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OUR CULTURAL MYTHS

This January, 2017 mythopoetry.com is introducing guest blogging to mythopoetry’s myth & culture blogspot.  Many of the guest bloggers this year are affiliated with the arts and are cultural mythologers (my term for this mode of being in the world) or, as many guest bloggers like to refer to themselves, cultural mythologists.  All, in some way, have an affiliation with PacificA Graduate Institute where they either teach, taught or did post graduate study.

Given the political shift in the direction the country is headed after the election of 2016, and before knowing myself what the guest bloggers who’ve graciously accepted my invitation to guest blog have to say, I thought it might be interesting to journey with the help of the Internet Wayback Machine, aka, the Internet Archives, and revisit how one of the early internet cultural mythologers, Maggie Macary (mythandculture.com)  ponders myth and politics just a few years after 9-11 during the republican era of the George W. Bush presidency. 

One thing which struck me as relevant and the reason for beginning with Maggie’s reverie written and published initially in January, 2003 is its opening quote. 

The author, the late cultural mythologer, Maggie Macary, Ph.D. is a student doing her doctoral research and the person she is quoting is her doctoral advisor, Dr. Dennis Patrick Slattery. The opening quote to Maggie's "Manifest Destinies" republishing here this Sunday is taken from Dr. Slattery's essay, "Seduced By Peace" first published to one of the earliest of the on line cultural mythology literary magazines, Headline Muse, Dr. Laura Shamas, editor and publisher.
(Slattery, Dennis Patrick. "Seduced by Peace." Headline Muse. 27 January 2003.  headlinemuse.com/Culture/seducedbypeace.htm.)

Although Headline Muse, e-magazine is no longer available on line nor are we able to access it through the Wayback Machine's portal, it so happens, Dr. Slattery is a first contributor to the 2017 Guest Blog Series.  His upcoming blog ponders mimesis and painting. It will publish this March. Dr Shamas will follow with Aphrodite in an April guest blog.

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Maggie’s blog on cultural myths is also relevant to me for how it will provide my readers with an insight into how thinking mythically and thinking politically hang together and how this matters to holding together or not holding together political tensions. Thinking politically, from mythical thinking’s point of view, archetypally inheres. At the same time, each kind of thinking hangs in its own darkness. In essence, this is Heidegger’s de riss, rift or rift-design. Mythically each of us needs the other’s way of thinking just as each needs her own mythical thinking’s point of view all the way.  Politics and myth need each other, each has psychic validity and each as a mode of seeing, apprehends the world—ways of being “in” the world. Politics and myth seem together and yet differently, to paraphrase one of Dr. Macary’s ideas.

The final thought I have as to my purpose for beginning with Dr Macary’s reverie on the myths of our culture is to retrieve and place here conclusions she reaches in her final paragraph.  It is my hope  we may continue to ponder them going forward. 

COME BACK AND VISIT  Sunday, January 29, 2017 to read Maggie's 2003 blog, "Manifest Destinies".

©2017 mythopoetry.com All Rights Reserved 

ONCE UPON A MOON FETCH

ZEUS SUCKLING AMALTHEIA ~sketch, Jacob Jordanes 

Mouths/Stippled/Weavings

a mother drops the pail & screams
all the birds scattering like a black cancer… 
                  ~Richard Scow Williams, Vietnam September 16, 2015

A mother drops (blind to shutters) into golden time (& timing).

An in
finite, incarnate, big as Christ or big with child (twins!)

flowers showering mother's drop, milk language, starlit pablum.

Who knows of this anymore? One cannot moon fetch
standing still so let us all go live the years that make us old.

Once upon a moon fetch
Jack and Jill
Hjuki & Bil

gathering & separating
belonging together & dissolving
filling & emptying
never is the bucket empty
never are the children old

Or how falling overturns heartbeat's bleating love
love's paler pail's lingo splatters diving down
in an uprising that fills time
time, filled tenderly, that tenderness fierce.

An image of mother cloaks this opening blossom’s watery light
blackened with temporal quality; mistaking it for something
(a muddy center) or someone
will quantify it (back to black just like that)
downward love rendered opaque in dead skin shedding itself
tries to dive down underneath again; showing through, a new skin.

When times cannot fulfill a myth logical space always expanding
time will outgrow the old story, shed it like skins; skin upon skin,
a mouth opened wider and wider in a honeyed line that doesn't;
myth to mythology, blind to shutters, I’s closed;
Soul must eat death again.

Let us not write lines blind to shudders in perigees eclipsed
by eyes unfilled (not to mention lines & shovers not forgetful of being)
or the drip calligraphy of  old, old stars read in wonder
old, old woman threading again through cleavage at the breast—even Helen
laced time’s libation with heart-ease in passing it between fathers and sons

a lunar cup
glistening dew

watery light—O!
by the light
by the light
in this moon
 

So open your own old woman lips stippled with age and myth before myth
begins (and ends); hear the dark flower's psyche sing with hidden in
finitely here, a goat story that isn't evil.

O Aletheia, every word incarnates true, not truth, in water
clear & sweet fed in (to Achelous’ spring), a gift unspoken
(a passage streaming between a father & daughter); disclosures
carry some sense of timing—a strong force, and disappear (Heidegger)
(weaving this back in, penelopean)

But, should the shover of eyes "I" gain foothold remembering
not (negative capability) not forgetful of being, how terrifying
what Helen’s beauty faces lacing heart-ease hospitably to fill time now.
 

Times seem to sit empty like a hide with a hideous face or excrescent story
cancerous, the milk of Amaltheia missing from its horn.


© 2015 Old Woman Remembers Her Youth stephaniepope mythopoetry.com

notes

1. Aletheia is likened to a daughter of Zeus and muse. ("Ah Moisa (Muse), I beg you, and Alatheia (Truth) daughter of Zeus… Pindar, Olympian Ode 11. 6 ff (trans. Conway) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) ) Being true or faithful or attentive or ‘wet-nurse” to the in finite incarnation is perhaps the experience of the blossoming of the wonder of being.

2. The goat goddess, Amaltheia, called “sacred” (Strabo, Geography 8. 7. 5 (trans. Jones) (Greek geographer C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) is said to wet-nurse Zeus. See Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 4 - 5 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.)  Suidas s.v. Amaltheias keras (trans. Suda On Line) (Byzantine Greek lexicon C10th A.D.) 

3.  The Horn of Amaltheia
"Amaltheias keras (Horn of Amaltheia) applies to those living in plenty and, steering this straight course,  are flourishing. There is a goat story told how Amaltheia, a word meaning something like “tender goddess”, her name deriving from malassesthai, 'to be softened'  ( see Suidas s.v. Amaltheias keras (trans. Suda On Line) (Byzantine Greek Lexicon C10th A.D.)), broke off one of her horns, filled it to the brim with flowers and fruit and presented it to Zeus who placed both it and Amaltheia among the stars. (see Ovid, Fasti 5. 111 ff (trans.Boyle) (Roman poetry C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.))  In another version of the story it is Zeus who breaks off the horn and who then gives this special horn to Amaltheia telling her it will supply her inexhaustible abundance; she in turn, presents it to her brother, Achelous. He exchanges it for his own horn lost in battle with Hercules. Meanwhile Zeus fashions out of the hide of Amaltheia, the aegis, a beautiful hide with the ugliest of faces. See Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2. 148 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.)

Contrast this image to that of Pandora, the gift which Zeus commands the Vulcan god to fashion beautifully faced to 'hide’ something far uglier about promethean ways underneath the image's crafted, desirably-fleshed appearances. This moment is the inventing of something. The central motif is an image of beings without being. It is the inventing of and crafting of the cultural identity of the other.  This move is the beginning of othering. it is the beginning recognition of the absence of being and a clue to its soul retrieval in poetic language.

Now compare that to how “mythic” imagination “falls”. Do mythic images fall “down” like an eyelid or blind (and/or like a blind eye gazing upon its own dark lid/Wallace Stevens) begin to see the way mythic being sees?  Does mythic imagination fall or not? Do mythic images open but close like shutters turning  “mythic” nothingnesses  in finite, mythic dominants over into a mythology and in timing lose the glistening, mythic imagination falling gloss to mud? Or does mythic imagination fall open letting a poetic line stay (as in curb or check) closing (enjambment) to continue opening inwardly showering a fetched experience of fully fruited ripeness moonlit upon the brow?  Examine the play in the phrase 'stay closing'. A poetic gesture of moving  towards an eternal falling/closing action and never "The Fall" to me invokes a mythic imagination in which a mythic pattern (something archetypal) activates the archetypal imagination letting something of being's nothingness manifest a mythos in a logos beyond which,  that, turning in the direction of a mythology to story through, otherwise kills. 

4. To help in pondering the nothingness being is, not itself a being, i.e. a “thing” see, “The Forgetfulness of Being”.

5.  Jack and Jill went up the hill
     To fetch a pail of water
For more in regards the moon pail, the moon’s mana and  Hjuki & Bil see Jules Cashford “The Moon: Myth and Image” (London: Caswell Illustrated, 2002),  Water In The Moon pp. 181-183.