Looking both ways - including to fairyland Warsaw, (making a) difference at Roehampton and my Herculean resolution for 2020

The last few weeks have been energy-creating and hectic: so much so that I need a bit of time to pull together the various things that I have been doing and their implications for this blog's topic. This includes the many things I gained from a recent Ciceronian excursion to Warsaw, some of which are indicated among these photos:

Among the Ciceronians:
1. asking a question while blown away by what I'd just learnt about a 16th-century commentary on the de Officiis;
2. in the Herculean interiors of Wilanów Palace;
3. with delegates plus posters from 1989 and 2019 Warsaw Cicero congresses;
4. in the Wilanów winter fairyland

This also includes what came out – for the students, and for me – of a session I taught on myth and (making a) difference during a second year module I convene at Roehampton: Myths and Mythology. I’ll be posting on these – probably now in early January.

Looking ahead… I have agreed give an update in early spring on the activities on the Choice of Hercules to colleagues in Special and Inclusive Education at Roehampton, following up from a session I did just over a year ago. Around this time, I shall be speaking on the same topic at a Myth and Education conference at the Faculty of Education in Cambridge. Then, in May 2020, I’ll be in Warsaw for the last of the three conferences for ERC Our Mythical Childhood Project: Our Mythical Nature.

And… during 2020, I shall be WRITING A BOOK. This book will present the Choice of Hercules activities. While I was Warsaw I agreed a deadline for submission of the book with Katarzyna Marciniak, the editor for the series of books linked with the Our Mythical Childhood Project. This deadline is... 15 December 2020. So: my New Year’s Resolution is this: to write the book. And I’ll use the events for spring 2020 detailed above as deadlines for the completion of stages of this book.

 

Love the Max: thank you!

This current posting is a very short one - possibly the shortest I've ever written. I've just discovered the existence of Love the Max: A blog about kids with disabilities who kick butt. I had been checking the ‘top referrers’ for my previous posting – the one I wrote not long before I headed to Warsaw for a Ciceronian excursion. One of these referrers is Love the Max's weekend link-up for 13 December 2019. I’d like to thank the kind person - whoever you are! -  who put up this posting alongside some snapshots of the huge amount of current blogging relating to disabled children.

I'll blog again soon - including in relation to the trip to Warsaw...

 

Hope 12 - Ciceronian thoughts on the Choice of Hercules ahead of a Congress in Warsaw informed a little by Binary Computation

When I last blogged at the end of last week, my session at the British Museum about Hercules and his choices was about to take place. This has now happened. I had some unexpectedly useful feedback, including from one of the participants who raised the potential of considering Hercules' Choice in the context of Computer Science and binary computation. I’ll say more about this as soon as I’m ready to get my head around this wonderfully unpredicted possible new path.

Tomorrow I’m off to Warsaw to take part in a congress on something that is more within my disciplinary comfort zone – it’s on a Roman rather than an ancient Greek topic. But that topic is Cicero, one of the few ancient authors who wrote about the Choice of Hercules. The key thing I will be doing is making a presentation during a session led by Katarzyna Marciniak. This sesson will be setting out work underway by members of The Cluster for the Past and the Present and the Our Mythical Childhood project. The presentation I shall make will be on the Choice of Hercules. The exact content is a surprise, so I’ll keep that a secret for now. Instead, I’ll say a few things here about Cicero’s take on the Choice of Hercules, as I will refer to this during my presentation.

Cicero raises the Choice of Hercules in the de officiis, a treatise concerned with how best to live and behave including where a conflict emerges between different obligations. Referring to the time when a youth, i.e. a male youth…, will need to decide which calling in life to take up, Cicero says that this is is ‘the most difficult problem in the world.’ For:

it is in the years of early youth, when our judgment is most immature, that each of us decides that his calling in life shall be that to which he has taken a special liking. And thus he becomes engaged in some particular calling and career in life, before he is fit to decide intelligently what is best for him. For we cannot all have the experience of Hercules (1.117-18, W. Miller Loeb tr.).

Cicero’s Hercules, then, is faced with a simple choice – between hardship that would bring great eventual rewards, and a life of pleasure. But it is always so simple for Hercules? Or perhaps I should put it like this: the choice might be simple. But does Hercules ever commit himself? He does… and he does not… And it is this lack of clarity in terms of the outcome that makes the episode so full of potential, as a talking point and as an opportunity for reflecting on moral positions and about dilemmas one might face in life. Making choices can be difficult for anyone. It is possible to feel caught in indecision. Looked at one way, the choice involves a clear decision between two things as opposed as Virtue and Vice, where the heroic career is reduced to a choice between things as extreme as they come, with none of the ambiguities that often accompany a choice in life. Or there is complexity (Computer Science, I’ve learnt since Saturday, is likewise moving beyond binary thinking – I’m itching to discuss this with the participant I mentioned above…).

It is not clear how to read the episode and how to determine what choice the hero made. It is this simultaneous simplicity and complexity that I shall be drawing on in my resources for autistic children. The episode offers potential for getting any user to reflect on a choice in life, and to think about different possibilities and what the implications of these possibilities could be including around where they fit in the world, between themselves and others. Meanwhile, it is this simplicity of Hercules' choice – the very thing that distinguishes Hercules’s choice from that of other young people according to Cicero – that counts as one of the reasons why the story has so much potential for use with autistic children. This is because it can enable children to think about moral dilemmas and to think about contrary ways to respond to making a decision in life. By doing this, the children for whom I'll be creating the resources will have the opportunity to engage in a process that has engaged others as well, including those for whom the particular representation of the choice was likely created.

I’ll come back to this on my return from Warsaw. Plus, I’m looking forward to learning from the assembled Ciceronian expects, which include my Roehampton colleague Kathryn Tempest. What I discover might well impact on my appreciation of the use of the Hercules example in the de officiis, especially as a strong focus of the conference will be Cicero’s vision of education.

Hope 11 – Hercules, Blue Story, British Museum… thinking about children's choices

With this posting, I turn in earnest to Hercules. I pretty well got there with the previous posting. Here the hero gets centre stage some more.

Tomorrow (Saturday 6th December 2019), I am going to be talking about Hercules at the British Museum. Specifically, I shall be talking about the Hercules who is relevant to the autism activities I am developing. The event is a study day on classical myth - to tie in which a new exhibition, on Troy, at the Museum. It's the cover of the exhibition guide that is illustrated to the right. I shall be talking about myth as it can be relevant today, and I shall speak about how it came to matter in the eighteenth century, and before then in Rome, and before that, in Greece. I shall talk about its appeal in particular as a way to think about an aspect of what children can experience as they are on the path to adulthood – namely what choices to make between different paths in life.

I shall include a reference to something very current: the film Blue Story which has recently been in the news in the UK: here for instance. The film's poster is illustrated to the left. In an interview on the radio the other week, probably on the Today programme, I heard the director, Rapman, saying that it is a film, above all, about making a choice between two contrary paths.

 

From a quick search, I’ve found a few references to the director talking about the film in these terms. For example, Rapman is reported in the Sunday Times for November 28th 2019 in a piece by Fariha Karim as stressing that the film "was intended to make youngsters involved in gangs think about their choices."

 

The film is innovative and timely. Its themes are perennial too. In the next posting, I’m planning to come at the angle of choice-making faced by young people – this time from the perspective not of something contemporary, but from the perspective of… Cicero.

 

Hope 10 – The Choice of Hercules could be “brilliant”, like Odysseus

Over the course of these Hope-themed postings, I have mentioned Hercules from time to time, mostly to say that Hercules is the focus of the activities I am designing for autistic children. With the current posting, I am going to turn in more depth to Hercules – to give a sense of why I have chosen this figure. I shall start by following up on one thing I looked at in the previous posting namely the activities developed around another mythological character by Nicola Grove and Keith Park. This is Odysseus. As I said in the previous posting, one reason Grove and Park pick Odysseus is his enduring popularity. Because of just how rooted Odysseus is in a shared cultural heritage, there is the potential for opening up a cultural experience to people who might find such experiences difficult to access. I shared some views a few views I have around this... I am going to keep reflecting on these, but, for now, I am going to turn to some of the other reasons for the selection of Odysseus.

According to Grove and Park, the story of Odysseus is “a brilliant story which everyone can enjoy”. As they continue, this story can enable a teacher to “nourish the imagination and emotions of students, as well as providing them with practical skills.” Among the reasons why the Odysseus story is so “brilliant” and so full of potential for stimulating the imagination, and for engaging the emotions, is its concern with a traveller, who keeps reaching new places. There is a good fit here with Hercules who, like Odysseus, is a traveller who keeps reaching new places: some pleasant, some strange, some full of dangers to negotiate.

This leads me to a second point about the parallels between Hercules and Odysseus. Hercules is often regarded as one who achieves his successes thanks to his distinctive strength. This is often true – but not always. Hercules often finds a way to succeed in a given task though cunning, a quality above all linked with Odysseus among classical mythological figures. But Hercules, like Odysseus, keeps getting himself out of a particular difficulty not so much by brute force but by finding some clever solution. The image that illustrated my previous posting showed him wielding his club above the Hydra, one of his victims, but how he defeats the hydra isn’t though superior strength, but is through finding a way to stop the hydra being able to grow new heads. Hercules does this, mind you, by an act of violence – by searing the severed neck of each Hydra head he cuts off.

This takes me back to the heading of one of my previous postings: “But Hercules is horrible…” He often is. But what I am going to look at is Hercules as the hero in a strange place: the hero when he finds himself in a location which is overpowering – a place whose rules he needs to work out. This is a hero who needs to work out what to do in this place because, here, he is faced with making a choice: a choice over the road he will take from this point on, and a choice between two very different ways of living – hard work and pleasure. It is a stark choice, and choices that people encounter in life are not likely to be so stark. However, for autistic people, choice-making can be especially difficult, and what I would like to propose is the following. Hercules’s choice can provide an opportunity to engage with choice-making. And there can be a fit with other aspects of being autistic too, including feeling out of place in some spaces and, conversely, finding other spaces pleasant or reassuring. Another is going though sensory and emotional experiences, both pleasant ones and ones that are so intense that they are too much to deal with.

In the next posting, I shall turn in earnest to this particular episode: the choice Hercules faces and makes.

Mythical Hope 9 - Cultural heritage or cultural baggage?

Over the course of the Hope-themed postings I’ve been putting up since late September, I have written on a few occasions about worlds – the world of non-autistic people, and the world of an autistic person. I have stressed that this is an over-simple way of dividing up autistic and non-autistic experiences. But I am also aware that it can be helpful to think in terms of an autistic ‘world’. And one thing I am seeking to do with the activities I am developing is to engage an autistic way of being, feeling, thinking, and engaging with others. 

I am driven by a view that classical myth can bring something distinctive here. But there is one thing I would like to stress in this posting. This is that I am not trying to give classical antiquity as some kind of ‘gift’ to autistic children. One view of ‘outreach’ activities is as follows: it's that outreach can open up cultural heritage to those who might otherwise be excluded from this heritage. There is a lot that can be great about such activities, but there is also a risk here that those doing the outreach are trying to bring in the ‘reached,’ less ‘privileged’ ones – and I am worried that the result might be that certain, elitist, notions of classics might be being perpetuated.

But there is another way of coming to this issue. This is the way proposed by Nicola Grove and Keith Park in their book Odyssey Now.[1] This book adapts some of the adventures of Odysseus and his companions for disabled people, especially those with profound disabilities. They stress that one reason for picking Odysseus was this: the very heritage of the Odysseus story. What they are offering is an opportunity for people who might be excluded from aspects of a shared cultural heritage to participate in stories and to encounter characters whose roots runs deep into a shared culture. And they make the case that basing their activities around the story of Odysseus, with all its cultural heritage, can open up cultural experiences to those who might otherwise lack an access to intellectual life.

There are some problems with all this. One is that the intellectual life in question is a ‘Western’ one. More than this, it is one shared by a narrow group within such a ‘Western’ civilisation.


My first gateway: Tales of the Greek Heroes:
Retold  from the ancient authors
by Roger Lancelyn Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Date given 1958, but this is presumably to a hardback edition?

Activities using classical myths can help provide ‘cultural knowledge’ to those who might not easily access such knowledge. By ‘cultural knowledge,’ I mean shared beliefs, customs and systems: what Eva Loth describes as “socially shared models or meaning systems, beliefs about the world, which influence the way we perceive, construct, think about, define, and interpret the social world and our experiences in it.”[2] Such activities can also extend people’s experiences in a way that fits what Lev Vygotsky said in his study of cultural-historical psychology about human learning. This was that such learning “presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them.” [3] Could classical myth do this? Could it help autistic children become part of a wider intellectual life?



Maybe – but I want to come at things from yet another angle. This is the angle of a child discovering classical myth. I’m meaning a specific child – myself, aged about ten. This was a very personal discovery. There wasn’t any classical myth told by, or known by, those around me. My experience of discovering classical myth would have been different if I had experienced classical myth at home or school. Rather, I was given a book retelling stories from classical myth by my grandfather, who didn’t himself know any of the stories. And reading it opened up a world that fascinated me – but in part because it fuelled my sense of being different. If it helped me, it was because it gave a kind of refuge.

So… to draw this posting to a close, I would like to stress that I can see benefits in giving people access to a shared cultural heritage – to stories of such heroes as Hercules, who has been part of culture – ‘high’ and ‘low’- at various points since antiquity. But I am not only seeking a way for autistic children to ‘grow into’ the intellectual life around them. I am also looking for a way to stimulate or engage children’s own inner lives.

In a future posting, I plan to say more about the use Grove and Park make of Odysseus and to discuss how their approach to Odysseus might have some Herculean applications.

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[1] Nicola Grove and Keith Park, Odyssey Now, London: Jessica Kingsley, 1996.

[2] Eva Loth, “Abnormalities in “cultural knowledge” in Autism Spectrum Disorders: a link between behaviour and cognition,” in Evelyn McGregor et al., ed. Autism: An Integrated View from Neurocognitive, Clinical, and Intervention Research, Malden MA etc.: Blackwell) 85.

[3] Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978 (published posthumously), 89.

Mythical Hope 8 – Two monster stories... from Hydra heads to Hydra babies

The previous posting stared to relate why it is Hercules that I am offering as the focus of my activities for autistic children. Here, I run further with Hercules, including why this hero, unpleasant for some, favourite of others, is the one I have picked as source of autistic hope – hope, that, is as I have been defining it in these postings.

I have written recently about an autistic world – from where autistic people look into the non-autistic world. But I am not saying that there is one single autistic experience. I am hardly saying anything striking here. There have been a saying going around for a while along the lines of ‘if you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person.’[1] This fits with one move in recent autism pedagogy, which concerns finding a way to negotiate how on the one hand, being autistic involves a particular way of experiencing and being – and on the other that each person is a distinct person.[2]

I am going to explore this further by sharing two things which I have heard about – each two to three years ago, when I was starting to come to the view that Hercules would be a suitable choice for the activities. Both of these deal with hardships, and with hope in some way. And both concern the Hydra, a monster that seems especially appealing in relation to autism. 

Something violent: Hercules getting ready to club - though
not here behead - the Hydra.
16th century CE bronze fountain figure from Northern Italy.
Image details here and here

 

One experience was from a librarian at a library I regularly visit (‘regularly’ sometimes meaning ‘once a term’ to be honest). Chancing to learn that a visitor to the library was the grandmother of an autistic young child, she told the visitor about my work and mentioned that I was looking, particularly, at the myth of Hercules as a subject for resources for autistic children. The visitor responded that she very much hoped that I would not be including anything particularly violent, like the Hydra’s heads being cut off.

This is precisely one of the features of Hercules’s adventures that I was, then, planning to work on: as one instance where Hercules, journeying into a fantasy land, encounters hardships which he overcomes against the odds. Conversely, in the mundane world, he is often an outsider, who gets things wrong – because the behaviour that is suitable in a fantasy realm is not such in the everyday world.

I am aware that I need to treat the episode with care, including because it is not necessarily possible to control how someone will engage with any aspect of mythology presented to them. For example, the encounter with the Hydra might appear an instance of how to engage in problem-solving to one person. Yet it might be taken as uncomfortably violent by someone else, especially perhaps if the user empathises with the monster rather than the monster’s slayer. Stories of Hercules tend to be presented form the perspective of the hero, but what if a participant in an activity for autistic children identifies with the Hydra instead?

There are various possible solutions here. One is to shake up the question of ‘who is the hero’ and ‘who is the victim,’ perhaps by focusing on how the Hydra deals with the violence of Hercules by growing new heads.

Baby Hercules strangling - or playing with? - snakes.
From Verona after 1506 (poss. cast 19th century CE)
now in the Metropolitan Musuem and Art. Details here

The second Hydra story comes from another  colleague, a classicist who spent a few years working as a teaching assistant with preschool children. The colleague has shared with me an experience she had when reading a picture-book telling the adventures of Hercules with one of her pupils – a pupil whose behaviour is commensurate with autism. This book included the episode where Hercules cuts off the Hydra’s heads. It also includes another serpentine incident: the strangling of the snakes sent to attack the baby Hercules in his cot. The pupil would repeatedly ask to go back and forwards from the picture of the Hydra to the picture of the cradle. She regarded the snakes in the cot as little “Hydra babies” and wanted to go back and forth between the two images in order to reunite the babies with “their mummy.”

One thing to take from this, I’d say, concerns just how open classical myth can be to varied responses: contradictory ones indeed. The little girl in my colleague’s preschool class found a story often seen as violent to be concerned with babies and their mother. There is huge potential for classical myth to engage the imagination of a given user – for them to make their own interpretations and to work though various things in their lives as they make sense of the world – this can include things like family values, and the mother-child bond. Solace can be found in unexpected places, including what is usually regarded as a story of an act of violent killing by a monster-slaying hero. Hercules can be received in many ways. Monster, as here the Hydra can received in many ways too, including by autistic children.

Last year, I was involved in a pilot study of the initial version of my activities for autistic children with a group of children aged 8-11. It was the Hydra that they especially liked. I need to think more about the Hydra. I also need to think about how Hercules and the monsters he encounters are presented in books for children. Some of my Myths and Mythology students at Roehampton have been examining how mythology is presented for children – often with violent episodes sanitised or even erased. They have been thinking about the ethics of this, and also at how far this creates a skewed image of classical myth.

All this raises questions including what the role of retelling classical myth should be – should one seek to keep as close as possible to ‘the original’? What - if so - even is the ‘original’? At some point soon, I’m going to review the books on Hercules discussed to date in the Our Mythical Childhood survey, including to see what patterns emerge, and to go deeper into various issues raised in this posting. This will include looking into how children respond to monsters and to heroes, and contemplating what the lessons might be for me as a develop my activities. for children.

I advised a student just this afternoon that an ideal maximum length for a blog posting is 1000 words – I’ve gone over this, so I’ll stop for now. More soon: where I go down one of the Herculean paths that will emerge out of this posting.

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[1] See, for example,  “Understanding Autism,” Autism Empowerment, online at https://www.autismempowerment.org/understanding-autism/  (accessed July 21, 2019) (“If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.”)

[2] See, for example, Rita Jordan, “Preface,” in Rita Jordan and Stuart Powell, eds., Autism and Learning: A Guide to Good Practice, London and New York: Routledge, 2012 (updated edition; first edition: 1997).