tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7336849734534566982024-03-13T05:22:50.402-07:00Falstaff Was My Tutor"I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass."Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-51969309408323088482020-08-06T09:28:00.004-07:002020-08-06T09:28:50.620-07:00Thinking Myth: Seeing the Nothing That Is not There and the Nothing That Is(A Presentation at the 2020 Mythologium, a conference on Mythology, July 31-August 2)<br />
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I’m very pleased to be invited here today, and to be able to talk about nothing. Oscar Wilde once remarked, “I love to talk about nothing. It’s the only thing I know anything about.” In Genesis, we are told that “In the beginning […] The earth was without form, and void.” Heinz Pagels, an American physicist, remarked that the universe is “a re-expression of nothingness.” Ernest Hemingway, in <i>A Clean, Well Lighted Place</i> famously writes, “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada (translation: well, anyway…). Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.” Shakespeare’s Lear tells his fool, “This is nothing, Fool.” The Fool replies, “Then tis like the breath of an unfee’d lawyer, you gave me nothing for’t. Can you make no use of nothing, Nuncle?” Robert Thurman, in his translation of <i>The Tibetan Book of the Dead</i> remarks, “No sane person fears nothingness.” And then there was Martin Heidegger, who said, “The nothing nothings.”<br />
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Marcus Aurelius said that life is more like the wrestler’s art than the dancer’s, and that is never truer than when one decides to wrestle with nothingness. When we inquire into nothingness as an absence of something, or as an alternative to, or a lack of, something, we’re asking the wrong question. Shadows and holes have locations and even qualities of temporality, but they don’t consist of matter. Nothingness is not a negativity contingent on some positive something.<br />
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Nothingness always encompasses us, it inhabits us in the form of the intuition of what we were before we were born, and where we’re headed when we die. When we speak of nothingness, of no-thingness, we’re not speaking of emptiness, we’re not speaking of disorder, nor are we speaking of incomprehensibility, because contrary to being incomprehensible, we feel the looming presence of nothing attending our every mood. We are inclined to believe that something is better than nothing, that more is better than less, and that there are no voids in the natural world. But nothingness is something entirely of itself, and when I use the word in the context in which I am using it today, I’m not being coy or evasive, suggesting that nothingness is a euphemism for a something that is unfathomably mysterious. Nothingness is Chaos in its archaic Greek sense, the primordial source from which all order comes, and by which it is maintained.<br />
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Nothingness is a reality so unimaginably rich, so pregnant with inconceivable possibility, that no language or use of language can capture it, no matter how precise or innovative, no matter how poetic or imaginative or expressive it may be. We know that even mosquito larvae see shadows, so one might conclude that the perception of “nothing” doesn’t depend on complex or highly evolved mental states, in fact, the cognition of “nothing” may be primal. Silence, too, is often thought of as nothing, but silence is not simply the opposite of sound. What we hear as silence, a dog hears as noise, or John Cage heard as music; and Cage said that “These sounds (which are called silence only because they do not form part of a musical intention) may be depended upon to exist. The world teems with them, and is, in fact, at no point free of them.” (Alex Ross, <i>Searching for Silence,</i> The New Yorker, October 4, 2010)<br />
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Moods and emotions, particularly dread and anxiety, place one in relationship to, and suggest a relationship with, nothingness. In fact, these moods constitute, in part, what Heidegger called “Fundamental Thinking,” and they allow one to be more fully aware of Being, what Heidegger called Dasein, and in Heidegger’s view, Dasein is projected out of nothingness. Indeed, much, maybe even most, of life is lived through feelings that are not, in themselves, cognitions. Moods or emotions are not something that we possess, that we put forth, but instead they are aspects of living—ontological experiences which possess us, and by which we understand ourselves to be overcome or subjected to. Dasein, or literally There-Being, is fundamentally a disclosure of Nothingness, and one may go so far as to say Being IS nothingness, as they are not conceptual opposites. Nothingness belongs to essence itself, and it issues forth Being. But logic tends to break down in the face of Nothingness because logic exists in relationship to matter and time; logic does not exist in relationship to the unimaginable, the unthinkable, or in relationship to no-thingness. Logic, reason, and rationality are not able to reach into Dasein or Essence itself. Isaiah Berlin put it this way:<br />
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<i>No matter what I say I always have to leave three dots at the end. Whatever description I give always opens the doors to something further, something even darker, perhaps, but certainly something which is in principle incapable of being reduced to precise, clear, verifiable, objective prose.” </i><br />
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One might say that Life ‘happens’ in the ellipses.<br />
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To understand Nothingness, one must let go of anthropomorphisms and the tendency to want to reduce experiences and concepts to certainties and facts. So, traditional anthropomorphized notions of a universe that is responsive to human entreaty or influence must be renounced, and the phenomena represented by relational narratives must be surrendered to the ellipse. Consequently, these ellipses are shockingly rich, downright Protean, one might say. Poetry lives in the ellipses, and most importantly for our purposes here today, so too does myth.<br />
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The Greek word, poesis, means to make. It is, Donald Polkinghorne says, “an activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.” (<i>Practice and the Human Sciences: The Case for a Judgement-Based Practice of Care</i>, SUNY Press, 2004, p. 115) It is apparently, but only apparently, the act of creating something out of nothing, creatio ex nihilo. But, the only way that something can be created out of nothing, is for the nothing to be nothing like what we typically understand nothing to be. The nothing of creation cannot be an absence or a lack, it must be something else. As Wallace Stevens put it in his poem, <i>Of Mere Being</i>, it’s “beyond the last thought,” and “without human meaning, without human feeling, a foreign song.”<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> The Palm at the end of the mind,<br />
Beyond the last thought, rises<br />
In the bronze décor,<br />
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A gold-feathered bird<br />
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,<br />
Without human feeling, a foreign song.<br />
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You know then that it is not the reason<br />
That makes us happy or unhappy.<br />
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.<br />
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The palm stands on the edge of space.<br />
The wind moves slowly in the branches.<br />
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.<br />
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By conjuring “the palm at the end of the mind, beyond the last thought,” Stevens demands that we struggle free from rational, familiar thought—"you know then that it is not the reason,” he writes—in other words, it’s not the cognitive function of reason—"that makes us happy or unhappy.” Abandoning reason, we enter a world beyond the factual, beyond the familiar world of known things, we experience the transcendent essence of being, and we become aware of the Nothingness, which is that unanthropomorphic world “without human meaning, without human feeling.”<br />
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That palm tree beyond the last thought and beyond human feeling on the edge of space is, in Stevens’ poem, the symbol of indefatigable, indestructible Being which is projected from Nothingness. The barely glimpsed bird with golden feathers in the palm tree, the “fire-fangled feathers,” can only be a Phoenix, the bird that self-immolates and is reborn from its own ashes. And the brilliant mind of Wallace Stevens knew that the Greek word for palm is phoenix, and by placing the phoenix in a Phoenix, he emphasizes the abiogenic fecundity of Nothingness.<br />
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Once to a friend, Anton Chekov remarked that if you see a gun on prominent display in the first act, you can be sure it will be fired in the third. So, let’s pick up that gun and examine it for a bit before we fire it. Freud once remarked of his own theories that they appealed to him because they tended to, like the theories of Copernicus or Darwin, diminish man’s pride. While that may be one of the greatest humblebrags ever uttered, Myth has a similar power to absorb and disturb us in secret ways, diminish our pride; it puts us human beings in our place in the world, and in the order of things.<br />
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Myths point to, or implicate intriguing truths, the apparatuses of Being and disclosures of Nothingness that generally remain frustratingly secret, and in a certain sense, allow us to explore—or at least wonder about, that which lay beyond the last thought. Myths highlight the existentially puzzling phenomena to which we’d rather not give too much attention, things like consciousness, death, the constant struggle between free will and determinism, and all the other issues of human There-Being that remain stubbornly resistant to the intellect. Myth allows one to grasp the full force and effect of a complex world on limited human beings, and this is so because myth arises from a response to Nothingness, an attempt to understand Nothingness.<br />
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Myths are projections of Being (or <i>Dasein</i>) much in the same way as Being is a projection of Nothingness. Heidegger’s use of the word understand (<i>verstehen</i>) is one of the two essential constituents to <i>Dasein</i>, or There-Being (Da is the there in there-being), but he didn’t use the word “understand” in the way we typically use the word to indicate a grasp of something, to see things more clearly, or to integrate information into a larger context. Rather, Heidegger insisted that understanding was not so much a cognitive process as much as it was a capability, a capacity, a possibility of existence. For Heidegger, one who understands something is one who can deploy practical skills. This doesn’t require one to have a highly developed theoretical understanding of one’s skills. I’m pretty sure, for instance, that Babe Ruth would not have been able to speak to the technical aspects—such as the transfer of energy, or apply the principles of fluid dynamics to the effort of hitting a home run. Ruth just knew—he understood (<i>er verstand</i>)—how to hit a home run. It was simply a part of his being.<br />
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Let’s look at another poem, because in the context of this presentation, the poesis of Wallace Stevens and mythopoesis are pointing at the same thing—nothingness, and the search for a practical relationship to it. Here’s Wallace Stevens again, and his poem, <i>The Snow Man</i>:<br />
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One must have a mind of winter<br />
To regard the frost and the boughs<br />
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;<br />
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And have been cold a long time<br />
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,<br />
The spruces rough in the distant glitter<br />
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Of the January sun; and not to think<br />
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,<br />
In the sound of a few leaves,<br />
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Which is the sound of the land<br />
Full of the same wind<br />
That is blowing in the same bare place<br />
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For the listener, who listens in the snow,<br />
And, nothing himself, beholds<br />
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.<br />
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In this poem, we see that all the conditions to properly recognize nothingness are satisfied. A mind of winter isn’t created through or because of an intellectual or theoretical effort; it’s fashioned out of experience, the experience of having been cold a long time, so long in fact, that you begin to act, even think, like winter itself; moving slower, sometimes ponderously slow, and parts of your psyche become brittle and exposed, as other parts are buried and the flow of libido is thinned, conserving energy while ambition is dormant and darkness absorbs us into our own depths. There’s no misery in the sound of the wind and a few mutinous leaves, because now, one is the winter wind; one no longer inhabits the winter landscape, one has become it. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is the experience one has just before freezing to death, so one can see the risk accompanying such understanding. One recognizes that one is oneself the Nothing that is not there as well as the Nothing that is.<br />
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Human <i>Dasein </i>and the Nothingness from which it’s projected can’t be grasped, can’t be logically apprehended, and when myth is used as a parlor game whose only object is that of recognizing and identifying one’s ego with the patterns of a particular archetype while neglecting the frequently perilous challenges of the archetypal, the various myths and mythic figures become just another story the ego can use for its own inflation, or to engender the comfort of familiarity and certainty, and confirm what one wants to be true, or even what one has believed all along.<br />
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Personalizing myth and archetypal images in this manner is similar to a butterfly collector pinning a butterfly in a shadow box; the object of beauty and fascination, the object of a particular kind of awe, is no longer alive. Semiotically speaking, the butterfly thus pinned has become a sign rather than a symbol. Likewise, the myth is reduced to a psychic tchotchke, an object of bemusement, in which one is no longer able to find beauty or follow heedlessly on its unhurried, meandering, often erratic way, leading away from the comfortable environs of domesticity and deeper into, not just the natural world, but deeper into one’s own nature and the sublime discoveries awaiting one there. (I should point out that the Greek homonym, psyche, is used to denote both butterfly and soul.)<br />
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Thinking mythically, thinking not of archetypes but of the archetypal, one finds the real power of myth; one wakes up, as it were, and is less constrained, less burdened, and less in opposition to the complexities and limitations of living a human life. Mythic thinking opens the doors of perception to astonishment, to contentment, to life with its full range of emotion and experience. Thought this way, one discovers, to quote from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, that “Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form - all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void.”<br />
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Thank you, and I am very grateful that you were willing to listen so attentively to nothing.<br />
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Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-75230624365302014962020-08-06T09:14:00.000-07:002020-08-06T09:14:27.655-07:00Missing Out and the Anxiety of the Unlived Life<br />
(A talk to the Northern Arizona Psychological Society 5/15/15)<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I have noticed over the years of working with clients that much of what troubles them, “all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain” as Melville wrote in <i>Moby Dick</i>, is the lack of congruence between the life they are living and the life they believe they should be living. Freud would have called it the difference between the ego (Ich) and the ego-ideal (ich ideal), in other words, it is the difference between who one is and who one might have been, and may yet become. The me I fantasize about is a me, according to me, that I might well have become if only some of the things that I had experienced had been different, or if only I had made different (and the script often insists, better) choices. The fantasy me is what I call the unlived life. It is unlived because I want to believe it was once an option, and a part of me wants to believe it may still be possible. A significant motivation upon the part of the client entering therapy is to discover why the unlived life was not possible. As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes, “The story of our lives becomes the story of the lives we were prevented from living” (<i>Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life</i>).<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It is the unlived life that keeps us awake at night, by either losing ourselves in the projected fantasy of what it might be like to be living the life we are not able to live, or alternatively, the unlived life haunts us as a spectral delivery mechanism for anxiety: why don’t I feel loved, why don’t I feel safe, why don’t I feel special? Why can’t i feel satisfied? What would it be like to be able to satisfy what feels so unsatisfiable in our daily lives. Freud suggested that all anxiety is separation anxiety, particularly separation from the mother, but I think it is also the case that anxiety is created from a sense of being separated from oneself, a separation from one’s true and proper life. One might think that the psychoanalytic answer to separation is love.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The first experience of love is the love of oneself (no separation of self), secondly, the love of what one was (separation from self), and thirdly, we love what we would like to be, because if we could become what we would like to be, there is something of a successful reunification of self (Jacques Lacan, <i>Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954</i>). The first three kinds of loving are ultimately narcissistic and creates a self enclosed world in which nothing is hidden, nothing is unlived, and consequently then, nothing is threatening. When we eventually begin to see some cracks in this self-contained world others, like mother, become objects capable of acting independently rather than acting as mere extensions of oneself, and another experience of love is discovered. Freud calls this love <i>anlehnung</i>, which is loving the mother who brings the nurturing and the father who protects, a love that is unsatisfyingly dependent.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>But are these the only two options? Are narcissism and dependence our only choices? Jacques Lacan suggests that “Freud rejects this hypothesis, and reminds us of of the existence of repression, which has, in the end, a normalizing function. Repression proceeds from the ego and its ethical and cultural requirements [...] For the ego, the formation of an ideal would be the conditioning factor. This ideal is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the true ego” (<i>ibid</i>, 132-3). The ego ideal becomes the target because in hitting that target we become special once again. And feeling special provides one with a feeling of indescribable satisfaction.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Being special is the peculiarly singular ambition of contemporary American culture, is it not? It is worth wondering though, “...what the need to be special stops us from being” (Phillips). Being special is, I think, another way of saying we don’t want for anything, anymore, and the best way to not want is to have enough money to buy whatever we will: we purchase the best home, the best technology, car, body, and the best love that money can buy. One is tormented by the things and experiences one has missed, obsessed by notion that missing out has sabotaged satisfaction.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>When we look at ourselves in this way, it isn’t hard to see why Freud wanted to talk about pleasure seeking and the avoidance of pain as the organizing principles of life. How many times have we heard clients suggest that a life without pleasure is not worth living? Simply surviving life is nowhere near pleasurable enough, and even spiritual practices that nudge one toward asceticism are festooned with the trappings of materialism (at least they are here in the U.S.), if not of the literal comfortable, pleasurable variety, then materialism of the spiritual sort. As an aside, our spiritual disciplines foster the primacy of the unlived life by delaying the most “important” existence to a time after death or make a goal of enlightenment in such a way that only a very few, if any, can achieve it and thereby creating one more life one cannot live and may only experience in fantasy and self-reproach.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The entire point, it seems to me, of the unlived life is to provide pleasure by imagining a more complete satisfaction, and perhaps such imaginings or fantasies are even attempts at some kind of self cure. As Adam Phillips notes: “Our solutions tell us what our problems are.” Perhaps it is the unconscious wish that the unlived lives might somehow materialize in one’s mundane life and become real, and really lived, experiences. Perhaps these fantasies of a more satisfying life are ways to deal with a reality that leaves us very little wiggle room in terms of free will. Schopenhauer said, “A man may want what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.” Perhaps it is only in the fantasy of the unlived life that we in fact are able to experience a truly free will.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Whatever one chooses to think about the idea of free will, one cannot but be aware that there is a gap, sometimes a yawning chasm, between what we want and what we have and that we can’t get around what we have in order to create what we want. This realization is essentially what Freud meant by “the Reality Principle.” And in some important ways, the unlived life tells us what is wrong with the life we are currently living; to put it clinically, what are our symptoms if the fantasy life is the solution? In a very general way, one might think that symptoms tend to cluster around anxiety and frustration, and this is particularly true of the gap between the lived and the unlived life.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>`The anxiety and frustration one feels is about missing out, missing opportunities, missing crucial pieces of knowledge, missing the joke. Missing out means not getting it and not knowing; missing out means not belonging. And when we suffer from the anxiety of not belonging, we are once again with Freud in his notion of separation anxiety. Look at the way we are attached to, say, our smart phones. Has anyone’s phone buzzed with a missed call or a text message since I’ve been speaking? How hard was it to resist looking at the message or knowing who called? The technological umbilical is very, very short these days. We don’t want to miss out on anything.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Another reason so much anxiety accrues around separation is that children understand instinctively that should they be separated from or lost to their parents, their very survival is in doubt. Instinctively, children “know” they don’t have the resources to take care of themselves and to be abandoned is tantamount to a death sentence. Separation becomes paired with the idea that one is unloved and unwanted, a shame-filled being in search of some other, any other, with whom one may fuse in a narcissistic attempt at ensuring one’s own survival. Often in the unlived life, the conceit is that one is highly competent, successful, and loveable. In the unlived life, one has either achieved a complete satisfaction, or at least knows the way to it.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A foundational idea of psychoanalysis is that there is something unfeasible, unrealizable, or unworkable about the telling and the living of a contemporary, modern life, and psychoanalysis became a story about why people couldn’t speak honestly about their own lives, and about what it was they couldn’t speak about. In fact, what we suffer from, as Phillips writes, is biography. “[W]e need to cure ourselves of biography,” he says, “and our beliefs in it” (<i>Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst</i>, 21). We all know the problems with our own biographies; we’ve all had the experience of being at a family reunion, a wake, a wedding, or some such thing telling stories about our own history when an older relative interrupts to say, “it didn’t happen that way at all!” One reason for this is that we must live our lives forward, while biography is constructed backwards.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Our biographies, our histories, are fictions; they have to be fictions since that is the only way to make a different future for ourselves or, conversely, justify the future we are living into. If one listens carefully in the therapeutic hour, the stories we hear are the stories of unmet needs, stories of what one wanted long ago, of what was missed, and what is wanted for the future. The stories we tell about our lives are usually, and unconsciously, meant to mislead--both others and ourselves. We are constantly trying to unknow what we already know about ourselves; we create the illusion of a life that makes sense (in either a positive or negative way) so that we won’t perish of the truth. In therapy, the mere clarification or chronologizing of biography is not the agent of change. Rather, it is the creation of a kind of intimacy within the therapeutic hour that allows clients, and ourselves, to realize and speak what is true about oneself. That kind of intimate honesty is never found in biography.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Often, people are haunted by their unlived lives, the lives they should have had, and the story of their lives becomes the story of what they have missed out on, and the idea that one is missing out can be paralyzing. One result may be that, fueled by the anxiety of missing out, one cannot commit to anyone or anything, and even if one does manage a commitment, one cannot stay faithful to it. Furthermore, the inability to tolerate missing out is really an inability to tolerate any form of frustration, and if one refuses to tolerate frustration, one will not tolerate satisfaction, either. A generalized greed begins to dominate one’s choices; a greed for sensation, for experience, for consolation, for regard drives one on until, like Terry Jones’ enormous glutton in the Python’s movie, <i>The Meaning of Life</i>, one simply explodes from surfeit. I think that if addiction is anything, it is frustration that’s too easily satisfied. When one is willing to wrestle with frustration and anxiety, rather than effortlessly ameliorating them by distraction, denial, pharmacology or the like, one is liable to discover strengths one never knew one possessed, or creativity in problem solving, and a novelty of thought one never knew one was capable of.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“In general it is also certainly true to say,” Freud writes in <i>Contributions to the Psychology of Erotic Life</i>, “that the psychical significance of a drive rises in proportion to its frustration.” In other words, the more frustrated we are in our wanting, the more we value and desire the absent object. Freud is not simply counseling us on the pleasures of self-restraint or a kind of ascetic denial (yet there is undeniably pleasure in pain), but he is speaking to the idea that frustration is the vehicle for illuminating our desires, and necessarily then, illuminating the conditions for our satisfaction. What we might call therapeutic change.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>But we don't want to change, change is not simply being something at one moment and then deciding to be something else the next. It is a painfully ambivalent process, and it goes on far too long for our tastes, alternating us between what we were and what we will become, suspending us between what we are and what we want to be. W.H. Auden wrote: <i>We would rather be ruined than change/ We would rather die in our dread/ Than climb upon the cross of the moment/ and let our illusions die. </i><br />
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The 18th Century philosopher Immanuel Kant highlighted this alternating psychic movement in his descriptions of encounters with what he called the sublime. But the sublime is not a product of psyche; it is itself a totality which exists outside of psyche and to which psyche may be exposed. As I understand him, Kant argued that the sublime has at least two dimensions, one of magnitude and the other of force. In other words, when confronted with the sublime, the experience is so big, so immense, that one simply cannot wrap one’s mind around it; it is incomprehensible. In addition to its incomprehensibility, there is the added and intense feeling of being overwhelmed in its presence and one’s physical and emotional integrity feels threatened by an encounter with the sublime.<br />
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What makes the sublime even more disturbing is the feeling of undeniable pleasure in the face of the apparent “counter-purposiveness,” as Kant named it, and which one experiences as the disorganizing, distressing, and disturbing effect upon cognition, emotion, and consciousness in general. One would expect such an encounter to be painful, but instead the sublime encounter evokes pleasure and an aesthetic experience one retrospectively understands to contain a sublime beauty. <br />
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Perhaps it is, in fact, the unlived life that, improperly regarded, threatens to trivialize or domesticate the sublime, and constellates as a singular image of satisfaction that serves ultimately to trivialize and domesticate an ungovernable and unfathomable reality. The danger of the unlived life is that we remain unaware and unconscious of the embedded political, theological, social, and psychological agendas buried so deep within the lives we must live that we are more likely to shackle rather than free ourselves, more apt to obscure than illuminate, more likely to limit than expand our lives. As Freud insists, what we see is determined by what we cannot see, or by what we refuse to see.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To accomplish the knowing of what we do not want to know provokes and invites disturbance and discomfiture, it demands from us a willingness to allow our senses to incorporate something that initially appears insensible. But there is something else going on in one’s experience of the sublime. One’s own ideas and intuitions (both conscious and unconscious ideas of one’s own reason, which Kant suggests interact with the sublime, if not actually constituting it) are brought to bear on the experience and eventually result in a harmony of reason with the sublime. With this move, the sublime becomes “purposive” rather than “counter-purposive” and creates a feeling of deep, acute pleasure. The initially disturbing experience of the sublime is now matched by a higher pleasure rising from the newly discovered purposiveness, and it persuades us, as the poet Shelley noted, to forsake the easy for the harder pleasures. Of course, one can’t craft the sublime encounter into a continuous state of being. The purposive and counterpurposive states are alternating continually and neither of them wins out, which is to say that experiencing the sublime subjects one to a disturbing, rapid alternation of feelings and perceptual states. <br />
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Sometimes, people understand the gap between the unlived life and the lived life, and the frequent alternation between them to which we are subjected, as a kind of hell. And if there is a hell, this is as good a definition of it as any, for hell is not to be found in some distant place, but exists here and now, formed by all of us together. It seems to me there are only a few ways out of hell; one is common and used by many: fail to attend to the hell and become so much a part of it that one no longer sees it. An alternative way, a challenging path to be sure, demands that one live seeking out the sublime encounter, a way of living and thinking that places one, more often than not, uncomfortably outside of one’s pleasingly comfortable beliefs. This way out of hell requires one to disregard easy pleasure and instead be determined to recognize who and what voices, in the midst of hell are not hell, and subjecting them to rigorous examination helping them to be recognized and abide, creating a space for them and in so doing, experience marvelous hopes, extraordinary insights, and sublime pleasures, rendered all the more marvelous for their difficult acquisition.<br />
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Forsaking the easy pleasures of the unlived life for the harder pleasures of living the life one has is a difficult challenge: one must value both equally and move between and among the lived and unlived lives because much of living is the task of embodying the imaginal. A significant part of understanding love, for instance, happens imaginally and then must be, through trial and error, embodied between and among people in the material world. The purpose of living, as I see it at least, is to make what is implicit in imagination explicit in living; this is the gift the unlived life offers us.Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-87044241067919203442020-08-06T08:53:00.001-07:002020-08-06T08:53:18.205-07:00The Mything Voice: A Conversation Regarding the Study of MythDavid Miller tells a charming anecdote in which Joseph Campbell delivers the punchline, saying, “A myth ith ath good ath a sthmile,” punning on the idiom, a miss is as good as a mile. More than simply recalling the incisorless speech of a child, mything and missing are a conspicuous pair pertaining to the study of mythology as well. There is, as Dr. Miller points out, something missing in our mything. <br />
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Indulge me the telling of my own anecdote, one that I’ve heard in various settings and circumstances my whole life, and has always suggested to me the peculiar ability of my people to ignore discomfort or emotional disturbance. It goes like this:<br />
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<i>An English couple have a child. After the birth, medical tests reveal that the child is normal, apart from the fact that it is Norwegian. As the child grows older, it obsessively reads about farming and farm implements and dresses in overalls, flannel shirts, and hand knit sweaters bearing wintry designs, but all his basic functions develop normally. He walks, eats, sleeps, learns, and so on, but for some reason the Norwegian child never speaks. The concerned parents take the child to the doctor, who reassures them that the child is normal in all other areas and he is sure there is nothing to worry about and that the child will speak in time. Well, years pass and the child becomes a teenager and still does not speak, although he seems to be completely normal in all other respects. The Norwegian child’s English mother is particularly distressed by her son’s apparent inability to speak, but she tries to hide her worry and sadness from the child while she works very hard to make her unfortunate child’s life comfortable. One day she makes the now 17 year old, still silent child, a bowl of tomato soup and takes it to him in his room where he is listening to music on the stereo. Not long after, the child appears in the kitchen and suddenly says, “Mother. The soup is a little tepid.” The astonished mother says, “All these years you never spoke a word, and it appears you could speak all along! Why? Why did you never say anything before?” “Because, mother,” answers the child, “up until now everything has been fine.” </i><br />
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For most of my life, whenever I heard one of the several variations of this joke, I merely chalked it up to a gentle lampooning of Scandinavian stoicism. But now I find something deeper and darker in this old joke, a disturbing truth about a cherished value, comfort. This little anecdote reveals the disturbing shadow of comfort in that when one becomes too comfortable one is removed from, or taken out of the stream of life, one lives as an invalid. Being comfortable and certain, suppressing dissonant voices and unwelcome experiences, creates a wound; a wound that inhabits and inhibits individuals—as well as scholarly disciplines—as well as intellectual discourse, and inhibits the development of more subtly complex perceptions of the sublime mysteries to which one is exposed through the often prosaic effort of living. If one is to more deeply understand the sublilme mysterium which lives us, a willing acceptance of the uncomfortable, discomfiting voice, the voice of the stranger at the door, the speech of that which is disturbed and disturbing, is essential. One must encourage the kind of disturbing conversations and inquiries which are often missing from the methodology that we, in the Pacifica tribe, employ in the study myth. And like the little Norwegian boy, I found that up until a few years ago, the way we studied myth had been fine. But it is no longer fine, at least not for me, and now I have something to say.<br />
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Considerations of disturbance lead me to, once again, consider David Miller. In a keynote address, in fact, the same speech in which he told the anecdote I previously referenced, Dr. Miller spoke of the need for those of us who employ what he calls a synoptic study of mythology, to address its criticisms. Upon reflection, I believe Dr. Miller was characteristically generous in his understanding of our understanding. Those of us who attended Pacifica Graduate Institute and who, like myself, received a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies, run the risk of cultivating an embarrassing self-deception because we did not study the studies of mythology; we did not study the source material that C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, and James Hillman studied. Instead, we learned about Jung, Campbell, and Hillman, and their psychological, metaphorical approaches to mythology. All too often critiques of that, largely psychological, method were received as ad homonym attacks rather than legitimate, albeit disturbing, appraisals.<br />
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Professor Miller assumed, perhaps over-optimistically, that those of us listening in full sympathy with him on the cusp of that Labor Day weekend in 2012 knew full well what he meant when he uttered the word synoptic. I know that I thought I knew. I knew that the word synoptic meant that several different stories, perhaps by several different authors, writing in different places and at different times, despite their lack of correspondence or consistency, all told the same story. I was sure that I knew that the word synoptic meant that different narratives point to the same meaning—in the case of myth, a psychological meaning—and I became enthused to write just such a synoptic methodology for the study of myth and answer critics like Roland Barthes, Bruce Lincoln, and even our own academic sibling, Sophia Heller (whose work holds no small appeal for me). Not surprisingly, as a psychotherapist the program running in the background dictated that, for me, the best use of myth is that use which clarifies and valorizes the human-all-too-human condition. Other, unconsidered and "irrelevant," perspectives had been of little importance and held only a marginal interest for me. Perspectives like that of, say, William Faulkner’s, himself a great mythographer who is supposed to have said, “One of Keats’ odes is worth any number of old women;” or that of Roland Barthes, who seemed to aggressively suggest that myth “…is stolen speech” and is best understood semiotically, or even the notion of Goethe’s in which he insists that the presented form of myth is not allegorical or metaphorical but is itself an Ur-phenomenon, or in other words, the reality that a Greek statue of Aphrodite is not a mere representation of the goddess, but is itself nature manifesting in material form, the very form love would necessarily take were it to become incarnate. <br />
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So I wrote David a longish letter about my plan to write a methodology for the synoptic study of mythology illustrating that all myths had one meaning—namely, a psychological one—to which he responded that that would be a fine idea, and that since he didn’t have ownership of the word synoptic, I could use that word however best I saw fit, but he wanted me to know that the way I used the word was not how he used the word. Professor Miller borrowed the term from Feldman and Richardson (The Rise of Modern Mythology 1680-1860), a term which they used in the early 70’s to argue for a return to treating myth as a “master field” unto itself, a primary subject which could be used to illuminate other disciplines rather than the other way around, causing mythology to be embedded within other disciplines. For example, from a Jungian perspective, archetypes are meant to “attract, to convince, to fascinate and to overpower” (Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious). Myths, in Jung’s conceptualization, are the epiphenomena of archetypes, psychic products which are themselves twice removed from conscious inspection or elaboration. From such a perspective mythology is in service to psychology, and while that is very appealing to me, it is very far indeed from being the only possible reason for the existence of myth. For instance, it is clearly possible that it is not only differing levels of consciousness which are responsible for the production of myth, for archetypal images are “…neither evenly distributed, nor found on all continents” (Witzel, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies, 15). It may be that physical and social environments, pathway dependencies, charismatic qualities of political or spiritual leaders, and other individual and cultural factors all, in some way, condition systems of mythology. As G.S. Kirk stated it, “Analysis of a myth should not stop when one particular theoretical explanation has been applied and found productive” (The Nature of Greek Myths).<br />
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Because I am nothing if not persistent, although I acknowledge that some call it perseveration, let me return to Jung’s statement about archetypes, those productions of Psyche which he described as overpowering, fascinating, and enthralling, or some words to that effect, and which provide a very big clue to that with which mythology is engaged, and why we find it so engaging. Jung’s language is very similar to the language the 18th Century philosopher Immanuel Kant used in his descriptions of the sublime. But the sublime is not a product of psyche; it is itself a totality which exists outside of psyche and to which psyche may be exposed. As I recall, Kant argued that the sublime has at least two dimensions, one of magnitude and the other of force. In other words, when confronted with the sublime, the experience is so big, so immense, that one simply cannot wrap one’s mind around it; it is incomprehensible. In addition to its incomprehensibility, there is the added and intense feeling of being overwhelmed in its presence and one’s physical and emotional integrity feels threatened by an encounter with the sublime. What makes the sublime even more disturbing is the feeling of undeniable pleasure in the face of the apparent “counter-purposiveness,” as Kant named it, and which one experiences as the disorganizing, distressing, and disturbing effect upon cognition, emotion, and consciousness in general. One would expect such an encounter to be painful, but instead the sublime encounter evokes pleasure and an aesthetic experience one retrospectively understands to be beauty. <br />
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Perhaps it is, in fact, the sublime which is the proper subject of myth—that <i>mysterium tremendum</i> which the logos of myth attempts to render intelligible, and if this is so, the addressed subject is so vast, so extensive, so interminable and immeasurable that only one approach to its study, or a singular voice of understanding serves ultimately to trivialize and domesticate an ungovernable and unfathomable reality. As David Miller put it, “The danger is that we may be unaware and unconscious.” Unaware and unconscious of the embedded political, theological, social, and psychological agendas buried so deep within the psychological way we study myth as to be unrecognized, we are more likely to further shackle than free, more apt to obscure than illuminate, more likely to limit than restore mythography to its rightful place as a master discipline. As the philosophical method referred to as destructuralization has repeatedly demonstrated, what we see is determined by what we cannot see; or as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes, “Our vision, […] what we are able to see, is sponsored by our blind spots; [knowing] what we are determined not to know frees us and forces us to know something else” (<i>Becoming Freud</i>).<br />
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To accomplish the knowing of what we do not know provokes and invites disturbance and discomfiture, it demands from us a willingness to allow our senses to incorporate something that initially appears insensible. But there is something else going on in one’s experience of the sublime. One’s own ideas and intuitions (both conscious and unconscious ideas of one’s own reason, which Kant suggests interact with the sublime, if not actually constituting it) are brought to bear on the experience and eventually result in a harmony of reason with the sublime. With this move, the sublime becomes “purposive” rather than “counter-purposive” and creates a feeling of deep, acute pleasure. The deep disturbance is now matched by a higher pleasure rising from the newly discovered purposiveness, and it persuades us, as the poet Shelley noted, to forsake the easy for the harder pleasures. Of course, one can’t shoehorn the sublime encounter into a continuous state of being. The purposive and counterpurposive states are alternating continually and neither of them wins out, which is to say that experiencing the sublime subjects one to a disturbing, rapid alternation of feelings and perceptual states. <br />
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If myth is indeed the speech of the sublime (ology typically refers to the study of something, but the root word is logos, commonly taken to denote speech) then one, single, unopposed perspective is nothing more than a blind alley in a welter of urban streets. Myth needs a variety of approaches and voices in interposition to even begin to plunge its limitless logos; it requires a cacophony of voices clambering to live in the awkward fullness of life rather than seeking out a comfortable, banal, and ultimately regressive paradise of belief. Campbell knew this very well, and while his rhetoric or his imagery sometimes left the earth, he never did.<br />
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And if there is a hell, it is not to be found in some distant place either, but exists here and now, formed by all of us together. It seems to me there are only a few ways out of hell; one is common and used by many: fail to attend to the hell and become so much a part of it that one no longer sees it. An alternative way, a challenging path to be sure, demands that one live seeking out the sublime encounter, a way of living and thinking that places one, more often than not, uncomfortably outside of one’s pleasingly comfortable beliefs.<br />
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This way out of hell requires one to disregard easy pleasure and instead be determined to recognize who and what voices, in the midst of hell are not hell, and subjecting them to rigorous examination help them to be recognized and abide, creating a space for them and in so doing, experience marvelous hopes, extraordinary insights, and sublime pleasures, rendered all the more marvelous for their difficult acquisition.Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-41163703014663028822020-05-13T01:41:00.003-07:002020-08-06T09:38:04.398-07:00Out Damned Virus<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 12px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: domine; font-size: 14px;">As the Corona Virus pandemic marches on, despite having claimed more American lives in four months than the entire 19 years of the Vietnam War, Americans are becoming increasingly impatient. Some are frightened about their health and economic well-being, some are panicked and locked in the grip of irrational fear, hoarding food and supplies, and too many, it seems, deny that there is anything to fear from the disease and rail against the weak-minded, cowardly lot of social isolators and distancers, and take no precautions against the virus whatsoever (some people in this category have paid for their dubiety with their lives). Of course, confusion and anxieties are stoked by leaders who dismiss science, history, ethics, and instead rely on wishful thinking, superstition, and lies. This isn’t new, of course, and certainly by now we shouldn’t be surprised by the craven personalities that populate elected seats of government. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Mark Twain is supposed to have remarked that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” and that is, whether Twain said it or not, the truth. In 430 B.C.E. Athens found itself in a profound political crisis as the result of a plague. Thucydides tells us that prayer and appeals to the gods were useless, that social order disintegrated, and anarchy reigned because there wasn’t a figure of authority capable of managing the response to the emergency. In Sophocles’ drama, Oedipus <i>Tyrannus</i>, the city-state of Thebes is being devastated by a plague. This play, many scholars agree, was performed for the first time after the outbreak of plague in Athens, and opens with a chorus of Thebans of all ages pleading with Oedipus the King to find a way to end the devastation. Oedipus assures them that he has it under control, that the best minds are on it, and relief will soon be found. Of course, the problems that perpetuated the plague in Sophocles’ play were problems fundamental to the person of Oedipus. Once he had been deposed and proper expiation made, the miasma was eliminated.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">In ancient Rome, there were nine plagues between 174 and 463 C.E. and no doubt out of desperation and due to the lack of scientific understanding of viral and bacterial contagions, sometime in the late 3rd century C.E. an island in the Tiber River was set up as a sanctuary and temple to the Greek god of healing and medicine, Asclepius. This seemed to have some palliative effect, but it was probably due more to the island temple’s proximity to fresh water and its isolation making it a good place to quarantine that helped to flatten the curve, rather than any kind of divine intervention. But human nature being what it is, I’m reasonably sure the citizens of Rome were relieved to be able to “return to normal” and were satisfied to attribute their good fortune in surviving to “amazing, tremendous leadership” and to the gods hearing and responding to their supplications. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">It doesn’t appear that much has changed in the past 1,900 years or so. A surprising number of people still say the pandemic will be neutralized by prayer and that god will protect them; that the virus “will just disappear,” that it isn’t any worse than a cold, or that it’s a hoax. Many people are mobilizing to protest lock downs, even in states that are among the hardest hit by the virus. Please explain to me, as Lionel Trilling put it, </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><i>Why, in American Culture, intelligence is considered to be some sort of perilous faculty, that ‘cleverness is the first step into mischief,’ that the heart and the mind are rivals in the struggle for truth. Why is it always too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing?</i> (The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Another, less obvious part of our problem in dealing with COVID-19 is that there are the primordial, archetypal fears which are reflexively attributed to a surprisingly novel existential threat, a threat which we don’t understand and can’t control. Viral pandemics carry with them the metaphor of pollution. There is something unclean, something dirty, something disgusting, about a virus that requires constant hygienic attention, and it seems, perhaps because of its asymptomatic presence, much more hygienically disturbing than say, a rhinovirus that gives one watery eyes and a runny nose. With Coronavirus, one can’t be self-aware enough to know that one is dirty; and such unknowing is shameful, a bit like not knowing that much of one’s supper has remained in one’s beard. Anxieties about cleanliness and purity are often accompanied by feelings of disgust, revulsion, and abhorrence, feelings that have some evolutionary benefit to us in that they help us to avoid substances like feces, vomit, blood, or rancid, maggot-infested meat. We also instinctively avoid people with visible signs of something that might be contagious—suppurating wounds and lesions, infestations of one kind or another (DO NOT google this), or disfiguring illnesses (probably shouldn’t google this, either)—as a way of enhancing our own chances for survival. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">But unfortunately, our mysophobia, fear of dirt or germs, often crosses over into xenophobia, a phobia of strangers, and in this case the stranger is identified as the threat rather than the actual threat, which is the virus itself. A variety of Xenophobia is probably at work in the willingness of some people to let others (most likely strangers to them) die in order to develop “herd immunity.” Surely they aren’t so committed to the well-being of the herd that they would consider sacrificing themselves, their own spouses, their own children, their own parents to scale up the immunity of the herd, would they? I’m doubtful. The cruelty of relying upon herd immunity is hard to escape; it lies in the sacrifice of those who are deemed to be impure, polluted, and unhealthy, those who have themselves become societal pollutants, and they are, unconsciously, held responsible for the miasma that can only be eradicated by their sacrificial death. This reflexive need for purification is unconsciously, and ironically, reinforced by handwashing, the most effective way we have of preventing COVID-19 contagion.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Handwashing is a way of removing personal responsibility and guilt. Idiomatically we say, “I’ve washed my hands of this matter.” Pontius Pilate washes his hands in front of the crowd and says, “I am innocent of this man’s blood.” After King Duncan is brutally murdered, Lady Macbeth tells her blood-soaked husband, “a little water clears us of this deed.” But her compulsive handwashing is a sign that her contamination cannot be washed away, her guilt is inescapable, and her crime, unpardonable.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Therefore, if one is so inclined (and I fully realize that I may be the only one) to understand handwashing as activating an unconscious awareness of guilt and the attempt to expiate it, what exactly are we guilty of? First of all, we are all of us, every day and to varying degrees, guilty of the petty larcenies and perjuries of social interaction, of living a life that bumps up against other lives in a sometimes messy, frustrating, and disingenuous manner. Some are petty criminals and engage in misdemeanor frauds or thefts, some commit crimes of passion, some aspire to be criminal masterminds and ply their nefarious trade as racketeers, CEOs, or politicians. These last mentioned are, obviously, lives of crime that require a degree of intent, a certain level of <i>mens rea</i>, stitched together with a crippled conscience that is usually not found to such a degree in an ordinary life. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">But even those of us living relatively normal lives, comfortable with our image of ourselves as good citizens, good neighbors, and good parents, even we are condemned to live with a guilt of which it is hard to rid ourselves. Paul Tillich put it this way:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><i>The citizens of a city are not guilty of the crimes committed in their city; but they are guilty as participants in the destiny of [humanity] as a whole and in the destiny of their city in particular…. They are guilty, not of committing the crimes of which their group is accused, but of contributing to the destiny in which these crimes happened</i>. (Systematic Theology)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">I realize there are people who, thinking and acting in good faith, refuse to believe that we are interdependent to that degree and who, perhaps, wrestle with the competing values inherent in the issue of governmental intervention in areas of social and individual self-determination. But such an acknowledgement of, and struggle with, competing values suggests at least some small awareness of existential guilt. In what I’m about to say, I’m referring only to the most arrogant and radical of the protesters, those who stand in heavily armed defiance of best medical advice and mock or aggressively threaten those who attempt to follow it. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">People who behave in such ways are self-righteously convinced that they have been prevented from achieving the kind of life they wanted by outside forces, some massive conspiracy instigated by minorities, a secret cabal, or a “rigged” system. They imagine themselves bold enough to have chosen the “red pill,” smart enough to avoid the comfortable prison in which most people live, and their public pose indicates that they are no longer subjugated to, or enslaved by, anyone. They ignore expertise and believe they know more themselves than scientists, intellectuals, or anyone whom they derisively associate with “the elite.” They are always self-righteous, they tell themselves that they know what is right, what is correct, and what is true in any situation. Their unconscious defenses are revealed in their refusal to wear masks, in their ridicule of those who do, and in their refusal to pay any heed whatsoever to the communicability of the virus; they may privately believe they won’t contract the virus, or even that it doesn’t exist in the first place. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">They protect themselves, not from a real physical threat, but from feelings of vulnerability, a lack of understanding, and profound insecurity; all of which, one may presume, present a greater threat to them than death. These compensatory behaviors don’t allow for the possibility that they might possibly bear a significant degree of responsibility for their dissatisfaction with the state of their lives and the state of their world, and therefore they won’t allow any kind of introspection or any acknowledgement of guilt, either consequential or existential. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">If we are to be connected to our own inner world, more connected to other human beings, and more connected to the natural world, we must engage our faculty of self-reflection and take stock of how we live, exploring the nature of our own existential guilt. We must eventually come to accept that we can’t possibly know everything, that our lives collide with other lives in all sorts of ways, often unintended, and that most pernicious of American Myths, that of the rugged individual, is an invention designed to let one rest comfortably within a specious sense of unrivalled individual mastery and unfettered free will. However, by becoming more self-aware we have a better sense of reality, we actually end up making better choices for ourselves, for others, and for the planet, by understanding that we cannot overcome the difficulties of living by simply martialing personal will, by a declaration of individual fiat, or pretending that such difficulties don’t exist.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Individual acts of self-reflection can initiate powerful personal changes; it gives one the opportunity to experience the gift of self-reconciliation via a radical acceptance of one’s own life, and life in the world, exactly as it is and needing nothing in it to be different. Reconciliation may even be found in washing and keeping social distance if we do it with an eye toward understanding the unconscious specter of existential guilt and, perhaps, even the guilt of privilege which we might otherwise deny and repress. It affords one an opportunity to face that guilt and privilege and cast off the comforting, albeit distorted and deadening, illusions of security, opportunity, freedom, and exceptionalism; especially the delusions of <i>la folie pour beaucoup</i>. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: domine;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Appreciated this way, the modest act of self-reflection lays the groundwork for a revolution that is at first personal, but one which, some way or another, eventually radiates out to one’s friends, community, state, nation, even the entire world. That’s the type of pandemic we need, a pandemic whose symptoms are self-awareness, compassion, and communitas. A contagion that opens the mind and expands the heart, rather than one that closes the heart and suffocates the mind. With an open mind and a heartful attention we may take in the whole of life, “wrapped cool in its mystery and promise” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, <i>My Lost City</i>), and be confident that no matter what we may face, it is right and proper and entirely suitable that we should face it.</span></span><br />
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Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-27499755772528496522020-03-29T13:13:00.002-07:002020-03-29T13:13:32.165-07:00More Joyce<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">As you may know, James Joyce, was an important influence on </span><a href="https://www.jcf.org/works/a-skeleton-key-to-finnegans-wake/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #7461aa; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">the work of Joseph Campbell</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">, and continues to be an important influence for many of my colleagues and friends affiliated with the Joseph Campbell Foundation. But I must admit that I’m at a bit of a loss regarding the way to distill the essence of James Joyce in a MythBlast. It’s not that I’m unfamiliar with Joyce; to the contrary, I’ve read Joyce most of my adult life. It is impossible not to regard James Joyce as a giant of the modernist movement and, despite the too common currency of the word these days, a genius. But I find that in his books, Joyce remains distant, difficult to know, unknowable in the way that one feels one knows Hemingway or say, Virginia Woolf. This lack of knowing, this authorial distance or remove, exists as paradox in the most autobiographical of authors.Paradox is the word that best defines Joyce, it seems. Lionel Trilling wrote that in </span><em style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #666666; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.joyceproject.com/index.php?chapter=telem&notes=1#.WzAEW6dKgRl" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #7461aa; font: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Ulysses</a> </em><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">particularly, Joyce exhibited an intrinsic “sympathy for progressive social ideas.” Relying on </span><em style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #666666; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ulysses</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> alone, one easily assumes the author to be politically liberal, democratic, protective of individual rights, and supportive of social and political reformation. But Dominick Manganiello, </span><a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Joyce_s_politics.html?id=YNlaAAAAMAAJ" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #7461aa; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">in his work on Joyce’s politics</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">, concludes that Joyce was a libertarian. And then there’s the matter of Joyce’s nuanced relationship to religion. While Joyce categorically denounced the Catholic Church, some of the subject matter of </span><em style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #666666; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ulysses</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> sincerely wrestles with profoundly religious concerns and intimations. Some catholic supporters of Joyce argue that he reconciled with the church prior to his death, and in an interview, during which he was asked when he left the Catholic Church, Joyce replied, “That’s for the Church to say.” On the one hand he adored Nora Barnacle; so much so, that he memorialized the date of their first encounter, June 16, 1904 as the single day within which the narrative of </span><em style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #666666; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ulysses </em><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">unfolds. He was capable of summoning feelings of great love, and yet he was often faithless, self-centered, and unthinkingly cruel to her. Joyce was both highbrow and lowbrow at once: he was undeniably the brilliant stylist of literature, something of an elitist and an aesthete, dandyish, spendthrift; and yet had remarkable affection for and concerns about the plight of everyday, ordinary, anonymous people barely eking out livings in the great urban sea of everyday life. Joyce granted some of the faceless mass immortality through his indelible characterizations and satires of them. His family was often nearly destitute during Joyce’s adolescence and in the early days of his adulthood, his father having squandered, if not a fortune, at least a very sizable nest egg. Perhaps, better than anyone, Gertrude Stein summed up the paradox of James Joyce when she remarked, “Joyce is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him.”</span><br />
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Paradox is the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">métier</em> of myth, and the more intensely paradoxical one’s situation, the more deeply one finds oneself in the mythic world. Paradox is the most present and identifiable feature of the sublime mystery commonly referred to as the divine. Joyce’s writing, as well as his life and biography, abound in paradox and I don’t think it a stretch to call him the most mythological of modern writers. Furthermore, I don’t even think it is a stretch to favorably compare Joyce with Sophocles; like Sophocles, Joyce has a great compassion for those unfortunates who have to bear difficult fates, he empathizes with those who find themselves struggling with, and ultimately pinned beneath <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Fortuna’s </em>revolving wheel.<br /><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />Finnegans Wake</em> has a distinctly mythic, cyclical structure, and one can’t help but recall Joseph Campbell’s remark that dreams are private myths, and myths are public dreams. HCE’s somnambulistic journey through dreams and a bad conscience has the familiar mythic elements of finding oneself in a strange world with unfamiliar physics, populated with challenges and terrors (not the least of which are the ten one hundred letter words scattered through the text), and finally emerging once again into the familiar light of day, transformed and renewed. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Wake’s</em> narrative pattern is, as is its entire form, circular and recursive, falling back onto and into itself and reemerging from the murky dream and myth-like darkness with new directions and insights; worlds coming into being and dissolving, Brahman-like, dreamt by the dreamer dreaming the dream of the Universe. What Picasso’s cubism did for the visual arts, in his last two books Joyce did for the literary arts. I don’t even pretend to fully comprehend Joyce, but as he wrote in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ulysses</em>, “I’m almosting it.”</div>
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I originally wrote this essay for the Joseph Campbell Foundation's MythBlast series. I thank them for their permission allowing me to repost it here. </div>
Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-84338676008748129812020-03-29T13:05:00.001-07:002020-03-29T13:05:39.846-07:00What Will Be, Is<div class="post-byline" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #aaaaaa; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;">
BY BRADLEY OLSON · JANUARY 28, 2019. </div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.jcf.org/works/a-skeleton-key-to-finnegans-wake" style="border: 0px; color: #7461aa; font: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake cover" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-17242" data-recalc-dims="1" height="300" sizes="(max-width: 195px) 100vw, 195px" src="https://i2.wp.com/www.jcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/skeleton-key-2008.jpg?resize=195%2C300&ssl=1" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/www.jcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/skeleton-key-2008.jpg?resize=195%2C300&ssl=1 195w, https://i2.wp.com/www.jcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/skeleton-key-2008.jpg?w=324&ssl=1 324w" style="border: 0px; float: right; font: inherit; height: auto; margin: 18px 0px 18px 20px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; transition: opacity 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline;" width="195" /></a>This piece was orginally published by the Joseph Campbell Foundation in their MythBlast series, of which I am the editor. I thank them for their kindness in allowing me to republish it on Falstaff Was My Tutor.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">This 1944 preface to </span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.jcf.org/works/titles/a-skeleton-key-to-finnegans-wake/" style="border: 0px; color: #7461aa; font: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A Skeleton Key to</span> <span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Finnegans</span><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> Wake</span></a></em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">, Joseph Campbell calls Joyce’s book “…a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programs, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millennium” (xxiii). It’s apropos, then, that Joyce’s main character in Finnegan’s Wake is named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, HCE, or as Joyce refers to him, </span><span style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">H</span><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">ere </span><span style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">C</span><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">omes </span><span style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">E</span><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">veryone. HCE is, himself, a terminal moraine in human form. When </span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463592" style="border: 0px; color: #7461aa; font: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline;">Finnegans Wake</a></em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> was published in 1939 (you can see what an early enthusiast Campbell was) many critics didn’t know what to make of it. Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, thought </span><span style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ulysses</span><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> to be the finest book of the 20th century, but found </span><span style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Finnegans Wake</span><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> to be “formless and dull,” “a tragic failure,” and “a frightful bore.” I think that Nabokov may have been wrong in his assessment of </span><span style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Wake</span><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">, though absolutely right in his admiration for </span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/ulysses00joyc_1/" style="border: 0px; color: #7461aa; font: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline;">Ulysses</a></em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">. In </span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Finnegans Wake</em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">, it might seem that Joyce abandons any regard for his readers. It’s hard to find any narrative traction, and while </span><span style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Wake</span><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> may be wrought from the English language, it is certainly not written in English, but rather in some strange, “Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues”; as Joyce writes, “ this is nat language in any sinse of the world” (</span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Finnegans Wake</em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">, 83).</span></div>
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<a href="https://i1.wp.com/www.jcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Nietzsche187a.jpg?ssl=1" style="border-bottom: none; border-image: initial; border-left: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; color: #7461aa; font: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="Friedrich Nietzsche, c. 1875 (photograph by Friedrich Hartmann)" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-17243" class="size-medium wp-image-17243" data-recalc-dims="1" height="300" sizes="(max-width: 221px) 100vw, 221px" src="https://i1.wp.com/www.jcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Nietzsche187a.jpg?resize=221%2C300&ssl=1" srcset="https://i1.wp.com/www.jcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Nietzsche187a.jpg?resize=221%2C300&ssl=1 221w, https://i1.wp.com/www.jcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Nietzsche187a.jpg?resize=768%2C1042&ssl=1 768w, https://i1.wp.com/www.jcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Nietzsche187a.jpg?resize=755%2C1024&ssl=1 755w, https://i1.wp.com/www.jcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Nietzsche187a.jpg?w=1464&ssl=1 1464w" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; height: auto; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; transition: opacity 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline;" width="221" /></a><div class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-17243" style="border: 0px; color: #999999; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 19px !important; padding: 0px 0px 8px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Friedrich Nietzsche, c. 1875 (photograph by Friedrich Hartmann)</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">But Campbell found traction, and boy, did he ever: “Underneath the verbal ambiguities and philologic traps of the </span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Wake</em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">, deep speaks to deep about such everyday matters as marital discord, sibling strife, military slaughter, racial violence, theological differences and financial thimblerigging—fascinating material that academicians (at their peril) fail to discuss or continue to ignore” (</span><span style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Skeleton Key, </span><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">xxvi). What’s more, Campbell sensed the profound influence the work of Friedrich Nietzsche exerted upon Joyce: “Nietzsche’s description of his own creative struggle, ‘I write in blood, I will be read in blood,’ is applicable tenfold to Joyce” (</span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Skeleton Key</em><span style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">360). But I’ll return to that “Nichtian” influence in a moment.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Perhaps it may seem odd, then, that the only thing approaching a ritual that I’ve associated with the arrival of the new year in the past two decades or so is reading from </span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Finnegans Wake</em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">. <a href="https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463592" style="border: 0px; color: #7461aa; font: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-17244" data-recalc-dims="1" height="300" sizes="(max-width: 203px) 100vw, 203px" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.jcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Finnegans-Wake-Cover.jpg?resize=203%2C300&ssl=1" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.jcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Finnegans-Wake-Cover.jpg?resize=203%2C300&ssl=1 203w, https://i0.wp.com/www.jcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Finnegans-Wake-Cover.jpg?resize=695%2C1024&ssl=1 695w, https://i0.wp.com/www.jcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Finnegans-Wake-Cover.jpg?w=700&ssl=1 700w" style="border: 0px; float: right; font: inherit; height: auto; margin: 18px 0px 18px 20px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; transition: opacity 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline;" width="203" /></a>At some point, near the end of December or the beginning of January, I read the last lines of </span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Wake</em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> and let it bear me serenely along like the Liffey, “So soft this morning, ours” and a bit later, “End here. Us then. Finn, again!” And finally, Joyce tells me I have the key to the whole thing: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” and thus endeth Finnegans Wake. But in this book, as it almost certainly is in life, the end is not really the end. This understanding is the key to life that Joyce offers his readers. That last sentence of the book is the first part of the sentence that begins the novel: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs” (</span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Finnegans Wake</em><span style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">3). That is the nature of mythic time: circular, recurring, non-linear. There are no beginnings or endings, only the eternally recurring flow.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px !important; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 19px !important; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Circling back to Nietzsche’s influence on Joyce, we arrive at the notion of eternal recurrence, an idea central to Nietzsche’s philosophy. Eternal recurrence suggests that since time is infinite, while the things in time (atoms and events) are finite, events—your life, exactly as you have lived it—will recur again and again and again, innumerable times. As Nietzsche remarked, how well disposed to oneself one would have to be to crave nothing more than this and be able to say, “and never have I heard anything more divine” (</span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/completenietasch10nietuoft/page/270" style="border: 0px; color: #7461aa; font: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline;">The Gay Science</a></em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">, section 341)! This is radical self-acceptance; not merely bearing the circumstances of one’s life because it is necessary that one does, but to love it! That’s the move Nietzsche called </span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Amor Fati</em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">, the love of one’s own fate, perhaps the most burdensome, the most awesome, of our responsibilities to ourselves.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px !important; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 19px !important; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Saying—no, shouting—yes! to life is the primal response to life. The eternal yes is not a call to reformation or redemption, but rather a response to life exactly as it is, embracing the creative, sustaining, destructive nature of life itself. It’s Molly Bloom’s </span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Yes </em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">at the end of </span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ulysses</em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">, and likewise, in </span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Finnegans Wake</em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">, Anna Livia Plurabelle is, as Campbell notes, “the carrier of the Eternal Yes; […] Men, cities, empires, and whole systems bubble and burst in her river of time” (</span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Skeleton Key</em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">, 362). As it is with dreams, the more we live with them, reflect upon them, marvel at the symbols and puzzles of them, the more meaningful to us they become. And so it is with Joyce’s dream of a book, </span><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Finnegans Wake</em><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">.</em> And, as I find with most symbolic puzzles, Campbell stands alongside, enthusiastically pointing the way.</span></div>
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Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-10512920617593821272020-03-28T16:53:00.000-07:002020-03-28T16:53:15.301-07:00Goats, Jars, and Pandemics<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">March, in Flagstaff, has it all: snow, rain, cold,
warm, skiing, hiking, spring break and vacations, work, an equinox and daylight
savings, basketball madness, the death of dictators, and even the </span><a href="https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/umbrella-month/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">celebration
of umbrellas</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">. This list merely scratches the surface
of life’s promenade through March and to it, I’m afraid, I must now also add pandemic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The possibility of having it all; that’s the American
Dream, yes? Many of us that choose to live in Flagstaff do so because we’ve
decided that living in this mountain community offers the best chance of
approximating whatever each of us may think having it all entails. And when we tell
ourselves that we desire it all, we forget that all means, all too often, the
horrors as well as the pleasure of life. The “pan” in pandemic means “all,” and
the “demic” part of the word is related to <i>demos</i>, “of the people.” So, a
pandemic is something that affects everybody, and today there can be no doubt
that we are all affected.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And this ability to affect everyone is one of the
characteristics of the ancient Greek god, Pan. Bearing the horns and the lower
body of a goat, he wasn’t a particularly cruel or punishing god. In fact, he
was rather more inclined toward music and sex. Lots of sex. Perhaps not
coincidentally, he also liked to sleep a lot and whenever he was disturbed in
his midday slumber, he would issue forth an angry, ear-splitting shout that
created panic (<i>panikon deima</i>, fear inspired by the god Pan) in those who
heard it. Panic, then, is inspired by something one has heard, it’s a kind of
aural contagion. If one hears, for instance, that people are buying up all the
toilet paper or chicken or milk available, it inspires a kind of panic to do
the same; a primal, instinctual variation of the Fear Of Missing Out. Panic is
always about the inability to know something, always about the possibility of
having missed hearing of a circumstance or protocol that impacts one’s chances for
survival. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But there is another Pan that is relevant to life in
our mountain town today, and her name is Pandora. In Greek myth, according to
Hesiod she was the first woman, a “beautiful evil” created by the gods on
Olympos, whose destiny it was to become a central figure in the inescapable
suffering of humankind. After Prometheus gave the gift of fire to men—humans
were literally all men at the time, there were no human women at all and human
men seeking the company of the feminine often consorted with or married nymphs
or dryads or some similar creature, Zeus was angry and gave this first woman a
jar (mistranslated as a box) filled with “burdensome toil and sickness that
brings death to men, […] diseases and a myriad other pains.” Prometheus (his
name means foreknowledge or forethought) warned his brother Epimetheus (his
name means afterthought) not to accept any gifts from Zeus but because foresight
wasn’t Epimetheus’ strong suit, he accepted anyway the gorgeous, the literally
heavenly, Pandora who arrived at his door carrying her jar, the contents of
which she immediately released. As a result, Hesiod remarks, the world is full
of evils. Only <i>elpis</i>, hope, a winged creature itself and nestled under
the lip of the jar, did not fly away and the lid was replaced on the jar,
retaining hope within it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Opinions differ about what it means that hope is left
in the jar. Does that mean that humans have no hope, or that hope is the most
evil of all the contents because it prolongs man’s suffering, or does it mean
that hope, optimism, and inspiration remain accessible to humans since it
didn’t wheel away on, to gloss Emily Dickinson, feathered wings. Pandora’s name
means “all giving,” and another yet older name for her is Anesidora, “sender
forth of gifts,” another name for the earth goddess herself, which connects her
to the source of life. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Pandora cannot fail to be all giving; that’s not merely
her name, it’s her essence. She cannot be the source of evil Hesiod claims she
is, since all the ills of humanity were brought about by masculine deities and
she herself was created by those same figures as a kind of Olympian Trojan
Horse to bring suffering to mankind. So, what gifts other than hope are to be
found in her jar? To begin with, human beings cannot be complete or whole
without a corresponding dark aspect, and an understanding of life that makes
allowance for such a reality is richer, more surprising, and more beautiful. In
fact, the richness and the beauty of life is only made recognizable by
comparison to “burdensome toil and a myriad other pains.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Most importantly, the panics and the pandemics of life
reflect us to ourselves more deeply and disturbingly than almost anything else
is able to. We see that the lives we live and the philosophies that support us in
the living of it are often irrational and unnatural. Social structures and
institutions that appear to be monolithic are suddenly revealed to be as
insubstantial as air, and so insignificant to the exigencies of life as to be
nonexistent. But most importantly, we see reflected in them our own psychic
illnesses, our own tattered, malfunctioning perceptions of ourselves and our reality.
C.G. Jung wrote, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">"We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as
if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so
forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no
longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious
specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders the brains of
politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the
world" (<i>The Secret of the Golden Flower</i>).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It's no less true today
than it was in 1932 when Jung wrote those words. What Pandora offers us today
is the opportunity to take a clear-eyed look at the world we’ve created and
decide if we want to reevaluate and revise our neurotic symptoms as well as our
neurotic culture and its institutions, do away with our infantile perceptions
of reality, and create a way of living, create life—individual and
societal—that is in harmony with the energies of life, with the aims of life,
and with the planet itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-31065741031284228692020-03-28T16:47:00.001-07:002020-03-28T16:47:28.013-07:00To Make An End is to Make a Beginning<br />
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The new year and New Year’s celebrations are
traditionally the time set aside for reflecting on the year just past, and
setting goals and making resolutions for the year to come. It is a curious psychic
position in which to find oneself, not quite out of the old year, yet not fully
engaged in the new, inhabiting a liminal space which leaves one betwixt and
between, attempting to resolve the conflict between past memories and future
ambition.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-color-alt: windowtext;">This year, as in others, my family watched the New
Year’s Eve celebrations from around the world. Sydney’s fireworks display and beautiful
skyline never seem to disappoint. London focused its Eye on the New Year
celebration. Beijing’s celebration was reliably surreal and often, to a
Westerner’s eyes at least, unintentionally comical as it tried to project the
image of an ethnically diverse nation (which it is) open to individual expression
and hep to contemporary Western Culture (which it is not—but then, I just used
the word “hep,” so you’ll have to decide for yourself.). But watching the
event—I can’t rightly call it a celebration—in Hong Kong, one of my favorite
cities, was an eerily foreboding, and sad experience. The fireworks display
over Victoria Harbour was cancelled due to concerns about the ongoing protests
in the city, and the laser light show and the accompanying music that replaced
it seemed to me ominous and dirge-like. The laser show had a Star Wars feeling
to it, as though it were produced by the Palpatine Empire, and seemed to carry
a thinly veiled warning to protestors, who were raising their hands and
spreading their five fingers to denote their “five demands, not one less” for
which they are risking their careers, their safety, their freedom, perhaps even
their very lives. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-color-alt: windowtext;">These incongruities in the celebrations left a gap, a
hole, a kind of lacuna in that big pieces of the story were missing.
Instability, be it environmental, political, or social, places one in a gap, in
a psychological situation of uncertainty, or a feeling of being “betwixt and
between.” The Australian fires seem unquenchable, Brexit is ongoing, and it’s
hard to imagine Beijing won’t forcefully intervene in Hong Kong eventually. Perceived
gaps or holes reveal a lack of structure and predictability, an inability to
know anything. The gap of unknowing creates a psychological situation <i>Homo
sapiens</i> has a hard time tolerating. <i>Homo</i> or <i>hominis</i> means
human being; <i>sapiens</i> means wise, discerning, knowing. Our species is
defined by knowing, by developing expectations and methods of prediction which,
when finding ourselves in a gap, or realizing that we are enshrouded by the fog
of ignorance, is constitutionally abhorrent to us. Gaps and holes are generally
associated with emptiness, with something missing, and unless one is very wise
or has practiced seeing and thinking through the manifest appearance of
“things,” we fail to see how abundantly rich, how teeming with life and
possibility, how present with something is the nothingness, how filled with
divinity are the gaps. In antiquity, chaos defined the nature of the gods much
as chaos defines the nature of emptiness and gaps, and it’s readily apparent
that the emptiness is not nothingness, it is a teeming surfeit of potential and
possibility. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-color-alt: windowtext;">The month of January was named for Janus, who was the
unique (he had no Greek precedent), ancient (some scholars find a relationship
to Romulus, the founder of Rome), and the essential Roman god whose numerous
and elaborate rituals acknowledged his influence over thresholds, transitions,
endings and beginnings, gateways, passages, and time. His two-faced image was
what one first saw upon entering the most significant gate into the Eternal
City. The gate called the <i>Ianiculum</i> displayed the old face of Janus
looking into the past—into the void from which all life arises, even—while his
young face is turned to the future and possibility, as well as toward that same
void to which we inevitably return. One might think of his domain as eternity
itself, replete with births and deaths, beginnings and endings, and all
varieties of psychosociomorphic possibilities. In fact, Janus is the god of the
gap, monopolizing the liminal space and offering a way of understanding our
relationships to the no-things of life that are the antitheses of nothing.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The singular image of Janus has transformed over time
and cultures and has become, in American life, the image of aged Father Time
ceding the stage to the infant New Year. In America we celebrate the New Year
by dropping a ball amid a million people in Times Square, or a giant Pinecone
amid thousands at Leroux and Aspen Streets. As a mythologist, it seems proper
that the new year begins with a drop or a fall. So often we associate dropping
something or falling as a failure. A failure of skill, clumsiness or
carelessness, even a failure of ambition—we have reached too far, flown too
high, exceeded our capacities somehow. But falling isn’t a mistake or a crime,
it’s one of the ways that life begins. The Ponderosa Pines we all love
propagate by dropping pinecones to the ground where new life then takes root. Even
its name, <i>Ponderosa</i>, is a Latin word that conveys a sense of the great
weight or heaviness of these trees, and the more subtle knowledge that eventually,
heavy things tend to fall. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Falling into the gap, finding oneself in liminal space,
is often an opportunity and not ruin. It’s an immersion in the generative,
cyclic nature of existence and not a death at all. It is a <i>felix culpa</i>; it
is, if we can find the courage to so view it, a very fortunate fall. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-90194604390603270862020-03-28T16:42:00.001-07:002020-03-28T16:42:30.720-07:00The Powerful Play Goes On<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Living here, in Flagstaff, AZ one can’t help but learn about at least a few of
the many rich layers of history submerged just below the surface of the city's daily bustle. The history of Flagstaff’s early days is always within reach; and
the vestiges of lumbering, ranching, and railroading are still hiding in plain
sight. But I never fail to be touched by the whispering echoes of ancient
voices that spoke, sang, laughed, wept, hoped, and shouted more than a millennium
ago in and around what would become the Flagstaff with which you and I are
familiar.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The earliest habitation of the Southwest dates to before
9,000 B.C.E. and those residents lived much like the indigenous hunting and
gathering peoples of the Great Basin or the Plains. Eventually the inhabitants
of the Colorado Plateau developed a genius for masonry and agriculture, created
impressive architecture and grew crops of maize, beans, squash, and even cotton,
by virtue of imagining ingenious irrigation systems that mitigated the harsh
growing conditions of the arid climate. After Sunset Crater’s eruption in 1064
or 65, the volcanic ash deposited around the area was a significant factor in
the creation of a fertile, hydrophilic soil that made the agricultural arts
even more viable in the region, and enticed an influx of people over the next
several decades. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Even though by the early 1200’s the community was
permanently abandoned, there is something ineffable that remains,
some…experience that one may have standing in the ball court or peering through
a window of a partially collapsed wall at Wupatki. In places such as this, a murky
pre-history arouses my imagination, and the place comes alive with images of
families, young men and women, leaders, story tellers, the elderly, going about
their daily lives, their routines and recreations. I imagine that, like
ourselves, they hardly ever gave a thought to the inevitable reality that one
day life as they knew it would end; that their people would disappear, and that
what they saw and heard and felt and believed would, in some unimaginably
distant time, become the subject of abstract conjecture, speculations proffered
by archaeologists puzzling over the remnants of the communal trash heap. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The temptation to imagine these early residents of the
Flagstaff area as uncomplicated stone agers is largely due, I think, to the fact
that the indigenous people of the region were pre-literate, and therefore left no
bequest of a written record to us <i>modernes</i>. I mentioned that in 1065
Sunset Crater Volcano erupted, and because we have no contemporaneous writings
to which we might refer for first-hand accounts, all we can do is speculate
about the effects of such an eruption on human life and activities in the area.
But at the same historical moment in Normandy, William the Conqueror was maneuvering
to contend for the hereditary throne of England and, one year later, win it in
the battle of Hastings. Because there exist contemporary written accounts, it sometimes
seems that British history of the same period is more accessible, and nearer to
us, than our own. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But a lack of a written history should not bamboozle one
into believing that the inhabitants of ancient sites like Wupatki were living
in a disorganized, undeveloped, or crude society. In fact, they seemed to
engage in a robust trade economy: Scarlett Macaw remains have been found on
site, and there is also evidence that they traded with other communities
ranging from the Pacific Ocean to the Lower Mississippi and Gulf Coast regions.
These were smart, competent, adventurous, and creative people, and I think that
in many ways they thought about the world the same way we contemporary human
beings think about the world. But we don’t often recognize that because we
don’t feel the need to reflect upon the antiquity of the ideas we use each day
in the living of our lives. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our own human-all-too-human expectations, spontaneous
responses and obsessive fears have not markedly changed since the dawn of human
history. In fact, the same rational, imaginative abilities that invented those
ancient irrigation systems invented the iPhone. The human imagination functions
now much as it always has, and gives us the power to imagine things that
aren’t, and the power to imagine differently the things that are; and in that
most human of qualities lies the power to radically transform the world. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of course, it’s wrong to say that sometime after the
beginning of the 13<sup>th</sup> century the people who created Wupatki or the
cliff dwellings along Walnut Canyon mysteriously disappeared. I’m sure their emigration
was no mystery to them, and in fact, they continue to live on in their
descendants. Thirteen different Native American communities, including the Hopi
and Zuni people who consider Wupatki to be a sacred site and have a significant
oral tradition regarding the area, claim to have some ancestral ties to the
site.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But doesn’t every piece of earth, each plot of land, a rock
outcropping, a river, a grassy knoll, have a rich and sundry history? We forget
that Planet Earth is as alive as you or I (If you don’t think the earth
breathes, just watch <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0296310/">The Blue
Planet</a> documentary’s segment on the earth’s water cycle). And like us, the
earth is also possessed of an unconscious, just as sleepily awash in memory,
reverie, and dreams as we are. It is alive with its own movements, its unique interactions;
it lives with and experiences emotion and memory, which then interfuse with our own.
We, Alan Watts has said, don’t come into this world, we come out of it. The
Earth influences us the same way children are influenced by their parents. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So, now we find ourselves in the first quarter of the 21<sup>st</sup>
century, blithely using technology we don’t understand, in a world whose manias
often sweep us along as though we’re caught in a rip tide. Regardless of our
will or desire, we are often left wondering what life means and how we should
live; I should think that every human generation from the beginning of our
species has felt this way about life. And what is the point of such a life? Well,
I don’t think there needs to be one beyond having as full an experience of
being alive as possible. But that’s no small thing; having such an experience
of being alive transcends understandings of meaning and purpose, it
constellates the longing that triggers imagination, which drives most human
behavior, and connects us to those ancient peoples across the “dark backward
and abysm” of time. If there must be a point, then the point is that, as
Whitman wrote, the powerful play goes on and we may contribute a verse.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-17305174009229041302018-06-21T19:05:00.001-07:002018-06-22T13:06:19.871-07:00Of Mere Being: Wallace Stevens and the Mythic Imagination<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Lately
I seem to myself to be more removed from the world, more separate somehow. I
don’t know if I like it or if I do not; it simply seems that it is so; my
remove is a fact. I don’t know if it is because at sixty, I’m older, or perhaps
because it’s due to the current social, economic, and political climates which
seem to make cultural life, and a life lived in it, less of a pleasant
proposition. Perhaps my inward reality no longer tallies well with the outer
reality. Perhaps I simply desire to reach beyond what I think are the edges of myself
and discover a place within large enough to hold and reconcile the totality of my
being. Whatever it is that I must do, it may only be accomplished by going
beyond inner and outer perspectives, beyond pairs of opposites, beyond
judgments of good or bad, right or wrong. I must go to the place, and perhaps
beyond, that allowed Whitman to say, “I am large. I contain multitudes.” The
poet, Wallace Stevens, in the final stanza from his poem, “<i>Tea at the Palaz of Hoon</i>,” put it this way:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> I
was the world in which I walked, and what I saw<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Or
heard or felt came not but from myself;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> And
there I found myself more truly and more strange.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">An early reviewer of Stevens’ poetry remarked that he
created “fictitious” realities and was apparently unwilling to concede that the
lie of art often exposed more truth than objective or consensual reality could
muster. Stevens himself often seemed to be a refugee in a war between his outer
and inner realities. He was a big, some might say burly, man who was often depressed,
drunk, and self-centered; he seemed to cause his family frequent unhappiness.
In the mid 1930’s he, drunk, broke a few bones in his hand when he punched
Ernest Hemingway in the jaw. Hemmingway promptly beat Stevens to a jelly, and
afterward agreed to tell others a face-saving story that Stevens had fallen
down the stairs. And yet, for all his human-all-too-human messiness, Stevens’
poetic insights and his use of language were utterly sublime. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It is the sublime, in fact, that is the subject of my
favorite Stevens poetry. Stevens is a hard poet precisely for this reason: the
sublime is hard. The sublime is not merely beautiful, although an aesthetic experience
is certainly a consequence of encountering the sublime. In the writing of
Edmund Burke, the sublime is characterized by its “vastness” and “terror.” The
sublime is overwhelming, disturbing, and possessed of a tremendous force, while
the beautiful is “balanced” and “delicate” and serene. But myths are made of
the overwhelming, the terrifying, the incomprehensible, and the vast; one’s
experiences of these qualities are the proper subjects of myth. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In his best poems, Stevens is working with, and on,
the sublime, rendering it through a modulating lens of beauty. The sublime,
according to Immanuel Kant, is a natural phenomenon, a phenomenon extant in nature,
and as such is difficult for a human consciousness to understand and be with it
in relationship because we feel, subjectively, a bit separated from it; a bit
different, alien to it. The best poetry and the best mythology (are they really
different?) present the sublime in a beautiful form; this is, to gloss Picasso,
the art of the lie that tells the truth. And the truth pointed at by fortunately
fashioned myths and art is that there is much more to being an animate, living
human than we can imagine based upon the reckonings of established,
conventional consciousness. Great art and great myth pitch us out of our ordinary,
domestic consciousness and exposes us, in some moderated way, to the sublime
realities of our existence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Here is another Stevens poem, <i>Of Mere Being</i>, that provides a good example:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> The Palm at the end of the mind,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Beyond
the last thought, rises<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> In
the bronze décor,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> A
gold-feathered bird<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Sings
in the palm, without human meaning,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Without
human feeling, a foreign song.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> You
know then that it is not the reason<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> That
makes us happy or unhappy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> The
bird sings. Its feathers shine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> The
palm stands on the edge of space.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> The
wind moves slowly in the branches.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> The
bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This poem, for me at least, symbolizes an approach to
a transcendent experience beyond definition or clear form, and exposes one to the
very substance of all things, which includes ourselves. One might think of it as the
singularly sublime. While ultimately unknowable <i>in toto</i>, the images It produces (and the images we produce since we
<i>are</i> It) act upon us as a glittering,
golden lure drawing us ever nearer and deeper into the ultimate mystery of being.
Stevens’ images succeed in this respect exceptionally well. By conjuring “the
palm at the end of the mind, beyond the last thought,” Stevens moves the reader
to struggle free from rational, domestic thought experience and into a
metaphorical, mythic, imaginal thought, and a distant, somewhat alien internal
landscape that lives apart from the familiar world of known things. The palm
calls to mind an oasis in the vast unmapped desert located between the mundane,
rational world of experience and the transcendent essence of being, and in this
palm is a bird with golden feathers singing a song without “human meaning” and “human
feeling,” a song previously unheard and unknown, a song that feels alien and
strange to we who visit this strange new world, but indigenous and well-known
to the new world in which we find ourselves. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Stevens suggests, I think, that in this mythogeographical
place, human meaning and feeling are not the constituent elements of happiness.
Rather, concepts like imagination, courage, and the sublime become the
ideals that offer one a deep sense of satisfaction. The mythological space of
the poem is the place of gold and bronze, colors that suggest illumination, <i>recherché</i> riches, and the sun burnished,
sun infused experience of an Odyssean traveler on a mythic journey. Odysseus himself,
is burnished bronze by his years under the Mediterranean sun, a Bronze-Age king
whose palace has floors of bronze reflecting his great wealth, achievement, and
not quite god-like but certainly not merely human, standing; his strange
encounters, over so many years, with divinities, monsters, and his own,
solitary experience, carried him beyond his own last thoughts, beyond human
meaning, they sustain him and guide him (often roughly), and finally, drive him
deep within himself to once again transform, to deepen his understanding of
self, of others, of the world, to psychologically and metaphorically die and be
reborn. He washes up on the island of the Phaeacians and buries himself in leaves
beneath two shoots of an Olive tree as one would, Homer writes, hide a “fire-seed”—a
hot coal—in the ashes to keep its light alive. And out of those ashes, he finds
himself reborn.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">One might begin to have an inkling of what this bird with golden feathers is, the bird who inhabits the palm beyond the last thought; it can be aught but the Phoenix, that bird with golden feathers invested with the power of the sun itself to self-immolate and be reborn of its own ashes. This is the metaphysical reality encountered beyond the last human thought, rooted at the edge of space. In this Stevens echoes Whitman, who unabashedly averred, "The smallest sprout shows there is really no death; and if ever there was, it led forward life." That palm at the end of the mind, on the edge of space is a symbol of indefatigable, indestructible life, for the brilliant mind of Wallace Stevens knew that the Greek work for palm is phoenix, <span lang="EL" style="color: #212121; line-height: 107%;"><i>φοίνικας</i>, and by placing in the phoenix a Phoenix, he compounds and insists upon the point that just beyond the place of human thought and feeling is a metaphysical reality that dictates birth, life, and death be understood as metaphors. Where are we before we're born? After we die? What is that realm or aspect of being?</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span lang="EL" style="color: #212121; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal;">
<span lang="EL" style="color: #212121; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangling down may be the only glimpse I can have, but I am discovering in my increasing alienation from the material world, that those dangling feathers may be just enough of an enticement to continue the inward journey, to find myself more truly (and more strange), to continue exploring the boundaries of consciousness, to continue to turn over the fertile ground of the unified field and plant the seeds of a far reaching--and ever farther reaching, human potential.</span></span></div>
Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-34842882873446826842018-05-13T13:43:00.001-07:002018-05-13T13:43:58.720-07:00One Must Forget Much To Live Here<div style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">
It's not a new realization, one might even regard it as prosaic, yet to me it never fails to be striking--sometimes even startling--when I realize that every piece of earth, each plot of land, a rock outcropping, a river or a lake, a grassy knoll, has a rich, sundry history. Sometimes the history of a given place is a secret lost to the amnesia inducing ravages of time; the earth’s arcane arts are buried by the passage of time and interred by the developer’s promiscuous blade. But in some instances the history of a particular place is so powerfully compelling, so majestic, so horrific, that the place forever after becomes a memorial and its events are preserved in the collective human memory. Such a memorializing is often, it seems, not through human agency alone but rather through the insistence of the earth itself whose purpose is to manifest images within us humans that serve as a link to the earth’s intelligence and make us remember. We seem to have forgotten that Planet Earth is as alive as you or I. And like us, the earth is possessed of an unconscious, too, just as sleepily awash in memory, reverie, and dreams as we are, likewise pulsing with exhausting intervals of emotional, intellectual, and physical activity. The world thinks and feels and imagines. It is alive with its own desires, its own memories; it lives with experiences, regrets, and longings that interfuse with our own and influence us the way children are influenced by the way their parents feel and think and live. This truth is among the first things we forget in order to live.</div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">
<br />We forget that a most remarkable thing about this planet is that it literally hums with energy, a magical energy which inexplicably, one might even say lovingly, sustains and creates all life on it. Because our sustenance is largely inexplicable it may be regarded as magical, yet because of its sustaining energy the different aspects and emanations of the world are united. In his commentary on the <i>Symposium</i>, Marcilio Ficino insisted that the force of all magic is constituted of love, and it is love that is essential to, perhaps even essentially is, the strong magic of healing ourselves and the earth:<br /><span class="style5 style6" style="font-size: xx-small; font-style: italic;"><br />The work of magic is a certain drawing of one thing to another by natural similitude. The parts of this world […] depend on one Love […]. From this community of relationship is born the communal Love: from which Love is born the common drawing together: and this is the true Magic.</span><br /><br />I grew up along the Minnesota River, an ancient, beautiful river valley teeming with wildlife, densely wooded hardwood forests, and ravishing, arresting vistas that can be savored from any number of spectacular rocky cliffs and promontories along its entire length. This river valley was formed relatively recently, in terms of geologic time, 13,000 years ago when Glacial Lake Agassiz burst through a natural earth dam creating a massive tsunami which proceeded to carve out the river valley from the flat and relatively featureless grassland plain. The river, which previously ran over the plain in a much smaller, inconsequential form, is known to geologists as the ancient Warren River so as to distinguish it from the modern Minnesota River. There were almost certainly people, though perhaps not particularly great in number, living along the peaceful, humble stream when the earthen dam broke, creating what was for them, a natural disaster of cataclysmic proportions. People and animals died, ecosystems were destroyed; life and all ways of life in the path of the oncoming wall of water were obliterated.<br /><br />If some similar event happened somewhere today, there would almost certainly be plaques placed, memorials erected, and an understanding that the affected geographic area—the earth as well as the river--would be regarded as sacred. Thirteen thousand years ago no such memorialization would be forthcoming, however, it would be a silly, even grotesque, misunderstanding of human nature to think that in regional narratives of place (which is to say, mythologies) this event was not somehow recalled with solemnity, trembling, and awe.<br /><br />But in fact, there <em>are</em> memorials placed alongside the Minnesota River honoring the event that heralded its inception. And it was the Earth, herself, who placed them there. Periodically along the banks of the river one finds outcroppings of a particular kind of Granite rock called Gniess. This type of granite is over three billion years old; three billion-year-old rocks on a planet that is perhaps 4.5 billion years old itself, and these rocks were first exposed by the same catastrophic hydraulic forces that formed the valley some 13,000 years ago. Since geologic time is so unfathomable, so unimaginable and utterly inconceivable, we forget the vast, unknowable histories it hides. We tend to think that memory cannot see into nor through what Shakespeare called “the dark and backward abysm of time.” But such thinking is merely a convenient forgetting because the past infuses everything present. Everything from the three billion year old ancient granite rocks and their troves of antediluvian memories, perched like sentinels along the banks of the Minnesota River, to evidence of an ancient and growing human presence evidenced by the spearheads, knives and other Neolithic stone tools found there from around 6,400 years ago, to a vastly diminished yet still visible 19th Century agrarian way of life dependent upon the river’s fertile deposits, to modern, high-tech farmhouses supplemented by solar panels and wind turbines with farm implements that operate with digital precision and ease.<br /><br />The ancient memory of place seeps into contemporary psyches and without much effort one may vividly imagine ancient inhabitants of the river valley preparing for a buffalo hunt while at the same time half way around the world, Sumerians were measuring the foundations of the first great civilizations; a great flood formed what is now called the Black Sea; and religious practice centered upon the powerful creative energies of ample, fertile goddesses took hold around central Europe. Writing would not be invented for three millennia after these events. Image and imagination, feeling and sensation, intuitive knowing, may well have been the most common and the most effective ways in which our ancestors communicated with each other as well as with the Earth.</div>
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Moreover, i believe it is a conceit of human nature to assume that only the human mind and its relationship to the collective unconscious accesses and stores memories of distant pasts. I believe that this earth which produces human beings the way apple trees produce apples, the land that sustains and nurtures us, the land that challenges and tests us and ultimately reabsorbs us, also holds memory and emotion. And we, the current residents of a given place, are influenced by the landscape’s memories, geographic upheavals, and emotions. At some level of consciousness we are made aware of the trauma, the resilience, the hope, and—I mean this quite literally--the dreams of the earth.<br /><br />One usually doesn’t take the time to consider why one feels certain emotions in particular places. Why do some places feel receptive, safe, and comfortable while others feel forbidding, foreboding, and threatening? Why do some places seem to be filled with a sense of despair or grief that suffuses one’s own consciousness and brings with it an uncomfortable sense of feral remoteness, a quivering sense of the uncanny? Because the earth whispers her story to human ears that are open and attuned, one often finds that the history of a place accords with the intuitions one has of it. It shouldn’t be a surprising or whimsical notion, and yet it is; and unfortunately such intuitive notions are dismissed as fantasy, wild speculation, or neurosis. But in fact, the <i>Soul of Things</i> wants to be seen, it wants to be known, and the <i>Anima Mundi</i> seeks out the often murky and barely conscious depths of the human experience with which to communicate her story.</div>
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<br />When I was eleven or twelve years old I spent much of my summers roaming freely through the woods near the river, often alone. In so doing, I presumed to escape the mundane demands of childhood, and yet oddly, I didn’t feel free. I was alone (as far as I knew), far from any house or road, in a pathless wood. Yet I could never escape that most disturbing of sensations, the eerie feeling that I was being watched by something or someone I could not, myself, apprehend. I often had the premonition that over the next hill or around the next bend of the river I would meet with some stranger who would, by challenging my right to be on this particular plot of land, simultaneously challenge my existential right to simply be. I now believe the feelings I had of being watched and the dread such thoughts engendered weren’t generated solely by my own fear or neurosis. I <em>was</em> being watched; watched by the earth herself and unconsciously assimilating her memories and emotions related to the physical and emotional history of the Minnesota River valley; I was connected to the landscape by the suffusing properties of the earth’s intellectual activity and her own processing, her own attempts to understand her experiences through a "dialogue" with another species. Just as it is a principle of human psychological life that we attempt to heal ourselves through remembering and describing our experiences to others--to which they (hopefully) respond with empathy, the <em>Mundi Intellectus</em>, the mind of the world, works in exactly the same way, except more subtly. Human communion with the earth is remarkably effortless, even commonplace, and yet it is also a and deeply sacred act requiring conscious, focused intention.<br /><br />Prior to my ancestors arriving in the Minnesota River valley from northern Europe it was home to the Dakota Indians, but by the early 19th Century the Dakota were no longer home alone. Newly arrived people who must have seemed utterly strange to them, people who dressed impractically and practiced odd customs along with a convoluted, self-contradictory religion were making shockingly irrational claims to ancient ancestral lands. These "settlers" broke promises and treaties; they lied, they cheated, they enslaved the land. They seemed to treat everything, even themselves, with disrespect and force; soon the Dakota were strangers in their own land. The Dakota right to exist as they had traditionally existed for centuries was challenged at every turn, and by the middle of the 19th Century, a dehumanizing and cruel "American" self-interest was as abundant in the river valley as sources of food were scarce. For the very first time the river was arrested by human construction and dammed, indentured to commerce; land was partitioned and fenced off with barbed wire; swamps and marshes were drained to create more arable land. How absolutely shocking it must have been for the Dakota to see their Great Mother, their <em>benefactrix, </em>so enslaved. Traditional Dakota life was turned upside down and a catastrophe of unimaginable scope unfolded in a short, intense, and bloody conflict. </div>
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<br />I married my first wife while standing upon the Minnesota River. It was one of those Minnesota winter days when the sunshine is so bright that it’s too bright and it hurts one’s eyes. The temperature of the air was so cold that the first breath one drew out of doors painfully seared the lungs. The river was frozen solid, a silver and white ribbon winding through a dense welter of barren Ash, Oak, and Cottonwood trees. Not for the first time, I failed to grasp the metaphor, I failed to listen to what the earth was telling me about the wisdom of my impending marriage. Eighteen months later my marriage was in a humiliating shambles and had become an utterly tawdry affair; we were living apart and my wife was involved with someone else. In another eighteen months we would be divorced amid the thick, incensed air of recrimination, rancor, and deep enmity—feelings that often arise from utter defeat. Between two people these kinds of feelings cause a divorce; between two cultures, they start a war. And as wars always do, this war, the Dakota War of 1862, produced unspeakable atrocities and ultimately provoked a program of genocide, undertaken by the Federal Government and heartily supported by the local white settlers, because people cannot even imagine living with another who cannot, or simply will not, think, believe, and live as they do. Each individual exposed to the horror of a war and its inhumane cruelty is forever altered. Altered too, are the lives of their descendants. Life in the valley can never be the same again.<br /> <br />We have forgotten that ghastly traumas, such as those evoked by war, are not only held in human memory, but are remembered painfully by the earth, too, and much like those countries or worlds of mythology that suffer from a <em>miasma</em> (a Greek idea denoting a spiritual pollution that degrades not only a people and a community or state but the very land itself), the land becomes barren and inhospitable; the earth withdraws from interaction with the source of pollution, and sadly, her indulgent benevolence for her human children is withdrawn: businesses fail and main streets are shuttered, a spirit of meanness lives in its residents characterized by a stingy penuriousness, shamefulness, and sordidness, and visitors sense an insular or vaguely besieged energy suffusing the community. </div>
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One of the most salient lessons of the 20th Century has been learned from the growing awareness that where atrocity has occurred, acknowledgment of the terrible events through an act of contrition must be undertaken in order to facilitate healing among people. Less salient is the awareness that just such an atonement must be offered in relationship to the land as well. I have come to believe that if events are not properly memorialized, if outrages, obscenities, and abominations are suppressed, repressed, or dismissed, the sufferings of all those involved (especially the wounded landscape which has literally absorbed the spilled blood, and has suffered nearly irreparable spiritual harm and trauma) will continue to live on in that geographical space--in the earth herself, and subtly, unconsciously, in those who currently occupy that particular land. The wounded landscape reaches out and into those of us who occupy it by making its own memories, emotions, and traumas seem to be our own. It whispers to us its story, a story we notice at first in the form of vague feelings, uncanny sensations, and dimly perceived shadows, and finally in suprapersonal, sublimely earthed feelings, sensations, and shadows we are obliged to recognize and honor if we are to understand the story and heal ourselves and our land.</div>
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<br />An enthralled, open-minded listening to the stories one's told is the surest path to understanding, and understanding is the surest path to forgiveness. Forgiveness is powerful, and often it is the only effective healing act available to either us or the planet. Forgiveness is an implement of the soul, it is love enacted, it is <i>radical</i> acceptance; forgiveness is the instrument of a loving awareness which is always present to hand and always available to be used. Forgiveness is not particularly effective if one insists upon thinking about forgiveness only in terms of offering a dispensation to another. The most difficult challenge of forgiving, if it is to be truly healing, is the often overlooked stipulation that one must become, often agonizingly, aware of one’s own guilt and then, even more agonizingly, to live with it; to live into the realization that there is nothing else to do with one's guilt but to acknowledge it, to experience it, and to surrender to it. And, paradoxically perhaps, while one is surrendering one must also be committed to continued living that is, perhaps, bittersweet for the confessional humility of one's guilt, but simultaneously richer in the human and humane aspects of the living of life. </div>
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I have come to understand that the only purpose, really, of difficult and painful feelings is to simply bear them; one needn’t and shouldn’t find a way to avoid them, or try to offload or project them onto others; instead one must recognize these challenges are in the world because I am in the world, they belong to me, and through the process of radical self acceptance, these feelings and experiences may begin to heal, and in their healing, the world heals, too. But radical self acceptance is very, very hard; so difficult as to be nearly impossible because, as Macbeth bitterly observes, “To know my deed, ‘Twere best not know myself.” Yet the willingness to know, and not just to know, but accept the motives for the deed as a part of oneself as well puts one in proximity to a very deep truth that, from some safe distance, appears to be irrational or at best, paradoxical. Niels Bohr once remarked, “It is a hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.” Deep truths invite paradox, and paradox is a singular quality of what we often call the divine. When we find ourselves in such a paradoxical position, we may be sure that the gods are not far away, and their paradoxical revelation to us is that in our guilty, broken, pained existence we are perfect, and in a position to not only heal ourselves, but our world as well.<br /><br />What we call history is not merely a dialogue the past has with the present, it is a colloquy involving ourselves and the earth with an aim to engendering a deeper understanding of past, present, and future actions. A proper understanding of history (and when I say history, I am simultaneously saying mythology) may lead to the intentional creation of more accepting, loving relationships between humankind and the landscape upon which the human drama unfolds. There is no single, eternal, unalterable, or immutable meaning of history. One’s relationship to the past, like one’s relationship to self or to the world, is a constantly evolving understanding, the past--history, is relentlessly renewing itself in a state of perpetual becoming. </div>
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We necessarily forget who we really are and what our connection to the world really is--we must forget if we want to continue to live life in the way in which we always have. Nevertheless, opportunities for greater awareness and understanding abound and that just once, we may be possessed by a notion, a radically different idea of reality that allows us to make novel connections that inspire a re-evaluation and redefinition of ourselves and the world, and if we're lucky, we discover we like it and search more and more earnestly for the opportunity. Like the startling revelations of heliocentrism in its time or quantum physics in our own, the strangeness and complexities of reality consistently outstrips not only our own subjective experiences and expectations of reality, but those of science as well, and one may only wonder at what sublime strangeness will be revealed as we extend ourselves farther and farther into humanity and into the world with a radical curiosity and openness.<br /><br />Shakespeare challenged us to “Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.” Once you've done this you know in your most secret heart that the earth is alive. The heart knows that the supreme adventure is the road that unfolds before us once we've acknowledged the deep truth that we are unquestionably the earth's children and the umbilical of the human mind connects us to her in all ways and for always. Homer describes a scene in the <i>Iliad</i> in which Glaukos tells Diomedes “I always hears my father’s voice in my head: ‘Be the best, my boy. Be the brightest, and hold your head high above the rest’.” Like Glaukos, we, too, have our parent’s voice always in our heads, and no longer can we afford to dismiss or silence the suffering <i>Vox Mundi</i> and her instructions in the art of healing ourselves and our planet.</div>
Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-16308084779304815142017-12-19T13:12:00.001-07:002017-12-19T13:12:25.300-07:00A Meditation on Myth<h2 style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-size: 22px; margin: 0px; position: relative;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A bit long, this one...but I am grateful for Stephanie Pope asking me to write a guest blog on her marvelous site, <a href="http://mythopoetry.com/">Mythopoetry.com</a>, and here it is, reproduced on Falstaff. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br style="background-color: white;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-size: 15.84px;">I thought for that at least a portion of this blog post, I might respond a bit to Dave Alber’s really fine September posts, which reflect nicely the essence of his recent book, </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-size: 15.84px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Myth-Wisdom-Stories-Endangered/dp/1534785515" style="color: #888888; text-decoration-line: none;">The Heart of Myth:Wisdom Stories From Endangered People</a></i><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-size: 15.84px;">. I particularly like his phrase “the grammar of myth,” because it is an unusual and surprising pairing of the words myth and grammar but soon, upon closer examination, one discovers the reasons for why the pairing of myth and grammar is apropos. Grammar is comprised of an internalized set of rules for the use of a given language, and for most native speakers those rules are not learned—internalized—by study and instruction. Grammar is learned by watching and listening to other speakers, and the grammatical nuances of a language learned very early in childhood are intuitively relied upon in writing and conversation, and even in thinking. Grammar may also be a word used to describe an orthodoxy that prescribes and governs punctuation, spelling, and usage. In other words, grammar is the foundation of self-expression. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-size: 15.84px; line-height: 16.9488px;">You see where I’m going with this; each mythology has its own grammar as well: rules that govern denotation, expression, orthodox understanding, thinking, and form. And these grammatical rules, sometimes called mythemes, tenets, or articles of faith, are also learned in very early childhood and often inexorably remain, over the course of even a very long life, the intuitive framework for understanding oneself and one’s world. Those of us cohabiting with a particular mythology rely on its grammar to communicate comprehensibly with one another, to support, instruct, encourage, and all too familiarly, rebuke. Perhaps even more important is that grammar insists on storytelling and making narrative possible, in fact, grammar may frankly necessitate story. I suppose one cannot truly imagine what trying to communicate with another person might have been like before, shall we call it, the invention or the organization of grammar, but I suspect that a lot of grunting, pointing, the use of contorted, exaggerated facial expressions, stick and dirt drawings, and an exasperated, repetitive emphasis on a few key sounds would have been the norm. An unwieldy enterprise, to say the least, and coupled with its <i>longueur</i>, it would certainly seem to incline one to fewer verbal interactions. Grammar allows one to participate in relationship by virtue of the narrativizing of life, not only one’s own life, but the lives (and deaths) of others, of the community, of animals, of forests, grasslands, deserts, seas, as well as the heavens. Grammar makes myth possible, grammar may even insist upon myth.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><span style="line-height: 19.26px;">Rethinking Myth Through </span></b><b><span style="line-height: 19.26px;">Joseph Campbell’s “Four Functions”</span></b></span></span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In <a href="https://mythopoetry.blogspot.com/2017/09/dave-alber-guest-blog-what-is-myth-for.html" style="color: #888888; text-decoration-line: none;">David’s September 4th guest blog on this site, “What is Myth For You?”</a>, he referenced an essay I had written: “Bradley Olson recently posted an essay on the importance of rethinking myth and personal definitions of myth, and similarly, he referenced it back to the mystical function of myth.” I was surprised to read this, because as I was writing it, I was thinking of it in terms of the psychological function of myth. But Dave was not wrong in associating what I had written with the mystical function of myth, of which is to awaken a sense of “awe” in the encounter with the, as Jung put it,<i>mysterium tremendum</i>. Joseph Campbell’s four functions of mythology, as I think about them now with Dave’s <i>grammaticus</i> influencing me, are also attempts at grammar, and it would be as wrong to relegate them to discrete domains as it would be to insist upon always speaking the King’s English; more elegant and clear, perhaps, but not nearly as interesting, nor as alive. Each of these four functions—metaphysical, cosmological, sociological, and psychological—are in dynamic relationships with one another, sometimes opposing, sometimes syncretic, and sometimes paradoxical. The student, less innately fluent than, say, the initiate, will struggle with the intellectual imperative of properly consigning this experience or that phenomenon to its proper function. For instance, is this particular narrative supporting a sociological function or is it advancing my own psychological needs? At any given time, the answer may be yes, no, or both. How does one decisively separate cosmology and awe (the metaphysical function) for instance? Here again, these categories function as grammar, and as such, one must first learn how to use and apply them correctly and reliably in order to effectively and creatively transgress the rules at some future point when the goal is to creatively open up and revitalize the mythic narratives. In mythology, as in the lives of cultures, perhaps this task falls to those best suited for the work: the heretics, the visionaries, the poets, the artists, those singular individuals living within a particular narrative who see, perhaps for the first time, something entirely new in the old forms, plasticity in the rigid structures, and beauty in the unavoidable, and often unforgiving, realities of life.<span style="line-height: 16.9488px;"><br /><br />Dave writes that “Myths are transmissions of knowledge from the enlightened state, from cultures that rightly identify spiritual work with the routine moment-to-moment development of their awareness state.” As David soon points out, “[the definition] is imperfect and limited,” and he believes the imperfection is intentional in order to, I presume, give myth the room and imprecision it requires to make it flexibly expansive enough to contain and transmit extraordinary esoteric, metaphysical knowledge. I am aware from our personal conversations and correspondence that Dave values, as I do, the timeless, mercurial, eternal, archetypal qualities of myth, the fleeting “Protean slipperiness” of it (as he once put it to me), and the ability of myth to evoke “profound states of awareness.” Dave’s September essays are deeply thought, innovative, and pleasurable to read, and I have no criticism for him in this regard. But since the point of my essay this month is to contribute something of my own thoughts about myth, my response is, it seems, yes <i>and</i>…. The <i>and</i>… is my problem with the focus on the transcendent and spiritual aspects of myth, a focus I acknowledge as a venerable interpretation and use of myth, but one I am exhausted by and, frankly, one I think the world can ill afford any longer. At its best, it denies the reality of human effort and inter-relatedness and creates comforting illusions; at worst it creates an excess of greed, stupidity, and shallow, trivial gestures performed within an atmosphere of mercilessness.<br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 19.8301px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><span style="line-height: 19.26px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Myth’s Grammar, Thought, And Imaginal Life</span></span></b></span></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-size: 15.84px; line-height: 16.9488px;"><span style="line-height: 16.9488px;">I prefer to consider myth as a mode of thought or a condition of imagining rather than a narrative containing a body of knowledge. Perhaps, referencing my above discussion of Dave’s notion of grammar, I can call myth the grammar of thought, or the grammar of imagination (as I recall, Hegel mentioned something along the lines of grammar being the work of thought). Myth was “taken up” or rediscovered during the Enlightenment because, as a mode of thinking, it was believed to be a key to comprehending history, philosophy, religion, art, linguistics, and creativity itself. Considering myth to be a mode of thinking returns ownership of myth to human beings and, from that point of view, a mythic imagination is an uncritical, non-causal, wholesale search for meaning and significance in a human life lived in a fundamentally mysterious world. Myth is no longer the province of gods or the expression in the world of supernatural intervention but instead, it rightfully reclaims for human beings an apprehension of the sublime nested within human passions, changes of fortune, joys, and depressions, elation and <i>pathos</i>. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 19.8301px;"><span style="line-height: 19.8301px;"><b><span style="line-height: 19.8301px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A Fifth Function Of Myth? </span></span></span></b></span></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-size: 15.84px; line-height: 16.9488px;"><span style="line-height: 16.9488px;"><span style="line-height: 16.9488px;">There is at least one other exquisitely human function of myth that I would add to Campbell’s well known four, and that is the function of <b>delight</b>. Delight as a function certainly isn’t my discovery. John Dryden specifically, and all manner of poets, writers, painters, classically educated people in all walks of life, have noted this function at work one way or another in the mythopoetic genre. The mythographer is, as the word <i>poesis</i> suggests, a maker and a creator, she aims at making something beautiful, something that stirs us, not by representing things exactly as they are but by heightening their intensity, deepening their depths, qualities Dryden called “lively” and “just” (<i>Essay of Dramatic Poesy</i>). <i>Poesis</i>, and by extension mythopoesis, is a uniquely human endeavor and delighting in it allows one to, if not exactly remake the world, remake our own reality here and now, for there is no fear in delight, and no pain, delight is play, not pressure. <i>Poesis</i> and drama also instruct, says Dryden, but the function of instruction is secondary in his mind, and what always assumes a place of primacy in his thinking is the function of delight. Delight is created by the contemplation of beauty, and it is the job of the creative person to create or highlight a beauty that contributes to the pleasures of the soul. The condition of delight taken in every aspect of life, even the difficult, allows one to accept one’s human, all too human, existence without the vulgar, slavish, and undignified need for transcendence.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 19.26px;"><span style="line-height: 19.26px;"><span style="line-height: 19.26px;"><br /></span></span></span><span style="line-height: 19.26px;"><span style="line-height: 19.26px;"><span style="line-height: 19.26px;"><b><span style="line-height: 19.26px;">Meditations On Existential Dread,<br />Salvation, And Transcendence</span></b></span></span></span></span></span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is a story I love about D.T. Suzuki, the great popularizer of Zen in the West and who was, as he was dying, visited by a friend and they had a wide-ranging conversation about Zen, poetry, and, of course, the meaning of life. Suzuki excused himself from the room for a bit, and once he was out of earshot his wife leaned over to the visitor and said something like, “You know why he doesn’t believe in <i>Satori</i>, do you not?” The visitor shook his head and said, “No.” Mrs. S. began chuckling and then exclaimed, “He’s never experienced it, himself!” I suppose I like this story because it reflects my own understanding; I’ve never been, in my exposures to Christianity, Zen, Sufism—all of which I took rather seriously at one time or another in my life, able to experience what “they” said I should, namely, some sort of transcendence. Some sacred wisdom, or some spiritual practice, was supposed to enter me, heal me, or expand my consciousness or something, and I would be fundamentally changed as a result. But stories, narratives, even sacred ones, don’t change anyone. Human beings don’t change. We are not transformed. We do not become different, altered (although we may well become altared, tied to doctrine, rituals, and forms) beings.<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One might wonder that with an attitude like that, what is the point of being a psychotherapist? Well, there is quite an important point it, and while I don’t believe that people can change, I do believe they can relieve their suffering. Suffering is created by the apparently insurmountable gap between who people believe themselves to be and who they believe they should be. Because they can’t change themselves in any way to which they are not already predisposed, that gap appears to be unspannable and they begin to long for transcendence, a transcendence that in its most frank, naked intention, is to somehow escape their human condition, the condition of limited agency and vision, competency and comprehension, beset by frailty and existential dread. It makes sense, I suppose, to wish that some divine hand of a supernatural agent, some compassionate, just and virtuous suspension of the universal order would simply erase my misery and install me in a life of happiness and ease.<span style="line-height: 16.9488px;">It may be that the wish for salvation and transcendence is built into myth as well as human nature. Chekov once remarked that if you see a prominently displayed gun in the first act, you can be sure it will be fired in the third. Likewise, in mythology, the first act emphasis is religious, it is focused on supernatural, divine beings, divine, supernatural realms, and the religious thinking that encapsulates them. So naturally now, in the third act, people often turn to myth the way they used to turn to religion, except that we tell ourselves we’re not being religious, we’re too sophisticated to fall for that. Instead, we think of ourselves as being scholarly, or psychological, or merely “spiritual.” Practices arise such as personal mythology, culturally esoteric and exotic spiritual practices, and what they have in common, deep down in their religious DNA, is the desire for transcendence and salvation in some fashion. Please, the practitioner begs, let me be something I presently am not, and seem incapable of becoming. And I suppose, to some degree, that’s what those of us who privilege the metaphysical or psychological function of myth may have wrought. We’ve focused on the transformational, cathartic properties that an immersion in mythology is expected to offer. And it is, after all, a reasonable first step in the study of myth to try to understand exactly what is the impact myth is having on <i>my</i> life, on <i>my</i> <i>personal</i> situation.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 19.8301px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span><span style="line-height: 19.8301px;"><b><span style="line-height: 19.8301px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Is That All There Is To Myth?</span></span></b><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-size: 15.84px; line-height: 16.9488px;"><span style="line-height: 16.9488px;">But if that’s all it is, if myth is only beneficial to individuals because it makes their personal lives seem easier or better, we might as well give up on the way we (in the manner of Freud, Jung, Campbell, etc.) study myth right now. If myth has become merely another more exotic, and because of its unfamiliarity potentially more likely, shot at salvation, the genre has been exhausted in the way that a lode of gold or silver has been worked out; the mining of myth can no longer yield usable amounts of its natural matter. Secondly, we cannot continue to believe that our human condition is somehow inferior, fallen, or inadequate to the task of living. Life in the contemporary world has given way to other circumstances which must be met with other ways and forms of mythological imagining. And even if my second point isn’t correct, and the circumstances of human life haven’t changed fundamentally in ten thousand years, we either lack the imaginative power to approach the form novelly, or we no longer find the answers that novelty supplies to be of value. Finally, and we see this played out on every world stage multiple times every day, misunderstanding myth (intentionally or not) serves as some advantage to someone, and when mythic narratives are an advantage to someone or some group, one is helpless to be understood or to lay in course corrections.<br /> </span><br /><span style="line-height: 16.9488px;">Freud once remarked of his own theories that they appealed to him because they tended to, like the theories of Copernicus or Darwin, diminish man’s pride. Perhaps it isn’t asking too much to imagine that pride is at work in the sacred fantasies of transcendence, salvation, the project of leaving one’s human condition behind. Pride has at its core a loathing of the human condition and its forms, and pride refuses to see that simple human life and living has a profoundly aesthetic quality. The myths we cling to tend to summarize our cultural life, which may be why we so badly want to impress them into the service of escape. To my way of thinking, myths investigate and celebrate human will and if that avenue of their contemplation is dying, then perhaps it’s because the will of our society is dying, and if it is, it is likely dying of its own excess. But contemporary culture seems intent on transcending human nature, too, and self-interested, selfish excess is the chosen option for the program: multiply, augment, display, annex, coopt, volatize, transmogrify, transmute…and, like the directions on a shampoo bottle, repeat over and over until we are, finally, no longer human. As Oscar Wilde aptly put it, “nothing succeeds like excess.”<br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933px;"><br /></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 19.8301px;"><span style="line-height: 19.8301px;"><b><span style="line-height: 19.8301px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">An Ethical Ideal</span></span></span></b></span></span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The answers to the problems of living are not found in self-transformation or through “realizing one’s divine nature,” but rather, becoming more and more and more human; more and more and more oneself. This is precisely what Nietzsche (no mean mythographer, himself) would prescribe. A self isn’t, according to Nietzsche, something you just naturally are. A self must be achieved, continually, over and over again. As Duncan Large notes in his forward to <i><b>Ecce Homo</b></i>, Nietzsche insisted that “the process of self-becoming [is] an ethical ideal.” In Nietzsche’s own words:<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Becoming what you are presupposes that you have not the slightest inkling <b><i>what</i> </b>you are. From this point of view even life’s <i><b>mistakes</b></i> have their own sense and value, the temporary byways and detours, the delays, the ‘modesties,’ the seriousness wasted on tasks which lie beyond<i><b>the</b></i> task. […] You need to keep the whole surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—untainted by any of the great imperatives. Beware even every great phrase, every great pose! With all of them the instincts risk understanding them too soon. Meanwhile in the depths, the organizing ‘idea’ with a calling to be master grows and grows—it begins to command, it slowly leads you back out of byways and detours, it prepares <i><b>individual</b></i> qualities and skills which will one day prove indispensable as means to the whole—it trains one by one all the ancillary capacities before it breathes a word about the dominant task, about goal, purpose, sense<b> (<i>Ecce Homo</i>)</b>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is exactly, I think, what Campbell means by following your bliss; one realizes that living a human life is often accompanied by inescapable constraints of one kind or another, but there need be no authority but the inner deep, Nietzsche’s “organizing idea,” that continually unfolds proportionally to how intensely we approach our own self-becoming. That was a rather long quote, but one often reads <i>about</i> Nietzsche rather than actually reading Nietzsche, and we should be reading him…deeply. Those we turn to in our study of myth were powerfully influenced by him; Campbell certainly read him, Jung read him and worried that perhaps his philosophy made him mad, Freud almost certainly read him and lied, saying he had not.<br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Self-becoming, not change, is what happens in psychotherapy, although I suppose from an outside perspective it appears that, through this process, the individual has changed. But that would be wrong; in fact, she has simply become more of whom she has already always been. When a rose seed becomes a beautiful, blooming rose, it might appear to have changed from a seed to a rose, but the mature rose was always there, inside the seed, and she became the fullest expression of herself. The true value of myth is found not in esoteric teachings about transcendence, nor in, as seductive as it may be, an occulted promise to escape one’s human legacy. Rather, the value of myth is found in its way of consoling us, beings who are subject to wild swings of fortune, impossible moral dilemmas, horrifying exposures to the cannibalizing tendency of life itself to devour life, to triumph, love, joy, sorrow, and all the rest of the exquisitely human experience—as Zorba lovingly called it, “…the whole catastrophe.” To be more fully human should be the goal, to enter one’s humanity more and more deeply, to become as fully and completely human as one can possibly be, and those indispensable qualities and skills which benefit, not just oneself, but the entire collective, are found there. What myths teach is what I have called, in other venues, radical acceptance; Nietzsche called it <i>Amor Fati</i>, Jung called it individuation, and Campbell called it bliss. Keats, in <i>Sleep and Poetry</i>, says it this way:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> …Though no great minist’ring reason sorts<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Out the dark mysteries of human souls <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To clear conceiving: yet there ever rolls <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A vast idea before me, and I glean <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Therefrom my liberty…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Myth has the power of absorbing and disturbing us in secret ways, just as our own self-reflection is likely to absorb and disturb us, in ways remaining frustratingly secret. Myth is one of the few ways complex civilizations keep in mind the uncivilized and untutored selves we desperately want to have outgrown. To keep us in mind, too, the existentially puzzling phenomena we’d rather not give too much thought to, things like death, birth, and the constant struggle between free will and fate, issues that remain stubbornly resistant to the intellect. Myth allows one to see the full force and effect of a complex world on a limited human being, and if one begins to think and imagine mythically, one wakes up and is less constrained by the complexity and limitation of living a human life, and opens the doors of perception to lives of joy and significance. Imagined and thought this way, myth serves the purpose of a closer and truer relationship with life. Myth doesn’t transform or solve the problems of living, but it does illuminate the subject, and that, itself, is something important and worth having.</span></div>
Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-67507719167553933822017-08-27T17:18:00.003-07:002017-08-29T07:18:09.055-07:00Stop Personalizing Mythology. Just knock it off!<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Google the phrase, personal mythology, and one gets in the
neighborhood of 2.4 million results. Personal mythology is a big deal. It’s an
especially big deal for mythologists and mythographers working on the edges of
popular culture, particularly those who seek to capitalize on the spiritual
vacuum afflicting the Western World at present. Religion is in precipitous
decline, even among (perhaps most noticeably among) the implacably religious.
An odd statement perhaps, but bear with me; “none” is the third most endorsed
religious identifier in the world after Christian and Muslim. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">But even more problematic for religion is that those who strongly
identify with a religion are in wild disagreement with one another over what
their religion says, what it actually demands of, and how it compels,
believers. For instance, many who argue that the bible is the literal word of
god have never, apparently, read the Christian bible. <a href="http://thefederalist.com/2016/10/10/survey-finds-american-christians-actually-heretics/">Doctrinal
literacy is at an all-time low</a>, and the bible takes its place on the book
shelves—likely adjacent to <i>War and Peace</i> or <i>Democracy
in America</i>—of people who also own many other books they have never read,
and chagrined to various degrees, understand they should have read them; just
another artifact or accessory that implies or signals something to others about
the intelligence, sophistication, or piousness of its owner. In
contemporary life, some of the most egregious acts of cruelty, moralistic
meanness, and unchristian malice are committed by those who proudly, obtusely,
and very, very loudly proclaim themselves to be humble servants of the Christ
they so preposterously claim to revere, a god with whom they must be only
passingly familiar. The silver lining appended to this cloud is that religious
affiliation is falling off markedly; people are leaving organized religions in
droves.<o:p></o:p></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Polls suggest that the numbers of those who claim some sort of
religious affiliation are declining precipitously. Presently, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-future-of-religion-is-bleak-1430104785">one
in six Americans claim no religion at all</a>, and by 2050 that number will
likely be one in four. But most human beings appear to possess perspectives
wired for narcissism atop <a href="http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/neurotheology-are-we-hardwired-god">brains
wired for belief</a>, and fortunately for those thusly wired, into the breech
ride the personal myth missionaries. Personal mythology is one of those
oxymoronic phrases, like jumbo shrimp or minor miracle, that seem to offer new
depths or innovation that is, in reality, simply a contradiction in terms. I
find the use of the phrase “personal mythology” to be particularly arrant in
its narcissistic and personalistic expropriation of a necessarily cultural
phenomena. Mythology is mythology precisely because it is a cultural product;
it belongs to a particular time, a particular geography, and a particular
group’s experience of the lived-in world. To personalize a myth does violence
to the myth by making it ubiquitous and holographic; it no longer symbolizes a
larger, culturally contextualized experience of hope, say, or anxiety, or
sociopolitical influences, but it rather is made to reflect only itself to
itself—its meaning is reduced to only its merest appearance.<o:p></o:p></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Personalizing myth is similar to a butterfly collector pinning a
butterfly to a display; the object of regard, of beauty, of a particular kind
of awe, is no longer a living thing. Semiotically speaking, the butterfly once
pinned has become a sign rather than a symbol. Likewise, in personal mythology,
the myth has become familiar, domesticated, and has no ability whatsoever to
produce in the one regarding it a sense of awe and mystery, the very experience
that Joseph Campbell insisted was the first function of mythology. It seems to
me that in personal mythology, myth and archetypes are conscripted into the
service of the individual ego in order to reassure and support, legitimatize,
or valorize the individual’s mode of expressing herself in the world. One may
realize that one has characteristics that are analogous to Aphrodite, or those
that line up with Mars, but that sort of pattern identification is focusing
merely on archetypes and not the archetypal. In focusing solely on the
archetypes, one may behave with a self-conscious awareness of approximating
some archetype or another and its behaviors, even attempting to cultivate the
behaviors of archetypes with which one wants to identify. Used this way,
personal mythology is nothing more than a psychic tchotchke, an object of
bemusement, a parlor game; it is little more than an exercise in pattern
recognition—something humans are doing all the time, consciously or not—that
has no relevance to a contemporary, lived-in-world. Its only aim is the
satisfaction of the ego’s need to see itself as having penetrated to the core
of some deep mystery.<o:p></o:p></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Personal mythology simply projects one’s own ego onto the world,
and then having repressed one’s own projection, stumbles across it as though it
were a novel, self-evident fact of existence, and plants its flag, declaring
itself to have found the soul of the world and the mythic foundations of
existence. Personal mythology is nothing more than self-bamboozlery, albeit a
pretty and a satisfying bamboozle, and its adherents, as was once said of
President Coolidge, once bamboozled, are impossible to unbamboozle.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The archetypal, on the other hand, possesses and overwhelms
individuals, often to their great dismay and without their awareness, without
their consent, and impels them to actions of which they had never thought
themselves capable. Survey some of the writings of the personal myth genre and
you will be invited to discover your inner guru or lover or magician or
warrior, and so on. Pleasant things to discover, certainly, but what about
one’s inner demagogue, savage, murderer, traitor, fraud, and so forth? These
are all archetypes, too, and live in the inky darkness of every heart. But
understanding archetypes, even locating them within, is not the same as
understanding the archetypal. David Miller writes that the archetypal “refers
to the deep self, to complexity and fundamental ambiguity, to plurality and
polymorphous structures, to depth, to the fact that things have more than one
side, many sides, like the many gods of mythology. The logic of the term is metaphor”
(A Myth is as Good as a Smile: The Mythology of a Consumerist Culture</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/mytho/Documents/Falstaff%20blog-personal%20myth.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">[1]</span></a><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">).
The archetypal is never only one thing.<o:p></o:p></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The archetypal seems similar to Kant’s description of the sublime
in his <i><a href="http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kant-the-critique-of-judgement"><span style="font-style: normal;">Critique of Judgment</span></a></i>, while the
archetype may be related to what he described merely as the beautiful. As Kant
imagines it, the sublime has a few dimensions, most notably those of magnitude
and force. The sublime is immense, it is an experience, as well as an idea,
that one simply cannot wrap one’s mind around. In addition, the sublime is
overwhelming and destabilizing to individuals when it is encountered; it’s not
all that comforting or pleasant, in fact, it’s often destabilizing and
disturbing. Encountering the sublime requires one to wrestle with the inner and
the outer experience much longer than one would ideally like, until some sort
of equilibrium is reached, and reaching equilibration, a profound aesthetic
realization is realized. As the poet Shelly once remarked, the sublime requires
us to forsake the easy for the harder pleasures.<o:p></o:p></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">There must be, I believe, a similar wrestling with mythology
because, strictly speaking, mythology is not relevant to the modern
contemporary world; the study of myth is always pointing us backward, to the
past. Wolfgang Giegerich puts it this way: “Working in and with mythology is
anachronistic, atavistic, regressive. Gods are lifeless relics. They are the
result of learning, not of religious or mythological experience” (<i>The Soul’s
Logical Life: Toward a Rigorous Notion of Psychology</i>, Frankfurt: Peter
Lang, 1998; “<i>Killings</i>," Spring 54, 1993). Myths allow us to explore
how we once thought rather than how we think now. But here is the interesting,
and I think important, thing about that: myths give us the chance to wonder
deeply, and imaginatively, about why we no longer think that way and how, in
the unconscious, inky depths of ourselves, we still want to. We are attracted,
ironically, to the comfortable certainty with which myths provide us. We know,
for example, that we live in a heliotropic solar system and the planet Earth
orbits around the sun like all the other planets, but it doesn’t <i>feel</i> that
way, does it? It <i>feels</i> as if the Earth is still and the sun is
moving. One’s intuitive experience is that the sun moves and the Earth is
still, and we occasionally need to remind ourselves of that in times when, say,
we witness a glorious sunrise or a heartbreakingly beautiful sunset. Myth is
often more aligned with intuition than with the reality of being--which we
cannot fully know, and therefore we find solace in that which makes intuitive
sense to us. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">On their surface alone, many mythological narratives offer the reader an unparalleled delight; that itself is an important function of myth. But mythology is ultimately meaningful when we use it to explore the deeper structures and motives toward which myth points. Those structures are not generally apprehendable with an understanding other than metaphorical, and we always end up saying what it is "like." This is not a failure at all, in fact, and this dance, this wrestling, this perspective, is a deep movement into and among the rhythms of contemporary life, our own as well as the life of the world. Wittgenstein suggested that the limits one perceives on one's world are created by the limits of one's language, and it is at this place, the place of limits, a protean potential for change and the realization of meaning exists. But to get there, on must transgress boundaries and categories, comfort and conventional thought, and that's why understanding the language of myth in the context of our present mythlessness is so important. It is literally the activity of working at the limits or the edges of oneself, and of oneself in the world. Myth must not, I believe, be worked within the confines of what one finds comfortable, attractive, or familiar; those things never take us closer to boundaries or limits. Furthermore, it seems proper somehow that if one is working at the limits, boundaries, or edges one becomes unsure of the way, one feels lost. The forms become strangely alien, perhaps even frightening or horrible, and our charge at these times is not to flee from nor banish them, but to more deeply understand what they are telling us about ourselves and our world.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">The ancient gods and goddesses have no relevance to modern thought or life, no influence at all, but the archetypal energy and thought from which they precipitated is shaping our modern world at every turn. It isn't Aphrodite or Ares, Sekhmet or Anubis, angels or demons, at work in the world but, every bit as archetypal, it is greed and wealth, digitalization and information technology, political theory and science, and to think of myth only in terms of individual, ancient gods and goddesses is to not only be wrong, but to be exactly wrong.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">The pull to domesticate the archetypal image is powerful, and it is ultimately destrictive to the image precisely because it excises the image from the primal, polymorphous, uncanny depths in which it first formed--those "terrors of which myth are made;" yet that is exactly what person mythology seems to do. It may also be a danger to one's self as well, because a domesticated, familiar, comforting image is finally, at bottom, only the image of desire and the product of desire's corrosive dullness and fatuous pacification. James Joyce called art that inspires in the observer the desire to possess the represented image pornographic, as opposed to didactic art that demands a conversation, or the transcendent image that inspires a "seizure of the heart," an aesthetic arrest. Doesn't that sound something like a heart attack? To have the epiphanic, transcendent, or numinous experience, one must risk being in danger. William Blake's Tyger is beautiful, but to run into a living, hungry tiger in the jungle is much more of an ordeal and much closer to the experience of the sublime (if one is fortunate enough to survive it).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">A more rigorous, critical thinking will prevent our mything from lapsing into the prosaic and comfortable, from becoming a fantasy of consolation. I think there should always be an element of danger as one works with metaphor and myth. I don't mean physical danger, obviously, but I do think I mean an element of psychological danger in the sense that one is courting actualities that once realized, have the possibility of changing one's life, of bringing one to one's knees, of overturning and subverting one's perceptions and values. It's dangerous! And the failure to make room for, and valorize this type of danger (as well as ignorance and confusion) and focus incessantly on personally uplifting, comforting, even protective images and narratives, produces in me a bone-deep exhaustion and cynicism. Personal mythology turns myth into a mirror in which every face is perceived except one's own. In her <i>Wolf's Hall</i>, Hillary Mantel writes this: "Why does everything you know and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corner are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world, too." By now you know where my sympathies lay; let's knock the corners off the certainties we think we know about mythology. Let's knock off the mummery of personal mythology. It is possible to have a personal relationship to the realm of the mythic--one thinks of methodologies like transpersonal psychology--but the mythic realm has no relationship to you, at all. A mythology that is in service only to individuals is not mythology; it's merely belief and fantasy, belief which has no real egalitarian, relational tie to the collective, to humanity writ large, to the social units of culture, other than in its desire to proclaim certainty and to regulate the behavior of the masses.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">One may believe whatever one wants, I have no issue with that until it gets personal. And when it gets personal, that usually means somebody is knocking at my door, telling me that I should believe the same things they believe. By my lights, that sort of compulsion only happens when the personal is seen as the anodyne for the collective, when dogma and missionaries are born simultaneously, when vice and ferocity are ennobled, and evil glories in its grotesque convictions.</span></div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/mytho/Documents/Falstaff%20blog-personal%20myth.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">[1]</span></a><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> David
Miller gave this presentation at a Pacifica Graduate Institute conference on
Archetypal Activism in Santa Barbara, California, on June 12, 1999. An
abbreviated version of these remarks was published by The Salt Journal, 2/1
(1999), 64.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
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Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-74380796336144553872017-03-06T10:44:00.002-07:002022-12-16T16:07:37.378-07:00Every Man a King<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Populism is not new to American life; in fact, it is as old
as the republic itself. In its most basic, lowest denominator, populists are
the “pure people” who set themselves against a “corrupt elite.” One might argue
that this sentiment is at the beginning of, and is the heart, of the American
experiment. Parallel to that sentiment is the desire to not be subservient to
any other living human. Every man, as Huey Long said, should be a king. And
this is an interesting thing; until Donald Trump arrived on the political
scene, Huey Long was perhaps the most successful populist politician in the
modern age, and though Huey wanted every man to be a king, he wanted to be, and
tried very hard to become, the emperor who ruled over all the kings. The
authoritarian government that Long set up in Louisiana was “…the closest thing
to a dictatorship that America has ever known” (David Kennedy, <i>Freedom From Fear: The American People in
Depression and War</i>). One of the major problems with dictatorships is that
the martinet seldom thinks about what his subjects need or want. Absolute monarchs
only think about what they, themselves, want and will selfishly do whatever it
takes to get it. Dictators are less statesmen and more Mafiosi.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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It might be interesting to go on and further compare Huey
Long with Donald Trump; both brash, both almost feral in their cunning ability
to get what they want, their demagoguery, their flamboyance, their rejection of
a globally unifying vision of the world, and their extremely thin-skinned intolerance
of criticism and contradiction. But these similarities are not what interest me
right now; I’m more interested in the message rather than the messenger,
because this populist notion of being servile to nothing and no one except
one’s own conscience is a malignant and pernicious idea. It’s malignant and
pernicious in large part because there is no longer (and perhaps there never
was) an agreement among the members of our society based upon the very simple, manifestly
evident proposition that we all do better when we try to ensure that we all do
better. But dictators must do better than everyone else in order to have
someone to rule, creating a climate of competition that forces competition to curry favor with the powerful and wealthy, rather than
cooperation. An autocrat creates largely
artificial differences between genders and races, wars external as well as
internal, and a constant state of chaos designed to keep others off balance and
frightened enough for them to look to him to provide them with answers,
stability, and leadership. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Populism insists upon the fantasy of not being subjugated or
enslaved to anyone, and it is a fantasy which belies the reality of life, the
hallmarks of which are the painful and frustrating limitations of being
a human being. But being human beings, we are geniuses at creating the
comforting illusion and the frangible “reality” that convinces us that we are unrestrained
free agents and can do as we please, especially if what we do pleases us. Populism
seems to depend upon the human tendency to create the comforting illusions of
existential freedom and easy certainty while ignoring the utterly crushing
weight of all that one doesn’t, and can’t, know or accomplish. These kinds of
movements reject expertise and ridicule as naïve the idea that scientists,
journalists, philosophers, educators, and others may possibly be working in
good faith, holding no agenda other than the desire to shed more light on the
mystery of human existence and, as Robert Kennedy once put it, “tame the savageness of
man and make gentle the life of this world.” The task of living a human life
is, in large part, the struggle to understand one’s internal and external limitations, and the fundamental problem to undertake when we encounter those
limits, is one of consoling and encouraging ourselves and each other to be adaptable,
resilient, and hopeful. But now in populist America there exists a rage, rage
predicated upon a belief that one’s failure to achieve a satisfying life is the
fault of someone else. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Why are so many of us willing, even eager, to believe the
worst about other people, especially those people who have struggled to somehow
cobble together an existence lived outside of “conventional” societal
expectations? Are we such a fragile people that we must purge from our midst
any ideas that emit the merest whiff of challenge or pose the slightest danger
to fatuous and puerile comforts—comforts that, I can only conclude, many
have proclaimed to be an unassailable, god-given right? Are our identities and our
beliefs so fragile that we can brook no criticism of any kind, nor any calls for
self-reflection at all? Why do so many of our people and politicians want to
hurt, actually want to harm and punish, people who, harming no one by their
actions, dare to step outside of the influence of conventional social life and
love, work, create, and simply live as some deep, impelling need commands them?
Like a January nor’easter, there is a profound meanness and a chilling
humorlessness blowing across the U.S., and if it doesn’t freeze you in your
tracks it should at least give you pause, because no one, and I mean <i>no one</i>, is really safe in such an
ungenerous world for very long. One’s successes are not owed to one’s special
brilliance, nor to a shrewd manipulation of the constituent forces that constitute life.
Good luck is always the most influential factor. Fortuna’s wheel can turn very
quickly and in so doing, unexpectedly crush one beneath it even though just a
moment ago, one was thrilled to have been atop the wheel. And, make no mistake, we must
all, as Bob Dylan sang, serve somebody. In Herman Melville’s <i>Moby Dick</i>, Ishmael articulated this fundamental truth saying, “Who
ain’t a slave? Tell me that […] either in a physical or metaphysical point of
view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should
rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.” The populist vision sets no
one free, it makes no person a king; in fact, it always does the opposite by
enslaving one to a dollar, a demagogue, a desire, a nation, or a religion. How
the enslavement happens varies, but it is a virtual certainty that one will be
enslaved, at the very least, often to one’s own worst impulses. <o:p></o:p></div>
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So why, then, are people attracted to mass movements like
populism? I think Eric Hoffer provides us with the answers in his 1951 book, <i>The True Believer</i>. Movements such as
populism are especially appealing to those who long to be other than who or
what they are; they want to be rid of an unwanted life, an irksome existence, a
too burdensome humanity; they have failed in terms of finding the ability to
create the kind of life they think they should have been able to live and they
find no hope of life being different for them in the future. Mass movements
appeal to those who feel cheated by life and believe that they have been prevented from succeeding
by outside forces or some massive conspiracy instigated by minorities, a
secret wealthy cabal, or a “rigged system.” The fanatic, writes Hoffer, “…is usually
an unattractive human type. He is ruthless, self-righteous, credulous,
disputatious, petty and rude.” He is willing to “sacrifice much that is
pleasant and precious in the autonomy of the individual […] The true believer
is eternally incomplete, eternally insecure.” Fanaticism is the only way for
some to quiet the inner voices of doubt and uncertainty, and by joining a mass
movement they hope to lose their frustration and seem to give themselves a new
self, a new identity, and a different, less problematic life.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Unfortunately, their new lives are empty of any individual
uniqueness, critical thought, self-reflection, or free choice. They give
themselves over to a demagogue who has convinced them that he is leading them
away from their undesired, intolerable lives, and the kind or quality of ideas
such a movement away embraces is of little significance to them. What is significant to
them is “…the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of
others, the single-handed defiance of the world” (Hoffer). The act of taking up
fanatical points of view is tantamount to an admission of deep fear and
uncertainty, of a profound personal shame at the center of one’s being. But, if the fanatic can convert others to the fanatical cause, he shores up his weak self-concept
and feels more whole and complete. Curiously, a forced conversion of others through
intimidation or other coercive means doesn’t seem to subdue his enthusiasm for,
or cause him to question the moral or ethical strength of his belief. <o:p></o:p><br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
It seems to me that the loudest, most insistent, most
authoritative voices demanding patriotism and trumpeting freedom are likely to
come from the very people who feel the least whole and the most aggrieved about
their inability to live a life of personal meaning and significance, and
who are the least fit for living contentedly in a truly free society, let alone
governing it wisely.Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-20033556307218810382017-02-06T15:52:00.000-07:002017-02-07T20:55:15.080-07:00An Open Letter to my Colleagues in the Study of Mythology<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>David
Miller tells a charming anecdote in which Joseph Campbell delivers the
punchline, saying, “A myth ith ath good ath a sthmile,” punning on the idiom, a
miss is as good as a mile. More than simply recalling the incisorless speech of
a child, mything and missing are a conspicuous pair pertaining to the study of mythology
as well. There is, as Dr. Miller points out, something missing in our mything. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Indulge
me the telling of my own anecdote, one that I’ve heard in various settings and
circumstances my whole life, and has always suggested to me the peculiar
ability of my people to ignore discomfort or emotional disturbance. It goes
like this:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An English couple have a child. After the
birth, medical tests reveal that the child is normal, apart from the fact that
it is Norwegian. As the child grows older, it obsessively reads about farming
and farm implements and dresses in overalls, flannel shirts, and hand knit
sweaters bearing wintry designs, but all his basic functions develop normally.
He walks, eats, sleeps, learns, and so on, but for some reason the Norwegian
child never speaks. The concerned parents take the child to the doctor, who
reassures them that the child is normal in all other areas and he is sure there
is nothing to worry about and that the child will speak in time. Well, years
pass and the child becomes a teenager and still does not speak, although he
seems to be completely normal in all other respects. The Norwegian child’s
English mother is particularly distressed by her son’s apparent inability to
speak, but she tries to hide her worry and sadness from the child while she
works very hard to make her unfortunate child’s life comfortable. One day she
makes the now 17 year old, still silent child, a bowl of tomato soup and takes
it to him in his room where he is listening to music on the stereo. Not long
after, the child appears in the kitchen and suddenly says, “Mother. The soup is
a little tepid.” The astonished mother says, “All these years you never spoke a
word, and it appears you could speak all along! Why? Why did you never say
anything before?” “Because, mother,” answers the child, “up until now
everything has been fine.”<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></o:p></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">For most of my life, whenever I
heard one of the several variations of this joke, I merely chalked it up to a
gentle lampooning of Scandinavian stoicism. But now I find something deeper and
darker in this old joke, a disturbing truth about a cherished value, comfort.
This little anecdote reveals the disturbing shadow of comfort in that when one
becomes too comfortable one is removed from, or taken out of the stream of
life, one lives as an invalid. Being comfortable and certain, suppressing
dissonant voices and unwelcome experiences, creates a wound; a wound that
inhabits and inhibits individuals—as well as scholarly disciplines—as well as
intellectual discourse, and inhibits the development of more subtly complex
perceptions of the sublime mysteries to which one is exposed through the often
prosaic effort of living.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If one is to
more deeply understand the sublilme <i>mysterium </i>which lives us, a willing
acceptance of the uncomfortable, discomfiting voice, the voice of the stranger
at the door, the speech of that which is disturbed and disturbing, is essential.
One must encourage the kind of disturbing conversations and inquiries which are
often missing from the methodology that we, in the Pacifica tribe, employ in
the study myth. And like the little Norwegian boy, I found that up until a few
years ago, the way we studied myth had been fine. But it is no longer fine, at
least not for me, and now I have something to say.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Considerations
of disturbance lead me to, once again, consider David Miller. In a keynote
address, in fact, the same speech in which he told the anecdote I previously
referenced</span><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/442f1f208b09d60a/The%20Mything%20Voice.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "calibri";">,
Dr. Miller spoke of the need for those of us who employ what he calls a
synoptic study of mythology to address its criticisms. Upon reflection, I
believe Dr. Miller was characteristically generous in his understanding of our
understanding. Those of us who attended Pacifica Graduate Institute and who,
like myself, received a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies, run the risk of cultivating
an embarrassing self-deception because we did not really study mythology; we
did not study the source material that C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, and James
Hillman studied. Instead, we learned <i>about</i> Jung, Campbell, and Hillman, and
their psychological, metaphorical approaches to mythology. All too often
critiques of that, largely psychological, method were received as <i>ad homonym</i>
attacks rather than legitimate, albeit disturbing, appraisals. Professor Miller
assumed, perhaps over-optimistically, that those of us listening in full
sympathy with him on the cusp of that Labor Day weekend in 2012 knew full well
what he meant when he uttered the word synoptic. I know that I thought <i>I</i>
knew. I <i>knew</i> that the word synoptic meant that several different
stories, perhaps by several different authors, writing in different places and
at different times, despite their lack of correspondence or consistency, all
told the same story. I was sure that I knew that the word <i>synoptic</i> meant
that different narratives point to the same meaning—in the case of myth, a
psychological meaning—and I became enthused to write just such a synoptic
methodology for the study of myth and answer critics like Roland Barthes, Bruce
Lincoln, and even our own academic sibling, Sophia Heller (whose work holds no
small appeal for me). Not surprisingly, as a psychotherapist the program running
in the background dictated that, for me, the best use of myth is that use which
clarifies and valorizes the human-all-too-human condition. Other, unconsidered
and "irrelevant," <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>perspectives
had been of little importance and held only a marginal interest for me.
Perspectives like that of, say, William Faulkner’s, himself a great
mythographer who is supposed to have said, “One of Keats’ odes is worth any
number of old women;” or that of Roland Barthes, who seemed to aggressively
suggest that myth “…is stolen speech” and is best understood semiotically, or even
the notion of Goethe’s in which he insists that the presented form of myth is
not allegorical or metaphorical but is itself an Ur-phenomenon, or in other
words, the reality that a Greek statue of Aphrodite is not a mere representation
of the goddess, but is itself nature manifesting in material form, the very
form love would necessarily take were it to become incarnate. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So
I wrote David a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">longish</i> letter about
my plan to write a methodology for the synoptic study of mythology illustrating
that all myths had one meaning—namely, a psychological one—to which he
responded that that would be a fine idea, and that since he didn’t have
ownership of the word synoptic, I could use that word however best I saw fit,
but he wanted me to know that the way I used the word was not how he used the
word. Professor Miller borrowed the term from Feldman and Richardson (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Rise of Modern Mythology 1680-1860</i>),
a term which they used in the early 70’s to argue for a return to treating myth
as a “master field” unto itself, a primary subject which could be used to
illuminate other disciplines rather than the other way around, causing
mythology to be embedded within other disciplines. For example, from a Jungian
perspective, archetypes are meant to “attract, to convince, to fascinate and to
overpower” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Archetypes of the Collective
Unconscious</i>). Myths, in Jung’s conceptualization, are the epiphenomena of
archetypes, psychic products which are themselves twice removed from conscious
inspection or elaboration. From such a perspective mythology is in service to psychology,
and while that is very appealing to me, it is very far indeed from being the
only possible reason for the existence of myth. For instance, it is clearly
possible that it is not only differing levels of consciousness which are
responsible for the production of myth, for archetypal images are “…neither
evenly distributed, nor found on all continents” (Witzel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Origins of the World’s Mythologies</i>, 15). It may be that
physical and social environments, pathway dependencies, charismatic qualities
of political or spiritual leaders, and other individual and cultural factors all,
in some way, condition systems of mythology. As G.S. Kirk stated it, “Analysis
of a myth should not stop when one particular theoretical explanation has been
applied and found productive” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Nature
of Greek Myths</i>).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Because
I am nothing if not persistent, although I acknowledge that some call it perseveration,
let me return to Jung’s statement about archetypes, those productions of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Psyche</i> which he described as
overpowering, fascinating, and enthralling, or some words to that effect, and
which provide a very big clue to that with which mythology is engaged, and why
we find it so engaging. Jung’s language is very similar to the language the 18<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup>
Century philosopher Immanuel Kant used in his descriptions of the sublime</span><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/442f1f208b09d60a/The%20Mything%20Voice.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "calibri";">.
But the sublime is not a product of psyche; it is itself a totality which
exists outside of psyche and to which psyche may be exposed. As I recall, Kant
argued that the sublime has at least two dimensions, one of magnitude and the
other of force. In other words, when confronted with the sublime, the
experience is so big, so immense, that one simply cannot wrap one’s mind around
it; it is incomprehensible. In addition to its incomprehensibility, there is
the added and intense feeling of being overwhelmed in its presence and one’s
physical and emotional integrity feels threatened by an encounter with the
sublime. What makes the sublime even more disturbing is the feeling of
undeniable pleasure in the face of the apparent “counter-purposiveness,” as
Kant named it, and which one experiences as the disorganizing, distressing, and
disturbing effect upon cognition, emotion, and consciousness in general. One
would expect such an encounter to be painful, but instead the sublime encounter
evokes pleasure and an aesthetic experience one retrospectively understands to
be beauty. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Perhaps
it is, in fact, the sublime which is the proper subject of myth—that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mysterium</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tremendum</i> which the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">logos</i>
of myth attempts to render intelligible, and if this is so, the addressed
subject is so vast, so extensive, so interminable and immeasurable that only
one approach to its study, or a singular voice of understanding serves ultimately
to trivialize and domesticate an ungovernable and unfathomable reality. As
David Miller put it, “The danger is that we may be unaware and unconscious</span><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/442f1f208b09d60a/The%20Mything%20Voice.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "calibri";">.”
Unaware and unconscious of the embedded political, theological, social, and
psychological agendas buried so deep within the psychological way we study myth
as to be unrecognized, we are more likely to further shackle than free, more
apt to obscure than illuminate, more likely to limit than restore mythography to
its rightful place as a master discipline. As the philosophical method referred
to as destructuralization has repeatedly demonstrated, what we see is
determined by what we cannot see; or as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes,
“Our vision, […] what we are able to see, is sponsored by our blind spots;
[knowing] what we are determined not to know frees us and forces us to know
something else” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Becoming Freud</i>). To
accomplish the knowing of what we do not know provokes and invites disturbance
and discomfiture, it demands from us a willingness to allow our senses to incorporate
something that initially appears insensible. But there is something else going
on in one’s experience of the sublime. One’s own ideas and intuitions (both
conscious and unconscious ideas of one’s own reason, which Kant suggests interact
with the sublime, if not actually constituting an aspect of it) are brought to bear on the
experience and eventually result in a harmony of reason with the sublime. With this
move, the sublime becomes “purposive” rather than “counter-purposive” and
creates a feeling of deep, acute pleasure. The deep disturbance is now matched
by a higher pleasure rising from the newly discovered purposiveness, and it
persuades us, as the poet Shelley noted, to forsake the easy for the harder
pleasures. Of course, one can’t shoehorn the sublime encounter into a
continuous state of being. The purposive and counterpurposive states are
alternating continually and neither of them wins out, which is to say that
experiencing the sublime subjects one to a disturbing, rapid alternation of
feelings and perceptual states</span><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/442f1f208b09d60a/The%20Mything%20Voice.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "calibri";">.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
myth is indeed the speech of the sublime (ology typically refers to the study
of something, but the root word is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">logos</i>,
commonly taken to denote speech) then one, single, unopposed perspective is
nothing more than a blind alley in a welter of urban streets. Myth needs a
variety of approaches and voices in interposition to even begin to plunge its
limitless logos; it requires a cacophony of voices clambering to live in the awkward
fullness of life rather than seeking out a comfortable, banal, and ultimately
regressive paradise of belief. Campbell knew this very well, and while his
rhetoric or his imagery sometimes left the earth, he never did. And if there is
a hell, it is not to be found in some distant place either, but exists here and
now, formed by all of us together. It seems to me there are only a few ways out
of hell; one is common and used by many: fail to attend to the hell and become
so much a part of it that one no longer sees it. An alternative way, a
challenging path to be sure, demands that one live seeking out the sublime
encounter, a way of living and thinking that places one, more often than not,
uncomfortably outside of one’s pleasingly comfortable beliefs. This way out of
hell requires one to disregard easy pleasure and instead be determined to
recognize who and what voices, in the midst of hell are not hell, and subjecting
them to rigorous examination help them to be recognized and abide, creating a
space for them and in so doing, experience marvelous hopes, extraordinary
insights, and sublime pleasures, rendered all the more marvelous for their
difficult acquisition.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/442f1f208b09d60a/The%20Mything%20Voice.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">
The Symposium on Myth, August 31, 2012.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/442f1f208b09d60a/The%20Mything%20Voice.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> As
found in his 1790 work, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Critique of
Judgment</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/442f1f208b09d60a/The%20Mything%20Voice.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">
Keynote address, August, 2012<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/442f1f208b09d60a/The%20Mything%20Voice.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> I
have written about this rapid alternation of perceptual states in an article
entitled, “The Disturbing Release of Personality,” published on the Joseph
Campbell Foundation’s website, jcf.org.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-18578891367598255612016-12-14T11:32:00.002-07:002016-12-14T14:58:37.814-07:00Immortal Longings<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Give me my robes, put on my crown; I have immortal longings in me.”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The quote above is from Shakespeare’s play, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Antony and Cleopatra</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Cleopatra utters these lines just a few moments before she places a poisonous snake to her breast, which then bites her, releases its venom into her body, and kills her. Most of us, I suspect, would be in agreement with her sentiment; when thoughts of death occupy our minds, most of us long for immortality, too.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our usual solution to the “problem” of death is to simply not think about it; if, perchance, we are for some reason forced to think about that bitter hug of mortality, it’s done only with a begrudging reluctance. Such denial is quite common, really. Perhaps even necessary. If we were to think of death in proportion to its effects on our lives, death would be on our minds constantly and we would be utterly paralyzed, unable to even get out of bed. It is functionally adaptive to be able to avoid thinking about our own mortality at every moment. Even that clear-eyed rationalist, Friedrich Nietzsche allowed that we need the occasional “comforting illusions.” He said that without them, we would die of the truth. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let me give you an example of how this self-delusion works, and it is nowhere better described than by Tolstoy in his novella, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Death of Ivan Ilyich</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">:</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 72pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 72pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius – man in the abstract – was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> “He simply did not and could not grasp it.” Death is, perhaps, the only human experience that can’t be learned. We go through life learning how to live from the experiences of others: how to behave in social situations, how to change a tire on a car, how to love, how to play a game, and on and on, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ad infinitum</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. We are told, often in great detail, what these activities consist of, why they matter, and, perhaps most importantly, we get to experiment with these activities under the tutelage of a parent, mentor, or coach and become so intimately familiar with them that we develop a sense of expertise, a “feeling” of doing it rightly, a sense of competence. All of which is terribly reassuring and lends to one concluding that life is knowable, reasonably predictable, and if one follow the rules as articulated, relatively safe, too. One feels competent and efficacious; one feels one is in control of one’s own life. And if you place those feelings of certainty and efficaciousness alongside self-righteousness, you will have identified the holy trinity of human feeling. We love believing that we know things, how they work, their contingencies, their limits. We also love believing that we know how life works, how we, ourselves work, because if one can know that, then one can perfectly order and structure one’s life to receive the maximum satisfaction from it. We literally bet our lives on it, and we don’t much like the idea that we simply do not, and cannot, grasp the idea of life.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At the cutting edge of neuroscience, we are wrestling with startling conclusions: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality (see, for instance, Amanda Gefter, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Case Against Reality</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, The Atlantic, September 25, 2016). What we call reality and “the things out there,” are more properly understood as icons on a computer desktop. These icons have a particular color, a shape, and a location on the desktop. And when you click on them you expect a particular thing to happen that does, in fact, usually happen. These icons can differ from computer to computer, or even from user to user depending upon how you arrange them. But those qualities or categories of shape, color, and location I just mentioned are not the truth about the file of which the icon is a representation, and there is nothing physically inside my computer that looks like that icon. One couldn’t reconstruct a computer if one’s only view of its reality was limited to the desktop, and yet we think we can understand life and death through the equivalent act of clicking on the icon of a child, a spouse, a job, or even a casket or a pair of angel’s wings, thinking that the icon itself is reality.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And yet we insist upon living, and thinking about our living, in just this way. We tell ourselves that life is exactly what it appears to be. Especially when it comes to dying. Dying appears to be the end of me; dying appears to be final; dying appears to be separation. Now, when I say dying </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">appears</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to be these things, I’m not implying that dying is the opposite of these things, either. I’m completely clear that I don’t know what, if anything, happens after we die. C.G. Jung has said that what happens after we die “...is simply a psychic activity that transcends the limits of consciousness…[death] means, psychologically, ‘beyond consciousness.’ There is positively nothing else it could mean since statements about immortality can only be made by the living, who, as such, are not exactly in a position to pontificate about conditions ‘beyond the grave’” (CW vol. 7, 191). And yet, because death conveys the possibility that one is to be annihilated, done for, torn away and irrevocably separated from everything and everyone one has hitherto loved, one may well long for immortality. And one may make any bargain to attain it. But, is it not perhaps so, that as long as one lives in fear of death, one is already dead? The fear of death pushes living out of one’s grasp.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Death is the inevitable and even necessary end to life, and as such, it is an important life task we mustn’t try to avoid. Learning how to die will, in fact, teach us how to live. If we refuse to learn how to die, the fear of death makes one into a slave, bonded to anything or anyone that arouses existential anxiety. The fear of death prevents us from living authentically as ourselves, it prevents us from thinking as we choose to think, and instead fashions our lives around the proclamations and directives of those who “know better” than ourselves. The fear of death makes us beholden to whatever person, activity, or belief professes to prolong life for us or even save us from death itself. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The problem, as I see it, is that death is not recognized for what it is, as one of the most important aspects of life (in fact, both Freud and Jung speak of death as the goal of life), and the avoidance of death insures that we will fail to fully live. Freud points out, “...at bottom, no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his immortality” (<i>Reflections on War and Death</i>). And if we don’t believe in our deaths, we will have great difficulty believing in our lives as well. Life becomes empty, mean, and frankly boring, when we refuse to countenance any risk at all to our survival. Jung writes, "Death is psychologically just as important as birth and, [as such], is an integral part of life...If viewed correctly in the psychological sense, death, indeed, is not an end but a goal, and therefore life for death begins as soon as the meridian [mid-life] is passed" (The Secret of the Golden Flower). </span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A complete life, a full life, would then involve living for life in the first half of life--achieving, mastering, building careers, raising families, and so on, while the second half of life (after the meridian, as Jung puts it) is lived for death--the cultivation of beauty or aesthetics, developing a sense that one's life has meaning, that it has a necessary order, doing those things with one's life that must be done so that at the moment of death, on may be satisfied with the way one has lived. In ancient Greece there was an ideal known as the <i>Kalos</i> <i>Thanatos</i>, the beautiful death, and a beautiful death begins to take shape long before one's actual death by living each moment of one's life as fully and richly as possible, as though one had no other choice. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Plutarch recalls the Great Pompey saying to his men as a terrible storm arose upon the sea on which they were about to set sail, “To sail is necessary, to live is not.” Eventually one finds that there are many things in life more important than death.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Before I close allow me to return for a moment to Cleopatra's poignant words, "I have immortal longings in me." Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, leaves the meaning of this utterance indistinct. One may read her as longing for immortality, expressing a wish to avoid death, but one might also read something else in this statement; one might conclude that it is longing itself that is immortal. Immortal longing. Here, I make a distinction between longing and desire. Desire may often be fulfilled, but longing can never be entirely satisfied; even when one achieves cherished, long held goals, what often remains is a nagging sense of incompleteness or gnawing emptiness, as though one expected to feel something more, something definitive and final. It is a function, I believe, of our human, all too human constitution to long for that which cannot be realized, for that which cannot be grasped. I think that the unquenchable longing is really the longing for an aesthetic experience, the longing for an experience of transcendent and pervasive beauty.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think that the apprehension of beauty is the product of an alchemy of impermanence--our own on the one hand and on the other, the rarity, the strangeness, the fragility of the observed. Those qualities in ourselves bind to the same qualities in the regarded beauty and for a moment, we are transported out of ourselves. We understand that the beautiful is also ephemeral, that the experience of beauty is momentary, it doesn’t last, that beauty is fugitive and hard to grasp. Those qualities don’t diminish the experience of beauty, they define it. The 14th century Zen poet, Yoshida Kenko, wrote: "If we lived forever, never to vanish like the dews of Adashino, never to fade like the crematory smoke on Toribeyama, men would scarcely feel the beauty of things" (my translation).</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So if it is, in fact, our longing that is immortal, one may experience immortality in a transient moment of aesthetic rapture. This is the experience William Blake described when he wrote, "To see the a world in a grain of sand/ And heaven in a wildflower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/ And eternity in an hour" (<i>The Songs of Innocence</i>). The longing for deep beauty, whose very nature is ephemeral and transient, places one in harmony with death in a profoundly powerful manner, allowing one to realize that death itself makes life beautiful, and what's more, it is death that makes life bearable. And finally, as Sigmund Freud archly noted, "To bear life remains, after all, the first duty of the living" (<i>Reflections on War and Death</i>).</span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-e26afe76-f9b1-3eb9-8eb8-a59a9d7dd0f3"></span>Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-6786776235403742502016-11-28T07:51:00.001-07:002016-11-28T11:22:27.037-07:00Altered People<br />
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<i>And up the paths </i></div>
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<i>The endless altered people came,</i></div>
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<i>Washing at their identity. </i></div>
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<i>Now, helpless in the hollow of </i></div>
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<i>An unarmorial age, a trough</i></div>
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<i><span style="color: #404040;">Of smoke in slow suspended skeins</span><span style="color: #404040;"> </span></i></div>
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<i>Above their scrap of history, </i></div>
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<i style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; text-indent: -1em;">Only an attitude remains:</i></div>
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<i>Time has transfigured them into </i></div>
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<i>Untruth. The stone fidelity</i></div>
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<i>They hardly meant has come to be </i></div>
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<i>Their final blazon, and to prove </i></div>
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<i>Our almost-instinct almost true: </i></div>
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<i>What will survive of us is love.</i></div>
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<i>--Phillip Larkin</i></div>
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The above is the last half a poem called <i>An Arundel Tomb</i> by the poet, Phillip Larkin (Larkin was just honored this weekend with a plaque in Poet's Corner inside Westminster Abbey), who so plangently renders the timeless relevance of sublime poetry. What catches my attention at this particular moment is the line, <i>And up the paths/ The endless, altered people came/ Washing at their identity</i>. This is a poem that is, on its face, about tourists visiting Arundel Castle in the south of England where there lies a medieval couple carved in stone atop a sarcophagus, he with a gauntlet removed and tenderly holding her hand. What is it about them that draws us to look upon them and feel an instinctual longing, and at the same time, a curious vulnerability?<br />
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I think that if I am able to write this essay as I feel it living in me, I shall have succeed in alienating those on the far right as well as the far left, but I don't write to alienate; I write because writing is a way for me to passionately engage the world, to wake myself up. There comes a point in alienation, I suppose, that one becomes so thoroughly alienated that one is alien to oneself, so alien that communal life may no longer be possible, and arriving at such an existential nadir one becomes dehumanized--the greatest risk of embracing the politics of grievance. But I'm getting ahead of myself. It is we who are the "altered people" Larkin writes of. We have altered ourselves to the point that we no longer recognize ourselves as complete, whole people, and have become a people to whom a sense of wholeness is largely unconscious and inaccessible. Once we were beings experiencing ourselves with a vital, physical existence mated to the challenge of exploring and understanding the human experiences of life and living; now we live virtually and vicariously and stake ourselves to a largely metaphysical state of dissatisfaction and lament in which our only responsibilities are protest and accusation.<br />
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The politics of identity and grievance have come to occupy American life to such an extraordinary degree that we shoehorn the elaborate heterogeneity of a personality into a single quality or behavior and then demand that this subjective declaration of self-hood be objectively accepted by the entire world. We continue to insist upon being known publicly in only this one particular way, and base an entire metaphysics, language, and world view on that single fact about ourselves--the lone fact of gender, sexual orientation, race, socioeconomics, spiritual practices, political affiliations or any other one of a myriad qualities. Then, too frightened to stand alone in our singularity, we practice our self-righteous, one dimensional uniqueness in groups, attempting to leverage as much power over the thoughts and behaviors of others as we can because we are too frightened of the vulnerability to which standing alone in the world exposes us. We seem to be unable, in modern life, to live satisfactorily as an ambivalent, confused, anxious, easily amused, absurd creature who can be capable of experiencing moments of transcendent beauty and happiness. And I believe that it is the unwillingness to stand alone, to be vulnerable or frightened (what every authentic human being is) is in fact, the biggest threat to our civic life.<br />
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We are altered in another way as well; we are altered by our altars. We chain ourselves to altars of belief that reduce complex and nuanced issues such as religions, politics, psychologies, nationalism, race, and power to simplistic, banal statements of irreducible fact and christen it knowledge or intelligence, saying in effect, that because of the complex nature of the issues, my ignorance is as good as your knowledge. This is neither an attractive, nor a recent human development. But what does strike me as novel is the vehement, increasingly angry and aggressive reliance upon raw power and intimidation as though to drive home the point that there is simply no other conceivable way to think. Might makes right, the only catechism needed in the new religion of strength. <br />
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The problem with this insipid, mind-numbingly trite, altaring is that it shreds the social contract, the implicit agreement we have with one another to be a democratic, civil society. Democracy is not, in my estimation, best described as a noun, but rather as a verb since it is more accurately an ongoing action, an intentional behavior, a dialectic rather than a thing. The dialectic of democracy requires the cultivation of and subsequent meditation upon certain uncomfortable, discomfiting, disturbing emotions and thoughts which then teach us the way to empathetically enter into each other's lives. This empathetic comradeship may be the most essential of the dialectics of democracy. Democracy depends upon the idea, the very rational idea, that every one's needs are more likely to be addressed or met through cooperation.<br />
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What is happening to us? I'm certainly not the first, nor the only one to ask this question. It's nearly the sole preoccupation of many people's minds. Generally speaking, we don't wrestle or explore or try to understand what disturbs us, we simply erupt in anger and try to intimidate the other to fall in line. We seem to live in a hot house environment of perpetual grievance, believing in the childish fantasy that my outrage and anger will restore what has been lost or taken from me. Everything will be made right by outrage. I do, by the way, think there are times when anger might be a helpful emotion to entertain because it might be a sign that some remnant of dignity has not been extinguished, that some humanity still abides within, that one may still marshall one's energies to respond to social injustice--that is the very anger which moved me to write this. But as soon as anger is used to frighten and intimidate others, whatever shreds of dignity and humanity might have previously existed, one has now sacrificed all traces of them and moved closer to the smothering embrace of totalitarianism. <br />
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What is happening? Well, one of the things happening is the subtle shift, ongoing for several decades now, in the preferences of modern Americans--Americans on both the right and the left--for authoritarian models of government, education, religion, law and law enforcement, business, and especially modes of thought. It is, I submit, undeniable; from the fatuously slow-witted, antediluvian, repellent second amendment fetishists to the equally fatuous and dogmatic, politically correct thought police terrorizing college campuses and other venues of public discourse. Authoritarianism is, literally, all the rage. Believe in supernatural beings ordering your life and the universe if you want, that is your right. If you seriously believe that a flying spaghetti monster created the universe and controls your life, I truly do not care as long as you don't attempt to make me believe or practice it, or teach it to my child in school. I think you may do whatever you like in private, but don't presume I should do it too. If you like, create an enormous pile in your living room out of all your assault rifles and handguns and writhe, naked, among them attempting some form of human-semiautomatic sexual congress, that is your right. Make sure you live every single moment mindfully in a state of spiritual bliss so you needn't be bothered with that messy, distressing, reality-based life that tends to destabilize your downward dog posture, that is your right. Police your thoughts so that you never harbor a resentment or a wound, a sorrow or a frown, a contradiction or a doubt. That, too, is your right. Above all else, one must be happy; be happy with a vengeance. And if you can't be happy, then you can be aggrieved. The politics of grievance, the social capital of victim hood and the tyranny of political correctness have largely created what Larkin termed our "helpless[ness] in the hollow of an unarmorial age." Life is not Disneyland, and it's not even close to being fair, or safe, or guaranteed to be fun or your money back. If you think your life should be happy, you're wrong. Not only are you wrong by believing that happiness is the most important thing, you've sentenced yourself to a lifetime of unhappiness. But life should be, and needs to be civil, perhaps that's the most we can ask of existence, the most we can humanly create, and when you stop to think about the freedom and security civility creates, well, that may be as close to Utopia as we're likely to come. Civility means that you don't have to think like me, but you must let me think. You don't have to live like me but you must let me live.<br />
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As Larkin notes in his poem, we no longer live in an armorial age; the brutish feudalism, the xenophobia, the bondsmen, the slaves, and all the other sundry roles of illiteracy no longer need be acted out in contemporary life. Who knows what the medieval stone couple's relationship was really like? But Larkin is sure, as am I, that time has altered (and altared) them "into untruth." Their actual lives were almost certainly nothing like we imagine them to have been in our childish romantic fantasies. And the untruth they "hardly meant," the fantasy of pure, gentle, romantic love has been clumsily altered into an idea that we achingly wish were true, an altar to which we moderns make a pilgrimage, shed a sentimental tear or two, and hope that what survives us, absent knowledge of our efforts, our works, or our words, will be love. What draws the tourists' gaze, what creates the vague sense of vulnerability is the wish for love to be real enough, and encompassing enough, to save us. That in the end, we hope we have not altered ourselves to the point where we no longer know how to love, and must face the disturbing fear that love has fallen out with us and fled from the world entirely.Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733684973453456698.post-10422630149595865632016-11-11T22:40:00.000-07:002016-11-12T07:28:34.420-07:00The Intelligent Obligation to be Moral<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> I thought that today may be a good day to revive Falstaff, not from the dead really, because even in Shakespeare's own hands Falstaff can never truly and finally die; but, rather, to bring him back, like Avalonian Arthur, because his sensibility is most needed in the present conversations of cultural and political life. Falstaff lived subverting conventional thought and morality, the edicts of a monarchical state, and ultimately his own intentions. And through Falstaff, Shakespeare gives us a compelling exemplar of the complex, flawed, ego-driven, and yes, loving, nature of humanity. Some suggest Falstaff is the most compellingly human life yet authored. Presently, it seems the times call out for a Falstaff to help us keep our eye on the ball, as it were. I don't claim to offer that, but I do offer my best effort toward it. There was a time when Falstaff Was My Tutor was quite popular, read round the world even, and I hope that in time it will be so again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> I have been re-reading a collection of essays by Lionel Trilling, a modernist bulwark at Columbia University for decades, who died in 1974. The title of these essays , in particular, always enchanted me: <i>The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent</i>. I realize now, writing this on November 9th, 2016, that my urge to re-engage these essays earlier this summer, after so long remaining on the shelf, had more to do with my unconscious need to explore why, in American Culture, intelligence is considered to be some sort of perilous faculty, that "cleverness is the first step into mischief," that the heart and the mind are rivals in the struggle for truth. Why is it, as Trilling himself writes, "...always too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naive moralizing?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> It seems to me the case that, as the result of their combat in the cultural arena, heart and mind are irresolvably locked in a death spiral plummeting each to its certain destruction, leaving only a painful nihilism occupying their former places, powerless in its ability to create and expertly equipped to destroy. Nihilism is the true enemy of culture, nihilism threatens civility, nihilism destroys beauty, and it is certainly nihilism which nudges democracies ever closer to accepting totalitarianism with nothing more than a rueful sigh of powerlessness. The rueful sigh is expelled at the dilatory realization that there is no longer a creative, generative, unifying mythology operating in the cultural fascia, binding us together with a sense of common experience or purpose. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Nihilism creates and exaggerates a simplistic, naive transparency of the world and ideas, ideas which in nihilistic fashion, tend to remain undifferentiated from and confused with opinion. It forsakes human beings, it forsakes an inquiry into truth, rendering both human beings and truth less important than ideas. Nihilism abandons, to subvert Trilling's title a bit, the intelligent obligation to be moral. Morality is not something that human beings need to be taught, nor is it a set of rules divinely ceded to humankind and recorded in some holy text so they may be careful to not be ignored. No, every child understands that it is better for everyone when they treat others as they would like to be treated. I do not think it likely that, before the Israelites set up camp at the base of Mt. Sinai and received the Decalogue, they thought murder, adultery, and larceny were perfectly acceptable and committed them whenever the occasion allowed. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> A moral vacuum develops whenever and wherever ideas assume primacy over human beings and is inevitable whenever real people are objectified or marginalized as statistics, modal examples, or as slaves, servants, or subjects, such as when they are uniformly required to offer complete subservience to an institution, a person, or a belief. In other words, an idea. This is what I am identifying as nihilism, and this is the present state of things in modern religion; it exists to an alarming extent in the academy; and it is certainly true, as we have just seen both on the left and the right, in contemporary American and British politics. Intellect is enfeebled when it is employed solely in the service of utility, when it is used solely for developing pragmatic solutions and definitive answers. In a moral vacuum, nothing is sacred except for the monolithic idea itself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> It is, in my opinion, exactly this lack of a placeholder for the sacred that plunges the institutions of culture into nihilism and, as to whether they address the real concerns of real people, into irrelevance so that there cannot possibly emerge any new cultural mythologies at all, let alone truly novel, generative, creative, unifying mythologies that, at the same time reflect and encourage, feed and inspire, the human spirit. Religion, pick any one from among them, in its early manifestation was replete with mystery and awe, and because it valued--worshiped even--mystery and awe, the sacred was palpably known. I might well say the same thing about academia. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In fact, </span>Trilling's<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> own teacher, John Erskine, wrote that "we really seek intelligence not for the answers it may suggest to the problems of life, but because we believe it is life [...] We love it, as we love virtue, for its own sake, and we believe it is only virtue's other and more precise name." When one values intelligence, not for the answers it may suggest to the problems of living but instead, <i>for its own sake as life itself</i>, the element of the sacred is reintroduced into and made relevant to the living of individual lives, and the pedagogical lynch pin of the sacred is complexity, uncertainty, possibility, difficulty, and most importantly, disturbance.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> The mind, the mental, the intellect, appears to operate as a force multiplier making any sensory or cognitive experience that much more powerful. And while this itself should not be mistaken for a monolithic idea, it really does seem that the natural affiliation of the mental is with the moral, each enhancing the other. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Intellect and moral sensibility should, rather than make us smugly comfortable, disturb us, disquiet us, and lead us to dissent from orthodoxy; they should even lead us, as Trilling put it, "to dissent from the orthodoxies of dissent." Our philosophies, our religions, even our science should, in some profound ways, disturb us if we are engaged with them, and they with us, vitally and meaningfully. Disturbance urges us to augment and elaborate our strategies of living. Put simply, embracing disturbance forces us to grow, and if lived authentically, this quickly becomes a challenging, exacting, and arduous life. It may even become a life of deep satisfaction and, dare I say it, joy. Gentle experiences don't disturb us, and therefore they don't often move us to reflection or contemplation, either; only the dangerous or the uncanny will reliably do that for us (and both are qualities of the sacred). The experiences that create the necessary psychic conditions that result in the expansion of consciousness are usually existentially terrifying; they move one to become so deeply disturbed, so entirely whelmed, that such events and their sequelae remain powerful currents in the stream of existential imagination, against which, we continue to beat until the ends of our lives. The wound is created by the penetration of the sacred into being and being into the sacred, culminating in a disturbing awareness of the vastness of each, soul and space. Such a wounding is, I think, a prerequisite for the discovery of an inner life and what's more, it is at least the necessary, but probably not entirely sufficient condition for the emergence of new mythologies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; text-align: justify;"> I have often been accused of thinking too much. To this charge, I suppose I plead guilty. No doubt that I am a depth psychologist because I think it is impossible to think too much about life, life that may, after all, only be understood by reflection. The disturbances, woundings, dissentings, and other manifestations of the sacred are not, as Trilling might point out, "a mere display of [may I say, personal and] cultural indecisiveness but, rather, that they constitute a dialectic, with all the dignity that inheres in that word." To encounter the sacred is to begin a conversation with life that not only, I believe, constitutes the essence of mythology, but also refines and advances morality and intelligence as well as our obligation to both.</span></div>
Falstaff Was My Tutorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17384865942893123660noreply@blogger.com4