Monthly Archive for February, 2008

Part One
I want more myth in my life. I want to think of myself as liv­ing inside a myth. I want to read myths that involve peo­ple and places that are famil­iar to me. I want talk­ing ani­mals, too, or ani­mals with all the answers. I know myth can be defined many ways. I know that just about every­thing con­tains some myth, or con­veys a lit­tle myth, or oper­ates upon a myth. But I want the kind of myth that is very obvi­ous, that is not inter­ested in ratio­nale or sub­tleties. It could be a mythol­ogy of sub­tleties enlarged. This would be very good.

When I think of myth, I think of large, well-spaced objects and lit­tle peo­ple wan­der­ing between them. A lit­tle me rub­bing my cheek along the side of some piece of large plas­tic machin­ery. There is a kind of myth that pre­tends to be art­less and ‘nat­ural.’ That, to me, is the ugli­est of myths. I want the implau­si­ble to parade around, root­less and proud. Hell, I just want parades. I want myth that hides noth­ing and doesn’t hide and char­ac­ters that stake their claim. I want sur­face mean­ing; an iconog­ra­phy with­out mem­ory. Things do not ‘fall where they may’; I want to see the set builders.

Part Two
I have been read­ing Mytholo­gies by Roland Barthes. It con­tains a series of essays he wrote, one a month, about the myths he saw at play in France dur­ing the 1950s. In a few pages each, he cleanly dis­sects images, prod­ucts, events and per­son­al­i­ties that fre­quently go unex­am­ined. He goes after the fierce lit­tle myths, the lit­tle bur­row­ing insect myths that you don’t think about liv­ing on your skin. Things like Garbo’s (he leaves off first names) face, Einstein’s brain, mar­garine, hol­i­days, the sweat on a Roman’s brow, beards, steak and chips, anthro­pol­o­gists and orna­men­tal cook­ery. He’s funny, too.

My favorite essay is on the hair­cut of Abbe Pierre, a French priest who devoted his life to the home­less (and who, by the way, died only last year). The essay begins, “The myth of the Abbe Pierre has at its dis­posal a pre­cious asset: the phys­iog­nomy of the Abbe.” One aspect of this phys­iog­nomy is the “Fran­cis­can hair­cut,” which he describes as “half shorn, devoid of affec­ta­tion and above all of def­i­nite shape…[It] is with­out doubt try­ing to achieve a style com­pletely out­side the bounds of art and even of tech­nique, a sort of zero degree of haircut.”

Okay, I just have to keep tran­scrib­ing here because it’s all too funny: “One has to have one’s hair cut, of course; but at least, let this nec­es­sary oper­a­tion imply no par­tic­u­lar mode of exis­tence: let it exist, but let it not be any­thing in par­tic­u­lar. The hair­cut, obvi­ously devised so as to reach a neu­tral equi­lib­rium between short hair (an indis­pens­able con­ven­tion if one doesn’t want to be noticed) and unkempt hair (a state suit­able to express con­tempt for other con­ven­tions), thus becomes the cap­il­lary arche­type of saint­li­ness: the saint is first and fore­most a being with­out for­mal con­text; the idea of fash­ion is antipa­thetic to the idea of sainthood.”

He goes on to talk about how this hair­cut is the “label of Fran­cis­can­ism.” So, if a saint actu­ally wanted to go unno­ticed, they would choose a dif­fer­ent ‘do. I love when peo­ple take jabs at our notions of saint­li­ness. I love it even more when peo­ple art­fully reveal that there is no such thing as a per­son who doesn’t care what they look like, or doesn’t pur­pose­fully and out­wardly con­vey a cer­tain self-image. I’m not say­ing that Abbe Pierre con­sciously wore his hair a cer­tain way so peo­ple would think of him as a saint, but he may have done so in order to con­vince him­self. Regard­less, there is a rea­son (prob­a­bly a wor­thy one) that he didn’t have hair like Elvis. Although, to be fair, he’s bald in most of the pic­tures I can find.

Part Three
Any­way, the point I’m get­ting at is I think my desire for out­right myth is related to my love of shame­less and ridicu­lous fash­ions. I want bright geo­met­ric pat­terns, color-block dresses, hats that could break your neck. If I ever met this man or this woman I would kiss them. I have this idea that peo­ple who dress like that would never tell a lie. There is no ques­tion that they care what they look like and devote time and money to mate­r­ial things. This is my own myth–that indul­gence is a form of honesty.

Why must we apol­o­gize for mak­ing up mean­ings? Why do we deny our­selves things that don’t have any util­ity? My entire life and recent edu­ca­tion has been steeped in the myth of mar­tyr­dom. How can we ever know the true value of sac­ri­fice if we are always equat­ing it with good­ness? I want some obnox­ious, scream­ing good fun for the health of us all, and big screen, sat­u­rated, prop-enhanced myths for our enter­tain­ment. All I know is when I think I might die from the seri­ous­ness and truth-talk of home, pop music and prod­uct place­ment save my soul.