MYTHOPOETRY SCHOLAR

                Revolution & Mythless Myth

One of the reasons for this three-year ezine project is to try and draw into a virtual space images of the unconscious life of the world, the soul of this world as it speaks to us today, mythlessly. What is the soul of our earth doing when we act the way we act toward each other globally and communally?

Some say the "new age", the "new millenium" began at ground zero. One can suppose the image today at work in a revolutionary manner. What manner of soul is this expression of the presence of the absence in which that moment now presences itself? The one event, depicted in the twin "shadows" lit by night, and the soul of this soul-loss carries an unknown value, a zero― a zero; soul-making "rounds"! And, may I add, still at work underneath our radar, such soul gets around!

So, too the various ways contributors present this year's theme: revolution...as in "the action for turning again" as one of our authors below suggests. David L Miller says it this way,  "The world is archetypally activist." For more on the meaning of this metaphor see David's essay, A Myth Is As Good As A Smile. Meanwhile, here are four more authors and a bit about their contributions to Mythopoetry Scholar eZine vol. 3.

Catherine Svehla

I received a beautiful painting done by cultural mythologer and essayist, Catherine Svehla called "Creation Story." Catherine will be contributing a reverie piece titled "Between the Worlds."

Catherine writes

Coyote comes and kicks the empty skull of that world. Old Man Coyote constructs a place fit for us all by deconstructing principles. Like the black dog that tugs on the loose thread in the garment of the world and pulls it apart so that it can never be completed and the weaving must continue and so the world keeps spinning.


Dave Alber
Cultural mythologer, Dave Alber wrote from China where he is teaching this term to say a little more about his contribution, "Myths and Moon Cakes: The Cosmological Symbolism of the Zhou Revolution."

The myth of Hou Yi the archer shooting down the nine suns is a polemical myth that describes the Zhou people working with the Hou tribe of barbarians ("yi") in the revolutionary overthrow of the Shang empire. The Shang, you see, had a solar calendar with a ten day week. Hou Yi shoots nine, leaving one left. Hou Yi is married to Chang-e who is associated with the moon. And so people with a lunar calendar defeat the people with the solar calendar. The Chang-e myth is known to every Chinese person as it is associated with Moon Festival celebrated every year. However, the cosmological origin of the myth has been lost. So, dare I say, I think that it would be revolutionary to publish something on the recovery of the cosmological and political threads of the myth.

Dave intends to send some great photos of Shang bronze vessels and city walls; wooden molds for moon cakes that depict scenes from the myth.

Meanwhile, the poetry section is set into the publisher and poetry submission to the 2012 zine is now officially closed. One sample of fine work is the experimental poetry of mythopoet, Richard (Ric) Lance Williams.


Ric Williams
Ric's image-idea for "revolution" appears in the title, "Revolution: The Act of Turning Again."  For me this brings to mind the image of the world soul at ground zero revealing itself in the photo as a "golden shadow" as if to say, " Now, we are two going on from two" "without value", meaning we are the door guardians of the gateless gate by which only the one who knows they don't know may pass into the realm of the unknown value to experience this shadow double's gold. You might likewise consider as do I this "golden shadow" might be a new metaphor for the soul of the soul of mythless times.


Stephanie Pope
Which brings me to one of three contributions of my own efforts to support this year's zine, "Mythopoesis in the 21st Century or 'Poetry In The Extreme.'"  The essay examines how a poetic revolution both affirms Ric's image idea of revolution as a turning action that "re" turns (aka, new and again) and reveals what gets around meaninglessness.  My thesis is that "what" indeed gets around meaninglessnesses; it isn't a substance, it is a perspective achieved through a mythic and poetic literary method.

THE END IS NEAR: November, 2011

         Photo/Art Credit: ph33lth3lov3


a shadow hound
its leafy cavity

lumber-like and numb
with V-like blue-nosed gravity
sniffing is only a fitting in...

... how kingly autumn
is sitting

well and worth a mining down
the worn trunk round
where the sap lay fast asleep

round like revolution―airy winds

poetic below the b-like wind and wind

the low-like opening
opening wider torn apart by sound
howling on behalf the shadow hound

in the spiral trumpeter a
diving V will know

the inner reaches of the
shadow bitch
in whose keep the vital life at rest, rests

the sun in the story shadows know, sleeping
who is she, this sol-gate guardian?




©2011 Royal Autumn stephanie pope enkata poetry mythopoetry.com

Mythopoetry Scholar

In This Issue: "La Nuit Au Claire" by Chris Paris


Mythopoetry Scholar vol. 3, whose 2012 theme is revolution, includes two short fiction pieces. One, "La Nuit Au Claire" by Chris Paris is set in the fictional, but not-too-distant campus unrest of the 1960's.

I was in a discussion with the author around the time I went to work setting the page in the publishing software that will include the story in the electronic zine publishing January, 2012. 

"There are glimmers, moments when something breaks through culture at certain times and in certain ways and my goal," I told him, "in doing the work I do on line, is often times to interrogate the tacit presuppositions within which cultural values operate out of mythic dominants to the detriment of certain cultural kinds. The mythic dominants more often than not operate via religious, scientistic, historical and academic sanction...which is really an expression of an imbalance operating and mostly around a grab for power and goods...greed. During such moments," I told him, "the collective opine for the goods isn't the same thing necessarily as 'the good, the right, the just, the true,' by straw pole or otherwise."  I think I had in the back of my mind something James Hillman noted in The Souless Society. He said America's myth is a myth of innocence and that's what gets us. Myth is tragedy and American tragedy lies in how it is remaining innocent. It does this for too long and until it's too late.

The truth be told the American majority opine misses, covers over, shuts away, shuts out and tries to shut up the subtle glimmer passing into being where openings are made culturally in which new meaning in a new cultural soul can come into expression and revivify how it all works."

One such opening of the '60's that ought be challenged is the notion of "the feminine."  And this part is tricky. Like racism one ought lay the ism of "the feminine" down. No ism can get the cultural work done. See, I have a feeling the work of culture-making is somehow alot closer to the work of soul-making than anybody knew.

That means, personally speaking, I would have hoped by now feminism, which has for more than thirty years, decontructed gender i.e. shown it to be an artifice, would be moving cultural mythemes along from glimmer to thunderclap and we would not attempt in our fictions to use a fantasy motif reinstating any notion there is such a thing as feminine work when re imagining culture. I would have hoped the work would by now be human work in the name of citizen body.

Paris agrees but not quite and uses the word "feminine" differently than do I. Paris has made something qualitative into a noun, a thing, "the feminine" and then personifies it.  What I am challenging is this very linguistic fantasy move since what it's doing reinstates the imaginal construct of a uniquely "feminine" role in culture via such language literally.

Work is work, yes, but I refuse to ignore the feminine and its profoundly and desperately needed value in the world--which proves revolutionary in itself, just as it did in the New Testament. Consider, for example, Mary's role at the wedding and the running out of food and drink. Many appeals to Jesus, who very intriguingly balks. SHE is the mentor--the feminine, and demonstrates to HIM that one cannot be compassionate just sometimes, but ALL the time... That's revolutionary...

Paris' own notion of what is revolutionary shapes the mytheme for "La Nuit." 

He adds, 

LA NUIT is all about mythologizing ourselves into believing how courageous we are when, in actuality, we have no guts at all as a nation as a people, not even for each other. Hence, oppressive enslaving corporate plutocracy dictating what government should be. The rich get richer, the exclusivists more exclusive, hegemony through the roof and all reinforced through fear.Paris goes on

In fact, you'll see it in "LA NUIT AU CLAIRE," although ironically, tragically defeated. We need to paint THAT picture, too, in order to de-mythologize to resurrect for revolutionary change-making action.

Even though this is not my idea of a revolutionary, de-mythologizing change-making action but the reinstating of a mythic dominant of yesteryear via a specific gender role in culture, I think you will find the story complex and interesting and, when you finally get the chance to read it this January, you can decide matters for yourself.

Mythopoetry Scholar

Work Begins

Work on volume 3 of Mythopoetry Scholar Annual eZine begins. With an editor’s “I-eye” on publishing in a little over eight weeks from now, I thought it might be worthwhile to blog on the process giving fans of mythopoetry.com a peek at what they can expect from this year’s zine. Readers can tap into the table of content for volume 3 at any time knowing the page is live and updated whenever new submissions are accepted into the zine.

The theme this year for Mythopoetry Scholar is “revolution.” The title of the volume is a little more complex, “Chaos as Creation, Revolution as Renaissance, Apocalypse as Promise.” And, there is a lot of wiggle room for how the poetic image and mytheme can be approached and re visioned, too!

Clinical social worker and cultural mythologer, Gene Toews suggests soul’s revolutionary renaissance moves toward even greater meaning and purpose at the end of one’s life. Approaching this year’s mytheme through all three poetic images contained in the title from a poetics of dying Gene writes,

Perhaps the single most important revolution each experiences most exquisitely is that which occurs intrapsychically, as one engages their death.

And he continues,

To paraphrase Viktor Frankl, death "... does not mean something vague, but something very real and very concrete. ... (no one's death) can be compared with any other ...." Earlier I have written of the poesis of dying. James Hillman writes of the intimate relationship between soul and death. Jung discusses dying as the final stage of development towards wholeness. Daily, in my hospice work, I witness patients who suffer the despair of believing they no longer have worth or value; they feel they no longer have anything to give. This, Hillman might say, is the fiction they've come to believe. Healing, he writes, has to do with healing this fictional account (Healing Fiction). Frankl's logotherapy arose from the unimaginable suffering he experienced and witnessed during his years in Nazi concentration camps. The resulting intrapsychic chaos gave rise to his understanding "...that human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have meaning…

Gene adds one more thought in his submission abstract regarding what is brought about inwardly by engaging in soul at its most profoundest levels…

Current research indicates that those who are dying, who face the final apocalyptic moments of their life in very real, palpable ways, find their quality of life enhanced as their suffering is reduced, through connecting with the meanings and purposes of their life's stories.


Whet your appetite for more soul food? I hope so!