return

I'm back, and I'm going to actually do what I said I'd do a long while ago. I started to write it, and then had a conflict about how to do it, and then eventually decided I was being horribly melodramatic about it and decided not to take it so seriously.

Anyway, so here's the small confession: I posted that poem more for its title than its content.

I actually found the poem by Googling 'mythopoeia', just to see what I'd get.

Granted, the poem says a lot, and turned out to be pretty much what I was looking for. But I posted it more for the idea of myth-making than anything else.

My understanding of the poem is that it presents the idea that creation is something innate. Tolkien, the most famous mythopoet of all modern mythopoets, explains it from a religious point of view, and particularly a Christian one: While he doesn't say all this in the poem, his view, generally, was that if God is the creator, and humankind was created in God's image, then humankind is a creator, and that indeed mythopoeia is almost a divine responsibility. He called this subcreation, a term he uses in the poem.

I like the innate aspect, and not the responsibility one.

He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song,
whose very echo after music long
has since pursued...

Add to that this: "Yet trees are not 'trees,' until so named and seen --" probably my favorite line in the whole poem.

Now I go back to a little of what I was going to say last time around. We humans live in a world built less of physical matter than language. It's been a realization of mine a long time in coming... Not that it's a profound statement: It's simply that for years I didn't want to see that. I was a gung-ho amateur scientist, obsessed with objectivity and experimentation. I liked physics, because for me it was the ultimate in philosophies: Abstract thought that explained how the real world worked!

Needless to say, I've had a change of heart. Trees are not tress until so named and seen -- we live in language. When I was thinking about this earlier, it struck me that this can almost be seen as a physical adaptation of humankind... Instead of being adapted to some environment, we are adapted to live in a world of language, a world of myths and symbols, which we can take with us where ever we go. Think about it: Most of the time, an animal removed from its native habitat will lose its ability to survive... A person stripped of their ability to communicate goes slowly insane. We don't live in the objective world of science, but the subjective one of language. (As a side note, this is where my fascination with linguistics comes from. It's the subjective-world equivalent of physics.)

Back to mythopoeia and why I'm so struck by that word.

We live in myths. Our societies are founded upon them, whether we realize it or not. Our interactions with others are affected by 'cultural norms', living myths affecting our daily life. Our beliefs are influenced by them. Science, by this definition, is a myth: Not a 'falsehood' or a 'story', but a set of cultural beliefs.

I'm so struck by the idea of mythopoeia because it can be seen, in effect, as a summary of everything. You're having a conversation with someone in the hallway? You're creating a myth, a set of linguistic ideas that both you and the other person (and possibly other people, later on) will believe in. Everything can be thought of as mythopoeia.

At the same time, mythopoeia in the form that Tolkien means it can be thus seen as both the most innate and most powerful of arts. How better to convey ideas than to create a mythos, an entire mythos, running parallel to our own but following its own course? We have a set of cultural beliefs -- challenge them! Set up a new set of cultural beliefs! How better to convey those ideas than hauling someone out of their own linguistic and memic habitat and plopping them down in another? Don't tell them about something, let them experience it for themselves by constructing the world you want to convey!

Of course, this relates to anything and everything. I was thinking today just how similar Broken Saints and, say, Fight Club are. Both are about a set of individuals becoming deeply aware of the myths that underlie our culture and, each in their own ways, setting out to change those myths, to rebuild our entire communal subjective world from the ground up. Fiction in general can be said to be the elaboration upon and exploration of the existing myths of our culture.

That's all I'm going to say about that, for now. Just to point out, Blogger has just updated its comment system: Those of you without Blogger accounts will now be perfectly able to comment, in a much more pleasant manner, without being anonymous. Comment, do!

-lelandpaul