Apocalyptic Imaginary: The Best of Modern Mythology 2011

Chapter 1

Myth in the Narrative

James Curcio

I’ve had many discussions with people over the past few years about why myth is important. Many of these come down to a misunderstanding about what the word myth means, so what could have been an interesting discussion about politics, permaculture, or even literature quickly deteriorates into a debate on 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. 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 all other disciplines 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 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 coffee shop 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.

You see, there are different scales on which myth can be approached.

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 giving this example of personal myth when asked this question, because it is something so many of us 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 are 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, well, quite often, things go wrong. Such as your partner doing something to lose your trust in them, however you define that. Let's say, for now that they run off and join the circus, or if you prefer the more likely scenario , let us say that they get wasted and bang some trash at a bar. Either way, your perfect story has just been re-written by some hack. Unfortunately that hack was your partner. Anyway...

For whatever the reason, the story twists.

Maybe the narrative is strong enough to stick to the story after the two of you fight for a while about plot structure. But if not, if the characters of our stories become too incompatible, now what? Now you have your arc, and they have theirs. Do they continue to work as a cohesive form, creating a specific story- No.

This is your new myth. To hell with the old book. Besides, some characters have to die, figuratively speaking.

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. 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.

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.

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 specialized for intelligent behavior and hypothesis formation. It also possesses the unique capacity to interpret - that is, narrate - behaviors and emotional states initiated by either hemisphere. Not surprisingly, the left hemisphere is also the language hemisphere, with specialized cortical regions for producing, interpreting and understanding speech. It is also the hemisphere that produces narratives.

Narratives are, once they've become embedded or repeated, no different from myths. There may be some sense in considering myth to be a narrative that has been repeated, and solidified with belief. If you find yourself confused by our use of the words myth or mythic, try the word narrative instead. There are slightly different connotations. Myth means by mouth, it is that which is spread. A narrative feels somehow less grandiose. But those connotations are aesthetic—rather than intrinsic.

So, understanding that personal, national, cultural, spiritual myths all operate similarly at different scales, at least structurally, we can see that 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 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 life as we look at fictional stories. This is not science, nor is it meant to replace science. It is instead meant to shed light on the range of epistemological, ontological, and psychological realities that quite simply cannot be parsed by the scientific method. That doesn’t make these realities less legitimate. Phenomena require no proof on their own ground—after all, analytic logic rests upon tautology—but when we seek verification, repetition or explanation, then myth comes into play, whether or not the model it presents creates a satisfactory representation of that phenomenon or not. This draws a line between the method of science and most everything else, which we discussed in The Immanence of Myth and look at again with new eyes.

The principal idea at work here is an imagined contention between science and the humanities, and that one is more valid than the other. As I expressed in what I hope was a more lucid way in Is Myth Dead?, this contention is a specious one, although the distinction is not. The success of the world-views supported by scientific discovery have been so complete that the common understanding of science has invalidated all that is seen to be outside the scope of scientific scrutiny. Again, the core of modern myth is the absence of myth. A purely scientific attempt at experiencing or interpreting literature would be as pointless as using Lord Byron to get us to the moon, if maybe not quite as dangerous. (Don't let him put the bear on board.)

Modern mythology is not a strictly philosophical project. However, we see philosophy itself as a form of meta-literature, which replaces personal narrative with generalized abstraction. We build this assumption upon the points explored in The Immanence of Myth, though for our purposes here we may be able to borrow from Mauthner's philosophy as paraphrased in Wittgenstein's Vienna,

The idea that there exists such a thing as logic, in the sense of something universal and immanent in all languages, is another illegitimate reification. Belief in such a thing, even though it appears to comprise a body of knowledge, is superstition. Everything about thinking is psychological, Mauthner insists; only the pattern [Schema] of our thinking is logical. However, the pattern of man's thinking—and of his speaking, which is the same thing—is determined by, and reciprocally determines, the culture in which he lives, as both develop simultaneously; it is not something pre-existing which can be derived from immutable laws of thought. Wittgenstein's Vienna, Janik and Toulmin.

This is a big idea, and deserves adequate consideration. Despite appearances, there is a point in this endeavor beyond philosophy or sophistry, but the point may not itself be what it seems. Regardless, this makes the project of philosophy and modern mythology virtually indistinguishable except for in this regard, where the former uses rigor and the latter additionally embraces the truth of the single instance, the irreducible, the ephemeral, rather than that which has been generalized by a rational process.

There is a natural desire to draw strict boundaries between narrative, myth, as well as the mythologization process itself, and philosophy. However, we have worked hard to avoid that desire, instead drawing the contours out slowly and through extensive demonstration that you can find in The Immanence of Myth and this work.

The distinction between personal myth and all other forms of myth remains a misleading one.

Precisely because the cosmos can be understood and interpreted only through the human spirit (ed: so far as we are concerned) hence through subjectivity, what would seem to be the purely subjective content of mythology has at the same time a cosmic significance. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Vol 2.

This is drawn from Schelling's observations about myth. Indeed, some academics might recognize in our work on immanent mythology a philosophical underpinning that seems derived from applying so-called postmodern critique to Schelling's idealism. This is not inaccurate, though I think it pigeonholes the scope of this project more than I would like. That philosophical position has only arrived through years of working directly with these ideas in practice, (producing and reflecting on the production of media), rather than by prescriptive design.

[Myth] is objective insofar as it is recognized as one of the determining factors by which consciousness frees itself from passive captivity in sensory impressions and creates a world of its own in accordance with spiritual [or psychological] principle. If we formulate the question in this sense, the unreality of the mythic world can no longer be said to argue against its significance and truth. The mythical world is and remains a world of mere representations–but in its content, its mere material, the world of knowledge is nothing else. We arrive at the scientific concept of nature not by apprehending its absolute archetype, the transcendent object behind our representations, but by discovering in them and through them the rule determining their order and sequence. The representation gains objective character for us when we divest it of its accidents and demonstrate in it a universal, objectively necessary law. Likewise, in connection with myth, we can only raise the question of objectivity in the sense of inquiring whether it discloses an immanent rule, a characteristic necessity. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms vol 2.

This sums up the essential position of immanent myth from which we can move forward without further concern about objective truth.

I hope this re-appraisal of myth 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... what it becomes, is as much up to you as it is to me.

James Curcio is a transmedia freak of nature coming to a screen near you.

He has produced a diverse range of projects including collaborative novels and graphic novels with associated immersive media/marketing campaigns, albums, unorthodox podcast and audiobook series, web magazines and group blogs, and interactive CDs. Much of this work is distinguished by its signature aesthetic and irreverent style, and has been published by a number of independent presses.

www.jamescurcio.com

Chapter 2

An Apocalyptic Vision

James Curcio

When I was sixteen, I started writing what became my first novel, Join My Cult! (New Falcon Press). I didn’t realize at the time, but it was my first attempt at rendering some of my personal mythology:

...Yet I was finding, to my amazement, that I was not alone in these woods, or in my need to find a myth with real, personal value. Alone all of my life, estranged from any sense of greater community, I was overjoyed by this. But I really had no idea how to proceed with it, or how to broadcast this message to all of these wanderers, winding their own paths to a center, an end which is still unknown to us all. What we are looking at here is an apocalypse. Spiritual, cultural apocalypse is much more subtle than mushroom clouds, fallout, and radiation burns. People can deny it. No statistics can prove it. The only evidence we have is a feeling of profound loss, and hope for a future that does not reduce the qualitative values of life to quantities and for companions to share these stories with so that they can have value, and pass on to our children in the next world. Reflecting back on this, I believe many in my generation have been so called. Not because we merely want to be important, but because we know that we are coming down to the wire.

If there is one thread that seems to tie together the articles we’ve written over the past year, it is the theme of apocalypse as personal revelation. This is not merely a collection of pessimistic fear-mongering. Looking back now, I can see this theme clearly, passing from one mouth to the next. In different ways, we all voice the necessity of cooperation and community on a personal and very real level, juxtaposed against the backdrop of a dehumanizing corporate and consumer culture. Much of this book is an attempt to examine the imaginary dimensions revealed through apocalypse, thus the title.

We speak of apocalypse rather commonly these days, it seems to be a part of the zeitgeist of this age. Yet many seem to have only a cursory or rather simplistic idea of what the reality—and the concepts we use to encapsulate that reality—entail. Let me help clarify.

The destructive force the precedes apocalypse does one of two things: the rupture either creates an ouroborous, so that the currents of the past can re-shunt into the future, or it provides a true break in which an entirely new process can begin. A galaxy can whirl about itself in seeming harmony for billions of years, and then collide with another in such a way that the stars therein don't collide, but the two galaxies mutually annihilate, sending some stars whirling off into the void while others remain to start a new show. This is in our own distant future, as Andromeda and the Milky Way approach their death-dance.

The emphasis on destruction seems to be distracting to most people. It's the same with Shiva—how easily people forget the all be-getter part when they hear all destroyer. They lose the actual sense of the symbol, much as myth becomes simply an untrue idea, apocalypse becomes merely the end of everything. Not so!

The apocalypse is not in the explosion, the rupture, it is not the initial catastrophe but rather what exists in the silence afterwards. Apocalypse is that revelation. Another example might be seen in the times during our