by Tim J. Myers.
Indulge me in a little metaphor if you will, one with riddle-like qualities. Three dogs have discovered a fallen branch in the woods and, as dogs will, they’re fighting over it. They tussle and tug, each determined to make the branch its own. And the branch just keeps flowering, flowering.
The branch in my allegory is Story itself, in this case, narrative that transcends ordinary experience; my term for it is “transrealist story.” Such stories include elements of what’s traditionally called “fantasy,” a lovely but, it seems to me, inadequate word in this context. The first dog is what I call “exclusive rationalism,” the cult of reason that simply can’t see beyond itself. The second is postmodern relativism. The third is what the Greeks called mythos. And why does the branch, fallen from the Tree of Life, go on flowering even as it’s fought over? Because whether we understand or fail to understand transrealist story, we continue to fill our lives with it. The three dogs fight their philosophical fight—but the stories never end.
My new book of poetry, Nectar of Story, is the product of a lifetime of experience as writer, storyteller, and teacher. It features stories, mostly transrealist, and the poems they called out of me. In offering it I hope to play a part, however small, in the immense flow of Story down through the ages. But I couldn’t have written the book, couldn’t even be a genuine storyteller, if I hadn’t come to understand the nature of transrealist story—something many remain more or less blind to. Imagine my surprise when I found the subject also merging with crucial issues of epistemology and spirituality. There’s more at stake here than meets the eye.
Human culture is, and always has been, inundated with stories that ignore to whatever degree our daily “realistic” human experience, serving up imaginary creatures, suspension of physical laws, far-fetched plots, a tone and wondrous sheen that rarely exist in our quotidian world. And if this seems “primitive” or merely historical to you, consider the following blockbuster movies or movie franchises (movies being our current “oral tradition”): Terminator—Batman—Spiderman—Children of Men—Star Trek—Star Wars—Superman—Alien—Mad Max—E.T. —2001: A Space Odyssey—Back to the Future—Planet of the Apes—The Matrix—The X-Men—Men in Black (based directly on an urban legend)—The Fantastic Four—vampire & werewolves (with or without shirts)—even “zomromcom” (Shaun of the Dead)—The Hulk—the somewhat lame-but-bank-vault-busting Avengers series—repeat versions of Godzilla and/or King Kong (including that mythic and mammal-affirming flick of my childhood, King Kong vs. Godzilla)—and of course I’m only scratching the surface. Nor have I even mentioned the burgeoning presence of transrealism in literature, both serious and non, or the revival of oral storytelling.
Of course some dismiss all this as mere “entertainment,” or shallow new folklore for new peasants. But if you agree, you’ll also have to dismiss, for example, the Matter of Britain—the stories of the Bible—Greek myth and its continual expression in Greek drama, not to mention its enormous influence across the centuries—the immense narrative traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism—the Dreamtime of the Aboriginal Australians—the Norse myths—well, you get the picture.
Transrealist story is so essential to human life that we sometimes barely notice it, paying it no more heed than we do the air we breathe. And the comparison is apt. We not only love and crave such stories, we not only turn instinctively to them—we need them. And despite the more scientific and technological tenor of our age, we especially seem to need stories that create other worlds, as if another reality—and not only need them but a flood of them.
Something is going on here, something even the most dyed-in-the-wool scientistic type is forced to recognize as a significant phenomenon.
What’s also overlooked, often enough, is the extent to which we use transrealist story as a major way to organize our experience, discover our values, help us navigate our relationships and ourselves. And such stories are usually quite the opposite of “escapist,” the predictable criticism regularly leveled at them; they push us, in fact, towards a more honest confrontation with reality in all its intensity. Their very story-ness can help us face what’s hard to face. Does Spiderman save the subway-car full of people or his beloved MaryJane? This is the tension between the personal and the political. Consider Cain and Abel—who besides the only child hasn’t felt sibling rivalry in all its ego-based ugliness? Read the newspapers about Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in a lake; then remember Medea or La Llorona. Or think about Jesus and the crushing reality of death.
In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong is both eloquent and insightful on this power, insisting that it’s been with us from the beginning:
“Again, mythology is not escapist. The new Neolithic myths continued to force people to face up to the reality of death. They were not pastoral idylls, and the Mother Goddess was not a gentle, consoling deity, because agriculture was not experienced as a peaceful, contemplative occupation. It was a constant battle, a desperate struggle, against sterility, drought, famine and the violent forces of nature which were also manifestations of sacred power…Human reproduction was itself highly dangerous for mother and child…In the book of Genesis, the loss of the primordial paradisal state is experienced as a falling into agriculture…the man has to wrest a living from the soil by the sweat of his brow.”
There’s a simple way to say it: Stuff inside us wants to get out, become conscious, buried seeds in our inner darkness are seeking light. And if we don’t listen to our deeper voices, impulses, desires and fears, sooner or later we find ourselves in trouble. Armstrong again: “Mythology is the discourse we need in extremity. We have to be prepared to allow a myth to change us forever…The myth tells us what we have to do if we want to become a fully human person.”
And transrealist story plays another profound role too. As Joseph Campbell emphasizes, one of the prime functions of myth is to release the energies of the cosmos and give humanity access to those energies. As Armstrong puts it, “The idea was to tap into the timeless energies that supported human existence.”
Our era might be described as the Age of Mythic Ignorance. You can’t always trust the “experts”; some get it, some don’t. Stories, especially traditional transrealist stories, often present hard-won, carefully-considered wisdom out of humanity’s deepest experience. And yet in a high-school text from the 80’s, Max Herzberg writes:
“If one goes back in imagination to the dim beginnings of time, when true religion had not yet enlightened man, nor had science explained to him the causes and origins of things, one may watch the birth of what we call myths…mythmaking still fascinates modern writers. They may not believe, as the ancient myth makers did, in the tales they tell, but they are delighted with their creations, and their readers are delighted too.”
Ironically, Herzberg evokes imagination even as he presents an arrogant and truncated version of its full use. (And one might ask, by the way, just why everyone is still so delighted).
Contrast this with Edmund Farrell and Raymond Rodrigues et al in another high-school text, Myth, Mind and Moment:
“In fact, you will come to discover that myths represent a basic way of viewing life, and that this mythic viewpoint is very much a part of our modern world, and, though you may not have been aware of it, of the way you think about your life.”
This is mythos as the classical Greeks understood it. Many of us have been sold a bill of goods about the Classical Greeks, seeing them as a nation of hyper-rationalists. But as even a cursory exploration of Plato or the Eleusinian Mysteries will show, the Greeks valued—and disagreed about—other ways of knowing too. (If you need more evidence, pick up Dodds’ exhaustive scholarly work The Greeks and the Irrational).
I’m not an anti-rationalist; in fact, I shudder at the notion, and human history is sadly replete with horrific examples of what happens when we give ourselves to unchecked irrational impulses. But the same can be said of unchecked reason; Pol Pot was being “reasonable,” after all, when he decided to erase Cambodian culture and “start over,” to the tune of over two million corpses. Logos and mythos, the rational and the irrational, must work in balance. And wherever reason can’t be the ultimate authority, it’s best to keep it as a constant check on what you’re doing. “Beyond reason,” in most cases, shouldn’t mean “wholly without reason”—huge abuses can result, not to mention a relativistic free-for-all. Reason is powerful enough to have much to say even about the transreal and the transcendent. But it can’t, as the saying goes, give us “the whole story.”
So the three dogs tussle on. Exclusive rationalism tends to dismiss transrealist story as mere escapism or childish entertainment, rotten with wish-fulfillment and an inability to face reality. Postmodernism tends to see it merely as a system of cultural mediation, deconstructible and reflective only of false essentialism, and further asserts that “meta-narratives” are only means of imposing order on natural chaos and asserting hegemonic power. And in all of this, the power of imagination—that immense transrational force at the root not only of Story but of spirituality too—is undervalued, misunderstood, often summarily dismissed.
And then there’s mythos, with the ever-flowering branch in its teeth, the only one of the three, I think, who can actually get a grip on it. Mythos whispers to us that Barry Bonds, in allegedly using steroids, “sold his soul” for his greatest desire—then reminds us that we heard it all before in the story of Faust. Mythos murmurs that Mary Shelley’s fantasy is re-told in every person who becomes a “cosmetic Frankenstein” via plastic surgery and the like. Tolkein gives us the One Ring of Power and, consciously or unconsciously, insists that such an ultimate weapon—Hiroshima, anyone?—can only be destroyed if we go back to the original source: the burning depths of our own hearts, with their capacity for creation but also violence and hatred. Orpheus sings on, with the irresistible suggestion that love and art are capable—perhaps—of transcending matter and death.
Story: There at the heart of who we are, offering us so much—flowering and flowering.
END
Tim J. Myers’ Nectar of Story, a volume of stories and poems they inspired, won endorsements from Joseph Bruchac, poets Chase Twichell and Grace Cavalieri, and National Book Award finalist Ron Hansen. It’s available at http://www.timmyersstorysong.com/TM_Website/nectar_of_Story_by_Tim_Myers.html