Myth - History - Geography
Today I learned about myth.
Tolkien, J.R.R. 1937. "The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again." New York: Del Rey.
Myth is a story told to make sense of something that otherwise would pass us by in life without notice or meaning. Religions do this. Folk tales do this. Science fiction and fantasy novels do this. When put through a geographical lens, myth allows us to look at landscapes and tell stories about them and their constituent parts that make us feel like we are in a narrative that is bigger than our own lives (Drake, 2008). While donning this lens, the world is seldom dull, for our wishes, fears, and actions become the arms of stories, and are marked in what we see around us at any given moment. The stories grant us a gap between our emotions and our actions, so that we are never alone with what we feel (Limburg, 2009); everything is normalized and placed in the world. This can be powerful and dangerous, of course, as in the case of blind devotion to a story, and the subsequent feigning of loss of control over one's own intent and thought. It can also be powerful and liberating, however, if the stories one tells analog to the present world in a way that does neither harm nor injustice.
Reading The Hobbit has crystallized this lesson for me. Learning, knowing, finding, or even inventing a hidden layer of meaning to the places we inhabit, and the spaces we move through, is a move toward the aesthetic - they become matters of taste and distinction. Bordieu says that the ultimate test for an aesthete is if they can translate the method of distinction to things in life that have not yet been distinguished - can they, in other words, apprehend things that were thought to be generic into the realm of thought, classification, and meaning. In The Hobbit, things, people, situations, sights, sounds - all become known and are given a history of their own that holds a lesson for the moment. Every place is perfect (Morrow, 2008). Every landscape is part of a narrative that is the unfolding of the human drama of which we are both puppets and puppeteers. The Hobbit itself, of course, is intensely geographical. Besides the fact that there is a map at the beginning of the book, it is the sense of wonder and creativity in moments of challenging encounter that make the book what it is. Everything has its place and knows what it's doing there. The Giant Spiders in Mirkwood are ferocious, but only if you enter their territory. The protagonist is learning to be a cosmopolite - to cross territory - in a world where cosmopolitanism has not yet been invented, and where territoty is bounded with iron. Where it does exist, it is reserved for the most enlightened and magical beings, the Wizards.
I realized just today that writing a dissertation is not about putting the puzzle together correctly in order to find the right answer. Rather it is about asserting what I think about a situation or set of facts. Anyone can relate a tale. This week I've been doing archival research at Loma Linda University, the main Seventh-day Adventist university and medical school. I've found that the archivists there are able to relate an enormous number of facts about certain topics related to my research about the Kellogg cereal enterprise, nearly in unison with each other, as historians are wont to do. I wondered 'what do I have to add to this, then? The story is known and complete.' Yet their story was lacking. For someone not affiliated with the religion or interested in the history of Kellogg's, actually, I would say their collection of facts was downright boring. What is it that turns a set of facts into something compelling? It relates a bigger significance. The information I'm collecting is nothing more than the scaffolding for the bulk of the dissertation. What I make of the bits I've collected is what people really care about.
A very low number of facts can reproduce a myth, but there is no number of collected facts that can create a myth. For that is the job of the myth-maker, the author.
Tolkien, J.R.R. 1937. "The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again." New York: Del Rey.
Myth is a story told to make sense of something that otherwise would pass us by in life without notice or meaning. Religions do this. Folk tales do this. Science fiction and fantasy novels do this. When put through a geographical lens, myth allows us to look at landscapes and tell stories about them and their constituent parts that make us feel like we are in a narrative that is bigger than our own lives (Drake, 2008). While donning this lens, the world is seldom dull, for our wishes, fears, and actions become the arms of stories, and are marked in what we see around us at any given moment. The stories grant us a gap between our emotions and our actions, so that we are never alone with what we feel (Limburg, 2009); everything is normalized and placed in the world. This can be powerful and dangerous, of course, as in the case of blind devotion to a story, and the subsequent feigning of loss of control over one's own intent and thought. It can also be powerful and liberating, however, if the stories one tells analog to the present world in a way that does neither harm nor injustice.
Reading The Hobbit has crystallized this lesson for me. Learning, knowing, finding, or even inventing a hidden layer of meaning to the places we inhabit, and the spaces we move through, is a move toward the aesthetic - they become matters of taste and distinction. Bordieu says that the ultimate test for an aesthete is if they can translate the method of distinction to things in life that have not yet been distinguished - can they, in other words, apprehend things that were thought to be generic into the realm of thought, classification, and meaning. In The Hobbit, things, people, situations, sights, sounds - all become known and are given a history of their own that holds a lesson for the moment. Every place is perfect (Morrow, 2008). Every landscape is part of a narrative that is the unfolding of the human drama of which we are both puppets and puppeteers. The Hobbit itself, of course, is intensely geographical. Besides the fact that there is a map at the beginning of the book, it is the sense of wonder and creativity in moments of challenging encounter that make the book what it is. Everything has its place and knows what it's doing there. The Giant Spiders in Mirkwood are ferocious, but only if you enter their territory. The protagonist is learning to be a cosmopolite - to cross territory - in a world where cosmopolitanism has not yet been invented, and where territoty is bounded with iron. Where it does exist, it is reserved for the most enlightened and magical beings, the Wizards.
I realized just today that writing a dissertation is not about putting the puzzle together correctly in order to find the right answer. Rather it is about asserting what I think about a situation or set of facts. Anyone can relate a tale. This week I've been doing archival research at Loma Linda University, the main Seventh-day Adventist university and medical school. I've found that the archivists there are able to relate an enormous number of facts about certain topics related to my research about the Kellogg cereal enterprise, nearly in unison with each other, as historians are wont to do. I wondered 'what do I have to add to this, then? The story is known and complete.' Yet their story was lacking. For someone not affiliated with the religion or interested in the history of Kellogg's, actually, I would say their collection of facts was downright boring. What is it that turns a set of facts into something compelling? It relates a bigger significance. The information I'm collecting is nothing more than the scaffolding for the bulk of the dissertation. What I make of the bits I've collected is what people really care about.
A very low number of facts can reproduce a myth, but there is no number of collected facts that can create a myth. For that is the job of the myth-maker, the author.
posted by Nick at
8:54 PM
2 Comments:
Nice! Thanks for the citation. I like relaxing into the idea that you are not figuring out the puzzle correctly, but telling a story through the evidence, to give a body of data meaning that is otherwise invisible. Is it giving the data meaning or is it finding meaning in the data? Can we allow for multiple meanings from one data set? I think so and that is why we have lenses, theory, and perspective.
To clarify my small contribution to this line of thought: I mentioned the gap between our inner feelings, thoughts, and values; and our outer behavior. It causes us distress. But we can't help it. It is nearly impossible to live up to our own expectations of what is right and who we think we should be.
Our stories and myths go a long way to explain that gap, balm it, and give us catharsis for our failures. Rama, the Buddha, Hercules: all these people wrestled with the same problem and resolved it somehow.
Welcome back to the blogosphere.
By
Breathing, at 12:40 PM
In line with the notion of myth I like the idea of giving the data meaning more than "finding" meaning in the data. Finding to me suggests that something is there, awaiting discovery. But history of science discourse says that process trumps discovery.
By
Nick, at 5:33 PM
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