"The End of Living and the Beginning of Survival" (click for video)

I was texting Pablo about Joseph Campbell during a discussion of myth. I wanted to send him a link to some video of Campbell, so I looked up The Power of Myth. I found the link above. In it, a very intriguing phrase occurred in Chief Seattle's reply to the governor of Washington who had made an offer to buy their land. He asks what the future will be of the white buyers of the land. When their civilization overruns the land, it will be "the end of living and the beginning of survival."

This is an intriguing contrast. Of course, one has to survive in order to live. "To live" suggests a quality of life that makes survival worthwhile. But I think it suggests more. Somehow in Seattle's discussion, we see that it is the Indian way of survival that is living. In our culture, if we achieve a quality of life, it is something we enjoy after we have done our work to survive. The cleavage that we know, even when we have things wired, seems to be absent.

I don't think the Native Americans are the only civilization to have achieved a unity of survival and life. In his book Aristotle, John Hermann Randall, Jr. writes of "a life of nous, of thëoria, of intelligence, burning, immoderate, without bounds or limits" (Randall, Aristotle, p. 1). I don't sense a cleavage there, either, even if Aristotle doesn't want to be entangled in mundane concerns.

I feel a tragedy in our history at the same time that I feel a thankfulness. Our history in this country is better at many points than we should have been able to insist upon, yet still deeply disappionting at other points. What might our world have been had other courses been taken? If Chief Seattle's warning had been taken to heart in a culture that was burning with Aristotelean nous? The wilderness would have been made friendly to man through thëoria rather than asphalt.

To those who imagine I'm being ridiculously theoretical, I am not. Our earlier polity was much more libertarian, and the complaint in the freest states was that no decent road could be built. How much would the members of the Green party give to live in that world? Individual solutions to problems of space use and transportation would have been developed rather than our mechanized one-size-fits-all auto-centered planning. Ayn Rand argues that "Aristotle (via John Locke) was the philosophical father of the Constitution of the United States" (Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason, ed. by Leonard Piekoff, p. 12). Had his vision been allowed to rule more thoroughly, I think we might have had a wondrous culture of greater harmony with the wilderness and greater harmony among the inhabitants. Perhaps a world where there were fewer roads, but we had gotten further in space travel. I like to picture that world, anyway.

It is when we are entangled in mere survival, and in the pursuit of survival we feel no harmony between our faculties and our world, that we feel the curse.

Men and Myth

The mythopoeic men's movement was created when Robert Bly discovered that telling fairy stories to men could help them to consider the issues of their lives on a deeper level than was otherwise possible. A mythic vocabulary is more easily learned than a technical one, but there are other benefits to this approach as well. The story of Iron John was the first story Bly used, and became the center of his bestselling book of the same title.

I am quite thankful for how I was introduced to this story. A week before this happened, an older friend of mine had been reading the book Iron John and either read or recounted the story from chapter one to Dr. Rod Rosenbladt. I went to Coco's with Dr. Rosenbladt and he recounted the story and offered some personal commentary. Well, I was hooked. To have my spiritual father and mentor tell this story to me at a critical time gave it a resonance that I'm sure went beyond what a typical reader would have found. And I think a typical reader would have found much to resonate with.

As time has gone on since then, I have seen two things happen. One was that Bly's men's movement got eclipsed for a while in the media by the Christian Men's movement. I had no interest in the latter. I was involved in Christians United for Reformation (CURE), a group of men who were involved together in Theology. I didn't need to add what appeared to be a bunch of pseudoevents from Promise Keeper's into my life. Don't get me wrong. I think male connection is such a powerful thing that many may have benefitted greatly from their activities. But I think the space they created for that mattered much more than the content. My life had a lot of space already for the kinds of connetions they fostered. In addition to being eclispsed in the media by the Christian men's movement, Bly's movement was also put under scrutiny for being either a reaction to the Woman's Movement, which it was not, or for being just a bunch of guys running through the woods beating drums. Well, the latter sounds like it couldn't be a bad idea. But from what I saw of the gatherings in the Bill Moyers special, the use of myth was a deeper part of what was done. And it is the mythic that I think needs greater attention. This was not just a bunch of overcivilized men going tribal, as feminists feared.

The mythic is a funny dimension of human culture to try to characterize. In the past, it was a much greater part of culture. In our own time, it would be easy to say that it had fallen on hard times. Except that it is much more widely recognized now than, say, fifty years ago. Great mythographers have exposed generations to the lost power of myth. There was James Frazer in the nineteenth century, W.B. Yeats in the early twentieth, J.R.R. Tolkien at mid century, and Joseph Campbell a little later. My own generation grew up in the shadow of Narnia, Middle Earth, and Luke Skywalker. This was a far cry from the mundane concerns of generations before us.

The mythic has greater popular exposure. But what do we do with it? We enjoy the myths as stories to be sure. Perhaps we see that they tell us about our lives to a degree. Sam and Frodo fight evil as we fight it. Their journey is much like ours. Their journey tells us what we can expect, even in cubicleland. But the description, even where it is true, is a different kind of description from that of Dilbert or Office Space. Comic treatments such as those are meant to deflate the importance of the bosses. Mythic treatments magnify the stakes. We know this much.

But the mythic has another kind of hold on consciousness. Mythic time is not like ordinary time. We feel like we're entering another realm when we go into it. Bly knows this. He makes use of sacred space and sacred time. He doesn't think that these dimensions are the sole property of religion. And current religious practice suggests this is abandoned property even if it belonged to religion. And when we enter this realm, we find that we are broader beings than we imagined.

One writer who gets this is G.K. Chesterton. His piece "Christmas and the Aesthetes" is must reading. (And it's a good time of year to do so.) It can be found in his book Heretics, which is not so much about formal heresies, as much as modern people whose ideas fall short of Christianity. Unlike an ancient apologist, Chesterton tells you all the places that these writers get things right, and expresses gratitude for that fact. (Generally, each heretic is a sage.) Chesterton explains that "A feeling touching the nature of things does not only make men feel that there are certain proper things to say; it makes them feel that there are certain proper things to do. The more agreeable of these consist of dancing, building temples, and shouting very loud; the less agreeable, of wearing green carnations and burning other philosophers alive." And I think that mythic work will take us to where we feel more of a need to be what we are.

Mythic work invovles rituals that give us a sense of what we are on a gut level. Bly once described one where the men were buried in the ground with only their heads sticking out. It gave them a certain sense of the earth.

I am drawn to this kind of thing. When I became Lutheran I found that having the Lord's Supper at the center of the service changed how I perceived all kinds of things. It was a reality whose centrality I had missed growing up. No amount of teaching from the pulpit could ever have registered on the same level as what happened when I would go forward with the congregation to receive grace.

But I think there are secular uses of this as well. In fact, I think we could speak of the mythic nature of much of modern life. The "myth" of schooling for one. John Taylor Gatto tells us of the "hidden curriculum" of compulsory schooling. The kinds of things students unwittingly learn as they go to school day-after-day, year-after-year, no matter what this or that teacher might teach under this or that stated curriculum. (For instance, that nothing is ever worth spending more than an hour on.) We need to be aware of these things.

When Heroes Fall

More often than not Hollywood through its movies gives us an unrealistic opinion of what a true hero is. Yet, very often real life gives us a glimpse into what makes a man a true hero. James Kim is one of these real life heroes.

Kim left his wife and children at the family's Saab station wagon, which was stuck in the snow deep in the middle of the Oregon wilderness, to find help. He walked 16 miles before succumbing to hypothermia. Surely we could second guess his actions and criticize him for not being properly prepared, but that doesn't diminish the heroism of this man. Clearly driven by love he pushed himself through what must have been a dark curtain of hopelessness until his body could no longer keep up with his heart. Our prayers should go out for his widow and his now fatherless children. Godspeed, James, you died a hero.

Here is a link to a James Kim CNet video. Take a look to put a voice with the story:

http://news.com.com/2009-12-6141617.html

William Stafford's Choosing a Dog (click for audio)

Above is a link to an audio piece on choosing a dog. Quite wonderful. This piece is humorous, and gets across dogs in their doggy glory very well.