reconcile mortal souls with immortal acts. This helps explain the many rhapsodies on a theme from Faust over the past few centuries.
“So you see how the mythmaking mind works,” writes P. L. Travers, “balancing, clarifying, adjusting, making events somehow correspond to the inner necessity of things.” This occurs in the country of myth, she says, where opposites are reconciled, as in the urban myth of Miles Davis who thinks he's God—and God who thinks he's Miles.
The Mythic Vision
“As it was in the past, so it is now,” a neighborhood priest, Father Stephen Gross, told me one day while we were discussing the need for even modern people to have a sanctuary away from the madness, a place to collect our thoughts and believe in the power of silence.
I thought of him again just the other morning. I was feeling out of sorts, numb and defeated, unable to write, converse, connect with anyone. After my ritual café session I was feeling like Sisyphus putting the shoulder to the boulder as I begrudgingly trudged back home up the steep hill where we live. Suddenly a man with a thick German accent ran across the street and grabbed my arm, shouting for help.
“That man over there is blind,” he yelled. “He needs directions. He's lost.”
I said of course and crossed over with him to find a tall elegant black man with salt and pepper hair leaning on his white walking stick. Very gently, he put his hand on my arm and said, “Can you help me? I need to find the stairs with all the flowers.”
I knew immediately that he meant the nearby Filbert Steps, which are festooned with beautiful flower gardens that border wooden stairs rising up to Coit Tower.
“Of course, I know where they are,” I told him, then hesitated, feeling rushed but needed. “I'd be happy to lead you there myself.”
I led him across the street and up the Montgomery Steps, then headed toward the gardens. On the way he confided to me that he was a poet and he had come there a year before with a writing class. He had fond memories of the smell of the flowers, but had been haunted by something else he needed “to put his finger on.”
“Where I come from isn't such a good city for blind people,” he said, looking crestfallen. “But San Francisco is a good city for blind people.” He carefully tapped his cane on the sidewalk in front of us as we walked, dipping his knees seconds before an approaching curb and pushed away the branches of overhanging trees before they would have brushed him in the face.
“There is something in the air here. I was raised here and need to come back every once in awhile just to see it, to smell it and hear it again, and feel it in my soul. It helps my poetry.”
There was joy in the brief telling of his story, and in the way his face lit up as we made our way down Montgomery Street. He sounded like Nat King Cole singing to himself on a drive down Route 66, or Pablo Neruda describing the effect of cherry blossoms on his lust for life. The noon bells chimed from the nearby Shrine of Saint Francis as we arrived at the base of the steps. The sun shone brightly on the purple bougainvillea around us, and monarch butterflies flickered in the light around the red roses. A flock of parrots rainbowed the air above the steps that led to the tower.
Oddly enough, the joyous sight triggered a sudden rush of sorrow for the blind poet because he couldn't see these things, but then, as if sensing my unwarranted pity, he startled me with a few choice words.
“You know I'm not completely blind,” he said, as if forgiving me. He placed his strong hand on my forearm as I led him up the steps to a wrought-iron gate. “I've just had to learn to see in new ways.”
He nodded thanks to me, sensed the presence of the gate, gently pushed it open, and sat down on the bench that overlooked San Francisco Bay. The sun lit on his face like a blessing. He smiled happily for a few moments and opened his backpack and pulled out a pen and blue spiral notebook.
“What we don't look for,” he said, “we'll never be able to see and never be able to tell, will we?”
Then, like the blind poet Homer, he looked out over the bay to see what he could see, and in so doing, he helped me see in new ways ever since. Not a day has gone by since that encounter when I haven't tried to see my own neighborhood with new eyes—and with gratitude.
And still the mystery turns. The mythosphere is all around us, to borrow Alexander Eliot's luminous image, in the most profound and the most ordinary of moments. We can sense it whenever an experience opens onto the unknown, as it did for our ancestors in the paleolithic caves who scattered flowers on the graves of those who had just died and told the first stories about what happens after death; or for me during my screening of The Dead when the spirits of all those who had ever died in my life were suddenly evoked. We can sense the mythosphere whenever an experience generates a deep longing in us for more lasting truths than the ephemeral ones of our own brief time. The mythic imagination, as Stephen Larsen has so beautifully written, “makes the soul talk,” and helps us transform the meandering path of our everyday life into a journey of soulmaking. The mythic vision gives us the courage to find personal meaning in the here and now, through which the past plunges into the future, and affords us the sense of being utterly alive.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back, ceaselessly into the past,” were the last words of the last novel F. Scott Fitzgerald, the past-haunted novelist, wrote before he himself was borne back along the plangent waters of time. We move back over the river of memory, seeking the stories and images that will fit the curve of our soul.
One night in the Paris of les années folles, the crazy years of the 1920s, a group of acolytes gathered around the Russian mystic Gurdjieff. All night they explored the loftiest of philosophical questions, wrestled with the darkest issues of existence. Near dawn one of them prepared to leave for home—but was stopped by the philosopher. “You can't go yet,” he explained, “we haven't figured out yet whether God exists.”
You can't go yet. We haven't figured out yet whether, when, or where myth exists—for you. We haven't found what—if anything—endures. We haven't discovered where our meaning lies. It is not diversion or cleverness or even answers that we are seeking; it is understanding. Understanding of the stories at the heart of our lives that reveal in a way nothing else can just how it is that we choose our gods, our heroes, our destinies.
When asked why, I can only answer elliptically.
The nothing is a craving after something.
We are here to deepen the mystery.
Phil Cousineau
North Beach, San Francisco
October 2000
ONE
The Myth of the Creative Struggle
Late-Night Thoughts from Sisyphus to Sinatra
Myths are made for the imagination
to breathe life
