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Ancient fairy tales thrive in British press!

"We find it pretty remarkable these stories have survived without being written. . . .They have been told since before even English, French and Italian existed. . . .They were probably told in an extinct Indo-European language"

I found the most detailed report about Durham University's anthropologist Dr Tehrani's paradigm-busting research in the Mail Online :



What do adamant textualists suppose happened in pre-literate societies to foster learning, wisdom and the transmission of knowledge? What was going on in those globally-scattered ancient painted or rock-carved caves?

As the Yanomami Shaman, Davi Kopenawa, states in The Fallen Sky:

"I do not possess old books in which my ancestors' words have been drawn. The xapiri's [spirits'] words are set in my thoughts, in the deepest part of me. . . . They are very old, yet the shamans constantly renew them . . . . They can neither be watered down nor burned. They will not get old like those that stay stuck to image skins made from dead trees. When I am long gone, they will still be as new and as strong as they are now."

Socrates alludes to something similar in Plato's Phaedrus when he says to his student: "I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence . . . . [or in written speech] always gives one unvarying answer."

Wikipedia quotes Doris Lessing in its opening paragraph on the world-travelled Panchatantra �� "It is based on older oral traditions, including 'animal fables that are as old as we are able to imagine'".

Meanwhile if you read Spanish

Comments?

For years magazine CARTOONS have been a form or medicine for me. It has long been observed by sages (who are seldom identical to those who are merely deemed “smart�� or even scholastically qualified) that personal development is impossible without sustaining a life-long sense of humour. This is probably why every culture on earth retains such a deep reservoir of “anti-priest�� jokes satirising the morally pompous.

One example tells of two psychiatrists meeting each other in a hospital corridor. “You’re fine!�� one says as he approaches the other. “How am I?��

Recent brain-research theory claims that we humanoids love STORIES because our mirror-neurones are activated by the reception (either by listening, watching or reading) of certain narrative structures.

In other words we (briefly and bodily) BECOME the fictional characters capturing our attention, a process which jiggles our awareness off one focus point onto another. If this is true, then magazine cartoons offer an even sharper blow to modern consciousness than the most adroit 150 words of flash fiction.

I’ve decided to test this idea here (hoping I’ll be motivated to make more frequent posts than my recent one-a-month rate) �� that magazine CARTOONS �� comprise a form of psychological nutrition. What do you think? By accident the first three have what might be called “an airborne theme��.