The Public Life of Symbols: Scheherazade 2.0

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