Surface illusions - monkey brains and the power of myths

Some people take exception to bible stories being characterised as myths, legends and fairy stories (if you're interested in exploring the mythical nature of the bible stories, click here for a very accessible exposition). That attitude actually trivializes the tales and perverts their real intent, because fairy stories are some of the most powerful, and true tales we posess.

Take a look at this famous painting by Magritte. For those of you who don’t read French, the caption says, “This is not a pipe.”

Now I’m not one of those art whizzos you see on TV who tell you that the orange in the bottom left hand corner of the portrait of Margathe Van Whiffenpoofen is a sly reference to the fact that she was having an affair with a member of the Dutch royal family at the time, which is also the reason she isn’t dressed in white, etc. etc.

So when I was first shown this painting, my literal mind said, “But it is a pipe – anyone can see it’s a pipe. What’s the guy talking about?”

Most of my fellow students thought the same, until the teacher said, “What are the characteristics of a pipe? Can you pick this pipe up, put it in your mouth, fill it with tobacco and smoke it?”

The penny clanged into the pan (I love sarcasm but it’s not a good teaching tool) as it dawned on us – it’s not a pipe, it’s a PICTURE of a pipe. The point being – to cut a long story short – that the representation of a thing is not the thing itself. The picture of the pipe SHOWS us what a pipe looks like, but the MEANING of the picture has nothing to do with pipes. The meaning is about pictures.

All pictures, books, plays, all have this double characteristic. On the surface they’re about one thing, but their meaning lies below the surface. The very best art has such a beguiling surface that the meaning slips into the mind unheeded. We learn something without knowing we have learned it.

All books are fiction

All books, plays etc., are works of art - fiction, if you will - even when they’re dealing with a factual subject. A biography, for example, is a story about a real person, using as much of the facts as are available to the author. So we get authorised biographies, where the subject collaborates with the writer, and the unauthorized version, where the subject is either neutral, indifferent or actively hostile. Neither is ‘the truth’ about the person.

In the authorized version, the subject has been able to exert their personality on the author, consciously or unconsciously revealing and concealing. In the unauthorized version, some factual material may have been hidden from him. However, the facts are not everything. They are only the skeleton. The important part is the interpretation and emphasis of the writer. A good biography will tell you a fair bit about the writer, and the culture into which it is published, as well as the ostensible subject.

This is why ‘new’ biographies come out all the time – each writer is the product of his or her own society, each generation has different concerns and attitudes. A Victorian biography won’t say much about sex, for example, whereas a later one may spend a great deal of time on the topic.

History of all kinds is subject to the same process. I remember being taught about the causes of the First World War, with a lot of stuff about inter-country rivalries, unstable empires, interlocking treaties etc. etc. And then along came A J P Taylor.

WW1, said Taylor, was caused by railway timetables. All the other stuff was important, he said, but the crucial thing that tipped this particular argument over into universal war was caused by the fact that the German railway system and timetables made a partial immobilization impossible. Once the mechanism to move troops up to one border was set in motion, they had no choice but to send them to their other borders too, even though they didn’t want or need to.

I have no idea if that theory is still fashionable today. Probably not. But the point is that a new historian with a new viewpoint came along and told a new story, using exactly the same historical facts that had been used to tell the previous one.

In the case of A J P Taylor, one possible truth is that the author craved recognition and notoriety – he was one of the first, if not THE first, television historian – and so quite deliberately looked for controversial interpretations of the facts, so as to keep his name in the public eye and his books and TV programs selling.

In other words, ALL books are fiction, even the ones allegedly based on fact. This does not mean they do not contain truths, merely that the truth is not to be found in the literal interpretation of the words.

Books only have meaning in context

Which brings me to another point. It is difficult, if not impossible, to discover the meaning in a book unless you know the context in which it was published. And the older a book is, the harder this becomes. Taylor is within my living memory. Shakespeare, for example, is not.

This is why scholarly editions of Shakespeares plays sometimes have only a line or two of dialogue on a page, the rest being taken up by footnotes explaining, for example, that this word has changed its meaning since Shakespeares day, that this saying meant, perhaps, the rough Elizabethan equivalent of ‘Half your luck’, and so on and so forth.

Read literally, they do not make sense, and can even give an impression totally at odds with Shakespeares intentions.

Shakespeare also wrote history, or to be more accurate, historical fiction. Take, for example, Julius Caesar. All the main characters actually existed, and many of the events depicted took place. But the Caesar we see on stage isn’t Caesar, he’s old Wills idea of Caesar, as interpreted by the actor and the director.

Directors try to achieve something of the same’ contextualising’ effect by playing around with the settings, moving them to different countries and eras, to try to give the audience some idea of what the play would have felt like to the original audience.

I must have seen at least three Macbeths set in a quasi-Fascist context, with Macbeth presented as a Hitler-like figure, and of course there’s the famous Kurosawa film which turns him into a Japanese warlord. But we can never see the play as its original audience would have seen it, and never have access to the range of meanings it would have conveyed to them.

Yet we cannot create meanings that are not here somewhere in the original text. At least one of the fascist Macbeths I saw simply did not work because the directors vision was at odds with the play itself. In this version, Macbeth was a strong man attempting to cleanse Scotland of an effete and exhausted dynasty, so that when the rightful heir assumed his throne at the end, he was a dissolute queen with a retinue of leather-clad pretty boys.

This ‘camp’ Macbeth failed because the meaning it dug for was not there. There was no gold in the seam where the director was looking for it. But there was a seam of gold – of truth and meaning – as Kurosawa discovered.

So, to recap. The surface story is always fictional to at least some degree. The truth lies below the surface, not in the words themselves.

Monkey brains

The next question is – why? Why are books always written this way? The answer lies in the dual nature of the human brain, as recent research has uncovered. The ‘monkey brain’ – the old, instinctive brain that makes your heart suddenly race or your blood turn to ice in your veins – and the ‘human brain’ – the rational, thinking mechanism that is producing this text. We like to believe that Mr Human is in control, but in fact, Mr Monkey makes all the decisions, quite unconsciously, and Mr Human follows along a short while after with the rationalization.

Experiments were done which showed quite clearly that decisions were made and acted on before the areas of the brain responsible for conscious thought lit up. The notion that Mr Human runs the show is a rationalization produced by Mr Human himself. The decision is already made. Think Before You Leap – The Age

This makes sense. When we were but apes on the plain, we needed fast ‘unthinking’ responses to survive. Only with development of complex societies did we begin to develop a system to review and sometimes rescind those unconscious decisions.

Hence the dual nature of books. The surface words talk to Mr Human, while the deep meaning speaks to Mr Monkey. Truly great books work on both levels – they’re satisfying both intellectually and emotionally. And it explains why some rather average books nevertheless enjoy great success. The surface words may not be put together all that well, but the deep story satisfies Mr Monkey. Did someone say ‘Harry Potter’?

This is also why old stories whose language we can barely understand without a lot of footnotes and explanation, like Shakespeare, can still work. The deep truth, the underlying story, still satisfies Mr Monkey.

This is why even older stories – the fairytales, myths and legends, the stories that form the books of the great religions – still have great power. The underlying story satisfies our primitive self.

For example, if you tell a story of a man who could not die, the rational mind knows it can’t be true. But Mr Monkey, the ever-alert, instantly reactive paranoid ape on the plains, the part that is all about survival at all costs, who lives in constant fear of death, is soothed. He can stop worrying. He can stop pestering Mr Human with incessant demands. He can even snooze. Thus the rational mind can begin to grow and blossom – and it did.

If you want a brilliant exposition on how all this works – and a wonderful evening of theatre – grab the DVD of Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods. It’s a near-perfect example of everything I’ve been talking about. On the surface it’s a witty, clever, charming musical based on traditional fairy-tales. On a deeper level it’s all about the power of those tales, and all other stories.

“Careful the tale you tell, that is the spell,” says the song. All storytelling is a form of magic; all books are books of spells. Our language acknowledges this. We speak of ‘a spellbinding performance’, a ‘magical transformation’, a ‘storytelling wizard’, and countless other metaphors.

Creeping irrelevance

But we must not mistake the painting for the pipe. Our oldest stories about deities began as oral traditions. They were not written down for centuries. As they were passed on from generation to generation, they changed. Each storyteller added something of their own personality to the tale. Emphasised different aspects of the story to adapt it to changed conditions. Some stories fell out of favour because the conditions they were created to address no longer existed. New ones were made.

Once writing was invented, a problem arose. On the one hand the stories were no longer forgotten, but now they did not change, or at least, changed more slowly. This meant that valuable wisdom was not lost when a storyteller died.

But it also meant that stories were no longer dropped when their relevance became questionable. And when stories did change, it was more likely to be through error rather than in response to a social need.

Manuscripts had to be copied by hand. Sometimes the scribes made errors. As copies of copies of copies were made, the chance of error increased. As people began to travel more, stories began to be translated into other languages, to be told in different social contexts. Like Shakespeare, they became susceptible to misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Those translations were also hand copied, by people with no connection to the original story. Then the translations were themselves translated into yet another language, and so on.

Then comes a catastrophe. It is decided that some stories are too important to be lost, too important to be changed. A selection process takes place: some stories make the cut, some don’t. And from then on no-one is allowed to change them.

If the story is strong enough, if the deep layers still charm Mr Monkey, then the story survives. We can still enjoy Shakespeare, with a bit of help. But if the world has moved on so far that the conditions the story was meant to address no longer exist, we become baffled, and the story is either forgotten, or is appreciated only for its pretty surface.

If stories form part of a religious faith, then they are not allowed to die, because if they do, the religion will die with them. Instead a whole industry springs up to explain, expound and interpret the stories, and keep them alive.

Shakespeare is God

I have used Shakespeare extensively as an example. One could very easily posit a Church of Shakespeare, with Shakespeare as God and Stratford on Avon as Rome.

A revered dead leader, divinely inspired, who is lavishly praised. Sacred texts –referred to as the canon - which you tinker with at your peril. Tremendous intellectual battles over the meanings of these texts. Centres of worship where performances are given. These performances may be traditional or, in an attempt to maintain their relevance, they’re given a modernizing makeover. The language may be modified to make them more accessible to modern ears. Again, huge battles over which way is the best, the purest, the most authentic.

Performance centres are terrific tourist attractions, but they are also propped up with large government subsidies. They are derided as benefiting only an elite minority. And the peak bodies running this whole enterprise constantly stake the moral high ground for themselves, because its ‘culture’, ‘great art’.

Sounds a lot like organised religion, doesn’t it? All this fuss over a few ‘fairy stories’ just goes to show how powerful, how important the stories we tell ourselves are. And how unreasoning belief, faith, intuition, the hidden Mr Monkey in us all who governs all our actions, can bulldoze Mr Human into doing what he wants, however irrational. And thinking up the reasons afterwards.

If the fairy story still has magic enough.