My unfinished application essay to Stanford School of Journalism
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Earlier this year, I got it into my head that I wanted to go back to school. I went to apply for a journalism fellowship at Stanford, but couldn't complete the edits in time, nor get my recommendations ready. So, I just wanted to share these ideas
In Carl G. Jung's series of essays in “Man and His Symbols”, he continuously makes allusions to the interdisciplinary role an individual must play in becoming acquainted with one's own unconscious in order to decipher and integrate the symbols of one's own internal narrative to posses the function of self-determination. When expanding this notion to the body of a populace, a culture, a people, in ancient times there was the role of mythology in which a culture shared a narrative dictionary of unconscious symbols. The symbols and narratives in conjunction held a culture together, enriched the lives of the people and gave meaning to every day occurrences. In the global world we find ourselves in, how do we maintain this function?
Several thousand years later, with the fragmentation of all types of knowledge having settled into their own niches, journalism being one of them, we have graced ourselves with the gift of the internet. An inevitable consequence of having this access to knowledge and information, we are beginning to understand the vital importance of interdisciplinary learning and interactivity in forming narrative that engages, which in my opinion, is currently usurped by entertainment media and advertising.
I will begin the proposal of my project by saying that I am not learned or practiced in journalism, but I have spent the past five years of my life committed to the process of storytelling in all of its vestiges, which includes taking the risk of consciously choosing to live within an imaginative storyline. The storyline in my context and locus being the agricultural movement in the Northeast of the United States as a hungry, intelligent and disenfranchised poet turned detective farmer-activist in Bucks Co., Pennsylvania.
If I am awarded this fellowship, my intention is to create a project that serves to bolster and enrich the bardic wellspring of journalists and to reinforce Jung's postulation that “...universally understandable gestures, and many attitudes follow a pattern that was established long before man developed a reflective consciousness.”1 For all of the work of anthropologists, sociologists, mythologists, psychoanalysts, my project is an attempt to keep the momentum of their work going and evolving by integrating it into the factual construction of journalism in the 21st century as we engage methods of storytelling on the unique frontier of digital self and communal expression and communication.
My theory is that if a journalist, the harbinger of news, is exposed to, immersed in, and familiar with archetypal stories that endlessly iterate the most basic trials and tribulations of individual existence in the context of their own community, the process of telling factual stories will be enriched by the vast landscape of imagination, which invites the specter of reflection and analysis from the reader. I would like to compile a semiotic anthology of the world's mythological motifs as they relate to contemporary journalistic narrative. The anthology would work as a compendium reference for journalists to use amidst the outlining and framing process of a narrative. Whether writing about a sporting event, a charity drive or a national headliner, I envision journalists using the compendium as a reference when they are reminded of an older, ingrained cultural message.
Imagine the sudden appearance of a talent onto the national scene. Imagine the journalist with the opportunity and foresight to cover the story being reminded of Robert Johnson's immemorial trip to the crossroads, where the “devil” tuned his guitar for him and gave him this talent at the expense of his soul(akin to Faust). In the compendium, there is a further explanation of the mythological roots of the devil being a cultural appropriation of the voodoo god Legba, the intermediary between living humans and the world of the ancestors. With this cultural meme in the awareness of the journalist, how may this story take shape and transmute? This is the type of impact I would like my project to have, that in the writing of factual stories, we can literally draw from and integrate cultural threads that reinforce the significance of a contemporary story and do so with tact and sensitivity to our multicultural past and present to create lasting impressions to give our particular, unabashed nuance of meaning to the emergent future.
My focus will be on the collection and compilation of the symbolism in mythologies and creation stories of the seven continents and juxtaposing the stories together, with further focus on the heroic storyline with specific attention given to the role of the natural world in the lives of the heroes. I also intend to include heroine narratives and the female storytelling tradition. I imagine spending the duration of the fellowship consulting with the others in the program about the narratives that appeal and would be useful to them, with the cultural anthropology department as well as the journalism department, in an effort to integrate the constructive function of mythology and fiction with the factual imagination of journalistic narrative.
I believe we are living in a time where the opportunity to bridge this gap exists and I have spent the past few months observing the ways that industry and economy, not bound by the rigor of academic honor, are taking narrative and perverting it in advertising in what I perceive to be the subtle attempt to conscript a loyal, technocratic class of consumers.
Exhibit A: marketing is manipulating poetic sentiment. Below is a recent Lens Crafter Commercial narrated by a child that sounds like Harry Potter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45IwXfaSLpI
Well, I certainly care more about my eyes right now as a result of watching that; I've been moved by those words and images... Is it an effort to help people take better care of themselves or... buy more eyeglasses. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsiepop holding within it a huge ball of SHIT?
I furthermore believe that the pursuit of journalistic integrity clings too dependently on statements and shallow opinion, rather than forming narrative rich with cross references and sensitivity to trusting and encouraging its readership to be an intelligent human with the choice and resource to follow up on statements and use the commodity of a narrative as a means for discussion and awareness, rather than personal branding mechanisms.
This is a risky innovation that has no boundary on how it can evolve. I envision, ultimately, a center for the formation of narrative, in which journalists, poets, fiction writers, musicians, natural scientists, astrologers, farmers, intellectuals, all manner of people with stories (ie, humans) congregate and create stories derived from factual events and bring them back to their communities to imaginatively enhance their interaction with the world. The compendium is for starters; I do not intend for it in any way to be authoritative or all inclusive, but a symbolic source that inspires others to dig into the roots of the stories of the past that continuously influence us, inform us and evolve with us. And if not that, to give journalists a connection to the root of their purpose: to tell the world like it is, from their, and their institution's perspective.
This will help journalism because a compendium such as this will help to level the playing field between advertising and journalism, giving journalists more ancestral tools to form narrative, expand the imagination of what is possible in factual storytelling and renew journalism's responsibility in staying on top of what is current, rather than what is trending.
I start the project with a few sources:
“Man and His Symbols” by Carl Jung
“The White Goddess: a historical grammar of poetic myth” by Robert Graves
“The Language of the Goddess” by Marija Gimbutas
and I intend to compile a work that facilitates mental associations between myths and reality.
1Jung, Carl G. “Man and His Symbols” p 76 Anchor Books Double Day Douglas Hill 1964
