Myth, the Universe, and Everything

Well, so much for the regular updates I promised you. Editorial Assistant Jack gave blogging a go between my last entry and this one, but he had some trouble with the keyboard.



At any rate, it's Friday, and in honor of how differently time is flowing for me now, I thought I would excerpt two short quotes about time from Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane and Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances.

Eliade

The mythical time whose reactualization is periodically attempted is a time sanctified by the divine presence, and we may say that the desire to live in the divine presence and in a perfect world (perfect because it is newly born) corresponds to the nostalgia for a paradisal situation.

Barfield

The Oriental concepttion of time was essentially cyclic. The picture was one of eternal repetition rather than of beginning, progress and end, and the path of the individual soul to the bosom of eternity was a backward path of extrication from the wheels of desire in which it had allowed itself to become involved. To reach, or to resume, the Supreme Identity with Brahma, with the Eternal, was the object and its achievement was a matter which lay directly between the individual and the Eternal. The Semitic way, on the other hand, was a way forward through history and it was a way, shared indeed by the individual, but trodden by the nation as a whole.

nalini_singh guest blogged today over at Silk and Shadows, listing ten things that were always true about her books. I thought it would be a fun experiment to try this on my own, so I did in the comments over there. It's hard! It's particularly hard since the space western story, "Rodeo in Area 51" took out a lot of the short-cut kind of things I could use if all of my stories were fantasy. But most of these even apply to the contemporary fiction pieces I wrote in my thesis.

Of course, when I look at this list, I imagine I see things that only I see when the writing's done.

1. There’s always an element of faith or belief, even if it’s the person fighting against their faith.
2. Borrowed mythology shows up, sometimes recognizably, sometimes disguised. I couldn’t use real-world myths for the Redemption trilogy, so I had to clothe them differently. (I'm not sure that "Rodeo in Area 51" fulfills this qualification.)
3. There’s often an unstated reference to a philosopher’s ideas (I’ve drawn on Owen Barfield and Jon Kabat Zinn for various tales).
4. There are strong women.
5. Often times, the people playing the role of nurturer or poet/romantic are male.
6. Relationships are a core focus, but often, the relationships between people who aren’t romantically involved are as important (or more important) than the ones that are. Sisters, friends, strangers who accidentally become important to each other, and even the relationship between my rodeo rider and an experimental motor-bike in the space western — they’re all over the place.
7. The cast is almost always multi-cultural, even if that just means elves or split generations. ("Nomi's Wish" is the hardest to fit into this category, but the age difference between the modern girls and Nomi, and the difference in her culture as a child from their own, is about as close to qualifying as I can bring it. I'm actually working harder on this, particularly given that rantsplosion that happened last year on various SF blogs, and I think it's important to have characters of different cultural backgrounds. In Blackstone Academy, the main characters are still predominantly white--one is learning about her Quinnipiac heritage over the course of the story, and one grew up with eccentric, mixed-religion parents, but I'm not kidding myself into thinking that they're not closest to my own culture and world-view than--but I want the school to feel diverse. Right now, I've just made a point of diversifying the names of the secondary characters, but I'm trying to be incredibly conscious of multi-cultural awareness as I'm writing, so I don't get to the end and feel like the setting is white-washed.)
8. Often the characters start out having failed at something, and part of the story is their having to overcome the emotions of having failed.
9. The emotional core of the story is almost always a moment that happens in a character’s head, rather than in a direct action climax.
10. Um… they all have my name in the byline?

As you can see, I ran out of steam for number ten -- but try this with your own writing and see if it's as challenging for you as it was for me!

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Quick link: YA writer Albert Borris had a stroke in December, so he's been unable to promote his novel, Crash into Me, which releases this month, as he's still trying to get his words back. I wish him healing and recovery, and hope that a positive book release will help spur both forward!

Today is Maundy Thursday, something I quite forgot about until I saw someone's status message on twitter that they were headed off to service. As I noted previously, my regular religious practice has fallen to the side since I moved out to the East Coast, and realizing that I'd forgotten today was Holy Thursday, which has always been one of the really important holy days for me, was sort of jarring. To honor it, I listened to a bunch of music that I'd written for a play I intended to write, starting on the Saturday after the crucifixion. The religious figures became real people to me during the writing process -- as they have to in order to write them, I suspect -- and that connection refreshed me a little bit. Not quite enough to alleviate the guilt of forgetting, but I'm planning to go to a service in the morning (and then sunrise service with holmes_iv on Sunday), so hopefully that will set things into right relation (to completely misuse a phrase I associate with a different religion all together).

As you readers know, I take pretty seriously the idea that people haven't always thought in the same way -- couldn't have thought in the same way, because their world was different. And so thinking about my musical today, I realized I'd logomorphed (to use a Barfield word) quite a bit -- made the religious figures not only into "real people," but into people who thought like me. And while I think that might not be the most mythic way to consider the story, I think there's some value in seeing the story in a modern way. What were people thinking? How did people feel? Or, maybe more accurately, what would I have felt if I'd been a part of the story?

There are definitely dangers in logomorphism, in assuming that things mean literally what we might see as metaphoric. But I also think that reimagining stories, particularly important stories, gives us a firmer connection to them than if we let them float away without us, if we see them as things that happened to people a long time ago. If we logomorph, we risk assuming that things are the way we see them. If we don't, we risk stories becoming irrelevant. I think there's a happy medium somewhere in the middle.

Just thoughts to muse on during a week I should have been paying more attention to.

One of the things I've been doing while I haven't been on livejournal is planning a new mythic home game. Several of the players I was interested in bringing into the game are fans of Norse myth, which is one of my weak spots in my myth studies, so this is a good excuse for me to expand my horizons. As we're doing the set up, a lot of my ideas about myth studies appear in the e-mails or in conversation, and something interesting is happening: I'm remembering that most people, even those well versed in mythology, don't have the same background in mythic analysis that I do, and that some of the concepts that I take for granted these days about sacred time/space (Eliade) and the evolution of consciousness (Barfield), are, in fact, foreign ideas. That people have pretty much always thought the way we think now is a basic assumption that I've had trained out of me. I'd just completely forgotten that it is a basic assumption, probably for most of the academic world.

But just like I've been trained to think of the history of thought in a non-standard way, I suspect there are a lot of ways in which we're trained to think in modern academic systems that aren't necessarily the way we'd think without the training. I was considering the Socratic dialogues I read in college this morning, and I remembered that within them, logic was used to show that knowledge existed outside of man, independently, and could be accessed, with the proper lead in, by even the simplest child. But later use of logic and reason, most specifically in the scientific method, doesn't have the same assumption of form, from what I understand. Applying the scientific method is a comparatively new way of thinking about the world -- the people who first applied it (arguably Muslim scholars in the 11th century, but it didn't get picked up in a broad sense until much later, possibly post Newton in the 1600s) knew it was a new way of thinking at the time. They were changing the way people think.

I recently had a conversation with a prof about how associative thinking is a style of thought that also has to be trained -- not everyone can do it naturally. Being able to look for similarities and group them together -- even if they have absolutely nothing to do with each other (though they might!) -- isn't something that all people do automatically. Robert Graves certainly did it on his own, and The White Goddess is a great example of associative thinking, as well as what happens when a poet eats a lot of mushrooms and thinks about myth on a Mediterranean Island.

This makes me wonder quite a bit about the ways people thought before academic training was as widespread as it is now: the way you'd be trained to think would likely be various rules of how to get on with the spirits around you -- leaving milk out for the brownies, etc., etc. The Puritans were terrified of the woods when they arrived in the Americas, if Hawthorne's writings about the subject have any merit. Why? Because it was unknown? Because it was wild? Because it was the domain of people other than themselves? Did they lack the training to think about it, because it was something they hadn't encountered before? Or had they, in fact, been trained to think about it as something to fear?

It also makes me wish I'd been keeping up with my Breakfast with Barfield project, which has, sadly, fallen by the wayside. I'm reading quite a lot of books for the Mythopoeic Society Awards lists, and much of my reading time has been with those titles rather than my normal TBR pile. (Luckily, the two have intersected quite a bit.) Hopefully, I'll have the chance to discuss more of these concepts with both the folks from different academic backgrounds, as well as the students who will have just covered evolution of consciousness before we go to England in May. I'll actually be visiting Mark Vecchio's Mythic Imagination course next week, so it'll be nice to have the refresher!

Two days in a row! It's been awhile since I blogged that frequently.

Since yesterday's commitment on Devon's Deadline Dames post, I've been thinking a lot about the nature of goals, and about the ones I set up for myself at the beginning of the year. It's easy to lose sight of goals when you're not doing anything about them, and I think I was headed down that path. But while studies show that people have a certain amount of willpower, and they have to spend it wisely, I find that sometimes, when I get going down the right track with things, it gets easier to stay focused on my goals.

Or maybe that's just bursts of inspiration. :)

So, I gained some weight over the holidays, and I'm working on bringing that back down to where it should be. (It's a matter of maybe twelve pounds, so it's not a huge issue--it's just something I need to be aware of to stay healthy.) I'm eliminating caffeine from my diet, also, which makes some of my standard techniques for putting off my sweet tooth a little difficult (no Cherry Coke Zero for me!). But otherwise, all of that seems to be going well.

I also started going back to karate this week, after adding playing outside and a little bit longer walking to my daily life. So I'm exercising a good bit more than I had been. And this is a good improvement, too.

Starting on those made me really think about the goal I set for developing a spiritual practice. I'm really bad about saying "I'll spend one hour doing X" or "From 5:00 to 6:00 is going to be my time to do Y." It's too restrictive for me, and I feel like I'm forcing myself to do things, rather than doing them because I want to. (Maybe that's where my willpower runs out!) But I realized last night, well, a girl's got to eat. And she might as well read philosophy and apologetics and books about the nature of faith, religion, and reality while she's eating. So my new idea is to use breakfast, and lunch if I eat at home, reading/studying some book from my spiritual bookshelf. I have quite a number of them. I figure this will also prep me for the England trip this May, where I'll be the TA/chaperon/driver for a myth course. I've been doing a reasonably good job keeping up with the students on the study tours, even though a lot of the material is a bit dated in my head (since I haven't studied it thoroughly since college). This year, I'd like to be a bit fresher on all the material they'll be studying this spring, so I can better delve into (and/or facilitate) conversations while we're at the sites we'll be studying.

Right now, it's breakfast with Barfield. (Better than Breakfast at Tiffany's! Try some in your own home!) I may try to bring in something from Saving the Appearances for my guest blog tomorrow (since I want to get back to doing those). There are some other excerpts waiting for me to get my act together and post them, however, so we'll see who rises to the surface!

I had a lot of ideas about what to post on today, but I keep coming back to the one that's on my mind at the moment: interactive storytelling. There is just nothing more satisfying to me than making a story with other people. (I'll use the term interactive storytelling for CRPGs and VRPGs, but they're really a substitute for good old fashioned gathering with friends and, roughly, playing let's pretend.) When I was a kid, these stories didn't often have a lot of plot, and since I was the middle kid in the neighborhood, I usually followed the lead of my surrogate big sis, and my own younger sister followed along. We were pioneers or astronauts or pirates, usually making the swing set in her back yard or the rock garden in ours the home base. At school, for kindergarten and some of first grade, I was the lead storyteller in my class, because I had a lot of good let's pretend ideas. But right about five or six, real life starts getting more interesting to most kids than full-on games of let's pretend--or the pretending at least takes a real life turn rather than the fantastic--so it really wasn't until discovering D&D in high school that I had an outlet for shared fantasy.

To say it was life-changing may be a slight exaggeration, but not much. Here were people I not just traded stories with (I had done that on and off in middle school), but created stories with me. There's something magical about that, about sharing imagination space. Mythically speaking, the collective representations of that group of people shift to something new and different, and while that can be shared with people who aren't there, being in the moment and creating those new representations--that sub-reality or sub-creation--is profound.

A friend once asked me how I could become so close to my gaming friends. It wasn't like we had any real experiences together. We just sat around a table playing make-believe. But to me, well, I've always made the best friends of the people who have shared imaginary realms with me. Sometimes that's in the world of theater (because I think theater touches on that same bordering realm), and my fellow mythographers in our thought experiments certainly touch that same profound experience, but most often, it's been my gaming group. I suspect it's not always quite as powerful for them as it is for me, but sometimes, I suspect it is.

And those are the games I can't help but think about between sessions, desperately craving what comes next, no matter what that happens to be.

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In other news, "The Chalice Girl" is not coming together the way I'd like, and I think I'm going to put that on hold until the next time a Lace and Blade open call comes around. In actuality, I mean that I'm going to continue working on it, though with less focus, since "Saving Tara" is still waiting for attention, and I'm considering a piece on a vampire in the Revolutionary War mostly to entertain my friend Michelle, but partly because I think there's an actual story there to be told. (This last actually ties into the current shared imagination experience I'm having, and because of that, it may well not translate to actual fiction, but I think I'll give it a go.) The biggest thing I'm regretting right now is that I wrote down the final deadline for the Lace and Blade open call rather than the opening of acceptance of pieces. I really need to give myself a deadline at least in the *middle* of the call in order to not be rushing at the last minute--and then putting together something that isn't my very best. So I'm giving myself permission to miss this one in hopes of having something better the next time an open call that I care about comes around.

(This is mostly for plura, who will be as astonished as I.)

How do I not own a copy of Poetic Diction? I've read sections and was sure I owned it!

I did find History of English Words, but no Poetic Diction for me. And unlike Saving the Appearances, which is actually quite easy to find on alibris for under $10, there are no extremely cheap second hand copies of Poetic Diction currently available.

Now off to troll the internet bookshops in hopes of finding one that a) has the book I want, b) for a price I like, and c) accepts paypal.