A MEDITATION ON THE GRAMMAR OF MYTH
"Each mythology has its own grammar." ~ Bradley Olson
I
thought for that at least a portion of this blog post, I might respond a bit to
Dave Alber’s really fine September posts, which reflect nicely the essence of
his recent book, The Heart of Myth:Wisdom Stories From Endangered People. I particularly like his phrase “the
grammar of myth,” because it is an unusual and surprising pairing of the words
myth and grammar but soon, upon closer examination, one discovers the reasons for
why the pairing of myth and grammar is apropos. Grammar is comprised of an internalized
set of rules for the use of a given language, and for most native speakers
those rules are not learned—internalized—by study and instruction. Grammar is
learned by watching and listening to other speakers, and the grammatical
nuances of a language learned very early in childhood are intuitively relied
upon in writing and conversation, and even in thinking. Grammar may also be a
word used to describe an orthodoxy that prescribes and governs punctuation,
spelling, and usage. In other words, grammar is the foundation of self-expression.
You see where I’m
going with this; each mythology has its own grammar as well: rules that govern
denotation, expression, orthodox understanding, thinking, and form. And these grammatical
rules, sometimes called mythemes, tenets, or articles of faith, are also
learned in very early childhood and often inexorably remain, over the course of
even a very long life, the intuitive framework for understanding oneself and
one’s world. Those of us cohabiting with a particular mythology rely on its
grammar to communicate comprehensibly with one another, to support, instruct,
encourage, and all too familiarly, rebuke. Perhaps even more important is that
grammar insists on storytelling and making narrative possible, in fact, grammar
may frankly necessitate story. I suppose one cannot truly imagine what trying
to communicate with another person might have been like before, shall we call
it, the invention or the organization of grammar, but I suspect that a lot of
grunting, pointing, the use of contorted, exaggerated facial expressions, stick
and dirt drawings, and an exasperated, repetitive emphasis on a few key sounds
would have been the norm. An unwieldy enterprise, to say the least, and coupled
with its longueur, it would certainly
seem to incline one to fewer verbal interactions. Grammar allows one to participate
in relationship by virtue of the narrativizing of life, not only one’s own
life, but the lives (and deaths) of others, of the community, of animals, of
forests, grasslands, deserts, seas, as well as the heavens. Grammar makes myth
possible, grammar may even insist upon myth.
Rethinking Myth Through Joseph Campbell’s “Four
Functions”
In David’s September 4th guest blog on this site, “What is Myth For You?”,
he referenced an essay I had written: “Bradley Olson recently posted an essay
on the importance of rethinking myth and personal definitions of myth, and
similarly, he referenced it back to the mystical function of myth.” I was
surprised to read this, because as I was writing it, I was thinking of it in
terms of the psychological function of myth. But Dave was not wrong in
associating what I had written with the mystical function of myth, of which is
to awaken a sense of “awe” in the encounter with the, as Jung put it, mysterium tremendum. Joseph Campbell’s
four functions of mythology, as I think about them now with Dave’s grammaticus influencing me, are also
attempts at grammar, and it would be as wrong to relegate them to discrete
domains as it would be to insist upon always speaking the King’s English; more
elegant and clear, perhaps, but not nearly as interesting, nor as alive. Each of these four functions—metaphysical,
cosmological, sociological, and psychological—are in dynamic relationships with
one another, sometimes opposing, sometimes syncretic, and sometimes
paradoxical. The student, less innately fluent than, say, the initiate, will
struggle with the intellectual imperative of properly consigning this
experience or that phenomenon to its proper function. For instance, is this
particular narrative supporting a sociological function or is it advancing my
own psychological needs? At any given time, the answer may be yes, no, or both.
How does one decisively separate cosmology and awe (the metaphysical function)
for instance? Here again, these categories function as grammar, and as such,
one must first learn how to use and apply them correctly and reliably in order
to effectively and creatively transgress the rules at some future point when
the goal is to creatively open up and revitalize the mythic narratives. In
mythology, as in the lives of cultures, perhaps this task falls to those best
suited for the work: the heretics, the visionaries, the poets, the artists,
those singular individuals living within a particular narrative who see,
perhaps for the first time, something entirely new in the old forms, plasticity
in the rigid structures, and beauty in the unavoidable, and often unforgiving,
realities of life.
Dave writes that “Myths are transmissions of
knowledge from the enlightened state, from cultures that rightly identify
spiritual work with the routine moment-to-moment development of their awareness
state.” As David soon points out, “[the definition] is imperfect and limited,” and
he believes the imperfection is intentional in order to, I presume, give myth
the room and imprecision it requires to make it flexibly expansive enough to
contain and transmit extraordinary esoteric, metaphysical knowledge. I am aware
from our personal conversations and correspondence that Dave values, as I do,
the timeless, mercurial, eternal, archetypal qualities of myth, the fleeting “Protean
slipperiness” of it (as he once put it to me), and the ability of myth to evoke
“profound states of awareness.” Dave’s September essays are deeply thought,
innovative, and pleasurable to read, and I have no criticism for him in this
regard. But since the point of my essay this month is to contribute something
of my own thoughts about myth, my response is, it seems, yes and…. The and… is my problem with the focus on the transcendent and spiritual
aspects of myth, a focus I acknowledge as a venerable interpretation and use of
myth, but one I am exhausted by and, frankly, one I think the world can ill
afford any longer. At its best, it denies the reality of human effort and
inter-relatedness and creates comforting illusions; at worst it creates an
excess of greed, stupidity, and shallow, trivial gestures performed within an
atmosphere of mercilessness.
Myth’s Grammar,
Thought, And Imaginal Life
I prefer to consider myth as a mode of thought
or a condition of imagining rather than a narrative containing a body of
knowledge. Perhaps, referencing my above discussion of Dave’s notion of
grammar, I can call myth the grammar of thought, or the grammar of imagination
(as I recall, Hegel mentioned something along the lines of grammar being the
work of thought). Myth was “taken up” or rediscovered during the Enlightenment
because, as a mode of thinking, it was believed to be a key to comprehending history,
philosophy, religion, art, linguistics, and creativity itself. Considering myth
to be a mode of thinking returns ownership of myth to human beings and, from that
point of view, a mythic imagination is an uncritical, non-causal, wholesale
search for meaning and significance in a human life lived in a fundamentally
mysterious world. Myth is no longer the province of gods or the expression in
the world of supernatural intervention but instead, it rightfully reclaims for
human beings an apprehension of the sublime nested within human passions,
changes of fortune, joys, and depressions, elation and pathos.
A Fifth Function Of Myth?
There is at least one other exquisitely human
function of myth that I would add to Campbell’s well known four, and that is
the function of delight. Delight as
a function certainly isn’t my discovery. John Dryden specifically, and all
manner of poets, writers, painters, classically educated people in all walks of
life, have noted this function at work one way or another in the mythopoetic
genre. The mythographer is, as the word poesis
suggests, a maker and a creator, she aims at making something beautiful,
something that stirs us, not by representing things exactly as they are but by
heightening their intensity, deepening their depths, qualities Dryden called
“lively” and “just” (Essay of Dramatic
Poesy). Poesis, and by extension mythopoesis, is a uniquely human endeavor
and delighting in it allows one to, if not exactly remake the world, remake our
own reality here and now, for there is no fear in delight, and no pain, delight
is play, not pressure. Poesis and
drama also instruct, says Dryden, but the function of instruction is secondary
in his mind, and what always assumes a place of primacy in his thinking is the
function of delight. Delight is created by the contemplation of beauty, and it
is the job of the creative person to create or highlight a beauty that contributes
to the pleasures of the soul. The condition of delight taken in every aspect of
life, even the difficult, allows one to accept one’s human, all too human,
existence without the vulgar, slavish, and undignified need for transcendence.
Meditations On
Existential Dread,
Salvation, And Transcendence
There
is a story I love about D.T. Suzuki, the great popularizer of Zen in the West
and who was, as he was dying, visited by a friend and they had a wide-ranging
conversation about Zen, poetry, and, of course, the meaning of life. Suzuki
excused himself from the room for a bit, and once he was out of earshot his
wife leaned over to the visitor and said something like, “You know why he
doesn’t believe in Satori, do you
not?” The visitor shook his head and said, “No.” Mrs. S. began chuckling and
then exclaimed, “He’s never experienced it, himself!” I suppose I like this
story because it reflects my own understanding; I’ve never been, in my
exposures to Christianity, Zen, Sufism—all of which I took rather seriously at
one time or another in my life, able to experience what “they” said I should,
namely, some sort of transcendence. Some sacred wisdom, or some spiritual
practice, was supposed to enter me, heal me, or expand my consciousness or
something, and I would be fundamentally changed as a result. But stories,
narratives, even sacred ones, don’t change anyone. Human beings don’t change.
We are not transformed. We do not become different, altered (although we may
well become altared, tied to doctrine, rituals, and forms) beings.
One
might wonder that with an attitude like that, what is the point of being a
psychotherapist? Well, there is quite an important point it, and while I don’t believe
that people can change, I do believe they can relieve their suffering. Suffering
is created by the apparently insurmountable gap between who people believe
themselves to be and who they believe they should be. Because they can’t change
themselves in any way to which they are not already predisposed, that gap
appears to be unspannable and they begin to long for transcendence, a
transcendence that in its most frank, naked intention, is to somehow escape
their human condition, the condition of limited agency and vision, competency
and comprehension, beset by frailty and existential dread. It makes sense, I
suppose, to wish that some divine hand of a supernatural agent, some compassionate,
just and virtuous suspension of the universal order would simply erase my
misery and install me in a life of happiness and ease.It may be that the wish for salvation and
transcendence is built into myth as well as human nature. Chekov once remarked
that if you see a prominently displayed gun in the first act, you can be sure
it will be fired in the third. Likewise, in mythology, the first act emphasis is
religious, it is focused on supernatural, divine beings, divine, supernatural
realms, and the religious thinking that encapsulates them. So naturally now, in
the third act, people often turn to myth the way they used to turn to religion,
except that we tell ourselves we’re not being religious, we’re too sophisticated
to fall for that. Instead, we think of ourselves as being scholarly, or
psychological, or merely “spiritual.” Practices
arise such as personal mythology, culturally esoteric and exotic spiritual
practices, and what they have in common, deep down in their religious DNA, is
the desire for transcendence and salvation in some fashion. Please, the
practitioner begs, let me be something I presently am not, and seem incapable
of becoming. And I suppose, to some degree, that’s what those of us who
privilege the metaphysical or psychological function of myth may have wrought. We’ve
focused on the transformational, cathartic properties that an immersion in
mythology is expected to offer. And it is, after all, a reasonable first step
in the study of myth to try to understand exactly what is the impact myth is
having on my life, on my personal
situation.
Is That All There Is
To Myth?
But if that’s all it is, if myth is only
beneficial to individuals because it makes their personal lives seem easier or
better, we might as well give up on the way we (in the manner of Freud, Jung,
Campbell, etc.) study myth right now. If myth has become merely another more
exotic, and because of its unfamiliarity potentially more likely, shot at
salvation, the genre has been exhausted in the way that a lode of gold or
silver has been worked out; the mining of myth can no longer yield usable
amounts of its natural matter. Secondly, we cannot continue to believe that our
human condition is somehow inferior, fallen, or inadequate to the task of
living. Life in the contemporary world has given way to other circumstances
which must be met with other ways and forms of mythological imagining. And even
if my second point isn’t correct, and the circumstances of human life haven’t
changed fundamentally in ten thousand years, we either lack the imaginative
power to approach the form novelly, or we no longer find the answers that
novelty supplies to be of value. Finally, and we see this played out on every world
stage multiple times every day, misunderstanding myth (intentionally or not) serves
as some advantage to someone, and when mythic narratives are an advantage to
someone or some group, one is helpless to be understood or to lay in course
corrections.
Freud once remarked of his own theories that
they appealed to him because they tended to, like the theories of Copernicus or
Darwin, diminish man’s pride. Perhaps it isn’t asking too much to imagine that
pride is at work in the sacred fantasies of transcendence, salvation, the
project of leaving one’s human condition behind. Pride has at its core a
loathing of the human condition and its forms, and pride refuses to see that simple
human life and living has a profoundly aesthetic quality. The myths we cling to
tend to summarize our cultural life, which may be why we so badly want to
impress them into the service of escape. To my way of thinking, myths
investigate and celebrate human will and if that avenue of their contemplation
is dying, then perhaps it’s because the will of our society is dying, and if it
is, it is likely dying of its own excess. But contemporary culture seems intent
on transcending human nature, too, and self-interested, selfish excess is the
chosen option for the program: multiply, augment, display, annex, coopt,
volatize, transmogrify, transmute…and, like the directions on a shampoo bottle,
repeat over and over until we are, finally, no longer human. As Oscar Wilde aptly
put it, “nothing succeeds like excess.”
An Ethical Ideal
The
answers to the problems of living are not found in self-transformation or
through “realizing one’s divine nature,” but rather, becoming more and more and
more human; more and more and more oneself. This is precisely what Nietzsche
(no mean mythographer, himself) would prescribe. A self isn’t, according to
Nietzsche, something you just naturally are. A self must be achieved,
continually, over and over again. As Duncan Large notes in his forward to Ecce Homo, Nietzsche insisted that “the
process of self-becoming [is] an ethical ideal.” In Nietzsche’s own words:
Becoming what you are presupposes
that you have not the slightest inkling what
you are. From this point of view even life’s mistakes have their own sense and value, the temporary byways and
detours, the delays, the ‘modesties,’ the seriousness wasted on tasks which lie
beyond the task. […] You need to keep
the whole surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—untainted by any
of the great imperatives. Beware even every great phrase, every great pose!
With all of them the instincts risk understanding them too soon. Meanwhile in
the depths, the organizing ‘idea’ with a calling to be master grows and
grows—it begins to command, it slowly leads you back out of byways and detours,
it prepares individual qualities and
skills which will one day prove indispensable as means to the whole—it trains
one by one all the ancillary capacities before it breathes a word about the
dominant task, about goal, purpose, sense (Ecce
Homo).
This
is exactly, I think, what Campbell means by following your bliss; one realizes
that living a human life is often accompanied by inescapable constraints of one
kind or another, but there need be no authority but the inner deep, Nietzsche’s
“organizing idea,” that continually unfolds proportionally to how intensely we
approach our own self-becoming. That was a rather long quote, but one often
reads about Nietzsche rather than
actually reading Nietzsche, and we should be reading him…deeply. Those we turn
to in our study of myth were powerfully influenced by him; Campbell certainly
read him, Jung read him and worried that perhaps his philosophy made him mad,
Freud almost certainly read him and lied, saying he had not.
Self-becoming,
not change, is what happens in psychotherapy, although I suppose from an
outside perspective it appears that, through this process, the individual has
changed. But that would be wrong; in fact, she has simply become more of whom
she has already always been. When a rose seed becomes a beautiful, blooming
rose, it might appear to have changed from a seed to a rose, but the mature rose
was always there, inside the seed, and she became the fullest expression of herself.
The true value of myth is found not in esoteric teachings about transcendence,
nor in, as seductive as it may be, an occulted promise to escape one’s human
legacy. Rather, the value of myth is found in its way of consoling us, beings
who are subject to wild swings of fortune, impossible moral dilemmas,
horrifying exposures to the cannibalizing tendency of life itself to devour life,
to triumph, love, joy, sorrow, and all the rest of the exquisitely human
experience—as Zorba lovingly called it, “…the whole catastrophe.” To be more
fully human should be the goal, to enter one’s humanity more and more deeply,
to become as fully and completely human as one can possibly be, and those
indispensable qualities and skills which benefit, not just oneself, but the
entire collective, are found there. What
myths teach is what I have called, in other venues, radical acceptance;
Nietzsche called it Amor Fati, Jung
called it individuation, and Campbell called it bliss. Keats, in Sleep and Poetry, says it this way:
…Though no great
minist’ring reason sorts
Out the dark mysteries of human
souls
To clear conceiving: yet there
ever rolls
A vast idea before me, and I
glean
Therefrom my liberty…
Myth has the power of absorbing
and disturbing us in secret ways, just as our own self-reflection is likely to
absorb and disturb us, in ways remaining frustratingly secret. Myth is one of
the few ways complex civilizations keep in mind the uncivilized and untutored
selves we desperately want to have outgrown. To keep us in mind, too, the existentially
puzzling phenomena we’d rather not give too much thought to, things like death,
birth, and the constant struggle between free will and fate, issues that remain
stubbornly resistant to the intellect. Myth allows one to see the full force
and effect of a complex world on a limited human being, and if one begins to
think and imagine mythically, one wakes up and is less constrained by the
complexity and limitation of living a human life, and opens the doors of
perception to lives of joy and significance. Imagined and thought this way,
myth serves the purpose of a closer and truer relationship with life. Myth
doesn’t transform or solve the problems of living, but it does illuminate the
subject, and that, itself, is something important and worth having.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bradley Olson, PhD is a psychotherapist in private practice with
an office at Mountain Waves Healing Arts. Dr. Olson has a particular
interest in Jungian Analytical Psychology and Mythological Studies, and his
work with clients is heavily influenced by these two traditions. Dr.
Olson works mainly with adults on issues of spirituality, identity, and
transitions into mid-life.
For more regarding Dr. Olson's work visit
Mountain
Waves Healing Arts.
Bradley Olson Blog
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