God Bless Taliesin and The Role of Myth

 

Late Aster or Fleabane

We've talked quite a lot about the Welsh Bard Taliesin and his capacity to sooth the furrowed brows of autocratic scumbags masquerading as Princes. Recently we've explored Wallace's suggestion that as Postmodernism became established it promoted a cynicism that needed to be replaced by a refreshing and positive yellow brick road that  postmodernists would refer to as narrative. Whether he turned left or right, up or down, David Wallace always found Oz. My own view is that as society progresses beyond the hunter-gathering period, it get's fat and confused by agriculture, is made to feel divine by the conquest of nature and Industrialism, it chokes on the Enlightenment, and as the post industrial age is subsumed by labor saving devices, gym memberships, exercise bicycles, cosmetic surgery and other forms of mutilation including tattoos, those of us in a position to grasp for fame and fortune can often lose touch with a self that has been well grounded in Hume's: An Enquiry Regarding Human Understanding. Briefly in the United States the project for common sense, William James' pragmatism fostered by his devotion to the understanding that truth emerges from facts, rocked the New World. Meanwhile in a Europe that had been around a bit, Nietzsche having desecrated the sacred texts attempted to describe the Victory of Will in his long poem Thus Spake Zarathustra. Not the most inspiring vision from Nietzsche, his Zarathustra - his advanced man, his superman, his perfectly wise superior human - to me at least, without a narrative, sounded a little bored out of his skull. Zarathustra descended from his mountain top, he went to find his own story and lo his vision of a world without God revealed the last real man on earth to be a creature fat and confused, addicted to every vice Dante could make up, including whatever that thing is people do to their lips to make them look bee-stung and puffy. And yes indeed while God tends toward a following much informed by a cynical hypocrisy, narrative remains a fundamental ingredient of any society, including hunter-gatherers. And by narrative I don't mean fiction or metaphysics, I mean myth.