Mythoclasm

A Plea for Secular Humanism - for the Sake of our Humanity

2011-07-24T19:10:00.004-05:00

Violence, hatred, intolerance, bigotry, racism, injury and murder......these are increasingly the legacy of our dominant theologies. Please at least consider that there is another path, secular humanism, which embodies morality, ethics and compassion but which rejects theism and the notion that gods and supernatural entities are responsible for our actions.

We live in an era wherein people praise gods for sports victories and material gains, claiming the intercession of a personal savior on their behalf. Where are these voices now, to wonder about the absence of such gods when Anders Breivik murdered 76 people? Why aren't those who thank gods for their vacations, their promotions, their good health, demanding an account from these phantasmagoria to explain why 11 million East Africans face starvation even as 34% of Americans are obese?

We're crippled by what has become a superstitious dependency on imaginary beings; beings in whom we childishly accord a chauvinistic posture, a Santa Claus for grown-ups who brings "our side" the very best, but only if we believe, we believe. . . .We purport that these gods love everyone -- but what kind of heavenly father fattens the calves of some of his offspring, while he leaves his others to starve. Would you treat your own children like this? Would you?

Such deities are a spectre of our own making; a creation which has evolved the monster of aggressive bias, an ultratheism that asserts its own, ugly hegemony over reason, tolerance, compassion and love. We claim that these "fanatics" don't represent our thinking, our faith -- yet we fail to acknowledge that it is our own "free grace" theology that spawns unilateral fundamentalisms, which inevitably take the form of religiously inspired acts of terrorism.

Such terroristic malevolence is hardly new; how else to explain the bloody Crusades, the Inquisition, the burning of witches, the annihilation of native peoples, the complacency we continue to project in the face of genocides past and present?

Without taking responsibility for our own actions, without admitting our own liability in a fanaticism born of puerile convictions that gods protect us while allowing others to perish, we deny our ability to accomplish wonders of our own agency. We have capacious powers of reasoning, we are capable of tremendous acts of compassion, we are moved by love and motivated by social relationships. We can realize our endowments as gifts of our humanity, not as behaviors we garner from imaginary creators who represent our interests first and foremost. As humanists, we can at last lay aside the swords of holy vengeance and seek to solve our differences nonviolently, to finally acknowledge that the “other” who thinks differently from ourselves perceives us, too, as “other” and that within the gulf that distances one from another lies a terrain that awaits our united stewardship towards a landscape of unprecedented potential for abundance, consideration and beneficence.

The Journey is the Story

2010-10-23T22:15:00.001-05:00

The Journey is the Story:

The Role of Mythos, Anthropos and the Guide

in The Way to Rainy Mountain

For N. Scott Momaday, the word, indeed language, is sacred. In his spiritual memoir, The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday harnesses the power of story to re-imagine both the physical and spiritual journey of his paternal ancestral Native American tribe, the Kiowa, who made their way down from the northern climes to their final resettlement at the base of Rainy Mountain, in Oklahoma. Weaving together tribal myths and legends, historical perspective, drawings by his Kiowa father, Al Momaday, and Momaday’s own remembrance of his father’s stories, Momaday virtually enlivens what has become a nearly extinct culture, assuring its continuance in modern memory by recreating, for his readers, a sense of what it is to be a Kiowa, a people for whom the journey is their story. As Momaday explains, “the way to Rainy Mountain is preeminently the history of an idea, man’s idea of himself, and it has old and essential being in language” (Momaday 4).

Dividing his memoir into three sections, “The Setting Out,” “The Going On,” and “The Closing In,” Momaday draws us into the Kiowa journey by layering a braided path upon this foundational landscape of the beginning, the middle and the end of the migration. Each chapter within the three sections is itself divided into three parts, which I would define as the mythos, the anthropos, and the guide. Mythos encompasses stories and legends that give a people a sense of themselves as a tribe or group; the anthropos governs the existent perspective, positioning humanity within the context of its myth and its historicity; and the guide is the storyteller whose narrative pulls us into the story in order that we may imaginatively experience the events of another time, another culture.

Momaday is the guide. His ancestral ties and his remembrances of the stories his father and grandmother passed along to him give Momaday his authority as a guide; he knows the myths and the history of his people, and in Momaday’s case, he has even physically made the journey the Kiowas made. Momaday’s father’s remembered stories form the mythos segment of each chapter, which include a creation story, legends about the Kiowa’s prime deity, the sun, and stories that link the Kiowas with nature. The anthropos in each chapter annotates the historical events involving and surrounding the Kiowas as they made their journey eastward, towards Rainy Mountain. Momaday explains:

The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself. (ix)

Just as a journey implies motion and change over time, the reader’s journey through The Way to Rainy Mountain shifts as she follows the contours of the narrative landscape. The first section, “The Setting Out,” is organized to present the legends and myths first, followed by historical observations, which are in turn followed by Momaday’s own memories. In the second section, “The Going On,” we readers begin to experience a melding of the myth, history and personal narrative, thus immersing us more deeply into Kiowa culture. Each of us lives in our own complex narrative structure of myth, memory and historical context, but these states conjoin and separate in a continuous flux, and are re-imagined with each new thought, with each act of memory. By mixing the historical, or anthropos, into the mythos, the mythos into the storyteller’s narrative, Momaday in effect initiates us into Kiowa culture, better allowing us to imagine ourselves as a member of the tribe. By the time we reach the last section, “The Closing In,” we, through the movement of the story as it weaves between myth, history and personal reminiscence, have made congruent motion and have now a living memory of these stories, their historical context, and Momaday’s own location in these stories and events. We now co-identify with Momaday and with the Kiowa. We, through the phenomenon of language, have each our own particular experience of the Kiowa.

Momaday prefaces The Way to Rainy Mountain with a poem, “Headwaters,” which is mysterious, yet inviting, as he asks “What moves? / What moves on this archaic force/Was wild and welling at the source.” Our curiosity is beckoned; we follow the storyteller to discover what does move, what is this archaic force? And despite the plaited narrative which entwines us, we proceed on a chronological journey, from beginning to end. In this way, we creatively participate in the development of the Kiowa tribe. We emerge from the log as we learn the Kiowa creation myth. We are told the story of the birth of the Kiowa tribe, as they “came one by one into the world through a hollow log. . . . They looked all around and saw the world. . . . They called themselves Kwuda, ‘coming out’” (16). Immediately as they begin their journey, the Kiowas mythologize themselves as the people who come out from darkness. As they continue in their history and migrate eastward, towards the plains and the warmer temperatures, the brighter days, they evolve a story of a primary deity, the sun. Momaday’s exquisite details show how the Kiowa transform themselves from “slaves to the simple necessity of survival;” who had “emerged from a sunless world” (7). Now, in the sun, where “Sweet clover takes hold of the hills and bends upon itself to cover and seal the soil,” the Kiowas discover their god. Momaday writes “The sun is at home on the plains. Precisely there does it have the certain character of a god” (7). We can feel the earth, warmed by the sun, which beams its deific rays on the Kiowa. And although it’s not clear that the sun and its attendant Sun Dance, which personifies the sun’s spirit, are holy to Momaday, through his devotion to language, he carefully and respectfully evokes the dignity of what is sacred to the Kiowa.

The Kiowas collide, inevitably, with the history of another people. The buffalo they sacrifice in the Sun Dance have all but disappeared and at last, the tribe encounters U. S. soldiers who force the tribe to scatter. Momaday writes, “Forbidden without cause the essential act of their faith . . . the Kiowas backed away forever . . . . My grandmother was there. Without bitterness, and for as long as she lived, she bore a vision of deicide” (10). Towards the end of the memoir, in Chapter XXIV, the story of the Kiowa tribe comes to an inexorable end, which is told through remembered story and fact: “East of my grandmother’s house, south of the pecan grove, there is buried a woman in a beautiful dress. Mammedaty used to know where she is buried, but now no one knows. . . . [H]er grave is unmarked . . . . That dress is still there, under the ground.” The earth, the darkness, have once again absorbed the colors, the artifacts and the bodies that were the Kiowa tribe. But not, however, the story, and herein lives the sacred spirit: through the word, the language and the story, the spirit and identity of the Kiowa people endures. Just as he prefaces the memoir with poetry, he ends the story with a poem, “Rainy Mountain Cemetery.” In spite of the haunting silence that surrounds the mountain, Momaday confers on us the understanding that perhaps death does not have the final word for the Kiowa, at least as long as there is a story and people who will listen: “The wake of nothing audible he hears/Who listens here and now to hear your name” (89).

The risks that Momaday, or any storyteller or guide, for that matter, takes, are that there may be no one to listen to the story, no one to lure into a past mythos and identity of a lost culture. For Momaday, for whom language is sacred, the story is the spiritual practice, and most certainly he has evolved a ritual that accesses the spiritual through the careful craft of his narrative. Language gives voice to what is otherwise ineffable: the mystical, sacred idea of who we are as individuals and as a people. Almost like a conjurer, Momaday has revived the idea of the Kiowa tribe to a different era, one in which without story, the Kiowas would no longer exist. By writing the story, Momaday decreases the risk of the story being lost forever. He writes, “The verbal tradition by which it has been preserved has suffered deterioration in time. What remains is fragmentary: mythology, legend, lore, and hearsay – and of course the idea itself, as crucial and complete as it ever was. That is the miracle” (4). Language becomes sacred because of its unique ability to transcend time, to survive history, to define and record humanity’s idea of itself. Story, or narrative, has a hierophantic task: to make evident the numinous and to connect it with ourselves, to locate our selves within the greater context of the cosmos. Momaday has resurrected the idea of the Kiowa tribe for contemporary readers and thus perpetuates their living memory in us for as long as there are readers for his memoir.

Etiology

2010-10-23T15:20:00.007-05:00

Mottled dogs

(dreadful riddles)

shun the right sun and make quick their dead.

<> < /scan > It Is.

A horrific beginning:

Blindness is always our companion;

Just the

Seeing

is strange.

Mend fences with the serpent

since renewal only happens in the dirt.

--even the mother of gods knows this much--

<> < /scan >

For whose murder are we the hero;

when the Magus raids your fire and plunders your solace,

(He would reduce your myths to parables)

lonely demons serve their purpose

in spare, gray novellas.

Wired for gods?

2010-06-25T10:37:00.006-05:00

Writing in this week's issue of The New Yorker, neurologist and essayist Oliver Sacks reflects on novelist Howard Engel's case of stroke-induced alexia, a nightmarish condition for anyone but particularly vexing for a writer. Sacks explains that thanks to neuroimaging we now know that there are systems in the brain which allow us to recognize letters, enabling us to read and write. He ponders the origin of this part of the brain, asking "How, then, did the visual word form are of the human brain arise? Does it exist in the brains of illiterate people? Does it have a precursor in the brains of other primates?" Sacks is hardly the first to ask the question; he points out that the issue posed quite a problem for the British naturalist and evolutionary theorist Alfred Russel Wallace, who felt that since primitive humanity was hardly in need of a lexical mind, there must then be a god who could design the human brain in anticipation of just such a cultural phenomenon as reading.

Sacks, however, rules out the divine engineer and concludes that "experience - experiential selection - is as powerful an agent of change as natural selection. . . . We are literate not by virtue of a divine intervention but through a cultural invention and a cultural selection that make a brilliant and creative use of a preexisting neural possibility."

But what of the origin of actual letters and alphabets? How is it we recognize what it is we recognize? Sacks refers to research by Mark Changizi at Caltech, who, with his colleagues, studied the literary systems of hundreds of ancient and modern languages and discovered that virtually all human writing systems "share certain topological features with the environment" which has caused the researchers to believe that graphemes 'have been selected to resemble the conglomerations of contours found in natural scenes, thereby tapping into our already-existing object recognition mechanisms.'"

Is this process perhaps linked to the creation of our gods and myths? Indeed, Brandon Keim, of Wired Science, reports that there is a region in the brain linked to religion. This particular region resides, interestingly, in areas that correspond with social intelligence. Citing one of the authors of a recent study, Jordan Grafman, Keim explains that "the origins of divine belief reside in mechanisms that evolved in order to help primates understand family members and other animals. 'We tried to use the same social mechanisms to explain unusual phenomena in the natural world,' he said."

We have cast our gods in images familiar to us - animals, humans and hybrids - but we have done so in the spirit of explanation, comprehension and invention; stories that order our chaos. As we evolve, technologically, scientifically and psychologically, will our brains develop new ways of believing? Will the frontiers of our creative fertility originate in nature, or in science and technology? Is our continual search for divinity an expression of our ongoing lust for eternity?

I am once again a lucky recipient of a book of poems, this volume on loan to me from the writer and memoirist Shannon Lynch, who is another of my friends patient enough to explore this territory with me. The book is Dunstan Thompson: On the Life & Work of a Lost American Master, from Pleiades Press. I leave you with Thompson's poem, "The Artifice of Eternity."

The spinning fates

Were kind to Yeats:

They cut his thread

When he was dead:

But not before.

Early he wove

Yellow and mauve

Into a cloth

Which every moth

Easily tore.

He moved his loom

To a public room

Where he could find

The art to wind

His skeins once more.

Then with new skill

He worked until

The pattern showed

How time had flowed

Across the floor.

The weave was tight

Against the light:

The strict design

Of perfect line

Was what he saw.

The thread was spun:

The web was done:

The dyes were fast:

The shroud would last

Which now he wore.

"Reality"

2010-06-15T12:56:00.005-05:00

All reality is myth, or mythic...Gaston Bachelard writes "We cannot say what reality is, only what it seems like to us." And while we separate reality from spirituality through experiential and empirical evidence, our psychical understanding is plucked from a metaphysical fulcrum; we understand these consequent vibrations through metaphor. Charles Simic says that "Every new metaphor is a new thought, a fragment of a new myth of reality. Metaphor is a part of the not-knowing aspect of art, and yet I'm firmly convinced that it is the supreme way of searching for truth. How can this be?"

Simic's question fascinates me, as I believe his epistemology to be correct: it's as if metaphor is a way of empirical knowing, based not on our senses but on our sense. We create an abstract architecture of understanding. This is a fluid and ongoing, if imperfect process, in the individual. Jan Zwicky explains that "In metaphor we experience a gestalt shift from one distinct and emotional complex to another 'in an instant of time.' A metaphor, then, is also a meta-image. It is multiply resonant."

How does a culture absorb and assimilate all of this vast and incessant creation? It's impossible to enumerate thought, yet perhaps the process is recursive and certainly its expression is possible (only) in art. Yet how does a cultural narrative evolve, (bearing in mind that no such story is ever static, but that there is a consensus or a willing subscription to the myth) with so much "input;" how do we filter that which is no longer "true" while incorporating that which is new and unknown? While the individual may constantly create meaning and understanding for him or herself, surely there is a break between what occurs locally versus what is ultimately widely expressed. We can turn to the philosophy of science to understand the obstacle épistémologique; in culture best understood as a cleaving to patterns, stories and myths that leave us longing for relatedness and relevance: an understanding for our times.

My friend, the playwright and poet Tom Poole, recently loaned me his copy of Poems of R.S. Thomas, who asks these questions in his poem, "The Answer."

Not darkness but twilight

in which even the best

of minds must make its way

now. And slowly the questions

occur, vague but formidable

for all that. We pass our hands

over their surface like blind

men, feeling for the mechanism

that will swing them aside. They

yield, but only to re-form

as new problems; and one

does not even do that

but towers immovable before us.

Is there no way

Nous sommes vraiment post-coloniaux ?

2010-05-13T13:35:00.000-05:00

Qui possède le mythe ? Qui possède la manifestation matérielle de mythe : les objets fabriqués, les icônes, les objets sacrés et cérémoniels ?

Christian Fundamentalism and Absolute Truth: Why a Belief in Biblical Inerrancy Represents a Potential Danger to Peace

2010-05-07T18:55:00.005-05:00

We have a variety of ways in which we construct and interpret knowledge and meaning. Empirical evidence, derived from experience, and a priori, or innate knowledge are some examples of theories about how we acquire knowledge in our material world. In order to gain understanding and insight in abstract matters, however, we turn to metaphor, narrative myths and religion, which comprise a psychical epistemology that provides us with a way of creating meaning and formulating an idea of our stance in the cosmos. Myths and religious stories are metaphorical constructions that help us to understand that which is not empirically knowable or demonstrable. Truths about the meaning of life, its origins and its possible continuance in some other dimension after death are emphatically not evidentiary facts, but the human need to create meaning is imperative and so we attempt to create meaning through myths about our origins, our life purpose, and our immortality. Fundamentalism, or a literal approach to mythical texts, however, is a distortion of this epistemology as it seeks to strip mythos from spiritual narrative and instead views these stories as accurate, factual accounts of human history and our relationship with a god. This essay is concerned with Christian fundamentalism in the United States, and how its attempts to espouse absolute truths about human history, and particularly about human destiny, represent a potential threat to worldwide stability and peace. In order to apprehend the prospective dangers inherent in a fundamentalist outlook we need to know something about the fundamentalists in the United States: who they are; why they came to believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, and how their involvement in national politics is skewed towards a politics of Christian redemption, which could result in the very apocalyptic scenarios they believe are foretold in the Book of Revelations.

An impressive number of Americans call themselves fundamentalists. According to Charles Strozier, author of Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America and a historian and a trained psychoanalyst who spent five years researching fundamentalism, “some 40 percent of the American public believes in the Bible as the ‘actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.’ That would approach 100 million people” (3). The most highly profiled groups of fundamentalists in the United States belong to large, established organizations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the United Pentecostal Church International, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Many more congregants belong to unaffiliated evangelical churches; Jeff Sharlet, author of “Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military” explains that still others refuse to identify with any organized religion or church, as they “reject denominational affiliation as divisive of the body of Christ” (Sharlet 33). Demographically, according to Strozier , fundamentalists belong to virtually every strata of society. What tends to separate one sect from another is limited to petty differences. What unifies fundamentalists, he says, are a personal commitment to Jesus, acceptance that he is their personal savior, and a fervent belif in the apocalyptic visions in Revelations. Strozier writes that “the apocalyptic is more than subtext. It is the ground of fundamentalist being” ( Strozier 11).

Profoundly faithful Christians have not always been energized by an obsession with end times. In fact, Christianity used to be a far more optimistic faith. Religious scholar Karen Armstrong explains, in The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, that before the 19th century, Christians believed in the virtue of humanity and theorized that they could build God’s kingdom here on earth: the New Jerusalem would exist as a peaceful world for 1,000 years, awaiting the return of the Savior. Fundamentalism is an about-face of Christian optimism:

Instead of becoming more virtuous, as the Enlightenment thinkers had hoped, [fundamentalists believed] humanity was becoming so depraved that God would soon be forced to intervene and smash their society, inflicting untold misery upon the human race. But out of this fiery ordeal, the faithful Christians would emerge triumphant and enjoy Christ’s final victory and glorious kingdom. (Battle 138)

The modern fundamentalist eschatology, known as premillennialism, is vengeful and hostile to non-Christians. According to premillennialist doctrine, prior to Jesus’ return, the Antichrist - a cunning charlatan who pretends to seek world peace - will rule over us, ultimately wielding a satanic power resulting in mass murder, war, persecution and oppression. Finally, Christ will return to defeat the Antichrist and to fight Satan himself in the Battle of Armagegeddon just outside of Jerusalem. The Christian faithful are spared from watching the ultimate epic battle between good and evil, as they are “raptured” up into the heavens before the violence begins. Christ defeats Satan, and then rules for 1,000 years before God delivers the Last Judgmenet, after which the faithful live forever in Heaven and the damned are sentenced to eternal Hell.

The roots of this current doctrine of fundamentalist thinking stretch back to the 19th century, after Darwin’s ideas came to the public’s attention. His theories about the origins of life, together with the industrial revolution and unprecedented technological advancements, threatened to supplant religious beliefs. To many faithful Christians, it seemed that science would now render spirituality useless and archaic. Their entire mythology, the religious stories in the Christian Bible, was in danger of mythoclasm. Mythoclasm is a word regrettably not defined in most standard dictionaries, but we can certainly construe its meaning. The suffix, “clasm,” denotes total destruction; thus mythoclasm is the destruction of myth. Abraded against science, fundamentalist doctrine found itself in a fierce battle to survive the onslaught of science. Armstrong examines the divide between relgion and science:

From the very beginning, the conflict between religion and modern science was couched in extreme, even apocalyptic rhetoric. Thomas H. Huxley, who popularised the Origin of Species, insisted that people had to choose between faith and science; there could be no compromise . . . . In response, conservative Christians launched a crusade against Darwinism. (Armstrong)

In hindsight, when we study historical trends like the Scientific Revolution and The Enlightment, it’s not difficult to predict the ensuing conflict between religion and the scientific mindset. What could not be predicted, however, was how quickly scientific knowledge started to accumulate during the 19th and 20th centuries. Fewer people, however, had either the capacity to apprehend this knowledge, or the means to participate in its acquisition (at universities or in private laboratories, for instance) at the pace at which it was being discovered. And for many, especially the devout, science offered precious little to account for the origins of our moral code and our values. As cognitive scientist Steven Pinker writes in The Blank Slate, people were, and continue to be very worried about these issues:

If scientists are right that the mind emerged from living matter, we would have to give up the value and dignity of the individual, solidarity and self-lessness with regard to our fellow humans, and the higher purpose of realizing these values through the love of God and knowledge of his plans. Nothing would keep us from a life of callous exploitation a cynical self-centeredness. (Blank 187)

And while most people were on board with the techological conveniences garned by all this new knowledge, others grew marginalized and increasingly suspicious. Even with a relatively universal acceptance of many of science’s advantages that can reduce some of humanity’s suffering, many Americans still feel somewhat disconnected from the realm of progress, an alienation which binds them closer to their religion. Political scienticists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris explain that “the United States is exceptionally high in religiosity . . . because it is also one of the most unequal postindustrial societies . . . . Relatively high levels of economic insecurity are experienced by many sectors of U. S. Society. . . “ (Zuckerman 173).

Not only was science advancing at a relentless pace, estranging those who didn’t understand, or who feared the implications of theories like evolution, scientific knowledge now became inextricably linked with truth. The ensuing central dilemma for people of faith was that their Weltanschung didn’t stand up to the new pillars of truth: verifiable facts, scientific evidence and proof. Rather than give up their religious myth and yield to the new pantheon of science, fundamentalists chose instead to adopt a “factual” or literal view of the Bible. Fundamentalists could thus retain their original gestalt while maintaing their relevance in a new age defined by fact and reason by proclaiming the Bible as a factual, scientifically accurate account of humanity, provided by the highest authority: God. And so evolved the decision to fight Prometheus’ fire with brimstone. As Armstrong points out, “because by the end of the nineteenth century science and rationalism were the watchwords of the day, religion had to be rational too, if it was to be taken seriously . . . . It must be as clear, demonstrable, and objective as any other logos” (Battle 140). The impetus towards a fundamentalist approach to biblical text came fairly swiftly after after Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. By 1873, Princeton theologican Charles Hodge articulted what would become the essence of fundamentalist doctrine, when he argued that the “theologian’s task was not to look for a meaning beyond the words . . . . Every word of the Bible was inspired and must be taken seriously; it should not be disturbed by allegorical or symbolic exegis” (141). Science had become the enemy of religion, and in order to survive, religion must now compete with science. As Armstrong says, “Faith had to be rational, mythos had to be logos” (144).

It would be reasonable to wonder why deeply religious people clung – and continue to cling – so fiercely to the idea that the Bible is inerrant. The answer lies in the fact that meaning is essential to the human mind, and science leaves too vast a void for most people to live without some kind of myths or religious stories to explain the abstractions that science and technology cannot. As mentioned in the beginning of the essay, the human mind turns to metaphor in order to create meaning. Other epistemic systems, like empiricism and rationalism, rely on deductive and inductive reasoning. Psychical epistemology employs neither deduction nor induction. Instead, myths, religious stories and allegories are constructed, elaborate metaphors that are elastic enough to allow us to explore questions like “What is the meaning of life?” or “Is there life after death?” Cognitive scientists and theorists support the idea that we generate meaning through constructed metaphors in order to find answers to these questions. George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, and Mark Johnson, an epistemologist, explore the role metaphor plays in human cognition in their seminal work on the subject, Metaphors We Live By. The authors explain that metaphor is quite a bit more than just a literary trope or idiomatic language. Rather, metaphor is the underlying cognitive function that gives rise to thought. They write that “on the basis of linguistic evidence, we have found that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature” (Lakoff and Johnson 4). The authors explain how our metaphorical thought system gives rise to our understanding:

Metaphors are basically devices for understanding and have little to do with objective reality, if there is such a thing. The fact that our conceptual system is inherently metaphorical, the fact that we understand the world, think and function in metaphorical terms, and the fact the metaphors can not merely be understood but can be meaningful and true as well – these facts all suggest that an adequate account of meaning and truth can only be based on understanding. (184)

Our understanding is based on metaphor and metaphorical constructions of meaning, and because the way the human mind generates knowledge is through the construction of metaphor, there can be “no fully objective, unconditional, or absolute truth” (185).

One of the ways to comprehend our world then, especially abstract elements of our world like meaning, is through the narrative of myth. We construct myth as a “way of comprehending experience; [myths] give order to our lives. Like metaphors, myths are necessary for making sense of what goes on around us. All cultures have myths, and people cannot function without myth anymore than they can function without metaphor” (185-86). Steven Pinker concurs with his colleagues. Myth, religion, “beliefs about a world of spirits do not come from nowhere. They are hypotheses intended to explain certain data that stymie our everyday theories” (Pinker, How, 557).

Meaning is so vital to the human spirit that without it, argues the psychiatrist and Nazi death camp survivor Viktor Frankl, the mind becomes ill. Without meaning, we generate no hope, and Frankl personally witnessed the outcome of those who have lost their sense of meaning, and thus hope, which is death. Meaning, which we search for and express through myth, “is the primary motivation in . . . life and not a ‘secondary rationalization’ of instinctual drives” (Frankl 121). The psychologist Rollo May explains further, writing that “the myth . . . is an eternal truth in contrast to an empirical truth. The latter can change with every morning newspaper when we read of the latest discoveries in our laboratories. But the myth transcends time” (May, Cry, 27).

When our myths are threatened or abandoned, society becomes anxious; when “our myths no longer serve their function of making sense of existence” the result is a panic created by the void of meaning. (27) Humanity will grasp at whatever shards remain after mythoclasm, as is the case with fundamentalists, for whom science and technology provide no meaning and who, in order to compete with science, maintain their stance that the Bible provides us with all the science we need to understand our history and our future. Ironically, the very idea that religious stories, allegories and myths represent absolute truth is mythoclasmic in itself. The paradox for the fundamentalists, though, is that the Bible is not a compendium of facts and absolute truths, and society’s rapacious appetite for more scientific discovery, more technological breakthroughs, push the fundamentalists towards an existential abyss which can only be avoided through death and reunification with their savior, Jesus Christ. Some cultural analysts, like Walter A. Davis, postulate that fundamentalists have an extraordinarily active death drive, which Freud called Todestrieb and what other analysts refer to as thanatos. Davis writes that “a psyche wedded to thanatos has found in thanatos the final solution” (Davis). He believes that fundamentalism “is ruled by catastrophic anxiety . . . . We will fail to understand fundamentalism as long as we resist seeing how close it is to a psychosis. Fundamentalist rage is the attempt of a subject to hold itself together . . . by waging war on all that terrifies it” (Davis). This rage and the accompanying overwhelming anxiety, the direct results of the mythoclasm arising out of the seismic rift between the scientific and religious mindsets, fuel a muscular apocalyptic vision which has found its expression in national politics. As Davis explains, fundamentalists have convinced themselves that the United States is the nation chosen by God “as the one . . . to advance the movements towards that long sought . . . blessed Apocalyptic event” (Davis).

And herein lies the very real danger that presents itself when a sizeable group of people endow a faith-based belief structure (religion) with the power of absolute truth chooses to partner up with the necessary political representation and military power required to realize their apocalyptic visions. In George W. Bush, for instance, fundamentalists found a president who was not only willing to entertain his loyal conservative evangelicals’ fantastic imaginings of the End Times; they found a man who actually believed that his was a Messianic presidency. Bruce Bartlett, an advisor to Ronald Reagan and an official in George H.W. Bush’s administration, told the journalist Ron Suskind that “I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to [George W.] Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do” (Suskind). Suskind writes that “every few months, a report surfaces of the president using strikingly Messianic language,” and quotes Bush has having said during a meeting “I trust God speaks through me.” Michael Ortiz Hill writes of Bush’s Messianic mission in the White House:

I’d become accustomed to George W. Bush’s use of the word evil until he told the nation this last spring, “The evil one is among us.’ Anyone with a passing understanding of the evangelical world . . . knows that he was referring to the Antichrist. The implications of this are grave beyond telling and yet scarcely ever noted in the public discourse. On the eve of a misguided war the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military force in human history has located American foreign policy within a Biblical narrative that leads inexorably towards the plains Of Megiddo, roughly fifty five miles northwest of Jerusalem: the battle of Armageddon. (Hill)

Bush shared his Messianic instructions with key players in the Middle East crisis, telling Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas that “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East” (Reqular).

Lest anyone think that now that the Bush era has come to an end, the danger of a self-fulfilling apocalyptic prophesy is over, consider investigative journalist and author Jeff Sharlet’s recent observation in his Harper’s article, “Jesus Killed Mohammed,” that Barack Obama has “inherited a military not just drained by a two-front war overseas but fighting a third battle on the home front, a subtle civil war over its own soul” (Sharlet 32). Sharlet writes that there is “a quiet coup within the armed forces . . . of religious authority displacing the military’s once staunchly secular code” (33). Ever since the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States by al-Qaeda, the military officials have increasingly endorsed a histrionic, crusade-oriented rhetoric. The Officers’ Christian Fellowship (OCF), a group whose membership grows each year and which has chapters at 80 percent of our military bases, is presided over by retired Air Force Lieutenant General Bruce L. Fister, who tells his recruits that the ‘global war on terror’. . . is “a spiritual battle of the highest magnitude” (33). In an OCF Scripture study report, soldiers are told that “We will need to press ahead obediently, not allowing the opposition, all of which is spearheaded by Satan, to keep us from the mission of reclaiming territory for Christ in the military” (34). Islamic extremists are not the only instruments of Satan, however. According to Army Lieutenant Colonel Greg E. Metzgar, “every unsaved member of the military is a potential agent of ‘spiritual terrorism’” (42).

Mikey Weinstein, head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, writes that democracy’s real enemy is “weaponized Christianity” (Sharlet 37). But in a day and age where reason and rational thinking is thought to prevail, it does not seem plausible that the United States is at risk of engendering actual apocalyptic war by manipulating events in the Middle East through policy and through our military forces. Yet consider how fiercely the faithful clung to their religious beliefs in the 19th century, sacrificing the mythos and interpretive qualities of religious stories to the altar of a false absolute truth.

That there is danger in fanaticism hardly needs proving; what does bear acknowledgement is that Christian fundamentalism in the United States has the potential to unleash unprecedented violence, in the name of God and in fulfillment of prophecy misunderstood as a necessary destiny. There are a number of conditions that could provoke apocalyptic fervor. An increasing sense of irrelevancy, for instance, now that their President is out of office, could result in a frantic attempt to revive a hatred for the enemy (to include the unsaved). Recently, in a Newsweek article prematurely heralding the end of Christendom with its title, “The End of Christian America,” John Meecham reports that “the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades.” In reaction to this news, R. Albert Mohler, Jr., who heads the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, laments the trend:

The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis with threatens the very heart of our culture. Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society. (Meecham)

Notwithstanding the fact that the U.S. has yet to see its thousandth anniversary, the very notion that a ten point drop in self-identified Christians poses a threat to the core of our country denotes the kind of apocalyptic hysteria that has come to characterize Christian fundamentalism.

Another precipitating event that could ignite zealotry involves another terrorist attack on U. S. soil. Since the Christian fundamentalism archetype paints the terrorists as Satan’s emissaries, it follows that God is on our side; all we need to do is follow instructions. Charles Strozier offers a cautionary explanation:

[F]undamentalism, largely because it is so directly touches ultimate issues, may resist any taming, and remain positioned to expand rapidly in the face of crisis. And it would be foolish to believe that we will always remain immune to crisis . . . . Protracted fighting abroad or racial war at home, large-scale terrorism, environmental disaster, or whatever, could easily prompt the eruption of the apocalyptic within fundamentalism. ( 253)

Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, believes that the death wish is not only present in religion, but that religion validates thanatos, when he writes that “religion makes such impulses legitimate . . . . There can be no doubt that the cult of death and the insistence upon portents of the end proceed from a surreptitious desire to see it happen” (59-60).

The race towards end times need not be inevitable, despite Christian fundamentalism in the United States and a growing number of Islamic extremists internationally. While it is unlikely that fundamentalist doctrine and secular devotion to the cultural myth of progress will reconcile their different views anytime soon, a compassionate understanding is needed in order to temper fundamentalist angst. As Armstrong points out, “it is important to recognize that [fundamentalism] is rooted in fear,” and that “the terror of extinction . . . had made all fundamentalists . . . believe that the secularists were about to wipe them out” (Battle 368). But fundamentalism also represents a yearning for god; a way to bring god back into “the void at the heart of a society based on scientific rationalism” (370). It’s not unreasonable that faith, even a misguided faith, would seek to fill that void.

It’s also important to realize that the fear and loathing many fundamentalists direct towards secularists is met, in kind, by even the most distinguished scientists. For instance, in his best-selling work, The God Delusion, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins unhelpfully harangues fundamentalists, writing that “as a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise . . . It subverts science and saps the intellect” (Dawkins 284) . The opportunity for redemptive dialog lies in the foundational precepts contained within the secular myth of progress and the relief of human suffering advancements in science can provide, and the Christian principles of forgiveness and compassion. Secularists and non-fundamentalist Christians can turn their evolved sense of tolerance for diversity towards the fundamentalist perspective and embrace the important charitable work churches accomplish on behalf of our disadvantaged populations. In turn, perhaps fundamentalists will find occasion for inclusion, and not alienation, in the realization of shared goals, particularly in compassionate, palliative efforts to relieve human suffering.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Karen. "Bush's Fondness for Fundamentalism is Courting Disaster at Home and Abroad." 31 July 2006. The Guardian. 18 March 2009 .

—. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. New York: Ballantine Books, 2000.

Davis, Walter. "Weekend Edition." 8 January 2005. Counterpunch. 25 February 2009 .

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Frankl, Victor. Man's Search for Meaning. New York: Washington Square Press, 1959.

Hill, Michael Ortiz. "Bush's Armageddon Obsession: The Looking Glass War." 19 October 2002. CounterPunch. 1 May 2009 .

Hitchens, Christopher. God is not Great. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007.

Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Vols. 9, Part 1. New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1959.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

May, Rollo. The Cry for Myth. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1991.

Meecham, John. "The End of Christian America." 13 April 2009. Newsweek. 13 April 2009 .

Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. Norton: 1997, New York.

—. The Blank Slate. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Reqular, Arnon. "'Road map is a life saver for us,' PM Abbas tells Hamas." Haaretz. 3 May 2009 .

Sharlet, Jeff. "Jesus Killed Mohammed." Harper's May 2009: 31-43.

Strozier, Charles B. Apocalpyse. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Suskind, Ron. "Without A Doubt." 17 October 2004. The New York Times. 18 March 2009 .

Zuckerman, Phil. Society without God. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Videothology

2010-05-07T18:48:00.001-05:00

Thanks to the few of you who miss reading my blog (to fight with me!) and told me off. Here’s some more grist for the mill:

Video games are a source of myth-making and myth-experiencing in our culture. Or so, at least we are told by the industry and its avid consumers, by way of finding justifications for playing these often violent, if epic, games.

The dearth of myth in our culture leaves a gap in our collective soul, and I suspect more than one parent has acknowledged that our children and young people need opportunities to experience mythic imagination in order to help fuel their narrative sense of identity.

Here, however, I spot a problem. While these video games like Halo and World of Warcraft offer up exciting mythic platforms, the overwhelming majority of those who play these games are young males who, when they try to discuss these games with their elders, are met with a palpable boredom and told that no one is interested in hearing these long tales of quests and missions in the cyberworld.

And so we doom these adolescent boys to an initiation rite authored by corporate America and confine them to basement man caves where they endure a kind of endless subjugation to the sweat lodge, with no wise seers or shamans to help them interpret their visions.

I wonder what we can expect, as a culture, when we allow our youth to mythologize in solidarity only with each other, without benefit of some kind of connection to a social context or relevance. I wonder, too, if there is perhaps some kind of link between the trend that more women go to college than men, now. Thoughts?

Today's Tower of Babel: Endless Stories Without A Unifying Narrative And The Need For Re-Storying in Our Time

2010-05-07T18:45:00.001-05:00

One Sunday morning, when I was four, my parents resolved to appease my ailing Irish Catholic grandmother and decided they would bring me to Mass. I refused to go, however, unless I could get there in a “covered wagon.” As I explained to my weary parents, “If I can’t see God, then I don’t want Him to see me.”

The attitude, perhaps beguiling in a small child, stuck with me and I fear became something of an idée fix; I admit I’ve never quite outgrown it. God, as framed for me through a Catholic school paradigm, surrounded us with the everyday but momentous miracle of life but He Himself remained aloof. A natural feminist, born with the innate knowledge that I was equal to any man, I resented the patriarchal structures that still plague the Church, and I spent the entirety of my Catholic education questioning, second-guessing, and challenging until at last, my parents, themselves not affiliated with any church, released me from their perceived obligation to my pious grandparents.

Like so many before me, I became a “seeker;” someone looking for a story to fit into – a faith, a religion, an archetypal cosmology that would include me while at the same time making sense to me. It wasn’t until I was quite a bit older that I realized how very necessary it is for all of us to feel a part of a story. Stories provide us with answers to our questions about life. As a species with consciousness, we need stories to give us a sense of embeddedness within the universe. We need to feel we belong, somehow; our souls yearn to connect with something larger than ourselves.

Several recent reading have taught me just how important it is to make a story particular, specific to oneself, while experiencing one of the most common but most difficult stories – that of loss. Donald Hall’s memoir, “The Best Day, The Worst Day, is about his wife Jane Kenyon’s illness and death I struggled, at first, with what seemed to me extremely personal and intimate details about Kenyon’s cancer, her bad days, her last days . . . . I even felt angry, sometimes, feeling that he was violating her dignity as he revealed her cognitive deterioration towards the very end of her life. Yet the story wouldn’t leave me – I found myself turning over his narrative in my mind again and again, until at last I realized that his painstaking details, his nearly minute-by-minute recall was his way of accompanying his wife as far as he could in her journey towards whatever it is that awaits us after our physical deaths.

Margaret Atwood addresses the story of afterlife in an unusual way, in her book The Penelopiad. Atwood positions Penelope in the perpetual hereafter in Hades and gives Penelope the opportunity, as it were, to tell her side of The Odyssey. What is so intriguing about Atwood’s novel, to a modern audience, is how she contemporizes these ancient souls. Rather than remaining statically attached to antiquity, Penelope, her maids, Helen, Odysseus and other characters from The Odyssey are interactively aware of the present; indeed, many choose to travel between Hades and the physical world. Helen even suggests that she and Penelope “could do a trip to Las Vegas. Girls’ night out!” (The Penelopiad, 188). Odysseus continues his journeys: we learn he’s been a general, a tycoon, an actor, and more. And while Penelope chooses to remain in Hades while her relatives cavort through the ages, she herself reflects on her past through the lenses of the present, comparing yesterday’s heroic mores with today’s more trivial obsessions with money and movie stars.

Thinking about the afterlife as a kind of party where a soul can mingle with one’s friends, even as they dart in and out of history, gave rise to my increasing awareness of the need – the thirst – we have in our society for re-storying. As our current stories, myths and religions seem to nurture us less, we appear to need an afterlife wherein we continue to search for meaning, perhaps because we are no longer finding a sustaining sense of our significance through our existing stories.

But just how do we re-story? How, during a time when so many of our rituals appear to be collapsing around us, do we generate meaning? While it’s true that science unravels new and fascinating mysteries every day, what do these facts matter, in the end, when we are bombarded with the knowledge that we are alarmingly insignificant from an intergalactic point of view? For even as we make ever more clever technological inventions, inroads to medical cures for illnesses, and improvements in space travel, we generate a detritus of war, environmental destruction, famine, and savagery. We build assurances of our own self-destruction into every advancement, from the devastating side-effects of the chemical toxins we use to battle cancer, to the inevitably imperfect – and thus potentially genocidal – nuclear energy plants we build in order to pollute less. As if we have finally realized that our Faustian story, our intense desire to know everything, leaves us nothing but smarter, but not wiser, we find ourselves in the chaos of a tantrum: having got what we wanted we realize we still don’t have what we need. As Julie Neraas writes in her essay “Living Between Stories, Religiously” in the Fall 2006 issue of
‘Confluence,” “To be un-storied is to go spiritually naked in the world. It is to lack the ‘container’ provided by a context or ‘holding place’ for one’s life experience, leaving us feeling as if we are completely on our own here” (Neraas, x). How do we connect? And with what do we connect?

Diane Glancy’s novel, Pushing the Bear, may signal a direction for us. She animates the Trail of Tears in her story about the thirteen thousand Cherokee who were forced to evacuate their homes and walk some nine hundred miles through rugged winter conditions. The Cherokee must abdicate their farms, their cabins and their belongings to the white people, and encounter enormous challenges en route to a new land which holds no known promise for them. What sustains them are their stories – stories which help propel these people forward, step by step, despite the physical and psychical toll the exile exacts on them. What the Cherokee have learned, and perhaps what we today have forgotten, is that we do not walk alone. The Cherokee story of the bear explains more eloquently than I can:
“A long time ago the Cherokee forgot we were a tribe. We thought only of ourselves apart from the others. Without any connections. Our hair grew long on our bodies. We crawled on our hands and knees. We forgot we had a language. We forgot how to speak. That’s how the bear was formed. From a part of ourselves when we were in trouble. All we had was fur and meat to give” (Pushing the Bear, 176).

I think that the bear story sums up what I have learned in
most succinctly: we have forgotten that we belong to each other; we have forgotten that we do not walk alone. The major religions that originated in the West and the Middle East are now divisive. We each claim God is “on our side.” In the West, we’ve separated ourselves from others so entirely that many people believe in a “personal savior” devoted to our individual needs. Meanwhile, some Muslim fanatics have so perverted the spirit of Islam that they believe a single, individual suicide bombing has enough import to blackmail the rest of us into complying with extremist demands. The reasons we have elevated the individual to such absurd heights are manifold and beyond the scope of my essay, but perhaps monotheism, in our time, has bred a theism of one: one person, one story, one relationship with one god. It’s almost as though we have become competing siblings, vying for the attention of our remote parent; we’re all shouting for attention but no one is listening to the others. We need a new story of inclusion and multiplicity, which focuses on our connectedness with Earth, each other, and the Cosmos. We need, perhaps, a re-envisioning of god – one that is palpable and communal, not detached and inscrutable. A spirit, perhaps, who belongs to all of us and to whom we all belong, which includes our ancestors and our heirs – not one that relegates our dead to the spiritual equivalent of a parking lot for the soul – or purgatory. We need a story that redeems our connectedness to Earth; a story which honors the sacred and the mysterious. We need a story that acknowledges our unity as a human race.

I look forward to continuing to try and understand how we can collaborate on a new story for our times, and I am especially eager to listen to those who are generating those very stories.

Murder and Myth: Coping with Unsolved Homicide

2010-05-07T15:45:00.002-05:00

Gabrielle Rose

I was seventeen when I was initiated into the torment that surrounds murder. My best friend Camille, with whom I attended a small liberal arts college in Iowa, had a summer internship with the Department of Transportation in Des Moines. During the week, she roomed with a family friend, and on weekends she returned to her home in order to spend time with her mother, who wasn’t well. She’d hop the Greyhound Bus a little after eight in the evening, which left her in downtown Grinnell around nine o’clock. This particular Friday night, however, she wasn’t on the bus.

The questions began immediately. Camille’s mother, Jean, called my family, in Hubbard Woods, Illinois, early Saturday morning, asking us if by any chance Camille had turned up at our house, some three hundred miles away, because she hadn’t come home the preceding evening as planned. I can recall an anxious barrage of questions, but I can barely remember the details of that conversation. I do remember, however, that my mother and I exchanged horrified looks. We knew at once that Camille was never coming home. That certainty remains one of a handful of lonely facts that we who loved Camille have in a homicide case otherwise riddled with questions, for Camille was found seventy-three days after her disappearance, her body hidden under a pile of leaves in an isolated area called the Flint Access, a couple hundred yards from the Des Moines River.

In the weeks after Camille’s disappearance, the questions had an urgency to them, fueled by the hope that she would turn up alive, even if under dubious circumstances. While some imagined that Camille spontaneously might have boarded a plane to Europe or Australia, where she had friends, police officials considered the possibility that she’d been abducted by a white slavery gang that had been particularly active near the intersections of I-35 and I-94, snatching up girls and bringing them north to a notorious prostitution ring in Minneapolis. Every question brought forth hope; every lead carried the promise of rescue. Everyone of us closest to Camille—her parents, her siblings, her friends—endured hours of inquiries as investigators examined every thread in the loom, looking for one loose strand that, once woven into the weft, would disclose the pattern, the choices Camille made that might have lead her into danger, and that might lead us to her. But after nearly three months of anguish suspended in an effervescence of hope, a man looking for firewood stumbled as he cleared brush near the river bank. His feet found what the rest of us were looking for, and we knew, at last, that Camille was dead.

Her body, decomposed beyond recognition, yielded few clues, just more questions. In the ensuing months and years, however, official interrogations and interviews began to wane in the absence of a solitary speck of new information. Eventually, Camille’s murder became an official “cold case” and we, the mourners, were left behind with nothing but unresolved grief and a slew of unanswered questions.

In Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief, Minnesota psychotherapist Pauline Boss writes: “The most obvious ordinary loss is death, an event codified by official verification—a death certificate, a funeral ceremony, and a ritualized burial, entombment, or scattering of ashes. In the case of a death, everybody agrees that a permanent loss has occurred and that mourning can begin.”[i] The trouble with unresolved homicide is that the mourning cannot end, because it cannot properly evolve. In his book, The Nature of Grief: The Evolution and Psychology of Reactions to Loss, John Archer explains that the process of grieving involves three tasks: intellectually accepting the death; emotionally accepting the loss; and finally, detaching oneself from the deceased. He clarifies, however, that there are circumstances which can disrupt or even retard the process of healing, for “[in] the case of traumatic deaths…problems of resolution arise because the events are particularly resistant to incorporation into the person’s personal world.”[ii] Still, Boss believes that a corpse brings closure to a loss, but a murder without a killer is a clause without a sentence. Our minds search furiously for a subordinating conjunction, something to complete the fragment, “He killed her because....”

The quest for the why is so elemental we’ve institutionalized it. Every murder is assigned a task force, every investigator searches for the killer—and once we have the identity of the killer we begin to try to understand the motive. We parse the deed. There are four types of murder in the US: Intent to Kill, Intent to Cause Serious Bodily Harm, Depraved Heart, and Felony Murder. The first is associated with the term “malice aforethought” and involves planning and organization. Those who kill while merely intending serious injury are charged with second degree murder, as are those who commit Depraved Heart murder. It’s hard to imagine a murderer who doesn’t have a depraved heart, but this category is reserved for the idiot who shoots his gun off at a party to open the keg and kills someone in the process. Felony murder occurs when the accused is busy committing a serious crime, like burglary, arson or rape, and accidentally kills his victim: collateral damage. Our categorizations are important, as these distinctions do more than help judges deliver sentences: they help the victim’s bereaved—her family, friends and community—make sense of the crime. To not know why someone took the life of a loved one is to live without context—without meaning or understanding. Though certainly painful to experience, the deaths of loved ones from conventional causes are more easily understood. Disease, old age, unintentional accident….these are the Moirae we accept, if begrudgingly, as the normal unraveling of a lifespan. Even the murder with established motive, although loathed, can at least be explained, if not justified. Jealousies, passions, and deranged acts are part of the human pageantry, and once we know the underlying motive in a violent crime, we are free to condemn or forgive. But when all we know is that our beloved family member or friend is dead at the hands of —?— for no known reason or apparent “purpose,” then we are left with little more than a vapid arbitrariness. The human mind is not comfortable with randomness: action without meaning is insanity. We’re driven to solve, to answer, to puzzle out every conundrum. Chaos, to the human psyche, is catastrophic.

And murder is chaos.

****

The victim—the Chandra Levy, the Milly Dowler, the Camille Njus—is sheltered until finally discovered: nature absorbs the body back into the earth, protecting the victim from the species who murdered her. But as her body is reclaimed by nature, the survivors of unsolved murder ossify; our grief fossilizes in the absence of answers.

Boss discusses so-called ambiguous losses like a missing soldier, or a kidnapped child who is never recovered, dead or alive. A missing soldier’s absence occurs within a context—in fact, a political context. He has offered up his life for our principles of life, liberty, and democracy, and if he is eventually found dead, his death is meaningful within this milieu. A missing child—a horrific scenario to contemplate, now, as a mother, as one who has witnessed the ravaging grief of parents who were missing a child for seventy-three days—a missing child is cradled in hope. When interviewed by Gail Milstein about the abduction of her son Jacob, Patty Wetterling says she has “adopted a bold stance toward her son’s abductor. From time to time she screams at him, whoever and where he might be: ‘You are not going to take anything more from me than you have already taken!’ she shouts. ‘You cannot have my marriage. You cannot have my other children. You cannot have my hope or my faith.’”[iii] Of these instances, Boss writes, “The absence of certainty contains an element of advantage over more ordinary loss because one is free to hope for a positive outcome. Victor Frankl, in his account of a Nazi concentration camp, calls this ‘tragic optimism.’”[iv]

To those of us stranded in never-know land, we have no context, we have no hope, we have no meaning. We can condemn only in absentia; we have no one to forgive. As Boss points out: “If we can’t forgive ourselves—or others—we ruminate about the past; there is no closure.”[v] Instead, she urges us to accept ambiguity: “The knowledge that we can’t always know why things happen is an answer in itself.”[vi] If only Boss’s hollow reasoning could withstand the realpolitik of murder. Abandoning the search for a killer, a motive and justice, however palliative, isn’t an option for the victim’s survivors. Turning again to Archer, “There is . . . empirical support for a link between better adjustment and being able to find an acceptable meaning for the loss . . . . [Those] who were able to answer the question ‘Why?’ showed less intense grief than those unable to find an answer or who attributed the death to chance.”[vii]

Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” in her book with the eponymous subtitle, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt uses the term “banality” to describe the kind of thoughtless, almost witless, unquestioning acquiescence to violence—a moral blindness that becomes an accomplice to the crime, whether one has participated in the act or merely stood by without protest. There is an aura of banality, too, when the bereaved, the victims’ survivors, are told, implicitly or directly, to move on with life and to accept that there may never be any solution or accountability for the horrific deed that wrought such devastation. The attentional fatigue that surrounds human tragedy is in some way tantamount to a condoning tolerance of violence. Initial compassion and interest soon give rise to disinterest and even impatience; survivors are discouraged from talking about the crime and the victim, and eventually find themselves in a disembodied community of the bereft.

Banality is the perfect antonym to meaning in the context of unsolved homicide. It’s not that murder is banal—rather, it’s the hopeless shrug of the shoulders, the tight-lipped tilt of the head at the Thanksgiving Day table, the “accept the situation and move on” response or collective “Oh, well ….” that trivializes the horrific. King Solomon is believed to have said, “Justice will only be achieved when those who are not injured by crime feel as indignant as those who are." The prosaic gesture towards acceptance does little to assuage a survivor’s grief, nor does it temper his resolve to find answers: “Sometimes it still feels like his death is not real. Not knowing who did it, you don’t have a way to put it out of your mind. You don’t even have a start to closure,” says Bruce Stewart, explaining why he will never stop looking for answers to his brother’s unsolved murder.[viii] Not only is there no closure, but in the absence of a community willing to talk and to listen, there is no opportunity for the survivors to come to terms with the violence and with their grief; our story doesn’t belong in the communal fabric. Our experiences are like loose threads, snipped off to keep the material from looking frayed.

****

I’ve likened my own search for answers in Camille’s death to that of a wind-up toy which, after marching valiantly across the floor, comes up against a wall. Instead of stopping, however, the feet continue hoisting and lowering themselves, in a determined lock-step to nowhere. Only new information, the as yet unthought-of question, can release the mourners from this interminable dance with absurdity. There is very little literature available describing the coping mechanisms used by family and close friends of the victim of an unsolved murder. Perhaps because no one has thought to ask or, more likely, no one really wants to ask. Speaking about the unresolved homicide of her son Brandon, Rose Maree Sazesh says, “There’s this stigma connected to murder.” She testifies to the loneliness and the isolation she experienced; there was “no place equipped to help her cope with her loss. ‘I searched everywhere. I couldn’t find a therapist that dealt with homicide. I couldn’t find any support groups. I pretty much lost my will to live. I just didn’t care about anything anymore.”[ix]

Not even Sartre’s Roquentin can live in this state of nausea, or existential dread, for long, at least not without an anchor tethered to something meaningful, something that connects the victim’s life and death to a narrative that makes sense for the bereaved. The disconnect between social order and the survivors of unsolved murders is so severe, it’s almost as if the survivors are in some way shunned, in place of the murderers themselves. The survivor who hopes to live a life beyond suspension in an abeyance of absurdity must invent a story, or adapt an existing myth, to bridge the chasm between her experience, the unsolved homicide, and the ensuing rupture with society. Archer says “there is evidence that not being able to attribute any cause for the loss is associated with more intense grief and more distress.”[x] I would add, however, that not being able to attribute motive to the deceased’s murder gives rise to a wrenching anguish, as well.

In Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Carl Jung writes, “Meaning makes a great many thing endurable—perhaps everything.”[xi] Without meaning, we feel unable to grieve properly, much less begin to heal. We’re compelled to unearth reason beneath the remains of our deceased. The murder has made a tremendous impact on our souls, and now we want so badly to ascribe significance to this death. When human beings cannot understand something, something beyond our ken, we invent. Rollo May writes: “Myths are our self-interpretation of our inner selves in relation to the outside world. They are narrations by which our society is unified. Myths are essential to the process of keeping our souls alive and bringing us new meaning in a difficult and often meaningless world.”[xii] Myth stands between us and death, like an interface of translation. Some, of course, look for rationale within their religious faith. But here again there is surprisingly little written about the solace of faith and unresolved homicide. Where Judaism, Christianity and Islam are concerned, the rather plentiful exhortations to murder and slay compromise the consolation within the holy texts. (Interestingly, much can be found about murderers who find succor in Christianity.) In an increasingly secular society, though, the need to invent one’s own narrative, particularly in response to the trauma of unsolved murder, becomes an imperative for the survivors.

One way to invent narrative, or myth, is through art. Art itself is not myth, however. Lillian Feder explains:

Myth is a form of expression which reveals a process of thought and feeling—man’s awareness and response to the universe, his fellow men, and his separate being. It is a projection in concrete and dramatic form of fears and desires undiscoverable and inexpressible in any other way.[xiii]

Where the survivors cannot find meaning, rationale or motive in an unsolved murder, we can find, through art, a story for the victim’s life that offers transcendence for her death, her suffering, and our sorrow. It’s no accident, I’m sure, that James Ellroy, whose mother’s murder was never solved, has himself become a crime novelist. Sometimes, an unsolved murder, however rooted in fact, becomes a kind of mythical story for the victim’s community. Folk artist James Bauer grew up fishing in a creek where a woman had been found murdered. Her mystery was so compelling to him that he wrote an entire album of music, The Island Moved in the Storm¸ inspired by to the murder. He explains that “the songs are written more in an abstract way that threads her story along with my childhood and my own stories . . . . They are attempts at trying to write with her life in mind as well as mine . . . . I just wanted to make an album that intertwined her story with mine.”[xiv]

Others might not create something new, but will re-create, so to speak, an existing art work as a personal myth. Over time, for instance, I realized that I had incorporated the tale of The Little Prince into my experience of Camille: the significance of her life and her death to me, in the context of an unjust and untimely death.

Two decades elapsed before I could cry for Camille; it was as if the task of weeping were too daunting and too final to assume. I remember her wake: the closed coffin, the dark room void of sound—no weeping, no talking, just stunned assemblage. Then, a few years ago, I rummaged through my books, looking for my copy of The Little Prince which I planned to read to children at Bancroft School in Minneapolis. As I reread the novella, my mind reeled backwards to 1983 and I found myself fumbling through my filing cabinet to retrieve a newspaper clipping with Camille’s photograph in it. Something I had known, on perhaps a supraliminal level, abruptly became clear to me, and that was the uncanny resemblance between the prince and Camille. The physical similarity between Saint-Exupéry’s drawings and Camille is intriguing: each has round eyes and helioid hair, and like the prince, Camille was petit. As I compared the crumpled photo of Camille to Saint-Exupéry’s portrait of his tiny nobleman, the enormity of our loss weighed heavily on me. I pushed the photograph into The Little Prince and crushed the book to my chest as if to stem arterial bleeding. I stood pressed up against the front door so that I wouldn’t fall down. I was a mother now, an adult, and I at last took in the atrociousness of this loss.

Perhaps Camille was our own little prince, a visitor to our planet whose laughter, innocence and vivid intellect were a gift we enjoyed, albeit temporarily, but whose ultimate bequest endures. The prince tells the pilot that he will make a gift of his laughter to the pilot, as he prepares the pilot for the prince’s inevitable “departure” (or death):

At night, you’ll look up at the stars. It’s too small, where I live, for me to show you where my star is. It’s better that way. My star will be . . . one of the stars, for you. . . . .You . . . you’ll have stars like nobody else. . . . . When you look up at the sky at night, since I’ll be living on one of them, since I’ll be laughing on one of them, for you it’ll be as if all the stars are laughing. . . .

And when you’re consoled (everyone eventually is consoled), you’ll be glad you’ve known me. You’ll always be my friend. You’ll feel like laughing with me.[xv]

I’ve come to think of Camille as a companion to the tiny paraclete. For me she has become a star—celestial royalty, like the little prince. And the story of The Little Prince has become a refuge: its pages an asylum of remembrance, for a girl whom justice has forgotten but whose story I can now tell to my own family, to create a community of people who may never have known Camille, but who will never forget her.

NOTES

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[i]Pauline Boss, Ambiguous Loss: Learing To Live With Unresolved Grief (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 8.

[ii]John Archer, The Nature of Grief: The Evolution and Psychology of Reactions to Loss (New York: Routledge, 1999), 112-113.

[iii]Julie Neraas, Apprenticed to Hope: A Sourcebook for Difficult Times (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 2009), 42.

[iv]Boss, Ambiguous Loss, 135.

[v]Ibid., 128.

[vi]Ibid., 127.

[vii]Archer, The Nature of Grief, 116.

[viii]Jack Brown, "Families Living with Unsolved Murders," The Inquirer, July 12, 1998, http://vidocq.org (accessed November 14, 2008).

[ix]Ace Stryker, "Parents of Murdered Children Find Solace in Sharing Pain," Daily Herald, September 25, 2008, http://www.heraldextra.com (accessed November 5, 2008).

[x]Archer, The Nature of Grief, 143.

[xi]Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Random House, 1965), 340.

[xii]Rollo May, The Cry for Myth (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1991), 202.

[xiii]Quoted in May, The Cry for Myth, 28.

[xiv]Terra Lopez, "Unsolved Mysteries: Once Local Folk Artist Matt Bauer's Tales of Murder in the South," News Review, September 18, 2008, http://www.newsreview.com (accessed December 4, 2008).

[xv]Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, trans. Richard Howard (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 2000), 77.