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I was eight when I first grasped the power of storytelling. One night, my mother presented me with a book titled Telephone Tales, published the year she was born. Night after night, page after page, it cast an enchantment, but it was one particular story that kept me up. "The Air Vendor" was a cautionary fable about a man who devised a way to bottle and sell air, until everyone on Earth had no choice but to become his customer in order to keep breathing. Just a few years earlier, young idealists high on the dream of democracy — my parents among them — had finally torn down Bulgaria's forty-year dictatorship, only to watch the tyranny of capitalism replace the tyranny of communism, one kind of propaganda supplanting another with a sudden explosion of storefronts selling every imaginable commodity, bottling water and branding bread, packaging things in shiny tinfoil emblazoned with words like "happiness," "health," and "love." I read "The Air Vendor" over and over, delighting in the shimmering sentences, shuddering at the logical progression I sensed between the reality I was living in and this fantastical world of breath for sale. I knew nothing about politics, but I could tell that someone with a deep heart and a sensitive mind was trying to warn us about something menacing, to invigorate our imagination so that we may envision and enact a different course. I knew nothing about the author, except that he had died just a few years before I was born and that his name was Gianni Rodari (October 23, 1920–April 14, 1980).  Gianni Rodari in his classroom I now know that he was born on the shores of an Italian mountain lake in the wake of the First World War and that he was eight himself when his father, a baker, died suddenly. There is no record of what happened, only that the young boy took solace in solitude and music. He sang in the church choir, mastered a small orchestra of instruments, and dreamt of becoming a professional musician. But then he discovered Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky and Novalis ("books written with the passion, chaos, and satisfaction that are a hundred times more fruitful for one's studies than a hundred years of school," he would later recount); discovered Dadaism and Futurism, the German Romantics and the French Surrealists; discovered the symphonic power of ideas and imaginative literature, the way language can liberate and words can empower. Although he never stopped playing his violin, he became a professional storyteller instead, his work touching generations in a living testament to his American contemporary Maurice Sendak's insight that great stories have "the shape of music." Having worked as an elementary school teacher since was only a teenager, having watched his country's spirit shatter under the fist of fascism, Rodari yearned for a way to unite his passions for philosophy, teaching, and justice. And so he started writing stories, songs, and poems for children, insisting over and over, in subtle and sensitive ways, on the human capacity for independent and imaginative thinking. 
One early spring in his early forties, he was invited to conduct a week of workshops on storytelling for about fifty kindergarten, elementary, and high school teachers — a week he would later remember as one of the happiest of his life. Tasked with distilling everything he knew about what makes a great story based on his fifteen years of teaching and writing for children, he suddenly remembered a notebook he had kept many years earlier under the title Notes on the Fantastic, sparked by a sentence he had read in a book by Novalis:  If there were a theory of the fantastic such as there is in the case of logic, then we would be able to discover the art of invention.
Storytelling, Rodari realized, was a system for organizing thought into imagination, the way grammar is a system for organizing words into ideas. 
Within a year, he had distilled what he presented at the workshop into a dazzling, deeply original book he titled The Grammar of Fantasy (public library), only now available in English with enchanting illustrations by Matthew Forsythe. Examining the structure of folk tales and the function of fairy tales, drawing on Tolstoy and Hegel, on the Brothers Grimm and Scientific American, Rodari explores the inner workings of the imagination and its relationship to logic, the way it bridges the real and the ideal through fantasy, the way it makes our lives not only livable but worth living. Noting that he is making no "attempt to establish a fully fledged 'theory of the fantastic,' with rules ready to be taught and studied in schools like geometry," that he is not seeking "a complete theory of the imagination and invention," Rodari offers: I hope that this small volume will prove useful to all those who believe it is necessary for the imagination to have a place in education, who have faith in the creativity of children, and who know the liberating value of the word. "All possible uses of words for all people" — this seems to me a good motto, with a nice democratic sound. Not because everyone is an artist, but because no one is a slave.
Not unlike the "grammar of animacy" needed for rewilding our relationship to the natural world, a grammar of fantasy allows us to animate our inner world with the natural wildness of the imagination. And, like all grammar, it is built of words and the reactions between them in the laboratory of the mind. Rodari considers the process: A stone thrown into a pond sets in motion concentric waves that spread out over the surface, and their reverberation has different effects, at varying distances, on the water lilies and the reeds, the paper boats and the fishermen's buoys. Each of these objects was standing on its own, in its tranquility or sleep, when awakened to life, as it were, and compelled to react and to enter into relationship with one another. Other invisible reverberations spread into the water's depths, in all directions, as the stone falls and brushes the algae, frightens the fish, and continually causes new molecular agitations. When it finally touches the bottom, it stirs up the mud, hits the objects that had been resting there, forgotten, some of which are now dislodged, while others are covered once again by sand.
The word stone itself dislodges fragments of his own past, and he is suddenly transported to a stony sanctuary on the cliffs of an Alpine lake he used to bike to with his violin and his friend Amadeo, who always wore a long blue coat through which the outline of his own violin could be seen. They would "sit in a cool portico, drinking white wine and talking about Kant" — and already we have a story sparked by a single word. Observing that he has invented many stories starting with just a single word, Rodari writes: Any randomly chosen word can function as a magic word to unearth those fields of memory that had been resting under the dust of time… The fantastic arises when unusual combinations are created, when in the complex movements of images and their capricious overlappings, an unpredictable affinity is illuminated between words that belong to different lexical fields.
At the center of his grammar of fantasy, however, are not individual words but an embodiment of the combinatorial nature of creativity he calls the fantastic binomial — the felicitous combination of two contextually distant words that becomes a prompt for storytelling by requiring you to invent a shared context and a conversation between. "Words belong to each other," Virginia Woolf half-whispers in the only surviving recording of her voice. Through the fantastic binomial, we become the authors of that belonging and make language not a vehicle of information but an instrument of the imagination. Rodari describes the fertility of these fantastical word-pairings: One electrical pole is not enough to cause a spark; it takes two. The single word "acts" only when it encounters a second that provokes it out of its usual tracks to discover new possibilities of meaning. Where there is no struggle, there is no life. This is due to the fact that the imagination is not some hypothetical faculty separate from the mind: it is the mind itself in its totality, which, applied to this or that activity, always makes use of the same procedures. And the mind is formed by struggle, not by tranquility. […] A certain distance between the two words is necessary. One must be sufficiently strange or different from the other, and their coupling must be fairly unusual, for the imagination to be compelled to set itself in motion to establish a relationship between them and construct a (fantastic) whole in which the two elements can coexist.
The fantastic binomial creates a kind of riddle — to figure out how these two words can belong together — and riddles are a classic element of the fairy tale. Rodari considers why they are so compelling to children: [Riddles] represent the concentrated, almost emblematic form of their experience of conquering reality. For a child, the world is full of mysterious objects, incomprehensible events, and indecipherable figures. Their own presence in the world is a mystery to be clarified, a riddle to be solved, and they circle around it with direct or indirect questions. Knowledge often occurs in the form of surprise.
It may be that the most deadening effect of growing up is our incremental preference for certainty over surprise, which ends up keeping us a safe distance from alive — life, after all, is an experiment that continually confounds our hypotheses, and it is on the hubris that we know more than life does that we most regularly break our own hearts.  Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print Noting that an active imagination is just as essential for making art as it is for making scientific discoveries and making daily decisions in even the most mundane regions of life, Rodari insists that "the creative function" belongs equally to all of us, that all human beings "have the same aptitude for creativity, with whatever differences exist between humans in this domain revealing themselves to be largely a product of social and cultural factors." He considers the defining features of the creative mindset: "Creativity" is… thinking that is capable of continuously breaking the patterns of experience. A "creative" mind is one that is always on the move; always asking questions; always discovering problems where others find satisfactory answers; completely comfortable in fluid situations where others sense danger; capable of making autonomous and independent judgements (even independent from parents, teachers, and society); and one that rejects everything that is codified, preferring to reshape objects and concepts without allowing itself to be hindered and inhibited by conformism. All of these qualities manifest themselves in the creative process. And this process — listen up! listen up! — always has a playful character, even if we are dealing with "strict mathematics."
Echoing Einstein — "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales," he reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. "If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales." — Rodari adds: The mind forms a whole. Its creativity must be cultivated in all directions. […] Fairy tales are useful to mathematics, just as mathematics are useful to fairy tales. They are also useful for poetry, music, political engagement — in sum, they are useful for everyone, and not just for the dreamer… They're in service of the complete human being. If a society based on the myth of productivity (and on the reality of profit) needs only half-formed human beings — loyal executors, diligent imitators, and docile instruments without a will of their own — that means there is something wrong with this society and it needs to be changed posthaste. To change it, creative human beings are needed, people who know how to make full use of the imagination.
In the remainder of the book, Rodari goes on to explore the importance of turning mistakes into catalysts for invention and pathways toward deeper truths, of telling stories that break taboos in order to liberate us from the social hypocrisies of conditioned shame, of "deforming" existing words into fantastical new ones in order to "make words more productive" by bending and broadening the possibilities within them so that we may bend and broaden the possibilities within ourselves — something of which the word marginalian is an example, and something children do naturally as a form of play, but which has the serious consequence of encouraging nonconformity in them. 
Complement The Grammar of Fantasy with Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga on play and the making of civilization and Maurice Sendak on storytelling and creativity, then revisit Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear and J.R.R. Tolkien on the psychology of fantasy. Illustrations by Matthew Forsythe courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nineteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |  | |  |
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The best measure of serenity may be our distance from the self — getting far enough to dim the glare of ego and quiet the din of the mind, with all its ruminations and antagonisms, in order to see the world more clearly, in order to hear more clearly our own inner voice, the voice that only ever speak of love. It is difficult to achieve this in society, where the wanting monster is always roaring and the tyranny of should reigns supreme. We need silence. We need solitude. The great paradox of our time is that the more they seem like a luxury in a world of war and want, the more of a necessity they become to the survival of our souls.  Art by Anna Read from The Wanting Monster by Martine Murray Pico Iyer, that untiring steward of the human soul, liberates the possibility imprisoned in the paradox with his slender and splendid book Aflame: Learning from Silence (public library) — a reckoning with the meaning of life drawn from his time spent in a Benedictine monastery on a journey toward inner stillness and silence, along which his path crosses those of those of fellow travelers in search of unselfing: a 100-year-old Japanese monk and a young Peruvian woman with a love of Wittgenstein (who worked as a gardener in a monastery himself), the Dalai Lama and Leonard Cohen, a middle-aged corporate refugee "red-cheeked and glowing with life" and a white-haired French-Canadian widow with a spirit that "keeps shining, like a candle in the fog." He paints the portal through which he enters what is both an enchantment and an annealing of reality: The road looks milky in the moonlight. The globe feels rounded as I've never seen it elsewhere. Stars stream down as if shaken from a tumbler. Somewhere, a dog is barking. Taillights disappear around the turns twelve miles to the south. Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter. That argument I was conducting with myself on the drive up, that deadline next week, the worries about my sweetheart in Japan: gone, all gone. It's not a feeling but a knowing; in the emptiness I can be filled by everything around me.
 Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase's stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.) To contact that emptiness is to realize that we spend our lives trying to find ourselves, only to discover that the self is precisely what stands between us and being fully alive, what severs our consanguinity with star and stone, with mycelium and mourning dove. This is why an "occasion for unselfing," in Iris Murdoch's lovely term, is no small gift — one only ever conferred upon us not by seeking and striving but, in Jeanette Winterson's lovely term, "active surrender." We may come to it (in art, in music, in nature), or it may come to us (in cataclysm, in love, in death). Iyer comes to it in the silence of the monastery — which is "not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop" but "active and thrumming, almost palpable" — and it comes to him redoubled: Why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery? Maybe because there's no "I" to get in the way of the exultancy. Only the brightness of the blue above and below. That red-tailed hawk circling, the bees busy in the lavender. It's as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy. […] Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me.
 Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days And then the world intrudes — his mother is felled by stroke, a fire consumes his home, a pandemic engulfs the globe. But what silence and solitude end up teaching him, end up teaching anyone who enters them, is that what seems like an assault on our best laid plans, an obstacle along the way of life, is the way itself: experiences that wake us up from "sleepwalking through life" and bring us closer not only to ourselves but to each other. Iyer writes: In the solitude of my cell, I often feel closer to the people I care for than when they're in the same room, reminded in the sharpest way of why I love them. […] As the days mount in silence, I'm quickly freed of most of my preconceptions. A monk, I see, is not someone who wishes to live peacefully and alone; in truth, he exists in a communal web of obligations as unyielding as in any workplace, and continuing till his final breath.
 Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse In the fathoming of silence, he learns that "the best in us lies deeper than our words." In the austerity of the monastic life, he learns that "luxury is defined by all you don't need to long for," that retreat "is not so much about escape as redirection and recollection." He reflects: One kind of asceticism comes in the letting go of certainties, and of any notion that you know more than life does.
There is but one possible action out of that realization: surrender, which he discovers it the only point of being there — "simply, systematically picking apart every inconstancy to remind us that we cannot count on anything other than a mind that is prepared to live calmly with all that it cannot control." In the end, we are reminded that to be in silence, to be in solitude, to be in surrender amid a fragile world is not defeatism but an act of courage and resistance, not escapism but the widest-eyed realism we have: Some nights, of course, I still wake up in the dark, unable to sleep… Chaos and suffering seem endless. Then I recall the sun burning on the water far below and feel part of something larger in which nothing is absolute or final. […] I watch the golden light of early morning irradiate the hills, while valleys remain in deepest shadow. I turn to see the sun scintillant on the ocean in the distance, the sky so sharp and blue I can make out the ridges in the islands far beyond.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nineteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. | | | |
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Born in present-day Iran (then Persia) months after the end of the First World War and raised on a farm in present-day Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was fourteen when she dropped out of school and eighty-eight when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, her long life spent writing keys to "the prisons we choose to live inside." In 1957 — the year the British government decided to continue its hydrogen bomb tests, the year the pioneering Quaker X-ray crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale composed her short, superb insistence on the possibility of peace — Lessing examined the responsibility of the writer in a precarious and fragile world menaced by dark forces, a world in eternal need of those lighthouses we call artists.  Doris Lessing In what would become the title essay of her collection A Small Personal Voice (public library) — an out-of-print treasure I chanced upon at a used bookstore in Alaska — she writes: Once a writer has a feeling of responsibility, as a human being, for the other human beings he influences, it seems to me he must become a humanist, and must feel himself as an instrument of change for good or for bad… an architect of the soul… But if one is going to be an architect, one must have a vision to build towards, and that vision must spring from the nature of the world we live in.
In a passage speaking of her time and speaking to ours, evocative of what James Baldwin so astutely observed in his magnificent essay on Shakespeare ("It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it."), she adds: We are living at a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive, and precarious that it is in question whether soon there will be people left alive to write books and to read them. It is a question of life and death for all of us… We are living at one of the great turning points in history… Yesterday, we split the atom. We assaulted that colossal citadel of power, the tiny unit of the substance of the universe. And because of this, the great dream and the great nightmare of centuries of human thought have taken flesh and walk beside us all, day and night. Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares and this is no time to turn our backs on our chosen responsibilities, which is what we should be doing if we refused to share in the deep anxieties, terrors, and hopes of human beings everywhere.
 Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards. She distills the essence of our task in troubled times: The choice before us… is not merely a question of preventing an evil, but of strengthening a vision of good which may defeat evil. […] There are only two choices: that we force ourselves into the effort of imagination necessary to become what we are capable of being; or that we submit to being ruled by the office boys of big business, or the socialist bureaucrats who have forgotten that socialism means a desire for goodness and compassion — and the end of submission is that we shall blow ourselves up.
Although the looming apocalypse of Lessing's time was nuclear and that of ours is ecological, the experience she describes is familiar to anyone alive today and awake enough to the world we live in: Everyone in the world now has moments when he throws down a newspaper, turns off the radio, shuts his ears to the man on the platform, and holds out his hand and looks at it, shaken with terror… We look at our working hands, brown and white, and then at the flat surface of a wall, the cold material of a city pavement, at breathing soil, tres, flowers, growing corn. We think: the tiny units of matter of my hand, my flesh, are shared with walls, tables, pavements, tress, flowers, soil… and suddenly, and at any moment, a madman may throw a switch and flesh and soil and leaves may begin to dance together in a flame of destruction. We are all of us made kin with each other and with everything in the world because of the kinship of possible destruction.
Noting that history has rendered not only plausible but real "the possibility of a madman in a position of power," she holds up a clarifying mirror: We are all of us, at times, this madman. Most of us have said, at some time or another, exhausted with the pressure of living, "Oh for God's sake, press down the button, turn down the switch, we've all had enough." Because we can understand the madman, since he is part of us, we can deal with him.
Observing that we will never be safe until we bridge the gap between public and private conscience, she returns to the role of the artist in a world haunted by the madman's hand on the button: The nature of that gap… is that we have been so preoccupied with death and fear that we have not tried to imagine what living might be without the pressure of suffering. And the artists have been so busy with the nightmare they have had no time to rewrite the old utopias. All our nobilities are those of the victories over suffering. We are soaked in the grandeur of suffering; and can imagine happiness only as the yawn of a suburban Sunday afternoon.
 Art by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) Indicting as cowardice our reflexive ways of confronting the gap — by indulging in "the pleasurable luxury of despair," or with hollow manifestos and platitudes that "produce art so intolerably dull and false that one reads it yawning and returns to Tolstoy" — Lessing locates between them the still point of courage: Somewhere between these two, I believe, is a resting point, a place of decision, hard to reach and precariously balanced. It is a balance which must be continuously tested and reaffirmed. Living in the midst of this whirlwind of change, it is impossible to make final judgments or absolute statements of value. The point of rest should be the writer's recognition of man, the responsible individual, voluntarily submitting his will to the collective, but never finally; and insisting on making his own personal and private judgments before every act of submission. […] We are all of us, directly or indirectly, caught up in a great whirlwind of change; and I believe that if an artist has once felt this, in himself, and felt himself as part of it; if he has once made the effort of imagination necessary to comprehend it, it is an end of despair, and the aridity of self-pity. It is the beginning of something else which I think is the minimum act of humility for a writer: to know that one is a writer at all because one represents, makes articulate, is continuously and invisibly fed by, numbers of people who are inarticulate, to whom one belongs, to whom one is responsible.
Noting that the artist — unlike the propagandist, unlike the journalist, unlike the politician — is always communicating "as an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice," she prophecies the age of Substack: People may begin to feel again a need for the small personal voice; and this will feed confidence into writers and, with confidence because of the knowledge of being needed, the warmth and humanity and love of people which is essential for a great age of literature.
If you are here at all, reading this, you are feeding the confidence of this one small personal voice while also feeding that part of you refusing the conformity and commodified despair of the stories sold by those who make themselves rich by impoverishing our imagination of the possible. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nineteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. | | | |
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BIRD DIVINATION OF THE WEEK
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