It started out with me musing about teaching even young children about budgeting and maybe trade-offs.

Imagine a young mother sitting at a table doing some budgeting by a woodstove.  The clear sunlight of winter streams in through the window.  She’s doing it partly in paper and pencil so her children can see and experience her doing it.  Having them learn about budgeting is important to her.

She gets an idea.

She calls over her little girl.  The child is maybe 3 to 4, maybe even 5.  The mother takes out some wooden blocks of different colors and labels them, including maybe with little drawings.  She uses some long plain blocks to create a square.

“Here,” she said, “let’s play the the Big Person Game.”  The kid is excited.  The mother explains that the square is the money they have to spend each month, the blocks have to fit inside it.  Any blocks that cannot fit they cannot use.  Fitting blocks is something the child does, so she understands.  Then the mother lays down some blocks.  “Here’s paying for the house, here’s a block for the lights and the electricity, here’s a block for the car, here’s the basic food we need, here’s some clothes.”  Then, as the mother designed, she shows the child there is a little space left and shows the child some blocks that could fit into it.  Ice cream, maybe.  Toys.  A trip to the ocean.  Small things that are discretionary where letting the child have some say can do no harm and possibly good.

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A modern day parable of the refiner’s fire:

If you treat wood so that it partially destroys the inner structure, then subject it to heat, and pressure, it ends up stronger than steel.

Can literally stop bullets.

The greatest sculptor who ever lived began where Michelangelo left off.  He made statues that changed their meaning a hundred times as you walked around it.  He made great, towering works that shifted their content as you walked towards them–the work was not just one sculpture of genius but several, depending on your angle.  He made outdoor pieces whose meaning and beauty shifted with the sun.

That was the first phase of his work. (more…)

Several young architectural students were surveying a grand old building.  Mostly they were criticizing it.  They pointed out various real flaws here and there.  That window was misaligned.  That cornice was damaged.  They then went back to their school to resume drafting cheap McMansions to be built en masse on sandy soil.

But one student stayed behind.  He was starstruck.  “Look how solid those foundations, are!”  he said.  “This building can last forever.  Look how it was built to be easily repaired and even added on to!”

The beaver proposed building a dam on  the creek, but the creatures who dwelled on the bank naturally demurred.

The beaver then returned with a new proposal.  He would place sticks and logs in the stream so that if a creature fell in, it might find something to cling to.  This safety measure, he averred, if done properly, might even offer an easy way to cross the waters.

He received their assent.

Unaccountably, after he had installed his safety measure-cum-transport option, the creek flooded.

Oh my, the beaver said.  I will have to add more safety measures, they are needed now more than ever.

Three Saints met.

I am the Prophet, said the first. I give guidance from God.

I am the Bishop, said the second. I am a Judge in Israel and a minister to His flock.

I am just the Nursery Leader, said the third. The Nursery Leader looked downcast.

The Bishop tried to offer some kind of reassurance but the Prophet hushed him.

All I do is . . . the Nursery Leader went on . . . All I do is . . . is personally hold and sing with and teach literal children of God at their earliest and most impressionable stages.

The Nursery Leader brightened.

The Nursery Leader then added, “and I wouldn’t be able to do any of it if it weren’t for the guidance from the Prophet and the calling from the Bishop!”

They all three were very happy together.

A crow on a fence spoke to the bull in the field.

“Your bellow is not beautiful,” said the crow. “You should try to sound more like a nightingale. ” The crow squawked triumphantly at what it evidently considered to be a real zinger.

The bull replied,  “Nightingales sing beautifully, no doubt.  What my herd needs to hear is the bellow of a bull. ”

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C.S. Lewis once said something like the essence of myth is that the person who makes it doesn’t see it as an allegory, but the hearer keeps seeing hints of allegories in it.

He is technically wrong, but substantially right.  A mythmaker can have an allegorical meaning in mind.  But the myth has to be stronger than their allegory for it to work.

Take Mr. Lewis’ own allegory, Pilgrim’s Regress.  Its nothing but allegory and pleasant enough in its way.  I can speak, though, of three different passages which I keep coming back to.   They have that kind of force.  For some of them, I don’t even remember what the original allegorical meaning was supposed to be.

The first is the giant whose sight turns people transparent so that you can see their bowels and their bones.

The second is the parable of the man closely pursued by enemies.  His wife sees him coming and is perplexed.  If she cuts down the bridge that leads to their home, he will be stranded on the other side with his enemies.  If she doesn’t, his enemies will cross with him.

Those two I don’t really recall the allegorical point Lewis was making, at least not off the top of my head.

The third passage proves my point the best, since it is the most clearly allegorical but is also a passage that I have *felt* many times.  It’s about the home of Mr. Wisdom.  He and his children live a quiet, sober life there.  They dine on plain fare and are content.  But at night, his children in a trance fly off to participate in witches sabbaths and bloody melees and the like.

The point is that a myth, to really work, has to have some weight to it apart from the message its supposed to be teaching.  Which is why Mr. Wisdom and his children have come to my mind at times that had nothing to do with the message that rationalists subconsciously derive their emotional satisfaction from elsewhere.

My best parables can sometimes have a very clear message, but they have a power beyond the message.

Poet Head, for instance, is so self-consciously message fiction that I literally call the head poet heads and sober heads.  But it still works.

A bull was gazing longingly over the fence into the next pasture.

“What’s the attraction of that pasture?” asked a pigeon on the fence.

“It’s greener,” said the bull.

“But look at all the hills,” said the pigeon, “they are greener too.”

The bull looked around. “Yes” he said, “now I want to roam all the hills, grazing there too.”

Moral: The vignette came to me first. I am undecided if the moral is something about ambition and desire being limitless. Or if the moral is that you need somebody to help you elevate your ambitions.

A certain lamb was being loaded onto a livestock trailer for the trip to the slaughterhouse.  As the tractor-trailer drove off, the lamb squirmed its way through the tightly pressed sheep to catch a glimpse out a ventilation hole, a glimpse of the pastures the lamb was leaving behind.

“At last, freedom at last,” the lamb exclaimed.  “No more fences, no more herd dogs!”

A worker put some wood into the furnace of an unlit boiler then tried to light it.

“What are you doing?”  his boss said.  “Studies show that there is a tight correlation between the amount of the wood and the heat of the fire.  Corporate wants us to do nothing but add more  wood.  Everything else is a waste of time.”

Moral:  You cannot start a fire by adding more wood.

Related: Light a Fire that will Never Go Out

Following on from Part I, read it first.

The wizard lands were stagnant. Millions striving to create their own language, their own script, their own scales, and not succeeding. Some few succeeding in a minor ways. A mere handful truly achieving greatness . . . and then dying, and their greatness dying with them.

The land without magic was not stagnant. Gleaming towers were there; and gleaming rockets to the Moon, and to Mars; and gleaming teeth. They were not stagnant. But if an angel were to jerk back the veil on time, you would see that their trajectory was a curve. Up and then over and then down. It would take no angel to see the signs that were already there. Their arts were complex enough now that no one person could achieve much in the way of greatness. But they were so far removed from want that struggle and suffering were no longer spurs to them either. Their growth had slowed. Movements and ideas insulated from reality were starting to spread. Individuals who wanted greatness were fighting for preeminence and celebrity instead. They had grown slowly and then for a few dizzying decades had grown very quickly. Now they would decline slowly and then very quickly.

But if the way of magic didn’t work, and the way of the country without magic didn’t work, what then?

A new thing was seen in the land. A boy was inspired with a new language. In it there were rules that made the language individual for each speaker. It captured their experience and their character. Their words would be shaded by their relationships with their family and their friends. Their achievements were built in. Only they could speak it. But others could understand them. Each one who learned the rules was able to create their own language, and speak words of power. And the words they spoke together, the songs they sung together, were more powerful still.

Anyone can become a wizard. They just have to create their own fully realized language to speak their commands in.

Anyone can write down their spells into spellbooks. They just have to create their own unique script to do it in.
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There once was a boy who was set to watch sheep. Some wolves gathered and he ran to the village for help. “Wolves! Wolves!” he cried. But shockingly, in describing the wolves he said that some of them were “bitches.” This was offensive. The villagers beat him a bit and then the village elder took him aside to counsel him. When the boy said that the wolves were already among the sheep right then, the village elder pointed out that the delay was entirely the boy’s fault. The slain sheep must be on the boy’s conscience. Finally the boy was let go to salvage the situation as best as he could on his own.

Wolves learn from experience even if boys do not, so the next time the wolves attacked they behaved and dressed in a very peculiar fashion, like an outrageous gay stereotype. The boy fought them but finally had to run to the village for help. He described the wolves as ‘acting gay.’ The villagers would have reacted badly in any case to this association of sexual minorities with vicious predatory beasts but they were even more concerned given the boy’s prior history of offensive conduct. They beat him thoroughly and lectured him long.

The next time the boy ran into town he said the wolves were painted in blackface and saying “n*****.” The villagers had put up with the boy’s antics for a long time, but saying “n*****” was really too much. They beat him almost to death and drove him out.

It was too bad about the sheep.

The ruler of that land was called the Tiger King.  He lived in great luxury and had utter sway from harvest to harvest.

When the harvest was in, he stepped down.  The time for choosing who would next wear the Tiger Crown came.

The choosing went like this.  They had a certain large field where they held a combat.  The last man standing among all the aspirants took the Tiger Crown for the next year.  But this was no ordinary combat.  Each man had to be mounted on a tiger.  Either his own, or one that would be provided.

More men were laid low by their own tiger then by another’s blows. (more…)