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For the last few months I have been trying to write
about myth. About what it is, what it means to us,
how it defines us, and how it connects us not only
to ourselves but to each other as well. The idea
to write about myth first came to me in early October
over dinner with my wife and a friend in a Chinese
restaurant in Montreal. I can’t recall the
exact line of conversation, but the friend I was
with triggered certain thoughts for me as he was
discussing his own work. The friend is a psychiatrist
who is exploring ways to expand his own work beyond
its perceived bounds, which was exactly what I wanted
to do in my chosen fields and interests. And it
was at a certain moment, either over the spring
rolls or the sesame tofu, that the idea about writing
about myth came into my head. Not about myth as
a separate entity, but myth as existing along a
continuum from dreams to stories to myth.
As these ideas started to form in my head, a simple
schematic came into view. If dreams are the way
we connect with our inner selves, and stories are
a way we connect with each other not only in the
present, but in the past and future as well, then
myth can be the thing that ties it all together.
That operates at a deeper level, connecting our
dreams to each other’s, as well as our dreams
to our stories. It forms the underlying narrative
that sets everything else in motion. It seemed a
promising idea to pursue, but I first had to define
my categories, to address myth in a very concise
way to prevent my thoughts and my explorations from
going all over the place.
The moment I returned home the next day my first
reaction was to browse through my books to see what
I had on myth. There ended up being quite a lot,
more than I was ready to deal with, from a short
contemporary work on myth for the contemporary general
reader to a master work by a contemporary German
philosopher. As I read and read and read, not only
was there so much to take in and digest, but the
more I read the more I lost my original inspiration.
It was becoming the kind of dry academic exercise
that had made me decide to take a break in my doctoral
studies.
If, as I believe, myth operates at this deeper
level, then it was necessary for my exploration
to occur at a deeper level as well. While studying
other people’s ideas about myth can be helpful,
it ends up making myth seem as if it happens outside
of us, in other societies, in other civilizations.
We all grew up hearing about the myths of the Ancient
Greeks and Romans, conjuring up images of a bearded
figure standing on a mountain top throwing lightning
bolts at his hapless subjects down below. We even
recognize the myths from our own cultures, such
as the story of George Washington and the cherry
tree.
But what I was looking for was something even deeper,
something that went to the root of how we define
ourselves as a people (however you may care to understand
that) or as an individual person living with others.
Not only do we have our societal myths, but we have
family myths, as well as personal myths. According
to the classics scholar Jasper Griffin (writing
in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books),
“It is the fundamental function of a mythology
to attempt to make sense of the world in which its
people find themselves.” And all of us, all
the time, are trying to make sense of the world
in which we find ourselves.
So as I began to put down my thoughts about myth
it seemed reasonable to begin at the beginning of
my exploration. Not only because it would give me
some perspective, as well as provide perspective
to those reading this, but because so many myths
are about beginnings themselves. In most of the
books I looked at, creation myths were given a prominent
place. All societies (and most families) have them.
Some of them reach into the far distant past. But
many of them, including those for most contemporary
countries and some major religions, fall within
the written historical record. This is especially
the case for those of us living in the United States
in the middle part of North America. While the histories
of its native peoples stretches back in to time,
the founding of the political entity goes back to
the mid-eighteenth century or, if we take the early
colonists into the equation, to the early seventeenth
century.
As with so many different aspects of our lives,
myth operates at the heart of politics as well as
all political entities. They each have a story about
their founding and how its people developed their
specific attributes. At the level of a society or
a specific culture, myth (like politics) doesn’t
happen by itself. It is a creative and selective
process, where we take those pieces and aspects
that best convey the meaning that is to be passed
on. It is created when people come together and
imagine a common present, past and future.
Myths are being created all the time. Certain dates,
certain times, take on mythic stature as we perceive
them to have represented a critical juncture for
ourselves individually or as a people. Depending
on who you end up speaking to, all things that are
good, or all things that are bad, with whatever
present time you are in, seems to flow from that
mythically important date. In my lifetime the year
1968 seems to have taken the aura of being such
a mythic date – the time when our hopes were
raised highest and then dashed to the ground. Or
for someone from a more conservative point of view,
it can be seen as the date when traditional values
came fully under attack and have yet to recover.
To take an overused example, let’s imagine
that a person is living alone on a deserted island.
While they may develop their own personal mythology,
there would be no entity to carry it on, passing
it from generation to generation. But when someone
else arrives, and they begin to interact, to consider
and figure out how to share resources, how to divide
work, how to deal with issues of power and dominance,
something else begins to happen.
They may not only be trying to figure out the details
of daily life, but assuming there is no hope of
rescue, they may begin to figure out what kind of
a society they are going to live in. As they begin
to make sense of their world and respond to the
conditions around them, a mythology may begin to
develop that can be passed on to those who come
after.
But myths are not static things. Like dreams and
stories, they may change with the telling. Even
as they change there is a kernel at the center that
remains, that conveys the eternal truth that keeps
getting passed on. That is what I am trying to get
a handle on, to understand those myths which have
influenced my life, my thoughts, and those of the
people I live with on a personal, political and
cultural level.
As myths, and the idea of myth, can be varied and
multi-dimensional, than how we explore and examine
myth should be varied and multi-dimensional. Using
all the scholarly, psychological and spiritual resources
available to us, we can begin to observe that kernel
at the center. By looking at it from so many different
perspectives, it may become possible to get a hold
on it. Only by looking at it from so many angles
does it become possible to understand something
which influences how we see and understand. By struggling
with myth we are doing something more than trying
to get a fix on a concept or an idea, we are engaged
in the act of critically examining both ourselves
and the world around us.
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