Mary Aswell Doll

The Living Stone

I am in an empty room with several long floor-to-ceiling windows. I am lying down on a wooden floor on the second storey. It is afternoon. Outside two boys are walking in a path. Shortly, a stone is hurled through a very small opening in the window in front of where I lie. The stone lands beside me. Shortly after, another stone is hurled, also through the very small opening; it too lands beside me.

Once Below A Time1

What is it to write “in the mythic mode”? Looking back over the chapter headings of this book, I suggest that some writers through time from all corners of the Earth have had the sense that trees breathe, the cosmos speaks, memory has both an ear and an eye; that small is smaller than imagined, and that birthings occur in wombs other than in human form. Certainly, too, myth abounds with shape changes. And perhaps that is a central understanding of myth: the ever-on-goingness of life forms, the constant occurrence of change.

The Monster as Other, as Self

To look at Jeffrey Dahmer I could not tell he was a monster. His finely chiseled chin, neat hair, and quiet demeanor belied the hatred he had for himself. As the son of a fundamentalist, it is believed that Jeffrey repressed his homosexuality, and so this hatred turned inward to self-loathing projected onto those who were openly homosexual. True, most of the photos I saw and the clips on television when I watched the trial showed him with downward turned face: I could not see the eyes to his soul.

The Cosmic Mouth

There is a carved stone head dating back to Neolithic times found in Knowth, Boyne Valley, Ireland that has spiral eyes, snake spirals on both sides and a fluted design along the forehead and chin. Most striking is the wide open mouth gaping from the center of the head. According to Marija Gimbutas (2006), mytho-archaologist, the open mouth symbolizes “the generative Divine Source.” When the spout of a container was shaped in the open mouth formation, the liquid poured from it “reenacted” the Goddess function of offering sacred moisture, from which all life springs (pp. 64, 65).

Dance as Life Force

The summers I spent in New Mexico I remember for the smell of pinon wood after a rainstorm, the narrow sidewalks on dusty Canyon Road, a Shubert piano concert, Indians wrapped in blankets in scorching midday heat, and my mother’s ramada where, as the sun set behind the Sangre de Cristo mountains, we cooked out and smoked cigarettes. Best of all I remember the Indian dances we witnessed in the hot summer sun: the anticipation, waiting in the empty plaza of Taos pueblo, the sun beating down, Anglos like us lining the walls, waiting.

Eco-Wisdom, or, Mind the Dog

The condition we face today in the eleventh hour of ecological recklessness requires more than changes in what we are doing (using fossil fuels, wasting resources, throwing away food, overpopulating, accumulating plastic, despoiling the planet). The condition requires a fundamental change in thinking about our place in the cosmos. To help us make this shift, I turn to the wisdoms I most honor in my fields of study: writers, mythmakers, and a psychology based on archetypal knowing, such as that propounded by Carl Jung.

The Eye in the Well of Memory

Somewhat in the manner of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, Odin of Norse mythology, father of the gods, travels to an under region in humility, having shed his outer garments. His venture takes him to Mimir’s well without his usual golden armor and adornments. He goes on foot, not on his mighty eight-legged steed, and he travels anonymously so as not to draw attention to his status. His purpose is to seek wisdom that lies at the eastern base of the great ash tree of the world, called the Yggdrasil, from a well named Memory (Mimir).

Reading the Textured World

Since the past sixteen years or so, a growing concern about reading has emerged. The argument concerns a pitting of books against computers, of reading against digitalizing, of text against texting. Many teachers have experienced a problem in the reading classroom, when students assigned literary texts often lack the skills or patience to sit still with a book and absorb, then analyze what is on the printed page.

The Breathing Bark

It is no wonder that fairytales frequently feature a forest as the place of initiation. Inside a dense dark wood the naive venturer enters the realm of the metaphorical unconscious. Evil lurks, death happens, people get pushed into ovens. There are witches and hunters. Fairytale forests are fantasy places where demonic presences dwell, as they do in nightmare.

Myth, the New “M” Theory of Education Offering Eleven Universes

In this last chapter my intention is to bring together voices that are not commonly joined: poets, psychoanalysts, and writers; together with curriculum theorists; together with students in my myth classes as well as in my Absurdist Imagination class; along with my own riffs. There are four types of voices in each section (universe), no one voice speaking to another with any intention to contradict; rather, the voices sing their own tunes. Together what we have is an orchestration under my selection that suggests to me the kind of sweet dissonance and rhythm found in jazz.