Muthos

I like the idea of myth creation. I wonder if it is something that can be consciously affected or if it is just something that must happen naturally as the wear of time turn things into stories polished enough--like rocks on the beach--to be the smooth stuff of myth, pretty much of a form, not to edgy to keep the people off. I'm not suggesting that we speed the process up along with everything else in our accelerated culture. That would make me sad.

But something inside of me seems okay with conscious myth creation. Hell I think novels are all the potential myths of the future. They are beautifully wrought and there is no reason those themes couldn't be blended seamlessly with the feel of history (especially in this age where fact is so tenuous in regards to history and humans).

All of this is coming out of the doomsday clock sort of, whose existence many of us just became aware of. And like many of us I was disappointed that there are no fact associated with the clock. Just the keepers and what they say. I want hard or soft statistics. I want change on the level of milliseconds and I want a reasonable time frame like, world likely to be over in 2042. I would dig all that. And I think it would be perfect for a new American myth about world's end. It would be perfect because it would be the type of myth our age would come up with, one based on psuedo-science and statistics. Unprovable but realistic. So fab.

For you, however, I suggest something different. I was told the other day about a cultish sect of folks going around preaching a form of nihilism. I'm more nihilistic than the next guy but these folks seem to be missing something. They are going around telling people that they are meaning making machine and that the world has no meaning. Then they are saying the world has no meaning and your own attempts to make meaning have no meaning.

Here's the deal. Sure I don't believe in anything. Sure I believe there is no reason for anything. And sure I agree there isn't even a second order meaning. But to say we are meaning making creatures is as much as to admit that that is what we should all be doing. Constructing stories is precisely what the human animal is good. I can't really tell you the biological advantage of it all. But I can tell you that perhaps the best part of life and the most power you can have over your own life is what you can do with your own stories. How you can create your own myths. But the ones that inspire you and the ones about yourself. It is a tenuous business just like everything. Plenty of places to wander astray. But it is also your best chance for determining your own perception. Anyways. Symbols, myth and metaphors are the stuff of life. Even when they are bad for you they are more fun (and more human) than anything else you'll run into.