The Public Life of Symbols: Scheherazade 2.0

Cover illustration, "A Modern Monster" by Craig & Karl, 2018,   Science , Vol. 359, Issue 6372   It’s been 200 years since Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein was written, and the monster lives on in the form of Frankenbook. The mess we are in with Facebook right now is not unlike the mess we are in with so many things too big to fail: a hyper-speed confrontation between the forces of creation and destruction, and the misshapen Giants born from that union.   Both Frankenstein and Facebook had a youthful aura of “protest” attending their birth, protest against perceived dehumanization, and protest against power structures through which information was available. Both were  adolescent hedges against the abyss of non-being -- Frankenstein with his scavenged body parts, dead and yet vitalized for eternity, and Facebook with its one-eyed romantic notion   of democratization of information and manifesto of open and limitless benign growth and  connectivity.   The parallel bet

Set design for Scheherazade, (Ballet Russes), Leon Bakst, 1910 How do we stay sane and humane in what feels like an insane world? Finding the deeper stories running underneath the runaway stories on the nightly news, well, for me it makes the difference between sanity and madness. It helps to parse the  divine from  the demonic, and most important, both of those from the human.   I look for those stories by rooting around in the rubble of history, getting messy in the dustbin of mythology, and in the flights of imagination that lift off, like a flying carpet, from both.     There may or may not be a 'deep state' but there are deep stories. They allow us to share emotional essentials within ourselves and with each other. And there we touch down on common ground. In One Thousand and One Arabian Nights  (originating in a three volume Syrian manuscript from 14th-15thC.) ,  the narrator Scheherazade tells stories that literally save her own life and  the lives of  others

  The Old Jester, Pablo Picasso, 1963. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © 2018 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York          When it comes to the complexities of human nature, Oscar Wilde was rarely wrong. “Man is least himself,” he said, “when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell the truth.” Three years ago a dear friend and colleague died just as Donald Trump’s candidacy for president was beginning to gain momentum but before the reality of the election had roiled and thrashed its way into the foreground of our awareness. Before her death she asked me to finish a manuscript she’d been working on about the psychology of persona — the various attitudes, masks, and dramatis personae by which we adapt to the world and also shape it.       Exhausted by grief and terrified by the prospect of the upcoming election this task weighed heavily on me, but as it carried the unquestionable myste