rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_77630fc2-c7e2-5d96-b955-30d255bfaa3b.jpg" alt="images"/>
Of course, this is one of my own myths. I was raised on the knee of Homer, which is an Old World way to describe growing up on stories as old as stone and timeless as dreams. So I see myth everywhere, probably because I am looking for what my American Indian friends call “the long story,” the timeless aspect of everything I encounter. I know the usual places to look for it, such as in the splendor of classic literature or the wisdom stories of primal people. I've memorized a litany of luminous definitions and descriptions of myth, such as “a sacred narrative” “the collective wisdom,” “the group dream,” “other people's religion,” “the vehicle of profoundest metaphysical insights,” “cultural DNA,” even “a metaphor transparent to transcendence,” I am profoundly indebted to the great scholars of mythology who have rendered such complex material into pithy sayings, and I am often startled by the beauty of their theories about its origin and function.
But in the chapters following I want to explore the aspect of myth that most fascinates me: its “once and future” nature. Myths are stories that evoke the eternal because they explore the timeless concerns of human beings—birth, death, time, good and evil, creativity and destruction. Myth resembles the god Proteus in the Odyssey, a shape-shifting creature who knows the secret that the lost Greek sailors long to hear—the way home. But they must learn how to get a grip on him, if only for one slippery moment, so he might surrender his hidden wisdom.
This is what I call “mythic vision.” The colorful and soulful images that pervade myth allow us to step back from our experiences so that we might look closer at our personal situations and see if we can catch a glimpse of the bigger picture, the human condition. But this takes practice, much like a poet or a painter must commit to a life of deep attention and even reverence for the multitude of meaning around us. An artist friend of mine, Gregg Chadwick, calls this “pulling the moment,” a way of looking deeper into experiences that inspire him. In the writing classes I teach, I refer to this mystery as the difference between the “overstory,” which is the visible plot, and the “under-story,” which is the invisible movement of the soul of the main characters. What is mysterious about mythic stories is how they always meander back to the same place: your soul. In this sense myth is a living force, like the telluric powers that stream through the Earth. It is this mythic vision, looking for the “long story,” the timeless tale, that helps us approach the deep mysteries because it insists there is always more than meets the eye. In this sense the mythic vision helps us see the stories we really live by, rather than the one we like to think we are living, and moreover, decide if our myths are working for or against us. If we don't become aware of both our personal myths and the cultural myths that act upon us like gravitational forces, we risk being overpowered by them.
But I am caught on the horns of a dilemma. How do I tell the truth about the immense gifts of the mythic imagination, as well as describe its bittersweet influence on my life and the life of the world? What I never learned from my father or my college professors is that myth is Janus-faced: one face turned to the ancient world of brilliantly colorful gods and goddesses, heroes and monsters; the other face turned inward, personal, soulful.
This much I know: Unless we search for ways to become aware of the myths that are unfolding in our lives we run the risk of being controlled by them. As the maverick philosopher Sam Keen has written in Your Mythic Journey, “We need to reinvent them from time to time…. The stories we tell of our ourselves determine who we become, who we are, what we believe.”
In this book I will tell you things I myself have lived and learned about myth. No doubt, I am inspired by my father's ideas about making the world of books real for us, and by my friend and mentor Joseph Campbell's ardent beliefs that the myths are alive and well “on the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue,” and that “myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.” But in the following six chapters I explore how I've actually experienced and encountered myth: in books and museums, to be sure, but also in art, literature, movies, poetry, ballparks, playgrounds, cafés, computers, and cathedrals. In other words, this will be a mythopoetic approach to the modern world.
My other inspiration for this approach is the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who lived in Périgueux, the same small village in the Dordogne where my ancestor Jean-Baptiste Cousineau came from back in 1687. When I was there a few years ago exploring my roots, I picked up a volume of his sagacious Essays and, while reading it one afternoon in an outdoor café, discovered something that has stayed me with me ever since. Into the oak beam of the ceiling in his private library in the Dordogne, a few miles from the Lascaux caves where his ancestors carved and painted their own questions forty thousand years earlier, Montaigne carved the legendary words, “Que scais-je?”
“What do I know?” Montaigne asked himself. What do I really know, deep in my soul? What have I lived?
A few months later I returned to the Bay Area and immediately drove down to Big Sur, where I was scheduled to teach a course on “Myth, Dream, and the Movies,” at Esalen Institute. As part of my preparation the first evening there, I reviewed a book by Evan S. Connell, written at Big Sur years before, and felt the tingle of literary synchronicity when I stumbled across these words: “A man's words should have the feeling of being carved in oak.”
“But how did it all begin?” asks the Italian scholar Roberto Calasso in his mesmerizing study of Greek myths, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. There is no more probing question. Whether it is the tales of Zeus and Europa, the mystery rites at Eleusis, or the origins of eros and strife, virginity and rape, comedy and tragedy, heroes and cowards, fate and necessity, the seed moment is what makes everything else possible.
At the Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, there is a twelve-foot-long narrative collage by Henri Matisse entitled, “Les mille et une nuits” (The Thousand and One Nights.) In this magnificent piece depicting Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights, the artist has made a cutout of a white magic lamp and set it against a mauve background, its wisps of smoke turning into flowers that drift across the increasingly dark panels, denoting the passage of night. In the upper right-hand corner of the frieze is a tribute to Scheherazade's courage and cunning while telling her soul-saving stories during those mythic nights: “Elle vit apparaitre Ie matin Elle se tut dicretement” (“When she saw the first light of dawn, she fell discreetly silent”).
Mysteriously, discreet storytelling is at the heart of myth.
The Strange Melody
The word myth comes from the ancient Greek for “word,” “tale,” or “story.” The clue to its deeper meaning lies in the roots of the word—just as myths are, in a word, “root” stories. Myth derives from the Greek muthos, which means “to murmur with closed lips, to mutter, to moan.” The suggestion buried deep within the strange melody of this deceptively simple word is that there is great power and perhaps even secret knowledge in stories about the beginning of things. Among some cultures, such as the Tibeto-Burman, there is a belief that unless the origin of something is described one should not even talk about it. Telling a story about how things began, from babies to stars, rituals to customs, is a way of paying respect to its importance, its endurance, and in so doing every event and experience is endowed with a sacred nature.
This belief has its modern parallels with family reunions, religious ceremonies, or holidays. In the moments when we feel the atavistic urge to tell our origin stories—anecdotes about our ancestors, tales of how we met our spouses, the roots of hallowed customs at Easter, Halloween, Hanukkah, or Christmas—we participate in mythmaking. We experience the mythic vision when we thrill to the findings of distant signals from outer space that push back the origins of the universe another billion years, or become alternately disturbed and enthralled by the mapping of the human genome, or are ineffably troubled by the threat of a hydroelectric dam inundating the
