So OK, here's the story of the week's meeting, since I have time to write
it.
First of all, this is the semi-annual face-to-face meeting of a
group that's scattered all over the country. Normally when this group meets, they
call it a "relaunch", which is a whole 'nother story. This time, however, they
decided that they didn't want to do the standard relaunch activities, so they
needed another name. Somehow, they ended up deciding to call it a "rendezvous".
Is it just me, or does that sound like it involves a motel that
rents by the hour rather than a conference room?
So then the
facilitator (who by the way is an outside consultant who actualy runs meetings for
a living. Just imagine.) and the head of this group had apparently decided that
the meeting needed a theme. Within the first couple of slides, I had noticed that
they all said "Rendezvous at Rivandell" at the bottom. Then they made us watch the
entire scene from the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring where Bilbo has a
party and disappears in the middle of this.
I should mention at this
point that the meeting attendees ranged from people who hadn't even seen any of
the LOTR movies to some of the ones who run the local F&SF conventions and
practically have the books memorized. Bad mix -- in my opinion that kind of thing
should only be used where either no one has more than a passing familiarity or
where everyone including the organizers knows it extremely well and can discuss
parallels, analogies, and lessons to be learned. As it was, some of us were just
annoyed when the department leader kept referring to the LOTR cycle as a "movie"
and saying she figured "that just about everyone had seen the movies". (Book?
Read? What?)
Then another consultant came in and started telling us
we were on a journey, like a hero's journey. I leaned over to one of the other SF
geeks and said, "What, like a Campbell mythological thing?" about a split second
before the speaker said, "Some of you may have heard of Joseph Campbell," who
according to him seems to have done nothing but talk to Bill Moyers on PBS. Then
he pulled up a slide showing the phases of a hero's journey, a la Campbell, and
describing how this is a "left hand journey" because we're taking the road less
traveled (he did *not* mention Frost) and showing the hero going on a counter-
clockwise path.
After half an hour of this, I couldn't resist
anymore. I raised my hand and said, "Excuse me, but I have some serious
reservations about this analogy. I don't think it's really a good one for a group
that wants to make a defined journey in a reasonable amount of time. After all, in
the standard hero's journey, the hero knows what he wants but has no idea how to
get there, and it can take years -- the prototypical case would be Odysseus, who
expected to get home in a couple of weeks and ended up taking seventeen years. Or
Moses, who took forty years crossing a rather small desert."
He said
something about how we do have to face trials, yada yada yada. Then after another
ten minutes blather, another of the local mythology-heads said, "Excuse me, but I
can't stay quiet any longer. About that left-hand journey ... you do know, don't
you, that in conventional paganism going counter-clockwise is always a Bad Thing?"
And I think it took me ten minutes to scrape myself off the floor
and stop laughing. Pity she only sat in that first day. But we didn't really hear
any more about heroes' journeys!