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.”