On the Job: Monkeys and Demons

So I started my job on Wednesday. Yes, it's huge! A big adjustment. And no, it's not that I'm finally a "working woman," as people keep saying to me -- though it's true that all of a sudden I have a commute, and co-workers, and a badge on a lanyard. I have departmental meetings, and inter-departmental meetings, and I get an employee discount at the gift shop. All of that is new and different, but none of it is half as revolutionary as the idea that these wonderful people are paying me. All day, every day. 

Which means, of course, that they have a fair amount of control over what I'm doing, and when and where I'm doing it. It means that I get up in the morning (and put on real clothes!), and leave the house, and I don't come back until it's time to make supper. It means I no longer have the chance to throw in a load of laundry while that almost-final draft of an essay is printing out -- or the chance to get all involved in folding the clean load and filling up the dishwasher and so on, so that by the time I get back to the essay the kids have come home from school and made microwave popcorn and painted their toenails and dribbled yogurt all over it. 

So you see, it's not that I'm suddenly working. It's that I'm no longer spending large chunks of my day on invaluable yet unpaid tasks, most of which were -- in fact -- work. That many of those things still need to get done somehow is a problem I haven't quite worked out yet -- and part of the reason I keep going to bed at two in the morning.

But all of that is just the friction around the rough edges of the transition... What I really want to say is that the job is great.

Take, for example, the fact that I got to spend my second morning on the job sorting through a mile high pile of Monkey King portraits painted by John Muir Elemntary school students. My goal was to pick out roughly fifty of them that I felt would convey the many faces of this remarkable character from India's epic saga, the Ramayana. A slide show of these portraits will become part of an exhibit called "Epic Tails," which features animal folktales from around Asia and the Pacific. (The exhibit opens July 16th in the Wing Luke's KidSPACE, if anyone's interested.) I'm responsible for shepherding the design through the final production process -- taking draft text and artifact lists and vague ideas for interactives, and bringing them to life in the gallery. 

Whack that gator, Simon!

The story of the Monkey King is one of six animal legends I've had to bone up on for "Epic Tails." (Another one -- if I may digress for a moment -- is "The Monkey and the Crocodile," a classic trickster tale from the Philippines, which I was amused to discover at Full Tilt on Thursday, thinly disguising good old Whack-a-Mole).

Now, I’m under no illusion that three days immersed in Wikipedia entries, skimmed translations and picture books from the library have allowed me to plumb the cultural, psychological, and spiritual depths of any of these stories. But I have been struck by a couple of things about the Ramayana, and Hanuman the Monkey King in particular.

The Ramayana tells the story of a prince -- Rama, the seventh avatar of the God Vishnu -- who is banished to the forest for fourteen years, and must defeat the Demon King in order to rescue his wife, restore his honor, and, ultimately, regain his throne. In the original Hindu version, Hanuman is Rama’s faithful friend, who helps him overcome impossible obstacles throughout the journey. Over thousands of years, the story has spread through South and Southeast Asia, incorporating strands of Buddhism and Islam, and spawning variations in which Hanuman is more the hero of the story than the trusted sidekick.

It's not hard to see how this could happen: Hanuman is awesome. He flies across the ocean, carries mountains from one place to another, and stops the sun from rising by wrestling it back to the ground. He can grow larger than the tallest buildings, or shrink to the size of a housefly. He can curl his tail up into a towering throne and sit on it. Sidekick or not, he is totally a superhero. 

But because of what Wikipedia refers to as "a mild curse” he received as a child, Hanuman is unaware of his remarkable abilities -- and thus unable to wield them -- unless someone reminds him that he has them. On the eve of the battle with the Demon King, his friend Jambavantha performs this helpful serviece, telling Hanuman:

You are as powerful as the wind.
You are intelligent, illustrious, and an inventor.
There is nothing in this world that's too difficult for you.
Whenever someone is stuck, you are the one who can help.

Hanuman’s superpowers are thus awakened -- and the Demon King's fate is sealed. 

I rather like this variation on that classic "Who, me?" moment that seems to come over so many of my favorite heroes, from Luke Skywalker to Spider-man to Jesus Christ Himself -- maybe because it opens up the possibility that any of us ordinary, doubt-ridden schmoes might be harboring hidden superpowers of our own. It's hard to believe it's now my job to try to convey this sort of thing through a slide show of kids' art -- what an auspicious way to begin my new adventure in full-time employment!

And then there’s the Demon King -- the Ramayana's ten-headed villain. 

I'm not sure if the Demon King is meant to embody the various outside threats to Rama's kingdom, or if he's more about the vicious monsters within Rama's heart: the doubts and fears he has to overcome before he is ready to be reunited with his lovely wife Sita and take his rightful place on the throne. (Or the Demon King may represent some combination of internal and external challenges -- or something else entirely! -- like I said, I'm new to this story.)

In my own personal mythic vocabulary, external enemies are generally dragons. Whether you're facing a soulless bureaucracy, a slashed budget, an impossible deadline, or simply a mountain of laundry, the idea with a dragon is to throw yourself into the fight using whatever resources you have at your disposal: strategy, trickery, teamwork, or brute force if necessary. You can lose to a dragon and walk away with your head held high, knowing you've put up the best fight you could. (This metaphor isn't universal, of course -- I've learned this week, for instance, that Vietnamese dragons are benevolent ancestors who bring life-giving rain.)

A demon, on the other hand, is (in my mind) an internal foe -- the darkness inside me that saps my strength, scoffs at my successes, gloats at my failures.  A demon is the creature who will creep up beside me and whisper "You can't..." at precisely the moment -- on the eve of the battle, at the end of the rope -- when I most need someone to grab me by the shoulders and shout, "There's nothing in this world that's too difficult for you!"

Demon mask at the Burke Museum:
mischievous or malevolent?

Now, sometimes it's helpful to call that dark part of me out -- to give it a name, whether it's "demons" or "insecurity" or "guilt" or "depression." If I can mentally separate that stuff from the rest of me, it becomes almost external, a little more like a dragon -- something I can exorcise, or medicate, or otherwise banish. This can be an absolutely crucial strategy on those days when despair and dread hang over me like swirling thunderclouds, blotting out all the light I know is out there (and in me).

But there are other days when I think dividing up my psyche that way is just as self-defeating as letting the demons win. Those thunderclouds are as much a part of me as any hidden superpowers, after all. Shouldn't I be trying to integrate all these different pieces of myself, instead of giving them mythical personas and siccing them on each other? If one part of me vanquishes another, how do I know if "I" really won?

The other day I heard an interview with neuroscientist David Eagleman, who doesn't seem to be bothered by this idea of multiple selves battling it out:

I make this argument about the brain being like a team of rivals... Your brain is made up of these competing networks that are all battling it out to control this single output channel of your behavior. And so your brain’s like a neural parliament, and you’ve got these different parties in there like the Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians, all of whom love their country and feel that they know the best way to steer the ship of state. But they have differing opinions on how to do it, and they have to fight it out.

This is why we can cuss at ourselves and cajole ourselves and get angry at ourselves, and this is why you can do behavior and look back and think, “Wow, how did I do that?” It’s because you are not one person, you are not one thing. As Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

So maybe it's okay to personify my dark side as a pack of vicious demons... And to imagine the rest of me rounding them up and riding them out of town on a rail. (Or, as Dr. Eagleman might put it, voting them out of my neural parliament.) Perhaps one day I'll find a way to face my demons with compassion and curiosity instead of fear and hostility. I think that's what Walt Whitman would advise.

So I guess it's appropriate that on the last night before my job began -- before I'd ever heard of Hanuman or Rama or the Demon King -- I pulled my own demon mask off the shelf and mixed up a fresh batch of papier-mâché. I started this project three years ago, at least, and have been working on it in brief irregular bursts ever since. To my surprise, after a minor adjustment to the sneering upper lip and a last-minute enlargement of the glaring eyeballs, I stood back and looked at the thing and realized it was done.