Of myth and time.

“We start at the beginning.

We say, ‘Once upon a time,” by which, of course, we mean now. 

We say, ‘There once was a lonely princess, a handsome prince,’ by which, of course, we mean ourselves.

We say, ‘There lived nearby a terrible monster,’ because, of course, that is where our own monsters live.”

To tell a story is to conjure up a time past and time future, and weave them into the time present.  Listeners of stories can find these moments of present to be so expansive as to fill entire lifetimes; we live and die beside Herakles, alongside Jason, next to Helen. But what these listeners do not often see is their own lifetimes are often nothing more or less. Our own acts and daily tangles are not mirrors of those ancient stories, they are the stories themselves.

A young girl out to recess gathering lily-of-the-valley into a woven basket.

Europa plucking blossoms from the seaside cliffs.

Which came first? Perhaps, if you want to get down to firsts and beginnings, neither; they exist as the same story resonating across all perceived boundaries of time. In this way one could say mythology erases all distinction between the past and the present.

It is not so much that the myths and stories of old are replayed again and again in the lives of we who walk the earth today, but rather that they never stopped playing at all.

 It is not so much that we are incapable of striking out with fresh footsteps into a virgin world so much that any footsteps we could leave have neither not yet been set down, nor have they already been pressed into the earth; they are perpetually just falling from our own feet, as from the feet of our fathers and our fathers' fathers, from the feet of the gods themselves.

Procrustes with a rusty crack brings down his bed-end blades.

A young man tapping, as a crow in the night, on a lover’s dark window.

A butcher heaving down his cleaver with a wet smack of parting bone.

Apollo gliding in through the cracks of Coronis’ room, her skin warm next to his skin in the dark night.

Time is not static, but is paradoxically incapable of movement, frozen in place by myth. We do not move through it so much as it swirls around us, without momentum and yet never still, without progress and yet never quite the same. Everything that has ever been is contained in all we see; all we see will fade into dust, yet in the dust there is all we are as verily as the pumps of our beating hearts; Orion and Scorpio swirl in the sand as well as the stars.

These great myths are not something far ancient, removed, from all that we live in. Neither are they far distant, waiting for us to reach them. They are present, swirling even now as we walk, and always will be.

We go about our daily lives under the assumption that all we do is dependent on movement, on the passage of hours and days and seasons, but this is a falsity. All there is, is present. All seasons, all stories, contained in a singularity through which we swirl. Not a line, nor a progression, nor a narrative. A single unity. Not a movement, nor a stasis, nor a stillness. A dance in place, a movement apart from movement, a story existing inside of itself, a dream within a dream.

            We live not in time, but in mythology.

“We move on into the middle.

We say, ‘He was fated for cruel seas,’ because they are the only type of seas we know.

We say, ‘There was a terrible catastrophe,’ because what other kinds of catastrophes are there?

We say, ‘All was lost,’ because we know from experience, deep down, deep where we won’t quite admit, that all is not. Or at least not quite.”

High summer. Beneath a green canopy heavy with the thrum of cicadas and lanced through with the late evening’s golden light there hangs a rich cavity in a stately oak; around it, dark and heavy, bees swarm the gap in the trunk, nebulous and yet filled with purpose.

By the rise of the next full moon, great swaths of bees will have been born in the oak, with just as many having died. But despite this, or perhaps because of it, the hive and the glade will be just as before. 

A year, ten years from now, not a single bee, not a single crumb of honey or its comb from that hive beneath the green canopy will remain.  But the hive will be indistinguishable. It sits at the center of the forest, a fixed point caught simultaneously in a perpetual dance and stillness, perpetual transience and timelessness.

So, too, perhaps, hangs our universe.

In the great hive of the cosmos, planets fall out of orbit just as trees crash to forest floors; cities fall into cold ruination and whole constellations go dark; northern lights spill their scintillations across the boreal skies and meteors blaze and fade into dust; yet what is the sum total of this great immensity?

Only to find everything as it was one minute past, and just as it will be one minute future.

We rise and fall, yet the underlying thread that weaves all we are into all there is, is never-changing.

In cities people come and go and buildings clamber up and tumble down and yet there is no change from one season to the next. All in the city, the world, the universe, is just as it was.

We walk the streets not dependent on time.

We have the appearance of transience and yet nothing changes.

Artemis bathing yet in her crystal grotto.

Herakles grappling even now against the lion of Nemea.

The plunging prow of the Argo carving this night across perilous waves.

Helios surging from up the Eastern horizon this very dawn.

We as a species, or, beyond that, as a part of the great thrown glitter of the heavens entire, exist in a single story, a single myth. Perhaps that single myth is only a part of the great cosmic story, which lies beyond what we can perceive and thus beyond what we can remember. But what we can remember—no small amount, if the literary mountain-ranges of the world are to be a measure—are the stories that make us who we are. 

We tell tales and they are original because they have never been told before, but forget they are at the same time unoriginal because they will be told again. And yet the having-told and the to-be-told are not different. The stories that weave together to form the singularity of the heavens, and we in them for of course we are inseparable from stories, exist only once, and never end, and never begin. It is why we are always fascinated by myths, by stories, why we never fail to be delighted by their tellings; we are perpetually opening our eyes.

The sounds falling upon our soft ears have never been heard before.

Yet ten-thousand tomorrows hence in some shining city of glass the same will be true.

Yet ten thousand yesterdays past on the wine-dark seas of the Aegean the same was true.

This is not for any lack of attentiveness, nor forgetfulness, on our part. Merely instead the fact that the only truth is the story, and not the time surrounding it.

Transience is a naivety, a fraction of the truth. And timelessness is a falsity, a desperation to make things larger than they are. The reality, perhaps, is both, and neither, and in-between, a realization that things as they are in this moment already swell to fill to the brim the edges of all there ever was.

“We find ourselves at the end.

We say, ‘The skies turned red, and all buildings fell,’ because that is how end the things we know.

We say, ‘The gods perished in the ancient seas, and the sun and moon devoured each other,’ because nothing can survive, when the end comes.

And we say, against all odds, ‘They lived happily ever after,’ because, against all odds, we do.

Because we have.

Because we always will.

Or that, anyway, is what I have learned.”

A healthy fear.

Watching everyone dress up on Halloween day and, later on in the evening, trot door to door to knock for candy, I can't help but think of how our culture of candy and costumes has consumed the rituals and lessons the dead used to share with us in more immediacy.

Today we are told to accept death, to fear not, to be joyful for the life we have and accepting of the mortal fate slowly snaking its way toward us. But there is something missing from this view, and it comes with the ignoring of the dead, and what dead really means. Corpses used to be an intimate part of many societies; places were set one last time at the table where cold bodies limped in their chairs and stared with sagging eyes at plates of food; pyres were built, and whole families gathered to watch and sing as they added fuel to the very flames which simmered the flesh off the bones of their loved ones, and boiled their organs one by one into ash; holes were dug out for still cadavers by hand, their bodies lowered stiffly at night, and fires lit, and dances danced, rituals full of agony and pain with masks and costumes to communicate to spirits, and smooth riverstones wept onto the ground as symbols for their immortal sadness. The dead were right there, the worms in their mouth, with their split stomachs, their roiling smells, their jaundiced eyes. The actions of grief from their relatives reflected this uncontrollable force; they tore out their hair, split their knuckles on stones, and cut open their bodies, as if out of desperation to know that they were still alive.

Not so today. Today, we have spotless crematoria which burn bodies behind walls of brick; the mouths of our graves are backhoe-dug, clean-cut and uniform; the bodies of our dead are placed into caskets, dressed up in fine clothes and embalmed against the maggots of decay before being sealed behind mahogany and lowered into the earth. We dab at the tears of our grief with powdered handkerchiefs.

So what have we lost? A healthy fear. How can we be afraid of the idea of the death if we've dressed ourselves up to reflect it in costumes of whimsy? And, if we can not be afraid of the dead, how can we listen to what they whisper to us just behind our ears?
The immediacy of death tells us continually that we are mortal; the fear of death makes us hold on to and suck out of life every last breath of morning air. As death fades away into something perfumed and well-dressed, our lives bend, too, toward apathetic room temperature. We need the extremes on both sides to remind us that death is very present, and, thus, that life is as well.

A found list/poem.

After discussing lists so extensively in class Tuesday, finding this one just off the sidewalk on my way to work this morning seemed...well...downright mythological. 

No repetitions, but what a set of verses it makes nonetheless! I mean, let's be honest: Have you ever read a poem with a more searing conclusion than 'Cabot cheddar'? 

Of cellars, tunnels, catacombs, and crypts...

There are things in us that crave the deaths of old.

In ancient cultures, death and the spaces and rituals reserved for them held high precedence in society. Catacombs and crypts threaded their way beneath cities, and villages had holy rivers for anointing the dead, or communal pyres for the incineration of corpses.Today, such spaces are boarded up, or roped off with placards explaining their long-outdated histories. The general view from society is one of smug relief; we are glad we have moved away from such rituals to more civilized, sensible things.

In his short story 'Beneath the Cellars of Our Town', Stephen Millhauser writes of a mythical town ordinary in every way, except that beneath it spans a endless network of tunnels. These tunnels are entirely empty, paved with bricks and lit by the warm flicker of lamplight. They go nowhere, and serve no outward purpose; they burst up through manholes, through hidden trapdoors in cellars, behind bushes in parks… They obviously require extensive upkeep, and are not without their hazards. Because of both these and less tangible reasons, the people of this town are well used to the constant ridicule and harangues of their neighbors; what ungrounded foolishness, these neighbors ask, would possibly compel a town to keep such a network of unmappable corridors maintained and lantern-lit?
But the people of this town take the scoffing without expression, and dust it off their shoulders. They're well aware of the pointlessness of their tunnels, but therein lies their reason.
The people of this town are always turning off their sidewalks and roads to walk down stairs or to climb down ladders into the tunnels for no other reason than to wander there in the dim beneath the light of the earth. The corridors are so expansive and layered the probability of meeting another soul, or even another moving shape save the lanterns, is slim. Their breadth and depth means one could wander unimpeded for any length of time without a destination. The point, as the narrator says, is what the tunnels give to them; nothing more than a dark place rich in mystery to sink down into, to be alone, for a time, without reason or direction. The fact that there is no logic to the ritual is irrelevant. There is some deep and pulsing need fulfilled by the vanishing into the unplumbed dark of the world around us, as well as within us.

We become those neighboring towns laughing and cringing at foolish tribes in isolated jungles, or lonely villages on distant tundras, clinging yet to ancient acts and rituals of pain, humiliation, and death. We decry the pointlessness of such horrible deeds, and rejoice in our own abolition of such mindless savagery. But perhaps these villagers are the ones who should be smiling. In maintaining these seemingly pointless burdens, in keeping such dark passages of their society lit, however dimly, they keep alive what we dwellers-of-the-surface can only guess at.

In 'The Poetics of Space' by Gaston Bachelard, he famously writes of the spaces in our dwellings mirroring those of our beings. He claims in men, as in their buildings, the attic and the cellar each serve a valuable purpose. The attic is a place of rationality and clear vantage. Its windows pour forth golden light, the air is warm and dry, and the creatures residing there--birds and bats and shimmering insects--are things of air and open space.The cellar, on the other hand, is an irrational place. Both in human beings and their houses, it is where dark things crawl through the slime on their bellies. Twisted nails burst down from the low ceilings, and all is dark and damp. In modern society, we have fought back against this irrationality; we string electric lights from the floor joists to beat back the gloom, or we nestle sump pumps in corners to spit out the ceaselessly rising water. 

Deep down, however, as Bachelard writes, we know better than to think it is either sensible or beneficial to civilize the basement. "The subconcious," writes he, "Will not be civilized. It carries a candle when it goes into the cellar."

This, I believe, is the epitome of the value of ancient rituals. Like tunnels, or cellars, they remind us of the unplumbed depths in ourselves, and thus the world. Non-sensible and distasteful though they seem, the things they impart are as essential as grain or honey. 
Often, however, it isn't until we lie in bed and realize, upon hearing a creaking in the cellar, just how grateful we are for it.

A cycle of ashes and fire...

On page 59 of Callaso's 'The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony', Coronis, the beautiful daughter of King Phlegyas, is reduced to ashes.

The story of Coronis' perceived unfaithfulness to Apollo and his ensuing jealousy is a familiar one. Apollo, struck by the radiance of mortal Coronis as she bathed in Lake Boebis, swelled with desire and, as Calasso writes, 'descended upon (her) like the night.' It is a compulsiveness and lack of control that could be considered unusual for Apollo, and, perhaps as a result, sets into motion a string of events that is wholly unnatural, beginning first and foremost with Asclepius.
Pried out of his mother from her funeral pyre and coaxed into life by Apollo, Asclepius was tutored by the centaur Chiron, who had or would soon tutor Aristaeus, Ajax, Aeneas, Actaeon, Caeneus, Theseus, Achilles, Jason, Peleus, Telamon, Perseus, Heracles, Oileus, and Phoenix. The string of names Asclepius' tutelage by Chiron is shared in spans in some way every nook and corner of every classic myth ever set down. It's little wonder then, that with his knowledge would come the eventual ability to break the boundary of the living and dead through healing such as neither heaven or earth had ever witnessed before. It logically follows, too, that such power could not be allowed to stay in the hands of mortals. Hades, feeling slighted, convinces Zeus to vaporize Asclepius with a thunderbolt.
And Apollo weeps. His tears, as Calasso writes on page 59, fall as amber into (where else?) Eridanus, a river of both the mortal and divine, where Phaeton fell after being smote by Zeus for passing too close and setting the world on fire as he sped between the spheres of heaven and earth on his father's chariot.

And, as Calasso states on Page 59, the 'divine fire' hardly stops there. Semele, a mortal madly loved by Zeus and thus watched with simmering rage by Hera, is killed by lightning and fire when, as Ovid writes in his Metamorphosis, a disguised Hera whispers to her:

"Many, pretending to be gods, have found entrance into modest chambers. But to be Zeus is not enough; make him prove his love ... as great and glorious as he is when welcomed by Hera, so great and glorious, pray him grant you his embrace ..."

And she is toasted. And here, as with Apollo and Coronis, Zeus, filled with sudden realization of what is growing inside his mortal lover, snatches out the unborn child--here Dionysis--and saves his life.

Calasso writes, on page 59, that 'the divine fire devours those venturing outside the human sphere..."

At the beginning of page 59, A quote from Pindar is linked to Coronis, stating "The craziest type of people are those who scorn what they have around them and look elsewhere / vainly searching for what cannot exist." Coronis wasn't searching, however; she was retreating. Against her consent, she had been pulled out of her sphere and into the mouth of that divine fire. To be attracted to Ischys was to seek shelter from it, but as her coming doom would tell, and as Semele's doom before and her son Asclepius' doom after, there is no escape once the sphere has been broken. That fire crosses all boundaries and ducks under all logic to set right what has been tipped out of place.

The stealing of the light.

"A long, long time ago, when the earth was still so new it was soft, Raven lived. And, for the most part, the world was good, except there was no light.
And, in the dark, no one could see anyone, and the spirits could not see their bodies, and all the people and animals spent a great deal of time stumbling around sightlessly. It was through this dark that Raven was flying when he happened to see something strange.
A light.
It was coming through the window of the house of a jealous old man. The man was holding a large box, and through the cracks leaked out a pure, bright light. Raven knew at once he needed this light for the world, but he also knew the jealous old man would never let him into his house. But Raven was not troubled by this, because the old man had a daughter.

'Raven Steals the Light' by Bill Reid

Raven transformed himself into a grain of sand, and flung himself into the river from which the man and his daughter drank every day. When the daughter scooped some of the cold water into her mouth, Raven was there, and slid down her throat with ease, and settled into her stomach.
Over the coming months the man's daughter found herself inexplicably with child. When she gave birth, it was not to a raven, or a human, but a Raven Child, with feathers and fingers and a beak and claws. But of course no one could see this because everything was dark.
The old man was very fond of this Raven Child, and couldn't deny him anything. The Raven Child begged every day to play with the box that contained the light, and the man gave it to him, but the man was not as foolish as Raven had originally thought. The light was in a box, but the box was in another box, which was in another box, in another box, in another box... and the Raven Child could only manage to pry off the outermost box before the old man would snatch the rest away and stow them up high were even the tricky Raven Child could not reach them.
Finally, many many days later, the Raven Child knew he was on the last box. It was small, but it was warm and heavy in his hands. He pried it open, but no sooner had he caught the light than the jealous old man pounced after him, seeing at last the Raven Child's trickery.
But the Raven Child was too quick for him. At once he was Raven in his original form again, and he fled away with the light up the chimney pipe and into the open sky.
But now that the light was in the sky, every wandering body of beast and man, and every lost soul that had been floating around in the dark, raced towards the light with a mothlike desperation. And Raven tried to outfly them, but the light was so heavy, and soon Eagle—fastest of them all— was right on his tail-feathers, snatching at him, and Raven dropped the light, and it fell to the ground and shattered into two pieces, and the smaller piece and all the shards bounced back up into the night, and Raven, acting fast, took the larger piece and threw it into the day.
He threw it so high that no one could ever reach it, but he also threw it so high that no one could ever take it away again.

And from then on, the night and the day were never without light.

The Unbroken Web...

I'm wondering if this is how it begins.

I have an old, yellowed book of folktales retold by Richard Adams called 'The Unbroken Web', which I originally bought less for the actual stories and more for the colorful illustrations. I never looked too deeply into the stories before, but now, reading over them, I'm aware of how deeply mythological they are. I feel like someone entering into a room in the dark and only realizing with the light of dawn that the walls are filled with windows.
Richard Adam's explanation of the title in the introduction to this collection struck me especially; this passage from that introduction reminds me of the parallels and layers that are always coming up in our lectures between our own stories and the myths of the past. It's a little long, but it's worth it!
Plus, I've added pictures.
Adams writes:

'The Woodpecker' by Yvonne Gilbert

 

"I see in fancy — I have a vision of — the world as the astronauts saw it – a shining globe, poised in space and rotating on its polar axis. Round it, enveloping it entirely, as one Chinese carved ivory ball closes another within it, is a second, incorporeal, gossamer like sphere — the unbroken web – rotating freely and independently of the rotation of the earth. It is something like a soap bubble, for although it is in rotation, real things are reflected on the surface, which imparts to them glowing, lambent colors...

'The Boy and his Horse' by Yvonne Gilbert

 

"Within this outer web we live. It soaks up, transmutes and is charged with human experience, exuded from the world within like steam or an aroma from cooking food. The storyteller is he who reaches up, grasps that part of the web which happens to be above his head at the moment and draws it down—it is, of course, elastic and unbreakable—to touch the earth. When he has told his story—its story—he releases it and it springs back and continues in rotation. The web moves continually above us, so that in time every point on its interior surface passes directly above every point on the surface passes directly above every point on the surface of the world. This is why the same stories are found all over the world, among different people who have had little or no communication with each other...

'The Mice in the Corn' by Yvonne Gilbert

"And the meaning (of the stories in this web)? One can become too preoccupied with meaning. What is the meaning of a rose? These stories are very old. In times past they have no doubt meant many different things to different people. Some meanings may well have disappeared for ever, together with the vanished circumstances of lives gone by. Today some of us, in our turn, perceive meanings in terms of the unconscious and its symbolism. In centuries to come the tales will still be there, but what they will then seem to mean we cannot tell. For the unbroken web has one other property, which I forgot to mention. It is impenetrable."

As way of closing, I should admit I have absolutely no idea what Adams means with the last line of this passage. That line is also where his introduction ends. The meaning of it feels to be right near the surface, yet it doesn't quite click for me.
If anyone has any ideas, I'd be eager to hear them.