The Cry for Myth (17 page)

On his last evening, he went down to the beach and, sprawling out on the sand, gave himself over to his reminiscing. The big shore places were closed and there were “hardly any lights except the shadowy moving glow of a ferry boat across the Sound.” America had its flowering in the prosperity of this lush countryside with its great mountains and fertile plains.

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Nick then remembers Gatsby and his capacity to wonder.

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the Republic roll on under the night.
†
“Gatsby believed in the green light,” like millions of other good Americans. But Nick knows this “orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us…. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning—”

This last sentence hangs in the air with only a dash and no period to conclude it. In the silence Nick gropes in momentary despair. He pauses as he gropes. Is there any sense to it all? Is there any principle, any wisdom, any thought that will shed some light on this apparent hopelessness in American consciousness? Or are we doomed to live in a world nobody can make sense of? Nick gropes for a
myth
that will cast light, as a man seeks a light switch, to turn on whole heavens. He seeks a myth to absorb this ceaseless failure, a myth which will make of the eternal return something that we human beings can endure, a myth that can lend meaning to our absurd existence. Nick then adds the last line in the book, a paragraph in itself, almost like a postscript:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
*

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

Out of that moment of despair is born this myth which is new but eternally old, the only myth that fits this seemingly hopeless situation. This is the myth of Sisyphus. The one myth which directly counters the American dream, this myth denies progress, goes no place at all, seems to be a repetition, every day and every act being forever the same in perpetual monotonous toil and sweat.

But that is to omit its crucial meaning. One thing Sisyphus can do: he can be aware of each moment in this drama between himself and Zeus, between himself and his fate. This—because
it is most human—makes his reaction completely different from that of the dark night of the mountain up which he rolls his rock.

Punished by Zeus for deceiving the gods, Sisyphus is described by Homer:

With many a weary step, and many a groan,

Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone:

The huge round stone, resulting with a bound,

Thunders impetus down.
*

Indeed, Homer tells us then that “Poor Sisyphus” could hear “the charming sounds that ravished his ear,” which came from Orpheus’ flute in Pluto’s realm.
†
The myth of Sisyphus is sometimes interpreted as the sun climbing to its apex every day and then curving down again. Nothing could be more important for human life than these circular journeys of the sun.

Out of the melancholy brooding about Gatsby comes the monotony which all human creatures must endure—a brooding which the Jazz Age with its boozing and dancing and parties and endless agitation went crazy trying to deny. For we face monotony in all we do; we draw in and exhale breath after breath in ceaseless succession through every moment of our lives, which is monotony par excellence. But out of this repetitiveness of breathing the Buddhists and Yoga have formed their religious meditation and a way of achieving the heights of ecstasy.

For Sisyphus is a creative person who even tried to erase death. He never gives up but always is devoted to creating a better kind of life; he is a model of a hero who presses on in spite of his or her despair. Without such capacity to confront despair we would not have had Beethoven or Rembrandt or Michaelangelo or Dante or Goethe or any others of the great figures in the development of culture.

Sisyphus’ consciousness is the hallmark of being human. Sisyphus is the thinking reed with a mind which can construct purposes, know ecstasy and pain, distinguish monotony from despair, and place the monotony—the rolling of the stone—in the scheme of his rebellion, the act for which he is condemned. We do not know Sisyphus’ reveries, his ruminations, as he performed his act, but we do know that each act may have been again a rebellion against the gods of conformity, or each act could have been an act of penance. Such is the imagination, the purposes and human faiths which we construct. Sisyphus takes his place in that line of heroes who declare their rebellion against the inadequate gods for the sake of greater gods—an illustration and inspiring line consisting of Prometheus, Adam, and hopefully even down to our own myths and gods. Out of this eternal capacity to see our tasks, as Sisyphus did his, comes the courage to move beyond the rock, beyond the monotony of day-to-day experience.

Sisyphus, furthermore, must have noticed in his trips some wisp of pink cloud that heralds the dawn, or felt some pleasure in the wind against his breast as he strode down the hill after his rock, or remembered some line of poetry to muse upon. Indeed, he must have thought of some myth to make sense of an otherwise senseless world. All these things are possible for Sisyphus—even, if he had been Gatsby, to be aware that the past cannot be relived but in every step he can leave the past behind. These capacities of human imagination are the hallmark of our paradoxical condemnation and our epiphany as human beings.

The myth of Sisyphus needs to be held in juxtaposition with the Green Light to lend some balance, some dialectic to us as individuals as well as to America. It is a safeguard against unallowed arrogance of the chosen people, and it makes clear that Horatio Alger only leads us astray. Sisyphus balances the myth of the Promised Land: it requires us to pause in our exploitation of this promised America-the-beautiful to meditate on our purposes and to clarify our aims.

It is the one myth which Gatsby so clearly lacked. At the very least the myth of Sisyphus can help us understand why the dream collapsed; and at the most it can show us the way to an ecstasy which balances our hopelessness and inspires us to a new age in which we can directly confront our despair and use it constructively.

We know then that the meaning of human existence is infinitely deeper than Gatsby’s dream and the American dream. No matter how far we are borne back into the past of fatigue and ultimate death, we have harbored some ecstatic thoughts, we have wondered and experienced some poignancy as well as sadness in our wondering. And for a while the sadnesses are freed from guilt and the joys are relieved of anxiety. When eternity breaks into time, as it does in myths, we suddenly become aware of the meaning of human consciousness.

The myth of Sisyphus thus makes sense of our otherwise senseless efforts; it throws light on the darkness of our routine labors and lends some zest to our monotony. This is true whether we row our boats against a current that blocks progress, or work like a robot in a factory, or struggle day after day to express some recalcitrant thoughts in words that always seem to elude us.

The myth of Sisyphus is the ultimate challenge to the American dream. We are required—“destined,” if you will—to recognize our human state of consciousness in progress or without it, with the Green Light or without it, with Daisy or without her, with the disintegration of our world or without it. It is this which saves us from destruction when our little rules prove unavailing.

This is what led Albert Camus to conclude his essay on Sisyphus, “We must consider Sisyphus happy.”
*

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

Sigmund Freud

T
HERAPISTS BELONG
to a strange profession. It is partly religion. Since the time of Paracelsus in the Renaissance the physician—and afterward the psychiatrist and psychological therapist—has taken on the mantle of the priest. We cannot deny that we who are therapists deal with people’s moral and spiritual questions and that we fill the role of father-confessor as part of our armamentarium, as shown in Freud’s position
behind
and unseen by the person confessing.

Therapy is also partly science. Freud’s contribution was to make therapy to some extent objective, and thus to make it teachable. Third, therapy is partly—an inseparable part—friendship. This friendship, of course, is likely to be more contentious than the familiar camaraderie of social relationships.
Therapists best aid their patients by “evoking their resistances.” Even those in the general public who have not entered therapy know this beneficial struggle from published case studies and from popular films like
An Unmarried Woman
and
Ordinary People
.

These three ingredients make a strong brew. Four centuries ago Shakespeare has Macbeth take his physician to hide behind the curtain to watch and hear Lady Macbeth, as she moans in her hysterical guilt feelings. Macbeth then begs the physican,

Macbeth was indicating that human beings need some new mixture of professions. When the physician answers, in what seems to our age a platitude, “Therein the patient / Must minister to himself,” Macbeth rightly retorts, “Throw physic to the dogs, I’ll none of it.” For physic—no matter how many forms of Valium or Librium we invent—will not basically confront the rooted sorrow or raze out the written troubles of the brain.

Science and technology have, of course, proposed new myths as they displaced or exploded old ones, but the history of technology, so exhilarating at first, has increasingly repelled believers. Now, in the post-industrial age, humanity feels itself bereft of faith, like Matthew Arnold when he wrote more than a century ago the classic epitaph for his dying culture:

We have shown earlier in this book how a loss of this magnitude leaves people en masse without any reliable structure; each one of us feels like a passenger in a rowboat, loose upon the ocean, having no compass or sense of direction, with a storm coming up. Is it any wonder, then, that psychology, the discipline which tells us about ourselves, and psychotherapy, which is able to cast some light on how we should live, burgeoned in our century?

DANTE’S
DIVINE COMEDY

We propose another such myth, Dante’s great poem,
The Divine Comedy
. We shall ask what light it throws on the therapeutic process. This dramatic myth is that of Virgil’s relation to Dante as therapist-patient in their journey through hell in
The Divine Comedy
.