February 2, 2024
I was going to write a newsletter about the way, but instead find myself writing about not knowing the way. Northrop Frye has an essay called “The Journey as Metaphor” that, as usual, is a rich compendium of illustrations of the imagery of the journey, the way, the quest, in myth and literature. The heroes, they seem to have maps to guide them, like those colored lines in hospital floors that tell you “This way to cardiology,” this way to the knowledge of the heart. In fact, Joseph Campbell says that the heroes have one universal map, of which all individual maps are variations: he calls it the Monomyth. It may be externalized as a real map, which accounts for the enduring popularity of the plot convention of a map showing where the treasure is buried, as in Treasure Island. The Monopoly board is a map showing the goal, though it is still a question of how to get there. Or the map may be a kind of code of conduct, regulating behavior as the Three Laws of Robotics regulate Isaac Asimov’s robots, or, for that matter, the Ten Commandments, which are an epitome of the Law, the Torah.
But what we long for is an internal map, something that regulates our psychological functioning as our genetic makeup regulates our physical functioning. We envy animals their instincts. The birds do not need to invent or be taught how to build their nests or raise their young. Myths have been taken to be the equivalent of animal instinct. When Jung calls archetypes the form of the instincts, he means that certain deeply grounded images, and the mythical narratives they generate, provide us with a “way” based on the needs and desires of human nature, on what Northrop Frye calls primary concerns. Contrary to a common misconception, Jung is not saying anything deterministic. Unlike the animals, we have free will and can choose. But there is a human “way,” even if we are free to choose to follow it or reject it, and, if we choose to follow it, we have the choice of how.
The group of scholars called the Cambridge ritualists in the early 20th century went so far as to postulate that rituals came before myths: early cultures acted out certain rituals unthinkingly, out of deep impulse. The myths came later as explanations. It seems counterintuitive, and yet much human behavior is ritualized and unthinking. We do things in a time-honored “way” for no better reason than that’s how they’ve always been done, and when a certain ritual becomes obsolete and dies, some of us become nostalgic and a few people say it’s the end of civilization. On the screen of my laptop is a photo from the 1950’s of Market Avenue in downtown Canton, Ohio. It is lined with all of the old stores of my childhood: the 5 & 10’s like McCrory’s and Woolworth’s; the department stores like Sears, Grant’s, and Kobacker’s. When I was young, before malls, people traveled to the stores downtown to shop. It was a ritual much like that of the medieval market, and at Christmas the entire third floor of Kobacker’s was set up as a holiday wonderland for kids, with a train you could ride on, and a line of kids and parents waiting to see Santa Claus. The example may be merely sentimental, but the point is that ritual behavior grounds life on a level where we don’t think about it. Students still graduate from university wearing robes that come from the Middle Ages. Courtroom trials, inaugurations, weddings and funerals are all occasions of ritual. This newsletter will appear on Groundhog’s Day, that seasonal ritual of rebirth. Taken together, a society’s rituals constitute a “way” of life, providing comfort and stability.
I come from the 60’s, which reacted intensely against traditions and social conventions. The intellectual movements that dominated the next several decades, such as post-structuralism and postmodernism, were largely hostile to the idea of a common human nature and common values, and regarded myth as the instrument of collectivizing ideologies with authoritarian tendencies. I was a hippie, and identified myself with the forces of change, opposed to the conformism that valued, as “tradition,” what was often a mask for racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, imperialism, and sexual prudery. Yet intellectually I did not join the iconoclasts. Much of the literary and cultural theory of the time seemed to me no better than the Puritans of the 16th century who went around smashing the stained-glass windows of Catholic churches. My heroes became the two greatest theorists of myth, Frye and Jung. They offered a map, or, more accurately, the means of creating my own map. I did so, and wrote a whole book about it, complete with a map, a mandala diagram. I am enormously grateful for having been given this gift, which has immensely enriched a life lived largely in the imagination, and much of what I do—teaching, writing, newsletters, podcast—is an attempt to pass on some of the blessing.
However, when I speak of not knowing the way, I mean that my sense of a way, a journey, a quest that gives life meaning and purpose, is a private construct, a personal creation, though built with traditional materials. That is true of all modern mythology, which means all mythology since the Romantic period, though, as Jung points out in “The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man,” not everyone in the modern period has awakened to the crisis of the modern: millions still live, or try to live, in the traditional past. Nonetheless, modern mythology is a human imaginative creation, not a supernatural revelation, a fact that has two implications. First, creating one’s own myth, which can include adopting a congenial myth that one has discovered, demands thought, effort, and an educated imagination (though not necessarily a formally educated one). Faced with the task of trying to awaken and educate a mass population, not a few thinkers, starting with Plato, have lost faith in democracy and advocated rule by an elite. But none of them has solved the problem of how to watch the watchmen. Still, it must be admitted that modern pluralistic democracies have embarked upon an experiment whose outcome is still uncertain. At present, it is a race between the forces of imaginative awakening and an increasingly self-destructive herd instinct leading towards authoritarianism. Second, Joseph Campbell calls modern mythmaking “creative mythology,” and the idea of do-it-yourself customized mythology appeals to modern individualism. But any myth I have created begins as a fiction, in the sense that it is not guaranteed by any external authority. I know that I made it up, even if I am convinced that it is true. It only becomes real if I commit myself to it and live it as if it were real. This is Pascal’s wager: we gamble by committing ourselves to a myth, to a way. How far is it possible for large numbers of people to live with such a tentative attitude? It is the attitude of science, whose truths are always provisional. But the revision of scientific theory does not have an impact on people’s lives. Millions of people hunger for certainty, for absolutes, and it is unclear whether a more liberal and open-minded attitude can prevail.
Traditional mythology was embodied in a community unified by rituals, large and small. There were public ceremonies, but there was also a “way” of making an axe or a pot or a house. The whole of life was ritualized, as games are ritualized, with rules that often get quite intricate. We speak of “playing” games, and a society with a living mythology is informed by a sense of play, as the historian Johan Huizinga showed in his great book Homo Ludens (1938, 1949). Today, Indigenous societies are doing their best to hold on to their rituals and ceremonies, but in the main, modern society has been “demystified,” as the post-structuralists say. Nor is it just the radicals: Frye himself says that the traditional gods and their traditional cosmos are “projections.” As this conviction becomes more pervasive, life becomes “desacralized,” as Abraham Maslow puts it. There is a kind of fall from the sacred into the profane.
This is exactly the point at which those skeptical of mythology and myth criticism begin warning of a dangerous and illusory nostalgia, a desire for the good old mythic days that can easily turn into a reactionary and authoritarian ideology like Nazism, determined to arrest the progress of liberalism, skepticism, relativism, of anything modern, and, failing that, destroy the world in a paroxysm of nihilistic rage. That is in truth a grave danger, but such reactionary movements have little resemblance to genuine mythology, traditional or modern. Christian nationalism in the United States has nothing to do with actual Christianity: it is a cult, in which devotees submerge themselves psychically within the aura of a strongman figure who is, in Christian terms, the Antichrist, or at least the Beast that does his bidding. The energy that intoxicates such worshippers is not that of the sacred, but of the will to power.
There is certainly a danger in romanticizing some era of the past as one of “unified sensibility,” in T.S. Eliot’s phrase—an era when society “had it together,” to say the same thing colloquially, when there was a cultural unity based on a psychological unity, and life was therefore more meaningful than it is now, even if it lacked the blessings of modern technology. The most frequent candidate for an era that possessed a cultural unity based on a living mythology is the Middle Ages, which has been idealized from the beginning of the modern period, starting with the Romantics. Yet the Middle Ages was no unfallen time of wonder. The Church was corrupt, the Popes power players conducting wars and crusades, burning heretics; the average lifespan was shockingly brief, and plague wiped out nearly half of Europe in a way that makes our pandemic look like a minor event. And yet. And yet they built the great cathedrals, which are, unlike much “monumental architecture,” far more than monuments to a donor’s ego, to a ruler’s or an institution’s power. In literature, they left us medieval romance—the Arthurian romances, the Grail romances, and the Christian romance of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
It is easy enough to “problematize” this cultural inheritance, not so easy to deny that a sense of a sacred order and design persists despite the ideological corruptions that co-exist with it. It persisted in Western culture itself a long way into the Renaissance, pervading the music of Bach as a deeply spiritual sense of order. Shakespearean drama is secular, but the Elizabethan theatre, able to draw together an audience spanning the entire social order, from the royal court to the groundlings, has represented to later, more socially fractured ages, a kind of communal ritual no longer possible. Time after time, later poets tried to revive “poetic drama” because of what the form symbolizes: a society unified by communal ritual as presented by poets, who regain the public function they have long since lost. But they have largely failed, not for lack of talent but because cultural conditions prevent an audience unified by any common vision. Huge audiences today are unified only by the mindless collectivizing of mass entertainment. When occasionally a performer or group manages to give audiences a sense of meaningful communal experience beyond merely a good time, their performances attract followers for whom the performances have become quasi-religious rituals, as happened with the Grateful Dead. Right at the moment, there is just a touch of this, perhaps, in Taylor Swift’s concerts, and in the enthusiasm, in the old religious sense, of her Swifties.
Some of the Modernists before World War II were caught in bind: mass phenomena were repellent to them, yet they longed for cultural unity and communal art. A number of them coped by scaling down their ambition, pinning their hopes on a saving remnant or cultural elite. Yeats, for example, created a form of poetic drama modeled on the intense stylization of Japanese Noh drama, an aristocratic form contrasting with the popular kabuki theatre. The nearest Western equivalent would be the tragedies of Aeschylus, which resemble oratorios rather than later, more realistic drama. Needless to say, he imagined a “fit audience, though few.” Yeats also tried to convince himself that the Anglo-Irish aristocracy preserved something of the cultural order and stability progressively lost in the modern age of pluralistic democracy. In “A Prayer for My Daughter,” he wishes this:
And may her bridegroom bring her to a house Where all's accustomed, ceremonious; For arrogance and hatred are the wares Peddled in the thoroughfares. How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony's a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
That was a century ago. By now, the idealization of aristocracy is distinctly on the wane, in England confined to the extreme Tories who pushed through Brexit in order to revive the cultural unity of the British Empire, led by Boris Johnson, who boasts that he can quote Greek but who is in reality a vulgar, bad-haired Yahoo much like Donald Trump, whose idea of the ceremonious was illegal drunken parties during Covid lockdown.
I always thought “Prayer for My Daughter” was a rather silly poem, and wondered what Yeats’s daughter thought about it when she grew up. But lately I have found myself thinking longingly about what it would be like to live in a stable society. It was Yeats, but a much wiser Yeats, who wrote one of the definitive poems about modern times, “The Second Coming.” There is a reason its lines are so endlessly quoted: “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” The poem is over a century old, yet the pace of the anarchy seems only to be increasing. It is now over two centuries since all the traditional mythologies began to be doubted, since the realization began to spread that all externalized myths or belief systems are, as Frye said, projections of human desires and fears. It is what Nietzsche meant when he said “God is dead,” but what is dead is not just one god, or even all the gods, but the very possibility of gods “out there.” Those gods were the guarantors of an order that was at once cosmic and social, and that order gave meaning both to the exceptional quests of the heroes and to the accustomed, ceremonious phases of ordinary life. The decreation of projected mythology was a creative breakthrough of the imagination, a historical revelation, but it has been bought at a terrible cost. We are not, in fact, sure that we are going to survive it.
I find myself trying to imagine what it would feel like to live within a living myth, within a story and an order that was in place before I was born. Not just a power structure—we are all born into that, conditioned by it, constructed by it, in many ways determined by it. But rather into something humanly meaningful, a world of truth and beauty—and also a world that offered safety and permanence. Perhaps it only means that I am finally getting old and tired, but I do not think so. Since Yeats seems to be the presiding spirit of this newsletter, let me say that I feel as he felt in one of his poems of old age, “The Tower”:
Never had I more Excited passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible…
Yet at the same time, I feel battered, as if I have been out on the heath in the storm with King Lear. It is not merely personal—in fact, my life has been lucky—but everyone feels that it is all falling apart, especially since 2016, and really long before that. Indeed, as my historical perspective has deepened over the years, I have come to see that it is one long crisis in successive phases, which include two world wars and the Great Depression in my parents’ time, and in my time the Cold War and all the hot little wars, from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq; the civil rights movement and the reactionary violence it provoked; the 2008 meltdown, the ongoing Trump catastrophe, the pandemic, the crises of Ukraine and Gaza, the mass hysteria we call social media. The timeline could be extended in both directions: back to the Civil War, which in many ways we are still fighting, and forward to climate catastrophe which has succeeded the nuclear catastrophe we feared as children. We are a civilization in free fall after having lost our cultural grounding. Is it any wonder that people are turning to those who pretend to be strongmen? What is behind the rise of authoritarianism, in America but also all over the world, is terror whipped up to the intensity of near madness, and sometimes of madness outright. Millions of people feel they are on board the Titanic, and are screaming for lifeboats, screaming for safety. I do not blame them.
Tolkien’s long saga began with a hobbit sitting in peace and comfort in front of his burrow in the Shire, smoking his pipe. The story returns in the end to that location, but what has happened for hundreds of pages in between means that things will never be the same. As a medievalist, Tolkien also wrote the most famous essay on Beowulf. By chance, I just read a review of a fantasy novel that was inspired by Beowulf. It is one of many, but this one has an original twist. Instead of being set in his youth, when he was at the height of his powers and defeated Grendel and Grendel’s mother, it is set at the end of Beowulf’s life, when he is old and has reigned for 50 years, and has to defeat a dragon. He does so, but dies in the attempt. The narrator in Beowulf goes on for some time after his hero’s death, outlining what is likely to happen to his people, which in his opinion is most likely extinction. Old revenge feuds, kept suppressed by Beowulf’s power and wisdom, will flare up again, and the kingdom will eventually be obliterated. Beowulf is supposed to be a Christian poem, but scratch its surface and the old pagan sense of wyrd, of fatal destiny, immediately shines through. Salvational religion does not appear to be deeply rooted in the North, but then, it was not native to Greece either. The ending of the Iliad predicts the forthcoming end of Troy just as Beowulf foresees the end of the Geats. This is the old tragic worldview that preceded Christianity. Yeats tried to convince himself that he preferred it. Despite the approbation of some critics for “the tragic view of life,” which is supposedly more admirable than any vulgar optimism, Yeats’s attempts to espouse a tragic vision, celebrating “heroic violence” and flirting with the Irish fascist Black and Tans, are not, to put it mildly, his finest moments.
The view of fate or destiny, Northern wyrd, Greek moira, is the original conspiracy theory. That theory says that behind all the struggles in nature and in human life, behind even the gods who move human beings like chess pieces, there is an inscrutable something that rules even the gods. Yeats’s first great poetic influence was the Romantic poet Shelley, and it so happens that I am preparing to teach Prometheus Unbound, Shelley’s revisionist version of the myth of Prometheus. Prometheus is chained to a rock for defying Jupiter, the king of the gods, until he realizes, in Shelley’s version, that it is only his curse against Jupiter, in other words his hatred, that keeps Jupiter in existence. When he withdraws his curse, a mysterious figure called Demogorgon, not part of the traditional Prometheus story at all, rises, collects Jupiter right off his throne, and drags him kicking and screaming to the depths whence he arose, illustrating perfectly Frye’s assertion that the gods are only projections of the human imagination. Ostensibly, Prometheus Unbound argues that we could transform both human and natural life by altering the way we imagine them. The human weakness, exactly as the Bible says, is the tendency to idolatry, the tendency to project various figures, both divine and human, and then imagine that we are powerless to resist their commands.
But Shelley was young when he wrote Prometheus Unbound, and he had not yet fully processed the implications of his own vision. Jupiter is a figment—but what is Demogorgon? He ought to be an embodiment of the human imagination, like Blake’s Los, but he is not identified as such, coming off instead as a kind of fate or destiny that turns the cycle of time. Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry” is one of the great Romantic celebrations of the imagination, yet it is not the imagination but rather some inscrutable, inhuman power that saves the day in Prometheus Unbound. Shelley also has a troubled poem, “Mt. Blanc,” that senses some sublime, inscrutable power lurking behind the cold magnificence of that mountain in the Alps. The imagination in modern times may have withdrawn its projections of the gods, but it is not yet done, perhaps, with the decreative process. The gods have been reduced to mere bogeys, and anyone can be an atheist now, it’s easy. But with the demise of traditional mythology, with its divine and spiritual beings, its sacred cosmos, its changeless and endlessly renewing rituals, we are left with something other than a mere vacuum. Here I think the existentialists were wrong. What confronts us is not absurdity but paranoia, the sense of an ominous power lurking behind the scenes, puppeteering everything, including ourselves. I think the rather horrified fascination with Gnosticism in recent decades derives from the intuition that Gnosticism’s paranoid view that we live in a reality constructed and controlled by invisible evil powers is very similar to how many people see the world today. Yeats wrote a prose meditation called A Vision that sees both human personalities and human history as cycling between two tendencies that he calls primary and antithetical. The cycles, or gyres as he calls them, may the instruments of hidden powers, but mostly seem to run on automatic.
In Blake’s late, dark epic Jerusalem we find the same image of sinister wheels. They are on one level the machinery of the Industrial Revolution, the gears that grind up the little Tramp in Chaplin’s Modern Times, the automated successor to the mill at which Samson was enslaved. The machinery in the science fiction film Metropolis exhausts and destroys the workers that operate it. They are also the Starry Wheels of the mechanistic universe of Newtonian physics. And they are the mind considered as a mechanism that passively registers impressions from the senses upon its tabula rasa, then thinks about such data by a passive process of “association,” as in the psychology of Locke, predecessor of the computer models of the mind popular today in AI circles. In his early poetry, Blake, like Shelley, dramatized the defeat of tyranny by energy, the revolution against the frozen tyrant Urizen by the fiery-haired rebel Orc. But by Jerusalem he had realized it wasn’t that simple, and was looking for the power behind the throne, so to speak, trying to identify what is behind the curtain in Oz. I have often in these newsletters quoted Blake’s line about having to break the “mind-forg’d manacles.” The wheels are another version of the manacles, but whence this tendency to self-imprisonment? The argument here arrives at the central problem of the theory of the imagination, and it is parallel to the conundrum of the origin of evil in Christian theology. We are tempted to do evil because our nature has been corrupted by “original sin,” the sin of Adam and Evil. But why did Adam and Eve choose evil, since their nature was perfect and not yet corrupted? Why too did Lucifer, with an even more perfect nature, choose to revolt against God? The fact that there is no answer to the question of the origin of evil, in either theology or the theory of the imagination, means that we are bound by the assumptions of the question. The framework within which we are thinking prevents an answer, which means that the answer must lie outside the framework. “All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics,” says a character in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
This amounts to saying that the problem is with our map, which does not after all show us the way. In other words, what we are saying is that, to get beyond our present impasse, our present unguessable riddles, we must get lost, we must lose our way. If heroes are canny enough, this may be quite deliberate: Joseph Campbell loves to allude to the version of the Grail quest in which each knight rides randomly into the forest in a different direction. So much for maps. We can say, okay, we know that the knights will find later that they have been following the Monomyth after all, without knowing it, or at least that will be true of the one who actually finds the Grail. Maybe. But there is no guarantee of that, and yet you must work without a map, which is like working without a net. The less heroic and more realistic the questers, though, the more likely they are to follow the pattern of Dante, who in the famous opening lines of his poem realizes in mid-life that he has lost the way. Even if they have a goal in mind, quest heroes are wanderers, like Odysseus, like Aeneas, having to follow an uncertain path, or rather lack of path, to get there. The speaker in Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking” asks, “What is there to know?” The answer is implicit in the lines, “I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. / I learn by going where I have to go.” Note the word “have to go.” Life seems so random, yet at the same time in another way it seems inevitable, as if some deeper Self knows and compels.
Many quests follow the pattern of the nostos, or return: they are quests to return home, even if they have stopped at the Grail castle along the way. But to return home, you have to leave it, and leaving home means a painful loss. Many of my students can tell you that. But so could the immigrants who were the subject of a recent newsletter. To leave your home, your native land, your very language, the old way and the old ways—this takes a courage rightly called heroic, even if you were forced into leaving, as Aeneas was, after all, by the fall of Troy. Perhaps the immigrants had dreamed of living out their lives in the place where they were rooted, where they belonged, only to have to flee suddenly, carrying little or nothing of their old life with them. To lose your home is a terrible thing, as Indigenous people can tell us. Even if the migration was voluntary, following the dream of a new and better life, there is a sacrifice. My dreams are usually trivial and boring, but once in a while I have had what Jung called a “big dream,” and I had one recently that haunts me still. There was no plot, except in the sense of a plot of land: it was the vision of a house upon a windswept hill, the house being set partly into the top of the hill, like a hobbit’s burrow combined with Wuthering Heights. I knew in the dream that this was the same house I have dreamed of before, only from inside the house. The somber mood of the dream was perhaps the point. I had been thinking about whether I might, if my life’s circumstances changed due to a relationship, have to leave the house I live in, am deeply attached to, and had hoped to die in. Plans you have had all your life may never be realized. A beautiful love relationship turns problematic, seemingly out of nowhere. The marriage that should have been till death do us part ends in divorce or death, and we have lost the way.
It is true in creative work as well. Every new poem, every new book, begins by a mental process of feeling lost, of entering a mental space of blankness, of random thoughts that go nowhere, of doubt and anxiety. Every new creation begins with a sense of impending failure. And, in a sense, ends with it too. Dylan Thomas, when asked by an interviewer whether he felt any satisfaction when he completed a poem, said, “There is never any satisfaction. That is why I write another poem.” All his life, as we now know from his unpublished notebooks, Northrop Frye dreamed of writing a magnum opus he called his “ogdoad,” a set of 8 interlinked and interpenetrating works. There must be hundreds of pages of plans for this project, stretching over five decades, and many of his published works began as an attempt to write one of the ogdoad volumes, only to find it turning into something else. He never wrote the ogdoad. Between 1964 and 1972, he also made hundreds of pages of notes for what he called the Third Book, meaning the third major work after Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism. That book was never written: instead, he quarried part of the material to form the second half of Words with Power. In this, I am always reminded of what happened to his mentor Blake, who abandoned a whole epic called The Four Zoas but whose material formed the basis of the two late poems Milton and Jerusalem. In these cases, a new and different creation rose like a phoenix out of the ashes of a previous failure.
When we have no way, we must improvise. Improvisation in blues, rock, jazz, and bluegrass dramatizes the nature of the creative process as getting lost, abandoning the map and striking out on one’s own. There is usually a tune being improvised upon, which forms a ground and sets the parameters for the improvisation. The musician also has internalized any number of formulas or patterns that can be plugged in and played with. But when it comes time for the solo, the musician has to launch in, with no time to think or plan, and learn by going where they have to go. What happens is a combination of deep resources in the player’s musical imagination and chance. Yeats speaks of an interplay of choice and chance. Perhaps chance is just randomness, but perhaps also chance may be the manner in which a deeper “way” manifests itself. Methods of divination such as the I Ching and the Tarot cards are based on this idea, which is the opposite of the fatalistic paranoid conspiracy-theory sense of being determined by hidden ominous forces, perhaps an aspect of what Thomas Pynchon calls “creative paranoia” in Gravity’s Rainbow. It is hardly an abstruse notion: that out of chance encounters we find our life’s way is the commonest experience on earth. We meet someone by accident and fall in love. We happen upon a certain book and, at least for some of us, that determines the rest of our life.
In a modern world without a traditional mythology, where we have to create our own, with no reinforcement from the external world, no reassurance that we are following a time-honored path, we may have to redefine the religious virtues. In the spirit of creative paranoia, we may define faith as the trust that there is a way, even if, like Jesus, we may have to get lost in the desert in order to learn what it is. And if we follow it, we will find that it leads where the way has always led, to hope and love.