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INTRODUCTION

The Splendid Prism of Myth

It is a late autumn evening. Lamplight is glinting off the bookshelves in the living room. I know every title by heart and exactly where my father placed each book. I see the way he caresses their bindings when he takes his favorite volumes off the shelf, ancient classics such as the Iliad, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and The Nibelungelied, as well as modern ones like Faust, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and The Great Gatsby. I hear his voice as he turns off the ballgame playing on the old black and white Philco television, pours himself a shot of J & B whiskey, and grabs his favorite edition of the Odyssey.

“We're going to read out loud together,” he insists, pausing dramatically. “As a family.”

When he hears me groan, his response echoes across the decades: “Someday you'll thank me, son.” I'm twelve. I have no idea what he's talking about. I want to watch Gunsmoke or the Tigers' game, but it's useless to argue. He's been stuck behind a desk all day at the Ford Glass House in Dearborn, Michigan, writing out a press release for some new sports car called the Mustang, and he wants to forget the corporate pressure that is bending his soul. He wants to enter a different world altogether. So we're going to read.

For the next few hours my father, mother, brother, sister, and I take turns reading a page apiece about the epic wanderings of the wily Greek hero, while my dad keeps a running commentary on why this family ritual is good for us. The night grows furtive; we fight to stay awake. My father can read till dawn and can't understand why we can't keep up with him. By eleven the others have trundled off to bed, and it's just the two of us. He pours another scotch for himself, sloshing it over crackling ice cubes. Then he winks at me and clinks his glass of whiskey against my cup of Vernor's ginger ale. Carefully, he reopens the book and turns to a new chapter about old heroes.

Did we read about the agony of Achilles or the courage of Hector that night? I don't remember the details, but something deep within me recalls our family voices merging together above page after page of fantastic voyages, magical transformations, and heartbreaking deaths on the battlements.

Slowly, over the course of that evening and many others like it, the nutrients of those books seeped into my bloodstream. Together, those stories have inspired my lifelong fascination with heroes and monsters, gods and goddesses, beauties and beasts, quests and explorations, distant lands and romantic adventures. That was a great gift I got from my father, but just as fine was the ritual he enforced as if he were a tribal elder.

After we completed each book on his classics list, my father found some way to bring it even more alive for us. When we finished reading Homer and Virgil, he drove us in the old Ford Falcon to the Detroit Art Museum so we could look at the Greek and Roman vases. Once we had turned the last page of Apollodorus’ rendering of Jason and the Argonauts, he insisted on seeing the movie version at the State Wayne, our hometown theater, and after gazing at a book about ancient Rome we ventured into Detroit to see Kirk Douglas lead the slave revolt in Spartacus. The first summer we spent in New York City we read Melville's Moby Dick, then sauntered down to the Village to see John Huston's movie version. The next day we drove out to New Bedford, Massachusetts, so we could experience the old seaport that had inspired the whaler-turned-author. There on the docks we ate chowder at an old clam shack, and then, with the creaking of the ship's mast in the wind to accompany us, as if to indelibly imprint the story in the wax of memory, we read out loud from my father's favorite passages.

My father, Stanley H. Cousineau, who worked in public relations for Ford Motor Company for thirty-three years, is seen here at the helm of Henry Ford's original Model T, at the Ford Rotunda, Dearborn, Michigan, 1957.

One of the most exciting results of my father's synesthetic teaching came about on the weekend we saw, at the Metropolitan Art Museum, some old Greek pottery and sculpture depicting the original Olympic athletes, followed by a game at Yankee Stadium. I vividly recall the frisson, the uncanny shiver down my back, from watching Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris glide through the same outfield that Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio had once roamed. It was the thrill of recognition combined with the fascination of mystery. When I mentioned to my dad that the way Mantle threw the ball home from deep center field reminded me of the statue of the old Greek javelin thrower I'd seen in the museum the day before, his eyebrows arched; he looked up from the newspaper he was glancing at, and muttered, “Hmm. You thought of that all by yourself?”

He didn't say he agreed or disagreed, but I could tell he was surprised that I had made a connection between the two. For a flickering moment he even seemed astonished that perhaps all the books and museums may have made a difference in my life.

I could tell he was proud from the smile he tried to hide behind his newspaper.

Of course, this is one of my own myths. I was raised on the knee of Homer, which is an Old World way to describe growing up on stories as old as stone and timeless as dreams. So I see myth everywhere, probably because I am looking for what my American Indian friends call “the long story,” the timeless aspect of everything I encounter. I know the usual places to look for it, such as in the splendor of classic literature or the wisdom stories of primal people. I've memorized a litany of luminous definitions and descriptions of myth, such as “a sacred narrative” “the collective wisdom,” “the group dream,” “other people's religion,” “the vehicle of profoundest metaphysical insights,” “cultural DNA,” even “a metaphor transparent to transcendence,” I am profoundly indebted to the great scholars of mythology who have rendered such complex material into pithy sayings, and I am often startled by the beauty of their theories about its origin and function.

But in the chapters following I want to explore the aspect of myth that most fascinates me: its “once and future” nature. Myths are stories that evoke the eternal because they explore the timeless concerns of human beings—birth, death, time, good and evil, creativity and destruction. Myth resembles the god Proteus in the Odyssey, a shape-shifting creature who knows the secret that the lost Greek sailors long to hear—the way home. But they must learn how to get a grip on him, if only for one slippery moment, so he might surrender his hidden wisdom.

This is what I call “mythic vision.” The colorful and soulful images that pervade myth allow us to step back from our experiences so that we might look closer at our personal situations and see if we can catch a glimpse of the bigger picture, the human condition. But this takes practice, much like a poet or a painter must commit to a life of deep attention and even reverence for the multitude of meaning around us. An artist friend of mine, Gregg Chadwick, calls this “pulling the moment,” a way of looking deeper into experiences that inspire him. In the writing classes I teach, I refer to this mystery as the difference between the “overstory,” which is the visible plot, and the “under-story,” which is the invisible movement of the soul of the main characters. What is mysterious about mythic stories is how they always meander back to the same place: your soul. In this sense myth is a living force, like the telluric powers that stream through the Earth. It is this mythic vision, looking for the “long story,” the timeless tale, that helps us approach the deep mysteries because it insists there is always more than meets the eye. In this sense the mythic vision helps us see the stories we really live by, rather than the one we like to think we are living, and moreover, decide if our myths are working for or against us. If we don't become aware of both our personal myths and the cultural myths that act upon us like gravitational forces, we risk being overpowered by them.

But I am caught on the horns of a dilemma. How do I tell the truth about the immense gifts of the mythic imagination, as well as describe its bittersweet influence on my life and the life of the world? What I never learned from my father or my college professors is that myth is Janus-faced: one face turned to the ancient world of brilliantly colorful gods and goddesses, heroes and monsters; the other face turned inward, personal, soulful.

This much I know: Unless we search for ways to become aware of the myths that are unfolding in our lives we run the risk of being controlled by them. As the maverick philosopher Sam Keen has written in Your Mythic Journey, “We need to reinvent them from time to time…. The stories we tell of our ourselves determine who we become, who we are, what we believe.”

In this book I will tell you things I myself have lived and learned about myth. No doubt, I am inspired by my father's ideas about making the world of books real for us, and by my friend and mentor Joseph Campbell's ardent beliefs that the myths are alive and well “on the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue,” and that “myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.” But in the following six chapters I explore how I've actually experienced and encountered myth: in books and museums, to be sure, but also in art, literature, movies, poetry, ballparks, playgrounds, cafés, computers, and cathedrals. In other words, this will be a mythopoetic approach to the modern world.

My other inspiration for this approach is the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who lived in Périgueux, the same small village in the Dordogne where my ancestor Jean-Baptiste Cousineau came from back in 1687. When I was there a few years ago exploring my roots, I picked up a volume of his sagacious Essays and, while reading it one afternoon in an outdoor café, discovered something that has stayed me with me ever since. Into the oak beam of the ceiling in his private library in the Dordogne, a few miles from the Lascaux caves where his ancestors carved and painted their own questions forty thousand years earlier, Montaigne carved the legendary words, “Que scais-je?”

“What do I know?” Montaigne asked himself. What do I really know, deep in my soul? What have I lived?

A few months later I returned to the Bay Area and immediately drove down to Big Sur, where I was scheduled to teach a course on “Myth, Dream, and the Movies,” at Esalen Institute. As part of my preparation the first evening there, I reviewed a book by Evan S. Connell, written at Big Sur years before, and felt the tingle of literary synchronicity when I stumbled across these words: “A man's words should have the feeling of being carved in oak.”

“But how did it all begin?” asks the Italian scholar Roberto Calasso in his mesmerizing study of Greek myths, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. There is no more probing question. Whether it is the tales of Zeus and Europa, the mystery rites at Eleusis, or the origins of eros and strife, virginity and rape, comedy and tragedy, heroes and cowards, fate and necessity, the seed moment is what makes everything else possible.

At the Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, there is a twelve-foot-long narrative collage by Henri Matisse entitled, “Les mille et une nuits” (The Thousand and One Nights.) In this magnificent piece depicting Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights, the artist has made a cutout of a white magic lamp and set it against a mauve background, its wisps of smoke turning into flowers that drift across the increasingly dark panels, denoting the passage of night. In the upper right-hand corner of the frieze is a tribute to Scheherazade's courage and cunning while telling her soul-saving stories during those mythic nights: “Elle vit apparaitre Ie matin Elle se tut dicretement” (“When she saw the first light of dawn, she fell discreetly silent”).

Mysteriously, discreet storytelling is at the heart of myth.

The Strange Melody

The word myth comes from the ancient Greek for “word,” “tale,” or “story.” The clue to its deeper meaning lies in the roots of the word—just as myths are, in a word, “root” stories. Myth derives from the Greek muthos, which means “to murmur with closed lips, to mutter, to moan.” The suggestion buried deep within the strange melody of this deceptively simple word is that there is great power and perhaps even secret knowledge in stories about the beginning of things. Among some cultures, such as the Tibeto-Burman, there is a belief that unless the origin of something is described one should not even talk about it. Telling a story about how things began, from babies to stars, rituals to customs, is a way of paying respect to its importance, its endurance, and in so doing every event and experience is endowed with a sacred nature.

This belief has its modern parallels with family reunions, religious ceremonies, or holidays. In the moments when we feel the atavistic urge to tell our origin stories—anecdotes about our ancestors, tales of how we met our spouses, the roots of hallowed customs at Easter, Halloween, Hanukkah, or Christmas—we participate in mythmaking. We experience the mythic vision when we thrill to the findings of distant signals from outer space that push back the origins of the universe another billion years, or become alternately disturbed and enthralled by the mapping of the human genome, or are ineffably troubled by the threat of a hydroelectric dam inundating the recently discovered paleolithic temple-caves in Portugal, whose paintings of leaping bulls and wizard-beast shamans go back more than fifty thousand years.

An obscure Scottish definition of myth reveals yet another layer of meaning: “to mark, to notice, to measure,” and “the marrow of a bone.” Out of the heather and highlands comes a helpful suggestion that myths are the stories that mark us deeply, notice the sacred dimensions, measure the depths of our souls, and cut to the marrow with their slicing images of the never-ending struggle between life and death.

In these associative ways of approaching the essence of myth, we begin to see its beauty and its power. While science revels in explaining how the world works, myth and poetry explain why. Its stories and images about creation, origins, animal powers, quests, death, and rebirth are attempts to give a sense of the movements of the soul's experience of the world. This is why myths are lies that tell the truth, unreal stories that “signify the inner meaning of life,” in Alan Watts' memorable phrase. Or as Elie Wiesel writes of Hasidic legends, “Some things happen that are not true, some don't happen that are.”

What the deterioration of the word myth—implying delusion, falsehood, or a farrago of nonsense—reveals is the ironic truth that many of our myths are lies in the sense that they no longer reveal the inward significance of things that happen in our lives. As religion journalist Don Lattin has written, “Myths are stories, and we find meaning in our lives through the stories we tell. Myths are not true or untrue—they're living or dead.”

In fact, the modern world is full of living mythology. There is a wonder-cabinet of curiosities, stories, images, icons, and presences. In the past few months alone I've noted in the pages of the New York Times references to the American Myth of Progress; myths of love and romance in the movies; the myth of killer sharks; the mythic aspirations of George Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy; the twisted myth of Frankenstein as mad gene-splicing scientist; the mythmaking machine of political campaigns; the crippling effects of family myths; the legendary outsider status of Marlon Brando and the Olympian influence of Wall Street insiders; the fabled genius of Leonardo da Vinci and the legendary curse on the Boston Red Sox; and a much-ballyhooed story of the pre-Christian nomadic discoveries of dinosaur bones in Asia centuries before Christ that inspired the headline, “Monster Myths Born of Fossils?” and, just the other day, “Evolution: Myth or Fact?”

Despite the brash claims of scientific materialists and religious moralists, myth still suffuses and enlivens everyday life. We've hardly banished or “progressed” past it. We've simply renamed the stories, both good and bad, the way the names of Hindu gods have changed through the centuries, though their powers remained intact, or the way ballplayers come and go from our favorite teams, while the team uniforms remain the same. The urge to go back to the beginning to understand ourselves, then tell the tale, thereby mythologizing our life and times, is irrepressible.

In this uncanny way it is thrilling to me to notice the way a few of the old stories I grew up on keep reappearing in modern guise in movie theaters, the sports pages, art galleries, or science magazines, often recalling William James’ whirligigging line, “There goes the same thing I saw again before.”

With the old telltale shiver of recognition, I recall a night back in the late 1980s when I found myself in an old café on Place Contrescarpe in Paris, reading an essay by Albert Camus. One line made my eyes sting with bittersweet recognition. “A man's work,” he wrote, “is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

This work is a series of ruminations on those stories and images that first opened my heart and continue to open it again and again each time I encounter myths that renew my faith in the mystery dimension of the world. Similarly, I hope these musings will inspire you to find the guiding images that first opened your own heart.

Stories That Make Life Endurable

By the time I took my first seminar, in 1979, with my future friend and mentor, the mythologist Joseph Campbell, I had long been under the spell of myth. My subsequent work with him gave me the courage of my convictions that the old stories are indeed alive, even “once and future,” as the English fabulist T. H. White regarded King Arthur. For centuries there has been a strong folk belief that Arthur never really died. Instead, he lives on in a remote cave in the mountains of Wales, waiting for the right moment to return and redeem the land. The Once and Future King is both a memorable book title about the medieval model for courage and chivalry and a wonderful description of the timeless power of mythic tales and mythic imagination.

Out of the galaxy of myths to choose from, the ones I explore in this book are the ones I know in oak, as Montaigne carved, the ones that haunt me. In these essays I explore myth in the way I've encountered it in the street, on the road, inside books, through dreams, by way of vigorous conversation, and presented in a montage style that blends story, anecdote, poetry, freeze frame, and musical segue.

The chapters that comprise this book emerge out of thirty years of reading myths and traveling the world over in search of their origins, as if drawn to them by magnetic forces. Their topics range from a meditation on myths about the riddle of time to the creative struggle, contemplations on the soul-guiding influence of mentors to reflections on the ancient lore about travel, a rhapsody on the theme of mythic cities, and, finally, a reverie on the mythic pull of sports.

Unfolding within each essay are many other themes recurring in myth—origins, time, play, place, rhythm, gods and heroes, love and death—discussed as eternal metaphors for the invisible webwork of these mighty forces, symbolic stories for the sacred energies that forge our fate and destiny.

The old storytellers knew this. They knew that every life is mythic, and that each of our myths, our sacred secret stories, is the outpouring of deep longing for meaning, which by some still unknown form of alchemy confers purpose to our lives. To those who go beyond appearances and seek the truth of their lives, everything is a symbol, everything a story, everything mythic, and the discovery of these things, back at the beginning, is an uncanny kind of coming home. This is the deep urge to seek out the living meaning of myth.

For psychologist Carl Jung, meaning was the secret opening into the realm of myth. According to his assistant, Aniela Jaffé, Jung believed that every attempt at meaning was a myth, in the original sense of the term: a sacred story explaining an entire world.

But can the currently accepted authorities on the way world works—science, media, technology—satisfy the human need for meaning?

I asked just this of the psychologist Rollo May at his home in Tiburon, California, the last time I saw him, shortly before his death in the spring of 1991. With a sadness in his voice that startled me, he said that for him the sign of the times was what he called the “nothingness,” the lack of meaning in their lives that drove so many of his clients into therapy. He described this as “the cry for myth,” the cry for a pattern. That cri de coeur, he determined, wasn't for the rose-hued glasses of nostalgia or escapism into romanticizing the past, but the cry for meaning, which he believed is the heart of true myth. Isn't there anywhere in modern life where people can glean that depth of meaning? I asked him.

“Great drama in theater, books or even movies,” he replied. “Works like Hamlet and MacBeth, The Great Gatsby or Waiting for Godot speak straight to the heart of people and we retain them in our memory as myth.” He looked out over San Francisco Bay to the city that shimmered in the fog like Frank L. Baum's Emerald City, and talked about loneliness as being the absurd price we are paying for the “myth of progress.”

“I've come to reluctantly believe Nietzsche was right,” he told me. “Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. As a matter of fact, after fifty years of practicing psychoanalysis I'm convinced that people go into therapy not so much for advice as for presence, to be in the presence of someone they trust and admire.”

I asked him if he believed that was what Joseph Campbell was alluding to when he said, “People are always talking about looking for the meaning of life, when what they're really looking for is a deep experience of life.”

“Yes, yes, but not only deep,” May responded. “Numinous.”

The Nod of the Gods

Our word numinous has its roots in the Latin numen, which means “to nod or command; the presence or revelation of divine power.” The psychologist Edwin Edinger illuminates the depths of meaning in the word when he writes, “An experience is numinous when it carries an excess of meaning or energy, transcending the capacity of the conscious personality to encompass or understand it. The individual is awed, overwhelmed, yet fascinated.”

Now this is what beguiles me most about the guiding images of mythology. In what the ancient Celts called the “thin places” of sacred sites, and during what the Buddhists call the “eternal now,” it is still possible to discover the mythic dimension, and with our senses alert to the possibility, we can witness the “nod of the gods” and delve deeper into the mystery of how stories move us from afar.

I recall Dr. May emphasizing to me how ironic the “cry for myth” was in our time, considering the plethora of myths all around us, if we only knew how to recognize them: The Myth of Paradise, the Golden Age, the Lone Pioneer, Rugged Individualism, the Age of Melancholy, the American Dream. He told me that a novel like The Great Gatsby is the secular myth of the solitary hero, an image of one of the culture's most sacred stories, the myth of constant self-invention and compulsive change, as well as its colossal shadow of loneliness. Gatsby's tragedy was mistaking his myth, the American Dream, for reality. The task of Nick, the narrator, at the end of the novel, is to find the myth that will illuminate some meaning in the absurd fate of his friend Gatsby. To Rollo May, this is everyone's task in the modern world, which is why he saw the novel as a modern myth. The hunger for myth, he said, is the hunger for community, and the hunger for community is the hunger for myth.

As he spoke about contemporary myths, I thought about Campbell's poetic notion that myths are masks of god through which shine the eternal truths, and the philosopher Philip Wheelwright's remark that the essence of myth is a “haunting awareness of transcendent forces peering through the cracks of the universe.”

Tentatively, I asked Dr. May, “What is missing from our way of thinking?”

“A touch of infinity,” he said softly, and stared out the window at the sailboats in the bay.

The Presence of Myth

Not long ago I was teaching a screenwriting class at San Francisco State University and chose to close one session with a clip from John Huston's thirty-seventh and final movie, The Dead, an adaptation of James Joyce's stirring short story. As I introduced the scene for my class I felt my heart pounding.

“The Dead is sometimes called the greatest short story in the English language,” I explained to the class. “It takes place on a single night in turn-of-the-century Dublin, on the Feast of the Epiphany. There is a ritual gathering of old friends and the slow revelation of a secret that exposes the truth about the marriage of the two main characters. That is the plot, the overstory. The understory is revealed in the slow accumulation of details: a piano recital, a poetry reading, an after-dinner speech, a haunting Irish ballad, a wife's confession, and the strange report that ‘snow was general all over of Ireland.’ In this sense the understory is the movement of soul in the lives of these characters, described by Joyce in his book, and Huston in his film, as the strange interdependence of the living and the dead.”

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 in Washington, D.C., and in Hollywood, but is far more significant when we notice it in the unfolding 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 who scattered flowers on the graves of those who had just died and told the first stories about what happens after death; or for me during my screening of The Dead when the spirits of all those who had ever died in my life were suddenly evoked. We can sense the mythosphere whenever an experience generates a deep longing in us for more lasting truths than the ephemeral ones of our own brief time. The mythic imagination, as Stephen Larsen has so beautifully written, “makes the soul talk,” and helps us transform the meandering path of our everyday life into a journey of soulmaking. The mythic vision gives us the courage to find personal meaning in the here and now, through which the past plunges into the future, and affords us the sense of being utterly alive.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back, ceaselessly into the past,” were the last words of the last novel F. Scott Fitzgerald, the past-haunted novelist, wrote before he himself was borne back along the plangent waters of time. We move back over the river of memory, seeking the stories and images that will fit the curve of our soul.

One night in the Paris of les années folles, the crazy years of the 1920s, a group of acolytes gathered around the Russian mystic Gurdjieff. All night they explored the loftiest of philosophical questions, wrestled with the darkest issues of existence. Near dawn one of them prepared to leave for home—but was stopped by the philosopher. “You can't go yet,” he explained, “we haven't figured out yet whether God exists.”

You can't go yet. We haven't figured out yet whether, when, or where myth exists—for you. We haven't found what—if anything—endures. We haven't discovered where our meaning lies. It is not diversion or cleverness or even answers that we are seeking; it is understanding. Understanding of the stories at the heart of our lives that reveal in a way nothing else can just how it is that we choose our gods, our heroes, our destinies.

When asked why, I can only answer elliptically.

The nothing is a craving after something.

We are here to deepen the mystery.

Phil Cousineau

North Beach, San Francisco

October 2000