Mythology

In an old episode of "Doctor Who," the Doctor and Rose meet Charles Dickens, who aids them in investigating the mysterious gas creatures who call themselves the Gelf. While the eminent author is at first incredibly skeptical, having sealed and stamped his understanding of the world, he ultimately saves the time-traveling duo when he recognizes a way to defeat the surprisingly dangerous Gelf in the nick of time. He walks off into the snowy Christmas evening with a spring in his step and a laugh on his tongue, because he has had a revelation. In the words of Hamlet, chiding Horation:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Hamlet has ghosts, Dickens has Gelf, and... what do we have? There is something intensely appealing about Hamlet's statement, something that goes deeper than a belief in any one bit of supernatural phenomena. I think G. K. Chesterton touches on a similar vein in his Orthodoxy, when he says:

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

With the reign of the skeptics, nobody is permitted to have anything less than absolute certainty about any given topic. Hence, I sit through my Western Myths class silent on the topic of my faith, because I have no fantastic defense to state when students laugh over the apparent absurdity of the parallels between Mithras and Jesus. Or when the teacher suggests by a wry tone that you would be foolish to maintain belief in the validity of the Bible when many of its foundational myths are obvious descendants of Babylonion and Sumerian mythology. Things that I have always treasured as sacred and beautiful are desecrated and spat on, but I have no words.

Among the many attributes that humility embraces, there is one that I appreciate above all others: mystery. Naturalism reduces all things to that which we can empirically observe. There is nothing more. But oh, what a universe is missing from that worldview! If it deserves that title, then it is a speck-of-dust world floating in a far greater cosmos that cannot indeed be "dreamt of in [that] philosophy." I think I should infinitely prefer someone who acts on superstitious beliefs than someone who mocks such people. At least the former understands that causation may be beyond our natural ability to see.

I don't think anyone can seriously and truthfully call our culture sexually repressed. Maybe the norm is not the absurd portrait that we are treated to in bursts from Slut Walks to American Apparel advertisements, but it is hard to deny that we are anything but repressed. And yet, sex loses its interest. So we must be more open, even less restrained? Until what end? What unhappy and vigorous appetite is this that grows as if its sustenance were Subtraction Stew? 

But what if there were more to the interaction than biology? What if we might just possibly be more than an evolved, pre-determined chain of physiological demands and body chemistry? What if there really were something so wildly fantastic about sex that it deserves to be treasured rather than set loose? No one without a grasp of mystery could believe it.

That is what I want when I sit in my Myths class. I want to burst with the beauty of something beyond our claims to the acknowledgment that human theories are the better uncertainty. I want to believe that there just might be something bigger than my tiny belief system can encompass, something that reason dares not prove or disprove, that science cannot substantiate or dismiss. I want to embrace the stories of St. Thomas levitating, St. Denis the cephalophore, and modern marvels of similar nature. True, all I have heard are stories. I'm not likely to run into someone who has a heart attack and resurrects at a prayer to heaven. But I can and do believe that it could happen.

For now, the handful of beliefs that I clasp in my hands are like the walls of house. I cannot see well beyond those walls into the greater world beyond, but they are something and they are real. Though I see through a glass darkly, someday I shall see face to face. And oh, what a glorious day that shall be.

The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them ... The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid ... The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. {The Maniac, Orthodoxy, Chesterton}

Writer's Block

If you couldn't tell from the massive chronological gaps that tend to fall between my posts and kind of resemble the ever-elusive fossil records of missing links, I am not exactly immune to writer's block. Okay, well, in that case it's more of a lack of ignition fuel rather than a failure to finish a thought, but what's the difference?

Right now, I'm trying to write a rough draft of a creatively formatted argumentative essay. First things first, I am not into creative arguments. I like to say what I have to say and own my words. The whole idea of giving my thoughts to a fictional character smacks too closely of ventriloquism, and I am not a ventriloquist. I can't do the "speaking with my mouth shut" thing. Plus, it takes twice the brain power because I have to attend to the balance of two simultaneous threads. One is the meat of my argument and one is the personality of my character. Is it obviously distinct? Appropriately gruff? Can you stomach his argument even though he's a bit of a snob? I like a world in which the quality of an idea determines its ability to be received rather than the character of its proponent, but the Sophists demonstrated that my world is an idealistic fantasy rather than a likelihood.

So second things second, I am stuck. Calling everybody stupid is not a good way to make them like your character. And I have realized that my understanding of the past is extremely biased because the people who have been elected to represent various eras are, generally, those who were more cultured. Writing was not a middle class profession in the 1700s because they barely had a middle class. So how can I judge the present state of education in classical knowledge when the reality is that it probably hasn't changed that much? Sure, C.S. Lewis can toss out references in French and Latin without bothering to translate them in his Allegory of Love, but chances are decent that he had a far better education than most young men of his time, and he was an academician writing to other academicians so he could afford to assume that his audience would understand.

Where does that leave me? With the startling revelation that my topic is crap. Baseless, structureless crap that I am forcing a misshapen, ill-formed character to surround himself with so that I can write an argumentative essay. No wonder I have writer's block. It was just a matter of time.

Whiff

I smelled my past this afternoon,
A lost thought that floated in
Through my open car window.
Sometimes I get the impression
that I'm growing older.
On days like today, though,
Days stained with cut grass musk,
I know it's what I've always done.
Like a song stuck in someone's head:
Doomed to remember myself
Until at last I forget.

Narrative

Sometimes I think we should change the way we analyze plot structure. It seems overly simplistic to dwell on actions and descriptions; after all, people are more than what they do. Somehow, to speak of a story in terms of expositionrisingactionclimaxdenouementconclusion feels cold, calculating, empty. As if a story were only the sum of its parts and no more than that. I guess all I'm saying is that

Every story is a timeline of brokenness, and every ending takes a stab at hope.

Eyelashes

There is something innocently sweet about an eyelash when it has lost its roots. I hate when I have to pick off all the strands of hair that I've left on my pillowcase after a good night's sleep, but I can't begrudge the delicate arc of a lost eyelash. They're funny like that; even when they're not surrounding your eyes, they make a statement.

I just watched Dirty Dancing for the first time. I know, I'm almost twenty-one and, guess what, I've never even seen Grease, which is probably a crime against humanity or at least against culture. I don't think I can really recommend the movie, to be quite honest, and there are a lot of tangents I could go down, but I think one of the significant reasons why that movie works is because it has a lot of hope. Sure, it's a fairly standard bildungsroman, with Baby as the wide-eyed idealist pitted against the jaded but alluring society of the camp staff with their gritty tragedies and local horrors that can't be cushioned against like Vietnam and war. She is quickly drawn in by her attraction to Johnny and the rest is history, except it kind of isn't because movies aren't like real life and instead of letting herself be changed completely by the prevailing sentiments, she maintains her optimism and manages to not only be changed but also to change others.

It is easy to feel tired when everyone around you is something else entirely. I have a dear friend who is so unlike anyone I've ever known. She is tenacious, determined, funny, and intelligent, and she stands out because she is swimming against the current instead of letting it take her where it will. Sometimes she doesn't get it right, and she's humble enough to know when, so that mostly she tells me about her failures. But I like knowing that she's alive being stubbornly who she is (and she would probably hate that I'm describing her that way). She's like my Baby because she gives me hope.

You see, an eyelash is an eyelash wherever it is. It's not entirely out of place on my pillowcase, but if I found it on, say, a brick: its rough surroundings would only highlight its delicacy. Baby means something because she is who she is wherever she is. My friend means something because she doesn't want to change in any of the easy ways, so she's willing to tough it out and be who she is no matter what. And they all make me feel like I can do it too, because I lied about Dirty Dancing being a bildungsroman. The world doesn't change Baby- Baby changes her world.