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Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.
We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists share music, ideas, events and research that connect to our stories.
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Rasa → Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow Śṛṅgāraḥ (शृङ्गारः): Romance, Love, attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: light green
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Archetype → Explorer
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The journey makes you forget yourself; you stop obsessing over the exoskeleton of little parts of yourself and giv e into the unknown. The familiar shells get broken, and you are reborn. You begin to notice the relationship between being and place, human and environment.
But paradoxically, it is this loss of self that leads you to find yourself; not the version you knew, but a truer, more essential you. The eternal you that remains despite the world rushing by. This is the wisdom of the explorer archetype—one of the Jungian archetypes we use to create characters, whether they are fictional or for real brands and businesses. The rasas—categories of evocative emotions used in our storytelling—that we explored this month are wonder and beauty.
This reading list will take you through ideas, incidents, people, films, music and research connected to this month’s story, character archetype and evocative rasa.
April 2023
2023, Rick Rubin. Magic, everyday mystery, and getting creative. On Being with Krista Tippet: The flow and the ingredients by which an idea becomes an offering — and life practices which call that alchemy forth. The mystery of it all that can only be named and wondered at — and the ordinary mystery that creativity is a human birthright, a way of being rather than doing, that beckons to us all, in everything we do, from crafting something to conversing to the arranging of furniture in a room. This is where Krista goes with the rock star music producer Rick Rubin. It's not a conversation about the creative process of the many great musicians he's worked with — but a conversation that is for and about us all.
2021, Kravchenko, N., Zhykharieva, O., & Kononets, Y. (2021). Rap artists’ identity in archetypal roles of hero and explorer: A linguistic perspective. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies: The explorer archetype, also known as the seeker, adventurer and pilgrim, is one of the most culturally popular archetypes that particularly appeal to younger people. The Seeker archetype resides on two principal discursive roles manifesting archetypal motives of wandering along the roads of life and searching for freedom, discovery and the unknown. In this research paper, popular rap artists’ identity in the archetypal role of the explorer is decoded from a linguistic perspective of song lyrics. It’s an interesting short study of how popular music may influence the popularity of archetypes in the collective psyche.
2007, Into the Wild. Sean Penn. Art Linson, Bill Pohlad. Paramount Vantage, River Road Entertainment, Square One C.I.H., Linson Film: This iconic movie is a story about the desire for freedom. It is an adaptation of the 1996 non-fiction book of the same name written by Jon Krakauer and tells the story of Christopher McCandless ("Alexander Supertramp"), a man who hiked across North America into the Alaskan wilderness in the early 1990s.
2020, An Explorative Study of Wanderlust; Examining the desire to travel for the sole purpose of traveling rather than reaching a destination. Emma Bak Nielsson. Copenhagen Business School: Looking back at our times, ‘wanderlust’ is probably one of the cultural phenomena that would define the 2015-2025 decade. What is Wanderlust and what does it drive and is driven by? This study investigates the construct of wanderlust based on the foundation of travel motivation literature and on the existing, however, limited literature on the term. Furthermore, the study considers the possible drivers and outcomes of wanderlust, while simultaneously comparing the construct with the already established concept of tourism xenophilia. It investigates a new and potential travel motivator and further intends to develop a reliable scale based on wanderlust to enable researchers and marketers to explore and conduct possible future research on the concept.
2001, Water music 2. William Basinski. Digital album: The fluidity of water is captured perfectly in this mesmerizing work by Basinski. A one-hour track entirely composed on a Voyetra synthesizer, Water Music is a perfect antidote to stagnant city lives. It's a never-too-present low humming lullaby, caressing the brain and the ears and slowly developing from silence.
2020, Musical Exploration in Everyday Practices. Tiri Bergesen Schei and Elin Eriksen Ødegaard – Identifying Transition Points in Musicking: While music exploration is the process of examining and being curious about sounds, rhythms and instruments, musical exploration refers to musicality and the embodiment of and sensitivity to music as a possibility for expression.
2021, Within the Known: Wonder That Comes from Understanding. Amanda Vick: Is understanding contradictory to wonder? There are two sub-moods of the Adbhuta Rasa (the mood of wonder) in the eastern Rasa theory. The first includes wonder that occurs when there is a lack of understanding of an experience that could be understood. The second sub-mood comes from not understanding experiences that cannot be understood. What is the possibility of understanding leading to or supporting experiences of wonder? To explore the concept of wonder, thirty interviews were conducted in this study.
Movies and books touching on space exploration have held appeal over the last century, feeding our collective desire to discover meaning through the lapse of time and place in the greatest possible scale. These films and books chart us through our known world and beyond, following explorers undertaking the loftiest of missions, traveling beyond our planet, solar system and even galaxy to discover our place among the stars.
2015, Interstellar. Christopher Nolan. Warner Brothers.
1979, The black hole. Gary Nelson, Walt Disney Productions.
1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Arthur C. Clark. Hutchinson (UK), New American Library (US).