauty of glowing fire. 

Asia — India, in particular — is the home of thousands of highly educated workers who do for American companies the left-brain-directed work that American white collar workers here once did for far more money per hour.  The American workplace now puts a premium on such right-brain directed activities as forging relationships, solving novel problems, and synthesizing the big picture rather than analyzing its components. 

Automation has been changing the workplace since the 19th century.  First machines replaced human muscle; now they’re replacing human brains.  So making it this changing economy means becoming conversant with practices which are at root narrative, empathetic, and holistic. 

I feel the right-brain magnet.  I want to change the way I use my office space.  I want it also to art-friendly.  I want to marry narrative and analysis — as I’m doing in ”My Brain by Me”; I want to ask Pink’s three questions:

a. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?

b.  Can a computer do it faster?

c.  Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?

I commit to exploring his “six senses”:  design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning.

OK. Give myself a star for meditating — 30 days to make a habit — and sit with the blood and the grief.

Nemesis, the goddess of righteous anger, takes literally the prayer of another spurned by Narcissus and arranges that he “love himself” because he won’t love others. As he leans over a pool to drink, Narcissus fall in love with his own reflection, and is filled with an anguish almost kin to compassion. The image is not enough, and yet he cannot leave it. But, too, he knows what others have suffered at his hands. He pines at the side of the pool, sure that only death can set him free. Even on the boat to the Land of the Dead, his spirit leans over the prow for one last look. Kindly nymphs, set to bury his body, find instead a beautiful flower where his body had lain.

There’s are four main forces here: Hera balanced by Nemesis, and Echo by Narcissus. Hera is the part of me whose jealousy of others, comparisons of my talents to others, renditions of worldly expectation to which I cannot rise, render me voiceless, a copycat, however beautiful. How difficult it is for my Echo against the forces of Hera! Her tragedy deepens: all her love energy now is directed at the one who cannot return love.

My Nemesis rages, too, but in service of justice — not mercy, but justice — against this “self-love,” immortalized by Sigmund Freud. It is neither the hard won self-regard of slowly growing integration of all my parts, nor the invitation of self to self for friendship. This self-love is languidly insatiable: I seem “fine” but am never-satisfied. I am never home for the meeting of self to self. I am the hungry ghost for whom all coveted honor and regard glitters out of reach. How easily my Narcissus indulges himself — in anguish, yes, in a mix of understanding and compassion that still cannot drop my private pride in the public selves I’ve created. Narcissus is the story of look-good even though you feel bad.

The myth of Tantalus, in Hamilton’s Mythology, p. 346-347, is known mostly through the word tantalize which refers to the punishment part of the story — in which something acutely desired is endlessly out of reach — an instantly recognizable feeling. The backstory, though, is poignant.

Tantalus, the only mortal child of Zeus is allowed to drink ambrosia at the tables of the gods, pays them back not with the expected loyalty but with a terrible crime — the motivation for is never explained — and for he is eternally punished. Tantalus , after his only son, Pelops, killed, invites the gods to his own table and serves them a stew made of the child. Unfooled, the gods — except for the goddess who first tastes the dish — spurns the cannibal’s feast, and sets Tantalus in a pool in Hades which forever drains from under him when he tries to quench his thirst. The surrounding fruit trees, too, swing out of his reach whenever he tries to quell his hunger. Pelops, though re-membered and restored to life, has ever after a shoulder made of ivory to replace the one inadvertently eaten by the goddess.

This is Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child: the child, called over and over to the table of the all-powerful culture-bearers, who fashion in her a ravenous, but hidden, grandiosity certain to be dashed in the real world. She barely recognizes her rage, but she kills off, cuts away her awareness of her wholeness — as the antagonists in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy wish to cut away with the children’s daimons. So she serves up her part-selves to the table of my grandiosities, until now she is the hanged-woman, the hungry-thirsty ghost straining for what is always out of her grasp. She is restored to life only when she can piece the whole of herself back together again, but bears the reminder of it, the murdered never-forgetting elephant of it, forever on her shoulders.

Of long I have known that the mythology of the cross, while powerful and understandably resonant, does not match what my bones know. For almost thirty years, I have been living other mythologies in terms of the earth, the air, the fire, the water as primary forces of instruction and power.

For a time, I have left off the retelling of myths and folktales, in order to work on a children’s book. First it was a picture book, then a transitional reader, then a young adult novel, now an aspirational middle grade novel. I have pushed and pushed, scheduled my time to the minute to work and write and be married and walk the dog. I’ve told friends about my unavailability. I have exhausted myself for a product that just isn’t working.

I proved I can all the way through a whole novel, though. And again, and again.

But now I’m unpeeling a new understanding. Perhaps this pushing is a form of exceptionalism. As measured by money per hour society values astronomically more my work to help children learn to read than it does my creative writing. Yet it tantalizes me with the possibility of stardom, for that is what at least for a moment even the most green author — you wrote a book?! — has. Stardom. Reach for the stars. Measure up. You can never measure up. Christ’s blood. Develop your talents. Contribute to the world. Be known for good works. Make a difference.

Fist in my back.

Taking a breather with Edith. Edith Hamilton, a Hoosier, born in Dresden, raised in Indiana, lived to be 95, died in 1963. Made honorary citizen of Athens in 1957.

Taking a breather with a blog. Isn’t an audience, of even one, what writers want? So resistant as I’ve been to the narcissism of it (OMG, everyone and their Aunt Susan is writing one and so what), here I am, with a sense of inevitability — the little girl with the secret gold stationary box in the back of the green doll cupboard is taking out what’s inside and laying it out on the table for Grandpa and Grandma and Lily Bunch and Rebecca Gaither, and you.

That fundamentalist, evangelical Christian girl that I was: how interested — and uneasy — I would have been to imagine such a thing. I would have classed it vaguely as idolatry — that’s what everything other got classed — or pagan, maybe. Said with quiet distaste — not a sneer, quite, just a feeling that there might be a name for worlds beneath the ones I knew — the place from which bullying came, perhaps, or the Holocaust with its pictures of starred children with suitcases in front of trains.

What would that have meant, if the universe, if I, if we created the gods?

That’s what this blog is about. If I daily simmer the stories of the Greeks — that mythology that is the stock of this Western soup in which we swim — what will become of my own thinking, my own heart, my own path?