Teaching Stories

Between work and other distractions, I’ve been slow about posting. But then, this was not intended as an exercise in writing random daily thoughts. I’ve preferred to wait until I’ve had something I wanted to say, relevant at least to writing this book. Of course, I keep changing my strategy for tackling the work and am well over 10,000 words into The Temple of Hanuman, which tends to limit my options. But I only have about two-thirds of the stories from the Ramayana that I plan to use and, in the meantime, am looking for pages of notes that I’ve misplaced. I expect they’ll turn up, unless I’ve inadvertently thrown them away. Nevertheless, this is all a wonderful testament to my lack of organization and my inability to keep my thoughts focused on more than a few things at once.

As I’m going through this process, I’m remembering more clearly how I wrote the three books comprising The End of Reason. Many years ago, I read Sufi teaching stories collected and translated into English by Idries Shah and published by The Octagon Press under such titles as The Hundred Tales of Wisdom and Tales of the Dervishes. My interest in Sufism was piqued by these inoffensive little books and helped warm me up to original source material like Rumi’s Masnavi and Fihi Ma Fihi, Attar’s Conference of the Birds and Sadi’s The Rose Garden. The process was similar (though not quite simultaneous) to my introduction to world music beginning with Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack Passion, which led me to Passion Sources, which led me to original works of both modern world-fusion music (e.g., David Parsons, Stellamara, Vas) and traditional world music recordings upon which the former genre is based. Of course, there’s very little in the way of modern “world fusion” literature, even counting my own work or vastly better-know authors like Kahlil Gibran or Edward FitzGerald. But if popularity were my aim, I would have given up in disgust and disappointment some time ago.

Originally, I wrote original stories and recast traditional stories independently of any broader narrative structure. Many of the stories within In Herod’s Keep were written this way and only later did I create the conversation between Herod and John in which those tales were organized and integrated. The Madness of God was written differently; the idea for the narrative structure was in place; only then I scoured Sufi literature, Jewish mythology, and Christian apocrypha for stories that I could use, or bend, to Iblis’ arguments. The Men Who Have the Elephant was written not as a narrative structure in which teaching stories could be framed but to reflect upon and to wrap up the arguments made in the two previous works. Moreover, these three parts grew out of one another. The Madness of God nearly ended up as a long section within In Herod’s Keep and was conceived after much deliberation on John’s arguments relating to theodicy. The Men Who Have the Elephant, meanwhile, was written as commentary on the two previous works and to offer something of a resolution.

The Temple of Hanuman is being written much like The Madness of God. In general terms I’d already conceived of the work and who and what it would probably cover and already knew where I wanted it to go. In the meantime, I’m collecting stories from the Ramayana (and will collect stories from the Mahabharata, the Bhagavata Purana, and the Gitagovinda). These stories once collected, refashioned, and retold are the hinge upon which the dialogue of the book will turn. My focus must necessarily be on these original works first; from them I will draw out the stories I need to support the arguments I make.