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!

ARIZONA HABOOB / Feathered Gods

The walker came down from Tucson last night just after seven
striding the horizon in phainein form; the strider appeared
an occurrence extraordinaire as if a god from out a cloud
ten thousand feet tall had just arrived for dinner.

I was out grilling salmon when the feathered one swallowed
the mountains on the horizon at the edge of town and not quite
done, I snatched the foil pan from the fire and ran before the
great one began shedding its skin all over my supper.


Some folks I know call the walker “old man”; some call him
the storm serpent and some just say “Avanyu Sendo comes hither”
and mean something biblical and primordial, a tall strider
big as god moves like a serpent behind a wall of dust.


When Avanyu walks the sun fades; Avanyu is hungry and it is
the dinner hour. The serpent is no invited guest and so I hide
indoors and eat my fish watching as he swallows Phoenix
on TV. I can just as easily watch it from the front window.


Considering it’s a storm god, I hospitably relent and agree to share
repast by the window. Avanyu’s tongue is made of barbed
lightening and dining with the serpent god can be more
than a spectacle should there be dinner conversation.

Avanyu is no good in his youth the story goes; folk gossip in dread
P’o anyu is a monster who threatens to flood because he, nearly one
hundred miles wide, is a big boy is all; he means well folk say
into the swollen street swallowed earlier in a wall of dust.


Tonight he’s more polite in watching what comes out of his mouth
although, a diminished flood of sorts pours out when he opens it
and this is true because dining with any god is one wild party; the
cleaning up afterward takes all next day and requires a hose.

I can’t help thinking TallStrider a kind of benevolent serpent, too
while the hose, what comes out of its mouth, descends like a river
onto the patio floor to rid the way my dinner guest could chew and
how, the way Avanyu left last night in a hurry, made his clothes fall off.




©2011 Feathered Gods stephanie pope Bugs & Monsters mythopoetry.com