Keep in mind that this is an early work (originally
written in 1978) whose theme on mythmaking would of necessity reference much
more if it were written today. It is obvious now that its constant reference to
this period of transition between Ages is called the Postmodern and
Postmodernism. Woven in, were it written today, would be the UFO phenomenon, ET
contact and Other Intelligence as a new understanding of the Gods and
Goddesses; also, the paranormal, the cyberworld, the
Internet, and all the new technologies of the transhumanist
movement. The New-Old Spirit that I speak of is of course the New Age movement.
My unfolding Vision of Psyche as the Advent of The Mythos today would be
central to it.
The work is posted here in its entirety.
The
Golden Thread
A Manifesto on the Art of
Contemporary Mythmaking
1978 / 1988
Ron Lampi
Let us leap with our Passions high!
Let us laugh out with infinite joy at those who croak from their holes in the
mud: It's
too late! It's too late!
With wings of Fire given to me by the
Sun, I have soared above Earth and now dive from ten thousand feet into the
vast, primal Sea. Let the shouts ring out:
Look! With wings, out of the Sky, he falls! Look! He falls! Let the shouts of the myopic ring out—they
know nothing of my joyful descent.
And I let Darkness embrace me...
And what emerges from the Dark to herald
the dawn? A Snake uttering the cryptic first lines of a new
text. A Sparrow Hawk crying out to the Sun as it breaks from the
crystalline waves. A trillion Stars of Divinity shot across the heavens. And
dancing figures now circling the Sun, more flame than flesh.
And whose laughter is this?
*
It is always too late in the frog life
of those resigned; they croak and make statistical news. Again and again the
same reports come pouring in, no matter where in the country you go. Called to
account for the Passion of life, another has confessed at the door: I lost my nerve years ago. I know I've
failed my soul. Have I become a neurotic wreck? A mediocre career
man? A repressed bore? A
miserable worm? A parrot? A
blob? You got it. I embarrass myself. I have no treasures to give the
world. And I expect nothing in return. It's true, I
once stood on my front porch with fists raised. I once defied the heavens, and
even took some pride in myself. But who anymore believes in that? The heavens
are bunk. They don't speak to us anyway. So why even go out? The fact is, we're doomed from the start. The years drag on...and what
do we get? When it's over, just give a knock...
(If we are to renew ourselves, our
bodies, too, must be willing. If we do not have the vitality of the lightning
flash in the fingertip, or the lion with ravenous gut, or the lone albatross
able to wing over distant, land-forsaken seas, then we might as well give up
and remain as lazy as slugs, no matter what our little brains might be tested
for.)
*
We do lose our way. Did I not lose my
way? Did I, too, not find myself an inhabitant of our capital city? How to
escape Pandemonium? How many have made the attempt? How many have stormed down
a pathway, long overgrown, only to realize they scarcely knew in what direction
to go, and so got scared and turned back? But how many were foolish enough not
to stop for a moment and reflect upon it, how they might, in fact, find their
way, but, instead, heedlessly hurled themselves into an even greater hell? And
how many have watched all this with a snicker as they downed another of their
cynical brews? Certainly the citizen majority never dream of escape.
The planet is apparently moving
somewhere. Are there signs? But if the signs no longer speak
the modern tongue? If we cannot yet read the new text?
On all ways, we seem to have lost our
way. Without a way (to see and touch and listen, to dance and sing and open the
heart, to cherish silence, to fulfill desire), what have we?
Plenty. We have
cars, TVs, stereos, and yachts; radios and home movies and the digital watch;
calculators and computers and atomic clocks; radar and 727s, satellites and
submarines, missiles and anti-missile missiles; H-bombs and neutron bombs, and
chlorpromazine. And we are had. Technos guides the witless hand at the wheel,
button, and switch; the key punch, terminal, and dial. Technos is the luring spectre in the oil. Technos lies wide awake, day and night,
inside the Bomb. Though we do not see Technos, Technos is as omnipresent as the
electromagnetic field. As long and as much as we want, Technos will give.
Technos is a giving God. But it is sheer error to believe that It is above suspicion, as if it were our greediness alone
which poisons the air we breathe, or our lack of more information which
increases the tranquilizer rate while whole suburbs go loony. Technos is out to
glorify Itself and will stop at nothing to do so.
Technos Itself offers but one way out of Pandemonium—annihilation. Would that
not be Its supreme glory among the Gods? We are fools
not to believe it.
It is not that our abstracts go out of
date so fast, or that our calculations have been rounded off too soon. We lose
our way because we have lost touch with the Sun and Moon, the Stars and Earth.
We have lost touch with all the greater Powers. We have forgotten the Source.
Yet, someone is guiding us into this mess. Who guides us? Technos?
Yes, but even It goes unrecognized. There is still
this ignorant insistence that it is we who hold the reins of technology; but
when will we realize that, on the contrary, it is Technos who is doing the
commanding? It is Its Power working through us, and It
knows quite well how to take advantage of our wretched confusion. The Master is
cunning.
At one time we held a compass of dark
water that sang.
*
One spring I was living in the country.
Almost every evening I would meditate beneath a grand sycamore tree, looking
west, over an old farm field years ago abandoned. Wildflowers gloried now in
their freedom. I would sit face to face with the magnificent, dark bound Sun,
and this presence of an Other would come to me, a Muse
to whom I would address these questions I had. I would ask, Why
is the Sun not allowed to speak? Why is the Moon not allowed to speak? Why not
Earth, or the River, or the Sea? Who silenced them? And what of the creatures
that sang? Who decreed that their songs were superfluous? Was it that only
humankind could speak? Or things made to speak by humankind? The microwave oven
could certainly speak. It said: I am at
your command. The stereo likewise could speak. It said: I am at your command. And the car that
sat in the drive: I am at your command.
Even before I picked up the phone, I could hear a voice speaking: I am at your command. And though I have
never seen the neutron bomb, I know what it would say: I am at your command.
We cannot escape it. Wherever we go, we
are unceasingly accosted by the drone of things enslaved to our command, for we
ourselves are enslaved to this very dogma of their enslavement. Nature, of
course, had long succumbed—the first to succumb. Oh, that once her autonomous
Song was heard everywhere! But we submitted to Technos and Its mastermind Plan,
reducing that Song to meaningless sound, if not silencing it outright. And so
our great Western monomaniacal project triumphs aloud: an army of chain saws in
the forest.
But to break free, free of the ego mad
with power and its monotony of frenzied cacophony orchestrated by Technos and
surrender for once to the song of another creature! Outside of my command, Song
yet lives! And am I not a creature among creatures? What Song am I to sing? And
how am I to sing it?
*
Am I not a creature born into this
world? Why then must I wander about homeless? Why then must I wander about
aimless amidst myriads of unloving molecules arranging and rearranging
themselves according to the figment of some recent theory? For how many miles
and miles have I wandered, while the telephone wires above me crackled; and how
well I know that language—the language of loneliness across the dagger-sharp
silence.
I have wandered far and wide for an
answer, and to the world I now shout:
I reject the vain hope in some Forever
Beyond!
I reject the vain hope in some great
futuristic Scientific Society!
I reject the vain regrets for the past
and forever gone!
I reject the impotent resignation to our
present hell!
And I reject, reject vehemently any and
all attempts to evade this hell, our spiritual bankruptcy, and how we suffer
because of it!
I thereby reject any and all attempts to
evade the struggle to confront our hell, to work through it and rise from it,
to transform ourselves in the Here and Now!
Yes, I have already wandered the many
miles of contemplating our malaise. And I have given up on the mole-like
scholar, digging through libraries, through its mountains of paper, seeking the
old, all-knowing Concept with which to picture frame the world. Have I then
turned my back on Western knowledge? I'll let others decide. What I want is
transformation. But scarcely, for that matter, have I turned onto the road
called Eastern Enlightenment. Only now I realize what I must live for, above
all: the Most Vital Being-In-The-World of which I am capable. And I will
surrender to any and all Powers who can revitalize for me the life of Passion,
who will grant me the Vision of Home.
And so I no longer wander, for I am
homebound. And already an auspicious radiance is beginning to glimmer through
the pedestrian cement we have paved over all the life streams emanating from
the Sun. Already, for the Vision is before me! Already, Here and Now, It Is
Happening...
The Season of Fire
It is Autumn,
and the Autumn Sun blazes fiercely, stirring seductive hands of air with an
ambient desire so adept at eliciting the tindery
aroma. Unperceivably, leaves kindle in silence. Sap
is everywhere suspended—a timeless moment—before it must begin its slow wintry
retreat. All that must expire now succumbs, for this moment announces the
purification by Fire. First is death, then is renewal.
Yet, in this moment, Nature awaits us, for we, too, are to prepare rites for
the great seasonal round. This, too, is our Autumn.
Oh, to remember it always, that we, too, are participants in this endless
round!
It is time for the gathering of our
accounts. It is time for shaking from ourselves our mistakes and stupidities
and petty ways. It is time for that realization as to where we really stand,
and as to what we aspire. It is time for taking our hand from our eyes: For so
long we have forgotten that it was there. Why must we forget: We stand before
perpetual Mystery and yet see nothing. Our garments:
What have they become but the excuses and defenses we press hard against
ourselves like an in-growing chitinous shell. We imprison ourselves, while we play out our vicious
but simple-minded games of superior and inferior. It is time for gathering it
all: all that we have ravaged and spoiled, all that we have oppressed and
suffocated, all that we have maimed and killed. We will hide nothing. Like
numberless leaves, our accounts are brought forward, and each story told but
repeats a common refrain—that of our forgetfulness. Our accounts, from near and
far, are all brought forward and piled high. Higher and higher still, they are
piled high. We have begun the ritual called the Season of Fire.
*
Our Autumn Sun we kindle, as we gather
and join hands to encircle and dance this Blaze. Together we shall be purified
that our souls may be joined and descend as one to that realm of our granted releasement. And how quickly that enormous pile bursts into
flame! And how the skin, stripped of its imprisoning garments, is so sensitive
to the sudden heat!
Our Autumn Sun is born! And round and
round we dance! We watch as the flames leap, and there, a dream parade, a
phantasmagoria, is born! We step, and step again, and each step sets to rhythm
the flames of our reveries. O surrendering delirium! In the shapeshifting
Fire our accounts we behold in the very instant of kindling! And
how they expire in each fulgurant leap, in the
alternate succession of down-stepping and down-stepping feet. There, in
the flames, is revealed our life with husband or wife, a child, lover, friend,
our encounters with colleagues and strangers; and some see relived the story of
youth, family, career, riches, or fame; and there bursts into flame the office,
factory, or school; some read in flame their nation's history, while others
behold great cities flourishing, then in decay, while others still see vast
wilderness retreat before the advance of machine; some behold visions of forced
migrations and imperial fleets, and of ensuing war, famine, and riot, of mass
torture and slaughter; all forms of aggression and violence against man and
woman, against peoples and nations, against Nature, against self, are witnessed
there; and some see all life as hell; and some witness in horror the untold
cataclysm of all life—annihilation. As in a dream, all witness their own dramas
played out in those purging flames.
Our Autumn Sun consumes! Round and round
our dance we continue as flames leap further and further in frenzied twists, in
growing spirals of encircling wisps. Round and round flames dance as they weave
among and whirl about us, as they slowly embrace us. And the touch of flame,
how it stings! The nerves of flesh glow like the white hottest of needles! But
the flesh welcomes that fiery touch. The flesh yearns for the merging with
flame! And suddenly, it is the rush of white Fire! Up the spine, a geyser of
blinding Fire! The skull's darkness instantly is lit! Hands melt into hands!
Our many bodies are fused! One life blood flows through all as we gravitate
with that same desire of flesh returning to Fire. Our billions of vibrant cells
yield to the imperious heat—they enkindle at once as we expire in flame and to
the bone are immediately consumed. We have surrendered. The Autumn Sun is all.
*
Heaps of ash are
the remains of us upon the silent expanse. The music of Winter Earth is sleep.
But deep in the hard-baked ground, deep in the clay, deep in the dark rock, our
souls have gone, and there the dream images of another life begin to rise and
flicker. Sleep releases them. For there is a faint sound, a
haunting sound in the bedrock, an echoing spring that is the fountain of dream.
The Ocean, our Memory of another life seemingly so far away, is yet near. The
echoing of these subterranean springs brings us back to remembering, while the
very waters transform into the images we dream.
In our dream, we will rise from Earth
and walk about marvelling at a world we never knew.
Our dream and the Song of Spring Earth—they are one.
***
At every point we must kindle ourselves
like living flames and take a step back, a step down, a step into the Dark. Our
revitalization is our return to the Source ever shrouded by that veil of
perpetual Night. Who today speaks in the name of the Dark? Who realizes where
the Light today must come from?
The Light! The Light! we
hear from the spiritual proselytes who bathe themselves in the glare of
imported floodlamps. Why this illusory light of
counter-illusion? Why not be honest and admit that the Light we know of no
longer lights the path? Why not admit the inadequacy of the light switch?
How annoyed I often get with those who
flock to the guru. The old cosmic soap bubble is popped by some vague yearning,
and suddenly they are turning to the latest light show to hit the West Coast.
So little can some tolerate a healthy dash of confusion, the suspense of
uncertainty, in a day when this is to be expected. To
even suggest that we experience fully the complete disorientation of the
Age—from that they run in droves. How can we firmly root ourselves anew in the
bedrock of Earth, if everyone is shining like a lawn full of dandelions whose
seeds blow every which way in the wind? Myself, I prefer the tall Sunflower
whose face bursts open with its treasured kernels intact.
I sing to praise the Dark Sun and its
voyage.
Yesterday, Technos was numbered among
the Dark Ones. But today, Technos has ventured far into the Light, so far, in
fact, that Its own particular light blinds all. In the
Night, however, from a nearby hilltop, we can actually see Its
megalopolitan outline glittering in Its daring to
rival the Stars.
I am not out to conquer the Stars; I am
out to be conquered. Only if we allow the Stars to overwhelm us can we dream
ever more wonderfully. One alone is enough to disintegrate the pitiful ego. For
only our complete surrender to them can equal on our part their immeasurable
splendor, for only this act of surrender could claim to know the secret of
Passion.
*
What is the language of the new text
that would rise as the Song of our Earth? What is the primal word of our
revitalization? Indeed, the language is an old, old language—it speaks the
primal. But it is not for that reason a literal return to some past or
primitive or so-called innocent condition. Here we are, the Spirit of our Age,
having undergone 100 years of Critique, sitting in the ever-shifting lap of
relativism, with its pluralistic life-worlds multiplying so fast that through
the blur, beneath us, only the bared teeth of the dogs of nihilism flash
awesome white from the bottomless. Here we are, Spirit of our Age America,
superpower of advanced capitalist, postindustrial society, having become a
museum for all world cultures, a library for all philosophies, a platform for
the heralding of all New Age consciousness, and yet, we stand culturally,
philosophically, and spiritually bankrupt on our very own soil. Here we are, in
a period of transition and ruins—can any naïve, simplistic, old Cartesian or
Christian dualistic, any previous paradigm be foisted upon us? Can we be
content with anything less than the paradigm emerging from and confronting the
very Spirit of our Age? The paradigm shifts. The paradigm shifts into the very
process of shifting: The ice on the mountains has melted, and now the thousand
and one new streams come leaping and cascading, building momentum, surging in
size, till crashing they fall as if the Sky itself had opened up, a torrent of
living water to sweep over the plains where we have been wandering aimlessly.
And we are swept into the dizzying flux of a new possibility—that of
multidimensional being.
It is not some free-floating, abstract,
merely mental possibility we speak of; no, but the possibility that opens out
in the immediate but infinitely dense, mediated moment of Here and Now. No one
model can hold it, for it itself holds out to us all
possible models. From now on we will not be enslaved to any one model, any one
dogma of interpretation, any one mode of being!
Historicism, modernism, nihilism—interpretations all!
Language itself is now freed from its
incarceration by Reason and its interpretative monologues of domination. Those
who are superficially glancing over our shoulder are quick to see only corpses
of meaning. But the resurrecting power has come to us. We laugh at their morbid
obituaries on language. Through Passion, we have discovered the old secret: All
Language is alive.
Certainly there is an art that can speak
this new, though at the same time old, old language, that can creatively
transform this teeming water of new possibility into living protean form, into
life itself! An art prior to and resulting in all arts, philosophies, and
interpretations. An art able to embrace the totality of the
world, in all its multiplicity. An art allowing the world to speak with
significance to us again, as it builds its bridges into our daily life,
allowing that vital speech to be brought across. An art,
therefore, able to make sense of the chaos of our contemporary transition in
concrete day-to-day living. An art of the depths, able to ground us as
it lets the deepest springs of our being rise up, to originate the
commanding symbols and stories which would reorient and reorganize our life.
What, then, might this art be, this art so long misunderstood, though today
being rediscovered? Is this the Golden Thread to guide us—the art of mythopoesis?
Originary mythopoetic process, that is the
art that answers to our total being. To make myth, through the narrative
word and image carried into living, sprung from the origin of primal meaning,
not once and for all, not now and then, but continuously, that is the
art of our resurrection. We are not speaking about borrowing myths from around
the world. We are not speaking about spying out the myths already active in
society or in the behavior of our neighbors. We are not speaking about the
establishment of new myths which would again open another chapter of naiveté
and oppression. We are speaking instead about an informed and liberating art of
mythmaking making making.
The battlefield throughout history has
always been mythological, and today is no different. Religion, art, science,
technology, tradition, custom, ideology, life-style, are all built upon
mythological foundations. But the wide open horizon that Nietzsche foresaw was
this: We can be the mythmakers of our lives. Today, the process of mythmaking is
the new Mythos emerging.
Mythopoesis advances where Critique
cannot. We have only to observe how the advocates of Critique, whether Marxian,
Nietzschean, Freudian, Negative Dialectical, shrink
back to the safety of their strategic positions when faced with the reality of
the emerging new paradigm. True, their artillery has accomplished some
admirable work in the modernist drive to demythologize, work that within its
own set task may actually prove to be unending; but when it comes to
actualizing the new-old possibilities of multidimensional being, possibilities
they themselves have often helped to open up, they can only sit back and talk,
and in the most general terms. The new advance—an affront perhaps to many
critical ears—is precisely that of remythologizing
the world. It is here that mythopoesis would prove to be the actual script and
the actual deed.
Need I say that mythopoesis is the
pathway to Home that I have set out upon, that here is the Golden Thread to
reorient and transform—revitalize—my being-in-the-world? And need I say that
its creative élan is Passion, the gift of God Eros?
*
It is time to give our tongue freely. By
mythmaking we mean just that, giving our tongue to the Sun, Moon, and Stars; to
Earth; and the Rivers and Sea; to all the creatures known and unknown; to all
the voices of those around us; to all the greater Powers who act through us; to
every subtle stirring of our animal body; to every flash of Light given by the
Dark. The mythic process allows the forgotten world to speak, that world where
the blueprints of Technos end and the fulfillment of our total being begins.
Only mythopoesis can prove revolutionary enough today to overthrow the despotic
reign of Technos or any other totalitarian God.
If we are to give our tongue, we must
first know that to which the tongue is connected—our own bodies. Our tongue
merely chatters if we do not first experience our revitalization happening
there. The body must sing...
My Song
My Song is primordial. My Song is the
Song of the Earthborn whose creature being rings. Listen! it is my bones and
blood and gut that sing, my rootheart that sings, my
inflammable flesh that sings, my limbs animate that sing, my eyes and ears
heralding that sing; and where breath is the gathering of all into the sheer
emerging of total polyphony, there my lungs sing the primal force rising. My
body temple ushers its Song. It is the Song of animal energies at that pitch
breaking into unfolding dimensions. It is the Song of creature vitality
overflowing for the sake of nothing, the nothing that is this: the radiance of outwardness opening out the most original of openings, the
Source in its happening as perpetual presence being born. It is the Song ek-stasis—standing outside, in that open, in overwhelmed
self-forgetting. Only the Source, and it is Song. All
the world returns in this moment to the plasma that is its primordial coming to
be.
If you were to hear this Song, you might
well wonder in astonishment that this raw animal trill without word or rhyme,
when the tongue scarcely begins to shape the pure, liberated sound, is but the
joy of these originary moments of revealing radiance.
Such is the Song that announces the first primal word, the sound signature of
Sun, and of Moon, and now these surrounding hills naked before the
mist-shrouding advance, and now this bay shimmering in quintessential Night. My
Song is the cry of the sparrow hawk at dawn.
I am a creature of Song. To near the
Source, and, in that nearing, to inwardly dwell—this is joy. It is life become
attuned, letting the Source sing.
***
Song liberates the body. Its vibrancy,
being somatically contagious, moves the entire body to its own animated
language. And how the body today wants to throw off these shackles into which
the mental control tower has put it. A whole dimension of freedom is there, in
our own body! in its endless potentiality for play and
delight! The moment's gesture which can create that aura we know of as sensual
magic is an example of the Passion through which our very body, too, can speak.
(The gesture
repertoire of the contemporary human still remains under the lock and key of
repression. What God might we invoke here to teach us more about the
Song of the body? Dionysus? To what extent do we invoke him already, say,
through our music? But is this extent ever so explicit as to acknowledge
Dionysus himself? How then might we do so? A mythmaker's
challenge.)
Once we begin listening to the body
itself, we can learn then what is meant by attuning ourselves to the primal
realities of our environment. What is the language of the Sun? Where in the
body is it being spoken? What is the language of the Moon? Where in the body is
it being spoken? And to live beside the Ocean, to live in the Desert or
How subtle these stirrings rightly are! And how easily we kill them with the merest side-glances at the
obvious. And our excuses! What we get away with with
our excuses! Indeed, such stirrings cannot survive the idiotic traffic light.
Least of all can they be used for any cybernetic intelligence.
But the body whose every pore is a
channel of sensitivity into its center of vitality does receive the subtle
resonances from its surrounding environment. Our vitality is stirred: It is the
moment for listening. We must become this most sensitive of tuning forks if we
are to be able to hear what cannot be heard by the latest in amplified
stethoscopes put to Nature. The practice of long listening is indeed the
initiation of the mythmaker. We must listen patiently till the stirrings are
brought to that degree of intensity where consciousness suddenly opens out that
primal meaning they announce. It is in this moment, with its forceful
numinosity, that the tongue itself is moved, that the word breaks and is born.
The Sun has spoken: Our rapport has begun.
We are all aware of the notion that
science, too, allows Nature a hearing. Its method, however, prescribes a
limited listening—not everything is allowed to speak—that has, at the same
time, the audacity to respect no limits. Science marches on is too often the
bulldozer gone berserk. Mythopoesis, in contrast, is an unlimited listening
that is always recognizing and respecting the limit. Whereas the
conceptual limit posited by science will attempt to straitjacket all
possibilities, the limit heard by mythic attunement is always a result of
listening in the moment and respecting what is possible. In the flow of
life, though a certain Power may command the moment, there is always, too, the
open horizon and the other Powers who beckon and who come near. There, in the
moment, whatever our engagement, we must remain the most sensitive listener.
And if we listen?
Should it surprise us if so many of the songs we heard were of anguish? The
merganser stuck to the oil drenched beach is anguished. The fish in the
stinking rivers are anguished. The chorus from the slowly draining swamp sings
anguished. The whales, dolphins, seals, eagles, condors, even the wolves, are
anguished. And the hills are howling across the land as the aggressor man
mercilessly rapes.
What of the anguish we see in the faces
of those around us? What of our own anguish as we gaze about a landscape of
suburban sprawl, highways, airports, fast food avenues, strip mining, shoreline
dumps, smoke-billowing industrial plants, smog-obliterated horizons? What do
our nervous systems wish to say but cannot for lack of a more vital vocabulary?
And what of our dread, when we realize we can destroy the world in one day?
The refined sensitivity for listening we
would also expect to see in our ecologists. Not only is every tree and niche
and cove a familiar presence, but the landscape as organism is alive at every
nerve ending. Our dwelling approaches then a true communion with the very
Spirit of the land.
Might the Gods and Goddesses then speak
to us again? Might Nemesis awaken and avenge for us the escalating hubris of
Technos?
*
This is only the beginning.
What we are speaking about is the
transformation of our entire culture through the mythopoeic.
However, we are not proclaiming a way to save the world overnight, as if a
Mythos, answering, in all its complexity, the Spirit of the Age, could spring
fully armored from our heads. That is absurd. First, we are not out to save this
world anyway; we are conscientiously lighting the dynamite fuse. It is not save
the world, but liberate the world! Too, those who do
understand myth know that it cannot merely be "dreamed up," but can
only be engendered through our total, passionate surrender to the Dark, even if
that Dark should suddenly appear to us as bright as the Sun. A greater Power
must first seize and wish to speak through us before we could ever think of any
making of myth that would truly be vital.
The linear mind has launched its rockets
to the Moon. This is often paraded about as a typical myth for today. Next come
the space colonies—our new image of salvation. (The schemes of Technos are
endless.) But surely we cannot accept this as coming anywhere near to an
adequate Mythos. It is not the living myth we speak of. Our criterion for
living myth will always be this: What vital meaning does it allow us to play
out in our own everyday life? And we know, in the same breath, that we will
never be satisfied until all the desires of life are able to find a possible
fulfillment with significance.
Myth must remain in permanent coition
with life, else it suffers the fate of becoming
another addition to the fossil exhibit at the local university. In other words,
living myth can never separate itself from the art of mythopoesis, from that
art practiced by the sensitive, shaping hands of the mythmaker.
But where do we find the mythmaker?
*
The case for poetry comes forward:
Poetry is often acclaimed as the golden
key which can unlock the door to the magic theatre of life transformed. Yet,
can we justify this, given poetry as we know it today? What Powers does poetry
reveal? What influence has it? Does it even extend at all beyond its own little
province? Has it charisma in today's culture?
The results of the modernist attempt to
strike new ore by way of scrapping and redesigning our poetic machinery—for
technique was all the rage—are quite apparent. Language has been smashed like
the atom through advanced cyclotronic technology, and
yet poetry remains only poetry, splendid and wonderful in its own little
province, but completely ineffectual in changing the language, and thereby
perceptions, of the greater world. And for those who rave about the language of
the street, it, too, whatever its authenticity might be,
is circumscribed completely by the confusion of the Age. It provides no
transformative clue.
Let us be honest about it. All glory to
the poem, but if the poem does not speak from beyond itself; if the poem makes no
demands on the everyday world; if the poem is not itself a moment in the
process of world transformation; if the poem does not potentially unfold the
whole Story; if the poem is but a trinket in a bag of miscellanea; then the
poem remains what we all know and value, but it fails as myth.
Let us be honest about it. With all due
respect to their excellence and significance in the culture, and recognizing
what they faced in the heyday of scientistic
sterilization, our modern masters had a shortcoming—they failed at myth, and
probably had to. To those who claim to find a replete mythology in James Joyce,
for example, we can only reply that his work appears to us rather as a literary
monument littered with mythic ruins; however eminent, a purely personal and decadent
production. It is not what we mean by a living Mythos. D.H. Lawrence comes much
closer in this regard; he at least grappled with the issue explicitly—in works
and in life—but still no living Mythos emerged. One American poet of more
recent times we might also credit as having taken our concern to heart, who
made his great push for a contemporary approach to mythos, though he did not
fulfill it in his poetry, was that "archeologist of morning"—Charles
Olson. But another American poet, often forgotten, who, it might be argued,
came even closer to a possible form of mythos in his long narrative poems was
Robinson Jeffers. Yet, none of them actually brought forth the living Mythos we
need.
So many of our other
poets in the mainstreams of recent years also failed here because they never
outgrew their infatuation with the mirror. On the one hand, they have
insisted—and how many still!—on reflecting ad infinitum, in photographic
detail, the picture of our current wasteland; but it's a closed circle. However
they may at the same time rail against and scorn or throw up their arms in
despair over the wasteland, it goes untouched, and is curiously perpetuated by
that selfsame act of mirroring. On the other hand, if it isn't society out
there, then it is the mirror put up to the poets themselves; and how long must
poets go on dredging up the muck of their own private lives? The poet at the
confessional box—it is enough at times to make us nauseous. What true risk is
there, what danger, what challenge, what Passion? There is no denying, of
course, the fatality record of our poets to date. But we have to admit, we are not impressed with these statistics if the
question remains that of revitalizing ourselves. A suicide poet is not exactly
a model to emulate. What connection have our poets sought with any Powers
greater than their own self-pitying egos? Can the confessional not be
transformed that we might see greater Powers at play? That is the challenge,
the danger and risk, the life magnified beyond itself through Passion.
Let us take the damn mirror and throw it
out the window! Let it shatter on the pavement! Let us for once lay the
world-weary ghost of Prufrock to rest. Today we need
so much the herald and pointer. What is the highest calling of the poet? A Vision of Home. And more—the language
itself for our dwelling there. Why, too, must our poets fall into that
unbecoming habit of forgetfulness? Like all who have been duped by one or
another form of enlightenment Reason, they have lost touch with Memory.
Poetry, not as we
presently know it, but as it might be—poetry as living myth—that is our
perspective now.
*
The art of mythopoesis naturally invokes
the imagination. And who has not sung the praises of the imagination? Its
supremacy has been contended for by romantics and moderns alike; but this is
precisely where the miscarriage so often occurs. The imagination is truly the
alchemical function working for us in all our endeavors. It is that door to the
magic theatre of transformation, where all events, even the basest, can be
turned into a multifaceted diamond reality. Our respect will never cease for
those who have championed it. But the imagination, we must note, is not the telos we want; to stop there is like being forever curious
about the eyes, studying them in all their detail, all the while ignoring what
those marvelous eyes can see. When so much emphasis is given to the
imagination alone, it too easily becomes, at the hands of facile surrealists,
writing workshops, patronizing rationalists, but an amusing toy; and there we
are, trapped into playing that old metaphysical game of hide-and-seek: Is it
illusion? Is it reality? What is necessary is what everyone has seemed to
shirk: that we stop playing like children with the door, step through the
threshold fearlessly, and actually start living the transformed life on the
other side. Imagination is but the door into a measureless mythic dimension,
and it is the ability to live like Blake consistently did in the reality of
that dimension which we prize. Why has this been so difficult to see? Yet,
there are those of us who have already entered that realm and who attest to our
being there, being initiates of mythmaking. Under the auspices of Psyche, we speak
myth. We will hear no more of timid apologetics for the survival and
justification of myth in our day. And no longer will the imagination be set
aside for only those special holidays. Our Vision demands nothing less than
total liberation.
The dynamite for blowing everything wide
open again is mythopoesis. Suddenly, there is real power there,
and power active in a thousand directions. We had better be prepared...
The Liberation of Psyche
To be granted a Vision of Psyche
liberated! To be granted a Vision, and the
terror-struck head struggles to hold itself together under the immediate impact
of the rock-splitting power! To experience that premature corpse called the
"self" being blasted by Divinity! No longer will it know its dreary
landscape of interiority, but only this swift emergence of an ominous, transformational
presence that fragments the world mosaic and is about to scatter it fast,
sending pieces of uncanny light across the Sky. There is no longer the toil of
building the castle invincible, for suddenly it is a letting go of our hands
and letting our precious sand dissolve into the insatiable Sea. Suddenly, it is
a flowing outward of our dismemberment into innumerable Rivers meandering
through wondrous landscapes of their own making.
Visions are not passive image. Visions
are image empowered to excess, exploding onto the world stage.
The repression of Psyche ends. Shut up
inside our private prisons, kept down by Ego, Psyche, in the Vision, now
unveils her true being—her untold figures of Divinity, Gods and Goddesses who
laugh at our crude, iron-fettered attempts to dance the game of life.
But Eros wants Psyche, and now wants her
completely...
*
We heard something strange from the Sea.
It sounded like some sort of—speech? We were frightened at first, but not
knowing what to make of it, or what to do, we soon continued the weekly cycle
of business as usual. Even the sharp scholars' eyes and the scholars' learned
ears could not discern its meaning or source. Only new towers of babel rose. But that day was to arrive when a marvel was
seen by all.
It appeared on the shore one day. Yet
trailing its lengthy, scaly body in the oceanic abyss, it was a monstrous Snake
come from the Sea. We were shocked. We stood about gasping, terrified. Never
had we seen anything like it. And when it next opened its mouth and started to
speak—we were bewildered. But immediately we recognized that same mysterious
speech. And again, we were unable to comprehend. Interpreters of every language
on Earth could make no sense of it. The language was utterly unknown to us, and
yet, the Snake wanted something of us, for the piercing eyes of that huge,
fiendish head looked into our own. Slowly it turned from side to side, as if
addressing the multitude that had gathered, that stared back in silent horror. Shortly, then, it, too, fell silent. Deathly still, it posed
before us and waited, as we all waited; not a one of us moved.
Minutes went by, perhaps an hour, or
more, and the rising sound of an impatient murmuring was heard among us. It was
then that those unblinking eyes abruptly closed, and then opened again, as the
Snake swung about hard, and, before we knew it, slithered back, beneath the
fomenting waves, and was gone. Still, we understood nothing.
The following week, business reached an
unprecedented peak of feverish exchange...
*
It was some weeks later, and now we
began to hear laughter from the Sea. Again, we were stunned. What was the
meaning of it? What was the source? Was it meant for us? We soon tried ignoring
it. We tried shutting it out. We drew around us a heavy, dark cloak called the
Spirit of Gravity. But stunned and bewildered we remained. Yet, there were some
of us who stood sentry on the shore, watching for a possible sign. And one day,
indeed, there was another, yet greater wonder that took place.
Emerging from the foaming, thunderous
surf, a figure was spotted, advancing toward us. Immediately all eyes fell upon
it. Perplexed, we asked, Who was it? And was it
woman—or Goddess? For she stood before us radiant with all the iridescences of
the starlit deep, and the stateliness and beauty she displayed were
unsurpassable as her long, white gown rippled in a gently breeze. She smiled
and then laughed. "Forgetful creatures who have
forgotten Psyche! I have lived all this time among the Gods and
Goddesses and divine spirits! This is my return!" she exclaimed, songlike
and proud, while she flew from the sand and swooped over our heads. "Look,
I dance!"
We looked up, but she was too quick, she
swept like wind, her protean form spun about, and the next moment she was gone,
only to reappear in a flash, in even greater blazing power. Here she was, and
there, and here again, her unbelievable dance was dazzling. She was Goddess
transforming into God, and then back into Goddess, and then into bird and beast
and now Fire, an ever shapeshifting form, an inchoate
flux of hundred-colored brilliance. "Look, I dance!"
We were all thrown into confusion. Over
each man and woman and child, with a flick of her hand, she now cast a spell.
We feared we were going mad. Suddenly, no one seemed to know who they were.
Face looked into face, only to mirror, Who am I? Who
am I? Who are you? In a grand unison of perplexity, we were all asking, Who are we? The spell then took over
completely. It was bizarre. Suddenly, some people believed they were toads—and
there they jumped, and toads they were! Some believed themselves birds, as they
started flapping their arms, while others began flitting about with the
delicacy of butterflies. Others, too, had become tigers and sheep, dogs and
cats, and some insisted on being pigs! There were elephants and lions, fox and
rabbits; there were quizzical apes and monkeys. And how many appeared to have
just discovered their bodies! Some wanted to caress and make love, regardless
of the scene. A few seemed frantic, with lusts overpowering. And some cried,
some screamed, some cringed from mysterious, internal pains. Some were
catatonic pillars of stone. Some tried to root themselves in the sand, to
bloom, like flowers, or, with arms branching upward and out, to rise like
trees. Most of the children ran in circles, in a frenzy of fright. And there
were whole parties who crawled and rolled about, who dug, who jumped, who
twirled toplike and then fell. And others still were
dashing about, fighting off invisible foes.
And Psyche laughed! "Forgetful
creatures, simple heads! Learn to dance!" But our confusion was
rampant; there was panic among everyone to act out some role among the
thousands that were possible. All were desperate to play the self they believed
they were. Yet, who understood the meaning of Psyche?
And where was Psyche? I, believing
myself winged, looked up dazily into the Sun and saw
a sparrow hawk hovering there, shrieking with joy. And it said, "Look! You
are all but forms that play upon the Sea. Learn to dance!"
As if all that had happened were not
enough, along the shore the sand then appeared to be melting beneath us. With
each return of the tide, it appeared to melt and dissolve a little more,
turning glassy and liquid, like a mirror of water. The shock now hit us: We were
standing upon the Sea. Realizing this, each man and woman and child, one by
one, slipped under the silvery surface. No one swam. All were taken under by
the Sea.
In one brief moment, before I slipped
under, I saw once again the sparrow hawk close by, its wings opened over my
head. And in that moment, instantly, the illumination I received: I realized I
did have wings, that I, too, could dance across and dive from the Sky...
***
The Sea rages, the Sea is calm. It
is the wisdom of natural rhythm. But for us everything appears to be coming
down, and we tend to see only this, the coming down, the ruins, the dark mist, the savage unknown. We see only this—and what fantasies of
doom have not been shot into the public arm—that the danger, on the contrary,
is that of being so security conscious that everything before our eyes will
continue to be wired up into one seamless circuit of technological reality. We
have been too content to simply gaze over the Sea from our ivory tower of
safety—the self-conscious intellect. We fear to drown.
But Psyche returns. And Psyche's return
travels as the shock wave of a dawning new era whose
advancing front blasts across our psychic structures, shaking and shattering
them to the depths. Does Psyche not emerge from the depths? Then the depths
must resound. Our task, if we are to fully acknowledge her liberation, which,
indeed, is our liberation, is to rewrite across the face of our culture
the language of our being-in-the-world. For those who would put their hearts to
the task, for those who have been called, the game rules of sanity
itself are stamped void.
The only possibility for a radical art
today that eschews the sensationalism, the sterility, of mere outrage is the
methodic cultivation of divine madness. This is the new-old dance which Psyche
performs. This is the new-old dance which disconnects the circuit, fragments
and pluralizes the System, depotentiates the fascist
impulse. The most vital future for the arts lies in the divine madness of
mythopoesis.
Are we willing to surrender our cheap
sanity so that the Gods and Goddesses might dwell among us again?
*
What joy should be ours on this dawn of
multidimensional being! What joy beyond sanity!
But can we alone fulfill its promise? We
who are so often the confused creatures who know not which way to turn? Today,
multidimensional being is surely becoming the situation we are living in, but
we still experience it as fragmentation and chaos. Who will then guide us? Who
can make sense of it all? And who will defend our polycentricity,
the many, "fragmented" modes of our being, against monocentric Technos and Its technics?
"Who," it seems, must be a plurality of whos
in order that our plurality be respected. Or, should we say, in order that their
plurality be respected? Indeed, they—the other
Gods, Goddesses, daimons, demiurges, divine
spirits—are the unacknowledged Powers behind our polycentricity.
Our lack of respect creates havoc for us; the Western mind has long suppressed
them, even as they continue to struggle over us. And so, monocentric Ego, or Intellect, unable to deceive us any
longer, cries, "fragmentation."
How are we to know and respect them?
Initially, we must become conscious of our own many-mindedness, and thereby
become polyphrenics. Polyphrenia,
as we define it, is not the mere fact of fragmentation, disorder, and
confusion. No! It is already a step through it and beyond it. It is a conscious
sensitivity to, recognition and development of, our many minds, our
"fragmented self," and our being on the numinous tracks of its
origins—the divinities. Polyphrenia is the continuing
process of consciously allowing the divinities to speak through us. It is the
learning to live in many dimensions—the multidimensional.
To be of many minds is considered mad,
but polyphrenia is a madness
divine and a madness with a method divine—the Golden Thread. And we who
are polyphrenics have just discovered again the
Golden Thread, the other logos (Mythos) whose tongue is of Fire, whose logic is
infinitely more intricate and satisfying than that Logos which has heretofore
so dominated the West. The Golden Thread is our being in the possession of an
art that is able to reveal to us the divine significance in all things.
It is by our turning to the Dark that
the divinities come to reveal themselves. They reveal themselves, in that
experience of the numinosity of their Golden Light, as actually living through
us. To make the word of myth, which is the Mythos, the Word of Divinity
itself, is to spin a Thread from that Light, a Thread that tells a Story. From
the Golden Light of the divinities, we spin Golden Thread, the continuing Story
interconnecting all their stories, which, indeed, are the stories of our own
many modes of being. If, between our sensitive, shaping fingers, we are holding
the Thread, we are able then to meaningfully follow out and provide form to the
most convoluted twists and oblique turns in the dark maze, that Labyrinth, of
our lives. Again, we would have ways to see and touch and listen, to dance and
sing and open the heart, to cherish silence, to fulfill desire. Again, we would
have our stories, divine stories, to tell.
The Golden Thread glows in the
Labyrinth, and will glow all the more brightly, as we allow the divinities to
speak. And as we look around us, we soon begin to see that in the process of
spinning it, the Golden Thread itself is nothing other than the radiance of
life renewed.
The dawn of multidimensional being is a
Golden dawn.
*
Are we willing to surrender our cheap
sanity so that the Gods and Goddesses might dwell among us again? Let us put it
the other way around: Only through the guidance of divine Powers will we
realize the vital potentiality of multidimensional being; will we realize a
world which speaks to us again; will we realize a world which answers to our
Vision of Home. Our liberation—Psyche's liberation—can only be truly
fulfilled by religious sanction, the sanction of each God and Goddess and
divine spirit. If liberation is to be fulfilled, then they all must be respected.
Today's divinely mad, polyphrenic mythmakers are also
tomorrow's theologians of a new polytheism.
*
One spring I was living in the country.
It was a time in my life of uncertainty and confusion. Almost every evening I
would sit beneath a grand sycamore tree in quiet meditation. In the distance,
across a wide tract of uncultivated field, the magnificent Sun would always be
timelessly descending.
I was at the point of ending my years of
study in the sciences, for physics and mathematics had somehow lost all
relevance in my life. In the university, I had felt frustrated and homeless;
outside of it, I discovered it was no different. I had come to that point in my
life where I was faced with a fundamental disorientation before the world, and
I realized that the continued study of the sciences could offer nothing in the
way of helping me to confront it and overcome it.
Many questions I had in this state of
meditative preoccupation before the Sun; and it was as if I were addressing
them to someone other, some other close but unknown presence. Knowing the pain
of my alienation, I sought to ask why the world could not speak meaningfully to
me, or why it was that I was a misfit, a so-called outsider of society. With
seemingly nowhere to turn, nowhere to go, I yet felt that deeper within I was
on the verge of some radical transition.
One evening, inexplicably, a Song broke
through me. It signaled the transition, for uncanny stirrings were rising up
fast with an urgency I could not contain. I listened, I listened intently, and
then I heard the Call: A soft but a clear and firm voice spoke to me, summoning
me to open myself, to let myself go toward it, to be unafraid, and to listen.
But how strangely familiar that Call already was!
So it happened that an inner Voice spoke
to me, who I called my Muse. Almost immediately, in overwhelming radiance, the
Muse granted me a Vision. Turning within, I saw that I was to begin a Journey,
into the Dark. With some concern, the Muse cautioned me of the crisis in
thought and language which I was about to undergo. For some time, my thinking
would be stricken with a kind of crippling paralysis, and my language, thereby,
almost a stutter, for I would be unable to clearly think out and express what
was now being revealed to me. Her speech was not my speech, so hardly could I
have comprehended it, and repeated it. But the key to what I was told was that
only by a reorientation of my life through the mythic would I adequately be
prepared to understand the things of which she spoke. And only through the
mythic, above all, would I find my way back to a world that I could finally
call home. The Vision itself was, and remains, a Vision, beyond the Journey, of
Home.
From then on, during my evening
meditations, my Muse would come to me and discourse in her intuitive tongue
about the Journey ahead. She spoke to me of the Call, of Passion, of the Sun
and the Season of Fire, of the Sparrow Hawk I was, and of the many dangers and
sacrifices, trials and stages along the way, and of the waters which flow back
to the Sea, to Memory. She spoke, too, of the coming of the Gods and Goddesses,
like herself. The way would of course be long and many-branching—a labyrinthine
polyway. I was always to remain listening,
especially, too, to the other creatures who sang, as I likewise had a Song and
was to sing. These discourses were my initiation, above all, into the art of
mythopoesis itself. I had begun learning the art of spinning the Golden Thread.
(For some time now, the Muse has
persisted in wanting me to tell the story of that spring when she first came to
me and of all she revealed. Here it is, almost five years later, almost five
years spent in learning how to assimilate those teachings of a season and how
to speak a language adequate to them and to the Vision. The story I have yet to
tell. And the Journey itself—who is to say whether it has
only begun?)
*
A world transformed I sing! I have
surrendered, and the Powers have announced themselves, and are everywhere. I am
no longer alone, with Muse and Sun and Moon, and more Stars than one could
serve in a lifetime. We are not alone, we who are learning how to
participate in the new-old origins of the polyway we
travel through our making of myth. Everything wants to speak to us: tree and
bird and distant Mount, Earth and Sky, the River and Sea, spirits of the past,
each gesture and glance, each dream, each desire, and so many invisibles who come into momentary visibility. Technos, too, must now
recognize the full range of divine idioms. We will no longer allow our
constructed world to speak in its old, infantile monosentences.
We will teach our machines and gadgets and instrumentalities to speak with a
greater eloquence that they might be responsive to, and interrelate with, the the age-old cycles of Sun and Moon and body, and the
various ecosystems of Forest and Lake, Field and Swamp, River and Sea, yet not
to exclude universal Air, and all of their particular sensitivities. We
ourselves will be brought back in touch with them through the mythic enactment of
new-old rituals. For the ritual, too, is revitalized; but only the vital ritual
that has developed precisely from our own primordial experience.
And stories will abound. Why must anyone
at any time be without a story to tell? Our lives go in and out of stories; our
lives are lived by greater Powers. And like the Gods and Goddesses, do stories
not have their styles? The life of Passion wants style. Life is therefore polyphrenized into possibilities of passionate style. It
makes all the difference in the world for the story well told.
But does the Story ever end? Can it? Is
there a climax, a conclusion; a final, crowning sentence; a last, brilliant
word? Is that it, we reach Home and then it's over, we sit back and drift off
into a pleasant oblivion? Or is Home life itself, but life knowing and knowing
daily a world which is vital and alive, a world which speaks, a world which
answers to our profoundest desires? Oh, the Story never ends, and let us only
have the courage for continuing to spin it, for the Labyrinth of our
transition, in all its enigmatic darkness, calls us to spin, to spin and never
stop spinning, as the Golden Thread must and will, yes, will shine
forth, like a song, like our Song...
Who am I then? I am a Storyteller of a
dawning New-Old Spirit.
*
Here I soar, upward, toward the dreaming
Sun, having told my divers tale as I shook from myself those pregnant drops of
Sea; and how they glisten in their descent, only to return and merge again with
those vast, fathomless depths. Who has followed my flight along that Golden
trail I now leave behind? To dive and to reascend,
letting Water return to Water, and Fire be renewed by Sun—that is the Song of
my Passion! That is the Song I have learned to sing!