I asked him if he believed that was what Joseph Campbell was alluding to when he said, “People are always talking about looking for the meaning of life, when what they're really looking for is a deep experience of life.”
“Yes, yes, but not only deep,” May responded. “Numinous.”
The Nod of the Gods
Our word numinous has its roots in the Latin numen, which means “to nod or command; the presence or revelation of divine power.” The psychologist Edwin Edinger illuminates the depths of meaning in the word when he writes, “An experience is numinous when it carries an excess of meaning or energy, transcending the capacity of the conscious personality to encompass or understand it. The individual is awed, overwhelmed, yet fascinated.”
Now this is what beguiles me most about the guiding images of mythology. In what the ancient Celts called the “thin places” of sacred sites, and during what the Buddhists call the “eternal now,” it is still possible to discover the mythic dimension, and with our senses alert to the possibility, we can witness the “nod of the gods” and delve deeper into the mystery of how stories move us from afar.
I recall Dr. May emphasizing to me how ironic the “cry for myth” was in our time, considering the plethora of myths all around us, if we only knew how to recognize them: The Myth of Paradise, the Golden Age, the Lone Pioneer, Rugged Individualism, the Age of Melancholy, the American Dream. He told me that a novel like The Great Gatsby is the secular myth of the solitary hero, an image of one of the culture's most sacred stories, the myth of constant self-invention and compulsive change, as well as its colossal shadow of loneliness. Gatsby's tragedy was mistaking his myth, the American Dream, for reality. The task of Nick, the narrator, at the end of the novel, is to find the myth that will illuminate some meaning in the absurd fate of his friend Gatsby. To Rollo May, this is everyone's task in the modern world, which is why he saw the novel as a modern myth. The hunger for myth, he said, is the hunger for community, and the hunger for community is the hunger for myth.
As he spoke about contemporary myths, I thought about Campbell's poetic notion that myths are masks of god through which shine the eternal truths, and the philosopher Philip Wheelwright's remark that the essence of myth is a “haunting awareness of transcendent forces peering through the cracks of the universe.”
Tentatively, I asked Dr. May, “What is missing from our way of thinking?”
“A touch of infinity,” he said softly, and stared out the window at the sailboats in the bay.
The Presence of Myth
Not long ago I was teaching a screenwriting class at San Francisco State University and chose to close one session with a clip from John Huston's thirty-seventh and final movie, The Dead, an adaptation of James Joyce's stirring short story. As I introduced the scene for my class I felt my heart pounding.
“The Dead is sometimes called the greatest short story in the English language,” I explained to the class. “It takes place on a single night in turn-of-the-century Dublin, on the Feast of the Epiphany. There is a ritual gathering of old friends and the slow revelation of a secret that exposes the truth about the marriage of the two main characters. That is the plot, the overstory. The understory is revealed in the slow accumulation of details: a piano recital, a poetry reading, an after-dinner speech, a haunting Irish ballad, a wife's confession, and the strange report that ‘snow was general all over of Ireland.’ In this sense the understory is the movement of soul in the lives of these characters, described by Joyce in his book, and Huston in his film, as the strange interdependence of the living and the dead.”
I turned off the classroom lights and ran the VCR, which was cued up for the last three scenes of the film. In the first scene Angelica Huston, playing the wife, Gretta, descends down the staircase of the Dublin mansion where the dinner party was held. But she hears the siren melody of an old Irish ballad, “The Lass of Aughrim,” being sung as she leaves, and it seizes and transports her, a sure sign of a mythic moment. Stunningly framed by a stained glass window, like a madonna, she begins to weep. Huston intercuts the sorrowful gaze of her husband Gabriel (Donal McCann) as he watches with utter incomprehension a look he has never seen before on his wife's face.
The chance singing of the song has ignited the memory of a long-ago romance, and it's as if a trap door has opened underneath the story. Hidden depths emerge. These are the mythic depths of anguish and passion that exist in the souls of everyone, including our wives, husbands, closest friends, which is why the greatest folklore, art, and literature appeals across time and space.
The final scene takes place in a bleak hotel room. Gabriel confronts his wife and she reveals that the song she just heard was once sung to her by a young lad named Michael Fury, who died of a broken heart for her when she was young. In this epiphany is the realization that there are inaccessible places in the heart and memory, even for husband and wife.
“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Fury?” Gabriel asks with an ache in his heart.
“I think he died for me,” Gretta answers, then collapses onto the bed in tears.
Gabriel is utterly baffled, turns away, asking himself in the film's mournful narrative track, “Why am I feeling this riot of emotion?” He moves dreamily to the window and peers out at the “snow falling faintly through the universe,” wondering whether he has ever understood his own wife or ever known the depth of love of which she is capable.
The scene dissolves like a dream to a montage of snow-covered medieval ruins.
The narrator intones, “One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than face and wither dismally with age…. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
My heart was in my throat as the lights came flickering on in the classroom. I have long vaunted the mysteries of what the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called “participation mystique.” This is the uncanny ability to write characters so thoroughly that an audience can drop into a kind of dreamtime participation in the story. But rarely have I so deeply identified with a series of characters as I did that morning, though I have read the book and seen the movie each a dozen times.
As the students stirred in their seats, adjusting their eyes to the bright lights, I was left wondering with Gabriel, Why am I feeling this riot of emotion?
My class of thirty students sat in stunned silence, waiting for me to speak. In the front row a young guy in a François Truffaut T-shirt and his long-lashed girlfriend squirmed in their seats, then turned painfully away from each other, like the fateful couple in the film, as if pondering in their heart of hearts the breathtaking lines about the difficulty of ever understanding their own lovers.
I watched them with tenderness, as if projected forward by the story and able to see them struggling with love and death in their various futures. Looking at their faces trying to get used to the classroom lights, I found myself reeling backward in time, recalling my first night in Dublin, December 1974, when my landlady, Mrs. McGeary, handed me a copy of Joyce's collection of short stories, Dubliners, saying, “Here, take it. You need to read this,” and how I read until dawn, recognizing in Joyce a mentor, a kindred spirit, and more, my own destiny, closing in around my soul.
