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James Joyce meets with his publisher Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier in Shakespeare and Company Bookstore in Paris in May 1938 to celebrate the publication of Finnegans Wake. The dreamlike novel took seventeen years to complete, a task that has become symbolic of the perseverance required in the arts.
The class waited as the last minute of class ticked off and I recalled the night I helped my brother and sister clean out my father's apartment after he died. On the reading table next to the chair in which he died, I found a beautiful bound edition of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses. I picked up the book and wished we had had a chance to read it out loud together, at least had one last chance to talk about it.
The class bell rang. Still, the class did not stir. They would not move until I said something to wrap up the film. I realized that they were right where Joyce wanted his readers and Huston wanted his viewers reeling in the “riot of emotion.” They were in the mythic moment.
I suddenly felt like my college professor of twenty-five years before must have when we asked him, while the Vietnam War was still raging, what he would do if his draft number came up.
I began tentatively, and then a great calm came over me as the words seemed to choose me. “John Huston called this movie his love letter to Ireland. Before he died he told the press that reading James Joyce when he was a young man made him want to become a writer. Joyce was only twenty-five when he wrote The Dead. That can either intimidate us or inspire us. Twenty-five. That's just about your age, isn't it? I found him when I was about your age. It changed everything. What he taught me was to trust the ‘riot of emotion’ that arises when we touch the depths. Can you feel it—can you feel the myth? What I'd like to urge you to do is try to get what you're feeling at this moment into your own scripts. If you haven't gotten there yet, go deeper. Then go back and go deeper yet. If you do you will find the secret opening to myth, dream, and art.”
The Secret Opening
Once in a great while we are pulled into the vortex of living myth, the stories and images that open us up to the great unknown. That screening of The Dead was such a moment for me and, I learned later, for several young members of my class. As Joyce mythologized turn-of-the-century Dublin, connecting the ancient wanderings of Ulysses with the modern peregrinations of Leopold Bloom, so too do modern filmmakers like John Huston, who mythologized our times with filmed stories that have become part of our cultural “sacred histories.” From the paleolithic caves of Lascaux to the dark movie palaces in small-town America, stories have helped define who we are and what is truly sacred.
For our purposes, stories become mythic when they evoke eternal concerns, whether on a stone tablet in the sands of ancient Sumer or on the flickering screen at your local Odeon. True myths, ancient and modern, stop time because they emerge from somewhere beyond time, which is why they are sometimes described as being written by an “anonymous hand.” Myths seize the imagination because they take on questions—love and war, birth and death, good and evil—that otherwise cannot be answered. While echoed in books, music, and art, myths are also experienced in ordinary life, as everyday epiphanies.
Although I was prepared that day in the classroom to lecture on the artistic merits and screenplay structure of an important movie, I was still surprised by its mythic impact. By compressing time, space, and emotion, myth reveals the inner meaning of our lives. In his very first book, the upstart Joyce announced himself as a mythmaker, a supreme artist who could pour old wine into new bottles.
In this book I explore a few similarly modest moments from my life and the life of my times, and reflect on the way they open onto the unknown and become mythic in memory. We all tell stories and conjure images from the fragments of memory and shards of dream, which means we are all, still, myth-making creatures. Sacred stories have always been the most natural way for us to defy our isolation and boldly make connections with others as well as with our own souls.
This work is an invitation to see how marvelous ordinary life is when we rediscover it by way of the mythic imagination.
The secret is that the mythic is everywhere, but most often appears when and where it's least expected. It exists on a superficial level in the myth-making apparatus of celebrity in Washington, D.C., and in Hollywood, but is far more significant when we notice it in the unfolding narrative of our own lives. All it takes is the willingness to look with what the painter Cézanne called “the mythic slant,” the eye that considers what is eternal, timeless, soulful in every encounter. This perspective doesn't require a university degree or arcane terminology, just the desire to search beyond the world of appearances to the mythic world that surrounds us at all times. What we learned from our parents, teachers, mentors, books, or travels about Hector, Gilgamesh, Ishtar, or Tristan and Iseult is still happening, if only we open our eyes and pay closer attention to the hidden places where myth lurks.
I'm prowling after images in this book, scavenging after metaphors, in the spirit of the poet Coleridge. I see myth as the old ruins of literature. They are the last stones, the jagged outline, of the grandeur of long ago, but stones that have been placed into new buildings, reused, recycled, reimagined. I read them the way I rove around the old grounds of Glendalough, Ireland, Ephesus, Turkey, or Angkor Wat, Cambodia, that is, for the reverie, for the prods to my imagination. I recall them the way I recall my own mythic memories, such as my own rambles, when I was in my early twenties, through the gladiator quarters of the Roman Coliseum or my midnight moonlit climb to the top of the Giza pyramid—for the pleasure of the story.
In this sense, mythic memory is not unlike the way the novelist and traveler Rose Macaulay famously described her visits to the relics of dead cities and remains of lost civilizations as “the pleasure of ruins.” She was referring to an Old World way of thinking that preferred contemplation to self-improvement, reverie to psychological transformation, and mythmaking to theory-developing. There is an unknown room in the soul that is constantly turning the stuff of daydreams into myths for us, helping us to get at meaning we can't get to through the front door.
And that reminds me of another story. One night a few years back I was drinking some wine with two of the great musicians of our time, Mike Pinder, the founder of the Moody Blues, and David Darling, the virtuoso cello player. We were discussing the immortals of music. I told a few Jim Morrison stories, inspired by my days of co-writing a book about the Doors; Mike regaled us with personal anecdotes about John Lennon; then David did his bluesy imitation of an encounter with Miles Davis, telling us a winsome tale that had been circulating in the clubs for years.
After Miles died, David told us in a voice that mimicked Davis' notorious growl, they say that he went up to heaven and no one saw him for awhile. One day Charles Mingus, the amazing jazz bassist, was wandering around heaven and bumped into the incredible saxophonist, John Coltrane. Well, man, while ’Trane was giving Mingus one cool tour of the place they saw this heavy dude with a long white beard, rocking in the Chair-of-Ages. Mingus couldn't believe his eyes, and sussed out ’Trane, “Who's that?” ’Trane rolled his shoulders and shook his head and said, “I don't know. But He thinks he's Miles.”
All around us, every day in every way, we are turning the stuff of life into myth to express what defies explanation, precisely because we're only human. Myths emerge from dreams, visions, inspiration, but also from a cultural need to explain the inexplicable, such as the unearthly sounds of Miles Davis' trumpet. We can't in ordinary words, so stories emerge from “anonymous authors” to describe in symbolic terms the “divine” source of genius and suprahuman accomplishment.
We yearn for the story, the image, that sheds a little light on the mysteries, like how in the world the great trumpet player can distill from his anguished life so much ineffable beauty. Creativity belongs to the mythic realm because it involves a struggle with the gods. World folklore is rife with stories about pacts
