Once and Future Myths. Phil Cousineau

Prism of Myth

      It is a late autumn evening. Lamplight is glinting off the bookshelves in the living room. I know every title by heart and exactly where my father placed each book. I see the way he caresses their bindings when he takes his favorite volumes off the shelf, ancient classics such as the Iliad, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and The Nibelungelied, as well as modern ones like Faust, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and The Great Gatsby. I hear his voice as he turns off the ballgame playing on the old black and white Philco television, pours himself a shot of J & B whiskey, and grabs his favorite edition of the Odyssey.

      “We're going to read out loud together,” he insists, pausing dramatically. “As a family.”

      When he hears me groan, his response echoes across the decades: “Someday you'll thank me, son.” I'm twelve. I have no idea what he's talking about. I want to watch Gunsmoke or the Tigers' game, but it's useless to argue. He's been stuck behind a desk all day at the Ford Glass House in Dearborn, Michigan, writing out a press release for some new sports car called the Mustang, and he wants to forget the corporate pressure that is bending his soul. He wants to enter a different world altogether. So we're going to read.

      For the next few hours my father, mother, brother, sister, and I take turns reading a page apiece about the epic wanderings of the wily Greek hero, while my dad keeps a running commentary on why this family ritual is good for us. The night grows furtive; we fight to stay awake. My father can read till dawn and can't understand why we can't keep up with him. By eleven the others have trundled off to bed, and it's just the two of us. He pours another scotch for himself, sloshing it over crackling ice cubes. Then he winks at me and clinks his glass of whiskey against my cup of Vernor's ginger ale. Carefully, he reopens the book and turns to a new chapter about old heroes.

      Did we read about the agony of Achilles or the courage of Hector that night? I don't remember the details, but something deep within me recalls our family voices merging together above page after page of fantastic voyages, magical transformations, and heartbreaking deaths on the battlements.

      Slowly, over the course of that evening and many others like it, the nutrients of those books seeped into my bloodstream. Together, those stories have inspired my lifelong fascination with heroes and monsters, gods and goddesses, beauties and beasts, quests and explorations, distant lands and romantic adventures. That was a great gift I got from my father, but just as fine was the ritual he enforced as if he were a tribal elder.

      After we completed each book on his classics list, my father found some way to bring it even more alive for us. When we finished reading Homer and Virgil, he drove us in the old Ford Falcon to the Detroit Art Museum so we could look at the Greek and Roman vases. Once we had turned the last page of Apollodorus’ rendering of Jason and the Argonauts, he insisted on seeing the movie version at the State Wayne, our hometown theater, and after gazing at a book about ancient Rome we ventured into Detroit to see Kirk Douglas lead the slave revolt in Spartacus. The first summer we spent in New York City we read Melville's Moby Dick, then sauntered down to the Village to see John Huston's movie version. The next day we drove out to New Bedford, Massachusetts, so we could experience the old seaport that had inspired the whaler-turned-author. There on the docks we ate chowder at an old clam shack, and then, with the creaking of the ship's mast in the wind to accompany us, as if to indelibly imprint the story in the wax of memory, we read out loud from my father's favorite passages.

      My father, Stanley H. Cousineau, who worked in public relations for Ford Motor Company for thirty-three years, is seen here at the helm of Henry Ford's original Model T, at the Ford Rotunda, Dearborn, Michigan, 1957.

      One of the most exciting results of my father's synesthetic teaching came about on the weekend we saw, at the Metropolitan Art Museum, some old Greek pottery and sculpture depicting the original Olympic athletes, followed by a game at Yankee Stadium. I vividly recall the frisson, the uncanny shiver down my back, from watching Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris glide through the same outfield that Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio had once roamed. It was the thrill of recognition combined with the fascination of mystery. When I mentioned to my dad that the way Mantle threw the ball home from deep center field reminded me of the statue of the old Greek javelin thrower I'd seen in the museum the day before, his eyebrows arched; he looked up from the newspaper he was glancing at, and muttered, “Hmm. You thought of that all by yourself?”

      

      He didn't say he agreed or disagreed, but I could tell he was surprised that I had made a connection between the two. For a flickering moment he even seemed astonished that perhaps all the books and museums may have made a difference in my life.

      I could tell he was proud from the smile he tried to hide behind his newspaper.

      Of course, this is one of my own myths. I was raised on the knee of Homer, which is an Old World way to describe growing up on stories as old as stone and timeless as dreams. So I see myth everywhere, probably because I am looking for what my American Indian friends call “the long story,” the timeless aspect of everything I encounter. I know the usual places to look for it, such as in the splendor of classic literature or the wisdom stories of primal people. I've memorized a litany of luminous definitions and descriptions of myth, such as “a sacred narrative” “the collective wisdom,” “the group dream,” “other people's religion,” “the vehicle of profoundest metaphysical insights,” “cultural DNA,” even “a metaphor transparent to transcendence,” I am profoundly indebted to the great scholars of mythology who have rendered such complex material into pithy sayings, and I am often startled by the beauty of their theories about its origin and function.

      But in the chapters following I want to explore the aspect of myth that most fascinates me: its “once and future” nature. Myths are stories that evoke the eternal because they explore the timeless concerns of human beings—birth, death, time, good and evil, creativity and destruction. Myth resembles the god Proteus in the Odyssey, a shape-shifting creature who knows the secret that the lost Greek sailors long to hear—the way home. But they must learn how to get a grip on him, if only for one slippery moment, so he might surrender his hidden wisdom.

      This is what I call “mythic vision.” The colorful and soulful images that pervade myth allow us to step back from our experiences so that we might look closer at our personal situations and see if we can catch a glimpse of the bigger picture, the human condition. But this takes practice, much like a poet or a painter must commit to a life of deep attention and even reverence for the multitude of meaning around us. An artist friend of mine, Gregg Chadwick, calls this “pulling the moment,” a way of looking deeper into experiences that inspire him. In the writing classes I teach, I refer to this mystery as the difference between the “overstory,” which is the visible plot, and the “under-story,” which is the invisible movement of the soul of the main characters. What is mysterious about mythic stories is how they always meander back to the same place: your soul. In this sense myth is a living force, like the telluric powers that stream through the Earth. It is this mythic vision, looking for the “long story,” the timeless tale, that helps us approach the deep mysteries because it insists there is always more than meets the eye. In this sense the mythic vision helps us see the stories we really live by, rather than the one we like to think we are living, and moreover, decide if our myths are working for or against us. If we don't become aware of both our personal myths and the cultural myths that act upon us like gravitational forces, we risk being overpowered by them.

      But I am caught on the horns of a dilemma. How do I tell the truth about the immense gifts of the mythic imagination, as well as describe its bittersweet influence on my life and the life of the world? What I never learned from my father or my college