Once and Future Myths. Phil Cousineau
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I turned off the classroom lights and ran the VCR, which was cued up for the last three scenes of the film. In the first scene Angelica Huston, playing the wife, Gretta, descends down the staircase of the Dublin mansion where the dinner party was held. But she hears the siren melody of an old Irish ballad, “The Lass of Aughrim,” being sung as she leaves, and it seizes and transports her, a sure sign of a mythic moment. Stunningly framed by a stained glass window, like a madonna, she begins to weep. Huston intercuts the sorrowful gaze of her husband Gabriel (Donal McCann) as he watches with utter incomprehension a look he has never seen before on his wife's face.
The chance singing of the song has ignited the memory of a long-ago romance, and it's as if a trap door has opened underneath the story. Hidden depths emerge. These are the mythic depths of anguish and passion that exist in the souls of everyone, including our wives, husbands, closest friends, which is why the greatest folklore, art, and literature appeals across time and space.
The final scene takes place in a bleak hotel room. Gabriel confronts his wife and she reveals that the song she just heard was once sung to her by a young lad named Michael Fury, who died of a broken heart for her when she was young. In this epiphany is the realization that there are inaccessible places in the heart and memory, even for husband and wife.
“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Fury?” Gabriel asks with an ache in his heart.
“I think he died for me,” Gretta answers, then collapses onto the bed in tears.
Gabriel is utterly baffled, turns away, asking himself in the film's mournful narrative track, “Why am I feeling this riot of emotion?” He moves dreamily to the window and peers out at the “snow falling faintly through the universe,” wondering whether he has ever understood his own wife or ever known the depth of love of which she is capable.
The scene dissolves like a dream to a montage of snow-covered medieval ruins.
The narrator intones, “One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than face and wither dismally with age…. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
My heart was in my throat as the lights came flickering on in the classroom. I have long vaunted the mysteries of what the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called “participation mystique.” This is the uncanny ability to write characters so thoroughly that an audience can drop into a kind of dreamtime participation in the story. But rarely have I so deeply identified with a series of characters as I did that morning, though I have read the book and seen the movie each a dozen times.
As the students stirred in their seats, adjusting their eyes to the bright lights, I was left wondering with Gabriel, Why am I feeling this riot of emotion?
My class of thirty students sat in stunned silence, waiting for me to speak. In the front row a young guy in a François Truffaut T-shirt and his long-lashed girlfriend squirmed in their seats, then turned painfully away from each other, like the fateful couple in the film, as if pondering in their heart of hearts the breathtaking lines about the difficulty of ever understanding their own lovers.
I watched them with tenderness, as if projected forward by the story and able to see them struggling with love and death in their various futures. Looking at their faces trying to get used to the classroom lights, I found myself reeling backward in time, recalling my first night in Dublin, December 1974, when my landlady, Mrs. McGeary, handed me a copy of Joyce's collection of short stories, Dubliners, saying, “Here, take it. You need to read this,” and how I read until dawn, recognizing in Joyce a mentor, a kindred spirit, and more, my own destiny, closing in around my soul.
James Joyce meets with his publisher Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier in Shakespeare and Company Bookstore in Paris in May 1938 to celebrate the publication of Finnegans Wake. The dreamlike novel took seventeen years to complete, a task that has become symbolic of the perseverance required in the arts.
The class waited as the last minute of class ticked off and I recalled the night I helped my brother and sister clean out my father's apartment after he died. On the reading table next to the chair in which he died, I found a beautiful bound edition of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses. I picked up the book and wished we had had a chance to read it out loud together, at least had one last chance to talk about it.
The class bell rang. Still, the class did not stir. They would not move until I said something to wrap up the film. I realized that they were right where Joyce wanted his readers and Huston wanted his viewers reeling in the “riot of emotion.” They were in the mythic moment.
I suddenly felt like my college professor of twenty-five years before must have when we asked him, while the Vietnam War was still raging, what he would do if his draft number came up.
I began tentatively, and then a great calm came over me as the words seemed to choose me. “John Huston called this movie his love letter to Ireland. Before he died he told the press that reading James Joyce when he was a young man made him want to become a writer. Joyce was only twenty-five when he wrote The Dead. That can either intimidate us or inspire us. Twenty-five. That's just about your age, isn't it? I found him when I was about your age. It changed everything. What he taught me was to trust the ‘riot of emotion’ that arises when we touch the depths. Can you feel it—can you feel the myth? What I'd like to urge you to do is try to get what you're feeling at this moment into your own scripts. If you haven't gotten there yet, go deeper. Then go back and go deeper yet. If you do you will find the secret opening to myth, dream, and art.”
The Secret Opening
Once in a great while we are pulled into the vortex of living myth, the stories and images that open us up to the great unknown. That screening of The Dead was such a moment for me and, I learned later, for several young members of my class. As Joyce mythologized turn-of-the-century Dublin, connecting the ancient wanderings of Ulysses with the modern peregrinations of Leopold Bloom, so too do modern filmmakers like John Huston, who mythologized our times with filmed stories that have become part of our cultural “sacred histories.” From the paleolithic caves of Lascaux to the dark movie palaces in small-town America, stories have helped define who we are and what is truly sacred.
For our purposes, stories become mythic when they evoke eternal concerns, whether on a stone tablet in the sands of ancient Sumer or on the flickering screen at your local Odeon. True myths, ancient and modern, stop time because they emerge from somewhere beyond time, which is why they are sometimes described as being written by an “anonymous hand.” Myths seize the imagination because they take on questions—love and war, birth and death, good and evil—that otherwise cannot be answered. While echoed in books, music, and art, myths are also experienced in ordinary life, as everyday epiphanies.
Although I was prepared that day in the classroom to lecture on the artistic merits and screenplay structure of an important movie, I was still surprised by its mythic impact. By compressing time, space, and emotion, myth reveals the inner meaning of our lives. In his very first book, the upstart Joyce announced himself as a mythmaker, a supreme artist who could pour old wine into new bottles.
In this book I explore a few similarly modest moments from my life and the life of my times, and reflect on the way they open onto the unknown and become mythic in memory. We all tell stories and conjure images from the fragments of memory and shards of dream, which means we are all, still, myth-making creatures. Sacred stories have always been the most natural way for us to defy our isolation and boldly make connections with others as well as with our own souls.
This work is an invitation to see how marvelous ordinary life is when we rediscover it by way of the mythic imagination.
The secret is that the mythic is everywhere, but most often appears when and where it's least expected. It exists on a superficial level in the myth-making apparatus of celebrity