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notes on myth, part three
Jan. 3rd, 2014 10:14 amWe need more comprehensive and better-structured cross-disciplinary models of the imagination, and as far as I can tell we don’t have them. Kripal has to waste a huge amount of time just arguing that there is a dialectic between marginal or “paranormal” experiences (let’s bracket for now, as an unproductive argument, just what is para- about the paranormal) and socially constructed interpretations of experience. This particular brand of social constructionism doesn’t debunk the marginal forms of experience, it simply ignores them and generally proceeds as though human beings never do anything more than respond to social cues or environmental pressures.
But anyone who browses the internet can affirm that even though millions if not billions of people spend their free time rehashing the details of the final episode of Breaking Bad, or the fourth season of Downton Abbey, or what Kim Kardashian did last week or last year, in much the way that their ancestors rehearsed the verses of the latest murder ballad or adapted anew the stanzas of the epic the griot recited, and even though more billions never get beyond arguing about the local sports statistics, those same billions put more emotional weight on certain aspects of those things than on other aspects of them, without ever thinking about it. Symbols emerge even from the stupidest situations.
And many, many other people spend their time remixing and mashing up the elements of popularly given imagery and narratives—some of them engage in cross-disciplinary discourse without realizing it, because they aren’t academicians. Others create spontaneous fictions that form striking parallels to books they have never read, because the great strategies of literature and art are transmitted in their structural essences. They are transmitted in their structural essences, via the forms generated in society, because they resonate with inbuilt (I don’t mean “built” literally) psychological proclivities that are not the same in each individual, but that repeat often enough in a variety of combinations.
Many, probably most, of the personality types represented on the internet obsess disproportionately over one or another of these structural essences, because their personal circumstances have made those particular essences particularly attractive. They also often don’t do a very good job articulating their obsessions, because they aren’t all that creative—“creative,” like “imagination,” is a cuss word or a god term for contemporary academicians that can be analyzed much more accurately than it usually is.
Some “creative” folks recombine the elements of the word and the world much more unexpectedly and unusually than others do—whereas some “uncreative” folks replicate the expectations of the society almost perfectly, although some of those still produce better replications than others; and many of the more imaginative others, far from being creative geniuses, do a modestly competent or an embarrassingly flawed job of expressing their own idiosyncratic reinterpretations or subversions of socially given expectations as to how things are supposed to be put together. We don’t have to put an absolute value on degrees of complexity to assert that some creative outcomes are more complex and unexpected than others; whether we find that unexpected complexity “intriguing” and/or “pleasing” depends on our own internalized criteria for interest or pleasure.
And somehow many, many people—no, actually, all people—are in some measure incapable of distinguishing between the structure of physical reality and the imaginative forms they themselves have generated. The most rationally inclined are capable of distinguishing and deploying the forms that are the most descriptive and emotionally filtered (not emotionally neutral), and we call these forms the sciences and the other academic disciplines.
We all live, to some degree, in a shared hallucination, because we never see reality unfiltered by social forces and by our own psychological/neurological factors. We advance in rationality by recognizing and analyzing the hallucinatory elements and realizing that there are other hallucinatory elements we haven’t yet brought to conscious awareness.
We need, and are getting, better analyses of hallucination in its more ordinary meaning of immediately perceived sounds and sights that are generated completely from within the brain, rather than from the interplay between the brain and the body’s sensory evidence of the physical world, which is always misinterpreted to some degree or other. But we also need better analyses of how interpretations can shift abruptly according to circumstances—all of us see what we think is “the real meaning of events” when viewed in retrospect. Most of us reinvent the past to improve our self-image.
But not all of us (or am I wrong in this?) undergo reinterpretations of the magnitude of the ones recounted by the flood of letter writers who told one visionary (the incident is described in Kripal’s Mutants and Mystics) that they themselves remembered having been imprisoned in subterranean chambers after they read about the visionary’s traumatic experience of same. The fiction writer who discovered and championed this particular visionary pointed out that during the time the man claimed to have been imprisoned beneath the ground by aliens, he was in fact detained in a mental institution. (This is one of those real-life parallels to a mytheme that leads, in one direction, to novels like Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell.)
The aforementioned visionary fits into a commonplace model, but we know less about the apparently just as commonplace model of the letter writers. Would they, granted more complex faculties of imagination and personal circumstances, have turned out like Howard Finster or Sun Ra, creating art out of a mixture of marginal experience and total fantasy? What do we know about the shared structures of such reinterpretations?
Whitley Strieber brought forth a similar flood of letter writers’ recollections of alien encounters that were, if not just like the ones he described, then close enough. None of Strieber’s correspondents, as far as I know, spontaneously recounted suddenly recalled experiences that were parallel to Finster’s or Sun Ra’s—neither of whom, as far as I know, ever reported sightings of gray-colored insectoids. The well-known power of suggestion is even more powerful than most of us think, apparently; but what is equally interesting is the range of creative experiences in which the memories are structured in individual directions based on no more than a few vague cultural hints. In their more pathological forms, the remarkable delusions that stem from such combinations of complex experience and inherited cultural information go off in all sorts of directions, but the directions are not infinite.
We have clinical descriptions of these delusional states in terms of their specific mental miswiring; but of course the miswirings are only extreme versions of the wirings (and I don’t mean “wirings” any more literally than I meant “built,” above) that we already have as a species. We have symbol-using and storytelling capacities that go astray because they are errant and erring to begin with. This is a boringly familiar commonplace, but one that ought to stir more conversations across academic disciplines than actually take place.
Too many of the attempts at such conversations do no more than correlate mutual misinformation, and other attempts simply confirm mutual incomprehension. There need to be more situations in which one specialist paraphrases what another specialist is assumed to be talking about, and then presents an alternative view; on occasions when this has actually happened, the specialists being paraphrased have protested that that isn’t what their work is about at all, then proceeded to provide a cartoonish summary of their opponents’ views that itself reflected a hitherto unsuspected mistake. After that, productive discussion sometimes followed.
But anyone who browses the internet can affirm that even though millions if not billions of people spend their free time rehashing the details of the final episode of Breaking Bad, or the fourth season of Downton Abbey, or what Kim Kardashian did last week or last year, in much the way that their ancestors rehearsed the verses of the latest murder ballad or adapted anew the stanzas of the epic the griot recited, and even though more billions never get beyond arguing about the local sports statistics, those same billions put more emotional weight on certain aspects of those things than on other aspects of them, without ever thinking about it. Symbols emerge even from the stupidest situations.
And many, many other people spend their time remixing and mashing up the elements of popularly given imagery and narratives—some of them engage in cross-disciplinary discourse without realizing it, because they aren’t academicians. Others create spontaneous fictions that form striking parallels to books they have never read, because the great strategies of literature and art are transmitted in their structural essences. They are transmitted in their structural essences, via the forms generated in society, because they resonate with inbuilt (I don’t mean “built” literally) psychological proclivities that are not the same in each individual, but that repeat often enough in a variety of combinations.
Many, probably most, of the personality types represented on the internet obsess disproportionately over one or another of these structural essences, because their personal circumstances have made those particular essences particularly attractive. They also often don’t do a very good job articulating their obsessions, because they aren’t all that creative—“creative,” like “imagination,” is a cuss word or a god term for contemporary academicians that can be analyzed much more accurately than it usually is.
Some “creative” folks recombine the elements of the word and the world much more unexpectedly and unusually than others do—whereas some “uncreative” folks replicate the expectations of the society almost perfectly, although some of those still produce better replications than others; and many of the more imaginative others, far from being creative geniuses, do a modestly competent or an embarrassingly flawed job of expressing their own idiosyncratic reinterpretations or subversions of socially given expectations as to how things are supposed to be put together. We don’t have to put an absolute value on degrees of complexity to assert that some creative outcomes are more complex and unexpected than others; whether we find that unexpected complexity “intriguing” and/or “pleasing” depends on our own internalized criteria for interest or pleasure.
And somehow many, many people—no, actually, all people—are in some measure incapable of distinguishing between the structure of physical reality and the imaginative forms they themselves have generated. The most rationally inclined are capable of distinguishing and deploying the forms that are the most descriptive and emotionally filtered (not emotionally neutral), and we call these forms the sciences and the other academic disciplines.
We all live, to some degree, in a shared hallucination, because we never see reality unfiltered by social forces and by our own psychological/neurological factors. We advance in rationality by recognizing and analyzing the hallucinatory elements and realizing that there are other hallucinatory elements we haven’t yet brought to conscious awareness.
We need, and are getting, better analyses of hallucination in its more ordinary meaning of immediately perceived sounds and sights that are generated completely from within the brain, rather than from the interplay between the brain and the body’s sensory evidence of the physical world, which is always misinterpreted to some degree or other. But we also need better analyses of how interpretations can shift abruptly according to circumstances—all of us see what we think is “the real meaning of events” when viewed in retrospect. Most of us reinvent the past to improve our self-image.
But not all of us (or am I wrong in this?) undergo reinterpretations of the magnitude of the ones recounted by the flood of letter writers who told one visionary (the incident is described in Kripal’s Mutants and Mystics) that they themselves remembered having been imprisoned in subterranean chambers after they read about the visionary’s traumatic experience of same. The fiction writer who discovered and championed this particular visionary pointed out that during the time the man claimed to have been imprisoned beneath the ground by aliens, he was in fact detained in a mental institution. (This is one of those real-life parallels to a mytheme that leads, in one direction, to novels like Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell.)
The aforementioned visionary fits into a commonplace model, but we know less about the apparently just as commonplace model of the letter writers. Would they, granted more complex faculties of imagination and personal circumstances, have turned out like Howard Finster or Sun Ra, creating art out of a mixture of marginal experience and total fantasy? What do we know about the shared structures of such reinterpretations?
Whitley Strieber brought forth a similar flood of letter writers’ recollections of alien encounters that were, if not just like the ones he described, then close enough. None of Strieber’s correspondents, as far as I know, spontaneously recounted suddenly recalled experiences that were parallel to Finster’s or Sun Ra’s—neither of whom, as far as I know, ever reported sightings of gray-colored insectoids. The well-known power of suggestion is even more powerful than most of us think, apparently; but what is equally interesting is the range of creative experiences in which the memories are structured in individual directions based on no more than a few vague cultural hints. In their more pathological forms, the remarkable delusions that stem from such combinations of complex experience and inherited cultural information go off in all sorts of directions, but the directions are not infinite.
We have clinical descriptions of these delusional states in terms of their specific mental miswiring; but of course the miswirings are only extreme versions of the wirings (and I don’t mean “wirings” any more literally than I meant “built,” above) that we already have as a species. We have symbol-using and storytelling capacities that go astray because they are errant and erring to begin with. This is a boringly familiar commonplace, but one that ought to stir more conversations across academic disciplines than actually take place.
Too many of the attempts at such conversations do no more than correlate mutual misinformation, and other attempts simply confirm mutual incomprehension. There need to be more situations in which one specialist paraphrases what another specialist is assumed to be talking about, and then presents an alternative view; on occasions when this has actually happened, the specialists being paraphrased have protested that that isn’t what their work is about at all, then proceeded to provide a cartoonish summary of their opponents’ views that itself reflected a hitherto unsuspected mistake. After that, productive discussion sometimes followed.
