On Wounded Kings and the Realists of a Larger Reality

I’ve had the great pleasure of hosting mythologist Kwame Scruggs in my year-round program these last two Saturdays (with two more to come!). Kwame is doing what he does best: drumming while sharing a mythological story. We listen intently, then he pauses periodically to ask us questions related to the myth. But they’re not about the myth, exactly. They’re about us. We contemplate the questions as they relate to our own lives and share what arises with the group, using the myth to open up our own stories; like a mountain lake, we peer into it so we might see ourselves better.

The myth that Kwame is sharing with us this time is the story of Parzival (or Parsifal). It’s a story that begins in a way that feels painfully familiar: The King is wounded, yet he cannot be healed, and also cannot die. And since the King is sick, the whole country is sick. Everything has become a Wasteland, a people held in suspension until the King is either made whole or dies.

The story that then unfolds in this landscape is of Parzival, the innocent fool. He is a young man without a father, wandering the land to become himself as an adult, bumbling and, as the story tells it, utterly guileless. His mother let him go into the world, knowing it was time for him to prove himself to himself and find his own path. But she left him a simple homespun tunic, and two instructions: be good to women, and don’t ask too many questions.

There is medicine in hearing old stories in modern times. Medicine, too, in hearing the stories of the future, the seemingly magical emanations of what Ursula K. Le Guin beautifully called, “realists of a larger reality.”

You’ve heard the quote before, I’m sure. It comes from Le Guin’s speech at the 2014 National Book Awards, a truth-telling that momentarily rocked the world, and now rings with even greater wisdom and prophecy than before.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.

We will need writers who can remember freedom.

Poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality.

Le Guin knew something about dystopic futures. She knew something about paying attention to which way the wind was blowing. And she knew what we needed in order to believe in a different future. A healthy imagination is a revolutionary tool against fascistic forces that assert, day after day, that the Wasteland is life. That there is no other way.

Whether in an individual life, a family, a company, a community, a nation, or the world, it is too easy to believe that what exists is fixed; that what was once created is just the way things are. But when we spend time with fantasies and stories that prime our imaginations, it helps us find other ways of seeing our own situation and believe in other worlds.

Le Guin had no doubt that there was another way to be, and that the status quo would not last forever.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art — the art of words.

The divine right of kings is not inescapable. Whether the wound heals or the king dies, the Wasteland will not last.

I’m Satya Doyle Byock, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, psychotherapist, and author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, and on podcasts like 10% Happier with Dan Harris, Apple News in Conversation, and Pulling the Thread.