https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=LfhFlpJJYaQ
So hello everybody, I’m here with Deacon Nicholas Cotar. Those of you who follow my channel have seen him here before. We did an interview talking about Tolkien and storytelling and Deacon Nicholas is just finishing up his series of books on Ravenson. So we’ll talk a little bit about that, but we’ll mostly talk about the situation right now. He wrote a great article for the Symbolic World blog on the question of vaccines and fairy tales and the importance of meaning. And so we’ll talk about that, our current situation and see how that leads us also to always talk about storytelling because we can’t avoid that. [“Symphony No. 1 in D Major, Op. 16, No. 2 in C Major, Op. 16”] This is Jonathan Pajot, welcome to the Symbolic World. [“Symphony No. 1 in D Major, Op. 16, No. 2 in C Major, Op. 16”] So Deacon Nicholas, first off I wanna congratulate you on finishing your series of Ravenson. Maybe you can give us a little tidbit of how that experience has been and then we can jump in to the question of vaccines and fairy tales. Well, it’s been a really roller coaster for me. I mean, not only because of all of the, you know, emotional fallout as a result of coronavirus and everything. We’re pretty isolated where we are, upstate New York. So it’s not touching us too much, but still, you know, there’s always the attraction of social media and things that tend to worry you. But it’s not just that, it’s also finishing a book series that I’ve been writing for 13 years on and off. And it turns out that’s a much more emotional and almost traumatic experience that I expected because these characters have become such a part of me. And of course they come out of who I am and every single one of them is carrying some tiny aspect of my personality. Yeah. As I was, and I had to kill a few of them off. And, you know, there was one that I killed off the next morning, I was like, I can’t work today. I’m in mourning. I’m in mourning for my character, that’s awesome. It’s true. But yeah, it’s been a great experience and it’s just the beginning. I’m now really in a good rhythm and I anticipate at least two or three more books coming out this year, so. That’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve been excited to see how productive you’ve been despite the coronavirus. And I’m really happy to see you kind of joining our team on the symbolic world because I love your work and I love your thought process. You know, even from the first articles you wrote on the Orthodox Art Journal, I like, okay, I have a kindred spirit in this person. So the article you wrote for us is called Why Fairy Tales Might Be Better Than a Vaccine, which was quite provocative. So maybe you can kind of lay out the thesis for it. People can obviously check it out and read it, but if we can lay it out and we can talk about the tenets of your article. Well, actually, it’s interesting that it all, it’s funny how, I don’t know if coronavirus is making us more cognizant of weird connections happening throughout our lives in different ways, but I’ve been preparing a podcast for ancient faith media and it’s basically, I’ll be retelling, it’s called In a Certain Kingdom and I’ll be retelling Slavic fairy tales with a little bit of analysis attached at the end of each reading. So it’s kind of performed and things like this, but my favorite part of it is gonna be the analysis. Of course, with fairy tales, they have to be careful not to analyze them to death because you can make them into a vivisective corpse and that’s no longer a fairy tale. But this first article for the symbolic world actually came directly from the analysis of the first story that I’ll be telling, which it’ll be made available very soon. And those of you who followed me at all will know that I have a slight love affair with a Russian philosopher of the late 19th, early 20th century named Ivan Ilyin, who is a bit of a controversial figure in some circles. There’s effectively a hit piece out there written by a historian for the New York review of books that people all the way from here to India have read and whenever they hear people who are really, who consider themselves people of letters, when they hear the words Ivan Ilyin, they automatically default to that article, which talks about Ivan Ilyin being a fascist prototype for the Putinist takeover of Russia and the Eastern whatever, which is, it’s a hit piece. Basically, the guy doesn’t even, he doesn’t actually quote Ilyin a single time. He says, Ilyin said that and then there is no quote. So it’s very easy to misrepresent the kinds of things Ilyin said. Ilyin did have a short flirtation with fascism because he was in Germany in the pre-war period, but a lot of the Russian immigrants ended up in Germany and unfortunately, there are a lot of people, we don’t remember this fact, but a lot of people had a kind of fascist flirtation before they really saw what was going on. Yeah, and it’s really easy for us now to judge people at the time, especially you can imagine a Russian immigrant who had to deal with a communist revolution, who’s now seeing Antifa and the communist parties taking ground in Germany and they want to resist that and so they feel like the only solution is this new thing that’s kind of appearing on the horizon and so it’s easy for us to judge them for making those moves at that time when in fact, a lot of the writers, like Heidegger is a good example, where people say, oh, Heidegger, Heidegger, but as soon as you understood what was going on in terms of the madness, he distanced himself from the party, but it’s too easy to judge people at that time. I really get annoyed when people do that and I feel like it’s almost like a weird leftist pathology, right, to just accuse, but we don’t accuse Jean-Paul Sartre of being a communist member until his death basically and Pablo Picasso to have been gone to Russia and propped up the communist state while it was massacring people and sending people to Gulag, so I have no patience for that crap. No, me neither and I get very angry and I have gotten very angry recently about it so I have to control my emotions, but the point is that you can only really judge a man by his own work, his own output and if you read the stuff that he’s written on culture, especially, it’s really incredible. He has a little booklet that I’ve translated and actually it’s available for anybody who wants to buy it, it’s called the Foundations of Christian Culture and it’s one of the most unique things that I’ve ever read because he talks about one of the main responsibilities of a Christian being not simply maintaining an existing culture, which seems to be the default position for about a millennium, if we’re honest, but he says that no, especially in this moment and he’s writing in the middle of the 20th century as the world wars are going on, he says it’s time to create anew and it doesn’t mean get rid of everything and start from scratch, it means take what you have, good and bad, transform it, take what you have now, take what you have in the past, take what you expect to happen in the future, combine it with an active and kind of, he calls it a spirit-inspired view of the world. He was very Hegelian and he kind of believed in the indwelling of the spirit being the prime movement of the creator and also immersing yourself in the worldview and in the narrative of the scriptures and from that, allowing yourself to be kind of moved towards a lifelong journey towards creating culture through your own specific medium, whatever that might be and he even enumerates a whole bunch of them, he talks about economics, he talks about government, visual arts, he talks about writing, he talks about all kinds of things. So it’s from that perspective that, and from that similar kind of mindset that I found this other article he wrote, it was actually a speech given to a bunch of Russians in Berlin in the 30s, so right before everything started to go crazy, where he talks about the spiritual meaning of fairy tales. The weirdest thing you could talk about in the mid-1930s, I mean, who’s gonna be talking about fairy tales right as the Great War is finished and another one is about to happen and it’s obvious that things are not going well throughout the world, I mean, the Great Depression is happening, I mean, who is gonna wanna talk about fairy tales? And yet here, this is what he chooses to talk about and he talks specifically about Russian fairy tales to a specifically Russian audience but especially if you compare what he says with what Tolkien and other, not folklorists, I have an opinion about folklorists that I will not share here, but people who actually write in the tradition of folklore, they all agree that there is something about that way of telling stories that reaches very, very deep into the historical past of a nation, that reaches very deep into the spiritual base of a human being that can help reconstruct a proper relation to the world around you in a very realistic way, as odd as that may sound because fairy tales are what? They’re invented funny little stories about talking animals, what could possibly be there that could help you form a worldview? And yet that’s exactly the argument that he makes, which is a fascinating argument, I think. Well, one of the things that the fairy tale does is that it’s using a grammar which seems very, very ancient, that is very, very old. And the very fact that you can take these stories seriously because some of the elements are so odd in the story, and the fact that we are able to listen to them and to think that this is fine, like that this is okay to listen to the story and to finish with a sense of satisfaction, it means that it’s actually going very, very deep in our psyche and very deep in the patterns of being. And it doesn’t matter whether or not they are believable in a kind of literalistic sense or a kind of historical sense, it doesn’t matter. They tend to hone in on the best image within the narrative to make it happen. Yeah, no, and it’s built on structures of symbolism, and these structures of symbolism, they tend to persist throughout, not even centuries, but millennia. I mean, there’s some interesting scholarship to suggest that some fairy tales that we tell now were first told 9,000 years ago. It’s pretty insane. And you’re right, and you touch on something that I think what I would even go further, I think that any sort of realism in a fairy tale makes it dead. I think that it’s precisely the lack of believability on some level, as long as that lack of believability also plugs into those symbolic structures, those commonly repeated images and ways of relating to the world that seem to appear in all cultures again and again, things like, and we talked about this with Father Andrew, Stephen Damick in the last Amon Sul podcast that I did with him, and it’s an interesting scene in The Hobbit where Gandalf is talking about storytelling in the context of his little limited world, and he mentions the unexpected luck of widows’ sons and the rescue of princesses. Now, neither of those things happens in the world of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. So what is he talking about? Except if you know your folklore, those two elements are tropes in fairy tales. They happen all the time. The princess always needs to be rescued. And by the way, there’s a lot of reasons why she needs to be rescued, and oftentimes it’s not because of the princess. So it’s not a feminist or non-feminist thing at all. It has nothing to do with that. While the unexpected luck of widows’ sons is also a very commonly repeated trope, it has to do with how you have to go deep into misfortune in order to find your fortune. You have to be deprived of everything on the superficial level to be able to find that sometimes mad, sometimes dangerous wisdom that will lead you by impulse and by instinct as opposed to by rationality, something that really we need to be paying attention to right now. No, exactly. And it’s definitely the Christian message, even though people might be surprised to hear that, is that all the symbolism of Christianity is about finding light in darkness or finding life in death. Even the symbolism of the fish, I always try to remind people that the symbolism of the fish, that’s exactly what it is. It’s all about finding these sparkly things that are hidden in the depth of darkness. It’s about finding life in a dead world. And so that is really what Christianity is about. Just the whole image of the crucifixion is about that and how life comes after this descent into Hades. And so our whole ascetic practice is a way to mimic, if you will, the unfortunate of the character, this character that you talk about, the last son or the widow’s son or whatever, the loser in the family. He’s never the first son. No, it’s never the first son. And so a lot of our ascetic practice is there to kind of recreate that pattern within ourselves. Even in a world that’s fine, you want to create for yourself that opposition so that you see your passions, but then you can also find some precious nugget there. And this is what drives me, what really mystifies me about the reaction to a lot of Christians, unfortunately. And I don’t know if it’s a lot, but it seems to be a lot based on what I’m coming across with, especially on social media, the reaction that a lot of Christians are having to the closure of churches and how church closure is being supported and defended by even people very high up in the hierarchy as a necessary step towards stemming the, or what is it, the flattening the curve and things like this. Well, I’m thinking, wait a minute, whatever happened to recapitulating the darkness that is around Christ at the moment of his crucifixion so that we can then go down with him into Hades and come back up? It’s not merely recreating, it’s recapitulating, it’s a word that Iterative Leon uses a lot, meaning actually reenacting in our lives in a way that would then allow for the grace of God to fulfill the same thing that happened to Christ with us. But this, we’re not even being given the chance. It’s really astounding to me how the necessity for maintaining superficial health is more important than leaning into, as we always have throughout history. How many epidemics have we had, Jonathan? I mean, hundreds and hundreds. I was just reading about St. Philaret of Moscow, who was the Metropolitan of Moscow, the head of the Russian church in the 19th century, who had lived through six, seven, eight cholera epidemics. People, cholera is much worse than COVID-19, I’m sorry. If you wanna die in the worst possible way, I’m not gonna get into the details, but just look it up, all right? He never closed churches, he opened hospitals, he sent his monastics to go into those hospitals, to minister to those people. He kept the churches open at all times. He rang bells at odd moments during the day and the night to remind people of what is ultimately of the most importance. And in the kind of superficial and pathetic and lax lifestyle we live in the West right now, this is the best kind of wake-up call that we could possibly have. And here, the doors are being shut in our faces as soon as we have the opportunity to go and recapitulate Christ’s journey. He is offering it to us, saying, go, do it, suffer with me. Yeah. And no, and they’re telling us, no, that’s not good for you. Yeah, and I think that that’s really, in your article, that’s what you kind of suggest, if it’s very powerful, is the idea that the communion we find in church and the communion we find in common story and in common participation in story is, when you say it’s better than a vaccine, it means it’s because what it does is it affords us the capacity to be human and to be there to help each other and to be a community, which is the actual thing which will get us through this crisis and not some artificial medication. Because the, you know, and the image that we saw, like the image that we saw happening, I don’t know if it happened to everybody, like here in Quebec, the scandal was the old people’s homes. Like it was a scandal. And so here we are, all closed off on each other, no church, no community, no nothing. We’re all shut down in our houses watching Netflix and the old people are abandoned in these old people’s homes and they die of thirst because no one is caring for them. They just die on these beds because they’re being abandoned. They’ve just basically been abandoned. And so- It’s worse than that. It’s worse than that because in the state that I’m in, in New York, there was a scandal that started to be uncovered and then it was just shut down of the governor was sending COVID patients into rest homes, specifically, into the population that is at the most at risk, the ones that are gonna die. And so that now the numbers in the US are clear. It’s almost 50% of all the deaths attributed to COVID in the United States have come from nursing homes. It’s totally insane. And so here we are, all these young people sitting at home, getting mad at everyone else for not following protocol, all the protocol of which is designed, whether purposely or not, doesn’t even matter, to disconnect community in a world that already has no community. I mean, how many people know their next door neighbors? Hardly anybody. I will tell you, this is one of the most incredible things about living in a rural kind of isolated place right now in the middle of this is because the people around me, for the most part, are being very calm. We talk to each other. We don’t talk to each other over across artificially imposed surfaces. Of course, we’re being careful. Of course, we’re not trying to infect each other on purpose. Goodness gracious. It’s not everything that we have here has to be seen in black and white categories, except most fairy tales are black and white categories, but nevermind. But so, and here, so if there’s any hope in all of this, it seems to me like the only way out is the rebirth of small communities in places that aren’t beehives, full of, or anthills full of unpeople going back and forth between their unwork and their unhome, where they try to spend as much time as possible in front of their screens so they don’t have any communication with their unwife and their unchildren. That’s it. Gee, Deacon Nicholas, tell us if your opinion on this. Ha ha ha ha. Sorry. No, I think it’s good. I think you’re right. And I think that this idea of also, one of the things that’s lacking, and maybe this can bring us to the next situation, is that one of the things that has been lacking the destruction of the common stories, you know, the evacuation of the fairy tales, and even not just evacuation, but the subversion of a lot of the fairy tales, with like the new kind of retellings, the modern versions of them, more and more we really do have this weird subversion of the fairy tale. And of course, ultimately, the deconstruction of the common Christian story, which has held the West together for, you know, since the fall of Rome, basically. And isn’t it interesting that those two happen hand in hand, that the destruction of the Christian story cannot happen without a subversion of the traditional story tropes. They all, you know, I’ll tell you, like most traditional publishing houses that are publishing fairy tale-based stuff, which is usually fantasy in today’s parlance, are very explicit that they don’t want anything traditional and that they’re looking for as many queer versions of traditional storylines, as many inversions of the men, women. Roles, yeah. Roles, yeah, and notice the recent horror movie that came out of Europe, it’s not Hansel and Gretel, it’s Gretel and Hansel. So even on the level of the names of characters, it has to be the woman first now, because there have to be reparations paid. And of course, I’ll be honest, like occasionally I will like to read, I do like to read a twist on something traditional, especially if that twist somehow re-illumines some basic aspect of reality that I know to be true. But more often than not, the twist is the point. And because most of the people who are writing now actively in these genres that have traditionally spoken to the deepest held, sort of the deepest longings of the human spirit, that used to be old white men. And now it’s young millennials, all of whom, as we’ve seen in a lot of the political version that’s going on, they have swallowed up a deconstruction of reality as their worldview. Yeah. That is their worldview, their worldview is that everything is nothing, or that that thing has to be twisted and that’s it. And they haven’t yet internalized, for whatever reason, the reality that there is actually no end to that, it’s the serpent that eats its tail forever. And there’s no way of coming out of it, you’re just gonna keep spinning and spinning until you go insane. Yeah, and your version is going to be eaten too. For whatever is left of the old world, then they’re gonna come after you later because you can never completely deconstruct anyways because the story still needs to have a pattern. When, like very soon, and I’m sure some people have already said that, they’ll say that the very pattern of a story that has a beginning and an end, and an arc, and a character arc, is a form of supremacy, it’s a form of power and position on the viewer, imposing a narrative on the person watching it. And so, these types of things are, like you said, there’s no, you think that you’ve reached the bottom and then some other bigger monster comes up to come and eat up what was there before. Isn’t there like a series of memes where there’s one thing eating another thing, eating another thing, and just kind of add in for an item. But, and this is something that all of us with no historical background, or with no historical, what’s the word I’m looking for, perspective, who’ve forgotten even the history of the last 100 years, don’t even realize, I mean, don’t forget all of you who are really happy about the recent changes in that have to do with the riots and everything. Don’t forget that they come from an extremely leftist position, a communist one. And what happened to the communists in Russia? They came to power immediately after the revolution in 1918. All of them, every single one of the main people who was involved in that pooch, they were all killed. 20 years later, they were all killed. As something, by the way, that’s really beautifully shown in a Russian movie, because we wanna talk about storytelling versions of history, not just beating people over the head with facts, but there’s a Russian movie called Burnt by the Sun that was directed by Nikita Mikhalkov. Yeah, I saw that, that’s an amazing movie, so beautiful. Everybody has to watch that. So powerful, and it’s powerful in that sense, where you see the general, they come for him now, and it’s his turn now. And the scariest scene in that movie is when we see the rising image of Stalin on a blimp, or it’s like a hot air balloon, and it’s coming up, the hot air balloon is covered by the face of Stalin, and the main character, who’s this young, young new communist who’s come to destroy the old communist, he’s smoking, he’s thinking, he’s kind of conflicted about reality, and he sees the image come up, his face goes dead, and he salutes to it. And that’s it, that is the end game of any such political and cultural program. It’s complete depersonalization in front of that power, that’s going to arise out of the ashes. Napoleon did it, by the way, and we tend to idolize Napoleon, tend to say, oh, what a cool character he was. Napoleon was not a nice man at all, and the things he did to Europe were pretty bad. I mean, go and read your history, people. That’s definitely one of the things that, one of the problems is that there is something about the way that the story is told in North America, which is that we only hear one version of the atrocities. We hear the atrocities of the fascists, which of course we should because it was horrible, and we should definitely know about them, but we then ignore the other side. We don’t know about the atrocities of the, we don’t hear about the red wave so much. It’s not taught, and so it’s very strange. I have my theory, one of the theories I think is because there’s a sin, there is a sin in the fact that we won the World War II, which is that we didn’t win World War II. People say, oh, we won World War II, no, you didn’t World War II. We didn’t win World War II. We won World War II by associating ourselves with a murderous communist regime, and now we have to hide that in our consciousness. We have to hide that and move on thinking that we won, not knowing that we also, we did win, and of course we defeated the fascists, which is great, but in that new origin, we gave half of Europe to a demonic, murderous regime. And we gave up all of our universities and all of the structures that raise our young people who are now all come up as basically neo-Marxists, and with, who by the way don’t, who have also been taught how to tell good stories. So this is part of the scariness of what’s going on right now in the world around me. It’s part of what’s making me kind of go, what on earth and how fast this happened, what is happening? It’s because they know the storytelling structures. They have the symbolism. They have it, we lost it. The Christians lost it because they were too busy arguing about the age of the earth and about dinosaurs and about things that don’t matter in terms of your actual life. They started to see the Bible as just a bunch of facts that were aligned next to each other, stop and saw narrative as almost something demonic. Yeah, that’s right. As if, and you can see it’s funny. I’m all for conspiracy theories, but one of the things that’s interesting to watch is how conspiracy types, they hate symbolism. Hate symbolism so much that every time they see a pattern, they immediately have to attribute it to a demonic force. That’s right. If there’s a pattern, it must be someone who is manipulating and not saying there isn’t. Of course there are people manipulating politics from all sides, and you can really see the end of that problem, which is that they hate narrative because they see it as evil in itself. So how do you get, so what happens is you’ve given up narrative to your enemy and now they’re gonna feed you. They’re gonna feed you stories. They love it. Oh, and they are. They’re feeding some really, really impressive stories. I mean, how can you argue against this Black Lives Matter narrative? Now I’m not speaking politically about this. I’m just talking about the way that they tell stories. You can’t argue. You cannot argue with what they are saying because the best you can do is come up with some sort of facts that counter their facts, but it’s not about facts. It’s about the emotion that has come about as a result of this story being told in this specific way. And the story that they’re telling is a good one, even if it’s not true. And whether it’s true or not is almost beside the point because it’s the nature of the narrative, the way it’s spoken. And the entire lack of narrative and worldview on the other side. And the complete obliviousness to the fact that, no, no, no, no, no, wait a minute. This is a clash, not of politics. This is not a clash of ideologies. It’s a clash of worldviews. It’s a clash of symbolism. It’s a clash of story. And if you start seeing it on that level, only then can you start, first of all, having the conversation. And second of all, being able to internalize and to decide for yourself what is the actual way of relating to us in a way that would give your own life meaning. Because people are just being erased in this. Their own personality, their own stories are just being erased in this massive monolith that is this incredibly well-told story. Yeah, but it’s also a very simple story of a good guy, bad guy narrative. And so it’s very convincing because those stories are very powerful. When you have an evil other, even if it’s weird because the evil other especially in the BLM narrative is that, because most people in America are so white. I think it’s like 20, 30% African Americans. And so most people have now taken on a bad guy narrative in which they play the bad guy role completely. And so, I don’t know, how do you get out of that? Do you just self-destroy? That’s the only way. To self-destruct? You’ve seen the- The flagellants, I saw the flagellants. Oh, the flagellants and the people who are doing digital blackface. As an act, not simply of repentance, but as an act of identity angst. I wish I had another identity. I wish I was not who I am. And that is just, I mean, all kinds of lights are going on in my head. Because as soon as you separate identity from the grounded reality of who you are, where you are in terms of your family, your history and your place and your nation, which has been happening for a long time now. But when it’s then suddenly given this fever pitch by all of the things that are happening. I mean, David Brooks recently wrote a piece in the New York Times where he said that America’s going through five crises at the same time. Like, yeah, that’s about right. And it’s just bringing to the fore all of the madness that has been going on inside people. And it’s also showing how most people have no worldview. There’s this incredible video, I think, or a photo, I’m not sure, I haven’t seen it. Somebody told me about it. Of somebody in an American grocery store. And he walks in and this grocery store doesn’t have all of the directions. About which way to go, where to avoid. Which aisle in what direction, yeah. And he stops, he walks in and he is petrified. He doesn’t know what to do. He has no idea where to go. He has no idea who to be. Because he has no identity as it comes out. And he hasn’t had any identity at all. And as soon as the external strictures that have been imposed, which are so comforting, because this will control everything for us. But as soon as those things are removed even for a second, massive confusion, massive just fear. And this is why more than anything right now you need story, more than anything else. Because that story is the only thing that can start building you up piece by little piece, which is the main point of my article. Yeah, yeah. And the thing is, yeah, I was gonna say there’s an interesting other video that came up which is kind of the counterpoint to that one. Which is the Karen video, like that there’s a lady at the aisle who because they ask her to wear a mask, she starts throwing all this stuff out of her cart onto the floor. She’s like, I’m not gonna wear a mask. And she’s just like tossing her stuff out on the floor. And I’m like, man, we’re losing it. Like seriously people, this is not going well. No, it’s not going well on all sides. Oh, mercy. So yeah, so we need good stories, that’s for sure. So all of you people watching this, don’t just analyze symbolism, write good stories. We need better stories. Well, read them first, because if you go and start writing it right now, the likelihood is that you’ll probably write some sort of some twisted version of something that doesn’t have the depth because you probably haven’t been formed enough. Because we haven’t been reading enough and because we haven’t been reading the right kinds of things. So that’s partially what I wanna do with that with that new podcast that I’m doing for Ancient Faith is give people exposure to the way people told stories. Not only by retelling the stories that have been told for thousands of years, but also telling it through a modern voice, my own, because I’m translating them from Russian to English, but I’m also adding my own thing, I’m performing it for audio. And so we have to internalize the stories that have been given to us. And if we have never had stories that have been given to us, then we need to find a tradition that we like and build it up. Because I think we’ve talked about this before, but it’s very difficult to really internalize the truth of scripture if you don’t already have a substratum, an internal substratum of those categories and those realities that are put in place by good stories. Most people, why was the gospel spoken at the moment that it was? It was the absolute fever pitch moment of the culture, of a culture of extremely fervent storytelling being spread over the maximum amount of space at any given moment. It was the absolute perfect time to do it because everybody spoke the same stories. Everybody knew them. And everybody spoke a similar language and everybody would understand those categories when they were spoken about. Now, and I’m speaking from an American context, there was an article that I shared about how black slaves in America created their own storytelling narratives by taking stories from the scriptures and from their own pagan past and kind of reimagining their life and adding consolation and hope and the possibility of reclamation through that storytelling tradition and how that eventually became things like jazz and stuff like this. It was an incredibly rich way of dealing with of a very horrifying reality. And in the comment section of the post that I shared, meaning on my Facebook page when I shared the post, there were people just crying out to me for the lack of their home culture having a storytelling tradition. Americans don’t really have a native fairy tale tradition. The closest thing you might have is something like the tall tales of the Paul Bunyan tales or something like this. But they’re fairly recent. They’re very culturally specific and they don’t really have that same kind of depth. You don’t think that wild west stories have that, they play that role a little bit? They do, but it depends on which ones. And those are very difficult to take up right now because of all the political issues involved. And they come from a close enough historical time period that it’s not as safe as taking some of these ancient Russian fairy tales that were told from the 10th century where you have the mythical king and the mythical hero and the mythical princess, who of course all came from real historical realities, but there’s enough distance from it. And there was enough storytelling tradition happening over centuries that gave it the kind of sheen of eternality. But I wonder about if you look at the epic genre in Greece and even in Persia or earlier than that in the Babylonian times or whatever, there really was a capacity to create complexity in the character. So when you read the Iliad, even though the story is being told from the side of the Greeks, it’s not clear who exactly is right in this conflict. There is a sense in which when Priam meets with Achilles, it’s a beautiful scene where you feel such sympathy for Priam and even almost more than you do with Achilles, who’s supposed to be one of the heroes of the battle. And so I think that within the epic genre, there could be a way to tell wild west stories where the native people aren’t represented as savages and that also the colonizers have it. There’s an ambiguity to their action on both sides and there’s a meeting of two worlds that is not gonna go well, some places it’s gonna go well. There could be ways to tell complex and powerful stories that wouldn’t be just one sided, but could even heal. Because if you look at the Iliad, for example, the Romans ended up taking the side of the Trojans and they saw themselves as being descendants of the Trojans. And so you can see how there really is a possibility to fit within a story told by Greeks that someone else takes the side of the Trojans and then it becomes a discussion between two civilizations. Jonathan, you have to have the capacity of holding more than one idea in your head at a time to be able to do that. And I’m increasingly seeing the inability to admit to the possibility of there being any complexity to any argument. One of the things that has happened as a result of Facebook and as a result of this particular brand of social media as it’s come down to us, is that by its very nature, by the way that it’s been created and by the way that it’s structured, it’s intended to remove nuance. It’s supposed to give you that immediate hit of dopamine from getting a like or from getting a comment. Rage bait is the best. Right, of course. And what nobody talks about, or some people do, but what we sometimes forget about is that these systems were designed with that in mind. They were designed to do that to us on purpose because that’s the easiest way of distilling the absolute most basic needs and wants that we have for the purposes of advertising to those basic needs and wants. I mean, there’s some really interesting books that have made their way out recently about the addictive nature of social media and how it seems to be, especially when you have these crises, it seems to be eroding our ability, even intelligent people’s ability, people who have education, people that I know are able to have a complex conversation about ideas they don’t agree with, something about the nature of this particular event at this particular moment in that particular medium is almost making it impossible to have any sort of conversation in which complexity is allowed to exist. And the idea with the Wild West stories is a really good one, but you need to have a community of creators and consumers of that creation who are willing to exist in that state of suspended complex storytelling and not judge it. And that’s actually why storytelling is so important, but you do have to break through a wall to get past the rational self. That initial movement from, oh, no, I’m not gonna listen to your story because it’s offensive and because you’re a white man and because you’re telling me things that you have no right to tell me. Getting from that point to, oh my gosh, that’s a really great story. I don’t care about the color of the skin of the protagonist. There used to be a much smaller wall there. Right now it’s massive. So there’s a lot more impetus on the storyteller to be able to draw people into that kind of nebulous nether sphere between your rational thought and your heart where stories have their most power. And that’s actually something that Elion talks about in this article that I referenced repeatedly in the symbolic world post that I did in that he believes that the stories are, and I mean, it’s interesting that he talked about fairy tales like I mentioned already during a time of intense ideological divide, fascist versus communist. This is like the worst, right? What we’re recapitulating right now. And yet at that moment he’s like, no, no, stories, stories, stories. Why? Because if you allow yourself to get into that almost somnolent rhythm of the storytelling structures, and by the way, all stories start with a nonsense statement with some sort of absurdity that shocks you out of the reality that you live in, some sort of bizarre concatenation of circumstances. So sometimes, I mean, one of the famous pre-stories in Russia is there was this muzhik, there was this peasant man, there was another peasant man, they came at each other, they started punching each other until they were both bloody. And then there was a bull and somebody stuck a sword, a knife into it and gold came out of it and in a certain kingdom, in a certain land, and we go to the story. So it’s like, everybody’s like, what on earth? But you’ve been shocked out of the reality, out of your everyday reality. And suddenly you’re like, oh, we’re in that part of, okay. I can deal with this. So yeah. Yeah, and I think that that’s been also one of the functions maybe of those types of stories is because they’re using categories which are not charged a lot of these stories, then they’re able to reach everybody. They don’t, and the danger that we’ve seen, for example, we saw some recent articles, I don’t know if you saw, people were writing me in private about this and they’re asking me, what do you think of this, what do you think of this? People were starting to say how in token, the orcs were racist, right? Because the orcs were supposed to represent black people. And I thought, I was like, guys, this is a dangerous road to go down, the people who are accusing these stories of doing that because, is that really what you want? Because it’s not that in the story. But if that’s what you want, then that can go both sides. That can go either way. It’s not a good place to go in your discussion. Look, Fahrenheit 451 has it right. There are no books left. All books must be burned. It doesn’t matter what they are. Doesn’t matter what they’re good or bad or well told or badly told. If you’re a fascist or communist, all books must be destroyed. All right, that’s where it’s gonna go if you go that way. And I’m not even gonna talk about the idiocy of that argument about orcs being black people. I mean, come on, give me a break. But of course, this only shows how if you’ve lost your connection to your nations or your people’s storytelling traditions, then you’ve lost your perspective on everything. And you’re gonna be able to be manipulated by anybody who has the best story or the loudest voice in the room. And you need to be able to understand. It’s so interesting. So one of the things if you notice, a lot I’ve been emphasizing a lot, the idea of the margin. I talk about that a lot because one of the things in a way that I want to help, I feel like that’s the band-aid that needs to be put on. It’s that on the one hand, you have people who are wanting to kind of move inside and cut off the margin, like the conservative types, you would say. And then you have people who live pretty much exclusively in the margin and who want the margin to basically take over the whole system. So I’m like, no, we need to put a band-aid there. We need to be able to help people understand the function of marginality, its role in the giant pattern, show some examples of it, and then help conservative types understand also that it plays a role in your story too. You need that stuff there as well. You can’t completely get rid of it. You know, it’s interesting. You mentioning the margin in that context really makes me think about something that’s been going on. One of the arguments that some traditional orthodox have been giving in support of the closure of churches has been, well, the hermits who lived out in the desert still had access to God’s grace. Or are you saying that God was not able to come to them out there? And like, okay, what you’ve just done is you’ve taken the existence on the margin and you’re trying to make it into the stage center. That’s right. You’ve taken it out of its proper context because what they’re doing out there is battling demons for God’s sake. That’s their point. They’re winning the war for the entire cosmos out there. As soon as you bring that in here, you’re bringing the chaos together with all of that back into the center. So that’s it, you brought the monsters in home. The difference between you and the hermit is that the hermit is out there fasting and fighting demons and you’re watching Netflix and the demons are pouring in. It’s like, come on demons, let’s go. I’m up for this. It just drives me off the wall. It’s like, you have no idea what you’re even saying. Especially when it comes to the argument about not having communion. Like, oh, those hermits, they didn’t have communion. Wait, no, they did. They did. Have you not read all those stories about angels coming to them with communion? There’s a lot of them. Those are not occasional stories. They happen all the time. And when those things don’t happen, it’s St. Mary of Egypt, who’s able to do these incredible things and the one time she partakes of it is like the apotheosis of the world. That’s right, yeah, she takes communion one time and she’s basically in heaven right there. That’s it, because she can’t live anymore, that’s it. Because her whole life has been moving up to that. Yeah, do you live that way? Do you prepare for communion that way? No, you don’t. Yeah, it’s like, you could say, okay, so if you agree that you want all the churches to be closed and then us not having communion, then how about this? You fast until you have communion, how about that? That’s right. Don’t eat three loaves in 47 years, go. Oh, mercy, yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s crazy times. It’s crazy times. All right, so before we all lose our mind here, tell us before we go, I want you to give us a bit of a sense of, I mean, obviously I don’t want you to spoil anything, but I want you to give us a sense of how you’re closing up your Ravenson series, and give us also a place where people can find your books and find your writings. And obviously that book by Ilyin, I’ll put that even in the description if you want to get the translation that you did. Yeah, absolutely. Well, okay, so the book is, this series of books started out with me kind of describing in story form my own spiritual journey. So the first book, first books are kind of, they’re extremely symbolic. But the more, the closer they got to the end, the more I saw them as a kind of, an Old Testament to another revelation, a storytelling time revelation, a kind of fairy tale version of the Old Testament. If we take Tolkien’s idea of the Evangelion of the incarnation as being the encapsulation of all stories, which he talks about in his famous essay on fairy stories. So this is kind of my addition to the genre. In which Lord of the Rings exists, in which the Silmarillion exists, in which some other stories exist, explicitly pre-incarnational, they’re not peddling any sort of religious idea. It’s more about the universal longing of humanity for something beyond themselves in a state and in a situation where they can’t get that in any easy way. Meaning there hasn’t been any incarnation, there isn’t an easy access to divine grace in any sort of meaningful fashion. Or it happens in kind of odd explosions of encounter that you can’t really explain. Or only if you willingly embody a path of most resistance, sometimes leading into death. So this one is all about death. It’s about the land of the dead. It’s about what it means to die and what it means to go through death to come to better life. And yeah, it’s like nothing I’ve done before and it’s probably gonna really polarize people. I think it’s gonna be one of those books that you either love or hate. Okay. I’d much prefer writing those kinds of stories anyway. So when is it coming out? Is it out already? No, it’s available for pre-order. The e-book is available for pre-order on Amazon. It’s gonna be officially available on July 7th. And at that point, it’ll hopefully be available in paperback as well. But at the very least, it will be available on all retailers in e-book format. Yeah, and you can find more about that on my website, NicholasKotar.com. And the Elion book, Foundations of Christian Culture, just look for it on Amazon. Foundations of Christian Culture by Ivan Elion. Or put in my name, sometimes it shows up because I’m the translator. And yeah, it’s a very, very good book. It’s one of these easy reads. It’s not very long, but you could read it slowly for days on end, trying to understand everything that he’s getting at. It’s more important than ever. And perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of people are buying it right now. It’s interesting to a lot of people. Yeah. All right. And I’m also looking forward to seeing your future contributions to our symbolic road log. And I was happy to see that you also popped in on the Facebook group. People were kind of engaging with you there. So that’s awesome. I’m happy about that. No, I love the fact that you’re doing this blog. And it’s, you know, this past month, I’ve been just, I wrote almost 70,000 words in a month of book five. So I needed to get it done. Wow. The symbolic world is in the near future for me. So. Great, great, great. Well, it’s great to talk to you as usual. And I wish you all the best in this craziness. And we pray to God that he can give us wisdom in these strange times. Yes, indeed. Thanks, Jonathan. All right, thanks, Father. Thank you, Nicholas. All right, bye. So I hope you enjoyed this discussion with the Nicholas Cotar. Make sure you check out his books, the Ravenson series and his most recent book five, the last of the series called the throne of the gods. Also check out his articles on the symbolic world blog and take the time to see the other great articles which have been written there. Some on bestiaries, some on cell tower burning and even an article on Minecraft. So there’s a lot of wonderful stuff on the blog. And of course, as you know, all of this is made possible by your support. So don’t forget to go on the symbolic world site and check out our support page there as well to see how you can contribute to this project of reawakening symbolic thinking in the world today. So thanks again, everybody. And I’ll talk to you very soon.