Once and Future Myths. Phil Cousineau
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narrative of our own lives. All it takes is the willingness to look with what the painter Cézanne called “the mythic slant,” the eye that considers what is eternal, timeless, soulful in every encounter. This perspective doesn't require a university degree or arcane terminology, just the desire to search beyond the world of appearances to the mythic world that surrounds us at all times. What we learned from our parents, teachers, mentors, books, or travels about Hector, Gilgamesh, Ishtar, or Tristan and Iseult is still happening, if only we open our eyes and pay closer attention to the hidden places where myth lurks.
I'm prowling after images in this book, scavenging after metaphors, in the spirit of the poet Coleridge. I see myth as the old ruins of literature. They are the last stones, the jagged outline, of the grandeur of long ago, but stones that have been placed into new buildings, reused, recycled, reimagined. I read them the way I rove around the old grounds of Glendalough, Ireland, Ephesus, Turkey, or Angkor Wat, Cambodia, that is, for the reverie, for the prods to my imagination. I recall them the way I recall my own mythic memories, such as my own rambles, when I was in my early twenties, through the gladiator quarters of the Roman Coliseum or my midnight moonlit climb to the top of the Giza pyramid—for the pleasure of the story.
In this sense, mythic memory is not unlike the way the novelist and traveler Rose Macaulay famously described her visits to the relics of dead cities and remains of lost civilizations as “the pleasure of ruins.” She was referring to an Old World way of thinking that preferred contemplation to self-improvement, reverie to psychological transformation, and mythmaking to theory-developing. There is an unknown room in the soul that is constantly turning the stuff of daydreams into myths for us, helping us to get at meaning we can't get to through the front door.
And that reminds me of another story. One night a few years back I was drinking some wine with two of the great musicians of our time, Mike Pinder, the founder of the Moody Blues, and David Darling, the virtuoso cello player. We were discussing the immortals of music. I told a few Jim Morrison stories, inspired by my days of co-writing a book about the Doors; Mike regaled us with personal anecdotes about John Lennon; then David did his bluesy imitation of an encounter with Miles Davis, telling us a winsome tale that had been circulating in the clubs for years.
After Miles died, David told us in a voice that mimicked Davis' notorious growl, they say that he went up to heaven and no one saw him for awhile. One day Charles Mingus, the amazing jazz bassist, was wandering around heaven and bumped into the incredible saxophonist, John Coltrane. Well, man, while ’Trane was giving Mingus one cool tour of the place they saw this heavy dude with a long white beard, rocking in the Chair-of-Ages. Mingus couldn't believe his eyes, and sussed out ’Trane, “Who's that?” ’Trane rolled his shoulders and shook his head and said, “I don't know. But He thinks he's Miles.”
All around us, every day in every way, we are turning the stuff of life into myth to express what defies explanation, precisely because we're only human. Myths emerge from dreams, visions, inspiration, but also from a cultural need to explain the inexplicable, such as the unearthly sounds of Miles Davis' trumpet. We can't in ordinary words, so stories emerge from “anonymous authors” to describe in symbolic terms the “divine” source of genius and suprahuman accomplishment.
We yearn for the story, the image, that sheds a little light on the mysteries, like how in the world the great trumpet player can distill from his anguished life so much ineffable beauty. Creativity belongs to the mythic realm because it involves a struggle with the gods. World folklore is rife with stories about pacts that artistic types have made with gods and devils, because the everyday mind can't seem to reconcile mortal souls with immortal acts. This helps explain the many rhapsodies on a theme from Faust over the past few centuries.
“So you see how the mythmaking mind works,” writes P. L. Travers, “balancing, clarifying, adjusting, making events somehow correspond to the inner necessity of things.” This occurs in the country of myth, she says, where opposites are reconciled, as in the urban myth of Miles Davis who thinks he's God—and God who thinks he's Miles.
The Mythic Vision
“As it was in the past, so it is now,” a neighborhood priest, Father Stephen Gross, told me one day while we were discussing the need for even modern people to have a sanctuary away from the madness, a place to collect our thoughts and believe in the power of silence.
I thought of him again just the other morning. I was feeling out of sorts, numb and defeated, unable to write, converse, connect with anyone. After my ritual café session I was feeling like Sisyphus putting the shoulder to the boulder as I begrudgingly trudged back home up the steep hill where we live. Suddenly a man with a thick German accent ran across the street and grabbed my arm, shouting for help.
“That man over there is blind,” he yelled. “He needs directions. He's lost.”
I said of course and crossed over with him to find a tall elegant black man with salt and pepper hair leaning on his white walking stick. Very gently, he put his hand on my arm and said, “Can you help me? I need to find the stairs with all the flowers.”
I knew immediately that he meant the nearby Filbert Steps, which are festooned with beautiful flower gardens that border wooden stairs rising up to Coit Tower.
“Of course, I know where they are,” I told him, then hesitated, feeling rushed but needed. “I'd be happy to lead you there myself.”
I led him across the street and up the Montgomery Steps, then headed toward the gardens. On the way he confided to me that he was a poet and he had come there a year before with a writing class. He had fond memories of the smell of the flowers, but had been haunted by something else he needed “to put his finger on.”
“Where I come from isn't such a good city for blind people,” he said, looking crestfallen. “But San Francisco is a good city for blind people.” He carefully tapped his cane on the sidewalk in front of us as we walked, dipping his knees seconds before an approaching curb and pushed away the branches of overhanging trees before they would have brushed him in the face.
“There is something in the air here. I was raised here and need to come back every once in awhile just to see it, to smell it and hear it again, and feel it in my soul. It helps my poetry.”
There was joy in the brief telling of his story, and in the way his face lit up as we made our way down Montgomery Street. He sounded like Nat King Cole singing to himself on a drive down Route 66, or Pablo Neruda describing the effect of cherry blossoms on his lust for life. The noon bells chimed from the nearby Shrine of Saint Francis as we arrived at the base of the steps. The sun shone brightly on the purple bougainvillea around us, and monarch butterflies flickered in the light around the red roses. A flock of parrots rainbowed the air above the steps that led to the tower.
Oddly enough, the joyous sight triggered a sudden rush of sorrow for the blind poet because he couldn't see these things, but then, as if sensing my unwarranted pity, he startled me with a few choice words.
“You know I'm not completely blind,” he said, as if forgiving me. He placed his strong hand on my forearm as I led him up the steps to a wrought-iron gate. “I've just had to learn to see in new ways.”
He nodded thanks to me, sensed the presence of the gate, gently pushed it open, and sat down on the bench that overlooked San Francisco Bay. The sun lit on his face like a blessing. He smiled happily for a few moments and opened his backpack and pulled out a pen and blue spiral notebook.
“What we don't look for,” he said, “we'll never be able to see and never be able to tell, will we?”
Then, like the blind poet Homer, he looked out over the bay to see what he could see, and in so doing, he helped me see in new ways ever since. Not a day has gone by since that encounter when I haven't tried to see my own neighborhood with new eyes—and with gratitude.
And still the mystery turns. The mythosphere is all around us, to borrow Alexander Eliot's luminous image, in the most profound and the most ordinary of moments. We can sense it whenever an experience opens onto the unknown, as it did for our ancestors in the paleolithic caves