The ancients lived their lives steeped in myth, living alongside and within it. Medieval consciousness imagined itself as existing simultaneously with the past: while there was an admission of historical time, history co-existed with a way of seeing the world guided and focused by constant symbolism. Similarly, Thomas Mann constructed his novels around the principle that it was possible to tell the story of one’s own life by following the shape of myths; his metaphor was that we walk in the footsteps of heroes, by re-living and embodying their quests in our own lives. Meaning is seldom absent from such a world view; indeed, meaning is literally everywhere. The first Australians call this the Dreamtime: a world of story that is neither long ago nor far away, but mythic nonetheless.
Frances Yates described such a way of seeing in her construction of the ars memoria – the art of memory. In the art of memory, one builds imaginary cathedrals in the hollows of one’s mind, modeled after physical cathedrals. The individual’s inner cathedral was built to contain the story of one’s life, translated into symbols and narratives enclosed within familiar structures, vividly imagined and meticulously practiced. (It is not so impossible an art, I suspect, as it sounds at first.) While the contents of every such imagined cathedral were individual, they were made out of and housed in structures shared by many; every individual house of memory was unique, but the architecture and building blocks were collectively the same. Those who practiced the art of memory built inner worlds – we might call them private infospheres - shaped individually out of shared materials, whose design and components resembled and coincided with the outer world.
We might imagine the infosphere as a postmodern way to perceive mythic consciousness: a world made of shared information combined in infinite variations. We, too, walk inside myth. The American Dream is most often invoked as a description of a common aspiration, but it also captures in a layered metaphor a state of mind, as well: a shared dream, a people defined by a commonly constructed idealism. But today’s American Dream – like the consumption-driven infosphere of today, dominated by a crazed rush to control and brand images and ideas so as to profit from their exchange – lies outside our individual control, and perhaps our collective will, too. We sleep but think we are awake; we believe we perceive, pragmatically but optimistically, what is truly the real world. But we ourselves have shaped our gaze, like sleepwalkers, to avoid the unpleasant cracks that shiver across our collective façade. We are like prisoners who eagerly keep watch on walls of our own construction, unaware even that we are afraid of that which lies beyond those walls. Cognitive dissonance begins to describe this – that state of mind wherein we reconstruct our understanding of the world to avoid and revise those data which contradict or endanger the fantasy, the Dream. I wouldn’t hesitate to claim that America today lives in a constant state of cognitive dissonance – constantly fantasizing, but – and this is the key, since fantasy itself is not the problem – unaware that we are fantasizing. Indeed, we adamantly insist that our Dream is the only Dream.
An early Christian (and apocryphal) myth called the Hymn of the Pearl – a beautiful text whose imagery and architecture can be found rippling through other traditions and times as well, and whose influence can be charted in many influential artists (such as August Strindberg, for instance, in A Dream Play) – tells a similar story. It imagines a hero who disguises herself (or himself) in order to seek out a precious stone she has accidentally lost. In the process of her quest, she loses herself; she forgets who she is, where she came from, and why she seeks the Pearl. The story hinges on the moment of anagnorisis, the opposite of forgetting (and a critical structural element in drama); some early Christians called it gnosis, a remembering of the forgotten divine. The Pearl can be used as a metaphor for this; as is the life of the princess (or prince) who descends into the world and forgets she has descended. The American Dream is a dream without gnosis, addicted to amnesia (because history, like myth, reminds us of ways of seeing that we might prefer to forget or ignore). We are like Oedipus in Sophocles’ tragedy; we look for the American Character, for a sense of collectively shared identity (perhaps condensed in a cultural crucible euphemistically called The Melting Pot), but blind ourselves in the moment that we grasp what we seek. We have fallen into dream and out of balance; we have forgotten who we are; and we turn our resentment on those very myths that drive and shape our desire, as though the Pearl itself is at fault for our willful, shame-driven self-forgetting.
What would it take for us to awaken? Or, perhaps: what would it take for us to re-claim (collectively and individually) the authorship of our own myths, and thereby of our own lives?
