Here we go again. As I, along with the rest of the world, try to make sense of the recent attacks in Paris, the most recent in a string of brutal killings, I'm reminded of that passage in One Hundred Years of Solitude when Ursula realizes that events are repeating themselves:


"What did you expect?" he murmured. "Time passes."

"That's how it goes," Úrsula said, "but not so much."

When she said it she realized that she was giving the same reply that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had given in his death cell, and once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle.

I also think of Groundhog Day. This must be what history teachers feel like all the time.

The cycle of violence we're currently stuck in is both predictable and inevitable. Predictable because it's inevitable, and inevitable because we are not willing to do that which would keep it from being predictable.

We get close, but then back off.

"We are one," they say on social media. People post profile pictures with the French flag background. Football players sing La Marsallaise.  We are one with Paris, just like we were Charlie Hebdo not long ago and everyone was a New Yorker for awhile. And we are, of course. If we are watching, listening, reading, wondering about people we know in Paris, remembering a great visit, contemplating lost high school French, mentally numbering the address of the flat we stayed in while studying there, then we are feeling sadness, confusion, anger but most of all solidarity.

I say "we" because the English-speaking world I exist in has porous borders across Le Monde and Youtube and Facebook and other international communication platforms. When I say "we" I call up a common bank of media memories, the canon that organizes our worldview through Western mass communication. It's the same reason we had trouble finding much attention for the murders in Kenya or Beirut, as those hovered just outside the closed media universe of CNN and lightyears from right wing outlets.

Don't get me wrong: I  may be cynical about the political and corporate agenda packaging our reaction to this tragedy, but I'm not cynical about the genuine expression of good will toward the residents of a city in pain. In fact. I think that's the only thing that makes any sense.

We are one. It feels good to say it. Our whole body knows it's right and important. Feeling empathy, feeling with someone else, is the biggest thing there is, connecting each of us to someone else across time and space. Across the ultimate boundary that is our own skin. Our amazing nervous system helps us picture and physically feel connected to friends, families, children being beaten, women enduring abuse, black students fed up with institutionalized racism, Malala, scenes of people in shock outside a nightclub. Empathy is perhaps the best gift that evolution gave us.

So we are all Paris. It's not hard for us to feel loss and sadness. We are so connected, after all. We love their baguettes, we love their films, Proust, we love their easy elegance and sexual liberation. We love the tree-lined streets in the City of Lights and the people who live there--who really know how to live, we say. We love the version of ourselves that loves Paris too, so we feel deeply disturbed by an attack on them. We feel attacked ourselves.  If we push the circle of caring a little further out we can also find compassion for the recent refugees hoping for a respite from fear, cold, and hunger in France, especially those living in a garbage dump in Calais. To most of us, they don't seem much different from most Americans' ancestors, who endured war, poverty, and famine before getting into boats to make their way to Ellis Island. We may not know terror for real, but we know something of it by proxy. If we dig a little deeper we find ourselves feeling with the second generation French immigrants who still suffer in their attempts to live between cultures, even as those struggles sometimes result in stand offs of fractured assimilation and sporadic violence in the suburbs. But we are educated, progressive. We can feel their plight. We might even be able to understand the fears of people in Europe and the US and their misguided impulse to build walls and dig moats and send boots and guns. We can hold all of this in our minds at the same time. We are large, as Whitman said, We contain multitudes.

But we also inherited from our early human ancestors the need and ability to categorize. Our brains are differential machines that relentlessly sort observations and experiences. And so for millions of years we have practiced sorting for survival by creating all kinds of categories, including social groups. Everyone who has studied social science 101 knows how easy it is to create and destroy in/out group formations. We've all studied Tajfel's famous Klee and Kandinsky study. And if not, well, you've been an 8th grader, so you know how it works: Us or them, this or that, sucks or cool, Sharks or Jets.

It's not hard to empathize with suffering Parisians. They fall naturally in our sphere. They were living their lives and suddenly got brutally attacked. The people who died were not soldiers or representatives of their countries abroad. They weren't hurting people but were just watching sports, listening to music, sitting in cafes. In no way did they deserve to be killed. But that seems to be where we draw the line. It's where, in the push pull between our ability to empathize and our need to categorize, the latter wins. It's hard not to give into black and white narrative: They were innocent, the killers are guilty. Punto final. Who among us would try extending the circle of caring out from there? Who will say, I will calculate the radius from me out into the world to include as many as I can? 

Who would dare say, "I do not just feel with the victims but the perpetrators too"?

Not many, I bet. The Dalai Lama, maybe? That nun that Susan Sarandon played in Dead Man Walking. Nurses who tend the wounds of serial killers. But what about ordinary people, those of us who do not have years of practice in perspective-taking and forgiveness? Well, Linda Ragsdale would. An artist turned peace activist, Linda was one of the few who survived the systematic murders in the hotel in Mumbai in 2008. She tells the story of how the attackers went table by table, methodically ensuring that there were as many casualties and as few survivors as possible. As she speaks, she holds her body--even after many surgeries--as only one with a meter long scar does. She tells about how the shooter not only broke her body but her heart too. Because Linda finds, every day, in the predictable line dividing love and hate, friend and foe,  a tiny space for ambiguity, an unexpected opening of compassion for her attacker. She reminds herself that on the other side of that gun there was a person. She says she doesn't believe that killer wanted, as a child, to become what he became.

Lydia Wilson dares to think it as well. Democracy Now! just featured her interview with ISIS prisoners, lost, angry by-products of the Western invasion. Is there no way for us to find even a scrap of empathy for the radicalized--especially when our own countries contributed to the radicalization?

Yeah, I know. It makes me uncomfortable to think it, much less write it. But there's a part of me that can't lay off it either. I don't feel innocent enough to condemn the guilty. I don't feel certain enough to hate.

I would like to learn to create that space Linda Ragsdale told me and my class about.  I tried after 9/11 and made a mess of it.  Everywhere I went there were people shocked and grieving. I knew that I felt empathy but also that my sadness didn't take the same form as others'. I couldn't figure it out. I thought I was maybe an emotional cripple or a sociopath. But slowly it dawned on me that it wasn't that I didn't care about the suffering of the people in New York. I did. I was overwhelmed by it. It's just that I didn't care more about their suffering than other people's. I felt like I was supposed to triage suffering and put that of people from my own country ahead of others'. I felt unpatriotic at a time when patriotism was the thing. Maybe because I knew from having recently lived in East Africa that the bombings in New York weren't coming out of nowhere, I remember that I just really wasn't that surprised that it had happened. Every time I expressed this to someone, though, they looked at me like I had just invoked the devil or spat on Gandhi or something. I tried to explain that I wasn't justifying Al Qaeda's actions, just saying that in terms of the range of human behavior, those actions made sense. In terms of what had been going on in the region both in the years before but also the centuries before, that the attacks had a kind of sense to them, that I could understand how from a certain point of view, bombing the US would seem like the thing to do. Saying this usually horrified people, so I stopped saying it and just nodded when people around me said--and then voted--to "get the fuckers who did this," even when, as even the willfully ignorant now know, the fuckers we went after weren't the fuckers who did it.

So, I risk being misunderstood when I say that although I feel sick for the people of Paris, it's important not to put their suffering ahead of others' just because they are familiar and therefore a shorter stretch for our empathy.  Can we push out the area of our caring circle to the Muslim kids in Paris and other places who will suffer in the days to come for somehow being associated with this latest violence? For the refugees who will find that gates open last week are now closed by those who don't realize or don't care that the refugees are fleeing the same people who did this. But also, in a tiny part of our brain, for the people who applaud the shootings, who created the hashtag Paris burns? Because they are people, and the people who became terrorists are people. Because they were born and came to see the world in a very different way, and I want to know why. Because we can see perspectives without committing to them. Because we can understand actions without agreeing with them. After all, nothing human is really alien to another human. 

Is it frightening to consider that the attacks in Paris or Beirut or Kenya or now Nigeria have a context? I guess it is. Ironically, maybe we fear the context not because we can't understand it but because we're afraid we will. We're afraid of the cognitive dissonance that would arise from another perspective of events. Again, this seems to be a great advantage to our species: making sense out of complexity with straitghtforward reasoning or a simple narrative. Once our brains grab it, though, that's what we stick with, even in the face of a mountain of contradictory evidence. It's hard work to deconstruct belief, especially knowing how much cognitive effort it will take to put a better mental track in its place.  We have a hard enough time conceiving of non-threatening events in the distant past in a new light. How can we have the will to adjust our thinking in the present? Just look at the resistance to re-framing Columbus in a way more consistent with current facts and evidence. Who would think anyone would still celebrate Columbus Day knowing what we know in the 21st century? But if we revise our opinion of Columbus, we might have to revise our opinion of the European conquest, and then we'd have to question Manifest Destiny and the entire formation of the US. I'm not suggesting that we are guilty for atrocities committed ages ago by other people. But we can be guilty of perpetuating what came out of the genocide, slavery, and environmental destruction that went along with the settling of the Americas. We can be guilty of framing events that hurt other people as the necessary evils of progress or our own short-term interest. And to avoid doing that, we have to look honestly at the context in which those events happened, from as many points of view as possible. 

And the same is true of Paris. People there suffered, are suffering. We empathize. We create solidarity. We can't help it, and it's beautiful. But these events are not occurring in a vacuum, and I'm not just talking about the current threat to Europe from terrorism.  There's a larger frame of the last 15 years (the post-9/11 Big Brother world of perpetual invasion), a larger frame of the last 40 years (pro-petroleum policies and puppet dictatorships), a larger frame (post-WWII carving up of territory), and ever larger frames, leading back through colonialism to the Crusades and back and back. I remember being schooled by my Muslim students in Ethiopia about my tiny understanding of the scope of the first Gulf War. I thought it was about the illegal annexation of Kuwait. They thought that was hilarious, and also dangerous. I don't really know what that war was about, only that my students and I seemed worlds apart from each other as our various countries chose sides and we as world citizens tried hard not to and read Anna Karenina instead.  Narratives in the real world, just like the novels we were studying, were driven by the framing of events: who was doing the framing and for what purpose? The rational ask: So what does it matter how you frame events as long as the facts are the same? Well they're not, are they. The juxtapositions, the correlations, the conclusions all derive from and reinforce a perspective. If there's a core lesson of the second half of  20th century academia it's that there is no neutral version of events, and yet when the world blows up we forget it. We jump back into our familiar categories and tropes. It's nearly impossible not to. But how can we understand why people do what they do if we don't know how they think? And how can we know that if we're not willing to climb inside their skin and walk around in it for awhile?

So, as my heart hurts for people in Paris, and for all who are suffering because of last week's attacks, I remind myself to keep trying to see other points of view. Points of view that I find barbarous, that I don't actually want in my brain at all. But I honestly don't see another way to stop the cycle. If we don't learn to take not just Parisians' perspective but the perspective of the ones who attacked them, then how can we ever stop it? I'm not just talking about seeing these events in a historical context. That's a start. But more than that we have to stop thinking of the actors in this perpetual historical drama in terms of nations and religions and dynasties and organizations and begin to see this violent, reactionary behavior as a tendency of our species. A tendency that is not destiny because it's not the only feature we have as humans. We have pride, greed, vengeance, and the ability to sell ourselves whatever narrative makes us look like the hero. But we also have meta-cognition and the ability to examine our own lives and motivations. (Am I the voice in my head or the voice that questions the voice in my head?) We can interrupt even ingrained patterns. Buddhists know it, your piano teacher knew it, neuroscientists know it.  We can create new responses. We can change, grow, adapt.

We have to. The weapons are too big, distances too small, borders too porous, resources too finite, the world on the edge as it is. As we condemn others' violence we have to be really careful not to commit a hundred other kinds of violence ourselves in the process. We have to do the one thing we really don't want to do, but it's really the only thing that will ever work to break this seemingly infinite loop: love others as we love ourselves. To be one with all of it, even the part we hate. And we need to start now.

Graduation speech to the class of 2015

So there’s this guy, and he says to another guy: Didn’t I meet you in St Louis?

And the second guy says:  No, I’ve never been to St Louis

And the first guy says, Yeah, me neither. It must have two other guys

It’s important to know where you are, you know? where you’ve been, where you’re going. Presumably, That’s one of the reasons we’re here today. But it’s not so easy to actually figure that out. To find yourself, you really have to actively look for yourself. Track yourself. Become aware of your route, altitude, speed, and direction. Ask yourself: how did I get here? Is this the right road? For that, you’re going to need a really good map.

But teacher, I already have a map. True enough.  I’m pretty sure that you’ve been following a navigational chart in which everything that has come before today, the trek through essays and equations and games and performances, has led you to this solid black line on the map: the border to THE FUTURE. And, the familiar lexicon of graduation ceremonies and Graded mythology says  that “your suitcase is all packed with the knowledge and skills you’ll need to make a successful border crossing .”  In fact, you have actually recited this travel itinerary to me and your other teachers many many times in the past few years: First I’m going to get on  diploma track for 2.0 years, travelling at 95 gpa and add SAT or cursinho prep class fuel so I can cruise into college in the restricted lane where I will study for 4.0 years then take exit to graduate school and stay straight for 3.0 years before that road dumps me right into the road to a job in .01 minutes and then: Arriving at destination.

As if your life could be lived by google driving directions.

As a teacher, I like that map. Your parents love that map. You have internalized that map. But it’s more of an aerial view, you know? Not a map that’s meant to guide you meter by meter. moment by moment.. Not an antique treasure map that you rigidly follow to find a fixed red X. In 2015, I think you know, the map you need is more interactive, more like WAZE, which gives you constant updates, route options, and  doesn’t keep saying:  you missed a turn, you missed a turn, you missed a turn.

So I’d like to change the scale of this map from the very large: your whole life, to the very small: This moment.  I don’t think of this moment as the boundary between your entire past and your entire future any more than I think of any other moment in those terms.

Isn’t every moment a moment between the past and future?

Let’s map this moment right now. right now. Well, it’s actually not right now anymore. It’s now. No, it’s now. As soon as we name it, it’s gone, into the past.  Moments are slippery, hard to chart as you whizz by, hard to notice or remember that we were even there. Because much of the time, we weren’t really there, we were just passing through, tourists in our own lives.

One of the students in my mindfulness study said, after a 5 minute meditation: wow. I never knew I had any other state besides being really busy or being asleep. That’s a state I’m hoping you’ll visit more often. I’m hoping you move there. Most of the time the state of just Being, doesn’t even show up on our maps, which are only the maps of the country of DOING.

So look out the window for a minute. Get your bearings.. Feel yourself breathe. This moment is beautiful, expansive, has its own dimensions, its own value, its own scenic attractions. It’s not just a highway marker on the side of the road to somewhere else.  What’s happening in this moment?: Is your foot asleep? Is your stomach churning? Are you feeling nostalgic? overwhelmed? bored? In the moment the way is fluid.: in the moment you can love fiercely, learn deeply, open your heart to getting it broken, laugh, sweat for something ; you can maneuver in the moment. I want you to be truly happy, which we know comes from living an engaged life, not just a pleasant one. It comes from tuning in and not tuning out. I don’t want you to wonder, when you’ve arrived at that destination that you plugged into your mental GPS years earlier, what happened to those millions of moments along the way.

So, there’s this problem:  you have two different maps, one for the overall journey and one for the moment.  In order to not just be a leaf on the wind, living randomly, in order to get somewhere, you need to plot a destination and move in that direction. But in moving in that direction you collapse the possibilities of other destinations, like electron positions in the quantum world. In plotting that destination, you create a map in which many beautiful places become just flyover country, a bathroom and a pao de queijo on the way to Maresias, not places in themselves.

So, how to balance doing and being, moving forward and appreciating stillness?

As I see it, there are 3 pretty good ways to map out your future while still living in the present.

1) Don’t fear the desvio,

the dreaded orange sign with the big black arrow that pushes you off the main road into winding alleyways or some isolated country track far from the sight of the freeway. There is knowledge off of the main roads too.  In the middle ages, some sailors must not have heeded the warnings to stay within the boundaries of the known world. Although the corners of their maps were filled with menacing drawings of fantastical monsters, labelled “here be dragons”  they went there anyway, found the dragons, classified them, named them manatees, and narwhals, orcas and volcanic islands.

2) Share the road

It’s easy to think that you’re the only one on a journey, the only one following a map,  that somehow everything else is just background highlighting your moving blue dot on the screen. But that background is actually other people, on their own journeys, with their own itineraries.

So next time you’re stuck in traffic, think about it from another perspective. You are not stuck in traffic; you are traffic You might be the obstacle blocking someone else’s journey.

3) Don’t get stuck on a dead end route

Neuroscience tells us loud and clear that whatever thoughts and behaviors you practice will be the thoughts and behaviors your brain defaults to. There is a literal map in your brain of the tracks and roads of your mind. The superhighway of a bad habit gets harder and harder to exit off of.  Use your compass--you have one, inside, built right into your human hardwiring-- Use it in the moment to make a different choice. Update your map. Enter new coordinates, and recalculate.

I guess what I’m trying to say to this crazy, anarchic, frustratingly lovable class, is I hope you can map the overall arc of your journey without losing the freedom of the moment.  And without dragging along a trailer full of toxic cargo that you have clearly outgrown. To really know the landscape, to find the treasure that is your meaningful life, you need to be both the explorer and the cartographer.  If you do this, you will not lose your way. Then, wherever you go, there you are.

Bon voyage!

On Rituals, Sam’s Club, and a not-quite-American holiday in Brazil

I have a complicated relationship with America. There. An AA-style confession which, like that of the alcoholic at rock bottom, comes as a complete surprise to precisely no one. And given this complicated relationship, I should have known better than to engage in the string of events that began Friday afternoon with a profound conversation with a student about finding a common groundwork across disciplines, continued through urging another to delve into the difference between finding and making personal meaning, peaked in a late afternoon yoga practice, and ended with me heading to a Thanksgiving celebration after having a 5-hour migraine that arrived poetically at dawn. 

At 10 AM, once the pain haze and nausea had cleared, comfort food sounded comforting, so I went. Which is strange because I’m a vegetarian and it seems that the big draw at Thanksgiving is the turkey. It probably helped that I had checked with the chef two days earlier and she assured me that everything but the turkey and gravy would be vegan. Who said Thanksgiving’s not about faith? I was prepared to believe in cruelty-free stuffing.

I have a complicated relationship with America, but I knew it was safe to go to the school’s Thanksgiving party once my friend told me that as the emcee he would he delivering Thanksgiving jokes, not homilies. After a particularly patriotic and religious ceremony several years ago I threatened the administration with coming to the day as a dead Indian, which I was prepared to go through with at the sight of flags, hymns, and Korean kids in Pilgrim shoes and headdresses.

The thing is, if you practice yoga you know that the idea that it’s relaxing is as big a lie as Disney’s Pocahontas. Well, lie is a strong word. Let’s say that the extent to which yoga is about relaxation is about the same extent that being a Pilgrim was about loving all of God’s creation. There’s no reliable correlation. Practicing ashtanga messes you up. The yogis of course have kinder names for it, like “shifting” and “growth.” But make no mistake; it messes with you. Rips up your flawed story of self. Picture dropping a cement block off the balcony. Yoga is growth in that same way. The smacking you down and splitting you apart kind of way. Getting yourself cracked open sometimes means that you stay open and then all sorts of things creep in--Or out--Which is apparently good for you. But for me, what sometimes creeps in is migraine. So let’s just say that before I confronted America, there was philosophy, there was yoga, and there was migraine involving head, soul and stomach.

So in this compromised state, I was wary about having a complicated relationship with America at a Thanksgiving celebration on the wrong day in the wrong country, without the comfort of a complicated relationship with my family. A celebration complete with marines, boy scouts, children with braces and clarinets playing Amazing Grace, enormous hormone-filled turkeys, and shopping at our own Black Friday of stalls of Brazilian lace, folk art, and bikinis. And the roughest of all: the pledge of allegiance. I saw it coming. I steeled my broken self. But the wave never hit. I watched the pleasant musical program, laughed at a joke about turkey feathers, ate an American-sized serving of vegetarian stuffing, talked to some reasonable parents, bought a purple journal for my daughter, and went home with a pumpkin pie wrapped in cellophane for later.  Why had I twisted such a simple narrative?  Rituals help us share a common story, and I fell right into the flow of the telling.

But I do have a complicated relationship with America, which I should have remembered. What was I thinking by climbing in to bed to watch a post-meal movie? Why didn’t I go to the Top Picks and give in to the comfort food of predictable cinema? Why not let my easy story end? Why scroll to and select I’m Not There?  Why watch another person, a kid on the run from Minnesota, for goodness sake, well actually 6 people if you believe the director, struggle with a complicated relationship with America?  War-mongering, greed, jealousy, confinement, cynicism, the corruption of art, and the worst—the very worst: the cruel knowledge that a complex message will always be misunderstood.

But it’s a layered story, a collage, really--not an indictment; and an artist is a person, not a movement. Poetry isn't finger pointing. In 120 minutes there was also beauty, freedom, wisdom, and an 11-year-old Black Woody Guthrie troubadour riding the rails singing the story of America to anyone who would listen. 

So: complicated.

Is there a happy ending? For Dylan, I’m not sure. For America? Harder still to say. For the turkeys? Definitely not. For me? Let’s see. Lying in a rolling puddle of weeping soundtrack and credits, I contemplate the power of story and stuffing. I’m stuck. I’m broken open and can’t close myself until I find a believable conclusion. And then, Deus Ex Machina: My phone buzzes. I pick it up, read the message, and explode in a laugh from the bottom of my previously sore but now pumpkin-filled gut. It’s my son, Adam, who has been selected by an American family to also celebrate Thanksgiving on the wrong day. Only, just a few miles from Plymouth Rock, he has a different America to contemplate. In Providence no less.

He texts: “Mom.

I’m standing in a giant parking lot of a Sam’s Club that’s not exactly a Sam’s Club on the edge of a highway, with cart returns, and everything, and I’m feeling overwhelmed.”

I text: “Take a deep breath, say your name, and cite 5 true things.”

“OK,” he texts back.

“I think I’ll take my breath in bulk.”

And there it is. I exhale finally into shavasana. It’s Thanksgiving, sort of, and I’m grateful.

The End. 

Constellation

Here is a coffee table photo of my daughter

toothy smile and soft map of freckles

eyes open as palms

her face a whale’s call

a self-portrait

reminding this me

that moments are coastlines

and she lives there between land and sea

seven forever within her frame

Next to her a photo of my mother

the same age I am now

her eyes like Sirens

success stitched into her dress

The frame can hardly contain her

frozen life expanding like ice

Her voice breaks through the cracks: there is still time

Here is my fault line

where continents slide past each other

like cross country trains in the dark

where a prairie becomes a sudden gorge

revealing layers of sediment past

and the core is forced to the surface.

I hold one picture in each hand

and create a meridian

through my body

to link shores and seas

and torn continents

but each resists the shift

insists on territory

So I close my eyes and make each of us a planet

in a large enough galaxy

but with mutual pull

With my outstretched arms

I draw zodiac lines connecting our lights

And set the picture of our souls against the sky.

The Tiger's Wife

I guess I liked The Tiger's Wife, the bestselling novel by Téa Obreht, most because it reminded me of so many other novels. I don't mean that it's unoriginal, for it's fiercely imaginative and fresh, but rather that it created an intertexuality within my own mind as it spoke to other novels I love: The Deathless Man recalled the Golem in Kavalier and Clay, a wandering phantom that embodies the shadow side of human life and belief, but one who is conscious of his fate, like Melquiades from One Hundred Years of Solitude.. The tiger seemed so much like the tiger in Life of Pi, a reminder of the beast within and the veneer of domestication, of our uneasy relationship with our wild and gentle selves. The post-tragedy setting, the suspicion, the heavy sense of collective loss kept taking me back to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, reminding me how we often choose weight over escape, even as it causes us pain. At great risk, Natalia sets out to find not so much answers but meaning, not like a detective but more like an innocent, like Kundera's Teresa. The historical context, a cycle of tolerance and destruction among peoples, seems so much like the inevitable demise of the Buendias, though Albrecht's ending is not as brutal as García Márquez'. And the way the magical elements mesh with the realistic and historical narratives reminds me of the stories that speak loudest to me, like Kafka's Metamorphosis, Shakespeare's Tempest, Helprin's Winter's Tale, Borges' Labyrinths, even Wicked. There are many readers and critics who label works like The Tiger's Wife as fables, suggesting that the animal characters and heavy hand of destiny reduce the work to childish moral allegory. Instead, to me it is these features that bring the work into the archetypal, a landscape of the familiar, where our actions and experiences, however strange, make sense.

Origin

The intersections I'm most interested in right now are the growing overlap between cognitive psychology and neurology, the change of the human brain from reading brain to digital brain, common ground between mythology and science, the ways in which language shapes our thinking, and stories (fiction or film) and visual art that feature Jungian elements, folk tales, and myth.