The myth behind the myth.
Photo in Public domain.
Writing isn't natural. It was invented. As far as we know, the first writing began in Iraq, around 3200 BC. The wedge-shaped indentations or cuneiform were preceded by clay tokens for counting and recording products.
The evolution of writing from tokens to pictography, syllabary and alphabet illustrates the development of information processing to deal with larger amounts of data in ever greater abstraction.
Denise Shmandt-Besserat
The word abstraction is an interesting one.
Abstract is from the Latin meaning pulled away, detached.
etymonline.com
Something detached from something else, pulled away. Something was necessary in a more complex society that needed to be dealt with differently. Things needed to be tallied, recorded.
Why?
Things became important. Perhaps they had been important a long time before 3200 BC, but now they needed to be accounted, measured, known to be possessed.
The complexity of society needed, demanded a system of annotation, from the Latin Annotare meaning to mark, note, make a note.
etymonline.com
Why?
... the development of information processing to deal with larger amounts of data in ever greater abstraction.
So there are the things in themselves, the reality and there's the abstraction, the idea of how many things there are. Ideas are not things. They represent things.
Complexity needs accounting unless you have a memory that is able to hold larger and larger amounts of information.
How did we communicate before its invention? We spoke to one another. We told stories from memory. Handed down myths and fairy tales. Stories from our ancestors and theirs before them. Stories of creation, of Gods and Goddesses. Stories of instruction and meaning, of origin. Stories of life, death and rebirth.
In those tribes, there weren't that many of us, and we moved about, hunting and gathering, life was simple. No complexity. No need to abstract, to annotate. Nothing to keep a tally of other than the original myths. Wonderful.
There are many similarities between the ancient stories of all tribes on the planet. Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949. In it, he explains his theory of the Monomyth.
It seems there's an inherent structure within all myths that are similar and which the protagonist follows. There are certain steps that are part of the journey as seen in this diagram:
Diagram in Public Domain.
I see this journey as the one story of human life. The one life that is in each one of us. What happens to each one of us appears to be different when viewed from a personal, intimate perspective, but if we can use that word, abstract, pull away from the personal and see from a larger perspective, perhaps it's possible to see the one and only story.
I have this conviction that we are the story. Except there is no we. There's only me, here, writing this and you, whoever you are, reading it. (If anyone is.) I don't call myself we. Neither do you. The collective we is another one of those tallies, another accounting, an abstraction.
You might think I'm a bit screwy here and that's fine. What the blue blazes has any of this to do with writing?
Why do we love the protagonists in stories? We put ourselves in the protagonist's shoes. We are them somehow. A vicarious abstraction that we subconsciously believe actually makes us them. For a few minutes, hours, days... whether in a movie, a book, on TV we are transformed.
Yet perhaps it's not just a simple process of imagination.
Archetypes are images and themes which have universal meanings across cultures which may show up in dreams, literature, art or religion.
Carl Jung
Somewhere in our psyche are the heroic myths, the archetypes and they are the connecting principles that allow us to recognise the protagonists. We (I here, you there), share in a fundamental way something sacred in the story that unfolds.
It might appear that we are separate. Obviously we are, outwardly. Logic and reason are still here, folks. No need for 911 yet. But I put it to you that in the myth that is within me and within you, there is only one archetype. I suggest that out here is a hall of mirrors and everything is a projection in matter, in form, of the one, formless Myth that is within.
And writing?
Maybe all art is an imitation of the first art. The word itself may hold the answer. It can mean a creation of some sort, a symbolic interpretation of an idea, an abstraction, or it can be the verb.
The ancient Hindu religion has the phrase That Thou Art. It's a pointer to that myth that is within each one of us. It's used to signify the divine behind the appearance, the abstraction from that which is eternal.
Perhaps myth is not an abstraction. Perhaps it's more real than this abstract reality that vanishes after seventy years or so.
Perhaps every character, somehow, is the one character repeated ad infinitum with variations.
Come on... tell me why it tingles when Judy Garland starts to sing that song? You know the one.
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