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

0:10 Jim Conrad: Welcome to Conovision. I'm your host, Jim "Cono" Conrad. On episode 10, we tell stories about the dark side, the dark side of the moon, as metaphor for the shadow side of the human psyche, the human soul. What demons lurk, what fears lie submerged in the Mariana Trench of our mind. We will hear the poems and prose of two literary gods, William Butler Yeats and Cormac McCarthy, and their revelations from the Shadowlands.

0:59 But first, a story about the tragic sense of life, the tragic vision, as so presciently illuminated in mythology by the ancient Greek playwrights and philosophers, and why it matters so much to us now. The word tragic, like myth, has been somewhat debased in our modern times. It has come to mean something calamitous, something horrible as when a television talking head intones, tragedy tonight on the Westside freeway.

1:40 The ancient Greeks did have a word for that. It is catastrophe, but we do have much to learn about who we really are from recalling what our ancestors intuited 26 centuries ago. Their imaginative rendering of the human dilemma, the dialectical play of fate, destiny, character, and choice still remains the best paradigm for how life's permutations play out on this finite plane. Our predecessors discerned that we often intend a certain outcome, work diligently towards its achievement, and yet wind up in an entirely different place than expected in our lives.

2:28 And most disturbingly, this altered course derives in substantial measure from the choices that a presumably conscious being made. How could this be that we could be our own enemy? The ancient Greeks understood that there were forces in the cosmos to which even the gods were subject. Those Greek gods being Aphrodite, the goddess of love, sex, and beauty, Athena, the goddess of reason, wisdom, and war. Artemis was the fleet footed goddess of the hunt.

3:09 Aries was the god of Bloodlust. Apollo, who was the twin brother of Artemis, was among the most important and feared of the gods. Son of Zeus, he disseminated the will of his divine compatriots through various means. Notably, Oracles. The Oracle of Delphi was his mouthpiece. Demeter, an agricultural goddess was mother to Persephone, who was abducted by the underworld god, Hades, to be his bride. Dionysus was a son of Zeus born to a mortal mother. The cult of Dionysus revolved around intoxication, sex, and savage ritual sacrifice.

3:52 As mentioned, Hades ruled the world of the dead. Hera, the queen goddess of Olympus, was both sister and wife to Zeus. Though she is often depicted as reserved and austere, she was mercilessly vindictive when it came to her husband's many extramarital adventures. Like many gods in the Greek pantheon, Hermes presided over multiple spheres. He was a pastoral figure, responsible for protecting livestock, but was also associated with fertility, music, luck and deception. Poseidon is best known as the Greek sea god. But he was also the god of horses and of earthquakes and had some seriously strange children.

4:38 Though humanoid, he fathered both the winged horse Pegasus, by Medusa no less, and the cyclops, Polyphemus, who is blinded by Odysseus and his crew in the Odyssey. And finally, with the assistance of Hades and Poseidon, Zeus overthrew his father Cronus, king of the Titans and became the chief deity in a new pantheon, comprising mostly of his siblings and children. The forces of the universe to which these gods were subject were named Moirai, or Fate, sophrosyne. Or what goes around comes around. Diking for justice, nemesis, or consequential retribution, and destiny.

5:22 These forces might be translated by us today as the organizing balancing structuring powers of the cosmo. A word itself, which means order. When we are ignorant of these forces at work, as frequently we will be, we most likely will make choices that run counter to the principles and energies of our own deepest nature. Moreover, our ancestors believed that we often offend the gods. That is, violate the energetic designs of which they are the dramatized personifications. Thus, a wound to Aphrodite will show up in one's intimate relationships, or one possessed by Aries will act out of unreasoned anger.

6:10 With all its attendant consequences. Accordingly, the ancient Greeks believe that by reading the texture of one's life, one can identify the ignored or repressed archetypal powers, the gods offended, and offer homage and compensation to them to restore the balance. Add to this mix, our predecessors acknowledge the role of individual character, which repeatedly plays a role in the creation of our choices and patterns, what they called hubris, often translated as pride, might more pragmatically be defined as our tendency toward self-deception. Especially the delusion that we are in possession of all the facts when we make decisions, what they called the hamartia, sometimes translated as the tragic flaw or the wounded vision, the inherent biasing of our choices as a result of our own psychological history.

7:06 Our tendency toward wrong choice or unintended consequences is fueled by these two liabilities. The first is our temptation to believe what we wish to believe, the assumption that we know all we need to know about ourselves and the situation to make wise choices. In fact, seldom do we know enough even to know we do not know enough. Moreover, there is a second element here, namely the biasing of our vision by the profound influence of our personal and cultural histories, our experience subtly, alters, even distorts the lens through which we see the world and the choices we make are based on that altered vision.

7:53 At birth, each of us is handed a lens by our family of origin and our culture through which to see the world. As it is the only lens we have ever known, we will presume we see reality directly, even as we are seeing it colored and distorted. How could we ever choose wisely when our information is biased, even inaccurate. Only the corrections of others or the corrections from our violated psyche may oblige us to consider that our fundamental way of seeing and understanding is suspect. From this encounter with our limitations, the wisdom of humility comes to know that we do not even know what we do not know.

8:39 And that what we do not know will often make the choices for us. Our lives begin and end with loss. We lose the safest, least demanding place we will ever inhabit with all our needs met and are forcefully extracted into a world of peril and contingency. And we end our journey with the loss of our mortal state. Natural as it is to seek to hang on the inevitability of loss rather asks that we treasure what we have appreciated for its precious, momentary presence in our lives and know that its gift to us is found precisely in its impermanence.

9:28 What would be ours in perpetuity is less treasured. What is fleetingly here is most dear. The Greek myth of immortal Tithonus relates how he found his life meaningless because of his immortality. Every choice this hour could be reversed in another, and so he petitioned the gods to grant him mortality so that his life through his now risky choices could be experienced as meaningful. The god's blessed Tithonus. We live today in the age of anxiety. We would rather be ruined than changed.

10:10 We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die. This excerpt from WH Auden's poem, The Age of Anxiety, captures the existential angst of being human. At the turn of the last century, Sigmund Freud published a book titled Psychopathology of Everyday Life, where he noted that one does not have to visit a mental asylum in order to observe psychopathology. One can observe the machinations of the divided soul in the mechanics of ordinary life. In his book, Freud detailed the implicit motives walled off from consciousness that interfere with the ego's choices, and behaviors producing namesake slips, forgetfulness, and camouflaging of dangerous feelings through acceptable disguises.

11:05 Freud, along with Carl Gustav Jung helped our age find a new vocabulary. Observed meaningful motives in the confounding of consciousness and in short helped us become psychological. Now, in this new century, we are driven to psychological inquiry. In large part because our social and religious institutions, as well as our great educational, technological, scientific, artistic, and humanistic accomplishments have failed to prevent the slaughter and madness of the 20th century. The great Crystal Palace in London, which in 1851 housed the first international celebration of the newly divine trinity of progress machinery and materialism was by the next century a glass and steel Hulk used by the Nazi Luftwaffe as a navigational point on their bombing runs over London.

12:05 It seems that not only minor interferences of consciousness, but madness itself, lurks beneath the veneer of civilization. How else can we look at a world where we are bombarded by sensations, driven by addictions, medicated beyond accountability, agitated into constant motion, and further from ourselves than ever. Unless we begin to look psychologically, unless we begin to consider, there may be a deeper meaning. After all, Carl Gustav Jung added the thought that the spiritually charged images that once linked humanity to nature and to the gods had eroded with the waning powers of tribal mythologies and sanctified institutions.

12:56 If points of spiritual reference had disappeared for most, the modern sensibility had to look within in order to find the place where those collective images were generated. Jung wrote, we think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind, but what we have left behind are only verbal specters. Not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians.

13:37 Today they are called phobias and obsessions. In a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases. Zeus no longer rules Olympus, but rather the solar plexus and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room, or disorders, the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world. The implications of Jung's observations reverberate through our culture and our personal lives. In examining that seeming oxymoron, that a god, an eternal one may die, he explains that the name attached to a form may fade, but the energy behind it has only been transformed and reappears elsewhere.

14:30 Where did the gods go then? The primal energies that gave rise to the ancient gods have not gone away. They have gone underground and become unconscious, have a spectral influence, even greater than when they were embodied as gods. The spiritual powers that the gods embodied, the invisible world made visible for a while, fall back into the human psyche, and oblige humankind to suffer separation alienation and estrangement from them. The most recent millennia began with so much hope for progress, for healing, for the solution of the ancient scourges of mankind, became the bloodiest in all of history.

15:20 The neuroses of individual politicians embodied and channeled the unconscious dynamics of the populace and led to more murderous possession than that ascribed to Satan during the Middle Ages. The distractions and enticements of popular media, newspapers, magazines, film, and most of all social media and television, delivered much information, but in a deadly mix of popular fantasy, collective projections, wishful thinking, obscure motives, and shadowy agendas that only dazzled intelligence. What fills this existential void? This meaning gap? this time between the gods who have vanished and the gods not yet arrived, is the stuff of our daily life.

16:07 Where our ancestors had living mythologies, we believe that we have transcended such a need and therefore stand naked and vulnerable before the raw, sometimes destructive powers of our nature. Our hubristic belief that we are in control of ourselves and nature only makes us more unconscious of what is at work within us. Our ancestors could seek the relief of their personal and tribal problems by asking which god had been offended, and then offering propitiation to reestablish right relationship with that god. To say that one has been offended by Aphrodite today would be thought mad.

16:51 And what about the culture of sensation? We are wrapped around by pop culture. News that runs 24 hours creates info junkies, local newscasts find the glorious accident, the most salacious scandal, the most paranoia, stirring threats to public health, to serve up for breakfast, for dinner, and to send us toward turbulent slumber at bedtime. Transient non-entities are catapulted to fame, followed by cameras throughout the course of their ordinary days, and described with hyped banalities of the unexamined life. Romances, survival contests, sensationalized disease reports, corporate greed, political greed, all feed the ever increasing lust for sensation.

17:39 Apparently, where one has no personal life, no depth of character, one must have an artificial life, an avatar with someone else's values. A life or a culture based on sensation has no choice but to continually escalate the sensations. For we quickly grow desensitized to their incessant drumbeat and their failed promise. A modern Dante descent into hell. Might be defined as taking a good thing, asking way too much of it, exhausting it, and then being left with only it.

18:19 Beware The Ides of March is a famous warning from William Shakespeare's play, Julius Caeser spoken by a soothsayer to Caesar foretelling his assassination. The phrase symbolizes a foreshadowing of tragedy and a fatal arrogance, as Caesar dismisses the warning as the words of a dreamer. And finally, a friend in recovery once told me that when he was drinking, he always had this strange feeling of impending doom. And then when he got sober, he realized what it was. I asked him, what was it? And he replied, impending doom.

19:02 Recall the words of Cassius from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings. The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats.

19:51 Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all convictions. While the worst are full of passionate intensity.

20:38 Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the second coming is at hand. The second coming. Hardly are those words out when a vast image out of spiritus mundi troubles my sight. Somewhere in sands of the desert, a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs. While all about it, real shadows of the indignant desert birds, the darkness drops again.

21:27 But now I know that 20th centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

22:07 They road on and the sun and the east flushed pale streaks of light, and then a deeper run of color. Like blood seeping up in sudden reaches, flaring plane wise, and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation, the top of the sun rose out of nothing. Like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them, like strands of the night from which they'd ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.

23:04 They rode on with their heads down, faceless under their hats like an army asleep on the march. By mid-morning, another man had died and they lifted him from the wagon where he'd stay in the sacks he'd laid among and buried him also, then they rode on. Now wolves had come to follow them, great pale lobos with yellow eyes that trotted neat of foot were squatted in the shimmering heat to watch them where they made their noon halt. Moving on again, loping, sidling, ambling with their long noses to the ground. In the evening, their eyes shifted and winked out there on the edge of the firelight.

23:49 And in the morning when the riders rode out in the cool dark, they could hear the snarling and pop of their mouths behind them as they sacked the camp from meat scraps. The wagons drew so dry, they slouched from side to side like dogs, and the sand was. Grinding them away, the wheels shrank, and the spokes reeled in their hubs and plattered like loom shafts. And at night they drive false spokes into the mortises and tie them down with strips of green hide and they drive wedges between the iron of the tires and the sun cracked fellows. They wobbled on. The trace of their untrue laborers like side winder tracks in the sand.

24:34 The duledge pegs worked loose and dropped behind. Wheels began to break up. 10 days out with four men dead. They started across a plane of pure pumice where there grew no shrub, no weed as far as the eye could see. The captain called the halt and he called up the Mexican who served as guide. They talked and the Mexican gestured and the captain gestured, and after a while they moved on again. A man from the ranks said, this looks like the higher road to hell to me. In two days, they began to come upon bones and cast off apparel.

25:14 They saw half buried skeletons of mules with the bones so wiped and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat. And they saw panniers and pack saddles and the bones of men, and they saw a mule and tire that dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their leans snouts on the air.

25:57 At night, the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watch the white hot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on. And they. Iron of a wagon. Tires group polished brightest chrome in the pumice.

26:38 To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand, like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now. They took to rioting by night, silent jornadas saved for the trembling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their mustaches and their eyebrows. They rode on. And the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the ink black mountains. They came to know the night skies well.

27:21 Western skies that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the pole star. They rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand laid blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes, and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor.

28:04 They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard. The silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on a plane, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight of vaporous dust, like the palest stain of their passing. All night, the wind blew and the fine dust set their teeth on edge, sand in everything, grit in all they ate. In the morning a urine colored sun rose blearly through panes of dust in a dim world and without feature.

28:50 The animals were failing. They halted and made a dry camp without wood or water, and the wretched ponies huddled and whimpered like dogs. That night, they rode through a region electric and wild, where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horse's trappings and the wagon wheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheet, lightning quaked sourceless of the west, beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the southern skyline stark and black and livid, like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.

29:44 The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit that does it all about them. Blue and barren. Great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream. They rode on.

30:24 An excerpt from the novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in The West, by Cormac McCarthy. Tales told by shadowy elders around ancient campfires offered both explanation and comfort. Life hasn't changed that much. Our dependence on explanation and comfort still lies just under our busy ambition and constant yearning.

31:09 This has been episode 10 of Conovision, the spirit of storytelling. We began with the words and wisdom of Dr. James Hollis from his book, finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, or how to finally really grow up? Asking the eternal question, where did the gods go? Plus the literary Olympians. William Butler Yeats and Cormac McCarthy. I urge you to find every word they wrote and read it slowly, please. I'm Jim Conrad.

31:50 Thanks for listening. And as always, remember, we are all stories to be told.