Imitations, Imaginings, Reflections

We spent the winter reading Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces and discussing the hero myth which emerges, in myriad forms, in all cultures, and we spent the spring exploring some specific examples.  We read  Beowulf and Gilgamesh, and then we turned our attention to a couple of modern novels which employ the myth in far more subtle and unexpected ways:  Robert Olmstead's Coal Black Horse and J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and these pieces have inspired both creativity and reflection.  The students selected their own pieces, and they edited each other's work.  

In the first two pieces, the writers have taken a moment from Gilgamesh and imagined it anew:

The Dive

Luke Merrick

The Great Deep. Only there, as Utnapishtim said, can I find the secret of renewed youth. I must gird my loins and take a deep breath, for to return to the world of the living without first plucking a branch from this divine bush would mean a life without meaning.

I dig all day with my bare hands, like some child playing in the sand, right between the great boulders of the cliff-lined shore, at the “X” that Utnapishtim marked. I dig and dig until I hit water, that unlighted abyss we call the Great Deep. Now I shall descend, with two of these great boulders to pull me down into the darkness. With hempen rope I lash these rocks to my legs, twisting the knots to be as strong as the stone itself. I take a great breath and sigh.

I proclaim, “Shammash guide my quest, deliver me this fated herb. Show me its spines, I yearn to grasp its thorns and feel it rend my hands. I make this vow unto you: I shall bring no knife with me. Either I will either find this plant and slice my ropes upon its spines or I will spend my final moments tied to the seafloor, searching. Hear me Shammash, god of sun and light and life! I have outrun your fiery chariot through the tunnel of the twin peaks. I have battled with the ferryman’s stone men and crossed the Waters of Death unharmed. Utnapishtim has unfolded to me the dawn of man, and he has told me of this youth-giving plant hidden at the bottom of the sea. I plunge now into the bowels of the earth. Guide my way and grant me success, O Shamash, or take me swiftly to my comrade Enkidu, who awaits me in the underworld, for there is no meaning in returning empty-handed to life.”

Readied, I step to the edge of the pit and look down. A mirror looks back at me, reflecting a dark image of the cloudless sky above. This is my moment, my last breath before the jump.

In one sweeping motion I roll the boulders into the water and leap after them. The stones jerk me downward, and the ropes cut into my flesh. But they hold, and I plummet downward, tasting the water turn salty and feeling the sting as it rushes into my nose. My eyes are burning, but I must keep them open. I must search for the plant. Through the haze of underwater vision I see the darker hue that marks the seafloor far below. I look above and watch as the circle of uncovered sky retreats into a distant speck.

I near the bottom. There! I see a plant, rocking slowly in the current. The burning in my lungs is forgotten as I reach and grasp. Its sharp spines slice into the soft skin between my fingers as I grab and pull. Yet still I tug, holding the razor thorns with all my might, squinting through the clouds of rippling red blood that swirl up from my palms. Suddenly the roots come loose, and I begin to hack at my ropes. My sight begins to dim and ripple from suffocation. My lungs scream out for air. Then the rope gives way, and I am free. As I swim for the surface, my fingers and toes begin to tingle, my ears ring. I feel the haze of sleep take over my mind, but then I feel as though an anvil is lifted from my chest. Bubbles stream from my mouth as I feel the warm rays of the sun return. Now the wind cools my face and gasp for breath. Sparks explode in my vision and I pant and cough and spit and wheeze. I’m in the ocean, just off shore. I roll onto my back and float, sucking in gulps of air and sea spray, before swimming for shore and lying down on the sand, clutching the precious plant to my chest. I roll onto my back to look up at Urshanabi.

“The deed is done. The plant is mine. If what Utnapishtim said is true, with a single drought of this herb I shall shed decades and return to my happy youth. Though I can never live as long as he, I will enjoy youth beyond that allotted to mortals, and that shall be enough. After I am gone, the people shall sing of Enkidu and me, of our intertwined legacies. They shall sing praise for the slaying of Humbaba, and they shall hold festivals in honor of the day we vanquished even the bull of the gods. I shall live two lifetimes of youth, and then live on forever in the hearts and minds of men, smiling on from Enkidu’s side.

Uruk

Keita Yagi

In the end, I came back to my kingdom of Uruk. After the long trip to seek immortality, I gained nothing. I failed to achieve eternal life and the plant I found to regain my youth has been stolen by a snake. I put my life in danger, but in the end, I came back empty handed.

When I stood in front of the great wall of Uruk, I decided to show Urshanabi how great Uruk is. Uruk is my last pride. It is the greatest treasure I have created in my life. Every glory, treasure, honor, power and beauty, everything I have captured in this world is stored in Uruk. I have spent my life making Uruk bigger and more glorious. Even the Bull of Heaven could not damage it. Soon, it will be greater than heaven. Even if my body becomes ashes, my Uruk will remain the mightiest city in the world.

The cold-stone wall of Uruk made me feel confident about myself more than ever. It was as if my greatest friend Enkidu had returned to my side. I took Urshanabi and showed him the city. I walked past the street of Uruk and saw joys within the eyes of people. Elderly, young, women and men, they are all part of Uruk. The more I showed him, the more proud I became. I finally realized what I had built in the world. My body will die, my legend and fame will disappear from people’s memory one day, but Uruk will retain its glory forever. Even if my footprints become forgotten in history, these stones I stepped on will remain for the rest of eternity. All of these structures, walls and roads, they are all mine. I have ruled over these people and this city. I am the king of the greatest city of all.

At last, I stopped in front of the statue of my great friend. Words cannot possibly express the glory of this statue. Even the gods pause when they see this statue. Even I lose my words when I face this great work of art. The soul of Enkidu lives within it. I could no longer resist the temptation to hold the hands of my greatest friend’s statue. I looked into his eyes.

My beloved friend, I will be with you soon, but I have one last work I must accomplish before I meet you in the world of gods. Uruk, the city we both loved and protected will be my last work. I am no longer the tyrant you met years ago. I must be the ruler who is fit to rule over the greatest city in the world. I have failed to overcome my destiny, but I will prove myself by establishing a kingdom which even Gods envy. Therefore Enkidu, I must ask you to wait for me in Heaven and look over the city of Uruk. And when the time comes, I shall be with you and be the guardian of our beloved city of Uruk.

The following writers were inspired to imitate Robert Olmstead's moving description of the main character and his horse:

Worn Fingers

Spencer Bibb

The music rang through his soul and HE was creating it. His fingers crooked and pressed the strings into the worn rosewood. The frets and inlays had been made slick by the oil of his fingertips. New blisters surrounded old calluses.  Dead skin flaked and fell past the strings. The notes running up the neck ran up his neck. He continued to play. His round belt buckle had gnawed the paint and a reddish hue had stained the silver. The muscles in his fingers were not strained as they usually were. He felt time stop, and he forgot himself.  Countless iconic guitarists had played the Fender Stratocaster before him. To one side of him was Jimi Hendrix and his pearl white Strat. To the other, was Eric Clapton with “Blackie.” Their fingers moved as his did.  Across time, across race, across styles they all played the same notes. The power chords to “Foxy Lady” were coming from his guitar and his fingers, yet he knew Jimi’s had moved the very same pattern at Woodstock. But the greats who came before him could only take him so far. If he were playing the very same notes, how would he become an individual? He had to leave his mark. He adjusted his EQ to how he liked it. His amp and guitar blended differently than Jimi’s or Eric’s. He liked the tone of the neck pickup way down. Jimi liked the tone that way too, but with more gain on the amp. What had they done to leave their mark on every Stratocaster that Fender sold? Their bodies let this instrument work through them, but their minds changed the way their hands played the instrument. Soon there was nothing but the sound of his amp blaring out. Jimi and Eric disappeared and blackness took over. He could feel each coil of metal wrapped around the strings. He could almost see the string oscillate after he struck it. He was the instrument of the pickups and the strings. This work was the same as Eric, Jimi, Stevie Ray, and Buddy Guy had all done before him.   

Shotgun

Phen Harris

I lowered my shoulder. Splash! The duck made a wake in the cold water. I slumped back onto my stool and rubbed the hot barrel against my cold, cracked face. It made a noise like sandpaper against a two-by-four, but only I could hear it. The microscopic noise blended with the white smoke coming off of my barrel and my breath in the cold air. Each individual sensation crept through my ears, mouth, and nose, eventually making its way to my trigger finger. Swoosh! Boom! Splash! I fell back down into my seat and inhaled the smell. I then exhaled, and again the steam of my breath mixed with the smoke from the barrel. I felt my hand press into the cross hatching. I brought the barrel to my cheek again. My dad has always told me not to rub my barrel against my cheek because it is dangerous. But I knew then that I was one with the gun. With my free hand I slid another shell into the chamber. Pling! The sound echoed into the quiet swamp. Nothing would dare come near me.

Recurve

Connor Janney

The bow was a piece of me, as though the wood had been taken from the heartwood at my very center. I knew every inch of the maple rings, the fiber glass, the string, all part of the most beautiful instrumentof death I'd ever seen. The bow is indeed an instrument, and I love to play it as much as it loves to be played. When I let go of an arrow the string glides past the tips of my fingers and then snaps through the air. The limbs sing and vibrate in my hand as the arrow passes. I watch as it flies. It wiggles side to side and then nails the target—thud—with deadly precision. Each limb of the bow is perfectly tuned by the craftsman to hum with the same tone. When I knock on the upper limb I hear a soft high note that moves down the whole length of the bow. The bottom limb has just the same resonance, and the sound reverberates through my hand and my heart skips a beat in joyful excitement. This kindred spirit comes alive in my hands. To anyone else this is just a weapon. To me it is a legend, sleek, strong, and light. It is an embodiment of youth, and yet the growth rings of the maple indicate its many years of wisdom beyond my own. The tree this bow came from saw many rains, many moons, many suns, and many stars. Now I see all this through the glint of the amber wood. He will never miss.

Blue-White Bed

Jin Uk Ok

I was now inseparable from the bed. The warm blanket covered my body and my head rested on the soft pillow. My eyes were tightly shut against the morning sun. Conscious awakeness and sleepy dreams swirled around together in my mind, in the state where I am neither fully awake nor still asleep. The bed comforted my tired limbs and my drowsy mind. The soft sheets and the cotton blanket felt as if I were wrapped by clouds on a nice spring day. I wondered how beautiful it would be to sleep through the morning and let the dreams carry me away. There I was, floating around the gateway between the conscious and the unconscious. I rubbed my face into my pillow and covered myself completely with my blanket. I could see a world of dreams right in front of my eyes as bright, glorious stars filled a coffee-colored sky. My body got heavier and heavier, and my eyelids felt glued together. It felt as if my body and the bed were now one, as if my body were weightless in the bed. The bed, on which life is born and death comes for us, once again embraced me and would not let me go. I stopped thinking and let the gateway to the unconscious open fully.

Turkey Hunting

Tim Welsh

I stood in the middle of the path holding the shotgun. With my shoulder pressed against the stock and the stock pressing back against my shoulder, we became one. I held its weight as if it were part of my own body, and I peered down the silver-dot sights as if they were projections from my own eyes. Everything felt natural, and I knew that the gun would not fail me. As I stood transfixed on the turkey that walked a mere 25 yards in front of me, the world around us faded away. I could not hear anything else and I could not see anything else. The seconds felt like hours, and I forgot that my father was standing beside me. I wanted the perfect shot. I took a deep breath, my nerves calmed, and I began slowly to squeeze the trigger. The turkey had no idea I was there. I began to think of where it was going and what it was thinking about. Was it looking for a mate? I began to think that maybe I shouldn’t shoot it, but the time to be sentimental was over. In a split second, those thoughts were gone. The shotgun let out deafening bang, and I saw the turkey fall. The peace was gone. I began to come back to reality, and I could hear my father’s praises. As I lowered the shotgun from my shoulder, the once strong physical unity between us was gone. We were separated, but I knew, as I held the gun in my hand, we were still one. The gun did not fail me and I did not fail it. I stayed calm and put aside my nerves and second thoughts, and though we are not always together, the trust between us is strong. 

The last pieces are  from our final  reflections on what we have done this year:

Who and Why?

Anonymous

In mythology class, I have tried to explore the questions Who am I? and Why am I who I am? I looked deeply into the relationship with the parents as Bly discusses in Iron John. He emphasizes the central role of the father in a boy’s maturation, but my mother has had a substantially larger impact on me than my father has had. When I was in middle school I lived with my mother, but I went out to dinner with my father once a week and stayed at his house every other weekend. Even though I spent more time at my mother’s house, I still saw my dad plenty.

At my mom’s, I always had friends over to play basketball or play station. At my father’s, my time was mostly spent sitting on the sofa talking. My friends never came over because my dad never knew any of them and none of their parents really felt all that comfortable with them coming over to his downtown apartment. But maybe my dad never believed I had any friends anyway. After all, he doesn’t seem to have many. My mother treasures both her own friendships and mine

I’ve always been a momma’s boy. My mom has come to almost all my athletic events, even since I’ve been at Woodberry. She picks me up from school, takes me home, and generally takes me out to dinner on Saturday nights before I go off to spend time with my friends. Holden Caulfield says, “All mothers are slightly insane,” and my mother sure does seem to be sometimes, but that’s what makes her unique. Every night, she lingers at the dinner table, and I swear I could sit down and talk to her until 3:00 in the morning if I wanted to. My mom loves to talk. In the way, she is a lot like me, and she loves to be social. She’s always trying to get me to have friends over. She would rather host my friends and me than have us out looking for trouble. In fact, my mother used to tell me about how sad she was when I left to go to my dad’s house for the weekend. I’d call her at times when I was upset and hiding in my room at my dad’s.

My mom was always caring and willing to hear me out, and that’s why I have grown into an outgoing person. My conversations with my mom have ranged from religious beliefs, to friendships, to her life. Nowadays, we often times talk about her life more because she is not surrounded by people all day as I am. My mother has had a larger impact on me than any person in my life. It hasn’t always been perfect, but through our experiences she has made me the person who I am today. So maybe Robert Bly would re-think his thesis if he knew my mom.

What Has Been Learned?

Andrew Hope

When I look back on my past years at Woodberry, I would do things very unconsciously. I did not do things for my own good, but for the good of my self-image. I was convinced that I had it all wrong upon finishing Iron John. Now I am devoted to live a deliberate life. I try to take something away from every conversation, interaction, and trial. Just as Robert Bly looks at Iron John and analyzes how he goes from a boy to a man, I look at my life and my experiences and try to point myself in the right direction. Joseph Campbell preaches that one must embrace his wounds rather than living inside them if he wants to grow into a man. Robert Bly says that we must “bathe in the ashes” to embrace the wound. These men have convinced me that I must go about life consciously. If I had never read Iron John or The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I would have never reached the conclusion that I must embrace my wounds if I want to grow up and begin learning from that experience.

I am sure that I will not follow through with the exact same structure Joseph Campbell lays down for us. But I do know how to look at conflicts in my life, analyze them, and take something away from all of them. That is one of the most important tools I will use in my adult life. If I am able to take things away from every conversation, every interaction, every failure, and every success, I should be able to live a happy deliberate life.

At the beginning of this year, I never would have guessed that I would come out learning about how to live my life. I thought I was going to read some dumb myths and have to write ridiculous essays every weekend. Some of the myths were not my favorite, and a couple essays were pretty challenging, but those dumb myths and tough essays taught me lessons that I never would have expected to learn. I can use these unexpected lessons to leave Woodberry, and grow up consciously and aware of the path I am going down.

Reflections

A. Cummings 

   

From fairy tales to Robert Bly, from Beowulf to Gilgamesh to Joseph Campbell, from Coal Black Horse to Catcher in the Rye. We made it. It’s been a tough year, but one that has flown by like no other. In this year alone, I’ve learned and grown so much. At the beginning of the year, it was as if I were a freshman again. I was in a completely new place with people I rarely had classes with. I had no idea what the course would entail or how I would master it. Books came and went, and I passed through each one. For some, I had to trudge, but for others, I pranced around the words and phrases like I had written them. As the year went by, I grew more accustomed to the language of metaphor, the symbols of great works, and Mr. Hale’s advice on how to “bitch constructively.” This class has been crucial for me. From conversations about the recurring archetype of witch to those about subjectivity in human life, I couldn’t imagine a better way to whet my philosophical appetite.

Starting off the year with Grimm’s Fairy Tales eased the transition from reading literature literally to searching for deeper significance. It also introduced us to motifs that Bly and Campbell would later detail. The tricksters, the guardians, and the monsters of fairy tales help us to understand our own inner lives and how to master them. As we progressed then to Robert Bly’s dissection of the fairy tale “Iron John,” I started to see the subterranean patterns that Bly conveyed. When we first started reading his work, I thought it was a waste of our time. I thought that Mr. Hale was off his rocker, but the more we read, the more I understood that Bly wasn’t just blabbering about every section of the fairy tale. He was analyzing the motifs, and connecting them to our everyday lives. He really started connecting with me when we talked about the transition of boyhood to manhood and the difficult journey that this entails.

One passage that still resonates with me:

Religion here does not mean doctrine, or piety, or purity, or ‘faith,’ or ‘belief,’ or my life given to god. It means a willingness to be a fish in the holy water, to be fished for by Dionysus or one of the other fishermen, to bow the head and take hints from one’s own dreams, to have a secret life, praying in a closet, to be a lowly, to eat grief as the fish gulps water and lives. It means being both fisherman and fish, not to be the wound but to take hold of the wound. Being a fish is to be active; not with cars or footballs, but with souls.

And one of the best discussions of the year was about how to not “live in the wound.” I took this to mean that if you have been hurt, you should not ignore the pain but rather learn and grow from it. Brandish that wound like a badge and display it with pride. Tell the world that you have a chink in your armor, knowing that you turned that wound into strength.

By far the height of the year’s literature was Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. This book is one that I will take with me wherever I go in life. Campbell was revolutionary and enlightening. What I loved about the book was that it resonated with me so strongly. There were so many passages where it almost seemed as if I were the one who thought of them. Passages like this: Even as a person casts off worn-out clothes and outs on others that are new, so the embodied Self casts off worn-out bodies and enters into others that are new … Eternal, all-prevading, unchanging, immovable, the Self is the same forever. Talking about going off to college soon, I hear friends say that they can be whoever they want to be when they get there. I think this is ridiculous because no matter who people pretend to be, there is always that same true self inside. No matter how hard someone tries to reject his true self, how hard he tries to bury it, it always comes back in full force. I’m no saint. I acknowledge that, just like most everybody else, I slightly change depending on the situation. But Campbell goes on to say, Just as an actor is always a man, whether he puts on the costume of his role or lays it aside, so is the perfect knower of the Imperishable always the Imperishable and nothing else. This constant self-adaptation is what makes us human. The true self is the key component, however, that you have to return to. You can’t live completely in the world of unknown external trials. You have to return to the world of the known, the inner world of your true self.

Of all that this class has taught me, this message is the most resonant: Be your true self. Be with people who accept you not for what mask you put on but for the man you are behind it. Be with people who allow the real you (including your inner wolf and all of the other “demons”) to flourish and expand. You aren’t born with your fully developed self, but rather you are born with a mere bud that gets developed through all of life’s wounds from which you mature. From these wounds and experiences you turn into the man that you dreamed of being as a boy. This class hasn’t just taught me about searching for deeper meaning in literature; it also allowed me to reflect on my life as a whole and how to approach it. It has allowed me to picture the kind of man I want to be.