Rembrandt, The Rape of Proserpina, 1632 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) In typing up my life journal from 1993 to the present, I’ve been coming across hundreds of thousands of words that I forgot I ever wrote. Some of these take the form of excursive, semi-extemporaneous mini-essays. Here’s one of them. I won’t be including…
Tag: mythology
Doris Lessing on storytellers as myth-makers: “Our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world”
From Doris Lessing’s lecture in acceptance of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature: We are a jaded lot, we in our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost…
Art, creativity, fate, and the end of the world: Revisiting Joseph Campbell
When The Power of Myth, the six-part PBS television series featuring Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell, first broke upon the unsuspecting American public in 1988, it became an instant sensation and Campbell became an instant celebrity (I mean in a pop cultural sense, beyond and in addition to the substantial academic fame he had already…
Recommended Reading 25
We have quite a varied assortment of reading this week, including: an article about a brilliant reclamation of an abandoned Wal-Mart building for a wonderful counter-purpose; an analysis of Burning Man’s sociocultural-mythological function; a report on widespread distrust of the United States around the world; a fascinating interview with a psychologist on the nature and…
“Metamorphosis” (SHORT FILM)
This post will launch our Cinema Purgatorio feature, wherein each Wednesday we’ll share one or more finds from the Internet’s rich trove of cinematic fascination. Whatever else may be true of the current state of our digital media-driven way of life — which flirts in so many ways with dystopian disaster — it’s a golden…
A Planetary Myth
Joseph Campbell once said that any new myth, in the “high” sense of the word as an overarching, meaning-making narrative, would necessarily have to be planetary in scope and nature, given the global outlook of our modern technological civilization. He said the famous image of planet earth as photographed from space — an image unknown…
Mythic Vision: Its lack killed NASA, its recovery may save us all
I’ve been observing with great interest the flurry of recent articles, essays, and editorials about the original moon landing and subsequent implosion of the U.S. space program. By far the most fascinating and moving is the essay by Tom Wolfe that appeared in The New York Times two days ago. Titled “One Giant Leap to…