Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason; 103; Jeanette Winterson and Will Power

You In this edition of Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason, it says that he has made us in his image. Then we are the ones who are full of contradictions, so that might suggest that God also is full of contradictions. And if you look at the text, that seems to bear it out.

Jeanette Winterson talks about gods and heroes and different ways of finding truth. Greek tragedies dealt with these these human themes I feel that we're still struggling with, but how do I make that bridge over into day society so that someone like myself or someone younger will be able to connect with him? Will power talks about edipus and hip hop, God and inspiration. That's in this edition of Faith & Reason. Major funding is provided by the Herb Alpert Foundation and by our sole corporate funder Mutual of America, designing customized, individual, and group retirement products. That's why we're your retirement company. I'm Bill Moyers. Welcome once again. In this hour of Faith & Reason, you'll meet two

storytellers who take ancient myths and turn them into parables for our time, putting us in touch with deep truths about human experience. First up, Jeanette Winterson. Myths are interesting because they allow us a completely different way in which to read our own lives. At the age of 12, Jeanette Winterson was reciting the Bible by heart and preaching sermons on street corners in the little English mill town where her parents were Pentecostal evangelist. At the age of 23, she wrote oranges are not the only fruit and became an instant sensation in Britain, winning the coveted Whitbread prize for best first novel. Since then, she's written nearly a dozen more. Most recently, wait, a daring take on the classical Greek story of Atlus. The titan whose fate is to hold the whole universe only shoulders for all eternity. Jeanette Winterson was a big draw at the recent pen festival of writers on Faith & Reason. And I've been eager to talk to her about why myths still matter. But first, I want to know more

about her amazing journey. How is it that a girl raised by fundamentalist Pentecostal parents in a house of utter poverty, no bank account, no phone, no indoor plumbing, who used to write sermons, who drove an ice cream van and worked at a funeral home? How does this girl go on to Oxford and get high on mythology? Well, I think children often feel that their own way of life is completely normal because they're not exposed to anything else. And I thought that everybody had a gospel tent and went around the seaside towns of the northwest trying to convert the heazen. Is that what your parents did? Yes, they were a tenor at evangelist. Yeah, and my mother used to play the harmonium, she was a good pianist and she had a portable harmonium and we go around and other people come from the church and you put your tent up, you know, planning laws were less strict in those days, you put your tent up and then you'd have services

and the heathen would come in and either they'd find Jesus or they wouldn't. You used to sing any of those hymns? Yes, but my mother's favourite one, it was really, it was a chorus called God has blotted them out. You can imagine why she would like that. And it went like this, God has blotted them out. God has blotted them out. My enemy's mocked and scoffed at me. He blotted them out when he set me free. God has blotted them out. God has blotted them out. As you can see, she wasn't the kind of forgiving, open-hearted, generous person. If she could oppress the button, she would. You know, she'd have been there thinking, you know, the sooner we bloke the world, the sooner Jesus will come back. Because, you know, creationism and armageddon are like the north and south poles of religious fundamentalism aren't they? If you can believe those, everything else in the middle is actually quite easy. And my mother was a creationist and she did believe in armageddon. She thought that the world would be rolled up into a fireball and Jesus would come back and she'd go off to heaven and none of her clothes would be secondhand. Those are mighty acts of imagination. I mean, religion

does fire the imagination. Yes, it does. I asked you to believe things which are completely impossible, like creationism. In any case, you know, why would God want to do it that way? There's no reason why God wouldn't do it any other way. I don't know. I've never understood why there's such a fight over that. But it is an unbending, inflexible kind of religion, that religious fundamentalism. And it is about punishing people. The God of love becomes a God of punishment. There's a line in wait where you say, the hells we invent or the hells we have known? Was home a hell? No, it wasn't. You know, it's, it was the craziest place. I mean, it was bonkers the way we lived. During her appearance at the Penn Festival, Jeanette Winterson talked about growing up in that fundamentalist family in England. My mother was terrified of any secular influences entering our lives. My father is illiterate and every day my mother used to read to us from the King James Bible. And only six books were

allowed in the house. The Bible was one and the other five were books about the Bible. Although in our house, books weren't allowed because I had a job on the market stool, I began to buy books with the money that I was earning and smuggle them in secretly and hide them under the bed. Now anybody with a single bed, standard size and a collection of paperbacks, standard size, will know that 77 per layer can be accommodated under the mattress. And this is what I did. And over time, my bed began to rise visibly. And it was rather like the princess and the pea. And one night when I was sleeping closer to the ceiling than to the floor. My mother came in because she had a suspicious nature. And she saw a corner of the book poking out from under the counter pane and she tugged at it. And this was a disastrous choice because it was by DH Lawrence. And it was women in love. And she knew that Lawrence was a satanist and a pornographer because my mother was an intelligent

woman. She had simply barricaded books out of her life and they had to be barricaded out of our lives. And when challenged with her defense, she always used to say, well, the trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late. How true. The books came tumbling down and me on the top of the monitor the floor and Mrs. Winterson gathered up the piles of books and she threw them out of my bedroom window and into the backyard. And then she went and got the paraffin stove, emptied the contents onto the pile of books and set fire to them. And I learned then that whatever is on the outside can be taken away. Whatever it is that you think of as precious can be destroyed by somebody else. That none of us is safe. That there is always a moment when the things that we love, the things where we put our trust can be taken away unless they're on the inside. And that's why I still memorize texts because if it's on the inside, they can't take it away from you because nobody

knows what's there. And I think that one of the reasons that tyrants hate books ban them, burn them is not simply what they contain though that's often the obvious reason but what they represent because reading is an act of free will and it's a private act. It's an intimate dialogue between you and the text and in there is all kinds of possibility. I didn't leave home that night. That happened some years later when I fell in love with another girl and this was clearly not going to happen in 200 water street and my mother gave me the choice. She said leave the girl or leave home so I had to leave home. And as I was going she called me back and she said Jeanette why be happy when you could be normal. But she said it to the right person because I went away weighing those words in my hand, happy, normal, normal, happy. Were such words always intentioned were they in perpetual fight or could there be some harmonies, some sympathy between them. And beginning to weigh those words I started to weigh other words too. Words like good and evil, black and white,

right and wrong, faith, reason. Were these things always going to be oppositions dichotomies? Was there a way of healing up these spaces? And I began to realise that what we must not do is accept false choices, fake realities imposed on us by other people. And for me one of the things that books have done, literature has done, artists done, is refuse those false choices but rather to offer a world where mind and body can be healed, where the heart can be healed, where it is possible to imagine a world constructed differently, a world that we could invent differently, a world that we could live in differently. Thank you. Are you the kind of person who needs another world? I always need another world. I mean I'm passionately connected to this one. You know with the world I think you might as well love it or leave it, so I love it. I want to change it. I'm political. I'm bold. I'm engaged. All of that. But I think too that there are vast dimensions

of which I know nothing but sometimes I can apprehend them a little bit. So I think of it in religious terms. Sometimes I think of it as the kick of joy in the universe. It's the moment when you feel that the whole thing is bigger than you, better than you. And you connect with an energy which is gigantic. And I think writers artists do feel that. I hope that people who are not writers and artists feel that. And it is a moment which is absolutely true and that absolutely cannot be proved by science. But you feel it. Why when you were invited by your publisher to write about any of the great stories of mythology that you would choose to do so? Why did you choose the story of Atlas and Hercules? Well it's a marvelous story. Atlas is punished for rebelling against the gods. And his punishment is that he will have to hold up the cosmos, you know, the great image that we have of him supporting the globe in space. And the name Atlas in the Greek means long-suffering one. So his punishment is in his name because, you know, naming his power, when you unravel the name, you often unravel the meaning of the thing that is

named. And Atlas is left there holding up the cosmos abandoned by the gods who go off partying like the gods always do. And then of course one day Hercules comes along, who is the second strongest man in the world after Atlas. Son of Zeus, bastard son of Zeus. Always a dangerous thing to be a bastard son of Zeus, you know. Shakespeare tells us that over and over again. Over and over again. And as Hercules says to Atlas, you know, here is his stepmother, the wife of Zeus, has really got it in for Hercules because she was tricked into suckling him as a baby. And that's what made him divine because he had the divine milk at here as breast. So he's half a man, half a god. So he comes to Atlas and says... He comes to Atlas and he says, Atlas, I've got to perform the 12 labours of Hercules that we all know. This is my punishment. Yours is to hold up the globe mind is to perform the 12 labours. And what I need is to get the three golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides. And I really need you to do it for me. And if you'll go and do it for me, I'll hold up the world for a while. And Atlas thinks this would be great. You know, I could get

free just for a while. And he decides that he will do it. So this swap jobs. Hercules ticks the weight of the world. And Atlas goes back to the garden. His beautiful garden, Atlas was a gardener. The Hesperides, by the way, are his daughters and he named the garden after it. And of course, the thing is all gone to rack and ruin and it's overgrown and it's a mess and he's disappointed. He spends all this time making bomb pliers and pruning trees. But he does get the three golden apples for Hercules. You know, but Hercules is no fool. He realizes that Atlas may never come back. So he has to trick him again into taking the weight of the world. You know, it's a drama between these two men, part guard, part human. Atlas is an introverted thinking type who really does suffer. And Hercules is just an extroverted black, who's only ever had two thoughts and only ever asked two questions. And one is, which where did he go? And the other is, are you married? Blood thirsty and lustful. Yeah. Whenever there's a problem, he uses force or violence to solve it. He never thinks first because he's the strongest man in the world. And he just says,

if these guys won't listen to me, I'm just going to club them to death. You know, we all know that kind of responding. But he was the most popular of the Greek heroes. Because one of the things that the Greeks offer us, it's complicated is they don't try and clean up their heroes. And their heroes are rounded complex creatures. They're not kind of squeaky clean like the superman cardboard cutout image of what we would like a hero to be now. The whole package is thrown in. And you're asked to look at it and say, yes, this guy is a hero. And he's also a murderer, a thief, a liar, a womanizer. So Atlas goes off, comes back with the three apples, and then Atlas decides he doesn't want the job anymore, right? Exactly. Because he's had a taste of freedom. He wants to go back into the garden and plant some seeds. There's no way he wants to take on the way to the world again. So what happened? Herculee's tricks him. He says that he's having a great time there. He's not in any hurry to give the world back to Atlas. He said it's marvelous to have some time just to be by himself. He said, I'm going to run around the place. He acts as though he's gone to some sort of

Zen Buddhist company, discovering he's in his self. But Herculee doesn't have an in his self. So we know there is a problem here. And he just says, listen, Atlas, you take the apples for me, go and deliver them. That will be fine. But could you just hold the world up for a few minutes while I get comfortable? He says, because the matter horns sticking in the back of my neck, and maybe we could just shift things around a bit. And then he's rather ashamed because Atlas just stooped down. And with infinite grace, it flicks the way to the world back on his shoulders. And Herculee says, sorry mate, I'm off. Goodbye. And walks into the distance. And once again, Atlas is alone. And he remains in that state, in my telling of the story, until something rather surprising happens. Well, I'm not going to give the end away to you. No, we'll keep a secret. But it isn't treating to me. I mean, the old story is pretty good. It's a great story. But you were presumptuous enough to change it. Yes, I mean, as a writer, you're always something of a vandal. You know, you're a tomb raider. You're going to go in there and take the things that already exist, drag them out again,

and dress them up differently. There is a sense in which you are a thief. You know, it's no wonder that writers are ruled by Mercury. God of thieves and liars, Mercury of the Double Tongue. So there is the sense in which you will all with steel and take for yourself the things that you need. But then you also bring them back into the lie. You dust them down, and then you put them out again for people to find in a different way. I mean, the whole thing about myths is that they need to stay fluid. They need to keep moving. They need to be dynamic. And that's why we can go on retelling them. So that what is valuable is passed on from generation to generation across time through cultures. What intrigues me about the Greek gods, Romans 2, is that they do great deeds, but they also, they get drunk, as you say, they they womanize, they lie, they negotiate with the gods of the underworld. I mean, it's true, isn't it, that if you find the hero in mythology, you also discover the monster? Always, yes. The thing is double-faced. It's as though these people are hinged in the centre and that the good and the bad are folded back, touching each other in each person.

But you know, that's what's so strikingly true, isn't it, about the human condition, that we're not one or the other or very rarely. And often the people who do achieve great things are also people who have fatal flaws. All heroes have fatal flaws as well as reprehensible conduct. But nevertheless, they are in the story that surrounds them, the only person who can do what is needed, either to see what it depends. Each hero will have a task, but nobody else can accomplish. And that hero's task is to accomplish the job. And in doing that, they manage to free up the whole set of circumstances, which otherwise would have remained completely locked in, impossible to shift. In order to be a hero, they have to do something big for other people that people can do for themselves. Always, always. Because there's a sort of fashion now that we won't bother to do anything for society or for the collective. We'll only do things for ourselves. That's not the hero's job. The hero is always, however, he goes about it, doing something for the bigger picture, for the world outside himself. And that's important. You know, think of Prometheus,

we all know about stealing fire from the gods for mankind. So suddenly, mankind can light a fire and be warm and cook food. And Prometheus is punishment, as you know, which is horrific, is to be chained to a rock and have his liver ripped out by an eagle. And every day the liver grows back and is renewed. And every day the eagle comes. And in my story, I have the eagle perching on his hip bone to get a purchase. And then just ramming its beak into the soft tissue. And the skin on his stomach is always pale like a child, although the rest of him is somber and beyond recognition, because he's chained to the rock. But every day he suffers this punishment. And so there is a sense that, you know, if we push outside of our limits, if we transgress what is the property of the gods, let's say, there will be suffering, there will be punishment. That's what happens to Atlas. Why do you think we're so fascinated with the stories of heroes and guards brought down by sex? I mean, do you think Bill Clinton wished he had known his mythology when he got into the White House? I wish somebody had told him. I wish somebody had told Kenneth Starr. Exactly. It was a Greek myth being played out in front of our eyes. That was a modern Greek

drama. In what sense? In the sense that he was this guy, you know, Clinton, I think, was, is a great politician. Somebody was capable of really achieving things in the world who wanted to transform things, wanted to make a difference. And so, you know, he fancies a pretty girl that should not be the thing that brings him down. But, you know, when you read the hero mist, the things that brings them down are always very trivial. So always the thing in themselves that they can't control. And there is also a truth about the hero that they can never be killed or destroyed by anything simply from the outside. They have somewhere to collude in their own death or destruction. So many of them experience death by female. Death by female, you know, it's a worry. Why is that? I think it's because there is often in the, in the, in the Greeks. It's a very one-sided aspect to the hero. He is the ultra-masculine figure who denies in himself any femininity. You know, this is now much clearer to us since, since Freud and Young have begun to unravel psychology. They talk about the shadow side in

particular. The thing, the part of you, which is, which is repressed in some way, a sense of yourself, which you don't acknowledge, which you can't acknowledge. And it's often a weakness. It's often the fatal flaw. It's often the failing. The thing that you do not want to know about yourself. Now, Hercules believes that he can do anything and he can. Nobody will ever be able to touch him. And that of course goes wrong because he is destroyed by a woman. It's a continuing theme. I mean, Sig Freed has told not to turn his back on his envy. He does. Samson has told not to reveal the strength of his, secret of his strength. He does. Caesar's told not to go to the form because danger lurks, but he goes, what is this? Is this pride, arrogance? What? It's, it's huge pride. It is, it is what the Greeks called hubris. There's a self-belief in your own strength and immortality. You know, Achilles is told always to keep his, his Achilles heel, his ankle covered so that no, because that's the only place that anybody can destroy him.

Of course, he dies with an arrow straight through. He's Achilles tendon. You know, they always do it. And it is, it is a warning. It's a warning not to collude and your own death and into your own destruction, not to become so arrogant that you really believe that you are invincible. Because outside forces will always try to destroy the hero because actually heroes are objects of envy as well as suspicion. But they're simply aren't able to, unless the hero in some way colludes in the act. You know, if Sigfried hadn't turned his back, he couldn't have been stabbed in the back. If Achilles had kept his boots on, he could have been shot through the heel. You know, and so you see always the kind of the folly which is part of the arrogance of these people that they allow themselves to be brought down by outsiders who are pigmies in comparison to them, moral pigmies. I think in our society, we are quite uncomfortable now with the hero figure. Because we're told we live in a democracy and everybody's the same and everybody's got to be treated equally. But it doesn't really seem to work like that because it's always an individual of some kind

who then pushes things forward. Things don't happen in mass movements. They happen because somebody has a vision or an idea or a brain wave and that changes things for the rest of us. It's always about the individual. It's never about the collective in that sense. I mean, Superman, Spider-Man, Tom Cruise, you know, they are meant to be hero figures, but they are woefully too dimensional and they give us a false perception of what a hero should be like so that when we meet real hero figures in our own world, we're uncomfortable with the fact that they are flawed, that they do have weaknesses and that they need forgiveness like the rest of us. How do you compare the gods of Greek mythology with the god of the Old Testament? Well, of course it's monotheism. The god of the Old Testament, Yahweh is one god and the Greek gods were many. They were kind of pantheon of playboys and dodgy actors. But they worked for the Greek people. Yahweh is something which is much more, somebody much more intense, much more poetic, much more terrifying. I mean, the Old Testament is

a terrifying book because you never know what Yahweh is going to do next and what's really scary is that Yahweh doesn't know what Yahweh is going to do next. Again, it is a huge figure, full of inconsistencies, you know, in the book of Job, for instance, and God actually has to hide people from himself under his throne because if he doesn't, he'll get so across, he'll destroy them. So it's almost like this god splits himself in two and thinks on the one hand, I'm a merciful god, on the other hand, I'm a vengeful god and I'm both of these gods in one god, so I'm going to hide you in case I get too vengeful before I get merciful. And I think one of the pleasures of the Old Testament is these contradictions because the right-wing fundamentalists weren't of any of this. They make god completely in their own image much as the Greeks made the Olympians in their own image. The mystery of the Jewish god that became the Christian god is you can't really make that force in your own image because there's nothing in the sacred text which really allow you

to do that. And if God says that he, she, has made us in his image, then we are the ones who are full of contradictions, so that might suggest that God also is full of contradictions. And if you look at the text, that seems to bear it out. You spoke here at the Penn Festival of Logos and Mythos. Words I remember from my years of study in Greek at the university and in seminary. Why did you raise those two in the context of a conference on faith and reason? Because they are different ways of arriving at truth. And since the Enlightenment in the 18th century, we have privileged reason, logos, the empirical sense finding proof for things, discovering things that can be touched and tested in the universe. Absolute rationality has seemed to be the key to our advancement. And in many ways, this Enlightenment, this rationality, this dependency on logic and reason, has freed us from many cruel superstitions, many

nameless terrors. It also brought us technological advancements, civilised advancements. But it's not sufficient. And the Greeks, for instance, who were a very rational set of people still knew that there were two ways of arriving at truth. And it's Plato who makes the distinction between Mythos and Logos, that there is a mythic truth, which is an imaginative truth and emotional truth, a way of understanding the world, which is not about the facts and the figures, but which is nevertheless valid. And we need to have a kind of a balance. The things need to be held in balance. And you wouldn't want to use mythic truth to tell you how to mend your washing machine, for instance. You'd probably just get the repair there. I've tried that. Don't go there. You tried it in no work. What I loved about the Greek idea of Logos was they did have this sense of God as the unifying principle of the universe. And therefore, respect and reverence for God was a logical act in their spectrum of examination, right? Yes, that's true. It was,

it was an extension of belief. So belief and rationality were not separate in that way. But at the same time, because they invented philosophy, moral philosophy, they invented geometry, they were aware that there were different ways of approaching the world. And they didn't confuse them. They held them together, as you say, with a certain reverence, which is often the feeling that you need to join things which seem incompatible. And at about the same time, the ancient Hebrews who mentioned, they had this notion, you'll find it in some chapters in the Old Testament of the wisdom of God, capital W, the wisdom of God, also translated sometimes as the word of God. And Philo, the great Greek, Greek of Astoic, said, you know, this God can't be knowable. God needs to be mediated. The Christians come along and say, we've got the mediator. And they go back to the Greek in the beginning was the word and the word was made flat. Religion evolves, doesn't it? It does evolve. And it needs to go on evolving. Because I think one of the things that happens is

when a myth gets fixed, it becomes an idol. That's what idolatry really is. It's when you fix something and you won't let it evolve or change or grow anymore. You get stuck with the thing and you say, no, this is the truth and only this is the truth and this will always be the truth. And so people evolve, society evolves and there's your idol slapping in the middle, which is the thing that is now completely out of date. You know, it's when Jesus was talking about putting new wine in old wineskins. You can't do it. The thing has to keep alive. And one of the ways we keep it alive is by retelling it. See, if I use the word religion evolving, you use the word myth evolving. Now a lot of people must say, wait a minute, mythology and religion are not the same. They will. And if they're devout, they may feel offended by it. I think it would be fair to say that a great deal of religion is based on a great deal of mythology, i.e., it's about events that in some sense happened once. For instance, we know there was a historical person, it's called Jesus and we know that this person was crucified and we know that he was a preacher.

So that story is true. Beyond that, then, all of the other things come into play and all the stories are made up around it. But what we're really not trying to do is say, you know, is this absolute historical, verifiable fact? When we talk about religion, we're saying, we're talking about some emotional truths and we're talking about the response of the individual to the ineffable. So it doesn't lend itself to those sort of scientific criteria. Interesting you bring up Jesus because probably no life has affected the world the way that life has Jesus thought about. I think not. No. I mean, Jung once said that he wasn't really interested in whether or not there was a God. But he was interested in the fact that human beings always wanted to believe in a God. And that was worth talking about. And that's why he did all his investigations into religious matters. And indeed, wrote answer to the book of Joe, which is a fantastic piece of work about the contradictions of the Yahweh figure. And we are interested in God. We are interested in religion. I don't think it's enough to dismiss it as superstition in the comfort zone.

It appears in every culture across time, as far as we can see, human beings have a need to worship. They have a need to make a God for themselves of one kind or another. And that is interesting because it's about us. Which gets us closer to the truth. Faith, reason or mythology. I think they are connected. And I think I would not want to live a life which did not have mystery in it. I don't need to know everything. I don't need everything explained to me. I do need to have an imaginative connection with the world I live in, which contains elements of wonder, elements of the unknown, elements of the fully mysterious. That fires me forward. And I look there to arrive at truths about the human condition, about myself. What do you think William Blake met when he talked about the doors of perception? Do you think one door was marked faith and one door was marked reason? Yes, I do. I think because we love to have things in polar oppositions. Don't we? Why? Good, evil, male, female. Reason, myth.

And somewhere there has to be a way of bringing them together again. And it's probably if you accept both as genuine ways of arriving at truth, but you don't privilege one above the other. Previous, see, to the Enlightenment, there was much less of an anxiety about things which belong to the realm of the magical or the miraculous and the things which belong to the realm of the mundane or the everyday. So they would just come together. So Shakespeare writing the winter tale doesn't ask us to have a problem with the fact that at the end, Hermione, who's supposedly been dead for 16 years, is a statue which comes to life and comes back to Leontes. It is the most wonderful and moving moment. And surely no scientist could sit there and say, but this can't happen. You know, look at the Arabian night. It's look at anything that happens before the great split in the way that we think. And the things just tumble over each other together. It's not a problem. It's accepted that the miraculous and the mundane live in the same place, that they're not

separate and they're not figments of people's imagination. As you talk, one gets a sense of the feast of opportunity that is awaiting the good writer. And yet you said it to Penn Festival, this is a dark time for a writer. It is a dark time. It may be that in some ways, I think, I do think of it that we might be going into a cultural dark ages. And we might have to be like the great abyss of Clooney and Fontainebleau and simply keep the culture alive for the future because people will come along and they'll want it and they'll need it. You keep writing because maybe one day somebody will read it. Exactly. You never know for sure. You never know. And you never know how long things will last. That's why you have to have the burning belief in the now and in the moment. And the thing is valid and that it's worth doing and it's worth doing with everything you've got for your whole life. You know, it can't be a hobby. It can't be a thought experiment. Much depends upon it. I believe that. But what is your Achilles heel? Oh, I've got so many. I think I'm covered in Achilles' heels from top to bottom. I'll tell you what I think it is and I'm going to have you read the concluding words of

of your book, Wait. Atlas looked round at the jigsaw of the earth. The pieces were continually cut and re-cut, but the pictures stayed the same. A diamond blue planet, ice-capped, swirled in space. Nothing was as beautiful, not fiery Mars, not clouded Venus, not the comets with their tails blown by solar winds. And then Atlas had a strange thought. Why not put it down? So your Achilles heel could be that you can't put the weight of the world down. Yes. Thank you very much for joining me. Coming up next, Will Power.

In the audience, as Jeanette Winneson spoke to the Festival of Writers, I noticed a young American actor, composer, playwright and rapper, yes, rapper whose talents are said to be helping transform modern theater. Will Power is his name. There he is, listening to Winneson. The very week, he won three big awards, including Best Musical, for his off-broadway play that is also based on ancient Greek myth. It's the continuing saga of the Sons of Edipus, as told by the great dramatist Escalus in Seven Against Thebes. Here's Power with his troop in rehearsal for the award ceremony. Teacles and Polynisees, the Sons of Edipus, and they were ashamed that they'd daddy. Man, daddy was tripping, man. All he had to do was not kill his own father. All he had to do was not G his own mother, and everything would have been cool. Like Winneson, Power grew up in humble circumstances, the son of activist parents in San Francisco's famous filmore district. Once upon a time, the filmore was known as the Harlem of the West, a cultural

and musical frontier noted for jazz grates, rhythm and blues, the beat, zen, the black panthers, and the grateful dad. Will Power came east with the sounds of the filmore in his soul, determined to tell the story of Edipus, so his old neighborhood would dig it. I am Edipus. If everybody wanted to look at me, they'd go to the blind door, check the priest. Edipus, you'll remember, was the King of Thebes found guilty of murder and incest, forced to abdicate and leave his kingdom to his two sons, only to watch them become rivals and kill each other. My daddy was cursed, I was cursed, but I won't be the last, because I wasn't the first. I won't put it on you, but the hood will write on you. What in the world possessed you to take a 3,000-year-old Greek play and turn it into a Racy modern riff? Well, there's a few things. I mean, one, in hip hop, in hip hop culture,

one of the things about hip hop is how do you take something old and what we call flipping it? How do you flip it? Flipping means you turn it. Flipping means you turn it into something that's relevant and powerful for today. And a lot of people that outside of hip hop culture don't realize this, but a lot of hip hop is based on flipping it. So you might take an old record. You might take a Barry White record, or a Stevie Wonder record, or I might take some of Bill Moria's voice. You would really have to flip back. Well, you know, people have done it. You take it and you might reverse it, play it slower, chop it up, you know, add your own baseline, and you create something new. And so really what hip hop is is paying homage to elders, playing homage to ancestors. It's having a conversation with music and cultural styles that have come before and updating them. That's really what a lot of hip hop is. So for me, how do I take something that's an old story? And that's still relevant today because, you know, a lot of these Greek tragedies dealt with these

human themes I feel that we're still struggling with. But how do I make that bridge over in today's society so that someone like myself or someone younger will be able to connect with it? You performed an extreme makeover on Escalus' play. I mean, here we get this. We come from the stately cadence of ancient Greek to do up and blues and rhythm and rap. I mean, that was not just barring here and there. You really made it over. I mean, I made it over, but I did try to stick to the original themes. And I just tried to imagine if these characters, these heroic and tragic figures, were alive today, what would they look like? And who would edit this be in my community? Who would it be? Well, that's what I said. Edit this, you know, in the original thing, he's this bitter guy. He's like, he's been done wrong. You know, he used to have a, he used to be a high a high statue. He had a fall from grace of for me. That'd be someone who's kind of like an old hustler from the 70s. You know, who used to be kind of hip, but now is kind of old school. In my community, a lot of the old hustlers from the 70s that used to be what we call high rolling

are now kind of, you know, of lower stature. You know, they weren't able to make that transition. So that's what edifice was to me. There's a character by the name of Eddie Oakless and he's a warrior. And in the original, he's described as one of the seven warriors that rides horse. You know, he's like really in the horse. He has tons of horses. And so I was like, well, what would that be in my world? I'm from California. So for me, that would, that warrior would be a police man on a horse. You know what I mean? That's what that would be. So as different as these characters ended up being in my version, I'd like to think that I tried to stick to the original in terms of the vibration of it. Instead of the Greek chorus, you have a disc jockey. Yeah, I have a DJ in contemporary hip-hop culture. A lot of times the DJ is a storyteller. When you go to a party, you go to a hip-hop club, depending on what kind of records the DJ plays, they're telling you a certain story or a certain series of stories that have a connection. And a DJ is the one that can, like I said, take a record from the 1950s, for example, or the 1970s, take a Stevie Wonder record and take the hip-hop record

that sampled from the Stevie Wonder record and play them both together and mix them. So it makes sense that the DJ can take this ancient, ancient old text and mix it with contemporary texts. And I kind of, I kind of approached it that way. Like I actually took some of the ancient text and put it, like you said, with the records voice and put it into the modern text. What appealed you about this particular play? Well, I think, for me, there's a number of things. It's the question of, do we, as individuals, do we as a community and do we as a nation, really? And as a world, do we have the power to make changes? Do we have the power to rule our own destiny, or are we destined to make the same mistakes as our four mothers and our four fathers? And I know that question is posed in the original seven against these bi-escalists. And that question is really personal to me. You know, I've had a lot of drama in my family with my fathers, it was a lot of drug abuse, a lot of violence, a lot of drama in my family, in the community.

So the question was, you know, am I destined to make those same mistakes, or can I reimagine myself? And I think those are the same questions that Etappis's sons were asking, you know, are we destined to fulfill this curse that our father put on us, this curse, this weight, this pain, or can we break it? The two characters, the sons of Etappis, that are kind of like the central characters here, they're constantly wrestling back and forth. And initially, they're like, God is on our side, you know, which everyone's always saying now, like, you know, Bush is like, God's on our side, you know, and okay, there's like God's on our side, everyone says God's on their side, you know what I mean? And so the brothers are like, God's on our side. And then they're like, well, maybe God's not on our side. Well, God's on my side, it's not on my brother's side, you know? So I feel like, again, I don't have any answers. I know what I believe personally, but I feel like that issue of fate of what does God want me to do is something that is always been, I think, very, very prominent in our psyche as human beings. And we'll continue to be, because we're always wondering about that. Who is God? What is God? What am I supposed to do?

Is this right? Is this wrong? You know, how do you experience God? I experience God in my meditation, I experience God, you know, with my wife. But I think a lot of it is also just in the moment of writing or in the moment of performing. You know, there's an energy that happens. And if you look at any artist that you really attracted to, there's something, there's something else going on there. You understand? There's an energy happening. And so I feel like that's God, that's God, that's God. And I've been blessed to be doing this for a while now. And that's God. God has creativity and the possibility of what's possible. How would the people in your world of hip-hop, how would they resonate with the theme and edifice of the fact that his father was cursed, he is cursed, he curses his sons, and fate is fate. There's nothing to do about it. Would they feel that in the hip-hop world? Absolutely, absolutely. And I feel like a lot of my friends, a lot of my contemporaries, we wrestle with some of those issues. You know, we wrestle with some of those issues. I think that we try to do the best. Like, edifice didn't want to do that. He didn't

want to marry his mother and, you know, murder his father. He didn't even know. Then when he found out, remember he left his kingdom, the other kingdom, because he thought he was leaving his parents, but they were really his adoptive parents. So a lot of times, we don't want to do that, but sometimes we make these mistakes anyway in spite of ourselves. You know? So I feel like it's something that we definitely wrestle with in the community. And I feel like a lot of cultures do wrestle with that even beyond hip-hop culture. I feel like the whole question of like, what will we take from our fathers and our mothers, the beautiful things, the essence of the culture, and what will we try to leave behind? And I feel like every generation has to question that and look at that. There's that moment in your play when edifice looks up and says, in effect, I'm paraphrasing him. God made me the way I am. It's not my fault. Right. Right. Well, see, that's the question. That's the question. That's the question. Are we, it's like, are we made and do we, are we destined to just fail? You know, if we're supposed to fail, we destined to fail, or do we have the power to break it? You know? And I think that edifice by the end of the play,

that's how he feels as a character. He feels like, you know, there's nothing I could have done. This is it. This is what it is. But the DJ after, after edifice says that the DJ comes out and asks the audience, when are we going to flip the record? When are we going to remix this record? This old record has been playing. This record's been playing for thousands of years. It's record of war, it's record of destruction. When are we going to flip the record? And for me, like I said, it's all about flipping it. You know, like it reminds me of the Wiz, for example. It's a very different piece. Yeah. I mean, it's a different piece, but the Wiz, you know, they took this American classic, the Wizard of Oz, but they flipped it into something at that time that was very current. So funk, you know, they made the Wizard of Oz the Wiz, you know, they, they brought this classic to them. I think that's, that's a, that's a sign of empowerment really. I feel, you know, to take an old story that's kind of, that you're not in and really make it yours. Well, Escalus did that. Euripides did that. Homer did that. All of the great classics were taken from figments and fragments of the past. Right, right, right. Yeah. But I think, I think Escalus would be turning over to his grave right now if he'd think you're playing, don't you? I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know, you know, I mean, I don't, I don't know. I'd like to think, I'd like to think they would dig it, you know what I mean? Right, yes. But I don't know. I mean, you know, you got to remember Escalus, you know, these, these stories are from older, you know, these stories are from myths that are, you know, what, three, four, five hundred years older than Escalus. You know what I mean? So these, these myths, these, these stories are not even from Escalus' time. They're from older times that he took and flipped for his time, you know? Now whether his spirit would, would see the connection or not, I can't say. I think he probably would have been applauding if he could have imagined his characters in modern, in modern guys today. Yeah, I don't know. How did you get interested in mythology? Well, you know, for me, I love, you know, what is mythology to me? Like mythology is, a myth is a story that, that holds in it the values and the culture and the rhythm and the vibrations of a people, you know? So for me, a lot of my work has been

mythological in the sense, not in terms of like the Western classics, but in terms of my own neighborhood, my own community, there's a whole mythology that has grown up around me in that area, you know? Characters that you see, people who are real life, but then there's some stories about them that are true, some stories that aren't. They get blown into fantastical proportions, you know what I mean? So I feel like I've always been moved into myth, into the heroics, into the, to the, to the largeness of it, you know, into the drama of it. And also not all myths, but a lot of myths are rhythmic, you know? They have rhythms, you know what I mean? They're inverts. And I think hip hop is natural to that. Hip hop is all about rhythms. And hip hop great courses were chanted. Exactly. And you know, it's a trip because, I mean, again, I just think of like hip hop lyrics or song lyrics from R&B or country or anything. If you took away how they sounded, how much would we lose, you know? So I feel like as much of a blessing as it is to have these ancient texts, I'm sure we're not getting the full umph, you know, of them because they were chanted. They were supposed to be all sung. They were danced. It was

supposed to be a real like, I don't say primal, but a real guttural type thing, you know? And I feel like in some ways we over intellectualize these myths and put them in this category of high art, but really these stories were originally stories that the common people told, right? I mean, Homer, you look at Homer, supposedly we don't even know if Homer could read it, right? You know, I mean, there's debate about that, but he was an oral poet. That's what we think in the so-called Greek dark ages. And he told these stories. And this was the way that the people kept their history alive. I feel like that's what hip hop is. It's oral based, you know? And it comes from a it's based in the community. And these are stories that are that are told that keep the community alive. Some of these stories are violent. Some of these stories are peaceful. Some of these stories are uplifting. Some of these stories about this girl that I like. Some of these stories are real deep. Some of the stories are shallow, but they're they're lyrical stories. They're sonic lyrical stories. Who is your favorite character in Eskis? I would say edipus. I would say edipus. Why? I just think it's because it's that whole question of it's like a man who is trying to do right. You know what I mean? He's trying to do right, but for whatever reason he does it, he can't do it.

You know what I mean? Now whether that's because the fate is against him or because he really could have made better decisions, that's the question. But he's trying to do right. Like edipus as evil as a catty is, you know, and as bad as he is. And you know, he puts his curse on his sons. He does it as bad as he is. He's like, it comes from a place of feeling like disrespected. Like his son's disrespected him. He's like, wait, but I tried. I tried. Don't disrespect me, you know what I mean? And I think I'm just fascinated by that kind of that kind of character. Where you remind me of when Eskis has the chorus at the end, say, you don't have to kill each other. You don't have to kill each other. And the sons say, yes, we do. Yes, we do. And it is a great tragedy. So they wound up killing each other. Right, right, right. And I hope, I hope that people will see the production and think of tragedy as a way of like, it was supposed to be a healing process. It was supposed to be a warning. And it was supposed to be used not to depress people. It would be like, you know, everything's going to hell, you know? But it was supposed to be in a way of an uplifting thing and say, we're determined to take the challenge of this play

and we're going to do better. What's the moment of truth for you in Seven Against Thieves when you really think something breaks through and you appropriate it and take it into your own life? I think because it's a tragedy, I think the moment of truth occurs when the brothers lose faith in each other. Like, you know, the older brother loses faith in the younger brother. And the younger brother loses faith in the older brother. Like, he's going to mess it up. So I need to take care of this myself or he's going to cheat me. He's going to manipulate me. So I don't trust him. And I feel like that's the, because it's a tragedy, that's the moment of truth. And I think it's, for me, it's a, it's a metaphor for the bigger problem of what's going on. There's a lack of faith. We have a lack of faith in our brothers, you know, in our sisters. Whether it means one country to another, you know, we have a lack of faith. And I think that lack of faith is really destroying, it's destroying us. It's destroying us. That doesn't mean like blind hope. That doesn't mean like, you know, I'll let you do anything you want to me. But it's like, we don't have faith

in each other. We have such little trust. And it permeates in the, in the local neighborhood. It permeates in the society and America. And it permeates throughout the country. So I think that's the moment of truth in the play. Doesn't mean that it has, that has to always be the truth. But that's the moment of truth when these brothers, they start off with well good intentions and they lose faith in each other, you know. Do you see life yourself as a tragedy? No, no, no. In fact, this play was very difficult for me to develop to work on because I kind of feel like I'm kind of optimistic. I feel like I'm a pretty optimistic guy. And I had, most of my plays are very optimistic and have more happy endings in a way. So I feel like, I feel like that's why in some ways I was, I was drawn to this because like, what would it be to put myself in within this world of a tragedy? And I even tried to like make it un-tragic at the end. It doesn't work. I even tried to change it. But what'd you try to do? Well, I try to, I try to find out why to see how I can make it that the two brothers wouldn't

kill each other at the end. Like, does it DJ come in and stop the record at the end? You know, does edifice say, I made a mistake. I try all those different ways. But I feel like the sound designer on the production, Darren West, he said that he feels that some plays have DNA. There's a DNA in the play. And so even though you can change it and you can flip it and you can make the characters vastly different, there's a certain deep intrinsic fabric of the play. And so when you try to deviate too much from it, I don't mean in form or style, but I mean the meat, the content of it, then the play is going to pull you. So every time I tried to do that, it just wasn't honest. Like, these two brothers were going to kill each other in this show. Now, some people might have said, well, you're the playwright, you have all the power in this play. You should just, yeah, you're God. You should just had the DJ come in or what is the day, Deus Ex, Machina, you should just brought the machine in and just did it. But it just didn't feel right. And there's nothing worse, I think, than being in the audience and having a play and you really move at the end, you're like, oh, that's so corny. You know? You're attracted people to

the play, who would never have read the original Esclis, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's one of the joys of it. That's one of the joys. And that's one reason why I had to try to keep the themes the same, but pull them into a contemporary context. Because I feel, again, remember these ancient plays, they were sung, they were danced. And that's a different way than the way they're presented now within a classroom environment for the most part in the kind of academic setting. And so I think it's really hard for a lot of young people to dig them because they're not presented the way they used to be. And they're, it's kind of a rigid way. So I was really trying to bring them in and have people be like, I know editors, that's a cat in my cat in my neighborhood. I know Eddie Yokeless, I know Ty Deus, I know those characters. And hopefully they'll get the themes. And I definitely got that. I got a lot of young people being, I'm going to go back and read some of these scripts with a different eye and not be so prejudiced. And I got it from the other side. I got old people like, they're like, people in the 70s and 80s. I mean, like, I thought I hated hip hop. But I actually could follow the story. And now I'm going to go back and maybe, you know, pick up a two-poch CD. I actually got that

and see what this is really about instead of writing the whole thing off. What inspires you? What inspires me? What's your source of inspiration? Again, my inspiration is the creative spirit, God, and the magic in life, and my ancestors, and my family. And that, my family includes my wife, my mother, my father, my sisters, and my community. You know, I grew up, I live in Beacon, New York now, but I grew up in. Little town up on the, on the Hudson. Little town up in the Hudson. But Peach Seagrard's home. That's right. That's right. Peach Seagrard's right on the hill. Yeah. He's like the guru. We always look up. He's up there somewhere doing his good, but that's where I live now. But I'm originally from the Fillmore, which is in San Francisco. And in San Francisco, in the Bay Area, there's such a rich culture there. I mean, it's so diverse. Everything from a strong, amazingly strong Asian presence, amazingly strong Latino presence. You know, the Black Panthers were started there. There's such an amazing culture there.

Since I'm from there, there's so many different stories and things that I come, they inspire me, you know, the Fillmore inspires me. And Beacon inspires me. That's my new home now. So I'm, I get inspired, inspiration by everything all over the place. And I try to do a little better. You know, I'm not trying to be perfect. I used to try to be perfect. I say, I'm going to try to be perfect. But I'm not, you can't try to be perfect. Just try to be a little better. Like, maybe I won't make as many mistakes as my father made, you know, and my mother made. You know, I'm not better than that. Maybe I just, I'll make less mistakes. And hopefully my children will make less mistakes. And hopefully every generation will just get more, more progressive. Well, Escalus is not very optimistic about that. No, he's not. He says we keep repeating the same mistake. No, he's not. But in seven against Thebes, in Escalus's play, he had the chorus really questioning the king, which was one of the brothers and saying, you don't have to make this mistake, you don't have to do that. And supposedly that was very revolutionary in Escalus's time. Even though the main king still ends up going out and killing his brother and being killed, you know,

but supposedly just the fact that having the chorus question the king like that, you know what I mean? Was very, very, very revolutionary and very, very, it was a big risk for Escalus to take. So I feel like even though he was a pessimist in the sense of working that genre, that was a very optimistic thing to do in that time. Just have the chorus be like, you don't have to do this. Don't do it. And it's like a lot of the plays devoted towards the chorus really urging the king. You don't have to do it. God won't look down on you. You know, I mean, they go back and forth. I mean, so where's our chorus today? Where's our chorus today? It's in me, man. It's in you. It's in the people. It's in the common people, you know, that are telling these stories. I mean, I feel like the leaders of come and go, but it's the stories that will continue, you know? Where are the chorus? We are the chorus. We'll power. Thank you for being with me. Thank you so much, Bill. Thank you. Log on to pbs.org to explore the myths for web exclusive with willpower to view previous episodes of faith and reason and to take a poll on religion's role in your life. Connect online

at pbs.org. Next time on faith and reason, honor provost. I don't call it God, but it's the same concept. I call it ethics. And David Grossman. The Bible, thank God, I say, in my secular way, is not politically correct. That's next time on faith and reason. This episode of faith and reason is available on DVD or VHS for $29.95, the complete seven-part series for $149.95. To order, call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen.

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