What-is-personal-myth, speech given at Bindlestiff Books 9-1-2011 by James Curcio
I’ve had many discussions with people over the past few years about why myth is important. Much of these discussions come down to a misunderstanding about what the word “myth” means, so what could have been an interesting discussion about politics, permaculture, literature (or sex or food for that matter) becomes a lesson in semantics.
I’d like to avoid rehashing that argument, and toward that end, give a definition of myth that all of us can wrap our heads around. And I hope as a result of it you will see why this is such a crucial issue to explore, as it has relevance in regard to every other discipline of study.
First, I’d like to start us off with a short excerpt from the introduction of The Immanence Of Myth (Weaponized press). This excerpt was also published on the net in the popular art journal Escape Into Life as “Living Myths.” I chose that title because most people think of myth as the study of classical myths, the study of what I would consider dead myths.
Modern myths are, quite plainly, alive. They represent not only our ideas about ourselves and the world around us, nor our beliefs of the same, but also and probably more distressingly, exist at that juncture that lies between these things, and which defy our plain view. Not quite pure fantasy, rarely easily understood as an objective or material force.
From that introduction:
There are different scales on which myth can be approached.
Instead, I want to talk now about the less understood personal dimension of myth, since many of us are more familiar with how it seems to operate at the macro- level of culture. “Personal myth” is a term several of us started employing in the discussion of immanence and myth, which seemed natural but it has caused a great deal of confusion when it isn’t clearly explained what we mean. It has come to have primacy in regard to myth through the lens of immanence rather than transcendence.
Which sounds pretty erudite, I suppose, but it really isn’t that difficult to grasp if we look at it headlong. So what is personal myth?
Lately I've taken to this example of personal myth when asked this question, because so many have experienced it: you meet someone and fall straight through the floor. You fall in love. Which means, you share a story with someone else. You are co-writers. Co-editors. And one of the preconditions of the plot is, “you’re in love.” That isn’t to underrate the reality of that experience, at that time. Not at all. It is real. Real as any other emotions is real. Dangerous as any wild animal. But it is still a story, and our relation with one another depends a great deal on it.
You develop a shared myth about your lives together. Some of it is just in the expectation they’ll be there tomorrow, or other day-to-day assumptions. Other myths might be about your shared future. You scope out houses, or fawn at the mysterious plants growing in someone’s front yard. Anecdotes, shared memories remembered as-if you are the same being, dreams, trinkets representing your shared history …
It may seem like your meeting could have been foretold in the stars because of its raw necessity. Falling in love is a deeply mythic process. Maybe that is why there are so many myths about it.
But sometimes things go “wrong.” Quite often. Whatever it is. They break your trust, however you define that, they run off and join the circus. Or, you suddenly look around, look at the script, and just go, “I can’t believe I listened to my agent with this.”
Whatever the reason, the bubble pops.
Maybe the relationship is strong enough to stick to the story after the two of you fight for a while about plot structure. But if not, our stories become too incompatible. Now you have yours, and they have theirs.
This is your new myth. To hell with the old book.
Suddenly the whole relationship is a different story, maybe they're even a villain now. It was a mistake, they are “a total asshole.” And who knows, those assessments may be more accurate than the ones you made when under their spell. Now you have to call your friends and tell them the new story. Share it on Facebook. Re-enforce it in your music listening habits. THAT LYING SON OF A BITCH. Turn the music up.
Have you ever stopped and looked behind what you’re doing? If so, I imagine you may have experienced something interesting, as I have. The force of these narratives is so strong that often you can be aware of the Wizard behind the curtain, and still be subject to his capricious whims. For better or worse, we are trapped inside our stories, a hall of mirrors that only death frees us from. (Or not.)
But maybe you don’t see behind these games we play with ourselves, and one another.
Either way, we go on thinking this posthumously written myth is the “true” myth. The most recent story is often the most appealing one. Maybe we’re all just obsessed with “The New.”
But all our myths are — at one time or another, in one way or another — equally true.
Take a breath. I want you to think about an ex-, and then recall yourself in the story you shared with them. Reify that story just for a moment, and pretend all your premises at that point in time were true. If you do it right, you’ll either feel nauseous and dizzy, or like the linebacker from the Rams just sucker punched you in the kidney. You will likely find a wide range of myths that conflicted with one another when you were with them, and a different assortment of them.
Consider that these stories were equally true, equally untrue.
Hard to swallow, isn’t it? We’re all constantly changing our stories, and the fact that we pretend otherwise is one of the greatest scams about “human behavior” that popular culture seems to pull off. (And yet we have this delusion that we have somehow “evolved” beyond myth because of the centrality of science in how we think of the world around us.)
We re-write the past like this, and we do it so constantly that it is absolutely unimaginable that a sense of our history is anything other than a series of overlapping myths. Our experience is a palimpsest—that is it is scraped only partially clean and used again and again.
Consider this except from a New Scientist article:
So, understanding that personal, national, cultural, spiritual myths all operate the same at different scales, at least structurally, we can see that modern mythology is not a topic relegated to one discipline, but is instead an open discussion that could benefit as much from exploration of cognitive psychology as it can from the analysis of literary symbol or the direct experience of a shamanic ritual.
In all cases, the operative word is literary. The “Modern mythology” project seems to be based on this single premise: that we can gain a more complete picture of the human puzzle by looking at it as we look at fictional stories. This is not science. That doesn’t make it less legitimate.
I hope this project serves as a platform for the discussion and contemplation of the myths we and others share, and I think the fact that 4000 people visited the site yesterday demonstrates that I’m not alone in that hope. (Note: August, 2011.)
I hope it leads us to new ideas and questions which none of us would have formulated on our own. It is a group endeavor and benefits the most from the interaction of minds in the commons.
What is is, and what it becomes, is as much up to you as it is to me.
I’d like to avoid rehashing that argument, and toward that end, give a definition of myth that all of us can wrap our heads around. And I hope as a result of it you will see why this is such a crucial issue to explore, as it has relevance in regard to every other discipline of study.
First, I’d like to start us off with a short excerpt from the introduction of The Immanence Of Myth (Weaponized press). This excerpt was also published on the net in the popular art journal Escape Into Life as “Living Myths.” I chose that title because most people think of myth as the study of classical myths, the study of what I would consider dead myths.
Modern myths are, quite plainly, alive. They represent not only our ideas about ourselves and the world around us, nor our beliefs of the same, but also and probably more distressingly, exist at that juncture that lies between these things, and which defy our plain view. Not quite pure fantasy, rarely easily understood as an objective or material force.
From that introduction:
We may use myths to explore why something is the way it is, or what we are to do with it, but a given myth remains just an interface. It is through us, through embodiment and direct interaction, that it is made immanent. There is no transcendent realm beyond the symbols, and in themselves, the symbols are empty shells. The myth is living because we are ever-changing and transitory. In other words, we are living, and myth too is living. It is a part of us, our mirror. It is like the moon in relation to the sun — without the sun, the moon would cast no light, but in the presence of the sun, it appears to have a light of its own. If this seems far-flung, consider this statement: coming world conflicts will be driven by ideological forces along cultural fault lines. In other words, by our ideas about ourselves, others, and the nature of the world we live in. Ideas are not just ideas, when they take hold of us.Framing myth in this light makes the discussion of the subject anything but “coffeeshop talk.” Modern myth is on the lips, minds, and knife-points of those in the midst of active revolution, as well as those working in media. In fact, all that is represented, all that we could form an opinion on as we form an opinion on it, is in that process entering the realm of myth. Doubly so when it is presented back into the world through discourse of any kind. This is the perspective of myth from the cultural level.
There are different scales on which myth can be approached.
Instead, I want to talk now about the less understood personal dimension of myth, since many of us are more familiar with how it seems to operate at the macro- level of culture. “Personal myth” is a term several of us started employing in the discussion of immanence and myth, which seemed natural but it has caused a great deal of confusion when it isn’t clearly explained what we mean. It has come to have primacy in regard to myth through the lens of immanence rather than transcendence.
Which sounds pretty erudite, I suppose, but it really isn’t that difficult to grasp if we look at it headlong. So what is personal myth?
Lately I've taken to this example of personal myth when asked this question, because so many have experienced it: you meet someone and fall straight through the floor. You fall in love. Which means, you share a story with someone else. You are co-writers. Co-editors. And one of the preconditions of the plot is, “you’re in love.” That isn’t to underrate the reality of that experience, at that time. Not at all. It is real. Real as any other emotions is real. Dangerous as any wild animal. But it is still a story, and our relation with one another depends a great deal on it.
You develop a shared myth about your lives together. Some of it is just in the expectation they’ll be there tomorrow, or other day-to-day assumptions. Other myths might be about your shared future. You scope out houses, or fawn at the mysterious plants growing in someone’s front yard. Anecdotes, shared memories remembered as-if you are the same being, dreams, trinkets representing your shared history …
It may seem like your meeting could have been foretold in the stars because of its raw necessity. Falling in love is a deeply mythic process. Maybe that is why there are so many myths about it.
But sometimes things go “wrong.” Quite often. Whatever it is. They break your trust, however you define that, they run off and join the circus. Or, you suddenly look around, look at the script, and just go, “I can’t believe I listened to my agent with this.”
Whatever the reason, the bubble pops.
Maybe the relationship is strong enough to stick to the story after the two of you fight for a while about plot structure. But if not, our stories become too incompatible. Now you have yours, and they have theirs.
This is your new myth. To hell with the old book.
Suddenly the whole relationship is a different story, maybe they're even a villain now. It was a mistake, they are “a total asshole.” And who knows, those assessments may be more accurate than the ones you made when under their spell. Now you have to call your friends and tell them the new story. Share it on Facebook. Re-enforce it in your music listening habits. THAT LYING SON OF A BITCH. Turn the music up.
Have you ever stopped and looked behind what you’re doing? If so, I imagine you may have experienced something interesting, as I have. The force of these narratives is so strong that often you can be aware of the Wizard behind the curtain, and still be subject to his capricious whims. For better or worse, we are trapped inside our stories, a hall of mirrors that only death frees us from. (Or not.)
But maybe you don’t see behind these games we play with ourselves, and one another.
Either way, we go on thinking this posthumously written myth is the “true” myth. The most recent story is often the most appealing one. Maybe we’re all just obsessed with “The New.”
But all our myths are — at one time or another, in one way or another — equally true.
Consider that these stories were equally true, equally untrue.
Hard to swallow, isn’t it? We’re all constantly changing our stories, and the fact that we pretend otherwise is one of the greatest scams about “human behavior” that popular culture seems to pull off. (And yet we have this delusion that we have somehow “evolved” beyond myth because of the centrality of science in how we think of the world around us.)
We re-write the past like this, and we do it so constantly that it is absolutely unimaginable that a sense of our history is anything other than a series of overlapping myths. Our experience is a palimpsest—that is it is scraped only partially clean and used again and again.
A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again. The word “palimpsest” comes through Latin from Greek παλιν + ψαω = (palin “again” + psao “I scrape”), and meant "scraped (clean and used) again.”There are many more esoteric ways of explaining what a myth is but this is the most direct. It's a part of the process by which we come to know anything, because we have to make assumptions and make a story of things to understand them and understand our place in them.
Consider this except from a New Scientist article:
“We are our narratives” has become a popular slogan. “We” refers to our selves, in the full-blooded person-constituting sense. “Narratives” refers to the stories we tell about our selves and our exploits in settings as trivial as cocktail parties and as serious as intimate discussions with loved ones. We express some in speech. Others we tell silently to ourselves, in that constant little inner voice. The full collection of one's internal and external narratives generates the self we are intimately acquainted with. Our narrative selves continually unfold.“Narratives” are simply a specialized version of myth.
State-of-the-art neuro-imaging and cognitive neuropsychology both uphold the idea that we create our “selves” through narrative. Based on a half-century's research on “split-brain” patients, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga argues that the human brain's left hemisphere is specialised for intelligent behaviour and hypothesis formation. It also possesses the unique capacity to interpret - that is, narrate - behaviours and emotional states initiated by either hemisphere. Not surprisingly, the left hemisphere is also the language hemisphere, with specialised cortical regions for producing, interpreting and understanding speech. It is also the hemisphere that produces narratives.
So, understanding that personal, national, cultural, spiritual myths all operate the same at different scales, at least structurally, we can see that modern mythology is not a topic relegated to one discipline, but is instead an open discussion that could benefit as much from exploration of cognitive psychology as it can from the analysis of literary symbol or the direct experience of a shamanic ritual.
In all cases, the operative word is literary. The “Modern mythology” project seems to be based on this single premise: that we can gain a more complete picture of the human puzzle by looking at it as we look at fictional stories. This is not science. That doesn’t make it less legitimate.
I hope this project serves as a platform for the discussion and contemplation of the myths we and others share, and I think the fact that 4000 people visited the site yesterday demonstrates that I’m not alone in that hope. (Note: August, 2011.)
I hope it leads us to new ideas and questions which none of us would have formulated on our own. It is a group endeavor and benefits the most from the interaction of minds in the commons.
What is is, and what it becomes, is as much up to you as it is to me.
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