I am wrapping up teaching a course on Myths today. And I want to try and wrap up the perplexing course material for them. I already know I will fail, and that the one very mouthy student will tell me I'm wrong, or "that depends on your belief." I have said over and over that the urge to form language, to communicate and to transmit ideas and stories is deeper than religion, belief or even conscious thought. We dabbled in Jung, but again, "that's just his opinion."
What I see, though, is that we are hungry for stories. HUNGRY. Turn on the TV and see hundreds of shows during a week that are stories - ongoing, long, slow, quick, one-episode, mini-series, feature-length, dramatic, funny, intriguing, "real" and fictional. Look at the bookshelves in the airport: magazines, books and newspapers loaded with stories. Tales of people in other places and other skins. In fact, it is an embarrassment of riches. We are story-laden, media-heavy in modern culture.
Something must be missing when the mass quantity of stories does not satisfy us. We continue to seek out new stories, new twists on the old plots, new characters for whom the same old story is playing out. (I'm thinking of a particular athlete whose story of infidelity is all over the news, even NPR. STILL. After a week.) Replace the main character in that story with a politician? with a desperate housewife? with a car salesman? Pretty much the same story, heard on E! News, talk shows, Oscar-winning feature movies and the headlines of the tabloids. And yet we listen, we rubberneck, we gawk and we stop to listen, or to read the headlines or the entire article (if we’re waiting at the dentist’s office).
Why? Why are we so obsessed with stories? What is missing?
My belief, based on a little reading and a little life experience, is that we are indeed missing the vital cultural components to properly absorb the "meat" of the myth. In the same way that rice and beans complement and provide a "complete" protein (remember Diet for a Small Planet?), too many stories and not enough deep structure cause cravings and even dysfunctional consumption of our stories.
Even Joseph Campbell talks about this quest for stories, the desire to tell and hear the stories, even to re-enact the major tropes of human culture in our own lives. The hero quest, the revenge story, the creation/flood/recreation motif. He writes about the "monomyth" that guides all of human striving. Clifford Geertz (and others) called it "deep structure" and Jung called it “the collective unconscious.”
True, we have plenty of stories but if we are not skilled enough to read the purpose and structure of these stories, if we cannot derive meaning from them a satisfying way, or learn to live, to pursue a proper practice, we will continue to binge and purge ourselves on stories.
Will the stories ever end? Will we ever get our fill? Not likely – without the rituals, taboos and prescriptions from our ancestors' time, we might understand our lack and supplement our stories with academic knowledge, but we won't be able to digest the moral fiber and make it a part of ourselves.
Campbell’s answer to those who wish to understand, to know the meaning of life: “Follow your bliss.” This cryptic answer is not satisfying and does not provide that key to why we crave stories so much. But it does however suggest that simply by doing our own lives, by creating our own story authentically, we will be participating in the mythmaking, in the storytelling, rather than consuming the easy-to-chew but ultimately unfulfilling vicarious stories of others.
Follow your bliss. Write your own ticket. Make your own kind of music. Do it “your way.” Or else, continue to live an attenuated, mediated, voyeuristic, shallow life. (Next piece of homework? finding the thinkers who have written about this “hell in a handbasket” view of media.)
When it's all said and done, however, we do still have the stories. Charlotte's Web. Black Beauty. Sophie's Choice. War and Peace. The Exodus. To Kill a Mockingbird. There are truths in our stories, and we cherish the capacity of these books (and retellings on film) to teach us and improve us. But only if we move from consumer to participant. One does not have to write in order to participate, but critical reading and active digestion of the stories might also be a way to "follow your bliss."
For now, following my bliss as a writer involves clearing away the fog and clutter, and getting to the real nugget of my novel.
And that is something I hope to get to... on Saturday, when the semester is over. For now, it's time to give a final or two.
This is, to my eye and ear and for whatever it's worth, a lovely analysis of a very interesting and important phenomenon. I marvel at the way my son engages with "stories." He plays out parts of them again and again (Wall-E crushing cubes of garbage for example). The power and compulsion he has to claim and act out the story for himself. To own and assimilate it... There is real bliss there and he fills the apartment with the joy of it.
ReplyDeleteThus, your proposal that we must make our own stories and live them to feel more whole makes perfect sense to me. I think, too, that the power of stories is about how they connect us to other people.
Superficially but not unimportantly in my opinion, you can share the TV stories around the "water cooler" (so-to-speak) with your colleagues. Much less superficially, you can read or watch something that so resonates with who you are inside that it makes you weep and shake... Connection... That all-important, if terrifically cliched, feeling that we are not alone.
For me, in other words, it is not just that we are at our best when we are creating and living our OWN stories, but when we are also sharing those stories with others in one way or another...
(Found you through Holidailies, by the way...)