Start Here!
Setting out the Philosophy of Myth
Welcome friends! Thanks for persevering through the canals, swamps and wide oceans of the web to seek me out.
There are no passengers on this ship! If you haven’t got the coin let it be the gold on your tongue instead.
Thanks friends.
Found the coin?
Start here!
Setting out the Philosophy of Myth
I thought I would explain a little about A Bright Ship. What we are and where we are going and why we are going. If the system is working right you might see this particular article somewhere on my Substack saying Start Here!
So here is a first run at the question that will guide our whole enquiry, that defines my work and the future study of the Philosophy of Myth:
How can we learn to speak more deliberately to our profound capacity for knowing?
Well here we are at the start – yes the ship is already sailing and yes we already have a rogue fork to another line of enquiry and no we will not stop moving and weaving over and over like this the rest of the voyage.
I want to name the fundamental principle that drives my work, here, at the beginning, because I want it to be in your mind as we take this journey together. I am planting a seed which the work to come will nourish. It is helpful for you to have a sense, maybe not of the destination, but of the reason we are making this journey over under and through the imaginations of the world.
It might not come out clear right now: It has all come together slowly slowly and then quite suddenly we are here. Which is to say like all good things it is an idea that has not yet learnt the limits of the possible.
Putting it as simply as I can: Our capacity for listening is greater than our ability to speak. To put it another way: We rarely manage to communicate at the full capacity of our comprehension.
At least that is what life is like for me. Through the course of human history our ability to express the world in language falls behind our capacity to comprehend it through listening.
The tongue is slower than the ear.
As evidence for such a proposition I am informed by my work with myth and story (we’ll get to defining those later). Enough years now lay behind me of listening carefully and deeply to the polytropic (twisting and turning/many facing/complicated) unfolding stories of the planet and its peoples. Within a story well told is the power for radical transformation. We are concerned here with radical transformation of the self. The complex compacted nuance of mythic narrative in a living story creates certain conditions that enable us to reshape our internal landscapes. I would suggest every person on the planet has had their life changed by a story.
We might ask:
Isn’t a story just a collection of words told in a certain order?
Why would words assembled into a narrative structure have more efficacy than a straight presentation of factual content?
Stories change lives because stories create encounters with rich significance for listening through densely layered images ripe with tangential meanings. A story told well lands differently in the ears of each person who hears it. The dance of import and suggestion drawn from multi-layered implicating images creates the space to speak uniquely and deeply to each of us. As a storyteller I have noticed it time and again – you would (and might have) too. The parts of a story that are most alive for each listener vary wildly. Certain larger motifs in turn draw a common noticing which reveals layers of multi-valent meaning exposed by personal relevance.
There is so much here and we could go so deep but I’m just trying to get some fundamentals down – We will come back to all of this in more detail on the voyage to come.
For now we want to understand that when a bunch of words gain a sort of structure that mirrors our embodied experience of movement it gains a kind of momentum and then we call that bunch of words a narrative. This can occur in single sentences or whole branching tomes of text or remembered histories. I guess what we’re really looking at is that there is some kind of sequencing to semantic content that becomes narrative - a series of semantic events. Do I need to break that down? I want to find the balance between informative and accessible.
Perhaps picture the difference between a snowflake and a snowball. Put enough snowflakes together and they become a collection of snowflakes expressed as a new, complex common structure. An absolutely unique moment of space and time snowflake. The beyond limitly wondrous snowball. Making one to the other is one of the great true pleasures of human experience. With the more complex structure it is negotiating at different levels of force. We can scale this all the way up to an avalanche.
Maybe a snowflake is a thing that happened, and a snowball could be a few things that happened making a story, and an avalanche might be a braided knot of story that we could call myth. As the collection of images grows they gain a sort of psychic weight when we hear them as the mind races to reimagine the events inside itself, repeating the sequencing that built a story out of single occurrences. Give it enough time and enough tellings and those clusters are so ripe with meaning and moments that we cannot lift them ourselves but instead they can push us about.
So a narrative would be any kind of collection of moments that are taken from reality and sequenced together in speech. Sequencing meanings through collections of words gives a kind of parallel of our directional experience in reality and our imaginations. We sort of live with a sense of sequence – Or the brain likes to imagine things in sequences. So the brain does a kind of sympathetic sequencing recognising the similarity between a narrative and it’s own experience of experiencing reality. Moments cease to be discrete in a narrative. This feels familiar to our imaginative reality where everything is connected.
We are going to swing from the back round to the front now and layer those ideas while they are still fresh in your mind.
Hearing narratives feels familiar to our minds because it sympathetically mirrors the minds experience of being alive. We consciously recognise this too of course and it can be pleasing to retread certain sequences as a result – Read the same book to a young child twice and watch them delight as the story unfolds the same way again.
Much of this will not sound new or surprising. I am trying to draw from diverse fields of enquiry in novel ways. It is where this collection of already known knowledge will take us when we let it share a conversation which could be exciting.
Anyway, probably on account of the sympathetic mirroring of narrative sequencing and our own sequential memory systems when we hear stories weird stuff happens to us that wouldn’t happen if the words were just an assembled list of facts. Go watch a tear-jerking advert and then read a shopping list. Spend time with a journalist or someone in marketing or a data analyst asking ‘Where is the story in this pile of information?’
I am not here to convince that stories are effective mechanisms for affecting change. I do not need to prove that story is a fundamental part of the human experience. What is interesting to me is what happens when you start to think about the cognitive functions at work processing story inside of our imaginative-self-construct.
The point here is that we can identify a powerful tool for communication and understanding and transformation present in our everyday lives which currently is sort-of siloed in a narrow bracket of usage. There is a capacity within us for comprehension that has been built up over unknowable amounts of human and non-human interactions over deep time. The most that most of us use it for (in my circles at least) is nomadic traversing from tale to tale in front of the television. There is a reason there is a TV set in (nearly) every home which I am suggesting suggests something much deeper at work that pulls us in and keeps us locked in avid anticipation of unfolding events.
I am trying to crack just the tiniest opening in a great vault door in the hope that even a whiff of fresh air might rejuvenate those of us trapped in the tomb.
What I am saying is that (obviously enough) we have these deeply complex capacities for listening that comprehend across multiple layers of meaning and significance simultaneously but that (maybe not so obvious) we only activate the full breadth of these sensors rarely, when we encounter a profoundly relevant narrative perhaps.
Myth, as a sufficiently complex linguistic vessel, (The Odyssey, for example) manages to hit that wide-band sensor array every time. That’s how you know you are in the presence of it – The whole mind fires in response to the complexity of its messages, meanings, imports and insights.
Encountering myth regularly is not the everyday experience of many, I would suggest. So this whole complex array of mechanisms for making sense goes underutilised. It is like we have spent our lives shaping a great, beautiful thing together, but we only visit on rare and sometimes accidental occasion.
Our busy brains have evolved, mostly through accidental success, a mechanism to understand such complexity as I could not easily communicate to you here. That is my point – that I cannot begin to describe just now how significant our capacity for knowing is in this language as it ordinarily operates. But the capacity for that kind of polyphonic knowing IS there.
The ear is faster than the tongue.
So here is a first run at the question that will guide our whole enquiry, that defines my work and the future study of the Philosophy of Myth:
How can we learn to speak more deliberately to our profound capacity for knowing?
Myths provide a ready host of examples that achieve this. But how can our mythic imagination approach different ways of speaking in ordinary language to carry similar semantic and pragmatic significance? Can we make our speech broader in terms of content and context to carry information more effectively to the ears of another?
What would an image rich way of speech ripe with significance look like? I think, in truth, if we could learn to speak to the ear tuned to mythic intelligence directly we could bring about a fundamental transformation of the experience of human reality.
Welcome friends! Thanks for persevering through the canals, swamps and wide oceans of the web to seek me out.
There are no passengers on this ship! If you haven’t got the coin let it be the gold on your tongue instead.
Thanks friends.
Found the coin?
I would absolutely love an audio version!
yes exactly, it's all about capacity; I believe too that Clarissa Pinkola Estes has a line in her book " Women who run with the Wolves' that speaks to the 3 levels of hearing (Apprehending). You mentioned the Odyssey, did you happen to attend Martin Shaw's Odyssey weekend in October?