February: The Heroic Journey

 

Welcome to the February issue of Synchronized Chaos! Happy Chinese New Year/Martin Luther King Day/Valentine’s Day/Black History Month!

This month we’re exploring various aspects of the primal and modern heroic journey. What would a hero, or heroine’s adventure look like in modern society? Do we still have frontiers, wide open spaces, places to challenge and find oneself in the wilderness? What does it mean to be a hero in these changing, uncertain economic times, when many people find themselves less capable of risk-taking or altruism than they expected?

We received a good number of submissions this month, some from previously published authors who wish to continue as part of the Synchronized Chaos family, which we strongly encourage, and others from talented newcomers.

Some of this month’s work, such as Dan White’s book The Cactus Eaters (submitted for review) presents the hero’s journey in a relatively traditional setting.  He and his girlfriend face down hunger, thirst, rocky passes, wild animals, etc along the Pacific Crest Trail. Yet fully a third of his book deals not with the physical wilderness experience itself, but with the journey of returning to his ordinary world afterwards, trying to find his way and incorporate what he has learned into a workable modern life. In many ways this presents as many challenges for White as surviving on the trail, and is an often unexplored aspect of the story arc of a hero’s journey.

Fran Laniado looks at a woman’s ‘ordinary’ life itself as a kind of heroic quest, in a prose piece where her main character honors her elderly deceased mother by creating a memory jug, a traditional, cultural memorial piece consisting of objects from her life. Her mother may not have climbed Mount Everest or participated in a dramatic moment of valor, but the piece suggests that her ‘quieter’ virtues of hard work, discipline, and care for her family over the decades also reflect a form of heroism.

Some authors have responded to the question of defining modern heroism by turning the quest inward. When the physical means for one’s journey of discovery or altruism are limited, one can pursue personal internal development. This can be taken as either a form of retreat or perhaps egotism, or simply a reaction to limited external opportunities or just another form of the heroic quest, creating workable life paths for oneself or perhaps others who follow. 

Kristie LeVangie presents a speaker juggling and arbitrating among various parts of herself, various social expectations and personal desires. Can she find wholeness and a workable, empowering relationship or will she become trapped within one or another personal role? Matt Baxter describes the quest of the unemployed for personal identity and self-respect as heroic in humorous, gently ironic terms, detailing his speaker’s journey from a statistic of failure to an individual who enjoys what he can make of his own life with his free time. Donna Arkee’s speaker also endures an internal battle, described in highly poetic terms, which leaves her to ‘awaken with the bite of a lion.’ Whatever one’s motivation, the inward journey can pose intense dangers for those who dare to voyage within.

February’s submissions also reflected a sense of nostalgia, or at least a desire to identify with, the old forms of honoring heroism. LeVangie’s Libidacoria is written as a poetic cycle, a rhyming metered ballad, reminiscent of much older oral-tradition poetry. George LaCas’ Legend of Jimmy Gollihue is the story of a Southern pool player – but told through magic realism and other old poetic devices, and intended to raise age-old questions of good and evil, life and death. The ballad-form prologue carries on these feelings and gives the entire story a lyrical quality.

Returning author Faracy Grouse conveys a sense of nostalgia for and a celebration of past heroic dreams through her childhood snapshots. She explores a young girl’s attempts at real/imagined accomplishments (dreaming of spectacular dance abilities that would change her life, amazing her aunt and uncle with her cups of Tang.) Many of us dreamed of becoming Superman/WonderWoman/football players/scientists/firefighters, etc  as children, when heroism was less cynical and possibilities were more open…and Grouse invites readers to celebrate heroic qualities by returning to this time through imagination.

There are times when the heroic quest seems impossible, when the forces against oneself, or within oneself, seem too difficult to overcome. How can one go on when there is no clear direction, no one and no worthy cause for which to fight, no trusted loved ones in the cheering section? David Mitchell’s narrator, Chance, faces this dilemma in his short story, “Untitled.” The title, or lack of a title, here is telling … the narrator undergoes a series of losses and betrayals but seems not to have any compelling motivation or reason to survive and triumph. Life assaults him, forcing him to make up a kind of heroic path on his own, discovering the reasons behind his lover’s death through a variety of means. Finally, he chooses perhaps what he may have seen as the last heroic choice available to him…reaching out to connect with his lover through his own death, to achieve and reclaim the relationship, which, although imperfect, was the most beautiful and truest aspect of his life. Perhaps this story is a call for truth and decency in an often frightening, difficult world?

Once again, we at Synchronized Chaos are grateful to the contributors for such a complex, insightful, multifaceted look at heroism and personal journeys of adventure. Was difficult to pull a common thread out of some of these pieces, but after a few moments it became clear that people grappled with how to find meaning, worthwhile identity, and self-respect in our changing world.

As always, we thank you for perusing our monthly offerings and invite everyone to contact the artists, post requests for creative help and collaboration, request and offer mentoring and writing instruction, and continue the process of building this virtual writers’ conference.