Bing Crosby’s “The Happy Prince”

I was rather fascinated by May’s citation of this particular aspect of Adler’s work:

Out of his great skill in treating children, Adler developed his central concern with the “guiding fiction,” which is a synonym for “myth.” It refers to a significant event in one’s early childhood that the person remembers, the event is turned into a myth which the person keeps as a guide for one’s way of life, whether it is fictitious or not. The person refers to this guiding fiction down through subsequent years as the secret myth of oneself.

For one thing, it seems to me to be an important clarification of May’s use of the term “myth.” More importantly, for me it raises the question of what my own “guiding fiction” was and to what extent I’ve ever been consciously aware of the “guiding fiction.” Considering how important Christmas has always been to me, I tend to look back to it to discover any guiding fiction I might have.

I’m pretty sure all the cowboy toys and my much beloved “Fort Apache” would have to play a part in that guiding fiction, but I’d like to think that the tale of The Happy Prince, a story I remembered in December of 2001 while reminiscing about Christmas also played a part in that guiding fiction. In 2001 I couldn’t find a copy of the story anywhere, though it would have been the perfect Christmas present. It was only this year through the magic of youtube that I was finally able to rehear the tale, though the images almost detract from the recording for me:

I was amazed how vividly I remembered the story 50+ years later. It’s clear that this recording was very important to me or I would never have remembered it so vividly. I’ve actually listened to it several times since discovering it, and still find myself strangely sad when the Prince’s heart breaks, not to mentioned outrage by the council members who pull the Prince down and throw him on the trash heap.

If May is right when he argues:

Memory is the mother of creativity. This is a myth worth pondering. For it is in memory that one saves and savors the significant experiences, the dazzling sights, the critical events. In memory these precious experiences form themselves together into a myth which tells a story. We say we “sleep on an idea,” and when we wake up we may feel we have arrived at a new insight, as though it were a gift from the gods. And who is to say it is not. Mnemosyne or “Memory” is the goddess who puts together our materials with which new materials are made and poems are written and great books and enduring paintings are inspired.

Then The Happy Prince is certainly a “precious experience” that may be part of my “guiding fiction.” I hope so.

The Myth of Christmas

Since I read this passage in May’s The Cry for Myth,

“Life in the myth is a celebration,” wrote Thomas Mann. The myths of community are generally happy, joyful myths which enliven us; they mark the holidays, or holy days. We salute each other with “Merry Christmas,” or “Happy New Year.” The holy days which draw us together in carnivals, such as Mardi Gras in New Orleans and in Mediterranean and South American cities preceding Lent, are times of overflowing color and mythic mystery. Then it is permissible to love everyone and to abandon oneself to the spontaneity of the senses. Good Friday and Easter are the celebration of the eternally amazing myth of the crucifixion of Jesus and the resurrection of the Christ, Passover as the original Last Supper, all blended with the celebration of the newborn beauty in the blooming of lilies, the tender time of newly grown grass and plants and other loveliness which breaks through the crust of the earth in spring.

I’ve been giving some thought to my own views of Christmas, the one holiday I still get sentimental over. Perhaps it’s as simple as that Christmas is the easiest time to express my love for family and community. Though I’ve consciously try to give money to charities like the Salvation Army throughout the year, I’m still more apt to give at Christmas time.

After I read this passage,

These holy days gather around them through the ages the mythic character of eternity. We get from them a sense of union with the distant past and the far off future. Christmas- literally, a mass for Christ-has become blended with the myth of the Germanic and Nordic tribes of Northern Europe, and hence we have such symbols as the Christmas tree with all its glitter and with the presents emblazoned around it. The gradual process of accretion, of absorption and merging of local myths with the myths from the religious past, gives the holy day this aura of eternity. The myth of Christmas is a prototype of the birth of the hero, as Otto Rank writes, describing the baby Jesus in the crib in a stable with the Wise Men following the star in the east and bringing gifts. The myth implies that we are wise if we too participate in the spirit of giving.

I realized that Christmas ties my oldest memories to a future when I will only be a memory myself. I think my oldest memory is of a Christmas that took place when I was three or four. When I was young my parents put up the tree Christmas Eve, after my brother and I went to bed. I don’t think there’s ever been another moment quite as exciting in my life as those Christmas mornings when I awoke to a fully lit tree surrounded by presents. Nowdays, I get nearly the same joy seeing grandkids’ excitement Christmas morning. Christmas comes as close as anything in my life to encompassing time. Over the years I’ve collected old-fashioned Santa Clauses, particularly reproductions of hand-carved Santas.

Though I doubt many people hate rituals more than I do, after reading

Rituals are physical expressions of the myths, as in holidays and the sacraments of religion. The myth is the narration, and the ritual-such as giving presents or being baptized-expresses the myth in bodily action. Rituals and myths supply fixed points in a world of bewildering change and disappointment. The myth may be prior to the ritual, as it is in the celebration of Holy Communion; or the ritual may come first, as with the Super Bowl triumph of the 49ers. Either way, one gives birth to the other. No self can exist as a self apart from a society with its myths …

I realized that Christmas is probably the only time of the year where I indulge in rituals. The oldest ritual is making cookies, but only because it starts long before the tree is put up. My mother loved telling how the first year we decorated cookies I cried after I bit the head off a Santa Claus cookie, which reveals how young I must have been then. I’ve been making Christmas cookies longer than I can remember, a ritual rivaled only by the playing of Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters singing “Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town” while decorating the tree.

The only time I’ve missed these rituals my entire life is the year I was in Vietnam, and even then mom sent Santa cookies. In fact, the tree was still up when I got home mid-January.

And though I tend to be somewhat of a loner, Christmas does seem more than just a family holiday:

In Europe the community’s myth is symbolically emblazoned by the churches in the towns and cities. High over the collection of houses, which are built close together for protection, there rises the Cathedral of Chartres or the great spires of Cologne, bolstered from outside by flying buttresses and in- formed inside by mythic Bible stories. These Biblical myths led the person gazing upon them to the adoration of the Most High God and other Christian myths which everyone in the village knew by heart. The church was there for all to see, the custodian of the heart and spirit of the community, the central symbol around which its myths were woven. In the villages of New England there is a similar overarching symbol of the myth of the community. When driving through Vermont or New Hampshire, one comes to the center of the village and sees the “common ground,” a large square of green grass with the village church towering at one end as though its simple beauty in Puritan white gives an eternal blessing to the town.

I’ll have to admit that I’ve been more than a little dismayed by the legal and political wrangling over Christmas displays. Though the Christmas tree is definitely the center of our decorations, we also include two Nativity scenes in our in-house decorations even though I don’t think of myself as being particularly “Christian.” Christmas may well be Christ’s Mass, but it’s also clearly the Winters Solstice and here in the Pacific Northwest we all look forward to having more light, even if we have to supply it on our own trees. Christmas is one of the few times I actually drive around nearby neighborhoods admiring other people’s yards. Even simple things like shopping seem more friendly during Christmas. It’s certainly the only time when I take trays of cookies to share with neighbors.

These personal myths and rituals are so intertwined with public myths and rituals that it’s hard to say where one begins and the other ends, but I’m sure my life would be considerably diminished without them. The fact that the season means so much to me surely also says something about its psychic importance.

The Importance of Myths

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of myths according to Rollo May as they serve multiple functions:

The many contributions of myths to our lives can be listed under four headings. First, myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, Who am I? When Oedipus cried, “I must find out who I am and where I came from!” and when Alex Haley searches for his Roots, they are both illustrating this function of myth.

Second, myths make possible our sense of community. The fact that we think mythically is shown in our loyalty to our town and nation and even our loyalty to our college and its various teams which produce such mythic phenomena as Trojans and 49ers. These would be absurd except that they illustrate the important bonding of social interest and patriotism and other such deeply rooted attitudes toward one’s society and nation.

Third, myths undergird our moral values. This is crucially important to members of our age, when morality has deteriorated and seems to have vanished altogether in some distraught places.

Fourth, mythology is our way of dealing with the inscrutable mystery of creation. This refers not only to the creation of our universe but creation in science, the mysterious “dawning” in art and poetry and other new ideas in our minds. “Myth is the garment of mystery,” writes Thomas Mann insightfully in the preface to his great book on ancient myths, Joseph and His Brothers.

I suppose if I’d thought hard enough about myths, particularly the way May describes them, I might have come up with most of these functions, but I’ll admit I was surprised when I first saw them listed this way.

If I have this little awareness of the importance of myths while having earned a Master of Arts in Liberal Arts, plus two more years of graduate work, I can only wonder how much knowledge of myths the average adult might have.

May argues that people who have never heard of a myth are still influenced by it:

The reader may well ask, “Suppose the patients are unsophisticated and have never read the Greeks or any other classics?” While it is true that this woman was eminently interesting and a pleasure to work with, it is not true that she consciously knew about this myth. So far as I can surmise, she had not read it and did not consciously know it. This illustrates that myths do not require that one have read them specifically. Myths are archetypal patterns in human consciousness, as Joseph Campbell and others have pointed out. We are all born of a mother and we die: we all confront sex or its absence; we work or we avoid it; and so on. The great dramas like Hamlet are mythic in the sense that they present the existential crises in everyone’s life. We cannot escape believing in the assumption that myth and self-consciousness are to some degree synonymous. Where there is consciousness, there will be myth. One will have dreams of the myth of Oedipus out of the vicissitudes of living in a triangular family (father, mother, child) whether he or she has actually read this classic drama or not.

What child hasn’t felt so awkward and wished so earnestly for personal satisfaction that he can immediately identify with The Ugly Duckling when introduced to it ? We identify with myths because they help us to articulate, or to see more clearly, what we’ve already sensed.

Jung, and May, believe poets and artists are most in touch with these myths, these archetypes:

Jung believes that poets are in touch with a reality beyond that which the rational mind can perceive; they know that they have discovered the “spirits, demons and gods.” The deepest level of the unconscious, writes Jung, can be discovered only through myth and ritual. He sees myths as necessary interlinks between the human spirit and the natural man. Out of this theory come the archetypes, the expression of the collective unconscious.

Each of us, by virtue of our pattern of myths, participates in these archetypes; they are the structure of human existence. It is not necessary to be a scholar in order to be influenced by them; it is only necessary that one existentially participate in human life. “I have written that myths get thought in man unbeknownst to him,” Levi-Strauss states. “For me it [the myth] describes a lived experience.” Dreams are a private application to one’s life of public myths in which we are all participants.

The poet Stanley Kunitz agrees with this interpretation as I noted here in the introduction to Passing Through, “Poetry, I have insisted, is ultimately mythology, the telling of the stories of the soul.”

May argues that those who no longer believe in myths are outcasts:

Surely Nietzsche is right: our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home, and one would indeed clutch for other cultures to find some place at some time a “mythic womb. “To be a member of one’s community is to share in its myths, to feel the same pride that glows within us when we recall the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, or Washington crossing the Delaware, or Daniel Boone and Kit Carson riding into the West. The outsider, the foreigner, the stranger is the one who does not share our myths, the one who steers by different stars, worships different gods.

I wonder if many of us who fought in Vietnam didn’t feel like outcasts because we could no longer believe in many of the myths those at home still held dear.

May’s The Cry for Myth

I’ve long admired Rollo May’s works. One of the first books I ever blogged was his The Courage to Create, when I re-read it after I retired. His My Quest for Beauty which I just finished, inspired me to put aside some just-purchased books in order to read The Cry For Myth, one the last books he wrote.

This quote from The Cry for Myths explains both why I like his books and why I became a liberal arts major:

It is a radical deficiency that, in the education of post-Freudian psycho- therapists, most students are left illiterate about the humanities. Our literature is the richest source of the presentation of human beings’ self-interpretation down through history. For therapists the peril is greater than for naturalists because the imagination is specifically their tool and object of study, and any abridgement in understanding its workings will significantly limit professional progress.

Of course it’s the line “Our literature is the richest source of the presentation of human beings’ self-interpretation down through history,” not the psychologist part that captivated me, though I’ll have to a admit I gave some thought to changing my major to psychology as an undergraduate. In the end, though, literature seemed to offer the best change of understanding who I was and who I wanted to become.

I’ll have to admit that if I hadn’t read May’s introduction to myth in My Quest for Beauty I might not have bought this one. I’m afraid the term “Myth” has become a pejorative term in recent times. For most people studying classical myths no longer seems relevant, unless they’re viewed in some bastardized comic version. It’s aso a way of dismissing a story, as in “That’s just a myth.” Luckily, May doesn’t use the term in either of these ways:

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance. Myths are like the beams in a house: not exposed to outside view, they are the structure which holds the house together so people can live in it.

Tying myths to “narrative patterns that give significance to our existence” provides a different way of looking at myths. Great literature attempts to provide those patterns and contemporary literature tries to reveal when such patterns lose their effectiveness while offering new patterns, though May argues that much of modern art is content with revealing failed beliefs rather than attempting to provide new narrative patterns.

Mays argues convincingly, at least for me, that myths are essential not only to society but to the individual’s well-being:

Myths are our self-interpretation of our inner selves in relation to the outside world. They are narrations by which our society is unified. Myths are essential to the process of keeping our souls alive and bringing us new meaning in a difficult and often meaningless world. Such aspects of eternity as beauty, love, great ideas, appear suddenly or gradually in the language of myth.

Mays makes an interesting distinction between “rational truth” and “mythic truths:”

Thus the myth, as Thomas Mann put it, is an eternal truth in contrast to an empirical truth. The latter can change with every morning newspaper when we read of the latest discoveries in our laboratories. But the myth transcends time. It does not matter in the slightest whether a man named Adam and a woman named Eve ever actually existed or not; the myth about them in Genesis still presents a picture of the birth and development of human consciousness which is applicable to all peo- ple of all ages and religions.

Myth is not art, though it is used in all the arts; it promises more; its methods and functions are different. Myth is a form of expression which reveals a process of thought and feeling-man’s awareness of and response to the universe, his fellow men, and his separate being. It is a projection in concrete and dramatic form of fears and desires undiscoverable and inexpressible in any other way.

I suspect I’ve long agreed with that definition, but I’d never quite thought of it in those terms. As an English teacher I’ve long acknowledged that novels are seldom “realistic,” but the truths they reveal about human nature can be more “real” and more “true” than real-life events.

The fact that Mays was a practicing therapist gives added credence to his argument that the lack of such myths contribute to the mental problems of many young people:

There are frightening statistics of suicide by young people in the last decades. In the 1970s suicide among white young men increased greatly. We may try various ways to prevent suicide in these young people, like telephoning seriously depressed persons and so on. But as long as the highest goal remains making money, as long as we teach practically no ethics by example in home or in government, as long as these young people are not inspired to form a philosophy of life, and as long as television is overloaded with aggression and sex with no mentors in learning to love-as long as these obtain, there will continue to be among young people such frightening depression and suicide.

Mays argues that the only way to defeat the anxiety that drives us is to form our own myths in order to make sense of our world:

Every individual seeks-indeed must seek if he or she is to remain sane-to bring some order and coherence into the stream of sensations, emotions, and ideas entering his or her consciousness from within or without. Each one of us is forced to do deliberately for oneself what in previous ages was done by family, custom, church, and state, namely, form the myths in terms of which we can make some sense of experience.