The Cry for Myth (6 page)

On the ship, Alex Haley chose to sleep each night in the hold of the boat to relive as closely as possible what his distant ancestor had been forced to do. Suddenly in his imagination the whole story “broke,” as such creative ideas do, and he knew how he would present the book. The myth came to life. Later he held in his hands the bill of sale transferring the slave, Kunta Kinte, from one master to another, and he could only stare at it and mutter, “My God!”

This book and the television program it fathered, this example of the search for one’s myth, set loose an active movement, even if short-lived, among all sorts of people in America to find their own special roots. Children of immigrants from Holland and Poland and all of Europe, in trips to the lands that had once been the homeland of their ancestors, pored over death certificates and the engraving—hoary, weather-beaten, and mostly illegible—on gravestones in foreign cemeteries. All of this was in the hope, sometimes rewarded and sometimes not, of finding some roots, “be it among the most remote antiquities,” as Nietzsche asserts. In Haley’s case, it is the poignancy of the ancestors, such as Kunta Kinte, which makes its core something to cherish and to love no matter how painful the process of discovery. Typical for a myth, cruel facts are welded together with beneficent facts into a pattern which we can cherish and call our own. We could define psychoanalysis as the search for one’s own myth. How healing is such a myth to the person who can find and live with it!

This myth of our past, this source, is a point of reference which we can revere. Unlike the Flying Dutchman, the mythic ship which could never take refuge in a port, we have found our past; and this itself is a guarantee of some port in a possible future.

MYTHS AS CELEBRATIONS

“Life in the myth is a celebration,” wrote Thomas Mann. The myths of community are generally happy, joyful myths which enliven us; they mark the holidays, or holy days. We salute each other with “
Merry
Christmas,” or “
Happy
New Year.” The holy days which draw us together in carnivals, such as Mardi Gras in New Orleans and in Mediterranean and South American cities preceding Lent, are times of overflowing color and mythic mystery. Then it is permissible to love everyone and to abandon oneself to the spontaneity of the senses. Good Friday and Easter are the celebration of the eternally amazing myth of the crucifixion of Jesus and the resurrection of the Christ, Passover as the original Last Supper, all blended with the celebration of the newborn beauty in the blooming of lilies, the tender time of newly grown grass and plants and other loveliness which breaks through the crust of the earth in spring.

These holy days gather around them through the ages the mythic character of eternity. We get from them a sense of union with the distant past and the far off future. Christmas—literally, a mass for Christ—has become blended with the myth of the Germanic and Nordic tribes of Northern Europe, and hence we have such symbols as the Christmas tree with all its glitter and with the presents emblazoned around it. The gradual process of accretion, of absorption and merging of local myths with the myths from the religious past, gives the holy day this aura of eternity. The myth of Christmas is a prototype of the birth of the hero, as Otto Rank writes, describing the baby Jesus in the crib in a stable with the Wise Men following the star in the east and bringing gifts. The myth implies that we are wise if we too participate in the spirit of giving.

Rituals are physical expressions of the myths, as in holidays and the sacraments of religion. The myth is the narration, and the ritual—such as giving presents or being baptized—expresses
the myth in bodily action. Rituals and myths supply fixed points in a world of bewildering change and disappointment.
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The myth may be prior to the ritual, as it is in the celebration of Holy Communion; or the ritual may come first, as with the Super Bowl triumph of the 49ers. Either way, one gives birth to the other. No self can exist as a self apart from a society with its myths, whether that society is a concrete reality or a subjective construct like Deborah’s Kingdom of Yr.
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In Europe the community’s myth is symbolically emblazoned by the churches in the towns and cities. High over the collection of houses, which are built close together for protection, there rises the Cathedral of Chartres or the great spires of Cologne, bolstered from outside by flying buttresses and informed inside by mythic Bible stories. These Biblical myths led the person gazing upon them to the adoration of the Most High God and other Christian myths which everyone in the village knew by heart. The church was there for all to see, the custodian of the heart and spirit of the community, the central symbol around which its myths were woven. In the villages of New England there is a similar overarching symbol of the myth of the community. When driving through Vermont or New Hampshire, one comes to the center of the village and sees the “common ground,” a large square of green grass with the village church towering at one end as though its simple beauty in Puritan white gives an eternal blessing to the town.

Hence for the citizens of the city-state, exile was a powerful threat in ancient and medieval days. One had to surrender his
mythic center when he was exiled from his city, where he was immersed in the language and the ethics which were the veins and arteries of myths and hence the society. Exile generally destroyed the psychic life of the person exiled; he was broken literally by being without a country. But exile might in rare cases force the exiled person into a greater surge of creativity, a sublimation one could call it, as it did with Dante and Ma chiavelli. Dante was forced by his exile from Florence to re-experience his myths in solitude, out of which there came his magnificent poem,
The Divine Comedy
. And without Machiavelli’s exile,
The Prince
may never have been written.

The presence of constructive myths is a product of the cultivation in citizens of the need for compassion, especially for the stranger. It was a great step in the ancient history of the Israelites when, in their Book of Leviticus, they placed the law, “Thou shalt judge the stranger [read: person of different myths] by the same laws as thou judgest the children of Israel.”

The presence of a home, a place where one is listened to, where one can feel “at home,” is essential to healthy myth. Many of our patients in therapy find that their neurotic problems are related to their never having had a home where they were listened to. Ronald Laing tells of his session with a little five-year-old girl who never talked. Brought to his office by her parents, she came into the inner consulting room and sat down on the floor like a “miniature Buddha,” so Dr. Laing described her. He sat down opposite her in the same way. She moved her hands this way and that, and Laing followed, moving his hands in the same way. The whole hour passed without a word being uttered but with their merely going silently through this tiny replica of a tribal dance. At the end of the hour they got up and the little girl left. But she then began talking with her parents. He learned later that the parents had asked her what had happened in that room, and she had retorted, “None of your business.”
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Children who do not talk may be showing, like the above child, that the milieu into which they are born is hostile, cold, inhospitable. One response to this is not to become part of it by refusing to talk. Others suck their thumbs for interminable periods or in other ways show they have to have something to be close to, if not a home at least a pet or a doll which carries some mythic meaning.

Such is the necessity of having a community, a home where we can feel we belong, a family where we will be protected and in which we can feel some intimacy. Without a myth that makes a child part of a community, a home which gives warmth and protection, the child does not develop in true human fashion. As Dr. Rene Spitz demonstrated several decades ago, orphans who are never mothered tend to withdraw into silent corners of the crib, and ultimately some of them literally die from lack of love.

To have friends and a family you can call your own, whether in reality or fantasy, is not only a desideratum; it is a necessity for psychological and spiritual as well as physical survival. We all cry for a collective myth which gives us a fixed spot in an otherwise chaotic universe.

WHERE HAVE ALL OUR HEROES GONE?

The myth of the homeland is symbolized by the hero, upon whom are projected the highest aims of the community. Without the hero the community lacks a crucial dimension, for the hero is typically the soul of the community. Heroes are necessary in order to enable the citizens to find their own ideals, courage, and wisdom in the society. “Society has to contrive some way to allow its citizens to feel heroic,” said Ernest Becker. “This is one of the great challenges of the twentieth
century.”
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We hunger for heroes as role models, as standards of action, as ethics in flesh and bones like our own.
A hero is a myth in action
.

Through our projection we become more like our hero, as Hawthorne illustrates in his story, “The Great Stone Face.” The main character in this tale lives in view of the mountain, the top rocks of which form a heroic face. It had been predicted that someday a noble man would arrive whose face would bear an undeniable likeness to the great stone face. Hawthorne’s hero spends his life doing good for his fellow villagers, looking up at the great stone face and waiting for its likeness to come. When he is an old man, the people suddenly recognize that
his
face is the likeness of the great stone face on the mountain top.

The hero carries our aspirations, our ideals, our beliefs. In the deepest sense the hero is created by us; he or she is born collectively as our own myth. This is what makes heroism so important: it reflects our own sense of identity, and from this our own heroism is molded. When my book,
Paulus: Reminiscences of a Friendship
, was published, one reviewer attacked it on the grounds that I seemed to make a hero of Paul Tillich. This was dangerous in our twentieth century, continued the critic, because it left the way open for hero worship, as was shown in the followers of Adolf Hitler, who used heroism demonically. One can sympathize with this argument, since the heroism which was cultivated by Hitler surely led to the greatest acts of destruction in our world’s history. But we must not throw the baby out with the bath water. Lacking heroes in the 1990s, we are unable to live out our myth of communal aims and ideals in society.

Time was when Charles Lindbergh was a hero to all America and to the literate world as well. In 1927 he embodied the
simple but in those days great human courage that was required to fly his flimsy biplane across the Atlantic Ocean all alone. Lindbergh was welcomed by tens of thousands of cheering Parisians awaiting him at the Paris airport. This event proved that the America of the Jazz Age had a soul as well as saxophones. Lindbergh was welcomed in New York by a tumultuous tickertape parade without previous parallel. He took it all with his all-American shy smile, a young Midwesterner representing the quiet courage of the heartland of America. His plane—which hangs in the Air and Space Museum in Washington—was called the
Spirit of St. Louis
, but it represented the spirit of all of us, whether from Missouri or not. We emulated the hero, and a multitude of likewise shy men and women, young and old, felt the strengthening of their own self-esteem in their identification with Lindbergh. Amelia Ear-hart represented a similar phenomenon for women in her pioneering spirit and willingness to take risks. Lindbergh and Earhart were carriers of the lonely myth we all sought in our own hearts, to be centered in ourselves as heroic Americans, capable of setting and achieving our goals by our own self-assertion and courage. We all felt secretly that we had, or could aspire to have, the same kind and degree of courage which Lindbergh and Eleanor Roosevelt and a few others exhibited.
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One problem is that we have confused celebrities with heroes. The definition is still valid, “A celebrity is someone who is known for being known.” From the Nielsen ratings on down, from the society pages to the shining advertisements we get in every mail begging us to accept ten million dollars from some gentleman’s hands, there are “celebrities” with phony invitations. But rare indeed is the genuine hero.

Often in America we confuse heroism, following the movement
called yuppies, with the making of the most money. In a lecture at the University of California at Berkeley, Ivan Boesky, the billionaire Wall Street trader and role model of many yuppies during the 1980s, stated, “There is nothing wrong with greed.” The enthusiastic cheering of the audience filled the hall, how much of it curiosity rather than hero worship it is impossible to say. But at the very moment this book is being written, Ivan Boesky is in prison serving time for illegal trading on the stock market and for criminal activity on Wall Street. He not only went to prison himself but implicated a number of his colleagues along with him. One wonders what Boesky now feels, as he looks out from prison, when he remembers his statement about greed, “After making a successful deal you can feel good about yourself!”

It is our fake heroes who give heroism such a bad name. Oliver North apparently was considered a hero by President Reagan and a number of his countrymen. North clearly broke laws, the full extent of which is not yet known. Is it any wonder that we have few heroes today?

Studies of students also reveal the collapse of heroism. Arthur Levine made such a study in
When Dreams and Heroes Died
, and came to some sobering conclusions:

[This] information reveals, among other things, that students today are overwhelmingly materialistic, cynical about society and its institutions (including higher education)—and so competitive about grades that they condone cheating. More significantly, their aspirations are inward, personal, and individualistic rather than social or humanitarian, reflecting the “me first” philosophy that has pervaded the nation in the past decade.
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