Once and Future Myths. Phil Cousineau

that often found me curled on the floor unable to move for hours at a time, my brother Paul called me from Pensacola, Florida. The first word out of his mouth was, “Help!” Then he laughed and added, “I've got a term paper due in my mythology class—in a week! Hey, bro,' can you help me?”

      “One week?” I asked warily. “Well, what's it supposed to be about?”

      “Hey, how am I supposed to know? No, just kidding. I think we're supposed to write about a myth that we think has some relevance today.”

      Out of the blue, I blurted, “How about Sisyphus?”

      “You mean the guy who was condemned to roll the boulder up the mountain forever? What's that got to do with us?”

      “Yeah, same guy. I think you'd dig his story. I recently read an essay called ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ by Albert Camus, the French philosopher, and he said some things that are a helluva lot more interesting than the usual moralistic reading. Camus actually saw him as one of the first rebels, what he called ‘the absurd hero,’ a man who learned how to overcome his fate.”

      There was a long pause on the telephone. I ran my fingers through my hair, as I do when I'm nervous, and they got tangled in clots of dried beige paint.

      Silence. My brother was carefully measuring my words.

      “How did he do that?”

      “If I remember right, Camus said that Sisyphus was paying the price for a life of passion, and had learned to accept his ordeal, learned to love the struggle.”

      As I spoke those words, I felt a tremendous surge of emotion. I suddenly knew I wasn't just talking about something that happened once, long ago, if at all. By chance, I realized in astonishment, I had stumbled onto a description of something permanent, eternal, in life, my own life.

      “Paul, has your teacher told you how Salutius, the old Roman writer, described myth? He said myths were things that never happened, but always are.”

      I remember trembling with excitement as I held the telephone. The air around me felt charged, as if after one of those green-skied electrical storms back in the Michigan of our youth. The hair stood on the back of my arms and my scalp prickled. The Camus phrase I had quoted— he “learned to love the struggle”—seemed to hover in the air like the last words of a great stage play. Not only did the ancients adeptly describe the problem; they also prescribed a way of dealing with it.

      “That's great, Phil. If you can write down a few of those ideas just the way you told me, I'll do the rest.”

      “Write it down?” I muttered, then thought to myself, Easy for you to say. But before I could say something I'd regret, I felt some resolve return to my voice for the first time in a long time.

      “Sure, just give me a few days.”

      For the next few days, I wrote down a flurry of thoughts about Sisyphus on the blank index cards I always carried with me to the painting sites. Around four o'clock, when the cold fog began blowing in from the Pacific Ocean and made it hard to hold onto our paintbrushes, I packed up and headed home, where I wrote until dawn.

      By the end of the week I had a thirteen-page essay to send off to my brother. Afterward, I felt as if an enormous burden had been lifted from my shoulders.

      I wouldn't know it for many years, but that serendipitous call woke me up from a long, potentially dangerous slumber. Writing about Sisyphus unleashed years of pent-up creativity. His story was my story; his struggle was my struggle. In those benighted days there was tremendous pressure on me from my family, from old friends and new, to become successful, famous, productive. It's the All-American way. If you choose the contemplative life, decide to drop out for awhile, it tends to trouble the people around you. One girlfriend confided to a buddy that I was “a diamond in the rough,” but she wasn't sure if she could hang around long enough to see me all polished. Another asked me, sotto voce, one day when I was going to grow up and get a real job.

      However, I held out, stubbornly. Then one night, I got a package of old Life magazines in the mail from my father. Tucked inside one of them was a postcard asking me to tell him one more time exactly what it was that I was writing because his friends kept asking him what I was doing with my life. I had no idea what to tell him. How could I describe the uncanny feeling of being pulled forward by a dream, an image, a story, even my destiny, for so many years, but had somehow lost sight of it? Well, I couldn't. I sensed he was ashamed and couldn't come right out and say it. Hadn't he recently confided to my sister that he was afraid that I was throwing my whole life away? I felt like an utter failure after reading his cryptic note, and my heart sank like a stone. A stone rolling to the bottom of the hill.

      The Shoulder to the Boulder

      On a blistering hot day in the fall of 1995 I stood on a hillside overlooking the site of the mythical King Sisyphus' domain, the ancient citadel of Corinth. The old grounds looked as parched as I felt at the ungodly hour of high noon. I was leading a tour around Greece for the Joseph Campbell Foundation. Our Greek expert was an elderly professor named Adrianna. She found a bit of shade for us underneath a gnarled olive tree and began the session with a brilliant history of Corinth, but then delivered a surprisingly conservative version of the Sisyphus tale, tinged with a slight sense of condescension, as if telling a fairy tale to a group of schoolkids she was sure had never heard the myth before.

      Adrianna may have had the best of intentions, to simply entertain the group for a few minutes in between the hotel, the ruins, and lunch, but I found her approach to be the kind that had earned mythology its reputation for being charming but irrelevant. Told like this, I thought to myself, a myth is a lie, irrelevant, untrue to the way people live now.

      As I stepped forward for my turn to talk, the group shuffled around uncomfortably. A few of them took desultory photographs of the archaeologists at work in the ruins of the old citadel below. Adrianna nervously checked her watch, then clicked at it with her finger, as if to signal me that we were short on time. Remember, she was reminding me, we still have half the Peloponnese to see today.

      Unwilling to be rushed, I leaned against the chained link fence that surrounds the excavations of the agora, then began by saying, “Many things change over the centuries, but the one thing that never changes is human character. That's why the old myths are still so fascinating to us today. They reveal the inner meaning of human life, what they used to call ‘the workings of the soul,’ the realm that defies time and space. As I see it, myths like this are metaphors for the dramas of our inward life, and the story of Sisyphus is a metaphor for struggle itself. On the outside, this is a tale of betrayal and retribution, but on the inside, the domain of myth, it tells us something about our attitude to struggle we can't seem to learn any other way.”

      Slowly I spun my version of the myth.

      Sisyphus, ruler of Corinth, regarded by Homer as the wisest and most prudent in his relationships with other mortals, was also, according to other ancient sources, rather a wise guy in his relationships with the gods.

      One afternoon, Sisyphus chanced upon Zeus en flagrante delicto with the lovely maiden Aegina, daughter of the river god Asopus. Before Sisyphus could even conjure up any judgments, he watched as the mighty god abducted the poor girl. As one might imagine, Asopus, the god of flowing water, was inconsolable over her disappearance. Asopus was so distraught he approached the king for help. Sisyphus felt compromised between his loyalty to the gods and the truth he witnessed, but the cisterns of his citadel were dry. So Sisyphus risked everything by trading a divine secret for a perennial spring, chancing retribution for an act of compassion for his own citizens.

      The fury of Asopus was so great that when he learned the true source of his daughter's sorrow, he went into a rage. The rivers around Corinth roiled. The banks overflowed, nearly drowning Zeus, who was hiding from his outraged wife Hera, and who narrowly escaped by