AN INTERSTICE: NEW YEARS & "END" TIMES Mirthology 101

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Happy 2013! Did you make your New Year's resolution yet? This year I promised myself I would continue my explorations into women and humor. As a poet-mythologer that means a mythopoetic exploration where psyche-making seems to open space between mirth and myth.

The idea came to me last evening during participation in a microblogging event, "Toast Pacifica" held for alumni of Pacifica Graduate Institute (see Pacifica Alumni) home to the collected works of Joseph Campbell, Marija Gimbutas, James Hillman, Christine Downing, and others. You can visit a full listing of names and collected works by visiting OPUS Archives on line.


 2013: Why Mirth
What is it about mythic imagination and the need for mirth? Could it be somehow that myth's birth and mirth's birth coincide in the same monadic space in imaginal mind? I've already started looking at this early mental matrix.

Mirth's name accorded western psyche in mythic imagination is Euphrosyne. She is one of three Graces or Charites. According to Timothy Ganz she forms, along with her sisters, Aglaia and Thalia, the diaphanous robe surrounding the goddess Aphrodite. (Early Greek Myth, vol. 1 p. 54)

Sure sounds like something archetypally in-formed to me. Perhaps 2013 has all the makings of a "nude" year after all!  If so, the imaginal term coined last night by @Pacifica Alumni, "arsechetypal" has left a just-right imprint to further explore―traces of the old "end-times" along with specular, simulated "spectacular" simulacra, images like the simultaneously unfolding, eleventh hour "fiscal cliff" negotiations. These are left "behind" as the new year begins. These seemings seam traces in poetic psyche's myth-making, fun-loving, festival animal as the old year vanishes into late night, New Year, Toast Pacifica tweets. 

In a salute to 2013 now, here's to naked Beauty and the gracefully mythopoetic, circle dancer, Mirth who traced the dancing imprint last night in PJ's EROS and the knowing and loving underneath the blue boy's timely trinitarian invocation. Here's to the winged "makers", mythoplokon, weavers of soul-making everywhere!

Furthermore, here's to beginnings in endings; here's to simulacra, simulation and fictionalizing arsechetypes.

Out with the old, in with the nude!

Happy Nude Year, Everybody!

©2013 stephanie pope, mythopoetry.com