Quotes about Myth

Science has rolled its war wagons over the crushed myths of so many religious beliefs. It has marshaled its mechanics to explain the motions of the sun, moon, and stars. It has mapped the heavens, leaving no place for gods to live.

It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.

Myth is not what we most readily-most facilely, and typically abstractly-take it to be: "exotic stories" from cultures unlike ours. Myth is a mode of culture itself, which precipitated those stories and gave them their power and form over the mode of mentality or personality to which it is a historical-psychological correlate. Myth is a way of being, a mode or dimension of subjectivity, an organic system of concretely grasped value-principles concentrating the meaning of human life into a pre-philosophical metaphor, a nuclear parable or potent allegory: we recognize it in primitive or premodern peoples, we see it-briefly-in the sparkling imagination and spiritual life of children, before our distinctive modern culture crushes their morale and introduces them to the prison of compulsively literalizing ways of seeing things, the prevailing prosaic, banal, fact-ridden existence to which literalized and abstractivized mentalities can of course see no alternative. Moderns know myth, as they know anything, only as what they have dissected it into, what they have "scienced" or intellectualized.

Art or culture or philosophy must ply its genius today against this most prodigious opponent in all of history-human self-obliviousness, man's deific powers of denial and delusion, the nescience buried in the heart of science. Art must keen its scalpel for one sure incision, it must razor the bladder of an inflationary corpus of hypertrophic beliefs so deftly that the violence is only felt after the fact. Delusion must be lanced like a boil bloated to purple distension: art is not the play of pretty illusions-entertainment is that whoring pastime-but rather righteous and wise disillusion, judicious severing of a malignancy. Art is far from amoral; it is in crusade against lying and trivializing conventional morality and must transcend that snakepit of corruption, certainly; but amoral it is not, in no way is it free to be neutral and objective. Art is either the lancet of a higher truth, a law superior to any of man's pleasant and flattering rhetorical reasonings, or else it has no authority, no right to command anyone's attention. Art traffics with the divine, that is, the hidden or occult, the mythic, which is after all of the very essence of man, the stuff his character and even his life are ultimately woven from. A wise society knows to have contempt for egomaniacal poseurs playing onanistically with art supplies, and a foolish society imagines that "art is whatever artists may do."

Myth is the practical metabolism of our soulish life, the logic of our obsessions and oversights for which we have no language or code. Myth is the "morality" that the ineffable puts upon us, our unaccountable imperatives, our inexplicably selective clarity and obscurity, the mortal one-sidedness of our talents and wits, the passion and apathy that make such a transient passage through our hapless minds; that weave a pattern of fatality others will see before we do. Myth is distinctively human or sublime higher-order instinct, the "reason" in culture that reason knows not of.

The original oppression of Woman was based on crude denigration.  She caused Man to fall, so she became a scapegoat.  No, not a scapegoat which might be blameless but a culprit richly deserving of whatever suffering Man chose thereafter to heap on her.  That is Woman in the Book of Genesis.  Out here, our ancestors, without the benefit of hearing about the Old Testament, made the very same story differing only in local color.  At first the Sky was very close to the Earth.  But every evening Woman cut off a piece of the Sky to put in her soup pot, or in another version, she repeatedly banged the top end of her pestle carelessly against the Sky whenever she pounded millet or, as in yet another rendering - so prodigious is Man’s inventiveness, she wiped her kitchen hands in the Sky’s face.  Whatever the detail of Woman’s provocation, the Sky moved away in anger, and God with it.

Well, that kind of candid chauvinism might be ok for the rugged taste of the Old Testament.  The New Testament required a more enlightened, more refined, more loving even, strategy - ostensibly that is.  So the idea cam to Man to turn his spouse into the very Mother of God, to pick her up from right under his foot where she’d been since Creation and carry her reverently to a nice, corner pedestal.  Up there, her feet completely off the ground, she will be just as irrelevant to the practical decisions of running the world as she was in her bad old days.  The only difference is that now Man will suffer no guilt feelings; he can sit back and congratulate himself on his generosity and gentle manliness.

Meanwhile, our ancestors out here, unaware of the New Testament, were working out independently a parallel subterfuge of their own.  Nneka, they said.  Mother is supreme.  Let us keep her in reserve until the ultimate crisis arrives and the waist is broken and hung over the fire, and the palm bears its fruit at the tail of its leaf.  Then, as the world crashes around Man’s ears, Woman in her supremacy will descend and sweep the shards together.

The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest.

And yet, and yet … Negar la sucesión temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronómico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. Nuestro destino no es espantoso por irreal: es espantoso porque es irreversible y de hierro. El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo desgraciadamente es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges.

If your Spanish is a little rusty or nonexistent the following is a fairly decent translation of the above quotation:
And yet, and yet . . . Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

Time goes by and Legends are forgotten, we leave memorials of people who were supposedly legends, but by definition what makes a legend. I was once told that it is our actions that define us, that we are all judged by our actions. but if it is our actions we are judged by then a Legend can not be born by someone who does the same thing every day!

I used to read the myths of love
Now I have become
the mythical lover

Luminous Silence 1 George Jisho Robertson to become a god is to sing a transient melody of time improvising on itself or to be a mask flaming in a dance of flames in the dark of the human mind, the human heart flaring like a comet in an ancient dream, a gorgeous intricate robe of intoxicated syllables, blood-calligraphy, a storm-driven forest of inscrutable shadows, hieratic, spell-binding dreams and unknown syllables – the hand of the hawk flashing in the firelight among wide-eyed children, the mane of the lion blazing in the camp ground of the hungry tribe, the serpent’s pulsing form slithering through the palisades of thought, a white-gowned girl scattering flowers, her hair rising & falling like seaweed… Nobility has the bearing of grace at play with the unknown – a teasing fragrance of roses fills the room where I write, and I hear Ramakrishna say, “Whatever I saw, I worshipped.” It is all perfectly deceiving, subtly deceptive, to be gathered into silence, into the cupped & open hands where the form of the self I am sits, transparent, gone in a moment, a moment of listening, for listening is the foreplay & interplay of heart & heart, mother & child, elder & young warrior: it is the inexorable music of a prayer so vast it accommodates despair, nurtures the hungry, it is a listening as precise as precious rain on the desert, drop by drop of silence blessing the withered roots, the parched leaves, the vicious angry thorns and so I sit in a rented room to write as silence wills, listening, learning to listen, learning to become a vessel of the silence that I call love, a vessel not mine Love silently offered is a gentle hand, a bowl of soup, a rag of cloth to wipe a tear or dress a doll, a flower laid on a silent pillow, or a surgeon’s knife swiftly searching: and thus by human day these visions fade in the light of kindness – yet never fade, never vanish, glittering and leaping phantasmagoria or mythic beings dancing archaic rituals born briefly out of the infinite womb of the human dark: or say it this way, the governing passions of the human heart are the very fire that can purify the human mind Therefore in these imagined ashes let us bake bread for one another today, let us break bread together, let us pause a moment, offering this silence to the silence itself

"Intellect" seems to itself the whole universe of conceivable possibilities and in this way and for this reason it rejoices over its liberation from the narrow or myopic cosmos of intuition, the feeling-life within which animals and infants and idiots are bound.  But just as there are physically vocalizable sounds that are not contained in the English alphabet, and difficult/unnatural/alien combinations of letters (diphthongs and consonantal blends) that English does not like or permit, and foreign or other-cultural comprehensions of experiences and concepts that are not able to be translated or framed in terms congenial to Englished and modernized and bourgeoisified mentalities, so too there are qualitative energies and energetically blended relations and flavors of meaning that are utterly lost in the transformation of personality from the mode of intuition to the mode of intellect.  Abstractivist mentality of course never MISSES anything that has dropped out or been edited from its more primitive to its more sophisticated ("rational," "conscious") modalities.  Myth - as a modality of mind to which the entire superstructure of mythos-culture is anchored, and out of which its cosmos of concepts and reasons and purposes is elaborated - is one of the most fertile and prodigious of these "logically" eclipsed or dethroned world-forces.  What "culture" is and what values it is harnessed to, and what ultimate range of personality-types it subserves, is radically transfigured from mythos- to logos-culture.

Myth is the quintessence or ultimate archetype of intuitive / rightbrained / gnosic / creative thinking:  it is the paradigmatic concentration, application, task, teleology, and mode of energy of this kind of figurative or concretizing thinking, that seeks to make truth "graphic" or palpable, revelatory or feelingly authoritative rather than just permitting it to dissipate and be volatilized into one-sidedly abstract terminology and ideas.  Myth is a strategy of analogical and metaphoric truthmongering, related to the concept that medieval philosophy of rhetoric (John of Salisbury e.g.) called "eloquence," the truth put in its most persuasive form.  Myth is not petty truth but truth in a grand mode, it ruptures the artificial apparatus of false distinctions and dysrelations, the conventional or doxic septa that separate organically related issues from one another:  myth is the infinitization of the finitized world-order that ordinarizing or mediocritizing intellect/ego has perpetrated all across society (modern society most especially).  Myth makes truth whole-mindedly experienceable rather than schematically or formalistically skeletalized and arid, bled white of all the energies of life.  In the warfare between what the Old Testament calls the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, myth is knowledge fighting on the side of life, against the "deathworks" of nihilistic consciousness and science.

The poet of today ...is profoundly inhibited by the dearth of shared consciousness of myth.  Our current motivating ideas are not myths but ideologies, lacking transcendental significance. This loss of myth-consciousness I believe to be the most devastating loss that humanity can suffer; for ... myth-consciousness is the bond that unites men both with one another and with the unplumbed Mystery from which mankind is sprung and without reference to which the radical significance of things goes to pot. Now a world bereft of radical significance is not long tolerated; it leaves me radically unstable, so that they will seize at any myth or pseudo-myth that is offered.

But what if on some level we are made of sound? What if in the beginning was the Word? What if the music of the spheres is no myth? What if we ourselves are a harmonic convergence? What if the holographic grid of our being is a linguistic and musical interface between higher-dimensional light, which might be considered a form of divine thought or intention, and sound in higher-dimensional octaves?

It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person’s fate. Translators use “plot” to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth.

One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form.

Every book that comes into being does so within the context of a web of interconnections between individuals, and this is no less so in the present case. The idea for this book first occured to me in 1994 while reading a passage from William Irwin Thompson's book - Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science - in which he briefly discusses David Cronenberg's great film - Videodrome - and I would never have stumbled across the works of Thompson if they had not been recommended to me by my friend John Lobell - and the website companion to this book -  CinemaDiscourse.com - would not exist without Lobell's initiative and enthusiasm for the essays contained herein.

"As a child I became a confirmed believer in the ancient gods simply because as between the reality of fact and the reality f myth, I chose myth...Myth is the truth of fact, not fact the truth of myth."

I believe imagination is stronger than knowledge - that myth is more potent than history.  I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts - That hope always triumphs over experience - That laughter is the only cure for grief.  And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Just as the introduction of the irrational numbers ... is a convenient myth [which] simplifies the laws of arithmetic ... so physical objects are postulated entities which round out and simplify our account of the flux of existence... The conceptional scheme of physical objects is [likewise] a convenient myth, simpler than the literal truth and yet containing that literal truth as a scattered part.

The Young Soldier It is not death Without hereafter To one in dearth Of life and its laughter, Nor the sweet murder Dealt slow and even Unto the martyr Smiling at heaven: It is the smile Faint as a (waning) myth, Faint, and exceeding small On a boy's murdered mouth.

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.

True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blonde Hero--really look--and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

There is a central myth about British science and economic growth, and it goes like this: science breeds wealth, Britain is in economic decline, therefore Britain has not done enough science. Actually, it is easy to show that a key cause of Britain's economic decline has been that the government has funded too much science. . . . Post-war British science policy illustrates the folly of wasting money on research. The government decided, as it surveyed the ruins of war-torn Europe in 1945, that the future lay in computers, nuclear power and jet aircraft, so successive administrations poured money into these projects-to vast technical success. The world's first commercial mainframe computer was British, sold by Ferrranti in 1951; the world's first commercial jet aircraft was British, the Comet, in service in 1952; the first nuclear power station was British, Calder Hall, commissioned in 1956; and the world's first and only supersonic commercial jet aircraft was Anglo-French, Concorde, in service in 1976. Yet these technical advances crippled us economically, because they were so uncommercial. The nuclear generation of electricity, for example, had lost 2.1 billion pounds by 1975 (2.1 billion pounds was a lot then); Concord had lost us, alone, 2.3 billion pounds by 1976; the Comet crashed and America now dominates computers. Had these vast sums of money not been wasted on research, we would now be a significantly richer country.

If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.

Did that myth at the heart of all the fairy tales her mother had told her, that part about happily ever after, ever really work out that way? How many children around the galaxy had been given that pretty picture, had swallowed it entire, only to grow up and find that reality was not so simple, not so beautiful, not so easy? The story didn't end when the brave princess killed the wicked queen and rescued the prince. That, she was learning, was the easy part. The hard part came when the guns were cleaned and reholstered, the bodies of the villains cremated, and the day-to-day business of life reared its ugly cobra's head and grinned down at you. When your prince had doubts you couldn't answer for him, when you had doubts he could only shrug at, that, that was the hard part. That was the part the stories hadn't addressed.

The Myth of the Angry White Male What has sprung up is a strange kind of thinking. . . . Americans are unhappy with their lot. They are feeling insecure - layoffs and corporate downsizing have made their future uncertain. Stirred up by talk radio, the theory goes, large numbers of formerly sensible people have embraced 'hate' and 'extremism.' Most of these, according to the media, are white guys. A Washington Post/ABC pre-election poll asked voters if they were angry 'about the way the federal government works.' Four out of five white males said no. 62 percent of white men voted for Republican House candidates (38 percent for Democrats in 1994, a ten-point increase from the 1990 midterm elections). But was this special to their gender? In 1994 white women voted for Republican House candidates by a 55 to 45 percent majority. Significantly, there isn't single article decrying 'angry white females.'

Regarding the "Poverty Equals Crime" Myth: Liberals state that many teenagers would rather sell crack for $100 an hour than to flip hamburgers for a minimum wage. Using the same liberal logic, you might think it would make more sense for the average middle-class worker to rob banks rather than work a forty-hour week? The reason why most people, rich and poor, do not commit crimes because they know it is wrong to do so.

Regarding the "Poverty Equals Crime" Myth: Liberals believe that crime is inextricably linked with poverty. In reality, most poor people never resort to crime, and some wealthy people commit evil acts to enrich themselves further. Harlem, East Los Angeles, the South side of Chicago are not the poorest communities in the United States. According to a new U.S. Bureau of the Census report, the poorest communities are Shannon County, South Dakota, followed by Starr, Texas, and Tunica, Mississippi. Have you ever heard of these residents rioting to protest their living conditions?

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.