The Cry for Myth (12 page)

Change
is a great word in America; we not only believe in it, we worship it. We see it all about us, and we shall see it emblazoned in Gatsby’s complete faith in his capacity to change his accent, his name, indeed to
invent
himself. De Tocqueville saw this clearly:

The American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more, he loves it; for the instability, instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.

Such change, whether it is judged as Providence or Progress, is always assumed to be good in America. In politics, which is a pattern of myths par excellence, the myth of the new is of great importance—
vide
the New Deal, the New Frontier, new blood, new visions. No one in this country runs on the platform of preserving the old frontiers. We recall that Kennedy’s charm in his election was partly that he represented new ideas, a youth leaving the old behind. The real question, namely, the
quality
of the new, is rarely asked. It is assumed in this New World to
be better because it is new. This is the myth of change, where we put on the new self, where we follow the belief in Cuéism, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.”

This mood is allied to the fact that we assume that history, even the little of it that we have in this country, is not significant; we cast off European history with a sense of relief. Many Americans secretly believe Henry Ford was right when he said, “History is bunk!” For him history began with the invention of the Ford flivver. Concerned only with the present and the future, our myth omits the actual richness of American history; for the very love of the new, the expectation of all kinds of change in psychotherapy, works against real progress. The patient in therapy, in his expectancy for a new life, misses the greater values of deep inner poise and serenity.

But all the while—to follow this myth to our present state—we have the underlying suspicion that we are simply running away by our New Age methods. When we talk about changing personalities, we need a more mystical term. The term that was born was “transforming”: we say we are engaged in “transforming persons.” In the 1970s Werner Erhard in California founded the EST seminars, and the movement spread like a prairie fire across the country.

About half a million mostly young, mostly affluent, mostly white persons, … paid Erhard and his fellow trainers between $300 and $500 to be transformed in a weekend from confused underachievers into self-assured, take-charge types who “got it”—accepted responsibility for their own lives.
*

But it was a short-lived myth. Half a decade later this fountain of transformation began to dry up and soon nobody heard anything about EST, as it was called. Not surprisingly, however, Erhard himself had been transformed. He had now developed a system of “breakthrough” for transforming businesses
called Transformational Technologies. Money was now to be made in the corporations. As the reporter of this new form of change puts it,

In our born-again, discard and replace culture, where conversation has replaced correction, fast transformation has become as easy for a self as fast food. It no longer seems to matter what you become in the process of transformation,
just so long as you are transformed
. And if you’re still the same imperfect animal despite your funny new vocabulary, simply transform yourself again.
*

THE MYTH OF PROTEUS

The Greek god Proteus represents the myth of change. Whenever Proteus was in any dangerous or difficult situation, he could change himself into some new form which promised security, whether animal or tree or insect. The American psychiatrist Robert Lifton has brilliantly described this personality which is always in the process of change,
Protean
. To a considerable extent in America the myth of change, the unending quest for the new, the yearning for transformation, is for us a fleeing from anxiety as it was for Proteus. Homer describes Proteus when, in the
Odyssey
, Odysseus and his men encounter the wily one and must ring from him the directions home, and it was absolutely necessary:

When Proteus at last slept

We gave a battle cry and plunged

for him,

locking our hands behind him.

But the old one’s

tricks were not knocked out of

him; far from it.

First he took on a whiskered

lion’s shape,

a serpent then; a leopard; a

great boar;

Then sausing water; then a tall

green tree.

Still we clung on, by hook

or crook, through every

thing.

Until the Ancient saw defeat,

and grimly

opened his lips to ask me.
*

But this addiction to change can lead to superficiality and psychological emptiness, and like Peer Gynt, we never pause long enough to listen to our own deeper insights. Lifton uses the myth of Proteus to describe the chameleon tendencies, the ease with which many modern Americans play any role the situation requires of them. Consequently, we not only do not speak from our inner integrity, but often have a conviction of never having lived as our “true selves.”

In such a situation, the myth of change can be a synonym for superficiality. We live according to others’ expectations. When a celebrated film actor in therapy was asked his ideas, he answered, “I have no ideas. If you want me to say anything, you must write it down on a card, start the cameras rolling, and I’ll say it.” This man was no different from many of his colleagues, though he had become affluent and a celebrity. But he was also deeply depressed and felt he had missed the meaning of his life—as indeed he had. He described his perpetual mood as “the salt which has lost its savor.”

Whether we dress it up by such terms as “new age,” “transformation,” “new possibilities,” or something else, the myth of Proteus, of continuous change, does temporarily protect us from anxiety. We Americans are always on the move to escape the anxiety of the human paradox and the anxiety of death.
But
the price for this evasion is a deep loneliness and sense of isolation
. With these go depression and the conviction that we have never really lived, that we have been exiled from life.

One of our contemporary poets, W. S. Merwin, discusses the expression of the myth of Proteus in modern Americans. First he states, “Myth is the most important and powerful vehicle in defining the role of the poet in the present.” He sees us in our day as acting out our Protean myth. In his interpretation of the myth of seizing Proteus as a quest for the gifts of wisdom and prophecy, which man projects on the gods, Merwin states,

We run from danger by emulating Proteus, a characteristic not only of the neurotic personality of our time but of all of us. So our passion for change in America harbors within itself our endeavor to escape the spectre of death, to escape any danger which we see threatening us.
*

“The head he turned toward me wore a face like mine,” Merwin continues, thus confessing that he too has fallen from time to time for the seduction of Proteus. The myth of Proteus is shown by Wordsworth to capture us by our commercialism.

The World is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

But like all myths, the myth of Proteus is not in itself only evil. It is that our error is our absorption in commercialism and our letting our love for money overcome our capacity to appreciate the nature around us:

… Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
*

In America … 1 have seen the freest and best educated of men in the circumstances the happiest to be found in the world; yet it seemed to me that a cloud habitually hung on their brow, and they seemed serious and almost sad in their pleasure … because they never stop thinking of the good things they have not got.

de Tocqueville

A
MERICANS CLING
to the myth of individualism as though it were the only normal way to live, unaware that it was unknown in the Middle Ages (except for hermits) and would have been considered psychotic in classical Greece. We feel as Americans that every person must be ready to stand alone, each of us following the powerful myth of the lone cabin on the prairie. Each individual must learn to take care of himself or herself and thus be beholden to no one else. James Fenimore Cooper put these words in the mouth of his eighteenth-century hero, Leatherstocking, when a friend was being rebuked for his solitary life,

No, no judges. I have lived in the woods for forty long years, and have spent five years at a time without seeing the light of a clearing, bigger
than a wind-row in the trees; and I should like to know where you’ll find a man, in his sixty-eighth year, who can get an easier living, for all your betterments, and your deer-laws; and, as for honesty, or doing what’s right between man and man, I’ll not turn my back to the longest winded deacon on your Patent.
*

Called “rugged individualism” in political circles, and “fierce individualism” by some historians, this myth has obviously great advantages for a democracy. But it exhibits the basic flaw of leaving us no solid community to call our own. No one doubts the important role played by the tough, weather-beaten scouts, dressed more like Indians than Europeans, in the founding and exploring of this nation, and especially the hunters, trappers, and scouts from the Alleghenies all the way through the far west—all individuals to the core. They contributed a myth of lonesome individualism that makes our own loneliness a strange and noble kind of moral achievement.

Walt Whitman, whom many students regard as the greatest poet of America, writes in “Song of Myself,”

One’s self I sing …

Of life immense in passion, pulse,

and power,

Cheerful, for freest action formed

under the laws divine,

The Modern Man I sing.

and,

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,…

I loafe and invite my soul,

I learn and loafe at my ease observing

a spear of summer grass,
†

Even in religion, which is supposed to work for community, this individualism is shown in the revivalism that swept the
middle west and far west like a prairie fire in the middle of the nineteenth century. The emphasis was on the individual as a figure standing alone. When huge crowds gathered to be “saved,” the songs they sang took no account of any other persons in the hundreds of people around each individual:

I come to the garden alone,

When the dew is still on the roses;

And a voice I hear, falling on my ear,

The Son of man discloses.

And he walks with me and he talks with me,

And he tells me I am his own,

And the joy we share as we tarry there

None other has ever known.

Robert Bellah has emphasized that in America our morality, stated originally by Benjamin Franklin, is focused so “exclusively on individual self-improvement that the larger social context hardly comes into view.”
*
This myth of individualism goes way back to a story in ancient times, though it has a different name.

THE MYTH AND NEUROSIS OF NARCISSUS

The lovely and talkative nymph Echo lived free from care and whole of heart until she met Narcissus, hunting in the forest. She no sooner beheld the youth than she fell deeply in love with him.

But all her blandishments were unavailing, and in her despair at his hard-heartedness, she implored Aphrodite to punish him by making him suffer the pangs of unrequited love.

Aphrodite did not forget poor Echo’s last passionate prayer and was biding her time to punish the disdainful Narcissus. One day, after a prolonged chase, he hurried to a lonely pool to slake his thirst.

Quickly he knelt upon the grass and bent over the pellucid waters to take a draught; but he suddenly paused, surprised. Down near the pebbly bottom he saw a face so fair that he immediately lost his heart, for he thought it belonged to some water nymph gazing up at him through the transparent water.

With sudden passion he caught at the beautiful apparition; but the moment his arms touched the water, the nymph vanished. Astonished and dismayed, he slowly withdrew to a short distance and breathlessly awaited the nymph’s return.

The agitated waters soon resumed their mirror-like smoothness; and Narcissus, approaching noiselessly on tiptoe and cautiously peeping into the pool, became aware of first curly, tumbled locks and then a pair of beautiful, watchful, anxious eyes. It seemed to him that the nymph was about to emerge from her hiding place to reconnoiter.