Authors: Rollo May
The Cry for Myth (35 page)
Suddenly the boy cried, “He’s dying, I tell you! He’s starvin’ to death, I tell you.”…
Ma’s eyes passed Rose of Sharon’s eyes, and then came back to them. And the two women looked deep into each other. The girl’s breath came short and gasping.
She said “Yes.”
Ma smiled. “I knowed you would. I knowed!” She looked down at her hands, tight-locked in her lap.
Rose of Sharon whispered, “Will—will you all—go out?” The rain whisked lightly on the roof.
Ma leaned forward and with her palm she brushed the touseled hair back from her daughter’s forehead, and she kissed her on the forehead. Ma got up quickly. “Come on, you fellas,” she called. “You come out in the tool shed.”
Ruthie opened her mouth to speak. “Hush,” Ma said. “Hush and git.” She herded them through the door, drew the boy with her; and she closed the squeaking door.
For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort about her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. “You got to,” she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. “There!” she said. “There.” Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the bam, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.
*
A great number of myths refer to life after death, such as the resurrection, the Neoplatonic concepts of immortality, the many Hindu myths, the Sufi, the new forms we may assume in future lives, and so on. We shall not deal with these myths of immortality here. Instead we shall direct our attention to the charm of mortality.
It is both significant and surprising in Greek myths that many times significant persons are offered immortality but choose mortality instead. One myth in which mortality is found to have charms is the story of Amphytrian. This myth is presented in modern times in a drama entitled
Amphytrian 38
, since such a multitude of versions of the myth have already been produced.
*
The story goes as follows: Zeus has fallen in love with the wife of Amphytrian, a young Greek general in the Greek army. Zeus cannot tear himself away from looking down on earth at her shadow through her window. He moons around atop Mt. Olympus almost beside himself with his frustrated passion. Mercury takes pity on him and suggests that Zeus arrange a harmless maneuver of war so that Amphytrian will be called away, and in his absence Zeus can masquerade as Amphytrian and fulfill his yearning to make love with his wife. Zeus proceeds to do this. Everything goes according to plan.
But after Zeus completes the love affair, he and Amphytrian’s wife have a conversation which greatly disturbs the chief of the gods. On his return to Mount Olympus he describes to Mercury what it is like to make love to a human being. Zeus is indeed troubled.
“Mercury, she will say, ‘When I was young, or when I am old, or when I die.’ This stabs me, Mercury. We miss something, Mercury.
“We miss the poignancy of the transient—that sweet sadness of grasping for something we know we cannot hold.”
This arguing for the charm of mortality gives us pause. Our compassion for other people arises from our awareness that we too are on this spinning globe for three score and ten or twenty years, and then we bid goodbye to the world. Erich Fromm used to argue that fear of death is fear of not living out one’s present life, which is akin to the above idea. There are assets to being mortal—that we experience our own loneliness, and as Zeus said, “the poignancy of the transient, the sweet sadness of grasping for something we know we cannot hold.”
Our mortality then has a certain strange charm. Abraham Maslow once wrote to me after his major heart attack, “My river [the Charles River, which flowed past his back porch] was never so beautiful as after my heart attack. I wonder if we humans could love—love passionately—if we knew we’d never die.” This is another asset of mortality: we learn to love each other.
We are able to love passionately because we die
.
I recall once taking a walk with the great theologian and philosopher, Paul Tillich, when he was in his late seventies and had not many more years to live.
“Paulus,” I asked, “are you afraid of dying?”
His expression did not change as he answered, “Yes. Everybody is. Nobody has ever come back to tell us.”
I continued, “What is it about death that you fear?”
He answered, “The loneliness. I know I never will see my friends and family again.”
Whatever happens after we die—as Tillich says, no one has come back to tell us—we achieve a stimulus from the fact that we know we have only a few years to live on this earth. This awareness of being mortal challenges us to use these few years in a way that reaches deepest into our hearts and the
hearts of those we love. There is, as Giraudoux tells us, a poignancy, an aliveness, indeed a vitality which is present in mortality.
The most famous choice of mortality is that of Odysseus in his long trip home from Troy when he is shipwrecked and spends seven years with the beautiful nymph, Calypso. She offers him immortality if he will stay forever with her. But he continually weeps in his desire to go home to Penelope.
Athena, the goddess who watches over the family of Odysseus, prevails upon Zeus to send Hermes to instruct Calypso to let Odysseus leave. When Hermes flies to the island and explains his instructions, Calypso becomes angry:
“Oh you vile gods, in jealousy supernal!
You hate it when we choose to lie with men—
immortal flesh by some dear mortal side….
So now you grudge me, too, my mortal friend.
But it was I who saved him—saw him straddle
his own keel board, the one man left afloat
when Zeus rent wide his ship with chain lightning
and overturned him in the winedark sea.
Then all his troops were lost, his good companions,
when wind and current washed him here to me,
I fed him, loved him, sang that he should not die
nor grow old, ever, in all the days to come,…”
The strong god glittering left her as she spoke,
and now her ladyship, having given heed
to Zeus’s mandate, went to find Odysseus
in his stone seat to seaward—tear on tear
brimming his eyes. The sweet days of his life time
were running out in anguish over his exile,
for long ago the nymph had ceased to please.
Though he fought shy of her and her desire,
he lay with her each night, for she compelled him.
But when day came he sat on the rocky shore
and broke his own heart groaning, with eyes wet
scanning the bare horizon of the sea.
Now she stood near him in her beauty, saying:
“O forlorn man, be still.
Here you need grieve no more; you need not feel
your life consumed here; I have pondered it,
and I shall help you go.”
But still Calypso cannot understand why Odysseus wants to give up immortality and go back to Penelope:
“Son of Laertes, versatile Odysseus,
after these years with me, you still desire
your old home? Even so, I wish you well.
Can I be less desirable than Penelope is?
Less interesting? Less beautiful? Can mortals
compare with goddesses in grace and form?”
To this the strategist Odysseus answered:
“My lady goddess, here is no cause for anger.
My quiet Penelope—how well I know—
would seem a shade before your majesty,
death and old age being unknown to you,
while she must die. Yet, it is true, each day
I long for home, long for the sight of home.
If any god has marked me out again
for shipwreck, my tough heart can undergo it.
What hardship have I not long since endured
at sea, in battle! Let the trial come.”
Now as he spoke the sun set, dusk drew on,
and they retired, this pair, to the inner cave
to enjoy themselves in love and stayed all night beside
each other.
When Dawn spread out her finger tips of rose
Odysseus pulled his tunic and his cloak on,
while the sea nymph dressed in a silvery gown
of subtle tissue, drew about her waist
a golden belt.
*
And so Odysseus chooses mortality even though he knows it means for him more years of being tossed in storms and his raft wrecked, and even though it means he must fight the rival gang of suitors when he returns to Ithaca.
We have said that in the moments when eternity breaks into time, there we find myth. Myth partakes of both dimensions: it is of the earth in our day-to-day experience, and is a reaching beyond our mundane existence. It gives us the capacity to live in the spirit. Who has not been moved by the majesty of the Corinthian pillars of the Temple of Zeus in Athens. Again we find ourselves repeating on hearing a Mozart sonata, “If I live to be a thousand years, I will never forget this moment!” Such moments are beyond time.
Nor does one need to travel over the earth. At sunrise in every meadow there are trillions of blades of grass, each with its drop of dew clinging to the green grass in the moment just before the sun rises; each drop of dew has, against its background of silver, a complete rainbow of colors. Trillions of diamonds in every meadow!
These incidents for that moment have the myth of eternity regardless of how brief they are or how many years we live. It is even a joy, when you are bored sitting in an airport, to enliven and beautify your existence by calling to your mind the many things of beauty and charm that you have seen or heard or experienced. We are all so much richer than we assume!
Life will never be the same again. We will see the earth as it truly is, bright and blue and beautiful in that silence where it float…. Human beings as riders on the earth together on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold know now that they are truly brothers.
Archibald MacLeish
It is the last phrase of MacLeish’s statement that affects us most powerfully, that we “are truly brothers.”
*
True, one reads that terrorism has not abated, that humans still kill humans in Africa, in the Near East, in the Orient, and in the Americas. The kidnapping of hostages has become a recognized form of warfare for some of the Third World nations which do not have powerful armies. We know that the great fact of brotherhood has not yet sunk into the awareness of the great mass of humanity.
But the exploring of the heavens is a myth out of which we can achieve a new international ethics and understanding, a new raison d’être for humanity. Though it has not yet changed us, we can believe that it will become a new myth out of which we may achieve a new international morality.
Russell Schweickart, one of the astronauts on the
Apollo 7
trip into space, tells us his feelings about these great events, and in doing so he gives us a remarkable narration and an authentic new myth.
†
He notes first the relation of his experience to the creation myth in Genesis, spoken in a previous flight:
In December of 1968, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders circled the moon on Christmas Eve and read from Genesis and other parts of the Bible, to
sacramentalize
that experience and to transmit somehow what they were experiencing to everyone back on Earth.
Rusty takes pains to point out that the astronauts are not heroes (though they may become heroes in the new myth) but they are neighbors, the people who live next door to all of us. In this way, Rusty makes his myth part of our community, whether we other members of the community do such novel things as fly in a capsule or stay at home. He, indeed, is part of the sacramentalizing of the planet.
Typical of myths, he talks about “you” as though all of us
were with them on their lunar module, and in a mythic sense we were.
You check out the portable life support system and everything seems to work and you strap it on your back and you hook all the hoses and connections and wires and cables and antennae and all those things to your body…. And outside on the front porch of the lunar module you watch the sun rise over the Pacific and it’s an incredible sight, beautiful, beautiful!
The astronauts depend on each other in ultimate ways, since whether or not the two who were slated to separate would be able to get back again, whether the lunar module will be able to dock again on the command ship, depends upon each one conscientiously doing his part. The infinity of space makes this interdependence a question of life or death. “Dave Scott is your next-door neighbor, but he was never a neighbor like he’s a neighbor now,” says Rusty of the bond that grew up among the astronauts.
After these incredible experiences, Rusty asks the moral question, “What does it all mean?” And he answers on a mythic level below the obvious things: “I think that we’ve played a part in changing the concept of man and the nature of life.”
This ultimate question and its answer give the myth its great moral depth. Musing about this question, Rusty gazes down at the earth looking so fragile from the perspective of the astronauts up in the stratosphere. The world is so small that the spaceship can encircle it in an hour and a half, and
you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing…. You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again and you don’t even see them. There you are—hundreds of people in the Mideast killing each other over some imaginary line that you’re not even aware of…. And from where you see it, the thing is a
whole
, and it’s so beautiful.
Rusty wonders about the mystery present in all myths. Musing about why he is up there and not you or me, he asks, “Am I separated out to be touched by God, to have some special experience that others cannot have?” He firmly answers no. He feels he has experienced this trip that anyone else could have made with the right training. This is why, he says, “I’ve used the word ‘you,’ because its not me or the others on the lunar module.
It’s life that’s had that experience.”
All of these expressions make a myth of a new age, as Columbus and Magellan in their day contributed to the myth of the Renaissance.
