Wisdom of the Mythtellers

This is the end of Sean Kane's wonderful book. I have some comments at the end.

Any reader of myth feels the sly tug of this claim- it pulls a person out of a dry rationalism back into some version of the Earth's poetry. However, this universal claim for myth holds certain dangers for the modern individual, and it is time, at the close of this book, to sound a warning. The warning is about the promise of redemption that mythology inevitably falls into in our time. For those of us lost in a modern oblivion, there is especially this dangerous allure of redemptive promise. I hope I may be forgiven for speaking personally of it, since I'm always in danger of being one of its victims.

For me, it is a promise harbored in nostalgia for certain childhood moments when I felt the earth under my feet. Pine needles under bare feet. The mysterious life of the forest. The whisper of the wind through all the stillness of Pre-Cambria. The storyteller was nowhere- and everywhere. There was no mythtelling elder to guide me into the meanings of those sounds of the primaeval. I was left, as I am left today, with an undefined yearning at the centre of a solitude.

Into that solitude steps the mythteller…. He brings the prospect of a way of being on the Earth that is different from what I have known. He brings a philosophy- an intellectual and emotional philosophy told in images, those images distilled from centuries of human beings treading warily upon the Earth, rather than undertaking to rearrange its basic furniture. I am unaccustomed to his power. I stare at the words he has left on the page. I try to translate them, and I depend on the experience of scholars to reproduce in a modern tongue the language of the mythteller- but what of that numinous vocabulary? The power of the mythteller exists beyond normal interpretation, making the mythteller a dangerous figure. That figure is especially dangerous when taken out of context. Vulnerable to the lure of ancient meaning, we are ill equipped to enter it as individuals. In such a state of distance and desire as this, we can see too quickly in myth a release from our alienation. And then there is the question that this redemptive promise is offered, not by an ancient humanity living within the Earth’s allowances, but by a more recent agricultural humanity, continuous with our own, which has reinterpreted all other forms of mythic experience in the context of its own redemptive mission. That single mindedness transcends the wisdom of myth altogether. It catches us in a bubble world of our own longing that is manipulated by others. We forget that all the work that various people have done- all the work that peoples must do- to live with the Earth on the Earth’s terms is pre-empted by the dream of transcendence.

What the mythtellers and the oral poets know is that truth cannot be captured in a solitary idea. It is alive and uncatchable. It tumbles about in the polyphonic story, is told by the animals and birds and mountains and rivers and trees- not in some taxonomy of their separate identities, but in the play of exchanges among them, which is the only way we really know nature.

Those stories are still there in the Earth, to be overheard by anyone who has the patience to listen. This active listening is not enough in itself to reach wisdom- but it is a start. It is the opening of an aperture to what lies beyond our species chauvinism and the version of human history on this planet which that chauvinism has constructed for itself. Yet history is real too, and there are new patterns that are part of the long, uneven narrative of human habitation on the Earth. The stories, old and new, will be told in new mixtures, with new tones, through new selves. Individuating consciousness is our destiny, and we embrace its power with the ironic playfulness it speaks, and also with an increasing humility for what it cannot speak. Only by hearing the many voices that are silenced will we recover a sense of a wider world than the one we make through our particular histories.

Then, when it becomes time to return to the language of the Earth for meaning, we may discover what the mythtellers knew- that the wisdom of the Earth has ways of re-seeding itself. The wonder of it is that the process has not yet halted. I am glad that the re-seeding has fertilised the minds of my generation, and now I'm not yet sure of its outcome, I dwell and hope that in whatever mists it speaks, the process will continue. In the generation to which my son belongs, and in his children, and his in his children's children.

What so impresses me about Kane here is that he expresses the temptation of some transcendent vision (of oneness, perhaps) buy holds it in abeyance: insisting that myth is rooted in actions in the world, where meaning is patterned, layered, polyphonic, operating on different levels, not reduced or transcendent.

It feels true to my experience with the trees, and it is hard to express, because our minds seem to shoot from one to many which fully appreciating the state of one/many. Experiencing remains deep and mysterious, inspiring and pregnant with significance when we can sit in the paradox.

I know think that the hollow places are the reverse of hollow: they are deep and many-layered, they encourage you to resist transcendence in favour of the deep immanence, where, paradoxically, a very different transcendence lies: a transcendence of the desire to contain, determine, categorise, decide... all is there in its diversity and its wholeness.

I leave you with two images of Kairos.