Myth in the Mojave podcast: The (Mythopoetic) Power

 

Transcript Myth in the Mojave Podcast The (Mythopoetic) Power

Aired March 8, 2018

 

Hello everyone, and welcome Myth in the Mojave. 30 minutes of storytelling and conversation about mythology and why it’s important to our lives today. I’m your personal mythologist Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.

 

Today I want to do something a little bit different. I want to tell you about a novel that I just finished reading. It’s called The Power by Naomi Alderman. It’s quite popular, it’s winning awards, maybe you have already read it. Now I don’t usually talk about contemporary novels but I think this book is really fascinating as an example and an experience of our primary project here at Myth in the Mojave, which is to understand our myth making. To try and understand something about what it means to be more conscious of ourselves as myth makers, and to explore the possibility of new myths that are emerging.

 

If we want to see changes in the world, in the world of human culture, we’re going to have to change our underlying ideas. We’re going to have to change our sense of what is really true and necessary and valuable. There’s no way to do that without changing our mythologies. This is not an amazing or unique insight that I have. In fact, I see more and more people working with this idea of the notion and the importance of story and changing story, even though they don’t call themselves mythologist or use the same terminology that I might use.

 

There’s also the sense or the hope that we can just create something new … the way that I understand mythology, it springs from something mysterious. It’s a conversation with a part of ourselves. A conversation with psyche that we’re not completely in control of. In fact, we may have no control over it at all. We’re doing this dance with forces that are much larger than we are, and yet we know our participation matters. We know, for example, that if we all decided today that the idea that we inherited through Christianity and other religions that preceded it, that man, man specifically, has dominion over the earth, that that’s just a rotten idea and has created a crummy world, we could all stop doing it.

 

Now, it would probably be harder than that, to actually root that notion out of our consciousness but my point is that these truths are only true as long as we all play along. Yet we are in a process of disengaging. I think that’s what’s going on in our culture right now. This book, The Power, is really fascinating to me because of the opportunity it gave me to reflect on myself and also to reflect on this process.

 

If you haven’t heard of it, I saw an interview with Swapna Krishna did with Naomi Alderman in the L.A. Times, and Krishna called it, “An electrifying work of feminist sci-fi.” Let me say right there, that if you’re put off by science fiction, don’t be. This is science fiction in the way that we call the Handmaid’s Tale, science fiction. It’s part thriller, it’s part social commentary, and I think it’s extremely well done.

 

I’m going to talk about the book, but I’m not going to say too much about the plot because I hope that you will read it if you haven’t. I found it really telling that Alderman in this interview with the L.A. Times said that this book, the idea of it, is to start a conversation. In brief, the plot: teenage girls all around the world begin to discover that they have the ability to generate electricity in their own bodies. Alderman said she got this idea from electric eels. Now, as awareness of this power grows, it moves from being a freaky trick that these young women are experimenting with to a deadly weapon. Along the way, the younger women find that they can activate this power in most older women and scientist and doctors discover that all of the baby girls that are being born at that time, are being born with this power.

 

Is it new? Is it new? Is it maybe the result of environmental poisoning? Or did women have this power millennia ago? Have women always had this electrical charge and was it suppressed or the knowledge of it lost or something? Who knows. What would such a world look like? That’s what the book explores. What would a world look like if women didn’t live with the threat of male violence? What would the response from men be as well as women, if suddenly the possibility for this world and a role reversal appeared?

 

Alderman explores all kinds of possibilities in her book through the stories of four primary characters. They each give her an opportunity to investigate it from the angle of religion, politics, the media, sexuality, organized crime, but there are many reversals and flips of perspective.

 

Given our current cultural moment, this is a really timely work. It reveals and deconstructs constructs. The stories and the myths that we tell about gender and the essential nature then, of men and women and human beings, and as I said earlier, those kinds of realities and truths exist as reality and truth because they are enforced, upheld by various forms of authority and through our complicity, which is largely unconscious.

 

One of the reasons why I encourage you to take a look at Alderman’s book and feel like it is a topic for this podcast, is that she’s taking on very important myths, myths that are not necessarily understood as myths because some people think they are the truth, and because some of us don’t see them as clearly as we could. Read the book and get Alderman’s much more elegant and fun exposition of what I’m talking about here.

 

I think the book is important and a good thing for me to be talking about with you because of the content, what she’s taking on, myths about gender and society and human nature. Also because of the way that she’s doing it, the form. This is a story about a story. She uses multiple perspectives. She raises many questions. It’s very open ended, and open to interpretation. It’s an act of what the Greeks called mythopoesis, making myths, or rather, engagement with mythic material in a way that allows for reflection. The Greeks thought it was so important that they come together to revisit their myths and also rework them and reflect on them, that they had annual festivals. They came together to watch the works of their very best playwrights.

 

Now, it’s kind of telling that the Greeks most commonly gave the high prizes to the playwrights that showed them the most flattering pictures of themselves, the playwrights who only tweaked the stories of heroism a little bit in light of the corruption or problems of the day. In that way, of course, they’re not so different from us. Still looking, aren’t we, for stories that validate what we think is best in us?

 

The Greeks were not the only culture that came together regularly to sit together and listen to their myths and reflect. They weren’t the only ones who understood how important that is for cultural renewal. While we may not be gathering together in large groups to investigate Alderman’s book, she has invited us into a conversation, and one can take place.

 

What are some of the questions that I found in the book? One of them is “what can we know about the past? ” What claims can be made really, about the pre-historical? Can we learn that claims about the pre-historical are going to be in service to someone’s agenda? There are questions of physical strength and the threat of violence, about what role they play in human societies, and whether or not this could be changed.

 

Alderman says she thinks men control women because they can. What do you think about that? There’s a question of whether or not women are better than men, if women are inherently more loving and nurturing, in service to life, or is that a matter of cultural training? There’s a deeper question about power, about what it is, how it’s valued and wielded.

 

She’s writing about myths and she’s writing about it in a mythopoetic form. As always, the reactions to the novel, if you read it, are useful information for us, just as when I tell other stories. I have to say that for me, reading it was painful and exhilarating and illuminating, particularly the smaller events or comments that were exchanged between some of the characters that showed me the depth and degree to which the patriarchy and my own relationship and fear of it, colors everything.

 

One small example, at one point one of the women characters is walking down the street and she thinks to herself that she feels really good, she feels joy, walking down the street. It’s so brief, and yet in reading that I realized that her joy is connected to an absence of fear. Later on I read a commentary on the book and the woman who is writing it said, “What would it be like to have the power, rather than to walk out to your car in a dark parking lot with your set of keys clenched in your fist?”

 

Alderman says that she had a snap moment in 2016. She was sitting on the London subway, sitting across from a movie poster of a beautiful woman crying. She was going through a break up and so crying a lot herself, and this poster really hit her. She thought about how this culture seems to relish the suffering of women. It’s being used here to sell this movie. A question came into her mind, “What would I have to do? What would have to change in the world for me to be sitting opposite a poster of a really beautiful, attractive man crying?”

 

This reminded me of a conversation that I had fairly recently with a man who said that he didn’t think of himself as a sexist, but he had a hard time grasping the distortions that we must be living within. If he posed an example to himself, like if he thought about secretaries and how he assumed that a secretary is a woman, although he knows there are exceptions, and tried to imagine a world in which the men were almost always the secretaries working for women, it simply felt wrong. It was disturbing to him.

 

This book can present you with many, many opportunities to step into that, and they’re not all disturbing. Let me just say, I really, really enjoyed the book. If you want to plumb your own relationship to these questions and be able to do it in the privacy of a conversation with yourself and a book, well, I highly recommend this.

 

That gets me to the final point that I want to make about The Power. That is the power in The Power. At the beginning of this podcast, I said something about a new mythos emerging, a new story. We can’t have a new story if we don’t participate. How do we participate if we aren’t in control? Well, I think it is a matter of giving attention to the conversations and the opportunities that we are offered by, in this case, an author like Alderman who has written a work like this. Having the power to rewrite the dominate narratives, that is an essential power. Salman Rushdie said that decades ago when he was persecuted for writing The Satanic Verses. This is not a new insight but we have to do it. We have to participate.

 

If you see people putting out a story that asks questions that you feel are valuable, that is attempting to reframe values in a way that you think is useful, then give them your attention, show up, participate, encourage. If you are an artist or a storyteller of some sort, I hope you’ll consider editing and elaborating on our cherished fictions.

 

Why not be the one to reveal the hollowness or the hypocrisy, or to offer us alternatives, or to do what I think Alderman has done, which is reveal the complexity and the nuances in our cultural struggles. To show us that maybe all of the struggle and the back and forth and the very real pain is necessary because there is no easy answer. I’m not giving too much away to say that Alderman does not present role reversal as the path to a more harmonious and beautiful human society.

 

Of the many things that I like about Alderman’s book and her approach to the topic, my favorite may be the frame that she creates at the beginning and the end of the book. I want to share that with you. I’m going to read it. At the beginning of the book, which is written by a historian who can’t get his history put out, so he’s decided to write a fiction called Neal. Yes, it’s written by a man, the story within the story, the book begins with a passage from the Bible. It’s from 1: Samuel 8.

 

“The people came to Samuel and said, ‘Place a king over us to guide us,’ and Samuel said to them, ‘This is what a king will do if he reigns over you. He’ll take your sons and make them run with his chariots and horses. He’ll dispose them however he wants. He’ll make them commanders of thousands or captains of fifties. He’ll send them to plow, to reap, to forge his weapons and his chariots. He’ll take your daughters to make perfume for him, or cook his food, or do his baking. He’ll take your fields and your vineyards and your olive groves. Oh he’ll take the very best of those and give them to his cronies. He’ll take much more, a tenth of your grain and your wine, those will go to his favorite aristocrats and faithful servants. Your manservants and maidservants, your best men, your donkeys, yes, he’ll take those for his own use. He’ll take one tenth of your flocks, and you yourself will become his slaves. On that day, believe me, you will cry out for relief from this king, the king you asked for, but the Lord will not answer you on that day.’”

 

“But the people would not listen to Samuel. They said, ‘No, give us a king over us so that we can be like all the other nations. Give us a king to guide us and lead us into battle.’ When Samuel heard what the people said, he told it to the Lord. The Lord answered, ‘Give them a king.’”

 

“Give us a king”, isn’t that how we end up in this place? Society after society, civilization after civilization, generation after generation, it’s really hard work to take responsibility and to be in the uncertainty. Here is how Alderman ends the book then, the other part of the frame. It’s title, “Apocrypha, excluded from the Book of Eve,” and you remember, I told you she does an investigation and reworking of religion. What would happen if we had the book of Eve I wonder? Here it is.

 

“Discovered in a cave in Cappadocia, circa 1500 years old. ‘The shape of power is always the same. It is infinite, it is complex, it is forever branching, while it is alive like a tree, it is growing. While it contains itself, it is a multitude. Its directions are unpredictable. It obeys its own laws. No one can observe the acorn and extrapolate each vein in each leaf of the oak crown. The closer you look, the more various it becomes. However complex you think it is, it is more complex than that. Like the rivers to the ocean, like the lightening strike, it is obscene and uncontained. A human being is made not by our own will, but by that same organic inconceivable, unpredictable, uncontrollable process that drives the unfurling leaves in season and the tiny twigs to bud and the roots to spread in tangled complications. Even a stone is not the same as any other stone. There is no shape to anything except the shape it has. Every name we give ourselves is wrong. Our dreams are more true than our waking.’”

 

Our dreams are more true than our waking. In that I hear the process that I’ve been speaking about, and also the mystery that I’m always invoking in this program. That we are in something that is happening to us. We need to show up, we have to participate, although we don’t control it.

 

On that note, I want to close with an excerpt from a work called “The Brand New Ancients,” by the poet Kate Tempest. I’m going to read this excerpt for you, but I strongly, strongly encourage you, in addition to Alderman’s book, to find YouTube videos of Kate reading these words herself because she is a real powerhouse and someone that you want to know about.

 

Here is the excerpt from her poem “Brand New Ancients.” “In the old days the myths were the stories we used to explain ourselves, but how can we explain the way we hate ourselves? The things we’ve made ourselves into. The way we break ourselves in two. The way we overcomplicate ourselves, but we are still mythical. We are still permanently trapped somewhere between the heroic and the pitiful. We are still godly, that’s what’s made us so monstrous. It just feels like we’ve forgotten that we’re so much more than the sum of the things that belong to us. Every single person has a purpose in them burning. Look again, allow yourself to see them.”

 

“Millions of characters each with their own epic narrative, singing, ‘It’s hard to be an angel until you’ve been a demon.’ We are perfect because of our imperfections. We must stay hopeful, we must be patient. When they excavate the modern day, they’ll find us, the brand new ancients. All that we have here, is all that we’ve always had. We have jealousy, tenderness, curses and gifts, but the plight of the people who have forgotten their myths and imagine that somehow now is all that there is, is a sorry plight, all isolation and worry, but the life in your veins, it is godly, heroic.”

 

“You were born for greatness. Believe it, know it, take it from the tears of the poets, there’s always been heroes, there’s always been villains. The stakes may have changed, but really there’s no difference. There’s always been greed and heart break and ambition, jealousy, love, trespass, and contrition, where the same beings that began still living in all of our fury and foulness and friction. Every day Odysseus’s dream versus decisions. The stories are there if you listen. The stories are here. The stories are you and your fear and your hope is as old as the language of smoke, the language of blood, the language of languishing love. The gods are all here because the gods are in us.”

 

That’s it for me, Catherine Svehla, and Myth in the Mojave for this week. I do hope that you will read Alderman’s book and that you will look for Kate Tempest on YouTube and hear that poem read as it really needs to be read.

 

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Thank you so much for listening. Please tune in next time, and until then happy myth making, and keep the mystery in your life alive.