Fables

Fables... some of the oldest stories in our collective memory!

Story telling has a long and beautiful history. Fables were some of the earliest known narratives to make it through the complexities of time and human interaction. They came out of a long oral history to finally make it to the written record. We will never know what a fable really sounded or felt like in its original design because that design relied on an oral tradition that we also could not truly understand.

Just as tales of biblical and other faith origins were developed to guide and sustain a sense of humanity, the Greeks and Romans passed on fables to remind us of our ethical and human responsibilities to each other. The use of animals was a way to place a healthy distance between the story, the teller, and the listener to assure all that the moral was heard above human specifics.

As we move closer to the "automaton" state that Oskar Schlemmer and many of the artists and philosophers warned us about in the emerging industrial age, people are reduced to illustrations, stereotypes, inhuman / inanimate objects. These are times when we are constantly reminded of the importance of our own ideals, and I believe anthropomorphisms of "inanimate" human artifacts from our daily lives--be they images from family, friends, strangers, politicians, entertainers, sports figures etc--may move us closer to the morals of these fables... perhaps to a more ethical and humane world.

From the American Heritage Dictionary

an·thro·po·mor·phism n.

Attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.