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William Butler Yeats, who with Lady Gregory reenergized ancient Irish mythology, and who received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1936, invented the character “Noah’s sister,” who “didn’t learn how to read symbols” and so drowned in the Flood. The name Noah means, mythologically, someone who, when the flood of materialism pours in, is able to stay alive through those symbols that connect us to the world of light. Rembrandt is a Noah; Georgia O’Keeffe is another. The “Ark,” we might say, then, is the ability to live a symbolic life, that is, to read symbols and experience them, so that ship of meaning -- whose architectural plans are stored in all our memory systems -- can save us as materialism floods in. Of course, e take the animals and plants on board with us -- a ship of meaning without them would be merely academic. Our interior wolf and her mate roam the ship, and the oldest of living mammals, the elephant, and his mate, and so on, and below deck are all the birds of spirit. And the real wolf with his claws and teeth comes along, too.
The story of Noah’s sister is a warning story fitted to American life now. From clouds on the horizon consumer goods roll in like fog or rain; people have little “interiority,” as the Europeans say; instead we experience daily the rising flood of communication devices. Lively students hit an iceberg disguised as the public school, and French rafts cannot save them anymore. Because information pours in from all sides, we have little attention left for symbols.
The average age of the advertising executives in say, McCann- Erickson, is now thirty-four or so. As in television, movies, the music business, advertising is run by the young for the young and almost no older mentors are left. The deepening and heightening of the psyche that was the distinctive virtue of older men and women is not a part of the sibling-driven corporation. The increasingly hurried and harried college education that comes before business means that many men and women graduate without ever having any experience of the “other worlds,” or of deeper meanings.
-- Robert Bly, The Sibling Society
In the play Amy didn’t want to be
Anybody; so she managed the curtain.
Sharon wanted to be Amy. But Sam
Wouldn’t let anybody be anybody else --
He said it was wrong. “All right,” Steve said,
“I’ll be me, but I don’t like it.”
So Amy was Amy, and we didn’t have the play.
And Sharon cried.
-- William Stafford
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