myths, maps, and sealing wax

(reposted from old journals)

As I’ve said many times before, the world is and has always been a rather mythological place for me. That is, I’ve always seen life, and my place in it, more in terms of how my/ our interactions continually play out these high level stories then as being the interactions in themselves.

Looking back at my childhood, this isn’t very surprising. I’ve always been fascinated by mythologies and their epic description of reality. If anything, that has been my own personal disconnect from the world and at times has kept me from being able to interact with the world "as it is." I think this approach was first fostered by being raised Christian, but not in being raised to believe that that view of the world was the correct or only view. As my Dad once said, he raised us that way to believe that there is something in the world to believe in, that we are part of something much bigger than this. With an active and critical imagination, it didn’t take me long to realize that this Christian story was only just another story. And being an avid reader as well I began pouring through the old stories of many different cultures and religions, the myths of Greece and Rome, the Norse, Assyrian, and Indian cultures. And beyond that I was attracted to other more fantastic stories that carried such mythic and epic perspectives, namely the Lord of the Rings, and movies like Tron (which paints a good picture for a late twentieth century take on these old myths) and Star Wars. Actually it didn’t really surprise me to discover that George Lucas had been good friends with Joseph Campbell, as Lucas’ epic deftly portrays a version of Campbell’s ‘hero’s journey’. And as I’ve pointed out recently, that myth itself is nothing but a story for our own coming to terms with being individual humans in this wide and crazy world. And beyond these, my mythic approach was also highly informed by certain epic role-playing video games, namely the Ultima and Final Fantasy series. These last perhaps really set up my beliefs that I was indeed the hero of my own quest through the world or personal legend, and as the hero, was capable and responsible for trying to save or at least change the world in some meaningful and lasting way.

Myths of individual self-importance aside, all these stories also set up my belief that the world would "end" soon in some cataclysmic struggle between good and evil or magic and technology. Looking at this now, I could say that this almost worldwide myth of the apocalypse might just be a story for learning to accept our finitude as mortal beings, or for our personal struggles trying to yoke disjoint aspects of our personalities. What is right and wrong, and should we approach the world analytically, intuitively, or both? Not that the world still doesn’t appear that it might end soon, or at least that humanity might not be pushing it and ourselves to some vast breaking point; our myths and history (and discernable future) seem to point to some apocalyptic climax looming on the horizon. Of course, I still could be reading too much into this, but we’ll never know until it happens.

As they say as above, so below, our personal interactions serve as reflections of higher level cultural interactions and vice versa. If anything, that is how myth works, in finding correlations between our personal stories and that of the cosmos, creating maps for our journeys through the world in the spinning of stars and migrations of our ancestors. One could perhaps say then that our personal interactions are also being played out on collective levels, that each culture, and humanity as a whole, are going through their own hero’s journey of world-discovery and self-affirmation. Perhaps the Universe is going through this as well, as the myths of gods playing, and sciences of physical forces interacting all seem to point too.

In fact, I would argue that it is possibly this mapping between heavenly bodies and natural processes to our everyday experiences and interactions that has allowed us understand our place in the world (at least to a limited degree) and communicate this to each other. Over time we have created elaborate symbol systems that serve to represent ourselves as these higher levels of interaction, and become frameworks to relate to our own and other’s experiences; such as the Kabala’s mapping of the cosmos, or the I Ching’s mapping of organic change. Even our daily language itself has its roots in such symbolic forms of representation, if you look at the old runic alphabets in which each symbol is not only its letter but a communicable concept describing aspects and interactions that had been consistently noticed in the world. And today, even though each concept is not directly mapped from its individual symbols, these jumbles of letters still serve to spell out and represent actual things in the world. Of course, some languages, like Chinese, never forgot this representational quality of the characters used, in that each symbol still represents a concept in itself in the form of a stylized picture of it. Which leads me to say that art in itself can serve as another representative form for communicating our experiences, whether in visual forms, sonic feelings, etc… And in this sense, any action or interaction could be considered art in that it is interpretable of representative of both itself and higher level interactions of our experiences of the world. The act of going to work each day is reflective of our daily animal struggle of fending to survive, but it is also just going to work. The act of going to sleep is reflective of giving oneself up to death and of the fall of cultures and of the inevitable end of all things. But it is also just going to sleep.

Now, the question that is raised in my mind by all this, is if and when it is necessary to frame our experiences in terms of their higher level interpretations. It seems that we have to find some common ground in order to relate our experiences to each other, and myths can offer us a collective framework for our experiences. But if we are trying to communicate more day to day interactions, the mythic filter can possibly distract from or add too much meaning to what is relevant in each information exchange. If for example I want to suggest to someone a good place to eat, it is not necessary to tie in discussions of our struggles for bio-survival or the role that cave drawings once might have played in ancient cultures, but just to say such and such restaurant has tasty and affordable food. But if the discussion were to tend to topics of how we fit into the world, such higher level themes and stories might be necessary in order to paint a decent picture of our experiences of reality. It seems to come down to being aware of what information is practical in any given exchange, and excluding the levels of interpretation that are not. Just because my actions of informing you where to eat could be interpreted as acting out some archetypal role of teacher or guide, it is almost meaningless to point this out when you just want directions. Instead our interaction could suggest to you what you need to know, and just, that unless you aren’t too hungry that you could chat for a bit before you eat. And so, though the mythic interpretation of reality is a meaningful approach to our experiences , it is only really useful in dealing with high level interpretations of our experiences, and not in communicating the actual interactions we have on a more experiential level.