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.