Myth and Creative Writing

The Self-Renewing Song

Adrian May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781408204641
• eBook ISBN: 9781317863021
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Myth and Creative Writing is a unique and practical guide to the arts of creative writing. It:

• Gives a historical perspective on the storyteller's art
• Takes a wide view of myth, to include: legends, folklore, biblical myth, classical myth, belief myths, balladry and song.
• Considers all aspects of the creative process, from conception to completion
• Provides tips on seeking inspiration from classical and mythic sources
• Shows how myths can be linked to contemporary concerns
• Enables beginning writers to tap into the deeper resonances of myth
• Guides students to further critical and creative resources

A secret that all writers know is that they are part of a long tradition of storytelling - whether they call it mythic, intertextual, interactive or original. And in the pantheon of storytelling, myths (those stories that tell us, in often magical terms, how the world and the creatures in it came to be) are the bedrock, a source of unending inspiration. One can dress the study of literature in the finest critical clothing - or intellectualise it until the cows come home - but at its heart it is nothing more - and nothing less - than the study of the human instinct to tell stories, to order the world into patterns we can more readily understand. Exploring the mythic nature of writing (by considering where the connections between instinct and art are made, and where the writer is also seen as a mythic adventurer) is a way of finding close links to what it is we demand from literature, which is - again - something to do with the essences of human nature. Further, in the course of examining the nature of myth, Adrian May provides a very practical guide to the aspiring writer - whether in a formal course or working alone - on how to write stories (myths) of their own, from how to begin, how to develop and how to close.

Part One

MYTH AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Each chapter concludes with suggestions for writing, and for readings of old, new and critical texts.

Chapter 1

STARTING CREATION

CREATION MYTHS

The Tongue of Mist (by A.M.)

Driving home at dawn

I pulled over to a lay-by

because a tongue of grey, silvery mist

was curling around the river Colne

waiting, its dark body gone with night

close by the pallid movement of cars

On cue, the sun appeared

and, having spoken its ethereal mystery

of the ordinary, miraculous day’s arrival

in a breath of light, the tongue of mist

vanished away

Who am I to deny

being bespoken fresh

in Remembrance Avenue

beside the dumb intention of traffic

on just another Monday morning?

This poem of dawn, perhaps a most obvious theme, nevertheless attempts to give a sense of the wonder of creation, of the mystery of life itself, embodied in a natural image. The language of creation is one of wonder, of dark and light, of experiencing something beyond, but close to, the bounds of normal human experience. This is the language of myth and the language of religious myth. Writers, in their attempts to make the world fresh, take part in the same ritual enactment, the same ‘tongue’ which speaks the world into existence.

Listening to Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Love Itself’ (Ten New Songs, 2001) likewise gives us a sense of the wonder and mystery of creation, of life itself. Watching motes of matter in a shaft of sunlight, Cohen uses familiar words of creation stories, as he talks about light and form and naming, as if the world is again speaking itself into creation, a process which the writer shares. Creation is bringing shape from what is shapeless and identity to what is unknown, showing the mystery and the difficulty of negotiating these boundaries between what we are and how we got here. Far beyond any scientific or religious ideals, we feel the need to give voice to this first question, to acknowledge and rehearse its careful move into life and to re-enact its strangeness, and the feeling that we are in a state of continual becoming.

If that was a bit too mystical, I make no apology. Creation, despite our endless attempts, embracings and rejections of it, is what we are trying to do, and what, despite us, must retain its urgency and mystery. We want the flower to grow, the bird to sing, so we must move to the mythic tune, like it or not. Creation is both familiar, in the sense that we do it all the time, and properly strange, so that it gives freshness and wonder, even by a main commuter road, on a dull, busy morning. We are existing and creating, however small and seemingly insignificant the signs of this seem. The use for this feeling to writers is to show us how crucial attention to detail is, how we must slow down and allow things to emerge and how to see things as strange. Literary criticism calls this ‘defamiliarisation’, which is a translation of the Russian Formalists’ ‘making strange’.

Creation texts remind us too of how it is to write and know writings; both familiar and strange. In the West, this is especially true of Genesis in the King James Bible. Even if we do not know it directly, our culture is still saturated with Genes’ imagery, so we feel we know it somehow, just as we feel we know the cadences of the wonderful use of language by the translators of the King James’ version. This is true, even if the contempt of familiarity is often more palpable than a useful possibility of wonder. If we do remember this text, we might see it merely as a kind of statement of authority, with a commanding and dogmatic tone. But the ‘in the beginning’ bit, which began, we are told, as a chant or song, is also full of a sense of goodness, fertility and the richness of life. ‘And the Spirit… moved upon the face of the waters… Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness’ (1:2–4). The wonder in this song reminds us that, as writers, we must take it mythically, see it as strange as it is, whatever else we see or do not see in it.

Man is soon to be made as an ‘image’, in chapter one, as an idea, a likeness of creation. The whole beginning is full of a kind of innate goodness, before the creation of evil. We might feel divided in our ideas about our own, sometimes disowned creation story, but ‘division’, workable opposition is both a source of creativity and a presence in chapters one and two of Genesis. We writers need to find the tensions in our subjects.

A few verses into chapter two, it can be a shock to see that, despite our prejudices, we get a very different, second creation story, where man, reminding us of Cohen’s song, is made ‘of the dust’ (2:7). We are the result of division, which is the move from chaotic stasis towards the possibility of change and growth, of definite and growing existence. Like the editors who assembled Genesis from various texts, we are ‘in the beginning’ and sometimes in two minds. We are material and materialists, in ‘dust’ (second Genesis creation) and we are our story of ourselves, in ‘image’ (first Genesis creation). Our ambivalence, our comparative way of thinking and writing, our minds and our bodies, our ‘image’ and ‘dust’ are no small things. These first stories feel like all stories, full of resistance and possibility and our scepticism is part of the process. We are like the editors, trying out alternate stories. Creation might need to be authoritative for us, where we work with these wonderful ambiguities, as we split from oneness into movement, into growth. The state of continual creation is growth and rebirth.

The world is full of change, of creation and we writers must notice the continual movement away from the static in opinion and in time. Writers try to explore and explain the changes the world is full of, in its state of creation.

Looking at the less familiar, in Hesiod’s Theogony, the Greek classic of the gods’ creation, we notice the language of creation recurs. In Dorothea Wender’s translation (Hesiod and Theognis, 1973), the request for a ‘sweet song’ gives the sense of goodness and richness from the first line, which asks the Muses to ‘celebrate’ the creation of the gods. We have ‘the beginning’, the ‘Night’ and ‘the Sea’. ‘From Chaos came black Night/ And night in turn gave birth to Day and Space’: this gives us the sense of division. The seventh meaning of ‘division’ in the OED gives a fourteenth-century musical term ‘divisions’ as being the art of variation on a theme, what we might call improvisation. This came from playing longer notes instead of shorter ones, to make playing easier, and then dividing the notes became the art of variation. The space was available to create within. This is what a modern musician might call ‘breaking it down’ to recreate the groove. Creation is the art of selecting, of dividing, of recombining, seen this way.

The same kind of language and divisions give us a sense of wonder through the song, the night and the sea, plus we can take from here the idea of combining strange things, with an infinite sense of possibility.

Evil soon appears in the Theogony, as it does in Genesis, but much earlier, and evil is seen as a kind of return to chaotic stasis. Giants and monsters appear, a whole other subject, but often there shortly after creation. Evil seems to be trying to stop or control creation here and the weird nature of creation myth shows itself in the harvesting of the controlling male’s genitals (misused tools of creation) and the birth of a goddess of love, the renewal of the earth and creativity. In this strange tale of innocence and experience, love and the feminine triumph and the sense of possibility is palpable, as it is in Genesis. Creation is for awe and wonder at life and its mysterious arrival. for writers, it is a reminder that to bring our work to life, we need to take part in the ritual of creation. With change, as we describe it, the possibility of evil is always present, as possible as good. Creation can give us writers the sense that innocence and evil are always near at hand, as perhaps they are. In creation, they are always there for us.

Turning to Ovid, we find that the great Latin poet’s collection of old myths also begins with a creation story. His Metamorphoses calls on the Muses, as Hesiod does and talks in the familiar language of chaotic unity. In A.D. Melville’s translation (1986), there is ‘chaos’, everything is ‘all one’ and ‘undivided’. From a writer’s point of view, negatives are used to define the great absence before life begins. Verse two of the opening of Genesis says that ‘the earth was without form, and void’, while Ovid does his ‘ex nihilo’ (out of nothing) thing too: ‘No foot could tread, no creature swim the sea.’ Imagining what is not would be a useful starting place for writing. Describing what is not is very evocative and very useful: ‘No love, no hope, no beer’, we might write. A world of stasis is a world without the possibility of change, division, creation itself.

Ovid, like us, is uncertain about gods, but names ‘whatever god it was’, using his sophisticated Latin ambiguity, before having man created as image again ‘in the likeness of the gods’, as ‘the unknown form of humankind’. The double mystery of form, as dust, and image, in ‘the unknown’ reminds us again of the dividing negotiation of creation.

As Karen Armstrong says in her exploration of Genesis In the Beginning (1996), we keep on dividing and we keep on creating in the flow of creative movement between our night of dust and our day of image. The uncertainty is part of the movement and the process, like the uncertainty of the writer starting a new work. Writers can write usefully about the divide between conflicting states, when idea and reality conflict.

As can be told from the above, it is hard to talk about this stuff except in its own terms, but when we talk about creation myths, we talk about writing. In Dudley Young’s, Origins of the Sacred (1991) chapter one: 1, among other vital things, he speaks of science as being concerned with the known, while myth deals with how we work, or think, or write and ‘the intersection of the known with the unknown’. ‘Science’, he says, ‘is uneasy with beginnings’, while myth explains them in process and tells us, significantly for writers, how to start. Science has a problem with ending too, and the facts need their process of happening, which is their story, or myth. Scientists must respect the creating writer for asking awkward questions of it, with our older, mythic mode of understanding. ‘Once upon a time’, Young says, is our ‘way of bridging the gap between non-being and being’ and makes us wonder, as all good creation stories do, about losing our sense of wonder. Writers have to begin and end and have to feel some wonder, however ambivalent it might be. ‘Life takes on meaning and value in the light of death’, Young says and the division here is echoed in the ‘liberating’ and ‘disturbing’ qualities of science, which takes us into space and yet can take away our wonder, until we feel that ‘if “anything goes”, the nothing need do’. This kind of modern banality, or empty certainty means ‘we are encouraged to forget that we owe the gods a death’. Scientists themselves remind us now that there is a limit to our story, and that pollution, a very ancient word and one of the ‘home truths’ of the ‘primitive mind’, still counts, or even counts more today, and we need to attend to our creation of the world and to our sense of creativity.

Scientists are good characters to use to explore these creative conflicts, as much sci-fi has shown and science can show both the open mind and the closed in internal battle, which might be the battle of our time.

Before suggesting some direct ways of moving towards the creation of creation, I will leave the last word o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Publisher's Acknowledgements
• Preface Mythic Intentions
• Introduction The Mythic Writer
• Part One: Myth and Thecreative Process
• 1 Starting Creation
• 2 Birth Myths
• 3 The Truth Lies
• 4 Mythic Navigation Devices
• 5 Dark Matter
• 6 Late Heroes
• 7 Happiness Writes Practical Comedy for writers in an age of Tragedy
• 8 Myth Madness
• 9 Modernising Myths
• 10 The Daily Myther
• 11 Dooms and Dead Ends
• 12 Myths of Fame
• Postscript Theories and Fairies, Myth and Magic
• Part Two: A Mythic Subject Dictionary
• Bibliography
• Index