Laura from Indiana, USA asks: If you had to chose only one event in your life, which would you say has had the greatest impact? Beth's death in 1998. It was ten-years-and-a-month ago, and I'm still working out ramifications of the life-and-death we shared. (When I go back and read some of my earliest reactions, from the days just after, I see I understood quite a bit. What takes time is the making-whole. It's intolerable to me to have dissociated bits. In that sense I'm more sympathetic to the universe as
Whitehead's clump of goo than
Russell's pile of buckshot. But really what we need is a fusion of the two. That's one of my long-term goals.) I'll write of all Beth and I shared someday - I touch on the barest essence in
she and I - but for now, this.
I believe we're all biologically-determined - to be intellectual, emotional, mythic, spiritual. There's not one culture known without some ritual, however simple. We're biologically-determined to need, seek, make, and have meaning. Nietzsche says, dramatically, "Man will will nothingness rather than will nothing." In that sense, the purely empirical-pragmatic approach to humans is doomed to failure. There'll always be something missing. It's like trying to pilot a ship only by eyesight, without reference to maps, sounding lines, sonar, or stars, not to mention GPS. If there were no use for meaning, the need wouldn't have evolved out so universally. It probably had tribal survival-value. Certainly it can ennoble and inspire one to work in ways that benefit the tribe.
But there's a danger to myth, one that artistic or mythopoetic people don't sufficiently address: myths can be traps. One can wind up working for the tribe, say - and it turns out that the tribe wasn't worthy of your sacrifice. You're not, really, say, going to heaven with the however-many-dozen-virgins. Conversely, you can cut yourself off from human contact in the belief you have some great individual destiny - and it turns out you don't, at least not one that required that means of execution.
Trap-myths can also lead you to stay where you shouldn't, to tolerate what you shouldn't. I remember an Israeli, some years ago, saying, "Our grandparents were told to sacrifice so their grandchildren would live in a perfect land. Now they tell us to do that for
our grandchildren! When will it ever end?!" (Quoting from memory.)
Now we're choking in unhealthy, low-level myths. Our life-giving, life-enhancing myths are largely silent. We've not lost the capacity - I've heard, in my sojourns through strange places since about my twentieth year, when i left the College, the most remarkable creativity from the most seemingly-ordinary people - sometimes the most seeming-ordinary have the greatest poetry inside them - but it's spasmodic and brief. We live in a culture that permits and rewards firing off a blast of momentary attitude - Paris Hilton arriving at an event - and that inhibits and discourages the long mythic arc. Most of our myths are petty and negative myths about the bad motives of our enemies or opponents - all businessmen are greedy vultures, or all liberals want to clap us into a new Gulag. False, negative, unhelpful.
But we all have a mythic dimension. Our lives, like stories, have beginnings and middles and ends - climaxes, developments, surprises. It's a comedy / drama / tragedy / romance / absurdity. As Joseph Campbell says, the guy standing at the corner of Thirty-Third and Park in Manhattan is the heir of Odysseus - he just doesn't know it. (I'd add he's also the heir of Cyrano, Puck, and
Monseiur Hulot.) Our lives are meaningful, whether we want them to be or not. And, just like our bodies, our myths are mixes of healthy and unhealthy. And we can and must work from within them to become healthier.
For ten-and-a-half years, the years of my marriage to Beth, I lived in a myth. A complex system of myths, actually. (I'm not referring here to her own multiplicity, but rather her mythic autogeny and sense of future destiny.) It inspired me to huge efforts, brought an unmatched sense of richness and meaning - but the system was almost entirely at a tangent to daily life, and at some points even in their manifestations (not to mention their roots) at odds with health, well-being, and prudence.
My own myth, if you will, was also almost entirely swallowed in hers. But, as Vladimir Horowitz once wisely said, when you're young and let yourself be strongly influenced by others, you're not being dominated - you're forming, through contact with masters. (Some of the poverty of our time consists in our refusal to accept any master but the one who promises to serve us, as with the President-Elect. We will acknowledge no master who is master simply out of transcendent competence and ability. And so we remain - not even apprentices. In Campbellian terms, we never so much as part off from the tribe. What we forget is that we cannot, then, return to help the tribe with the wisdom and honor accrued from our quest without. We just stay huddled in our community by the little fire.)
So even though my own myth-path was in some sense swallowed up Beth's - it was voluntary. I accepted it.
That swallowing, too, was part of my myth.What was not accounted for in any of the myths - was when her cancer was pronounced terminal. That was not part of the mythic path, which she'd believed mapped out in great multi-decade detail. I'd come freshly out of my first destructive criticism of Rand, and was as open as I'd ever be in my life. I was ripe to believe - and Beth came with unutterable force, shattering and healing. Through coming to know and love her, I was truly reborn in this life. For her part, she professed to have no idea why she'd been singled out for the strange life she had - had she'd her way, she often said, she'd have married her soldier-boy Kevin and had babies with him on the Jersey shore. But he was killed in a rice paddy, and she was ejected from that myth. "I don't know why," she would say, "but I'm one of those lighning-rod people. I don't go looking for it - but it comes."
And it did.
Not to put too fine a point on it: Beth told me it'd been foretold by a deeply gifted psychic - one who knew specifics of Beth's abuse by her father without Beth telling her a word of it - that Beth'd live to be either 78 or 87, that she would have several children, that she would be known in her lifetime for her novels but after her death more for her poetry.
And I believed.
So much else, even the most implausible, had checked out. (A tiny sliver: she claimed to have been an extra in the movie of
Hair - and there she was in a scene. She claimed to have been a student of
Salem Ludwig - and there was the casual photo of him in his apartment, and the student IDs from the acting school with her name on them.)
I believed that through our love, I'd entered a transcendent dimension. In a sense. I had - but what I did not realize was that it had little to do with daily life in its particulars. And in time, when it came time to deal with the lump in the breast that stood against the myth - that the myth would win. And in winning, lose. For she lost her life.
And our life together was lost.
And worse yet - I can't prevaricate here - is that even before her life ended, she pushed me out of our mythic existence. Unilaterally and without discussion, the essential foundation of our very existence was destroyed.
For those who've read
She and I, they will understand why, almost at the very end, I smash my first on my desk again and again, heedless of injury.
Beth's death was the final showing that the myth had been contrary to the truth and needs of daily life - yet it'd felt so inimitably, powerfully right.
This was the great tear, the great split, I'm still engaged in trying to heal. I haven't succeeded yet, though I suggest (to myself as much to anyone else) a way out in the final scene of
She and I.
For what I didn't realize was the immensity of the cultural change that'd happened in the time I was with Beth - the significance of her being seven years older than I - of having moved to the West Coast - and the fact that so many of the afterward-contacts were initially established via 'net.
For I've found that while people are still capable of the mythic flight, it's a spasmodic flap-of-wings - and then a quick return to ground. Most of the people I have known since - most've been females - have been able to whip up a mythic froth - but all too soon the bowl goes into the dishwasher and is set back on the shelf, and then we get back to the
real business of living: which apparently largely consists in talking about other people (usually their negative qualities), laboring at unenjoyed work, and trying to get more stuff.
I'll take myth - even parted-from-reality myth.
I've not given up, and this is not to say that there have not been great moments, experiences, connections. There have. But part of the thing is,
I have changed - and in the time when I most needed to repair to the wholeness of meaningful existence, to heal the edges of wounds - what would start out with mythic light would, again and again, deconstruct into banality on the other person's part.
There's a
will to banality afoot these days. Apparently people feel secure, keeping things on that level. To me it's the worst place. I cannot breathe there. One of my crimes against myself is not having protested when the banal reduction began - and staying in relationships in the futile hope of elevation returning.
So there I am. I'm a myth-lover who sees the danger in myths, who lived a great myth and was thrown out of it - and then out of a bunch of succeeding ones.
I'm trying to find a way between the rocks, out into freedom again. I'm not there, yet, but I see more seagulls in the sky lately, a hint of salt in the breeze.
I've not yet scattered Beth's ashes. I shall not, until I write the book of our life-and-death together. For then the myth shall be, in a post-mortem sense, reborn.
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