A Morning in the Life of a Reader of Myths

"But myth, so we are told, is only poetry. What have we said when we say that?" [Walter F. Otto: Dionysus: Myth and Cult ]

Brief encounter, this morning, with Aroma and Taste; Inspiration and Toil; Poet and Scholar; Mystery and Theory; Culture and Civilization; Mask and Glasses; and several other perplexing phenomena.

The aroma of coffee

In AD 2001 Morning still comes after Night; and this morning brings, to the lethargic man whom Hypnos has just set free, the aroma of coffee which presents itself as the genial prelude of several possible contrappunti, the first of which—the aroma suggests—could be the cup of coffee itself.

However, as the oblivious man imbibes the dark fluid that supposedly will deliver, if not clarity, at least alertness to the delicate entity acknowledged as his own mind, he detects the notorious discrepancy between the beverage's aroma and its taste. It is then that the first flashes of Memory cross the dim horizon of his mind, unveiling upon it Walter Slezak's reply in a certain movie:

—Ain't it funny how coffee never tastes as good as it smells?
—As you grow older, you'll discover that life is very much like coffee. The aroma is always better than the actuality.

As if the belligerence of the comment brought wakefulness, he suddenly imagines that the aroma of coffee could be one of the many perfumes of Memory; and it is the goddess, thus evoking herself, who brings about his vigil.

The cosy chair

When he, after breakfast, enters his study, the first to meet him, with a sly smile, is his cosy armchair: a two-edged strategic device capable of extraordinary simulations, including a rotating ease that permits sinking as well as shrinking, reclining as well as declining, and which would even grant dropping dead, a gesture that must, by Necessity, succeed a too long habit of breakfasting and coffeeing.

Missing glasses

As he sits, the blur informs him that he has left his reading-glasses on the breakfast table. And in a thoughtless quest for optical focus he rotates the chair to see the bookshelves, which, for being only a few steps away, look distinct. While watching them as in a sudden trance, the idea occurs to him that the position of the books on the shelves can reproduce neither the order in which he has read them, nor the phases they might have incised on his own thought.

Many books

But remembering that chronology is usually uncertain, he abandons the thought and instead takes notice of the relatively large amount of books concerned with the interpretation of the myths, which, in the course of time, have made their home on the shelves. This circumstance is by no means strange, since he has been reading the myths for a number of years now, and the habit has spontaneously led to further readings concerning their origin and nature, as explained by scholars from several centuries.

Daunou's Law

But as he, still reluctant to fetch his glasses, ponders on the subject of quantity, he recalls the words of Prof. Daunou (Pair de France), who pertinently declared that from the very moment one realises that many books have been written on a certain subject, the conclusion should be drawn that the subject has not been solved and that, most probably, will remain unsolved.

Arthur Quiller-Couch and libraries

That the quantity of books does not necessarily correspond to the actual level of knowledge, or culture, of a given society, was also observed by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who, although being a lover of books and reading, points out that great libraries not seldom make their appearance in times of decadence, when it may also become legal to demand that a copy of every book be deposited with them, whether they deserve it or not.

Books as symptom

Books on myths are concerned with the expression of a culture long ago deceased, and there is no better evidence of its decease, affirms Quiller-Couch, than their large quantity:

". . . the sepulture of books that admiring generations have heaped on it!"

This is presumably so because the splendour of a past age may be inherited by a society that, lacking the spiritual grandeur of its predecessor, cannot but settle in civilised balance, forgetting everything about fundamental issues, and turning for guidance to new standards of order, education, and mundane good sense. Accordingly, while a longing that cannot be properly attended tends to upset the heart of such a community, knowledge must find its source, no longer in vision, but in the dissection of both a glorious past and present world.

To die and slay

The mythical mind did not need to dissect, since it "lives in the myth" [Kerényi]. But when this kind of life starts to fail, analysis and interpretation must be called to the aid, so that they, acting like surgeons, might attempt to put together the meaning that is sensed to have fallen apart.

It is for the sake of this surgery that the many books are produced, which discover in the myths allegories, symbols, rational accounts, historical roots, ritual connections, moral implications, magical hints, natural representations, structural patterns, naive imagination, psychological truths, religious advice, childish apprehension, and many other things, from which theories are derived that, although thought to disclose meaning, are unable to touch the vital significance of the mythical world. Accordingly, the fate of such theories has been like that of the Theban brothers:

"... by a kinman's hand to die and slay ."

And when theories thus kill each other, they involutarily suggest that the privilege of properly dealing with the myths ideally reverts to the poet.

The double task of artists

Therefore, it has become once more reasonable and necessary to assume that the revival of myth will depend on artists, as one mythologist rightly points out:

"The people who can keep myth alive are artists of one kind or another." [J. Campbell (1985)]

However, artists cannot revive myths before they detach themselves from everyday life experience, rediscovering the transcendent nature of their art. For there is not such a thing as sociological art, except as an expression of exhaustion and despair. Nor is it sane to persist in the illusion that high art can be 'popular' without being diluted. In this context art, like myth and ritual, cannot be placed, as expressions of inner or transcendent realities, on an equal footing with everyday life experience. Their function is, on the contrary:

"... to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time."

In consequence, it may conversely be said that meaningful art cannot be kept alive if the sense of myth were lost; and that accordingly, artists confront a double task if both myth and art, which do not exist separated from each other, are to be rescued.

Arduous enlightenment

The enlightenment of contemporary society (in this and other connections) is the result of arduous research and unthinkable hardships, in the course of which the myths may have their structure exposed and their components analysed and compared. The general theory is later obtained out of this complex network of factual knowledge (the sole classification and retrieval of all knowledge accumulated constituting a science in itself), being supported by a number of pieces of evidence belonging to that corpus, and refuted by not a single one of those same pieces of evidence.

The theory then may remain true until some new evidence appears to deny it; or until another theory, supported by more or stronger evidence, comes about. Most conclusions are therefore of a highly ephemeral nature, showing, time after time, that as soon as they reach the top, they rebound backward again, like Sisyphus' stone. Nevertheless, the dream of a general theory is not abandoned, but heroically pursued, since the drops of knowledge are apparently assumed to sum up and come together one day to form the source from which enlightenment will afterwards pour even more abundantly.

Poet and Scholar

On this account, the position of the scholar (or that of the scientific researcher) is not, in most cases, enviable, specially if compared to that of the poet.

For whereas the former, weighed down with the burden of thought, produces with great effort, the genuine poet of myths, having been given a gift, is filled with inspiration and creates effortlessly. The result of his inspired activity is, in fact, so divested of labour that he does not even claim it to be his own. Otherwise, we had not talked of 'gift'; for a gift that demands struggle and exertion is not a gift.

Modern poets

Admittedly, there might have been poets, in recent ages, who have strained their lyre. But modern poets, however sublime, however wise, however delicate, however given to heroic loftiness or to sensuous beauty, to grandeur or to lucidity, to mystical visions or to passion, to polished artistry or to extravagance, to glamour or to mystic nature, or to whatever movement of the heart or the mind, were not poets of myths, and therefore enjoy another kind of authority, different from that of the poets of myths. Such a circumstance not necessarily affects the confidence of any great poet of a more recent age:

For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings. [Shakespeare]

The outer walls of Mystery

If one were to inquire the reasons why some produce relatively small things with great effort and others great things with little or no effort at all, then one approaches the outer walls of Mystery, which can be represented, not explained; or experienced, not investigated. Were it not so, it would not be a Mystery but simply something that was unknown, and Mystery is not just what is unknown.

Theory

Theory has a hard time deciding who this poet is and what those myths and their gods are. This is an all too well known state of affairs.

Some theory-makers have conceived the poet in their own image, that is, as a "myth-maker", a kind of interdisciplinary individual who puzzles representations together through the same toil that led him to investigate, manipulate and explain, or to impress, charm, and persuade. Others, like the author of The Future of an Illusion and his followers, have taken the myths and their gods as truthful symbols of the mind, though perhaps a traumatized one.

Such views are called profane for refusing transcendence; and the profane man, writes Mircea Eliade, "desacralizes himself and the world", regarding the sacred as "the prime obstacle to his freedom". Paradoxically, the gained freedom from the gods not seldom assumes, in practical life, the form of slavery. For he who is deprived of inspiration, must replace it with hard routine, if he is to achieve anything. Moreover, he may find himself, as knowledge accumulates through labour, swimming in an immense sea of data, whose coordinates, increasingly harder to retrieve, may appear devoid of meaning. He may also, like Tantalus, go hungry and thirsty, since he often must deem meager the results of his research, as compared to the size of the elusive task, which recedes as he approaches. And, as a result, he may even come to ignore the meaning and purpose of leisure, finding himself chained, like Prometheus, to the complexity of his own devices.

In this context, it will be noticed that if all theories of interpretation, both modern and ancient, were put together, a very wide range would be covered, exposing, not just their huge number, but also the significant discrepancies among the highest authorities, as well as the diversity of their points of departure. And although the material accumulated by theory may be supposed to have quantitatively surpassed, by far, that provided by the myths themselves, it cannot be reasonably expected to achieve comparable effects in the field of culture. Furthermore, the myths appear to be aware of this sort of development, and to have predicted it.

In any case, it has been hard, for any kind of scepticism, to associate the myths and the gods, for any longer period of time, with absurdity, irrationality, incongruity or nonsense since these shortcomings, which give testimony of spiritual, emotional and intellectual destitution, cannot be properly reconciled with the art of centuries, nor assumed to be the ground upon which the cultural life of several societies was built.

Indescribable Mystery

Others have regarded the mystery enshrouding the poet and the world of myth that he conveys, as being that of epiphany and revelation. The myths are fundamentally seen as the poet's attempt to express the indescribable: his own encounter with the gods. From this perspective, a factual demonstration of Mystery cannot be demanded, since it is declared, for example, that:

"A god understood is not a god"

Mystery explained has also been compared to the amputation of a vital organ, since such an explanation is believed to destroy the sense itself of Mystery, which is assumed to stand close to the primordial desire of spiritual life. The myths are therefore regarded, in this view, as the poet's lawful decription of his own initiation in a Mystery involving the mystery of Being and derivatives, such as the mysteries of meaning and beauty.

It could be inferred, from Walter F. Otto's demonstrations, that the presence of other signs, in the remote 'dark ages' beyond Homer, might have affected life itself in such ways as to make it possible for the word of the poet to be acknowledged as an expression of truth. The reasons why the poet's account was approved and preserved as an expression of truth are obscure, unless the public of his and subsequent ages were charged with limitless credulity. But the fact remains that he was not considered as an inventor of frauds, a mere entertainer, a master of fiction, or a clever man saying funny things. Instead he, having been aknowledged authority, became the founder of culture, and his account, rich both in contents and form, laid the ground upon which several societies could build the whole or large parts of their spiritual and artistic life.

The Children of Meaning and Beauty

It is hard to think of culture as the work of one man or very few men. But culture has been regarded, even less, as the work of many men, since it has been taken to be the result of inspiration, not of toil; of refinement of the spirit, not of whim; of revealed truth, not of artificial knowledge. The provider of culture has been therefore thought to be inspiration, and the provider of inspiration, the divinity:

"And a third kind of possession and madness comes from the Muses. This takes hold upon a gentle and pure soul, arouses it and inspires it to songs and other poetry, and thus by adorning countless deeds of the ancients educates later generations."

By contrast the results of toil and manipulation have been rejected on account of their inability to produce culture:

"But he who without the divine madness comes to the doors of the Muses, confident that he will be a good poet by art, meets with no success, and the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madmen." [Plato. Phaedrus 245a]

In this perspective, culture appears, through the myths, as a divine impulse that, coming at rare times, lights a flame that the spirit of man might keep alive or let extinguish. In it the soul might find comfort, but the final purpose of culture in the life of man is also part of the same mystery, since its function, divorced from Necessity, is not apparent for everyone. Nevertheless it has been remarked that with the exhaustion of culture (the soul of society, or its contents), the empty building of civilization (its body, or form) collapses.

The contrapuntal harmonization between contents and form, as it appears, should be consistently aimed at. The harsh subordination of form to contents or mere function exposes the disfigured and unbalanced rule of utility alone; and the arbitrary misplacement or loss of the transcendent aesthetic dimension reveals the necessarily fallacious nature of an approach that invites disaster on account of its own disequilibrium. Accordingly, Plato, the philosopher who never abandoned myth, clothed Meaning with the attire of Beauty in his written work, knowing that any truth must necessarily partake in both. For Meaning and Beauty, who cannot live one without the other, are the builders of the intertwined pillars upon which rest culture, civilization, and also nature.

Mask and glasses

"You forgot your glasses", Mai says, leaving them on the table and walking away. Certainly I did! They lie for a while where she left them, as if imitating a mask, or as if they could become the mask of a mask. But they reflect the surroundings, lack depth, and are devoid of meaning. Yet they do have a useful purpose; and if the mask—a sacred object—stood as the symbol of culture, then the glasses could stand, for their useful calibration of sight, as that of civilization. Homer, however, would not need them; he is, for some reason, a blind poet. I hear Mai's voice: "More coffee?"; and as I sense Morning departing, I feel tempted to retort: "Aroma or actuality?".

Carlos Parada
Lund, August 2001