Campbell begins the section with a discussion about the psychological nature of mythology, again relating myth to modern psychoanalysis, because of the connection he sees between dream imagery and mythology. The Universal Round especially embodies, to Campbell, the structure of life dreaming and waking, back and forth eternally. So go the cycles of mythological stories, the universe arises from chaos/void, assumes orderly and beautiful life, reaches a zenith, slides into dissolution, extinguishes into void, long silence, then begin again, to infinity.
This repetitious structure is quite beautiful in a strange and tragic way, but also very bizarre to me. When watching movies or reading books, I watch closely for two different underlying attitudes. One is an attitude in which the story takes itself seriously (i.e. it believes in fairies and knights and dragons and evil emperors), the second thinks of its characters and settings as vehicles for communication, with only a thin layer of effort to pump life and thought into its constituent parts. This, for me, is a major difference between good and bad narrative art. The best artists are the ones who believe in their work, who give their characters weight and thought and emotion and reality.
Hayao Miyazaki, my favorite filmmaker and an excellent narrative artist, portrays characters with striking reality. But, their reality is not in their looks, but in their actions and attitude. His films show characters constantly in the full-swing of life: they run, they dig, they climb, they cook, they eat, they tire, they sleep, they wake up and start all over. Even when they have internal conflicts, the films never belabor this, but exhibit their struggles by their responses and their interests. It is the old adage of filmmakers and dramatists, "Show, don't tell!" And, honestly, it is completely true. Showing a man have difficulty in deciding on which entree to order is MUCH, MUCH better than telling the audience that he's indecisive. While the telling may be a short hand to communicate information, showing gives a forceful impression of how a character moves and feels. It gives him the ring of truth.
This thought about hard versus psychological readings of stories keeps ringing in the background of my head. Campbell implicitly includes religions in his examples of mythology, but often repeats the problems of interpreting any of these collective stories as historically accurate; he sees them as stories we measure our lives against, as vessels to communicate values and truth. Yet, if the best narrative art is that which is believed in its telling, where the characters have a reality to them, where do belief and story meet? If it is not to be simply as a dry, pedantic blue-print for life, nor a codified encyclopedic set of historical realities, where does it fall in the middle?
To that extent, perhaps it burns somewhere between the two, in a dark forest. We catch but a whisper of its light the tree and snow, but only catch up to have it vanish before we arrive.
Most theists I know are not deeply concentrated on life-long searches for undeniable evidence for the existence of God, or for historical and geological evidence to uphold claims about the history of the world and who died and who rose. But, that is not to say they are wrong, it is to say that perhaps we simply lose our focus on what's most central. For it seems to me the central concerns of religion are spiritual formation, communal peace, justice and joy-filled life, not historical reality. So, where again is the meeting place of life and story, life and mythology?
From NASA's Godard Space Flight Center"The illustration maps the magnetic field lines emanating from the sun and their interactions superimposed on an extreme ultraviolet image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory on October 20, 2010. "
Other thoughts from these chapters: the neo-Platonist in me likes the idea of creation as a vast emanation of a grand, central being. The sculpture in Plate XX of "Tangaroa, Producing Gods and Men" is quite striking. The image of beings contorting from the essential fabric of the universe (which is the skin and organs of the great creator him/herself) is a beautiful notion of creation. It reminds me of John.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.
This panentheistic notion of the world's conception inside of God himself is an eloquent rendering of life, and a great way for giving an uplifting and hopeful image of a universe that can be at once beautiful and ferocious (God as Creator and Destoyer... of self?).
Virgin births: I'm not sure that I feel deeply struck by this. Campbell abstracts in this section, as you can see below.
In the Hindu myth, she is the female figure through whom the Self begot all creatures. More abstractly still, she is the lure that moved the Self-brooding Absolute to the act of creation.
This seems a projection of procreation. Let us move forward.
2 comments:
> Yet, if the best narrative art is that which is believed in its telling, where the characters have a reality to them, where do belief and story meet? If it is not to be simply as a dry, pedantic blue-print for life, nor a codified encyclopedic set of historical realities, where does it fall in the middle?
That's also my question. Like a friend of mine says, "I keep looking for meaningful stories about the universe, but as soon as I think I've found one, I realize, 'oh, that's just another story'."
Maybe the error there is in the word "just". Maybe stories are the only way that people can make sense out of the world -- like it's just not possible for brains to perceive meaning outside of some narrative or story about a thing -- and so if everything is "just" a story, then the word "just" is not meaningful when used to describe stories because it does not point to anything. Presumably it would point to the existence of a story that is "true" and not "just a story", but if we are properly humble about our ability to represent "true", we would realize that the idea of a "true story" is also incoherent. And so then we might be capable of valuing stories based on other qualities, and growing for them in that way. But it also might be that the power of big stories actually depends on that hubris about our own stories -- that they really can be true -- and once we realize that we're not really capable of representing Truth, stories are forever broken for us.
*growing from, not growing for
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