The Cry for Myth (36 page)

Taking off from actual history, the myth then gives us images that come alive. The community which experiences the myth and the morality of the true myth are both there. Since human beings can now fly around the earth, the boundaries over which people war now become a deadly and cursed mistake, an insane and cruel destruction of our small, fragile, but beautiful earth.

Sir Fred Hoyle said in the very middle of our century, “Once a photograph of the earth, taken from the outside, is available … a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”
*
We now have that new photograph. It was taken by the astronauts and printed in full page by countless newspapers and journals. It showed the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, the continents of Africa and South America, and all the countries of the Orient spinning on the surface of this earth. This photograph did leave an indelible impression on millions of peoples’ minds—the picture of the earth emblazoned in dark blue and gold, turning serenely in its orbit, populated by people who are truly brothers and sisters.

Rusty Schweickart did not see the borders of the nations of Europe and Central America, which are nonexistent from this range. And Rusty felt, as we all did, that there was something ludicrous as well as tragic about the efforts of these countries,
posturing like roosters, killing each other to preserve borders that no longer exist. The meaning of these great days and nights, merged together around the spaceship, was that scores of nations were trying to preserve boundaries which had become anachronisms. The moment of seeing that picture was the heralding of the time when at last it will be recognized, even though politicians may be the last to admit it, that what happens in Moscow also happens in Washington, that what occurs in London will also occur in Bombay. The moment in history has come when nation shall not lift up sword against nation and they shall study war no more.

The very dangers that we face, exemplified by nuclear bombs, are themselves commandments that we must learn to live together as brothers and sisters in a great family. From the Marshall McLuhan Institute in Toronto there had come a strange statement in the middle of 1982. The leader was quoted, “I’m delighted with the atom bomb.” But before we could shout out our protest at such inhumane sentiments, we read the next sentence, “Something is necessary to bring us all together.” And this is the danger we all face of destruction of the earth’s atmosphere, the pollution of our oceans even as we explore the heavens. Since they are the same dangers for all of us, whatever our color or nationality, it behooves us to face them together.

We now do have a common enemy. It comes by way of our understanding this myth. The very technology for the destruction of our enemies also leaves us hostage to the destructive power we generate. We cannot turn the clock back (nor do we want to), but the control of nuclear energy is the requirement needed to bring us all together. The near tragedy of Three Mile Island and the actual tragedy of Chernobyl demonstrate the irrefutable fact that we are one world. When thousands of tons of lettuce and green vegetables had to be burned in Italy after the Chernobyl accident and tens of thousands of reindeer—almost the whole economy of the Laplanders in northern Sweden—had to be slaughtered because of the radiation contagion,
we knew in our hearts we could never live separately again.

When headlines appeared in the
New York Times
after the accident, “Russia Asks the Help of the Scientists of the West,” many of us were overtaken with a strange conviction:
this marks the beginning of the world in which the nations will no longer be border-ridden
. The new myth of the stars and trips to the planets will then have taken effect!

Radiation surely hasn’t the slightest respect for fictitious borders. The efforts to keep these borders pure becomes, were it not so tragic, a strange joke—to protect borders which exist only in one’s imagination! In the twenty-first century they will seem like anachronisms of the most destructive kind. This holds not only for radiation in Europe but for all the peoples on the crust of the earth.

As Rusty Schweickart has revealed, the power of myths is still with us. “And outside on the front porch of the lunar module, you watch the sun rise over the Pacific and it’s an incredible sight, a beautiful, beautiful sight.”

“And what’s it all mean?” Here Rusty is forming a myth self-consciously, venturing his ideas on the most important point of all: “I think that in some ways there are other benefits which are more significant.” As Rusty repeated, “I think that we’ve played a part in changing the concept of man and the nature of life.”

We awake after a sleep of many centuries to find ourselves in a new and irrefutable sense in the myth of humankind. We find ourselves in a new world community; we cannot destroy the parts without destroying the whole. In this bright loveliness we know now that we are truly sisters and brothers, at last in the same family.

Index

abortion, women’s assertiveness and, 195

action, supremacy of, 237

Adam, 27, 42, 146

Adler, Alfred:

background of, 68-69

early childhood memories studied by, 68,69–70

on social interest, 69,165

on spoiled child syndrome, 181

women’s equality advocated by, 289

adolescents:

independence asserted by, 39

Orestes myth and, 39, 40

relationships between, 214

Adrienne (case history), 63–65, 67

advertising, 113, 119, 140–141, 242, 267

Aeneid
(Virgil), 156, 157, 166

Aeschylus, 16

see also Oresteia, The

Agamemnon, 231

“Age of Anxiety, The” (Auden), 208

aggression, 283

Ahab (biblical), 277

Ahab, Captain, 277, 278-281, 282

Air and Space Museum, 55

airplanes, 224
n

Alcoholics Anonymous, 61, 190

Alexander, Franz, 102

Alger, Horatio, 115–118

Sisyphus myth vs., 146

success prototype created by, 117–118,131

see also
“Luke Larkin’s Luck”

alienation, industrial development and, 242

American culture:

advertising and, 113,119,140–141, 242, 267

change valued in, 101-106

in
Death of a Salesman
, 43–44

European historical sense vs., 99–100

immigrant experiences and, 48, 49, 95-96

individualism in, 108–110,115

Jazz Age in, 55,125–127,128,133, 13, 137, 13,. 145

loneliness in, 48, 96–101, 106

luck and, 118,119–120

middle west in, 110,142

newness valued in, 101-104

New World discovery and, 91-93

politics and, 102,126

psychological depression and, 113, 120-123

rootlessness of, 48–49, 99

violence in, 100

wealth overemphasized by, 48, 56, 60, 106, 115, 119,123–124,131

see also
myth(s), American

American dream:

as ethical sanction, 131

failure of, 126,137,141–144

individual success as, 115

myth of Sisyphus and, 146–147

Wall Street takeovers and, 119

American Indians:

extermination of, 283

puberty rituals of, 39, 290

American Myth/American Reality
(Robertson), 46, 115

American Steel, 117

Amish, 122

Amphytrian 38
(Giraudoux), 293–294

ancestral roots, 47-49

Anders, Bill, 208

androgyny, 36

Answer to fob
(Jung), 237

Antigone, 83–84, 85

Aphrodite, 39,111

Apollonianism, 218

Apollo 7
, 298

apotheosis, 290

archetypes, 37, 38

Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
(Jung), 37n

arête
, defined, 29, 244-24;

Aristotle, 28

Arndt, Walter, 236n

Arnold, Matthew, 152–153, 154,155, 235–236

art:

as criterion of spiritual health, 261

Eros-Thanatos struggle and, 77

myth vs., 28

trivialization of, 43, 261-262, 266

see also
creativity

Asimov, Isaac, 24n

astrology, 22

astronauts, 208–300, 300–301, 302

Athena, 36, 284

Auden, W. H., 208

Augustine, Saint, 155, 161

authors, cultural influences on, 170

Bakker, James, 27, 225n

Barnes, Hazel, 41

bar mitzvah, 39

Barton, Bruce, 126

Bateson, Gregory, 25

Beatles, 98

Beatrice, 159,163,164,193, 220, 230, 253

beauty, feminine, 228
n
, 242, 244-245

Becker, Ernest, 53–54

Beckett, Samuel, 42, 207, 209
n

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 236, 262, 275, 282

Bellah, Robert N., 69,110

Benét, Stephen Vincent, 92-93, 218

Berg, Bernice, 60

Berger, Peter, 26

Bethe, Hans, 219

Bettelheim, Bruno, 28, 194

Bible:

astronauts’ reading of, 298

church symbolism and, 51

creation story in, 24

Melville’s characters and, 277

mythic names in, 43

Satan described in, 271-272

see also
New Testament; Old Testament;
specific books of Bible

birth, 36, 38, 50

“Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, The” (Nietzsche), 11, 45

Blake, William, 261
n
, 274

Boesky, Ivan, 56, 123, 124

Bohr, Niels, 25

Bok, Edward, 96

Bonnie and Clyde, 95

Boone, Daniel, 45, 94, 95

Borman, Frank, 298

Bosch, Hieronymous, 221

bourgeosie, 242

brain function, left- vs. right-, 25, 288

Briar Rose
(Grimm), 194-216

alternate endings written for, 214–216

case history related to, 197–109, 202, 210–214, 291

creative waiting in, 205, 207, 208-209, 287-288

evil element in, 201-202

feminine development presented in, 196–197, 201, 203, 206, 212

Oedipus Rex
vs., 205

Peer Gynt
vs., 196,197

story of, 199–200, 202–205, 206

time imagery in, 203, 205-206

title of, 194–196

Broadway theater, 43

Brockman, John, 25
n

Bronson, Matthew, 11

Brothers Karamazov, The
(Dostoevsky), 273

Brueghel, Pieter, 227

Bruner, Jerome, 16

Buddenbrooks
(Mann), 256

Buddha, 95

Buddhism, meditation practices and, 145

Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody), 95, 129
n

Buie, James, 121
n

business, women in, 291

Byron, George Cordon, Lord, 94, 284

Calamity Jane, 95

Calvin, John, 220

Calypso, 295-296

Campbell, Joseph, 9, 20
n
, 37

Camus, Albert, 147

Cantos
(Pound), 162

capitalism, 288

care:

inability to, 133-135

myth of, 250
n

Carnegie, Andrew, 96, 117

carnivals, 50

Carson, Kit, 45, 95

case histories,
see
psychotherapy, case histories from

Cassirer, Ernst, 26
n
, 92
n

castration, 81

catharsis:

Faust legend and, 221, 232-233

Moby Dick
and, 282–284

cathedrals, 51, 77, 99–100, 195, 220

Catholicism:

church architecture and, 220,288

see also
Christianity

celebrities, heroes vs., 55

Central Park, Levin murder in, 50–61

Cézanne, Paul, 275

Chambers, Robert, Jr., 50–61

change, myth of, 102-106

in
Great Gatsby
, 102, 129, 130

“Chapbook,” 221

Charles (case history), 31–34, 69, 271

Chernobyl, nuclear-power accident at, 301-302

Childe Harold
(Byron), 94

childhood:

community comfort needed in, 52–53

earliest memories from, 64, 65, 66–67, 68-70

sexual exploitation in, 73

Chiron, 244
n

“Choir Invisible, The” (Eliot), 58-59

Christianity:

classical mythology attacked by, 24-25

holy days of, 50

individualism vs., 177

puberty rituals of, 39

Reformation and, 220

sacraments of, 50–51

Waiting for Godot
and, 42

see also
Catholicism; Jesus Christ; Protestantism

Christmas, 24, 50

churches:

community myth symbolized by, 51

historical sense gained from, 99-100

masculine principles vs. feminine values in, 220, 288

Churchill, Sir Winston, 94

Ciardi, John, 154
n
, 160–161,163

circle, as Apollonian symbol, 218

cities, loyalty to, 46-47

Clark, Kenneth, 250

classical myths, Christian attack on, 24-25

see also
Creek myths;
specific myths

Classic Tradition, The
(Highet), 39
n

Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, 18

Cody, William F. (Buffalo Bill), 95, 129
n

collective guilt, 84, 264–265, 266

collective unconscious, 38, 171

Columbus, Christopher, 91, 92, 300

commercialism, 106,126,140–142, 242

commitment, 181-182

community:

church as symbol of, 51

developmental needs for, 52–53

earth as, 299-302

female symbols of, 164-165

heroism and, 53–54

loyalty to, 45-47

mythic sense of, 30–31

search for, 47-49

space exploration and, 298–299

symbols of, 50–51

compassion, 52,134

competitiveness:

American individualism and, 115

of Faustianism, 218

reaction-formation and, 98

of students, 56

concentration camps, 271

Concourt, Edmund, 140

confession, 151, 155