Once and Future Myths. Phil Cousineau
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two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
This work is a series of ruminations on those stories and images that first opened my heart and continue to open it again and again each time I encounter myths that renew my faith in the mystery dimension of the world. Similarly, I hope these musings will inspire you to find the guiding images that first opened your own heart.
Stories That Make Life Endurable
By the time I took my first seminar, in 1979, with my future friend and mentor, the mythologist Joseph Campbell, I had long been under the spell of myth. My subsequent work with him gave me the courage of my convictions that the old stories are indeed alive, even “once and future,” as the English fabulist T. H. White regarded King Arthur. For centuries there has been a strong folk belief that Arthur never really died. Instead, he lives on in a remote cave in the mountains of Wales, waiting for the right moment to return and redeem the land. The Once and Future King is both a memorable book title about the medieval model for courage and chivalry and a wonderful description of the timeless power of mythic tales and mythic imagination.
Out of the galaxy of myths to choose from, the ones I explore in this book are the ones I know in oak, as Montaigne carved, the ones that haunt me. In these essays I explore myth in the way I've encountered it in the street, on the road, inside books, through dreams, by way of vigorous conversation, and presented in a montage style that blends story, anecdote, poetry, freeze frame, and musical segue.
The chapters that comprise this book emerge out of thirty years of reading myths and traveling the world over in search of their origins, as if drawn to them by magnetic forces. Their topics range from a meditation on myths about the riddle of time to the creative struggle, contemplations on the soul-guiding influence of mentors to reflections on the ancient lore about travel, a rhapsody on the theme of mythic cities, and, finally, a reverie on the mythic pull of sports.
Unfolding within each essay are many other themes recurring in myth—origins, time, play, place, rhythm, gods and heroes, love and death—discussed as eternal metaphors for the invisible webwork of these mighty forces, symbolic stories for the sacred energies that forge our fate and destiny.
The old storytellers knew this. They knew that every life is mythic, and that each of our myths, our sacred secret stories, is the outpouring of deep longing for meaning, which by some still unknown form of alchemy confers purpose to our lives. To those who go beyond appearances and seek the truth of their lives, everything is a symbol, everything a story, everything mythic, and the discovery of these things, back at the beginning, is an uncanny kind of coming home. This is the deep urge to seek out the living meaning of myth.
For psychologist Carl Jung, meaning was the secret opening into the realm of myth. According to his assistant, Aniela Jaffé, Jung believed that every attempt at meaning was a myth, in the original sense of the term: a sacred story explaining an entire world.
But can the currently accepted authorities on the way world works—science, media, technology—satisfy the human need for meaning?
I asked just this of the psychologist Rollo May at his home in Tiburon, California, the last time I saw him, shortly before his death in the spring of 1991. With a sadness in his voice that startled me, he said that for him the sign of the times was what he called the “nothingness,” the lack of meaning in their lives that drove so many of his clients into therapy. He described this as “the cry for myth,” the cry for a pattern. That cri de coeur, he determined, wasn't for the rose-hued glasses of nostalgia or escapism into romanticizing the past, but the cry for meaning, which he believed is the heart of true myth. Isn't there anywhere in modern life where people can glean that depth of meaning? I asked him.
“Great drama in theater, books or even movies,” he replied. “Works like Hamlet and MacBeth, The Great Gatsby or Waiting for Godot speak straight to the heart of people and we retain them in our memory as myth.” He looked out over San Francisco Bay to the city that shimmered in the fog like Frank L. Baum's Emerald City, and talked about loneliness as being the absurd price we are paying for the “myth of progress.”
“I've come to reluctantly believe Nietzsche was right,” he told me. “Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. As a matter of fact, after fifty years of practicing psychoanalysis I'm convinced that people go into therapy not so much for advice as for presence, to be in the presence of someone they trust and admire.”
I asked him if he believed that was what Joseph Campbell was alluding to when he said, “People are always talking about looking for the meaning of life, when what they're really looking for is a deep experience of life.”
“Yes, yes, but not only deep,” May responded. “Numinous.”
The Nod of the Gods
Our word numinous has its roots in the Latin numen, which means “to nod or command; the presence or revelation of divine power.” The psychologist Edwin Edinger illuminates the depths of meaning in the word when he writes, “An experience is numinous when it carries an excess of meaning or energy, transcending the capacity of the conscious personality to encompass or understand it. The individual is awed, overwhelmed, yet fascinated.”
Now this is what beguiles me most about the guiding images of mythology. In what the ancient Celts called the “thin places” of sacred sites, and during what the Buddhists call the “eternal now,” it is still possible to discover the mythic dimension, and with our senses alert to the possibility, we can witness the “nod of the gods” and delve deeper into the mystery of how stories move us from afar.
I recall Dr. May emphasizing to me how ironic the “cry for myth” was in our time, considering the plethora of myths all around us, if we only knew how to recognize them: The Myth of Paradise, the Golden Age, the Lone Pioneer, Rugged Individualism, the Age of Melancholy, the American Dream. He told me that a novel like The Great Gatsby is the secular myth of the solitary hero, an image of one of the culture's most sacred stories, the myth of constant self-invention and compulsive change, as well as its colossal shadow of loneliness. Gatsby's tragedy was mistaking his myth, the American Dream, for reality. The task of Nick, the narrator, at the end of the novel, is to find the myth that will illuminate some meaning in the absurd fate of his friend Gatsby. To Rollo May, this is everyone's task in the modern world, which is why he saw the novel as a modern myth. The hunger for myth, he said, is the hunger for community, and the hunger for community is the hunger for myth.
As he spoke about contemporary myths, I thought about Campbell's poetic notion that myths are masks of god through which shine the eternal truths, and the philosopher Philip Wheelwright's remark that the essence of myth is a “haunting awareness of transcendent forces peering through the cracks of the universe.”
Tentatively, I asked Dr. May, “What is missing from our way of thinking?”
“A touch of infinity,” he said softly, and stared out the window at the sailboats in the bay.
The Presence of Myth
Not long ago I was teaching a screenwriting class at San Francisco State University and chose to close one session with a clip from John Huston's thirty-seventh and final movie, The Dead, an adaptation of James Joyce's stirring short story. As I introduced the scene for my class I felt my heart pounding.
“The Dead is sometimes called the greatest short story in the English language,” I explained to the class. “It takes place on a single night in turn-of-the-century Dublin, on the Feast of the Epiphany. There is a ritual gathering of old friends and the slow revelation of a secret that exposes the truth about the marriage of the two main characters. That is the plot, the overstory. The understory is revealed in the slow accumulation of details: a piano recital, a poetry reading, an after-dinner speech, a haunting Irish ballad, a wife's confession, and the strange report that ‘snow was general all over of Ireland.’ In this sense the understory is the movement of soul in the lives of these characters, described by Joyce in his book, and Huston in his film, as