I Want to Be a Hero
But the death of place makes it impossible.
Welcome to The Metaphor. This is an essay about how the death of place has made being a hero impossible, and how we might rescue it.
I’ve been wrestling with this for, well, a lot of months now. A few times, I thought it was not going to survive scrutiny, but the heart of it didn’t want to die.
It’s a map of what exactly has killed the hero archetype in the modern world. By describing it, it attempts to offer a way forward. An impossible one. But one that I believe we have to do, anyway.
I’ve recklessly put myself into this essay. I believe it’s the only way I could honestly say I’ve lived the problem enough to offer something that’s not either glib or Pollyanna.
Thank you for reading.
Act 1: Genesis
I popped into existence in a Baton Rouge movie theatre in the Summer of 1994.
That’s probably not far from the truth. Seeing The Lion King with my dad when I was three is my first conscious memory. I got the VHS and I rewatched it until the upper third of the tape went snowy. I was fixated on that scene where the glowing sky-Mufasa says, “Remember who you are, you are the son of the one true king.”
I wanted to be a hero.
My friends must have had the same thing going on, but we never talked about it. We just found stick-swords to fight dragons and ran around the woods making up stories about defeating the devil.
Then, we stopped doing that. We focused more on dial-up and figuring out if cargo pants are cool. I can’t figure out how to really play here. And because pretty much every man I know is also lost, I assume that’s normal: the inescapable soul-death of adulthood.
That hero drive became a stuffed bear we’re too self-conscious to keep. One day, you think, you’ll come back to it.
At first, you won’t. Then, you can’t.
Call to the Desert
My dad said that I was born running west. He had to watch that I didn’t toddle into the western street.
In social studies class (do they still teach that?), on a big map, I noticed that Highway 10 went from Baton Rouge, all the way to Los Angeles. I told my dad I wanted to go on a road trip there. “Okay,” he said. He and my mother had just divorced, and so we were happy to spend some time together.
On the way, I saw gas stations in the middle of the desert. I rubberneck at them like an existential car crash: dusty cardboard cutouts of MMA fighters who retired a decade ago and dick pills. A heavily tattooed girl behind the counter must live near here. What’s that like, I wondered. My dad bought a local map and a Diet Coke.
Highway 10 was drawn on a map by some politician, thoughtlessly mega-plowed through the landscape. Buildings made of materials freighted from nowhere in particular were tossed into copy-pasted floor plans. The city centers move toward Wal-Mart and Shell Stations. Something dies in the transplant. You can tell because the remaining inhabitants are mostly crackheads. That vital berserker spirit, which might have been channeled into becoming a hero, numbs itself with chemicals instead. People sleepwalk in these places, where there are no more heroes.
I remember a story: Moses walked along his normal route in the desert, unaware. When, suddenly, something shone. Taking a chance, he stepped off his worn pathway. There he finds a burning bush. The flame of awareness. He takes off his shoes, feeling the landscape beneath his feet again.
I notice a metal handrail on the side of the gas station, forgotten. It shone. I considered the man who installed it, maybe three decades past, to support his family, or maybe his drinking habit. I imagined the web of bureaucrats that put metal handrails into places like this, spreading mycelial over decades. Real people who watched TV and had a favorite superhero.
All of that to manifest this random pipe, bolted to the side of a forgotten Exxon in West Texas. I was just a kid, but I remember feeling overwhelmed by this lonely handrail, like no one had paid attention to it in a generation and no one ever would again. Like a stillbirth of meaning, mourned by no one, and I was there staring at it, asking, “What is this, though?”
All things are portals and all of them go all the way back to the beginning, if you are willing to stare. Most people are not (it’s rude to stare). But, risk the glance or not, you can sense the spirit that brings places into being. I knew the spirit that put that handrail there hated me. I don’t know how, I just knew. Check your blood pressure in a Cathedral and compare that to a Buc-ee’s. You know.
I hated it. I felt like I inherited something grand and terrible that had nothing to do with me. I would very much prefer it just went away. But it was too late now. After that, I couldn’t stop finding lonely handrails.
Meeting the Mentor
Later that same summer, the Louisiana woods are alive with bugs, birds, and who-knows-what-else. One adult is left with the embers, whittling an owl into the head of his walking stick. I’m watching him work through the black plastic mesh of my tent. Ghost stories haunt my mind, keeping me awake.
Assistant Scoutmaster and expert hunter/tracker, Butch Trahan lounges at camp, reading Hemingway, chewing tobacco. He tells us funny legends about opossums and some ecology, pointing to the streams and the stars. He taught me how to shoot a gun even when I was afraid. He wrote in his self-published book, The Gobbler and the Looking Glass, “In every boy is the spirit of a hero.”
He would walk us around trails, talking as he went. I could remember a thousand knots, animals, and plants because I could attach each idea to a physical location in the woods. It was a relief to feel grounded here after my trip to the desert. Places in the woods were places in my mind.
If I ever got lost in the desert with lonely handrails, I could always go back to the woods. Ground Truth. That helped me become a man who would one day try to rediscover the boyhood hero drive in the modern landscape.
Act 2: Crossing into the Hyperlandscape
Summer ended, and my school was an old Civil War hospital. That place was thick with a history of Southern defeat, memories of rusty bone saws, and echoes of anesthetic-free amputations.
That Plantation Hogwarts felt half symbolic, half physical, and so it was a pretty seamless transition into the hyperlandscape: those abstract landscapes of culture and collective memory, built on the operating system for remembering a natural landscape. You find “fruits” of the mind here: stories, brands, ideologies and even the “self.” All made of hyperlandscapes. Co-opting the mechanism for remembering where fruit grows, I can remember the year Abraham Lincoln was shot.
After the desert and the divorce, the rituals and rules of my hometown (good ol’ traditional hyperlandscapes) seemed strange. Suddenly, I was seeing pep rallies like an outside observer, kids screaming about a football game. I would ask questions like, “What is a pep rally for? Why are you cheering?” Other kids and even Ms. Sharon would get angry at me. I honestly just wanted to know so that I could participate (that’s very funny to me, looking back).
Still, I was lucky. I learned European history while staring through windows with glass so old that it looked like it was “melting,” and mathematics was in the room with the water-damaged baroque ceiling. I felt bad for kids in “normal” schools: filed in cinderblock buildings with identical fluorescent rooms, nothing to explore. Strong and dirty kids of hunters and farmers did not like sitting in sterile desks for eight hours a day. So, of course, they gave them amphetamines. The drugs reduce the desire for play, not as a side-effect, but the main event; to kill the inconvenient urge to explore landscapes.1
The year was 2000, and I had access to AOL and a developing attitude problem. My older brother sat me down and showed me The Matrix. Obviously, it completely captured my ten-year-old imagination. Everyone I knew was in an invisible hyperlandscape and they got pissed when I pointed this out. We were in a Matrix, just not one made of code. Ours was built from social norms, divorce court, and side-effect lists in pharmaceutical ads. It didn’t matter if I didn’t believe in hyperlandscapes. They believed in me.
I had stumbled on a crack in the matrix. But to fully escape, I had to go further in and learn to read the code.
Mastering Hyperlandscapes
There was this book that all the adults around me vaguely claimed to believe in. But it did almost nothing to change their behavior. That wasn’t enough for me. Like good rebellious teenagers, my best friend and I were super into punk rock (AFI) and apologetics. Both just loud attempts to believe in something.
My church smelt musty and therefore felt totally irrelevant. The sermons were Dale Carnegie-style self-help using Biblical stories as colorful backdrops. I was a teenager, not an unhappily married 54-year-old man named Terry.
I wanted to remember, in awe-stuck first person, what it was like to be an ancient person. Humans were around for hundreds of thousands of years - why did we suddenly wake the hell up a few thousand years ago in the desert? Knowing that, why would I read these stories like an ancient newspaper? That makes them seem boring and superstitious. These stories were how my mind was built. They are me. If I look at them like the lonely handrail, like I didn’t understand anything, they might take me all the way back to the beginning.
Look.
One tribe of people in the ancient Middle East did something extremely strange for their time. They moved.
Travel was desperate. They would probably die on the altar of foreign gods. There were no metaphysical gas stations. But the Hebrews, through being uprooted and enslaved, discovered a technology to keep them oriented and therefore survive no matter where they ended up: Letters. Alphabetic language.2 Literally a portable landscape for place, memory, and story (a hyperlandscape). Said another way, The Word. The Word shook the cosmos because it worked.
They borrowed hieroglyphs from Egyptians, straightforward symbols for waterfalls and birds, and transformed them to represent the sounds you make with your mouth. Knowledge symbols moved into the air and the human soul unmoored from the earth and floated up into the heavens. It made all this possible: moral codes, banking, and the first hero.
Abraham is the first literary hero. He exists in the hyperlandscape (we can still visit him in the story) and he mastered it. At the start of his story, he’s already old, living in the wealth created by his tribe’s grasp of the Word. Then he gets a call to uproot himself and go into the western desert where no one knows him and will probably kill him. He’s supposed to master his inner hyperlandscape without relying on any physical landscape. This is all very mysterious to him, but God promises that his children will be as numerous as the stars in the sky.
That happened. We live in Abraham’s story. Not Babylon, not Egypt. To quote David Foster Wallace, it is the water you’re swimming in. My teenage cynicism could no longer dismiss it - it’s how I’m even saying this to you.
Do you remember much before you could think in words? Now imagine if no one could. Now, imagine some people suddenly mastered a mysterious alphabet, giving them god-like powers of organization, prophecy, and heroics.
You don’t even have to imagine, because we have a test-case.
Talking Leaves
When the Europeans showed up in America, they had leather-bound portals that contained the souls of kings from all the way across the sea. The Native Americans called these strange portals into the order of the cosmos “Talking Leaves.” It devastated them.
Their magic was baked into their relationship with their landscape (like Butch taught me). If you were hunting deer, you would go to the ancestral hunting grounds and make a sacrifice, and this would guide your tribe's intuition toward a successful hunt. This was the way for millenia.
Suddenly, Talking Leaves. Portable inner kingdoms to pop you into self-consciousness. They uprooted and killed the Ground Truth that oriented the natives. Obviously, this made them deeply depressed.3
“The local earth is, for them, the very matrix of discursive meaning: to force them from their native ecology is to render them speechless—or to render their speech meaningless—to dislodge them from the very ground of coherence. It is, quite simply, to force them out of their mind.” — David Abram
When I was a depressed teenager, trying to find my “homeland,” the imbalance was real, but it’s not “chemical.” It’s a mismatch between the hyperlandscape in my head and the circumstances of my life. It happened (suddenly) to the natives and it’s happening (slowly) to the forgotten people in those rotting towns across America. It hums like quiet homelessness in most of us. You can see it in flashes, like when you feel the urge to pull out your phone and record a concert.
Stories, I believe, are maps of hyperlandscapes. Good ones align my hyperlandscape and my behavior. That alignment causes an explosion of meaning at my metaphysical location. You might call that charisma. It’s a rare moment because it can’t be faked. It usually comes in the darkest of pits. When I feel that call to “hold on!,” I cry tears of joy and hear trumpets. It is both irresistible and unbearable.
I don’t want happiness. I want more of that. Why is that so hard to find?
Not all Talking Leaves, I started to learn, guide you home. Some are traps, set by beings that can only survive in hyperlandscapes.
Confrontation with Hyperpredators
Spiritual bypassers say things like, “Your body thinks you are being chased by a tiger when you get a stressful email,” as if our intuitions are dumb relics more suited for Paleolithic living.
That’s not right. An email from Harvard might contain a bright new hyperlandscape, and one from the IRS might mean a bureaucratic beast is about to devour your wellbeing for the next year. That’s not just a predator. It’s worse. That’s a hyperpredator.
They use all flavors of political drama and shallow distraction. They play on our primal needs (connection, meaning, etc.) but provide them in a way that never nourishes. They operate at scales (global, algorithmic, institutional) that our minds aren't equipped to comprehend or resist, making them nearly invisible to individual awareness.
Hyperpredators were born shortly after the rise of hyperlandscapes, filling a new ecological niche.4 Ancients called them demons. We call them algorithms, hustle culture, and political news. Or we pretend they don’t exist. We pretend that our lives of quiet TV addiction are just the natural way of things. We pretend our prison, which doesn’t exist, is home.
We say things like “dopamine trap” or “doom scrolling” or even “the meaning crisis” when we try to talk about these hyperpredators. These descriptions are like ancient man’s mythical drawings of griffins and dragons. Parts of the whole, glimpsed in flashes, and clumsily portmanteau’d. The only hope to be a hero in this hyperlandscape is to see them in their wholeness, for what they really are.
We are in an ocean of titanic monsters. A little boat, no sail, no rudder. Why? Practically, because someone wants your money and your eyeballs. But what spirit are those men serving? The hyperpredators, who steal your misplaced meaning. They wear your desires like costumes. They live in dark UX patterns designed to addict, in ideologies that demand all your blind allegiance, or in success stories that would leave you spiritually bankrupt. All the alignment I need to be a hero is being consumed and scattered by these spiritual parasites.
They are prowling behind every corner, invisible, everywhere, all at once. Every person who has truly fought hyperpredators seems to vanish: from public favor, from memory, or they are ritually murdered.5 Don’t be a hero.
A hero in the modern world is probably as dumb and anachronistic as a stallion on Highway 10. Maybe I should become the narrator instead. A good post-modern man: a storyteller or marketer.
The Final Temptation
I think about this filmmaker I met at a party in Austin years ago. We bonded over our understanding of myth and story. I was selected to join his “cigar club.” There, he bragged that he used his grasp of the collective unconscious to make a documentary to overthrow some government in South America and another one to alter the 2016 presidential race. I was a little repulsed but, honestly, mostly impressed.
The truth was, he was braver than me. At least he had committed himself one way or another. He was an out-and-proud hyperpredator.
Risking being rude, I asked him if he thought he was a good person. He was absolutely enthralled by this question. Obsessed with it. It overtook the conversation. He started asking everyone nearby the same question: "Do you think I’m a good person?"
They say the devil tends to show up at a fork in the road. There he was. Do I really want this?
Like Cipher, we both felt the urge to kill the boyhood hero and plop ourselves back in the matrix as “someone important, like an actor.” Neo, the boy, the hero - he can’t win. The enemy is unstoppable. We can go further, at least, than the men who lost the will to fight, but not so far as to believe in the boy. That would be suicide.
I wish I could believe in him. I’m begging myself. That even if I’m financially destroyed, if my status is lost, if I’m embarrassed, if my friends don’t understand me, if I willingly look all of that square in the eye, I might find something greater than I can understand on the other side. That a tiny little thing like me might stand up to titans. And then bring back their treasure to the tribe that initially enslaved me. The hero redeems us all, even non-believers.
The more you see the code, the easier it is to pretend you are willing to die for what is good, but to secretly try to keep your corporate options open. It doesn’t work.
I don’t want to simulate heroics anymore. I want to go home.
Act 3: Back to the Woods
I forgot who I was. But it was always just as simple as what Butch wrote: in every boy is the spirit of the hero. The boy is worth believing in - even if that means sacrificing everything. I had gone a long way toward “mastering the code,” but in the end, I couldn’t bend all those complicated abstractions to my will. The enemy is much better at that than I will ever be.
I just needed to stop being a coward and go home. So, I took an Uber to the airport.
The woman driving was fifty-something and overweight. I had a feeling I would talk to her (I’m not usually chatty).
I asked her how she was doing. Surprised at first, she asked if I needed anything. I said no. I kept asking questions. I watched her shoulders lower.
She told me about her day. I asked about her life, her kids, and her mother who came here from Guatemala. Eventually, the conversation took a strange turn. She revealed something secret… She cried. She told me that she had cancer. She died.
The sea parted and she went deep below, walked through that tunnel of shining jewels, and found herself in the Kingdom of Heaven. She saw God the Father as a bolt of lightning so bright that she couldn't look upon him.
She said, "You think I'm crazy," and I said, "No, I think I believe you," and she said, "Well, I'll tell you this too, then: that’s when the devil showed up. Rows of teeth in an alligator grin. He sat with me at my hospital bed while I was dying. So, I prayed without stopping. And then I was brought back to life…” She said, wiping tears.
“People think I’m crazy. But I’m not.”
Easy to explain away, I’m sure. Jungian archetypes flashing in her brain as it was starved for oxygen. But that didn’t seem relevant. I was closer than I used to be, now that I was looking at this woman, who I would not have otherwise. I have a choice.
I choose the boy.
How do you pay the bills while living like that? I don’t know, in your case. But I do believe that our biology is situated so that every person on the planet knows what steps they need to take to become a hero. It would almost certainly destroy your life, so only you can make the choice. It’s unreasonable. Dumb, really. But you might be blessed with the faith to know that alignment to the hyperlandscape would create an explosion of meaning that might resist the hyperpredators, who cannot be beaten. They fear us, not because we are powerful. We are not. We are limited, fearful, and frail, and therefore uniquely capable of becoming a hero. Like Neo, let the bullets come at you, lift your hand, and calmly say, “No.”
If we all make this choice, the best possible hyperlandscape would map itself to the physical landscape, bringing The Kingdom of Heaven down to earth. The woods of our youth with all the wisdom of our age. Can you imagine that?
The snake wakes up within me now. He says: If you try to be a hero, you will hurt beyond repair when you lose your parents, your friends, and even your future children. I will take everything, make you suffer, and then I will take you. I am inevitable. Why do you keep fighting?
And I want to answer, “Because I believe.”
We go to the places with memories that still make you cry and figure out what there is to learn. We go to church and shake hands with elders and weirdos and ask them about their lives. We go to friends' art exhibitions and comedy shows and laugh and celebrate. We tell the truth, get fired over Zoom, and then find a new way home. We can have God, and pain, and fire, and dirt, and danger, and poetry, and sin, and goodness.
If we run at death like a strange berserker,
hyperlandscapes suddenly become as legible as road signs,
and we are free to run in them like the woods of our youth,
a real hero with a near-stupid faith in rebirth.
Thanks to
, , , and for helping me with this through conversations, suggestions, and support. Couldn’t do it without you.ADHD drugs are shown to reduce the desire for exploratory and social play. You could reasonably say that a good definition of “education” is to transmute physical restlessness (desire to explore landscapes) into a desire to explore hyperlandscapes (science, culture, literature, etc.). By squashing the restlessness chemically, you solve the problem of rowdy children in the short term (boys are mostly the ones given the diagnosis), but you do them terrible harm in the long-run. Learning to channel physical restlessness into higher aims is the entire point of education.
The mainstream view is that the Phoenicians invented alphabetic language. There are serious academics who believe the Hebrews were the originators of the alphabet, but my larger point stands either way. The earliest alphabetic systems are either Phoenician or Hebrew in origin, depending on who you ask. But by about 1000 BC, these advancements, either borrowed or pioneered, had evolved into Paleo‑Hebrew, where it really took hold.
Indigenous peoples encountering writing for the first time really did describe it as “talking leaves” and it did wreck them ontologically, perhaps more than guns, germs or steel. This idea has barely penetrated cultural consciousness, probably because it doesn’t fit neatly into any of the stories we like to tell about first contact, whether left-wing tales of exploitation or right-wing ideas of inevitable progress.
Milton’s Paradise Lost dramatizes the rise of hyperpredators who feed not on flesh, but on consciousness and meaning. In his Eden, spiritual beings coexist peacefully. Only after the Fall (triggered by the misuse of hyperlandscapes, “the Word”) do “many become predators.”
The list of people publicly killed for truth-telling is long. One of my favorites is Plato’s account of Socrates’ trial. It’s short, surprisingly funny, and worth a read.
Idea: Practice “hyper-fasting.”
Weekly hour in the woods without glass screens. The Fathers called this hesychia
silence in which hyperpredators suffocate
You are welcome friend… reading you is like looking in the mirror. You write what I try to have conversations about, you write things I have experienced, lived, died and resurrected from…. Talk soon. Abram’s language to Abraham’s dagger…