Reading the Archetype

Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth.
So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth
his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.
Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII

I actually own an ancient copy of Bacon’s Essays that looks as if it would be perfectly at home in a literary museum; and thus I feel it necessary to point out that I’m feeling particularly lazy at the moment and instead of quoting from my copy of Bacon I’m quoting from the PDF version of Louis-Jorge Borges’s epigraph to his short story, The Immortal. I am quoting Bacon being quoted by Borges – it’s mind boggling if you think about it, which I don’t suggest you do because I don’t want it on my conscience that you lost the last scrap of sanity that you owned reading this blog.

What I’m really trying to say is that I think those mysterious people who told Liz Browning that the epics are dead might have been right, but not in the cynical way in which they supposed. The moment the first truly great and epic story was told was the moment nothing better could be told. Every story that follows is simply another version of the archetype – its storyness is a shadow of the real story in the world of forms. This is all in Plato according to Professor Kirke; “Dear me, what do they teach them in the schools nowadays?” He asks. It’s certainly not Plato I can assure him.

Why do we continue to tell stories then? I think it’s because we are a forgetful bunch that constantly needs to be reminded of our place in the world in the world. We never seem to learn from our mistakes as a species. Look at our history: The Americans fought for independence from the British, who were being very mean to them, and then they started fighting with the native Americans (this probably happened before their independence). They drafted a beautiful declaration of independence that goes on about the rights of all humankind and then they go and enslave African people and act like they’re not human beings. The same thing happened all over the world: in South Africa the Boers fought for independence against the British (hmm... they seem to be the root of all evil in this tale) and then merrily instituted apartheid. I was telling a friend of mine that we’ve all more-or-less come to the conclusion that colonisation was wrong but if we ever discovered a planet in some far away galaxy that is populated by beings with less strength of arms than us we would colonize them in a heartbeat. We would argue that this is somehow different from what we’ve been doing on our planet in the past.

This is why we still write stories, to remind us that we are silly and that we need to stop it and eat all our veggies.

A Lazy Weekend Taking Over Middle-Earth

Hang a gold cord down from heaven, and all you gods and goddesses take hold of it: but you could not pull Zeus, the counsellor most high, down from heaven to the ground, however long and hard you laboured. But whenever I had a mind to pull in earnest, I could haul you up, earth and sea and all – then I could hitch the cord round a peak of Olympus, so that everything was then left hanging in midair. That is how superior I am to gods and men.
– Zeus, The Iliad

The earth is shaking
Because of His wrath
The mountains tremble
At the sound of His voice
He pulls down the sky
To crush His enemies
He descends upon them with fire
He is clothed in greatness
His voice resounds throughout the earth
His vengeance no longer is contained
His light destroys the darkness
If He speaks the earth will crumble
If He moves the universe will fall
He is clothed in greatness
- Becoming the Archetype, The End of the Age

At some point in our lives we all dream of taking over the world and ruling it with an iron fist; but unlike Hitler or Mugabe most of us are actually sane and know not get ahead of ourselves. I spent most of my weekend listening to the lead singer of Becoming the Archetype boom out lyrics of God’s greatness in his thundering voice as I sent my vast armies of Nύmenόrean descent across the plains of Mordor in The Battle for Middle-Earth 2 – crushing all who would dare oppose me. I was not trying to be blasphemous and compare myself to God; no, not by any means. I was just feeling very powerful as I ordered virtual soldiers to do my bidding and the music served as a muse of sorts. I felt like Zeus surely must feel in Greek mythology as he sits on his throne atop Mount Olympus, using his power to meddle in the affairs of humankind.

When you read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows you were told that Lord Voldemort died. If you believed this I’m sorry to tell you that you are a gullible fool because Voldemort did not perish in that battle with snot-nosed Potter, I spirited him away to Middle-Earth using my godlike powers. He now commands my armies for me alongside Gandalf and Galadriel. Sauron sits trembling on his black throne as my army marches through Mordor to annihilate him. I have also slain that foul creature who calls himself Gollum before he could get the chance to lose the Ring to Bilbo in a silly game of riddles. I’ve taken the ring and given it to Galadriel as she is the only one powerful enough to wield it against Sauron – she will become corrupted by the Ring in the process but I do not care about such trivialities.

Mwahahaha, mwahahaha... cough, cough.

No Rest for the Wicked

Dear traveller,

Surely you are lost. The interwebs, wonderfully wibbly and wobbly though they may be, are like the world-renowned labyrinth that Dædalus constructed for king Minos and it is easy to click on the wrong link and end up lost in cyberspace. Since you are here now and I can’t help you find your way home, you might as well stay for some cake and listen to me talk about things that will not change your life in any meaningful way.

It is said, by people I don’t know, that there’s no rest for the wicked. I’m quite certain that this means I can spend the next two weeks resting because I can’t be classified as a wicked person; selfish, petty, mean and proud perhaps, but not wicked. I am officially on holiday and as a result I’m ridiculously happy. Very practical people (whose role on this planet I’ve yet to figure out) have tried to rain on my parade by pointing out the stack of work that I have to get done by the end of my holiday. These puddleglums don’t have to worry, though, because I’ve already come up with a plan to get my work done in time; it’s a plan so brilliant that you can put a pointy wizard’s hat on it and call it Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.

When I am not doing my work or fending off irritating family members (who cannot bear to see me happy in any shape or form) with my imaginary kung-fu skills I will be reading. My reading list just keeps growing and growing, I spend more time haunting book stores than I spend reading it seems. At the moment I have three books that I’m focused on: The Song of Susannah by Stephen King, Odd Hours by Dean Koontz, my favourite fry cook who sees dead people’s fourth outing, and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. I eventually have to get around to reading books I picked up at second hand bookstores some months ago, books like Peter Straub’s Koko (which Lady Leigh assures me is disturbing) and The Book of the Dead, a collection of horror stories that pay tribute to George Romero’s zombie movies. To add to my long reading list I went to this super cool bookstore called Boekehuis, which serves coffee in a beautiful garden when you feel thirsty after browsing their impressive selection of books, and bought a copy of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. I read City of Glass (one of the three stories in the book) last year for literary theory, which totally blew my mind. Lady Leigh was kind enough to lend me her copy of book but I never got around to reading the other two stories so I just had to buy my own copy. Speaking of Mr Auster, I went and bought his friend, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (which I read in English last year). To round up my reading list I bought Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss because the stickler inside of me decided that it’s time improve my punctuation and grammar – which is atrocious at best. The fact that the Apostrophe Protection Society (APS) wrote me a scathing letter concerning my misuse of the apostrophe didn’t dissuade me from buying the book either.