One of the more fascinating and thought-provoking books that crossed my path in the 1960s was Pygmies and Dream Giants by Kilton Stewart (who was the late uncle of someone close to me at the time). Here is how I describe the book in my play The Half-Life Conspiracy:
OLSON: There's a book that's a favorite of mine. Pygmies and Dream Giants by Kilton Stewart. Stewart lived with a tribe on some island, in the South Pacific as I recall, and the tribe had never experienced war in their society. Besides being an anthropologist, Stewart was something of an amateur shrink, so he tried to find out just what it was about their society that negated war. To make a long story short, he discovered that these pygmies believed their dreams.
ANN: I'm not sure I follow.
OLSON: Literally. If they dreamed it, it happened. It literally happened. Dreams were just as real as action. Dreams were an action. For example, if one pygmy dreamed of seducing another pygmy's wife, it was as real as committing adultery. It was adultery. So he'd wake up feeling guilty as hell, and get his ass over to the other pygmy's hut and say, Look, man, last night I made it with your old lady, and I'm sorry as hell about that, so here's my fattest pig and three chickens and a couple gallons of home brew, so let's call it even, okay? In their dreams they did any damn thing they wanted but always woke up guilty as hell, so instead of war you had all these pigs and possessions being passed around all over hell, and nobody blew anybody away.
The Malaysian hunting and gathering tribe studied by Stewart, which he called the Senoi, became controversial in academic circles. Was Stewart a charlatan? Others suggested he was a guru. His work was controversial. (See Senoi, Kilton Stewart and The Mystique of Dreams: Further Thoughts on an Allegory by G. William Domhoff.)
What attracted me to Stewart's idea via the tribe is how it heightens the importance of thought/dream/imagination over literal action, a concept first introduced to me by another intellectual renegade, Norman O. Brown in his extraordinary book, Love's Body. I was in rebellion against what Brown called Protestant Literalism -- and still am.
As Brown paraphrases William Blake, the real fight is the mental fight, "the fiery chariot of his contemplative thought," the image at the foundation of my very first play, a one-act called "Above the Fire," which won a national competition and wooed me from getting my MFA in fiction (I had finished all the course work and was working on my novel-thesis) to one in playwriting (I also wanted to stay in school longer to collect the new Cold War G.I. Bill).
For some reason or another, I was thinking about Stewart's book while waking up this morning.
From the mail bag:
I happened upon your site http://www.ibiblio.org/cdeemer/Essays.htm#screen while looking for articles on screenwriting. After reading the first few essays on the site I realized that I had "struck gold"! In fact, if I lived in Oregon I'd take your writing courses at Portland U.
Well, it's Portland State U to be exact; the Univ. of Portland is across town. Always nice when someone takes the time to write something like this.
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