Myth-Making

Myth is the noble lie that binds society. So said Plato and I would never argue with him. Certainly, the Greeks made the most of it. It seems to me the same is true of us all. We make of our lives a myth. We might call it our memoir or our chronicle. We are victims, we are heroes. We slew dragons. We leaped over tall buildings in a single bound. Whatever it took to get us through till breakfast. Like the ancients we had our quakes and eclipsis along with unaccountable good fortune and moments of sublimity. Many of us seem to have a need to explain the unexplainable. It's all a matter of attribution. 

God loves a good story. That is why she made shamans, griots, troubadours and Fox News. Anything to propitiate those bewildering forces given to tantrums and fruit, floods and rainbows. Let us sacrifice a newborn…..better a goat. Anything for the greater good.

Get out of my Republic, said Plato again, you trouble-making subversive poet. But we are all poets. We compose our myth; subtract that, embellish this. It becomes our truth, our agreed upon fable. We find the lie that speaks the truth. We don't mean to lie but certain chapters don’t fit. Therein is the meat, the incongruities.

Wendell Berry called it the impeded stream and heard it singing. The mind that is not baffled, is not employed, he wrote. Early on when I was baffled, I settled for absolutes. Now I embrace the unknown as a friend. A recognition of chaos and mystery teeming with new life.

I write my memories even as I know they’re a composite. We cleave together even as we cleave apart. Grandpa couldn’t have walked to the schoolyard with me. But he does in my mind. Did I wet my pants in kindergarten or was I imagining myself in Harvey Benson’s shoes? Was I chased by a superintendent down the block for slipping political leaflets under doors in the 1948 campaign or was that my fantasy? I’ll claim it as a memory. True because I say so. The details are less important than the metaphorical meaning we invest in them.

Written or not we all live the myth of ourselves. At my age there is no one around to refute my narrative. I shall always cherish those glory days when my twisted, turn-around jump shot brought everyone in the sellout crowd to their feet. Then there was that fastball I hit, still in orbit. Or is that me orbiting my inner space, that vast and virgin territory?