Museum of Myth
Jack Foley
William G. Doty contacted me recently in connection
with a proposed museum that will feature worldwide cultures and myths.
The museum developer has provided a grant to The Joseph Campbell
Foundation to investigate innovative ways of presenting myths and mythic
narratives. Doty writes,
I
am engaged as a consultant to a project of the Joseph Campbell
Foundation. [I am] advising a major donor who proposes to develop a
museum/center of global culture with emphasis upon the mythic
dimension—a world-class operation inspired by the life and teaching of
Campbell...The project will combine housing, offices, shops, retail and
commercial activity, with the museum as its “cultural jewel.”
Doty included a questionnaire which he asked me to fill out. I
thought the project was a wonderful one—a kind of Disneyland for
adults—and enthusiastically answered his questions.
1.
What strike you as the major
mythic motifs one encounters along life’s path?
Often
our deepest mythic experiences are precisely those which we cannot
easily name—those of which we are simultaneously aware and unaware. In
many instances, myth allows us to express the multiplicity of feelings
with which we attempt to understand experience; in other instances, myth
simplifies, so that, through a mythic image, we can hold in our minds a
multitude of perhaps confused, conflicting feelings. The motif of the
journey is surely a major motif—as is the related motif of light and
dark (day and night). The motif of the earthly paradise—trivialized in
bourgeois culture as “the nice house” —is also related to the motif
of the journey.
Since
you asked about my personal responses, I would have to include the
experience of the disembodied voice as a major motif. I was born in 1940
and so grew up with radio, not television. The disembodied voice—which
is what radio projects—retains an enormously mythic quality for me.
This is from “‘And Again I Hear’: Old Radio and the
Imagination,” a paper I wrote on the subject (you can find it archived
in my column, “Foley’s Books,” in the online magazine, The
Alsop Review:
This
idea of a connection between conscience and voices is...strengthened by
a passage in Erwin W. Straus’s article, “Phenomenology of
Hallucinations.” “The schizophrenic hears voices, not persons,”
writes Straus; “Voice and speaker remain separate”:
Sound detached from the sounding body is something; yet it is not
a thing one can manipulate like the piano which produces the sound; it
is not a thing, but neither is it no-thing. Sound is somewhere between
thing and no-thing. It does not belong to the category of objects which
we can handle. In hearing, we have already heard. We cannot escape from
a sound in the manner by which we escape from visible things at their
distant place; we lend our ear to the words which come toward us and
claim us. A voice calls and orders. No wonder, therefore, that, in many
languages—in Greek and Latin, Hebrew, French and German, and
Russian—the words “hearing” and “obeying” are derived from the
same root. English makes no exception; for the verb “to obey” stems
from the Latin obaudire
(literally, to listen from below), a relation more clearly preserved in
the noun “obedience.”
Struck by the irresistible power of voices, the schizophrenic
feels no need to test the reality of his experience.
Straus’s last sentence might well pertain to the radio listener
who, like the schizophrenic, gets caught up in “the irresistible power
of voices” and so feels “no need to test the reality of his
experience.” The radio performer’s voice also hovers “between
thing and no-thing,” and this ambiguous status—neither something nor
nothing—might well suggest why people should be somewhat uneasy when
confronted with disembodied voices. Finally, Straus’s pointing to
linguistic evidence of a connection between hearing and obeying is very
powerful indeed. We do speak, after all, of the “voice” of
conscience.
The sexual is also deeply mythical. What we call “romance,”
“longing,” “the search for the other,” with its twin poles of
ecstasy and betrayal, is an endlessly recurring motif. Related to this
is the always astonishing appearance of “The Great Man” or
Woman—the guru figure who often functions as rescuer or savior. This
figure may also be connected to the motif of the twin, the “brother”
or “sister” who mirrors our soul: a sometimes sexualized person of
enormous power and “understanding” (“At last, someone who
understands me!”) who reassures us that we really exist, that our
consciousness has validity of some sort. This twin may also appear as
the rival: the other as threat—and so becomes the very person we must
defeat. The idea of the family, of a group of people whose relationship goes beyond the
accidental and whose connections, while sometimes hidden, are somehow
eternal, should be mentioned here as well: “mother,” “father,”
etc. are deeply mythic formulations.
2.
Which (fascinating and somehow
“mythical”) experiences have provoked you to reflect on the
significance of a particular life experience? Can you recall
particularly transformative
examples?
In
answer to this, I’ve appended my poem, “Bridget, Pronounced
‘Breed.’” Please consult the notes as well as the poem itself.
Many of the motives I named in answer to the first question appear in
the poem. The poem was occasioned by a number of more or less
simultaneous events in my life: some of them literary, some of them
sexual. My response to these events was to make a mythic construct which
allowed me “to reflect on the significance” of it all. The poem
itself marks a transformation
of sexual/literary energy into something more genuinely mythic,
resonant:
I
am the wind on the sea
I
am a wave of the ocean
I
am the roar of the sea
3.
What kinds of presentations and
interpretive content in the museum might help convey to others
mythologically-important materials? (Specific examples?)
I
think the important thing would be to allow the public to understand
that the “mythological” isn’t a special realm but something
ever-present, even everyday. Scratch any aspect of the real and it turns
into the mythic. It would be a good idea to present familiar objects in
some sort of context in which their familiarity is questioned: lighting
and juxtaposition are effective tools. Perhaps the same object might be
seen through various lenses—or from various points of view. This could
be done in the museum space itself or through the medium of film: one
could see how, over time, the same object changes, becomes differently
significant. One might keep in mind the kaleidoscopic as an aspect of
everything in the museum.
4.
Many people are now familiar with “interactive” experiences, often computerized. Can you imagine
how some of these might be presented, in this context?
Someone
put together a large, oddly-shaped building into which people could
enter. There was no light—or, at best, little light in the structure.
One had to grope one’s way around it in order to exit. The experience,
though relatively brief, was extremely disconcerting. Almost all
structures we encounter are made “for our convenience”: they are
made so that we can maneuver our way around them with a minimum of
difficulty. In nature, of course, this is not always the case, and here,
a man-made structure had a similar effect to something one might
encounter in nature. One might call the structure “The House of
Myth.” As with myth, we are forced into a creative response to a
situation in which we are not fully at ease. With the computer, one
might set up demonstrations which examine the multiple significances of
any fact—its “hypertextual” quality. One could easily show the
different ways in which words and things are in a constant state of
interaction. Look up the image of a “mouse,” for example: as the
meanings of the object begin to multiply, we could come to a powerful
sense of the interconnectedness of things. The experiment could be
called, “Are You a Mouse or a Mouse?” Another possibility involving
light and darkness would be to encourage people to have conversations in
which one of the participants would
be visible at some moments but invisible at others. At times you would
be speaking to a disembodied voice. What difference would that make to
the conversation, to your sense of the other? Perhaps at moments of
invisibility the other’s voice would be amplified in some way—or he
might be encouraged to say things he would not say face to face. (Cf.
the Catholic institution of Confession.)
5.
Can you name examples of experiences in museums or other programs and institutions that went
beyond description, history, and interpretation to help you connect
in ways that inspired you or changed your life?
In
1977 I came upon an exhibition of work by the artist, Jess. The
exhibition occupied three rooms of the University Art Museum at UC
Berkeley. I was stunned by the continual resonances of the work, the way
in which analogies constantly suggested themselves. One painting showed
a little girl sitting on a wooden table. She seemed to be wearing rather
over-sized shoes. Beside her was a scruffy, charming dog: hers, no
doubt. The painting was based on a 1910 photograph the artist found: he
had no idea who the little girl was. The photograph was black and white,
but the painting was in color—with paint thickly laid on. With the
painting the artist included a poem by Thomas Hardy, “Ah, Are You
Digging On My Grave.” The young woman speaker of the poem is dead;
someone is digging at her grave—trying to dig her up again. She wonders
whether it is her lover or her parents or her best friend—but it turns
out to be none of these: these people have for the most part forgotten
her. She discovers at last that the digger is her former dog, and she
muses that her spirit is not completely gone: there is still someone who
wishes to be close to her. Alas, the dog tells her that he was searching
for a bone in the area: he had utterly forgotten that she was buried
there too. This story about a woman and her dog of course resonates with
the image of the little girl and her dog. Yet we are not finished: The
painting is called Melpomene and Thalia—and Melpomene and Thalia are, respectively,
the muse of tragedy and the muse of comedy. Clearly the scruffy little
dog is the muse of comedy. That leaves the little girl as the muse of
tragedy. Why? If we look more closely at the little girl’s face, she
looks old. Indeed, there seem to be deep lines—indentations in the
paint—around her eyes. In this context, even her large, prominent shoes
take on significance: the buskin
was a special kind of shoe one wore when performing tragedy. Moreover,
tragedy was performed on a stage—which
is to say, a raised platform,
which is to say a table,
precisely what the little girl is sitting on: in this context the
“table” is not a table but a “stage.” On the other hand, since
they are sitting on a table, the little girl and the dog are in a sense food.
One remembers that one sometimes says to children, “I love you so much
I could eat you up.”
These
are just some of the
implications of one painting
by this artist. Put that painting in a room filled with other paintings
which are equally resonant and remember that the exhibition occupied
three rooms, and you will have a sense of the extraordinary power of
this exhibition. Jess’s work exemplifies what he calls—quoting
Shakespeare— “changeful potency.”He creates a mythic space in
which things may happen. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein opened his Tractatus
with the famous sentence, “The world is all that is the case.” That
sentence is answered in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations (I:95): “Thought
can be of what is not the
case.” Jess’s work is precisely an invocation of “what is not the case”: it operates in the realm of pure contextuality, a
realm in which things are seen not as dead entities but as constant
manifestations of various contexts. What is “real” is the
context—the myth, the story, “spirit.”
6.
From what you recall of Joseph Campbell’s writings and audio/video
presentations, what sorts of
materials would you think it would be most “in the spirit of
Campbell” to include? (Examples?)
Campbell
advised his readers to “follow your bliss,” so the museum ought to
emphasize learning through pleasure rather than through
didacticism—just as The Exploratorium does. It should lead the visitor
to self-discovery and should prompt him to imaginative response. For
Campbell the mythic was not merely an esthetic or even phenomenological
entity, but something to be used, as Nietzsche said of history, “for
life.” One of Campbell’s books is called Myths
to Live By; another is called An
Open Life. Here are some quotations from his writings:
There’s
always a risk...but it’s the risk of your own personal adventure
instead of just gluing yourself to what someone else has found. (An Open Life)
I
have heard good Christian clergymen admonish young couples at their
marriage ceremonies so to live together in this life that in the world
to come they may have life everlasting; and I have thought, Alas! The
more appropriate mythic admonishment would be, so to live their
marriages that in this world they may experience life everlasting. For there is indeed
a life everlasting, a dimension of enduring human values that inheres in
the very act of living itself, and in the simultaneous experience and
expression of which men through all time have lived and died. We all
embody these unknowingly, the great being simply those who have wakened
to their knowledge—as suggested in a saying attributed to Christ in the
Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas,
“The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see
it.” (Myths to Live By)
On
our planet...all dividing horizons have been shattered. We can no longer
hold our loves at home and project our aggressions elsewhere; for on
this spaceship Earth there is no “elsewhere” any more. And no
mythology that continues to speak or to teach of “elsewheres” and
“outsiders” meets the requirement of this hour.
And so, to return to our opening question: What is—or what is to
be—the new mythology?
It is—and will forever be, as long as our human race exists—the
old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its “subjective sense,”
poetically renewed in terms neither of a remembered past nor of a
projected future, but of now: addressed, that is to say, not to the
flattery of “peoples,” but to the waking of individuals in the
knowledge of themselves, not simply as egos fighting for place on the
surface of this beautiful planet, but equally as centers of Mind at
Large—each in his own way at one with all, and with no horizons. (Myths
to Live By)
The
question being addressed here is the ancient one of how to “awaken”
people to their own potentialities. Such awakening requires, as Campbell
says, “risk.” One must constantly allow for the penetration of
another realm into the realm of the everyday: that is the burden of so
much of what Campbell writes. His favorite writers were those who
focused on the transformational: he specifically names James Joyce,
Thomas Mann, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Robinson Jeffers, and Walt Whitman.
Some sort of display of Finnegans
Wake—the subject of Campbell’s first book—might be an essential
feature of the museum: remembering Campbell’s sense of pleasure and
enjoyment— “Follow your bliss”—the display should be structured in
a way that removes the book from the realm of the distantly
“intellectual”—which is where most people believe it to be—and
presents it in the spirit of joy and playfulness which in fact animated
Joyce’s vision. I remember attending one of Campbell’s talks and
seeing him hold up a copy of Finnegans
Wake; he said, quite seriously, “This is the Bible.” Like most
Bibles, however, Finnegans Wake
is largely unread. An exhibit which demonstrated how it is possible to
read the book with enjoyment would be a wonderful thing to include in a
Campbell museum. The marvelous recording of James Joyce himself reading
a passage from the book would be a must in such an exhibit. Campbell
also profoundly influenced filmmaker George Lukas: an exhibit which
could show the connections between Campbell’s thought and the Star
Wars films would be very interesting.
A
recent book by Christopher Phillips, Socrates
Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy (W.W. Norton), documents the
author’s involvement with informal discussion groups which center in
philosophical discussion. “I’d read about philosophers in Europe who
were holding philosophy discussions with the public at cafes,”
Phillips writes:
My
hope was to engage in a sort of philosophical outreach that would, among
other things, help resuscitate scholarly philosophy by expanding greatly
both the subject matter that could be grist for philosophical inquiry
and the audience to be engaged. And I wanted to build bridges between
academia and the so-called outside world.
The
Socrates Café idea proved very popular, and Phillips found himself
busily founding new centers in different places all around the country.
The Socrates Café might be a very interesting feature of the Campbell
museum.
7.
Can you name a site/museum (of whatever focus) that does
essentially what we have been referring to here? (Examples?)
I
think San Francisco’s Exploratorium is an excellent example of a
museum which would be similar to what you are attempting. The
Exploratorium’s web site (www.exploratorium.edu) describes it in this
way:
Housed
within the walls of San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, the
Exploratorium is a collage of over 650 science, art, and human
perception exhibits. The Exploratorium is a leader in the movement to
promote the museum as an educational center. ADVANCE
\x 540
ADVANCE \x 540
This unique museum was founded in 1969 by noted physicist and
educator Dr. Frank Oppenheimer, who was director until his death in
1985.
Our
Mission: The Exploratorium’s mission is to create a culture of
learning through innovative environments, programs, and tools that help
people to nurture their curiosity about the world around them.
8.
How would you visualize an innovative environment where myths could be “experienced”?
What sorts of museum spaces and activities?
I
think computer games could be used to involve the viewer in various
kinds of stories—stories that could give him a powerful mythic sense.
In Philip Pullman’s wonderful trilogy, His Dark Materials (three novels: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass), there is a marvelous moment when a pair of
children from two wholly different worlds meet in a third world:
“I came here out of a place called Oxford. There’s plenty of
scholars there, if that’s what you want.”
“Oxford?” she cried. “That’s where I come from!”
“Is there an Oxford in your world, then? You never came from my
world.”
“No,” she said decisively. “Different worlds. But in my
world there’s an Oxford too. We’re both speaking English, en’t we?
Stands to reason there’s other things the same. How did you get
through? Is there a bridge, or what?
“Just a kind of window in the air.”
The
museum ought to make people aware precisely of that “window in the
air.” The same “dark materials” may be conceived of
differently—placed in different contexts. Again, the kaleidoscope. One
might include presentations of stories, poetry, visual art and music in
the museum. Music is a wonderful example of a “dark
material”—sound, notes—which is conceived of differently in
different cultures, different contexts.
9.
To what extent and how do you think the outreach
of the museum can support community life and growth in a large American
city?
Joseph
Campbell was acutely aware that we are living in a state of “changeful
potency.” “All dividing horizons,” he writes, “have been
shattered.” Often people conceive of “the local” as a relatively
unchanging area in which people act in certain ways and not in others:
“This is how we do it in these parts.” Yet it is becoming clearer
and clearer that that is no longer what the local is.
What we call “local” is necessarily the intersection point of
various points of view: it
naturally lends itself to collage. What a Campbell museum could offer is
a model of various ways in which separate entities might interact in
profitable and creative ways. Such a model is desperately needed in our
cities, in which people feel increasingly isolated while, at the same
time, they inhabit a situation in which they cannot avoid others. Like
it or not, we have become what Ishmael Reed calls “MultiAmerica”—which
means that we are multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural. A Campbell
museum could be an enormous help in creating multiple contexts in which
people can relate to one
another. “New worlds,” says Campbell, “are breaking in on us all
the time” (An Open Life). As
Pullman points out, one “Oxford” exists in a wholly different world
from another; so does one “New York,” one “Paris,” one “San
Francisco.” The question is how these separate entities can find
“windows in the air” through which they can encounter each other.
10.
Can you refer us to other people whom you think would want to respond to this
questionnaire (please supply surface address and when possible eddress)?
Already
done.
BRIDGET, PRONOUNCED “BREED”
—from
the look of her not too good but I expect she’ll recover
it
was like walking with the sun
who
are you
to
tell me
what
to do?
(night
falling)
strange
aims
strangeness
nothing
to
speak of
hot
night
endless—
it
was
hard
it
was
hard
for a very
long
time—
feelings
which are
settled
no
longer
settled
why
don’t you just
take
the car?
I
wish I could
speak
I
no longer feel
as
though my feelings—
“Much
past experience convinces me that my capacity for self-delusion in these
matters
is
strictly speaking: boundless”
When
I took her home she stayed very close to me as we walked as we walked.
Her
sheer presence was dazzling, wonderful. It was like walking with the
sun.
What
do we read
as
we read—
books
unread—barely regarded—
Thinking
is still contained in perceiving. Perceiving is still a thinking of the
senses.
Thinking
is—Thinking—
“To
overcome the world means to behold the world as it was before it became
dead in us”
During
the months before the first menstruation, and for some time immediately afterwards,
girls
are often passive, seem sleepy, and withdraw into themselves
“I
guess the aleatory look of the spattered paper is supposed to play off
the rigid deliberation
of
the ruled lines, but the results are consistently boring.”
“Beautiful
credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not
the age
of
mutual trust, of unlimited reliance on human promises?”
lotus-bearer
lord of the world
lord of what we
see—
is
also a timid man, this violence is never expressed physically but only
verbally
in
the manner of certain painters who paint the same painting over and over
again,
writes the same poem over and over again. Form is not at /
issue
The
beloved
speaks,
softly, out of a
machine,
her voice
broken
with
sorrow
I can barely
listen to y-
ou I
fall in love
whenever
I hear
you
speak
She
is: beautiful blue-eyed
red-haired self-destructive
She
is: dark, with gray in her
hair
what
does it mean to love
it
is a kind of fiction
an
agreement to be deceived
it
is a
word,
spoken, in haste,
powerful
with
fiction
The
link in my mind between self-consciousness and religion. Religion is a
mode
of self-consciousness which doesn’t admit to its own bases. A mode of
“self-remembering”
which continually manifests itself in an effort to forget. But
“imagination”
= self-consciousness
that
guiding point to which we can
re-
turn (thought’s tower)
There
are all these women. Which of them do you want?
You.
Thanks
for the drink and the conversation. I’d like more of both.
secret
looks—charms—
words
meant only for—
“With
his thing out.”
“With
his thing out.”
“With
cum on his thing.”
“With
cum on his thing.”
“And
the cum is soiled.”
“Well,”
said the little girl in the tree, “some people call me Mother
Elderberry;
others
call me the dryad; but my real name is Memory. I sit in the tree that
grows
and grows; I can remember everything and therefore
I tell
stories”
R’s
fear that if she analyzes it it will “go away” (the child’s fear
of thought; the
association
of thought with death and growth); her “I’m a big girl now”; her
fascination
with/fear of death—all these suggest that she has reached a
transitional
point in her life but that she lacks the resources to make the leap.
At
her age (34) she is getting rather desperate. Prescription: NO love
affairs,
women’s
groups for at least six months—
Had
you followed your impulses here you might have arrived at something
approaching
“understanding.”
But no, you chose to remain the critic, the judge, the expert.
“‘What
Is’...remains elusive.”
You
can’t name them because the power is too direct. But you can refer to
them
indirectly.
They
are called The Shining Ones—ones who inhabit any body.
At
the
slipping
(shopping)
center
it is
warm—a
warm breeze
(not
enough)
I
close
my
eyes
She
looked at me the way any man wants a woman to look at him. She looked:
radiant,
beautiful. She was all the women I had ever desired. She told me she
was
about to throw up.
your
body—endless—time
sweeps
everything (wait and
and
see) In the field the children “dance.” I wish.
My
son
“chases”
the
ball.
Time
fixes everything—in the sense of
affixes, immobilizes it—
light
covers
everything, touches it
deeply
as
I
touch
you
or would
touch
you
(eyes—Isis!—)
It was the good crossing guard, Mary Foley. She stood in the
path
of a runaway car and pushed seven children to safety. “My first
thought
was
that a child had been hit,” said Sister Charlotte Ann, “but no, it
was Mary.
We
heard brakes screech and children scream.” The kindly granny had
helped
youngsters
survive the busy intersection near St. Mary’s Grammar School in
Melrose,
Mass., for 10 years before her final act of love ended in tragedy.
“The
outstanding
thing about Mary was her giving character,” said the Rev. John Finn,
pastor
of St. Mary’s. “There was not one selfish thing about her. She gave
her life
to the children.”
How
does love
linger
is us—how does it
“speak”—how
does it
“rise”
again—
what
is the source of this
“connection”?
A
strong ascetic element was present in Irish monasticism from the
beginning,
based
on that of some of the early fathers who lived far from civilization in
the
desert;
so that in remote and practically inaccessible places we find not only
provisions
for solitary hermits, but also small monasteries with two or three cells
that
might better be called “communal hermitages.”
And
so, just as from the Fancy’s image, taken from the body, there arises
in the
appetite
of sense a love inclined toward the senses, so from the intellect’s
universal
species or Reason, which is entirely remote from the body, there arises
in
the Will Another Sort of
Love
Stunned
in
this
wretchedness
Of silence—
im-pression ex-pression
de-pression
pressure—
what
is it, love? speech!—
—it
is therefore supposed
—the lion continues
—destruction
of structures
—means eye and foundation
—jeered
at as men
—superficial appearances
—are
transmutations
—on this account
—to
the path of Gimel
—subconscious level
—was
patroness,
a curve, which could,
the
history of Poetry
is a History
of Loss—
It
is necessary
to put fresh flowers
on her grave— Thin, beautiful body. Her
father
photographs, loving, but there is an edge to his voice, a sharpness. Rita,
listen. Not for long now.
The
abstracting by which she is able to make her points is also true of the
magazine
as a whole. What McLuhan calls a “galaxy or constellation of events”
is
absent
from her work. Despite the attempt at variety among the articles. Love =
power
= “imagination”
The
gods of the North have suffered two eclipses—first by the advent of
Christianity,
which destroyed their shrines and condemned their stories, and
then
by the Classical Renaissance, which as early as the 12th
century gave
Europe
a repertoire of Greek and Roman myths which almost completely
annihilated
the Germanic—
—seeing
at once too many people and too few—having the wrong
relationship
to
people—
What
I call the “auditory imagination” is the feeling for syllable and
rhythm,
penetrating
far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating
every
word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the
origin
and
bringing something back,
seeking
the beginning
and
the end—
eyes—
elusive—
distanced—
polytropon—
voyager—
(that
man
that came out
of the sea)
“I
don’t know what to do. My editor hated the book. She cut out all of
the
history,
all of the anthropology, and left me with just a few insights and a
bunch
of
sex stories.”
“I
know what to do! Cut the insights.”
Sam
Spade looked up as Brigid O’Shaughnessy popped another pill. “You
don’t know
what
the fuck you’re talking about.”
I
am the wind on the sea
I
am a wave of the ocean
I
am the roar of the sea
FIERY—
BURNING—
RED-HEADED—
WOMAN—
this
poem is an invocation
NOTES
In its themes and techniques my poem “Bridget, Pronounced
‘Breed’” raises a number of questions.
The poem continually shifts not only from one speaker but, in the
manner of open form, from one context to another—though it always
maintains some sort of connection to its title figure, Bridget, the
ancient Irish goddess of fire, poetry, fertility, household arts,
smithcraft, etc. Christianized,
Bridget became one of the three patron (in this case, matron) saints of
Ireland, and my poem is an invocation, an attempt to make her
“happen.” The poem's
sexual themes are in keeping not only with Bridget’s status as fire
goddess but with my belief that such huge mythic figures are created out
of desire—desire which
ultimately removes itself from the realm of any particular man or woman
and deliberately enters into the realm of mythology (“It was like
walking with the sun”). There
is much involved in such a subject—imagination, modes of love,
etc.—and the figure of Bridget herself thrusts us back into the rich
oral past of Irish folklore. To
mythologize, as I do in this poem, is also to take some sort of
“public” stance rather than merely asserting one’s own
“subjectivity,” and that too is an issue of “Bridget.”
There is, it seems to me, a persistently “public” aspect to
human consciousness which does not disappear even in the most
“inward” of states: one is always “in the world.”
This is reflected in my poem in the many quotations it
contains—quotations which come to me from more or less public sources
and which, in the manner of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, are collaged into the poem's fabric.
Finally, the poem is meant to be spoken.
As the great English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, writing of his
poem, “Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves,” put it,
Of this long sonnet above all remember what applies to all my verse,
that it is, as living art should be, made for performance and that its
performance is not reading with the eye but loud, leisurely, poetical
(not rhetorical) recitation, with long rests, long dwells on the rhyme
and other marked syllables, and so on.This sonnet shd. be almost sung:
it is most carefully timed in tempo
rubato.
SOURCES
OF QUOTATIONS: George Kühlewind, Stages
of Consciousness; Bruno Bettelheim, The
Uses of Enchantment; Kenneth Baker’s review of Richard Chase's
work in The San Francisco
Chronicle, 9/6/85. Mark
Twain on credit was quoted in The
Chronicle 9/13/85; the lotus bearer is Avalokitesvara—see the Britannica;
H.C. Andersen, “Mother Elderberry” in Complete
Fairy Tales, trans. Erik Christian Haugaard. The story about Mary Foley (as far as I know, no relation to
me) is from Weekly World News
10/8/85; The Northern World,
ed. David M. Wilson; Marsilio Ficino, Commentary
on Plato’s Symposium On Love, trans. Sears Jayne; Paul Foster
Case, The Tarot; Marshall
McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy;
T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and
the Use of Criticism as quoted in McLuhan:
Hot & Cool, ed. Gerald Emanuel Stearn; Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, Gods and Heroes of the Celts. Polytropon
is the word Homer uses to refer to Odysseus at the beginning of The Odyssey. Odysseus
has a mind of many turns.
I was thinking specifically of the Nausicaa episode and of the
many invaders of Ireland. I
discovered recently that I had unwittingly stolen the title of my poem
from Robert Kelly’s “Shillelagh Law,” which I had read as part of
a course given by the Before Columbus Foundation:
to speak or to receive,
to drink
‘Never trust an irishman who doesn't’
I used to say
but trust her
that Brigid
(pron. breed)
winter flower of western woman
Jack Foley
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