Hit and Myth in the Modern Mind: Old Patterns in New Stories

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Jim Conrad: Welcome to Conovision.

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I'm your host, Jim "Cono" Conrad.

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On episode 10, we tell stories about
the dark side, the dark side of the

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moon, as metaphor for the shadow side
of the human psyche, the human soul.

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What demons lurk, what fears lie submerged
in the Mariana Trench of our mind.

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We will hear the poems and prose of
two literary gods, William Butler

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Yeats and Cormac McCarthy, and their
revelations from the Shadowlands.

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But first, a story about the tragic
sense of life, the tragic vision,

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as so presciently illuminated in
mythology by the ancient Greek

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playwrights and philosophers, and
why it matters so much to us now.

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The word tragic, like myth, has been
somewhat debased in our modern times.

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It has come to mean something
calamitous, something horrible as when

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a television talking head intones,
tragedy tonight on the Westside freeway.

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The ancient Greeks did
have a word for that.

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It is catastrophe, but we do
have much to learn about who we

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really are from recalling what our
ancestors intuited 26 centuries ago.

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Their imaginative rendering of
the human dilemma, the dialectical

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play of fate, destiny, character,
and choice still remains the best

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paradigm for how life's permutations
play out on this finite plane.

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Our predecessors discerned that we
often intend a certain outcome, work

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diligently towards its achievement, and
yet wind up in an entirely different

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place than expected in our lives.

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And most disturbingly, this altered
course derives in substantial

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measure from the choices that a
presumably conscious being made.

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How could this be that we
could be our own enemy?

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The ancient Greeks understood that
there were forces in the cosmos to

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which even the gods were subject.

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Those Greek gods being Aphrodite, the
goddess of love, sex, and beauty, Athena,

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the goddess of reason, wisdom, and war.

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Artemis was the fleet
footed goddess of the hunt.

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Aries was the god of Bloodlust.

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Apollo, who was the twin brother
of Artemis, was among the most

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important and feared of the gods.

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Son of Zeus, he disseminated the
will of his divine compatriots

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through various means.

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Notably, Oracles.

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The Oracle of Delphi was his mouthpiece.

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Demeter, an agricultural goddess
was mother to Persephone, who

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was abducted by the underworld
god, Hades, to be his bride.

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Dionysus was a son of Zeus
born to a mortal mother.

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The cult of Dionysus revolved
around intoxication, sex,

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and savage ritual sacrifice.

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As mentioned, Hades ruled
the world of the dead.

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Hera, the queen goddess of Olympus,
was both sister and wife to Zeus.

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Though she is often depicted as reserved
and austere, she was mercilessly

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vindictive when it came to her
husband's many extramarital adventures.

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Like many gods in the Greek pantheon,
Hermes presided over multiple spheres.

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He was a pastoral figure, responsible
for protecting livestock, but was

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also associated with fertility,
music, luck and deception.

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Poseidon is best known
as the Greek sea god.

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But he was also the god of horses
and of earthquakes and had some

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seriously strange children.

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Though humanoid, he fathered
both the winged horse Pegasus, by

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Medusa no less, and the cyclops,
Polyphemus, who is blinded by

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Odysseus and his crew in the Odyssey.

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And finally, with the assistance of Hades
and Poseidon, Zeus overthrew his father

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Cronus, king of the Titans and became the
chief deity in a new pantheon, comprising

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mostly of his siblings and children.

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The forces of the universe to
which these gods were subject were

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named Moirai, or Fate, sophrosyne.

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Or what goes around comes around.

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Diking for justice, nemesis, or
consequential retribution, and destiny.

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These forces might be translated by
us today as the organizing balancing

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structuring powers of the cosmo.

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A word itself, which means order.

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When we are ignorant of these forces
at work, as frequently we will be,

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we most likely will make choices that
run counter to the principles and

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energies of our own deepest nature.

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Moreover, our ancestors believed
that we often offend the gods.

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That is, violate the energetic
designs of which they are the

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dramatized personifications.

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Thus, a wound to Aphrodite will show
up in one's intimate relationships,

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or one possessed by Aries will
act out of unreasoned anger.

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With all its attendant consequences.

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Accordingly, the ancient Greeks believe
that by reading the texture of one's life,

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one can identify the ignored or repressed
archetypal powers, the gods offended,

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and offer homage and compensation
to them to restore the balance.

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Add to this mix, our predecessors
acknowledge the role of individual

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character, which repeatedly plays a
role in the creation of our choices

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and patterns, what they called hubris,
often translated as pride, might

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more pragmatically be defined as
our tendency toward self-deception.

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Especially the delusion that we are
in possession of all the facts when we

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make decisions, what they called the
hamartia, sometimes translated as the

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tragic flaw or the wounded vision, the
inherent biasing of our choices as a

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result of our own psychological history.

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Our tendency toward wrong choice
or unintended consequences is

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fueled by these two liabilities.

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The first is our temptation to
believe what we wish to believe,

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the assumption that we know all we
need to know about ourselves and

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the situation to make wise choices.

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In fact, seldom do we know enough
even to know we do not know enough.

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Moreover, there is a second element here,
namely the biasing of our vision by the

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profound influence of our personal and
cultural histories, our experience subtly,

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alters, even distorts the lens through
which we see the world and the choices

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we make are based on that altered vision.

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At birth, each of us is handed a
lens by our family of origin and our

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culture through which to see the world.

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As it is the only lens we have
ever known, we will presume we see

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reality directly, even as we are
seeing it colored and distorted.

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How could we ever choose wisely when our
information is biased, even inaccurate.

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Only the corrections of others or
the corrections from our violated

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psyche may oblige us to consider
that our fundamental way of seeing

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and understanding is suspect.

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From this encounter with our limitations,
the wisdom of humility comes to know that

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we do not even know what we do not know.

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And that what we do not know will
often make the choices for us.

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Our lives begin and end with loss.

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We lose the safest, least demanding
place we will ever inhabit with all our

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needs met and are forcefully extracted
into a world of peril and contingency.

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And we end our journey with
the loss of our mortal state.

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Natural as it is to seek to hang on the
inevitability of loss rather asks that

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we treasure what we have appreciated
for its precious, momentary presence in

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our lives and know that its gift to us
is found precisely in its impermanence.

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What would be ours in
perpetuity is less treasured.

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What is fleetingly here is most dear.

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The Greek myth of immortal Tithonus
relates how he found his life

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meaningless because of his immortality.

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Every choice this hour could be reversed
in another, and so he petitioned the

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gods to grant him mortality so that
his life through his now risky choices

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could be experienced as meaningful.

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The god's blessed Tithonus.

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We live today in the age of anxiety.

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We would rather be ruined than changed.

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We would rather die in our dread
than climb the cross of the

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present and let our illusions die.

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This excerpt from WH Auden's poem,
The Age of Anxiety, captures the

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existential angst of being human.

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At the turn of the last century,
Sigmund Freud published a book titled

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Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
where he noted that one does not

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have to visit a mental asylum in
order to observe psychopathology.

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One can observe the machinations
of the divided soul in the

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mechanics of ordinary life.

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In his book, Freud detailed the
implicit motives walled off from

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consciousness that interfere with the
ego's choices, and behaviors producing

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namesake slips, forgetfulness, and
camouflaging of dangerous feelings

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through acceptable disguises.

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Freud, along with Carl Gustav Jung
helped our age find a new vocabulary.

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Observed meaningful motives in the
confounding of consciousness and in

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short helped us become psychological.

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Now, in this new century, we are
driven to psychological inquiry.

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In large part because our social and
religious institutions, as well as

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our great educational, technological,
scientific, artistic, and humanistic

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accomplishments have failed to prevent the
slaughter and madness of the 20th century.

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The great Crystal Palace in London,
which in 1851 housed the first

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international celebration of the newly
divine trinity of progress machinery

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and materialism was by the next century
a glass and steel Hulk used by the

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Nazi Luftwaffe as a navigational point
on their bombing runs over London.

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It seems that not only minor interferences
of consciousness, but madness itself,

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lurks beneath the veneer of civilization.

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How else can we look at a
world where we are bombarded by

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sensations, driven by addictions,
medicated beyond accountability,

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agitated into constant motion, and
further from ourselves than ever.

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Unless we begin to look psychologically,
unless we begin to consider,

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there may be a deeper meaning.

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After all,

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Carl Gustav Jung added the thought
that the spiritually charged images

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that once linked humanity to nature
and to the gods had eroded with the

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waning powers of tribal mythologies
and sanctified institutions.

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If points of spiritual reference
had disappeared for most, the modern

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sensibility had to look within in
order to find the place where those

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collective images were generated.

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Jung wrote, we think we can congratulate
ourselves on having already reached

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such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining
that we have left all these phantasmal

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gods far behind, but what we have
left behind are only verbal specters.

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Not the psychic facts that were
responsible for the birth of the gods.

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We are still as much possessed
today by autonomous psychic

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contents as if they were Olympians.

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Today they are called
phobias and obsessions.

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In a word, neurotic symptoms.

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The gods have become diseases.

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Zeus no longer rules Olympus, but
rather the solar plexus and produces

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curious specimens for the doctor's
consulting room, or disorders,

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the brains of politicians and
journalists who unwittingly let

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loose psychic epidemics on the world.

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The implications of Jung's
observations reverberate through

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our culture and our personal lives.

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In examining that seeming oxymoron, that
a god, an eternal one may die, he explains

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that the name attached to a form may
fade, but the energy behind it has only

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been transformed and reappears elsewhere.

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Where did the gods go then?

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The primal energies that gave rise to
the ancient gods have not gone away.

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They have gone underground and
become unconscious, have a spectral

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influence, even greater than
when they were embodied as gods.

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The spiritual powers that the gods
embodied, the invisible world made

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visible for a while, fall back
into the human psyche, and oblige

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humankind to suffer separation
alienation and estrangement from them.

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The most recent millennia began
with so much hope for progress, for

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healing, for the solution of the
ancient scourges of mankind, became

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the bloodiest in all of history.

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The neuroses of individual politicians
embodied and channeled the unconscious

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dynamics of the populace and led to
more murderous possession than that

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ascribed to Satan during the Middle Ages.

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The distractions and enticements of
popular media, newspapers, magazines,

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film, and most of all social media and
television, delivered much information,

00:15:43.455 --> 00:15:48.135
but in a deadly mix of popular fantasy,
collective projections, wishful

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thinking, obscure motives, and shadowy
agendas that only dazzled intelligence.

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What fills this existential void?

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This meaning gap?

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this time between the gods who have
vanished and the gods not yet arrived,

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is the stuff of our daily life.

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Where our ancestors had living
mythologies, we believe that

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we have transcended such a need
and therefore stand naked and

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vulnerable before the raw, sometimes
destructive powers of our nature.

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Our hubristic belief that we are
in control of ourselves and nature

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only makes us more unconscious
of what is at work within us.

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Our ancestors could seek the relief of
their personal and tribal problems by

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asking which god had been offended, and
then offering propitiation to reestablish

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right relationship with that god.

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To say that one has been offended by
Aphrodite today would be thought mad.

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And what about the culture of sensation?

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We are wrapped around by pop culture.

00:16:57.345 --> 00:17:02.295
News that runs 24 hours creates info
junkies, local newscasts find the

00:17:02.295 --> 00:17:06.525
glorious accident, the most salacious
scandal, the most paranoia, stirring

00:17:06.525 --> 00:17:10.754
threats to public health, to serve up
for breakfast, for dinner, and to send

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us toward turbulent slumber at bedtime.

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Transient non-entities are catapulted
to fame, followed by cameras

00:17:19.780 --> 00:17:23.595
throughout the course of their
ordinary days, and described with hyped

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banalities of the unexamined life.

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Romances, survival contests,
sensationalized disease reports, corporate

00:17:31.890 --> 00:17:37.800
greed, political greed, all feed the
ever increasing lust for sensation.

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Apparently, where one has no personal
life, no depth of character, one

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must have an artificial life, an
avatar with someone else's values.

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A life or a culture based on
sensation has no choice but to

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continually escalate the sensations.

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For we quickly grow desensitized
to their incessant drumbeat

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and their failed promise.

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A modern Dante descent into hell.

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Might be defined as taking a good thing,
asking way too much of it, exhausting

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it, and then being left with only it.

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Beware The Ides of March is a famous
warning from William Shakespeare's play,

00:18:24.120 --> 00:18:30.010
Julius Caeser spoken by a soothsayer to
Caesar foretelling his assassination.

00:18:30.370 --> 00:18:35.590
The phrase symbolizes a foreshadowing
of tragedy and a fatal arrogance,

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as Caesar dismisses the warning
as the words of a dreamer.

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And finally, a friend in recovery
once told me that when he was

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drinking, he always had this
strange feeling of impending doom.

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And then when he got sober,
he realized what it was.

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I asked him, what was it?

00:18:56.725 --> 00:19:01.165
And he replied, impending doom.

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Recall the words of Cassius from
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

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Men at some time are
masters of their fates.

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The fault dear Brutus, is not
in our stars, but in ourselves

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that we are underlings.

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The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats.

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

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Things fall apart.

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The center cannot hold.

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Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

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The blood dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere the ceremony

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of innocence is drowned.

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The best lack all convictions.

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While the worst are full
of passionate intensity.

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Surely some revelation is at hand.

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Surely the second coming is at hand.

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The second coming.

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Hardly are those words out when
a vast image out of spiritus

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mundi troubles my sight.

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Somewhere in sands of the desert, a
shape with lion body and the head of

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a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as
the sun, is moving its slow thighs.

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While all about it, real shadows
of the indignant desert birds,

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the darkness drops again.

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But now I know that 20th centuries
of stony sleep were vexed to

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nightmare by a rocking cradle.

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And what rough beast, its hour
come round at last, slouches

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towards Bethlehem to be born.

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They road on

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and the sun and the east flushed
pale streaks of light, and

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then a deeper run of color.

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Like blood seeping up in sudden
reaches, flaring plane wise, and

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where the earth drained up into the
sky at the edge of creation, the

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top of the sun rose out of nothing.

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Like the head of a great red phallus until
it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat

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and pulsing and malevolent behind them.

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The shadows of the smallest stones
lay like pencil lines across the sand

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and the shapes of the men and their
mounts advanced elongate before them,

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like strands of the night from which
they'd ridden, like tentacles to bind

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them to the darkness yet to come.

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They rode on with their heads
down, faceless under their hats

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like an army asleep on the march.

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By mid-morning, another man had died
and they lifted him from the wagon where

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he'd stay in the sacks he'd laid among
and buried him also, then they rode on.

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Now wolves had come to follow them,
great pale lobos with yellow eyes that

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trotted neat of foot were squatted
in the shimmering heat to watch them

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where they made their noon halt.

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Moving on again, loping, sidling, ambling
with their long noses to the ground.

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In the evening, their eyes
shifted and winked out there

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on the edge of the firelight.

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And in the morning when the riders
rode out in the cool dark, they

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could hear the snarling and pop of
their mouths behind them as they

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sacked the camp from meat scraps.

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The wagons drew so dry, they slouched from
side to side like dogs, and the sand was.

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Grinding them away, the wheels shrank,
and the spokes reeled in their hubs

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and plattered like loom shafts.

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And at night they drive false spokes
into the mortises and tie them down

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with strips of green hide and they
drive wedges between the iron of the

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tires and the sun cracked fellows.

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They wobbled on.

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The trace of their untrue laborers
like side winder tracks in the sand.

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The duledge pegs worked
loose and dropped behind.

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Wheels began to break up.

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10 days out with four men dead.

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They started across a plane of pure
pumice where there grew no shrub,

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no weed as far as the eye could see.

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The captain called the halt and he called
up the Mexican who served as guide.

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They talked and the Mexican gestured
and the captain gestured, and

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after a while they moved on again.

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A man from the ranks said, this looks
like the higher road to hell to me.

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In two days, they began to come
upon bones and cast off apparel.

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They saw half buried skeletons of
mules with the bones so wiped and

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polished they seemed incandescent
even in that blazing heat.

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And they saw panniers and pack
saddles and the bones of men, and

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they saw a mule and tire that dried
and blackened carcass hard as iron.

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They rode on.

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The white noon saw them through the
waste like a ghost army, so pale

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they were with dust, like shades
of figures erased upon a board.

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The wolves loped paler yet and
grouped and skittered and lifted

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their leans snouts on the air.

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At night, the horses were fed by hand from
sacks of meal and watered from buckets.

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There was no more sickness.

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The survivors lay quietly in that
cratered void and watch the white

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hot stars go rifling down the dark.

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Or slept with their alien hearts beating
in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon

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the face of the planet Anareta clutched
to a namelessness wheeling in the night.

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They moved on.

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And they.

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Iron of a wagon.

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Tires group polished brightest
chrome in the pumice.

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To the south the blue cordilleras
stood footed in their paler image

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on the sand, like reflections in a
lake and there were no wolves now.

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They took to rioting by night, silent
jornadas saved for the trembling of the

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wagons and the wheeze of the animals.

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Under the moonlight a strange party
of elders with the white dust thick

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on their mustaches and their eyebrows.

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They rode on.

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And the stars jostled and arced
across the firmament and died

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beyond the ink black mountains.

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They came to know the night skies well.

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Western skies that read more
geometric constructions than

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those names given by the ancients.

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Tethered to the pole star.

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They rode the Dipper round while
Orion rose in the southwest

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like a great electric kite.

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The sand laid blue in the moonlight and
the iron tires of the wagons rolled among

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the shapes of the riders in gleaming
hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly

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and vaguely navigational like slender
astrolabes, and the polished shoes of

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the horses kept hasping up like a myriad
of eyes winking across the desert floor.

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They watched storms out there so
distant they could not be heard.

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The silent lightning flaring
sheetwise and the thin black spine

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of the mountain chain fluttering
and sucked away again in the dark.

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They saw wild horses racing on a plane,
pounding their shadows down the night and

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leaving in the moonlight of vaporous dust,
like the palest stain of their passing.

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All night, the wind blew and the fine
dust set their teeth on edge, sand

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in everything, grit in all they ate.

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In the morning a urine colored sun
rose blearly through panes of dust

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in a dim world and without feature.

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The animals were failing.

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They halted and made a dry camp without
wood or water, and the wretched ponies

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huddled and whimpered like dogs.

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That night, they rode through a region
electric and wild, where strange

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shapes of soft blue fire ran over the
metal of the horse's trappings and

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the wagon wheels rolled in hoops of
fire and little shapes of pale blue

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light came to perch in the ears of the
horses and in the beards of the men.

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All night sheet, lightning quaked
sourceless of the west, beyond the

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midnight thunderheads, making a
bluish day of the distant desert,

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the mountains on the southern skyline
stark and black and livid, like a land

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of some other order out there whose
true geology was not stone but fear.

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The thunder moved up from the
southwest and lightning lit

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that does it all about them.

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Blue and barren.

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Great clanging reaches ordered out
of the absolute night like some demon

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kingdom summoned up or changeling
land that come the day would leave

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them neither trace nor smoke nor
ruin more than any troubling dream.

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They rode on.

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An excerpt from the novel Blood
Meridian, or The Evening Redness

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in The West, by Cormac McCarthy.

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Tales told by shadowy elders
around ancient campfires offered

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both explanation and comfort.

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Life hasn't changed that much.

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Our dependence on explanation and
comfort still lies just under our

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busy ambition and constant yearning.

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This has been episode 10 of
Conovision, the spirit of storytelling.

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We began with the words and wisdom
of Dr. James Hollis from his book,

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finding Meaning in the Second Half of
Life, or how to finally really grow up?

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Asking the eternal question,
where did the gods go?

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Plus the literary Olympians.

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William Butler Yeats and Cormac McCarthy.

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I urge you to find every word they
wrote and read it slowly, please.

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I'm Jim Conrad.

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Thanks for listening.

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And as always, remember, we
are all stories to be told.