heroes of the imagination

In response to the criticism of my last entry, it was not meant to be a well thought out essay as much as a rant or ramble just to get out some thoughts that had been building up in my head. With my eminent return to school in the fall I've found myself reading more and thinking more and needing to express my ideas, even if they are not yet coherent (certianly that last entry would not be a very good school paper!) nonetheless, feedback of any sort is always welcome. I've found that I can best articulate myself by "thinking outloud" and having others say, no, that's not it at all.

That said, on the subject of how children play, Sophie and I have been talking a lot about this recently, recalling from our own childhoods how we would take whatever movies or games we were exposed to and recreate them in our own play, rewriting plots of "labyrinth" or "star wars" in order to place ourselves into the action, which listening to descriptions of modern kids playing World of Warcraft seems like is a continuing tradition. How many times have you read a book and said, I really wish I could have been there? Despite the content, or perceived lack of content, in modern play, what remains essentially the same is the use of cultural plotlines in order to offer a jumping off point for the imagination. Whether reading old mythology or playing video games referencing that old material, a child might imagine themselves in that world, in any world that is more interesting than the one they daily live in, and if this kind of play is carried out through their lives could foster a deeper internal reality later accessible for artistic excavation. Indeed that is what I've found to be the case for myself. I watched Star Wars close on a hundred times growing up, and even though the specifics of the "arthurian space cowboy" aesthetic have lessened over the years, the deeper mythological themas have continued to hold importance in my psyche, even as a framing device for other stories. I imagine that Jung and Campbell were not trying to write out specific plot lines for others to follow exactly, but to find common themes that humanity has dealt with in its attempts to create coherent narratives over the centuries, which is what made Star Wars so successful in the first place (as well as the lasting resonance of punch and judy, or tom and jerry, or whichever two antagonistic figures are swinging sticks at each other on tv these days). At heart what is present is a conflict between forces, ideas, family, the need to find a place in the Universe or a sense of meaning to one's actions. It's not so much that today's media spectacles are meaningless in a world where things were once meaningful before, but that there has never been any meaning outside of what we have given to our experiences. The fin de secle writers in France decried a similar lack of meaning at the turn of the last century, which they addressed through various surreal, existential, or symbolic means, but each one an attempt to give personal meaning to modern life.

It is not surprising that superheroes and law-detectives have become the modern culture heroes, they are the figures that people can relate to, they are the legends that strive to rise above the Everyday and take real action in the world. Even if they don't exist, their possibility is enough for some even one kid in some small town to say, I could do that one day, I could do better than that. Or we see books coming out, on the other end of the spectrum from "the Da Vinci Code," where the heroes are intentionally irreal, mythical beings and monsters, who even more than the culture heroes address real human issues of the 21st century. Anne Carson's "Autobiography of Red" retells the myth of Herakles and Garyion, as if they were a homosexual couple going on vacation together, with all the monster's issues with being red, winged and unable to address the world except from behind the lens of a camera. Or Cary Doctorow's "Someone Comes to Town Someone Leaves Town" (which I heard about last night), whose main character is the son of a mountain and a washing machine and has a set of nesting dolls as brothers, and is trying to install free wireless in Toronto (Doctorow is a large proponent of Copy Left). Despite the element of the postmodern and absurd, such characters serve to focus the attention instead on a deeper psychology or perspective of what it is to feel different in an increasingly homogenized world. That in an increasingly wired existence where everyone has a voice, and every voice sounds about the same (like a large buzz from the vanishing bees), we are all still unique, and dealing with the same sense of existentiallity that earmarks such ancient mythic texts. Indeed, the classical gods ran around drunk and fucking each other more openly than the modern culture heroes do, and were worshiped for it.

The Vienna School vs. the Postmodern playground

Yesterday after packing the car to leave tomorrow i spent the afternoon reading Herbert Silberer's "Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts," which I picked up synchronistically at Caliban's the other day. Silberer was part of Freud and Jung's set in Vienna, and his work with alchemical symbolism predated and influenced Jung's own mounmental theories. The book is an intepretation of an old alchemical parable, called the Parabola, through Freudian dream interpretation and then integratively through alchemical and spiritual symbolism, showing how the analytical pshyco-sexual interpretations can not do justice to material that seeks at its heart to rise the spirit above the gross matter of the individual mind.

Perhaps more interesting than the material itself is the ease with which Silberer refers to a variety of world mythologies, and almost takes for granted that the readers (his intended audience being Freud's set), are already familiar with the process of deconstructing the texts of mythology and folk-lore as if they were the dreams of an individual, including referencing the quote that "dreams are private myths and myths collective dreams" to someone else other than Joseph Campbell and predating the esteemed mythologist! Despite the continuation of this process in Jung and Campbell's work, the idea of interpreting cultural texts as exemplery of the collective psyche seems to have fallen into disfavor (if it was ever in favor), and psychology chooses to focus more and more on the depths of the individual psyche, leaving cultural criticism to the literary critics. This work however points to an older use of this technique that predated psychoanalysis as the aim of the Vienna school, that collected stories, myths, folklore, whether by the Brother's Grimm or adventurous anthropologists, in order to deeper understand the human psyche on a whole. Indeed Freud could not have given such prominence to the Oedipal complex if he was only looking at one person's (or his own) psyche, and not the preponderence of such themes in world mythology surrounding the dismemberment of the parent/ god figures.

Perhaps the closest we come to such "collective psychology" today is found in movie or book reviews, and then only in mortification over the snarkiness and self-referentiallity of the post-modern paradigm (I was wholly disgusted by a recent review of Shrek the Third in the New york times, which could only comment on how the movie was a parable for the ongoing battle between Disney and Dreamworks). Even modern myth-makers like George Lucas, whose original Star Wars trilogy was an homage to his friendship with Joseph Campbell and based directly off Campbell's writing on the hero's journey, have fallen prey to cutesy characters and in-jokes designed solely to hook a young crowd that can not relate their experiences to a deeper mythological spectrum than pop-stars and punch-and-judy style pratfalls. Many of the children in Sophie's after-school program talked incessently of World of Warcraft, which though like Harry Potter and Narnia are fantastic in scope, and many older RPG video games like the Final Fantasy series referenced mythological names and themas, this kind of mythology is only a surface aesthetic, and further removes children from looking closer at the deeper themes and dramas of the original source material. Pretending you are a sword-swinging elf does not replicate the psychological depth implied by the heroic labours of Hercules (and not the Disney version) nor Theseus's struggle through the labyrinth, which are in themselves only metaphors for rising above the twisted and dangerous depths of the individual mind.