Once and Future Myths. Phil Cousineau
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fate: ‘Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.’ Camus then writes, ‘That remark is sacred,’ and concludes with the stunning thought that One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
I paused for a few minutes and we shared some refreshments. Our Greek bus driver triumphantly showed us the trick of slicing open a watermelon so it pops open like a sprung flower, and the group drank gustily and savored the juicy fruit.
“I think everyone who has a creative urge,” I tried summing up, “from poetry to gardening—can find some solace in this story. It's a great antidote to the reigning myth in our culture that there is only one ascent up the mountain—to marriage, money, or success. That's the kind of fairy-tale thinking that makes it difficult to accept the inevitable descents back down the mountain. And we wonder why we're afflicted with massive depression.”
I wiped my brow, and took another sip from my water bottle, then pointed to the sharply rising mountain beyond the town of Corinth and suggested that the story of Sisyphus may have taken a strong hold on the imagination of the ancients because they could go outside everyday and visualize their ancient king pushing his boulder up the subterranean mountain that was a mirror image of the one in their own world.
But the story carries on, like the voice of the goddess Echo herself, I suggested, because it teaches us something every generation has to learn for itself: It's not what happens to us that matters; what matters is our attitude toward what happens.
At that point, Mary, one of the members of the group challenged me. “Are you suggesting that suffering is noble? I'm an artist and I'll tell you right now that suffering is no fun.”
“The story doesn't ennoble suffering, it ennobles struggle,” I answered carefully. “I'm not saying that suffering is noble, I'm saying that struggle is inevitable and those who learn to perceive it as an obstacle rather than a burden make life a lot easier for themselves. The image of Sisyphus climbing and descending, climbing and descending, seems to echo the basic oscillation of life's backward and forward movements, owing to the diffusion of energy.
“Now it may be heresy to say this in these success-obsessed times, but even failure is noble—if you keep going. I think that's what the story is telling us. It reminds me of the old Australian toast, ‘Press on, regardless.’ Or Thomas Edison's admission that he was the most successful inventor in history because he had the courage to be history's greatest failure, meaning he never allowed defeat to crush him, only to spur him on to try a different approach. I'm saying that I find that the power to resist despair allows us to keep going. That's why writing or painting or composing never gets any easier for real artists. They keep on going back up the mountain, but by different routes, different challenges.”
I paused, and looked for the ghost of Sisyphus on the slopes of the distant mountain, then concluded, “What does it mean to suffer? Wasn't that the great question in the story of Job in the Old Testament? There is no final answer to that parable, as there isn't, can't be, in the myth of Sisyphus. The only answer to the constant question of life and death is your answer, my answer. Remember these stories are mythic images, attitudes not theories, and as far as I can tell, attitudes of awe and wonder.”
Mary sighed and looked away. Something had been nudged inside her, an old image, maybe even her previous personal myth about the creative life.
“Having pushed the boulder up the hill for a long time,” I said, “let me just say that I find a lot of unexpected comfort in this story. I don't find writing getting any easier. Who knows? Maybe it's because I push too hard. But I have learned something invaluable from this story—that the secret of the creative life consists in taking the next step, doing the next thing you have to do, but doing it with all your heart and soul and finding some joy in doing it.”
I paused for a moment, then remembered some lines I had once written down on an index card and taped to my typewriter.
“Henry James described the task of the creative life as well as anyone ever has,” I concluded. “He wrote in his exquisite short story, ‘The Middle Years’: ‘We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’”
When I had finished, our Greek guide stunned me by clapping robustly, and not just to get us back on the bus. Her eyes positively shone with delight, and she said, “I've known that story since I was a girl, but I've never thought of it that way, you know, psychologically.” She paused, looking for the right words in English. Her hands brushed hair out of her eyes, and she added, “I didn't know you could do that to a story. Interpret it, I mean.”
She rooted around in her purse, took out a notebook, and asked me with great earnestness, “Now tell me the name of that French philosopher again.”
Metaphors We Live By
The myth of Sisyphus is more than a cautionary tale that embodies an important realization about ordeal. It is a metaphor—like the stories of Hamlet, Faust, and Quixote—for what the psychologist Robert A. Johnson calls “the evolution of consciousness.” They are the spiritual descendants of Sisyphus. Quixote, the idealistic rebel, is incapable of accepting authorities he cannot see or respect, and he will not accept defeat. Hamlet, the incurable brooder, reveals our capacious ability to live in the dark underworld of anxiety and loneliness. In Faust we see the first modern man who makes peace with his shadow in his soul and does not wait for redemption by the gods, but instead redeems himself by forging his own consciousness.
Together, these modern myths are not just great literature but antidotes to the denial of struggle and the dream of unending, upward, soul-denying progress. In the rich imagery of these Sisyphean stories we find a number of immortal truths. We do have a chance to overcome ourselves, the story says, our phantoms, our persecutions. Quite possibly it may be the only way to find happiness. As the pilgrims walking to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, or the Shikoku poet's shrines in Japan will tell you, it is only through overcoming an ordeal that we are able to find meaning that touches our souls. Wasn't it Leonardo da Vinci who said, “Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields stern resolve”?
I think too of René Daumal's allegorical novel Mount Analogue. In this story of mountain climbers on a mythical island, he writes,
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. In climbing, take careful note of the difficulties along your way: for as you go up, you can observe them. Coming down, you will no longer see them, but you will know they are there if you have observed them…. There is an art of finding one's direction in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
In Rembrandt's 1652 etching, Faust in His Study, he renders the moment of inspiration as an epiphany, the sudden shining forth of light in the midst of darkness.
Mythically speaking, Sisyphus tells us that to “know” means seizing our fate from the zealous and jealous gods and goddesses—though all hell may break loose, as rendered in the image of Hades flinging off his chains after being freed by his brother Ares. His story may have ancient echoes of the sun's rising and falling, and may even be an echo of a much older tale about the soul breaking free of the cold clutches of death itself. It could be the model for the urban joke about knowing when you're in midlife: You've climbed to the top of the ladder and found it's against the wrong wall!
But for me the power of the image is that it captures the timeless moment when all of us who are trying to break free from the chains of “Death” (read: Depression, Melancholy, Hate, Negativity, Defeatism, Jealousy) have struggled to reach the top of the hill and felt that moment of elation of dropping our burden at our feet.
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