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.