A Reason to Begin

Talking about it, myth I mean, the intrusive and eloquent inexplicability occurs, the thought of vague eternity, like the shadow of the angel when his wings spanned the sky and the young man whose vision endured the sight composed the steps down the arid hillock that gave birth to a destiny of man.

Myth I mean. When you are twenty-two, your consciousness shaped, suffused and still grappling with the nature of stories, and yet nothing of those incandescent dreams secretes into the white emptiness of your legacy, it speaks like the angel's trial: Do it! What it is, what you must. That is, what you must do in order to fit yourself into this vast lyrical soul you have prepared for yourself. Or have I got it wrong? And it is the soul that must be fitted into the self that has been created?

Last year I suggested to my English lecturer the idea that myth is only a story of status, narrative matter for the arbitrary casting in capital letters. The Story of Hercules and his Twelve Labours. A Long Expected Party. The Day We Went To See Titanic. Now I perceive what I ought to have then, the difference between legend and myth. One is without need of a vital living self, while the other is self waiting eternally for lifelessness in order to live forever.

When I think of this it all seems extravagantly bound up with Profound Things, but I digress precisely for that reason. I do not stray out of the Perilous Realm when my life is in danger, only when the realm is. The realm is my webbed eye, gossamer iris veiling the window to 'reality', with which great fantasy writers have pursued truth, and found in my oppinion, only the vitality of self. The coherency of a culturally based construction of self. And from where I sit, this does not seem good enough for me. It makes of youth, my only grace at the moment, old age. It makes of creation, in my case, dreams. And dreams are Salem's ghosts outside the realm of faerie.