myth

Luminous Silence 1 George Jisho Robertson to become a god is to sing a transient melody of time improvising on itself or to be a mask flaming in a dance of flames in the dark of the human mind, the human heart flaring like a comet in an ancient dream, a gorgeous intricate robe of intoxicated syllables, blood-calligraphy, a storm-driven forest of inscrutable shadows, hieratic, spell-binding dreams and unknown syllables – the hand of the hawk flashing in the firelight among wide-eyed children, the mane of the lion blazing in the camp ground of the hungry tribe, the serpent’s pulsing form slithering through the palisades of thought, a white-gowned girl scattering flowers, her hair rising & falling like seaweed…

Nobility has the bearing of grace at play with the unknown – a teasing fragrance of roses fills the room where I write, and I hear Ramakrishna say, “Whatever I saw, I worshipped.”

It is all perfectly deceiving, subtly deceptive, to be gathered into silence, into the cupped & open hands where the form of the self I am sits, transparent, gone in a moment, a moment of listening,

for listening is the foreplay & interplay of heart & heart, mother & child, elder & young warrior: it is the inexorable music of a prayer so vast it accommodates despair, nurtures the hungry, it is a listening as precise as precious rain on the desert, drop by drop of silence blessing the withered roots, the parched leaves, the vicious angry thorns

and so I sit in a rented room to write as silence wills, listening, learning to listen, learning to become a vessel of the silence that I call love, a vessel not mine

Love silently offered is a gentle hand, a bowl of soup, a rag of cloth to wipe a tear or dress a doll, a flower laid on a silent pillow, or a surgeon’s knife swiftly searching: and thus by human day these visions fade in the light of kindness – yet never fade, never vanish, glittering and leaping phantasmagoria or mythic beings dancing archaic rituals born briefly out of the infinite womb of the human dark:

or say it this way, the governing passions of the human heart are the very fire that can purify the human mind Therefore in these imagined ashes let us bake bread for one another today, let us break bread together, let us pause a moment, offering this silence to the silence itself

Myth is the quintessence or ultimate archetype of intuitive / rightbrained / gnosic / creative thinking:  it is the paradigmatic concentration, application, task, teleology, and mode of energy of this kind of figurative or concretizing thinking, that seeks to make truth "graphic" or palpable, revelatory or feelingly authoritative rather than just permitting it to dissipate and be volatilized into one-sidedly abstract terminology and ideas.  Myth is a strategy of analogical and metaphoric truthmongering, related to the concept that medieval philosophy of rhetoric (John of Salisbury e.g.) called "eloquence," the truth put in its most persuasive form.  Myth is not petty truth but truth in a grand mode, it ruptures the artificial apparatus of false distinctions and dysrelations, the conventional or doxic septa that separate organically related issues from one another:  myth is the infinitization of the finitized world-order that ordinarizing or mediocritizing intellect/ego has perpetrated all across society (modern society most especially).  Myth makes truth whole-mindedly experienceable rather than schematically or formalistically skeletalized and arid, bled white of all the energies of life.  In the warfare between what the Old Testament calls the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, myth is knowledge fighting on the side of life, against the "deathworks" of nihilistic consciousness and science.

"Intellect" seems to itself the whole universe of conceivable possibilities and in this way and for this reason it rejoices over its liberation from the narrow or myopic cosmos of intuition, the feeling-life within which animals and infants and idiots are bound.  But just as there are physically vocalizable sounds that are not contained in the English alphabet, and difficult/unnatural/alien combinations of letters (diphthongs and consonantal blends) that English does not like or permit, and foreign or other-cultural comprehensions of experiences and concepts that are not able to be translated or framed in terms congenial to Englished and modernized and bourgeoisified mentalities, so too there are qualitative energies and energetically blended relations and flavors of meaning that are utterly lost in the transformation of personality from the mode of intuition to the mode of intellect.  Abstractivist mentality of course never MISSES anything that has dropped out or been edited from its more primitive to its more sophisticated ("rational," "conscious") modalities.  Myth - as a modality of mind to which the entire superstructure of mythos-culture is anchored, and out of which its cosmos of concepts and reasons and purposes is elaborated - is one of the most fertile and prodigious of these "logically" eclipsed or dethroned world-forces.  What "culture" is and what values it is harnessed to, and what ultimate range of personality-types it subserves, is radically transfigured from mythos- to logos-culture.

The poet of today ...is profoundly inhibited by the dearth of shared consciousness of myth.  Our current motivating ideas are not myths but ideologies, lacking transcendental significance. This loss of myth-consciousness I believe to be the most devastating loss that humanity can suffer; for ... myth-consciousness is the bond that unites men both with one another and with the unplumbed Mystery from which mankind is sprung and without reference to which the radical significance of things goes to pot. Now a world bereft of radical significance is not long tolerated; it leaves me radically unstable, so that they will seize at any myth or pseudo-myth that is offered.

But what if on some level we are made of sound? What if in the beginning was the Word? What if the music of the spheres is no myth? What if we ourselves are a harmonic convergence? What if the holographic grid of our being is a linguistic and musical interface between higher-dimensional light, which might be considered a form of divine thought or intention, and sound in higher-dimensional octaves?

It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person’s fate. Translators use “plot” to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth.

One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form.

Every book that comes into being does so within the context of a web of interconnections between individuals, and this is no less so in the present case. The idea for this book first occured to me in 1994 while reading a passage from William Irwin Thompson's book - Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science - in which he briefly discusses David Cronenberg's great film - Videodrome - and I would never have stumbled across the works of Thompson if they had not been recommended to me by my friend John Lobell - and the website companion to this book -  CinemaDiscourse.com - would not exist without Lobell's initiative and enthusiasm for the essays contained herein.

"As a child I became a confirmed believer in the ancient gods simply because as between the reality of fact and the reality f myth, I chose myth...Myth is the truth of fact, not fact the truth of myth."

I believe imagination is stronger than knowledge - that myth is more potent than history.  I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts - That hope always triumphs over experience - That laughter is the only cure for grief.  And I believe that love is stronger than death.