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I once promised myself that I would never make a stab at poetry, but sometimes you just have to use the means of communication that makes the most sense to you. If it happens to resemble poetry—then so be it.

Items in My Room

When I met you, my room was empty.
As you spoke and acted,
as you were quiet and asleep,
as you prepared food and entertained me,
as you deprived and forgot me,
as you taught me, and as you learned from me,
you decorated my room.

You put paintings on the wall,
or left a box with unassembled furniture.
Some decoration was expensive, and some was cheap.
A few items were curiosities that had value only to me.
Other items were essentials to anyone.
Sometimes you left garbage I had to clean up.

All of the items were how I knew you.
Some were your nagging habits,
and some were your great example.
They were all that I liked and disliked about you.

Then one day you shattered a beautiful vase,
one of the most precious items in my room
with an important history and a soul.
It was an accident, and you meant no harm.
You replaced it with another item,
but since then when you entered my room,
I would notice that the vase was missing
and that I had been mistaken about you.

Candy Tothill ponders the "law of three" applied to authors and speculates whether this makes it easier to love writers. She inspired me (and I will wonder if I should not have dared to use this word once this text is complete) to add a few thoughts on the transfer of the story from the writer to the reader.

As a strict atheist, I would have preferred a less religious approach than that of the "law of three," yet I have no choice but to apply mystical words such as "soul" or "spirit" and similar symbology because inspiration, creativity, emotion, and feeling cannot be described by Aristotelian logic. I could perhaps refer to Antonio Damasio's somatic marker model, but since this model is also ontologically incomplete (as Damasio himself recognizes), this detour would eventually be wasted effort. So please bear with me on the mystical language, and try not to imagine metaphysical entities as I use mystical expressions.

Anyone is an author these days; write an incoherent article that includes a few of your darling phrases and you're an author. Change a few fonts to the worse in a premanufactured template and you're a web designer. Submit some video footage of yourself to YouTube and you're an actor and a producer. There are plenty of options for you to earn your 15 bytes of fame.

Aim higher, and you may become one of those authors that have learned the handicraft of writing, applying strong language skills, mastering composition and powerful statements, who can state some profundities and maybe even have stories to tell, yet somehow leave the reader with a feeling that he or she has just read a user's manual.

Alternatively, become a no-style writer whose specialty is simplicity in every sense of the word. It probably helps if you're a religious person or a conservative, because their views invariably tend toward the simplicity of bifurcations.

But some authors charm their readers. Their readers have experienced the captivating feeling that made it impossible to put the book aside. As a reader, you did not merely read the book. You reacted spontaneously to the story as it entered your heart. You let yourself drift in the story with no safety jacket and found yourself sometimes carried gently along and at other times rushing in a deadly torrent. It felt natural and meaningful, but barring bland explanations about a stimulated imagination or entertainment, you could not explain where the meaning was found.

If you have never known this feeling, don't bother reading on, as it will make no sense to you.

The author feels a "higher sensation" within him, call it spirit or muse, which inspires him to ideas that give structure to his composition. The author feels part of a flow, or feels an insight experience, or a love experience; it may feel as a "mystic" experience where a larger whole is perceived. It is as if separates within the author unify and opposites resolve. Anxiety, inhibition, and restraint are lost, and intellectual self-criticism, fear, and doubts about himself are left behind.

Being more himself, the author is more spontaneous and expressive, and everything is done with greater ease. Although authors excel in verbalization, they live far more in the real world than in the verbalized world of abstractions, beliefs, and concepts. They see the raw, the fresh, and the existing in addition to the abstract, the categorized, and the generic. They combine a childish ability to perceive and express with a sophisticated mind. They sense in themselves both a strong ego versus ego-less behavior, their head versus their heart, self-love versus altruism, selfishness versus unselfishness, concreteness versus abstraction, any many other apparent contradictions and polarities that others would see as dichotomies or mutually exclusive; but these people are natural integrators that synthesize separates and opposites into a larger whole. As within themselves, so without themselves, they put together forms that fight each others and combine dissonances into unity: their works of art.

It is in this experience that the art is born in a slow but intense flash of inspiration, but it also requires hard work and training. The spontaneous leads to the planned, the Dionysian to the Apollonian, the feminine to the masculine, yin to yang, or being to becoming, by any expression. We yield to the darkness of our souls for inspiration, and only then turn it to form by control, criticism, judgment, and hard work. The experience of inspiration or heightened being happens to the person, who in turn creates the art. The latter can be learned, but is heartless. The former is innate, but is headless.

And thus the spirit works through the author to manifest itself as letters on paper. Many an author can testify to feeling as if being the tool of a higher purpose.

Now the process is reversed. The letters on the paper are perceived by the reader's body, which senses the contrasts and forms and combine them to words, then sentences and continuity in the brain. The perception of the text invokes feelings and wakes emotions in the reader which collectively create a gestalt, a feeling that is more than the sum total of the individual words. This higher sensation is the story that is told, and is exactly the higher sensation that the author felt as spirit; it is a sensation that, although manifest in words, cannot be expressed in words.

You are the story while the story unfolds, and you sense the spirit that originally inspired the author. It is mind that contacts mind; it is the spirit that speaks through the author's soul to the reader's soul. You may like what you experience through the author, or you may not, and the author's soul may contain both beauty and horror.

But like rays from the sun will cause only growable things to grow, the creativity emitted from the author will be lost on rocks and other dead material. The reader without a soul will never sense the spirit.

Swan Lake 2003

I have usually just shaken my head at the saccharine-sweet romance that accompanies the lifestyle marketed in the shape of Barbie dolls. In 2003, however, my slight contempt was replaced by indignation when the toy company Mattel introduced "Swan Lake" as a new theme in the Barbie universe: a dream of romance and love in the enchanted wood, where true love conquered the evil sorcerer, according to the commercials.

The original German story of the swan lake did indeed include both romance, love, and enchantment, but it is a tragedy. During his hunt for swans a prince meets the beautiful Odette, and they fall in love. She explains that a sorcerer has cast a spell on her, turning her into a swan and only allowing her human shape by the lake at midnight. The spell can only be broken if a man promises her eternal love. At the wedding when the prince expects Odette as his bride, the sorcerer plays a trick that causes the prince to promise his love to someone else. Odette's curse cannot be broken, and the prince has lost his love. When Odette forgives the prince his mistake, and the story seems about to end happily, the sorcerer drowns the lovers in the lake.

Tchaikovsky cast the story in music, and turned the Swan Lake ballet into one of History's most spectacular musical works. If Mattel's distortion of the original tale alone should cause some wonder, it is a mockery against this classical masterpiece to reduce it to Barbiefied pop culture.

Fairy Tale Exorcism

Mattel is not the only trend-setter. Disney has also discovered that romance sells better than tragedy, so in Disney's version of The Little Mermaid, the mermaid does not die and become the foam on the surface of the sea; she is married to the prince. And in Pocahontas, Disney prefers falsification of History to a tale of American extortion and brutality against the Amerinds.

The children's fairy tale books are also polished. Early versions of Grimm's Fairy Tales abound with bloody gruesomeness against children and other creatures that you won't find in today's renditions.

It is clear that popularization of fairy tales has taken a distinct direction. Fairy tales must no longer be too sad or too scary. Bloody scenes are converted to pastel-colored Teletubby worlds, and grand conflicts are converted to momentary disagreements.

In general, children must no longer be confronted with the dark side the fairy tales of fear, scare, and evil.

Embracing Fear

In earlier times it was a very real and familiar fear that the children could find in the fairy tales. The risk of being abandoned by one's parents was only too imaginable, and hunger and misery was often a daily challenge. Witches, trolls, and magic were something you believed in, and Hansel and Gretel weren't the only children that were left to die in the woods as a result of food shortage.

Fairy tales were thus not just exciting stories. They were scary because they confronted children with those things they had the most reason to fear. Fairy tales were gruesome tales, but they made children face their fears, enabling the children to process these fears.

At the same time, fairy tales confronted the children with a number of conflicts such as desparate love, the relation to an evil stepmother or stepfather, or the situation of being abandoned by one's parents. These conflicts might not have been solvable, but the fairy tales helped children use words or images for conflicts that the children felt but did not quite understand.

Protection from Evil

Responsible parents know that it is only elements of real danger that children should be protected against, such as falls from considerable heights. One should not protect the children from bumping against sharp table corners when they play around the tables. The only result of shielding the children against such accidents are clumsy children that bump into anything that has a shape.

The same is true for children's feelings. Just like a parent should not protect a child against any sharp corner in the house because that will produce a clumsy child, a child will develop a bad response to emotion by the parents that protect the children against its own emotions and feelings. If a child does not learn to cope with the obstacles in its daily life--be they physical or emotional--the child will be poorly prepared for life.

But that is exactly what one does by shielding the child against fear by softening the fairy tales. The fairy tales loose their original scary aspects, and the conflicts are lost. In doing that, the fairy tales loose the very effect that made them so appealing. They no longer provide children with a healthy and safe confrontation with fear and conflict.

If any conclusion is to be drawn from the recent tendency to add artificial sweeteners to the old fairy tales and folklore, it is that children are to be protected against pointy and sharp feelings that may hurt.

The parents' eagerness to protect their precious offspring by any bruise on its self-confidence and any scratch in the sense of justice can only lead to children that have no idea what to do when one day these feelings become pressing. I expect that the new generation will be unable to cope with emotional challenges. They will become even more dependent on religious pipe dreams and more or less dubious therapists and psychologists than currently characterizes the country that produces the Barbie dream.

More Fear, Less Costume

The alternative to padded wrapping of children's emotions will not lead to the brutalization that some film and movie critics warn against. I think the reason movie violence is in fact often a compensation against the movie's protection of the audience against the real fear, leading to a requirement for much more powerful effects before the movie leaves a reaction. If in the original fairy tale one was afraid of being abducted by a monster, the brutalized fairy tale would be a version where the fear of abduction was overlooked while the monster had been very fearfully described.

This is why the movie Alien is much scarier than its successor, Alien 2, where monsters are everywhere. The first movie captures the very thing one fears the most: the fact that there is a cunning and very dangerous monster that is hunting you, not how it looks. If a movie can capture the actual fear, its need for brutal helpers diminishes. Ironically, it is the very protection against the fearful element that turns the tale brutal.

In raising our children, we have never attempted to prevent them from being bruised, neither physically nor mentally. I think they learn that a scratch or a hurt feeling may be uncomfortable but temporary. It will not cause them to panic or to become incapable of coping.

I prefer that my children do not watch the Disneyfied interpretations of old tailes where conflicts have been filtered and brutality removed. We try to encourage self-confidence and a feeling of safety in our children, but we have also purchased a Brothers Grimm book of fairy tales from the time when blood and dismemberment was allowed in the fairy tales—and our children love the stories.

It is only a few years ago since I learned about Jürgen Habermas' division of statements into constative, normative, and expressive statements, and today I wish this would be mandatory education in school. I often engage in debates, but more often than not, the debate falls apart because people apply normative or expressive values in constative utterances, and one just can't use morals or personal taste in fields that deal with cold facts.

To briefly summarize, the statements can be classified as follows:

Constative statements—which can be objectively evaluated as true or false. For example, the statements: "the light is on" or "the Moon is made of cheese" can be determined to be right or wrong no matter what people might think of it.

Normative statements—whose truthfulness require a consensus among a group of people. For example, to determine whether the statements: "murder is bad" or "Republicans do good for the country" are true or false, you must consult the opinion formed by a group of people.

Expressive statements—which are a matter of personal taste. For example, the statements: "I like strawberries" or "I believe in fate" are statements whose truthfulness depend just on the person making the statements. It would not matter if most people thought strawberries tasted awful, or if science could somehow define an objective metric for good taste, because this person would still like strawberries.

There is nothing wrong with supporting normative or expressive statements with constative knowledge. For example, one may argue that cooperation is beneficial (a normative, subjective statement) because game theory indicates that cooperative strategies are advantageous (an objective, constative statement). People often back their opinions with facts that they believe support their opinions.

Problems arise when it turns out that their original, constative statement, which they thought proved their opinion beyond doubt, can be refuted. Then they quickly find another "final" constative argument that "proves" their opinion right. After just two or three attempts where their constative statements backing their normative statements have been rejected, it is clear that all they had was an opinion, and never really had any reason for having that opinon.

If one's morals or ethics (which one might refer to as "normative behavior" or "normative opinion") are to be based on axioms or "natural" causes, then they must necessarily be corollaries of constative statements. If one takes the opposite direction—that is, if one attempts to find constative statements that support a normative opinion—then one attempts to alter reality to fit one's opinions.

There is probably nothing wrong with having opinions that are just that. It is just frustrating to engage in a debate with people with unfounded opinions who misuse the realm of constative statements to argue that their personal tastes express objective or general truths.