Mythic Thinking.

I am in a graduate program on mythology and depth psychology, at a school that owns Joseph Campbell's academic papers. I am, for the first time ever, completely surrounded by people who not only get what it is I think about, but also get why I think it is important: they are all more or less in full agreement!

We have one intensive session a month: three days running, one long class each day. Yesterday was on approaches to mythic theory, starting with Greco-Roman, and moving on to Medieval and Renaissance. Filled a long day nicely. Next time we meet, in a month, we will do Enlightenment. Then modern theory, including sociological, and even biological. But yesterday we did all sorts of art. Shakespeare (Midsummer Night), painting (Sistine Chapel). Today we were doing Joseph Campbell with a particular interest in myth as aesthetics, and Campbell's own conviction that art and myth were slightly different perspectives on the same thing.

The two courses together were so enjoyable. For me it was validation of an idea I have been working with in my own head for some time, but was not finding many people interested in or willing to "play" with me. As I said, art and myth seem to be slightly differently connotative words for the same thing, highlighting different approaches and aspects more than deeply different natures. A myth is always a work of art, in some sense. A work of art is inherently mythic: it is just that the bad ones are mythic so weakly as to be irrelevant, or so predictably as to have lost much power or resonance. Yes, I suppose I am saying that the episode of The Brady Bunch where Marsha accepts a date from more than one boy on the same night is mythic, just kind of feebly mythic. It is to myth as diner-grade tea from a stale tea bag dunked belatedly in luke-warm water is to an even half way decent pot of darjeeling made with loose-leaf tea in scalding water in a heated tea pot with the tea added before the water, not five minutes after when someone bothers to bring the cooling pot to the table.

Some of my professors hold that myth is narrative. I tend to agree: there are images and symbolic representations that are integrated into myth. But myth itself is narrative, and all narrative partakes of myth. History partakes of myth, to the extent that it is a "story" of human existence in time. Myth, like all narratives, is involved in meaning, and in that meaningless, charged zone of pure existence in which everything floats in potentia. St. Theresa, glorious roccocco darling, grasps her breast as she is shot through with arrows of God's love and light, and she resonates with a moment beyond meaning: her story is one of passing the barriers of "because" or "better" or "worse" or even good and evil...instead she faces God and is pierced to the core, her narrative made mythic, and her myth one of finite reality falling before the brilliance of infinity.

I came out of today's class with too many dissertation ideas. Can a story not partake of myth? Can history not be a mythic representation of truth, modulated by the dramatic narrative of human existence that the historian and her culture believe in? Campbell and Joyce: I want to examine their shared understandings of religion, and their divergence. I have already done a paper on Joyce finding a "diaconal" role through art. I am curious if Campbell, then, seeing Joyce's art, did not find an artistic role through myth, each using the enspelling aspect, the enchantment of creation/dissolution to fulfill a religious calling. And then there is the yearning to try for a synthesis of Pinker's work on how minds function, and language functions, to try to discuss how myth is a natural function of mind: a conclusion I am not at all sure Pinker would support, given his atheism and his apparent discomfort with religious thinking. Yet what I have read of his would seem to lead to a very real possibility that language and human thought modes are inescapably mythic, and any attempt to try to escape that mode is either to stop thinking entirely...or to delude oneself dangerously into thinking one had stopped the mythic stuff when in truth one had mythologized one's thinking about thinking...a problem I already see with the New Atheist movement, which thinks so very religiously about science, "fact" and non-religion... enough so that proponents end up sounding like the responso to a fundamentalist verso.

And, from there, the question of whether, in choosing non-ambiguous dogma and totally pinned down exegesis of a narrative, trying to turn religion into clinical fact, not narrative of story, Fundamentalists of all religions and forms are not finding a way to think religiously but not mythically. Is that possible? If all thinking is in some way mythic, then obviously no. But there are clearly "more mythic" and "less mythic" forms of thought, at least to the subjective experience, and lord knows what myth is if it is not implicity tied to subjective experience.

Aiya.

Blogs are nice. I can say all this stuff at once, knowing that to most people it is the worst sort of argle-bargle, and knowing that it actually has meaning if I can just find a way to tie piece to piece to piece, twisting a rope of ideas together into something coherent.

But at least I have a room full of people, and a school full of professors, who follow what I am on about, and who grasp why it is all really, really exciting. In fact, they get excited by the ideas, too.

So nice. I do not mind that sports fans wax incoherent over sports, and fanboys wax incoherent over canon...but I live in a world that outright snarls when folks wax incoherent over myth and faith and culture and thought and art and religion, and how they are all webbed together in a great net. My sports stats, my canonical arcs: it is lovely to be with people who get the passion.

Hello, all.

It seems to me that the first thing a blog ought to do is announce what it is about. In this case, however, the real question is what, if anything, it is not about.

It is not about me knowing all the answers. I don't even know all the questions. I am told that I often sound otherwise, but the truth is I chose the title of this blog because so near as I can tell, I, and all the rest of us, are on a long pilgrimage. When it is done we are all dead, which could be depressing or catastrophic or otherwise really ghastly. Or, if we have been on a really good pilgrimage it will be ok. Maybe not great, but ok.

How do I define a good pilgrimage? One that leaves you facing death feeling more or less as though you have seen a lot of what was worth seeing, asked a lot of the questions that were worth asking, found a few really interesting answers to the questions, and left at least a few people with fond memories and a collection of good questions they would not have had otherwise. Beyond that it is kind of hard to say what a good pilgrimage is like.

I have an associate with sever, atypical MS. She spends her life in an assisted care residence. It would be very easy to assume that she is having a really rotten pilgrimage. I mean, she is mostly bed bound, largely broke, limited in her social contacts, cut off from the active life she loved. She has no career, she is dependent on the physical help, financial help, and good will of others. She is often in pain, and often fatigued. And, frankly, she is cranky, difficult, and sometimes needy. Bad pilgrimage, yes?

No. Oh, not a fun one. But she is exploring her world in spite of it all, she is dedicated to having an interesting and worthy pilgrimage, and she finds ways, some silly but some inspired, to make her bed-bound trip to the grave one of services she can render back to the world.

Not shabby.

As my profile will tell you, I am a student of religion, mythology, and depth psychology. I am a more or less active Episcopalian. I am left wing -- politically and religiously. I believe that a secular society is the bedrock of religious freedom: that we cannot be free if our culture demands we participate and participate in a particular religion, sect, or ritual. I believe that religious thinking in inescapable, and as a result, like many other inescapable things, it demands discipline and concern to avoid the inescapable from becoming an inescapable tyranny.

I consider no religion perfect, and no religion to be perfectly inspired by God. The gotcha there is perfect. I do not consider any scripture to be free of human influence, and human flaws, nor do I consider any mandate in any religion to be free of the alterations of time. If you attempt to argue that a mandate that was valid in 1000 B.C.E remains valid today, I will quite likely disagree, and will certainly not agree that all mandates of any particular religion remain applicable as written and practiced, all the way to the present.

I am the daughter of a history teacher with a passion for world history. That colors my understanding of the world, of history and current events. I am more interested in social history than in dates-and-events history. I am willing to believe in American exceptionalism on the understanding that all nations are both exceptional and ephemeral.

I can and will talk about all sorts of things, some of which I know little about. People on pilgrimage often encounter things they don't know much about, and end up talking about it. Indeed, I hope for my own sake that I encounter many things in future of which I am pig ignorant, as that means I am actually on pilgrimage, not just sitting in my mental comfort zone munching bon-bons and refusing to look out my own windows.

I hope at least a few people come and visit here. I hope I find at least a few interesting things to say about my journey. I invite you to share a bit about your own pilgrimages.

And I am "Lily" because the lily that will become my site picture is my own work, and comes as close to being an avatar of me as anything. In real life, however, I am just Peg. I will have to see what being Lily is like!

Have a great 2009,

Lily.