First off. I LOVE Ursula LeGuin. Love. What a woman. What a writer. I read
Tombs of Atuan at least once a year. Thank you for that quote, Kat.
Secondly, Joys and sorrows... Sim that phrase was a catalyst for some thoughts I've been having!
I've been thinking about all this as well over the past few days. I aopologize for the ranting I'm about to do, but I've been dwelling so I'm just going to brain dump. Apologies in advance for not editing this into more coherence.
How much of what we think of as Joy or Sorrow is based on our illusions about things like "happy endings" or "tragic consequence" which in turn are based on literary models? Stories as discrete sequences that have clear terminals at either end? The thing is there IS no such thhing as an ending. Or a beginning. It's wildly modern to frame our lives in these totally artificial narrative terms, as if life were a TV episode or a volume in a book series. We can't help it; our imaginations are desperate for meaningful patterns and we've been weaned on entertainment for lack of most other things. Even religion has been affected by it. Christianity was CHANGED by electronic media. Hell, even by the printing press. Ditto Judaism. Ditto Islam. The Peoples of the Book.
I think something we can't forget is that Entertainment has replaced Mythology for most of Western civilization. Despite some superficial similarities, they are EVERY different. Myths illuminate. Entertainment amuses. Of course there are times where they overlap, and even coopt each other's functions, but at root we live in a culture that seeks constant amusement... Every moment we have to be stimulated. Every story must have a structure. Every person is a character in a larger
dramatis. It's a seductive way of looking at the world because humans crave
certainty and
order, exactly the things the universe fails to offer. Supply and demand, right? But it's easy to decide that everything is a story when you've been weaned from birth (or earlier depending on your beliefs) on basic story models, basic archetypes, basic moralities. So and so is a happy ending. So and so is a bad person. So and so is a big risk, a last chance, a lucky break, an epiphany, a tragedy, a joke. All fo these things are lessons we learn from art... as in
artificial, that which is made not born.
...Which has had an enormous impact on our sense of personal narrative. We crave order and patterns and so we graft familiar patterns onto everything.
"My boss is a villain"... "That was a caper"... "I am a scapegoat"... Each of those words has its root in a story with a beginning-middle-end, even though Life has none of those things. Linear time is a pretty recent invention, in terms of civilization. Now that's irritating, because modern folks hate the idea of cyclical time, that nothing changes, that people make the same mistakes in different clothing over milenia. The truth is, people don't change much. As always, I'm reminded of the Ancient Egyptian graffito, "Kids today! The don't respect their elders and they spend all their time in bars." Same old same old. Death at the hands of youth.
EXACTLY! It's not thsat it doesn't affect you, but that you will only be as affected as it is possible for you to be. The same holds true in Magick. It's all well and good to cast a spell to win a court case, but if you don't hire a lawyer and show up, you're moron and magick isn't going to help you win anything. The dopey Hollywood hocus-pocus versions of myth and magick and metaphor have done awful things to people's sense of possibility and expectations. As usual, people want everything for nothing, which (for the record) is exactly what magick (and myth and metaphor and math) is NOT. As above, so below.
When folks grumble about Fate and protest that they only believe in Free Will, I think it's because (like all characters in all art) people like to feel special. And if you aren't special, the option Free Will might at first glance seem to suggest that you could "choose" to be special. (Insert reference to The Secret's feeble retread of an old idea here.
) As if Fate and Free Will were somehow flip sides of some nightmarish Boolean coin, I think Entertainment is at fault. How many people actually choose their lives as easily as picking out a DVD or a novel? How many women become the glamorous, feisty heroine desired by all and mastered by none? How many supermen and geniuses? How many cancer patients or veterans asked for the horrors they live through? Not many. It's a bit like the fundamentalist arguments that disease or rape or bombs are heavenly punishment. It's a simpleton's explanation of the problem of Evil in monotheism. I think the reason we like the idea of picking our destiny (which is completely oxymoronic if you think about it) is because Entertainment has suckled us on the lie that we can have what we want if we ask for it and pay for it. This is the shaky "I heart Free Will" line that gets trotted out when the subject comes up in casual conversation.
We cast ourselves as protagonists in these dramas. No one is raised to see themselves as a minor character. Hell, in post-reality-TV-land EVERYTHING is a reason to televise, novelize, cinematize. This is one of the big traps of modern astrology, right? Everyone is the hero of their own story. The thing is, for most of human history, the average person KNEW where they fit in the natural (and supernatural) order. All these ridiculous social mobility delusions and social empowerment falsehoods would have seemed insane, let alone possible. Monarchs had the blood of the gods in their veins; they ruled by divine grace, and were overthrown ditto. The rest of us were "flies to wanton boys."
We have become a world comprised solely of shopping and jail. That is not to say that the world has changed, but rather that our mythologies have been castrated and infected by insidious narratives which are at core commercial products. People plunk their kids (and themselves) in front of the boob tube to unwind. Appliances as childcare and sacrament. People are so numb that films have to be scored so that audiences know when to laugh or cry or jump; we are spoonfed content because our critical and imaginative faculties have atrophied. That stuff isn't truth. Any truth it contains is (as Griz once said) the peas in the casserole: the stuff that managed to slip by the suits. Nevertheless, when people start quoting fictional situations is "proof" or using photoshopped advertisements as "ideals" there is a
serious disconnect between the mimesis and the message. Is there anyone who doesn't know that
Reality Show and
True Story are oxymorons?!
I write stories for a living. I make entertainment. I try to slip a couple "peas" in where I can, when I can. And I think that's why Myth and magick are so important to me; because I feel like I have responsibility to know the difference and to trace the boundary obsessively and carefully. It would be as foolish of me to knowingly submit to the whirlpool of lies and live my life as if
The Poetics[/u] told the "Truth" as it would be to ONLY study Hermes Great-Great-Great because there's no point on living THIS side of the Veil. Know what I mean?
Now me, personally? I feel like I spend the vast majority of my time picking away at the granite encasing my destiny... chipping at it and dusting what's revealed. Like the slaves in Michelangelo's unfinished marbles. Everything I do That I'm even a little proud of is a direct attempt to reveal that Fate... Ananke... Necessity. What must happen. Often I have to get out of my own damn way, because I find that Fate is a razored steamroller.
Is it possible for us to shake off the explicitly false lessons of Entertainment? To go from selling a story back to telling a story? Will any modern Westerner ever see stained glass as a glorious holy comic book and absorb it in the way a 15th century Spaniard would? Dunno. It's a fashionable position to rail at the machine while you're cashing the check. If I am a whore, I'll cop to it. It's only the hypcrisy I find nasty. The same goes for Fate / Free Will. I don't really believe the line is as thick as some folks, because I know that I am destined to have Free Will as much as I choose to acknowledge my Fate. Or as Crowley might say, "The Universe couldn't be other than I chose it to be."
Scion
