Mythopoesis
MYTHOPOESIS
I. Prologue: Resurrecting the Dead
Mythopoesis begins with memory. We remember our deceased loved ones. They are not forgotten when they die. We continue to think about them. Our feelings for them exist in the present. We carry on a relationship with them in our minds. But there are no new experiences with them, so we can only rely on our memory to imagine what they would say or do, think or feel, if they were here now.
In 1960, C.S. Lewis lost his wife to cancer. Though they had only been married for four years, theirs was a deep and committed love. After her death, Lewis kept a journal which was later published as A Grief Observed. What is remarkable about this work of self-examination is his insight into the mental and emotional experience of loss. As he confronts his memories of his wife, he is aware of a distortion that is taking place, a distortion that could, if left unchecked, turn her into someone she was not. In his own words,
“I am thinking about her nearly always. Thinking of the H. facts – real words, looks, laughs, and actions of hers. But it is my own mind that selects and groups them. Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Founded on fact, no doubt. I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan’t). But won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me.”
Like the ancestors who grew to be gods, our deceased loved ones can metamorphose into the divinities of our personal mythology. This is the process that Lewis observed in himself. He was sixty-two years old when his wife died. Perhaps this accounts for his ability to observe rather than fully succumb to this process of mythopoesis. But what of a loss that occurs earlier in life?
II. History as Memory: Remembering and Forgetting
Just such a personal mythopoesis can be found in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Her father, Otto Plath, died when she was eight years old. Young Sylvia was very close to her father. In an interview, her mother, Aurelia Plath, spoke of her admiration for Otto – an entomologist who wrote a book on bumblebees. Once he told Sylvia that he could catch bees and they wouldn’t sting him. Then he demonstrated. He caught a bee in his hand, held it to her ear so she could hear it buzz, and then set it free. “She thought it was very wonderful,” Aurelia reminisced.
Throughout her life Sylvia Plath sought to impress her deceased father with her intellectual and artistic virtuosity. But the Otto Plath in her mind was not a real person, not the father she loved and lost in childhood. He was, to use Lewis’s words, an imaginary man, founded on fact, but a composition more and more Sylvia’s own. This mythic Otto Plath eventually became a torment to Sylvia. In “The Colossus,” she depicts him as an enormous shattered stone statue which she labors to repair.
“I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.”
Her masterful father, the man who wielded his godlike powers over nature, had grown larger than life and now, petrified into stone in her memory, the work of reconstructing him has become a wearisome chore.
“Scaling little ladders with
gluepots and pails of Lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow”
The poet herself is tiny in comparison to the god of her personal mythology. He offers both protection and oppression.
“Nights I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear”
She had served her god for thirty years, but at the expense of herself. Later in her poetry Sylvia would struggle to exorcise this mythic father from her life, but at this stage of the poetic process she is just recognizing its power over her.
III. Meaning in Retrospect: Patterns and Perceptions
A personal mythology consists of more than just representations of our deceased loved ones. Our entire life histories are subject to mythopoesis.
Memory is incomplete and fallible. Sometimes it is only in retrospect that events seem significant. Then we try to reconstruct – to re-member – our history. Significant events are interpreted in terms of what came before and what came after.
We experience ourselves as continuous over time. Past, present, and future are meaningful concepts to us. We are not merely “bundles of perception.” We naturally structure our experiences into narratives. A story develops – a way to understand ourselves. Life imitates art. We see patterns, themes, motifs. We make connections. We do literary analysis on our own lives. Meaning is discovered in retrospect.
Mythopoesis is an attempt to bring Order out of Chaos.
IV. Epilogue: The Art of Poetry
Blake says that visionaries have perceptions that are nonlogical, mind-expanding, and spiritual. These are moments of absolute reality. Once the trance is broken, it fades as dreams fade. The content of the vision may remain, but the feeling of its reality – the revelation – becomes a stale sterile fact.
Likewise Joseph Campbell describes “The Spontaneous Animism of Childhood” – moments in play when children put themselves into a trance. It is the borderland between the real and the dream worlds. Visionaries like Blake retain this childlike ability. But everyone has visionary experiences in the form of dreams.
The symbols in our dreams and visions are not poems. The poet must do the work of translating them into language. However, without this raw material there can be no mythology. Mythology is as deeply layered as the brains that bring it forth.
Symbols are not contrived. They occur spontaneously. Turning them into poetry is like solving a puzzle. The brain recognizes patterns in the symbols – naturally, since it was the generator of those symbols. Thus the feeling of recognition when one has solved the puzzle and translated it into poetry.