The Cry for Myth

by May, Rollo

  THE CHARM OF MORTALITY

  A great number of myths refer to life after death, such as the resurrection, the Neoplatonic concepts of immortality, the many Hindu myths, the Sufi, the new forms we may assume in future lives, and so on. We shall not deal with these myths of immortality here. Instead we shall direct our attention to the charm of mortality.

  It is both significant and surprising in Greek myths that many times significant persons are offered immortality but choose mortality instead. One myth in which mortality is found to have charms is the story of Amphytrian. This myth is presented in modern times in a drama entitled Amphytrian 38, since such a multitude of versions of the myth have already been produced.*

  The story goes as follows: Zeus has fallen in love with the wife of Amphytrian, a young Greek general in the Greek army. Zeus cannot tear himself away from looking down on earth at her shadow through her window. He moons around atop Mt. Olympus almost beside himself with his frustrated passion. Mercury takes pity on him and suggests that Zeus arrange a harmless maneuver of war so that Amphytrian will be called away, and in his absence Zeus can masquerade as Amphytrian and fulfill his yearning to make love with his wife. Zeus proceeds to do this. Everything goes according to plan.

  But after Zeus completes the love affair, he and Amphytrian’s wife have a conversation which greatly disturbs the chief of the gods. On his return to Mount Olympus he describes to Mercury what it is like to make love to a human being. Zeus is indeed troubled. “Mercury, she will say, ‘When I was young, or when I am old, or when I die.’ This stabs me, Mercury. We miss something, Mercury.

  “We miss the poignancy of the transient—that sweet sadness of grasping for something we know we cannot hold.”

  This arguing for the charm of mortality gives us pause. Our compassion for other people arises from our awareness that we too are on this spinning globe for three score and ten or twenty years, and then we bid goodbye to the world. Erich Fromm used to argue that fear of death is fear of not living out one’s present life, which is akin to the above idea. There are assets to being mortal—that we experience our own loneliness, and as Zeus said, “the poignancy of the transient, the sweet sadness of grasping for something we know we cannot hold.”

  Our mortality then has a certain strange charm. Abraham Maslow once wrote to me after his major heart attack, “My river [the Charles River, which flowed past his back porch] was never so beautiful as after my heart attack. I wonder if we humans could love—love passionately—if we knew we’d never die.” This is another asset of mortality: we learn to love each other. We are able to love passionately because we die.

  I recall once taking a walk with the great theologian and philosopher, Paul Tillich, when he was in his late seventies and had not many more years to live.

  “Paulus,” I asked, “are you afraid of dying?”

  His expression did not change as he answered, “Yes. Everybody is. Nobody has ever come back to tell us.”

  I continued, “What is it about death that you fear?”

  He answered, “The loneliness. I know I never will see my friends and family again.”

  Whatever happens after we die—as Tillich says, no one has come back to tell us—we achieve a stimulus from the fact that we know we have only a few years to live on this earth. This awareness of being mortal challenges us to use these few years in a way that reaches deepest into our hearts and the hearts of those we love. There is, as Giraudoux tells us, a poignancy, an aliveness, indeed a vitality which is present in mortality.

  The most famous choice of mortality is that of Odysseus in his long trip home from Troy when he is shipwrecked and spends seven years with the beautiful nymph, Calypso. She offers him immortality if he will stay forever with her. But he continually weeps in his desire to go home to Penelope.

  Athena, the goddess who watches over the family of Odysseus, prevails upon Zeus to send Hermes to instruct Calypso to let Odysseus leave. When Hermes flies to the island and explains his instructions, Calypso becomes angry:

  “Oh you vile gods, in jealousy supernal!

  You hate it when we choose to lie with men—

  immortal flesh by some dear mortal side….

  So now you grudge me, too, my mortal friend.

  But it was I who saved him—saw him straddle

  his own keel board, the one man left afloat

  when Zeus rent wide his ship with chain lightning

  and overturned him in the winedark sea.

  Then all his troops were lost, his good companions,

  when wind and current washed him here to me,

  I fed him, loved him, sang that he should not die

  nor grow old, ever, in all the days to come,…”

  The strong god glittering left her as she spoke,

  and now her ladyship, having given heed

  to Zeus’s mandate, went to find Odysseus

  in his stone seat to seaward—tear on tear

  brimming his eyes. The sweet days of his life time

  were running out in anguish over his exile,

  for long ago the nymph had ceased to please.

  Though he fought shy of her and her desire,

  he lay with her each night, for she compelled him.

  But when day came he sat on the rocky shore

  and broke his own heart groaning, with eyes wet

  scanning the bare horizon of the sea.

  Now she stood near him in her beauty, saying:

  “O forlorn man, be still.

  Here you need grieve no more; you need not feel

  your life consumed here; I have pondered it,

  and I shall help you go.”

  But still Calypso cannot understand why Odysseus wants to give up immortality and go back to Penelope:

  “Son of Laertes, versatile Odysseus,

  after these years with me, you still desire

  your old home? Even so, I wish you well.

  Can I be less desirable than Penelope is?

  Less interesting? Less beautiful? Can mortals

  compare with goddesses in grace and form?”

  To this the strategist Odysseus answered:

  “My lady goddess, here is no cause for anger.

  My quiet Penelope—how well I know—

  would seem a shade before your majesty,

  death and old age being unknown to you,

  while she must die. Yet, it is true, each day

  I long for home, long for the sight of home.

  If any god has marked me out again

  for shipwreck, my tough heart can undergo it.

  What hardship have I not long since endured

  at sea, in battle! Let the trial come.”

  Now as he spoke the sun set, dusk drew on,

  and they retired, this pair, to the inner cave

  to enjoy themselves in love and stayed all night beside

  each other.

  When Dawn spread out her finger tips of rose

  Odysseus pulled his tunic and his cloak on,

  while the sea nymph dressed in a silvery gown

  of subtle tissue, drew about her waist

  a golden belt.*

  And so Odysseus chooses mortality even though he knows it means for him more years of being tossed in storms and his raft wrecked, and even though it means he must fight the rival gang of suitors when he returns to Ithaca.

  We have said that in the moments when eternity breaks into time, there we find myth. Myth partakes of both dimensions: it is of the earth in our day-to-day experience, and is a reaching beyond our mundane existence. It gives us the capacity to live in the spirit. Who has not been moved by the majesty of the Corinthian pillars of the Temple of Zeus in Athens. Again we find ourselves repeating on hearing a Mozart sonata, “If I live to be a thousand years, I will never forget this moment!” Such moments are beyond time.

  Nor does one need to travel over the earth. At sunrise in every meadow there are trillions of blades of grass, each with its drop of dew
clinging to the green grass in the moment just before the sun rises; each drop of dew has, against its background of silver, a complete rainbow of colors. Trillions of diamonds in every meadow!

  These incidents for that moment have the myth of eternity regardless of how brief they are or how many years we live. It is even a joy, when you are bored sitting in an airport, to enliven and beautify your existence by calling to your mind the many things of beauty and charm that you have seen or heard or experienced. We are all so much richer than we assume!

  PLANETISM AND HUMANHOOD

  Life will never be the same again. We will see the earth as it truly is, bright and blue and beautiful in that silence where it float…. Human beings as riders on the earth together on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold know now that they are truly brothers.

  Archibald MacLeish

  It is the last phrase of MacLeish’s statement that affects us most powerfully, that we “are truly brothers.”* True, one reads that terrorism has not abated, that humans still kill humans in Africa, in the Near East, in the Orient, and in the Americas. The kidnapping of hostages has become a recognized form of warfare for some of the Third World nations which do not have powerful armies. We know that the great fact of brotherhood has not yet sunk into the awareness of the great mass of humanity.

  But the exploring of the heavens is a myth out of which we can achieve a new international ethics and understanding, a new raison d’être for humanity. Though it has not yet changed us, we can believe that it will become a new myth out of which we may achieve a new international morality.

  Russell Schweickart, one of the astronauts on the Apollo 7 trip into space, tells us his feelings about these great events, and in doing so he gives us a remarkable narration and an authentic new myth.† He notes first the relation of his experience to the creation myth in Genesis, spoken in a previous flight:

  In December of 1968, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders circled the moon on Christmas Eve and read from Genesis and other parts of the Bible, to sacramentalize that experience and to transmit somehow what they were experiencing to everyone back on Earth.

  Rusty takes pains to point out that the astronauts are not heroes (though they may become heroes in the new myth) but they are neighbors, the people who live next door to all of us. In this way, Rusty makes his myth part of our community, whether we other members of the community do such novel things as fly in a capsule or stay at home. He, indeed, is part of the sacramentalizing of the planet.

  Typical of myths, he talks about “you” as though all of us were with them on their lunar module, and in a mythic sense we were.

  You check out the portable life support system and everything seems to work and you strap it on your back and you hook all the hoses and connections and wires and cables and antennae and all those things to your body…. And outside on the front porch of the lunar module you watch the sun rise over the Pacific and it’s an incredible sight, beautiful, beautiful!

  The astronauts depend on each other in ultimate ways, since whether or not the two who were slated to separate would be able to get back again, whether the lunar module will be able to dock again on the command ship, depends upon each one conscientiously doing his part. The infinity of space makes this interdependence a question of life or death. “Dave Scott is your next-door neighbor, but he was never a neighbor like he’s a neighbor now,” says Rusty of the bond that grew up among the astronauts.

  After these incredible experiences, Rusty asks the moral question, “What does it all mean?” And he answers on a mythic level below the obvious things: “I think that we’ve played a part in changing the concept of man and the nature of life.”

  This ultimate question and its answer give the myth its great moral depth. Musing about this question, Rusty gazes down at the earth looking so fragile from the perspective of the astronauts up in the stratosphere. The world is so small that the spaceship can encircle it in an hour and a half, and

  you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing…. You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again and you don’t even see them. There you are—hundreds of people in the Mideast killing each other over some imaginary line that you’re not even aware of…. And from where you see it, the thing is a whole, and it’s so beautiful.

  Rusty wonders about the mystery present in all myths. Musing about why he is up there and not you or me, he asks, “Am I separated out to be touched by God, to have some special experience that others cannot have?” He firmly answers no. He feels he has experienced this trip that anyone else could have made with the right training. This is why, he says, “I’ve used the word ‘you,’ because its not me or the others on the lunar module. It’s life that’s had that experience.” All of these expressions make a myth of a new age, as Columbus and Magellan in their day contributed to the myth of the Renaissance.

  Taking off from actual history, the myth then gives us images that come alive. The community which experiences the myth and the morality of the true myth are both there. Since human beings can now fly around the earth, the boundaries over which people war now become a deadly and cursed mistake, an insane and cruel destruction of our small, fragile, but beautiful earth.

  Sir Fred Hoyle said in the very middle of our century, “Once a photograph of the earth, taken from the outside, is available … a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”* We now have that new photograph. It was taken by the astronauts and printed in full page by countless newspapers and journals. It showed the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, the continents of Africa and South America, and all the countries of the Orient spinning on the surface of this earth. This photograph did leave an indelible impression on millions of peoples’ minds—the picture of the earth emblazoned in dark blue and gold, turning serenely in its orbit, populated by people who are truly brothers and sisters.

  Rusty Schweickart did not see the borders of the nations of Europe and Central America, which are nonexistent from this range. And Rusty felt, as we all did, that there was something ludicrous as well as tragic about the efforts of these countries, posturing like roosters, killing each other to preserve borders that no longer exist. The meaning of these great days and nights, merged together around the spaceship, was that scores of nations were trying to preserve boundaries which had become anachronisms. The moment of seeing that picture was the heralding of the time when at last it will be recognized, even though politicians may be the last to admit it, that what happens in Moscow also happens in Washington, that what occurs in London will also occur in Bombay. The moment in history has come when nation shall not lift up sword against nation and they shall study war no more.

  The very dangers that we face, exemplified by nuclear bombs, are themselves commandments that we must learn to live together as brothers and sisters in a great family. From the Marshall McLuhan Institute in Toronto there had come a strange statement in the middle of 1982. The leader was quoted, “I’m delighted with the atom bomb.” But before we could shout out our protest at such inhumane sentiments, we read the next sentence, “Something is necessary to bring us all together.” And this is the danger we all face of destruction of the earth’s atmosphere, the pollution of our oceans even as we explore the heavens. Since they are the same dangers for all of us, whatever our color or nationality, it behooves us to face them together.

  We now do have a common enemy. It comes by way of our understanding this myth. The very technology for the destruction of our enemies also leaves us hostage to the destructive power we generate. We cannot turn the clock back (nor do we want to), but the control of nuclear energy is the requirement needed to bring us all together. The near tragedy of Three Mile Island and the actual tragedy of Chernobyl demonstrate the irrefutable fact that we are one world. When thousands of tons of lettuce and green vegetables had to be burned in Italy after the Chernobyl accident and tens of thousands of
reindeer—almost the whole economy of the Laplanders in northern Sweden—had to be slaughtered because of the radiation contagion, we knew in our hearts we could never live separately again.

  When headlines appeared in the New York Times after the accident, “Russia Asks the Help of the Scientists of the West,” many of us were overtaken with a strange conviction: this marks the beginning of the world in which the nations will no longer be border-ridden. The new myth of the stars and trips to the planets will then have taken effect!

  Radiation surely hasn’t the slightest respect for fictitious borders. The efforts to keep these borders pure becomes, were it not so tragic, a strange joke—to protect borders which exist only in one’s imagination! In the twenty-first century they will seem like anachronisms of the most destructive kind. This holds not only for radiation in Europe but for all the peoples on the crust of the earth.

  As Rusty Schweickart has revealed, the power of myths is still with us. “And outside on the front porch of the lunar module, you watch the sun rise over the Pacific and it’s an incredible sight, a beautiful, beautiful sight.”

  “And what’s it all mean?” Here Rusty is forming a myth self-consciously, venturing his ideas on the most important point of all: “I think that in some ways there are other benefits which are more significant.” As Rusty repeated, “I think that we’ve played a part in changing the concept of man and the nature of life.”

  We awake after a sleep of many centuries to find ourselves in a new and irrefutable sense in the myth of humankind. We find ourselves in a new world community; we cannot destroy the parts without destroying the whole. In this bright loveliness we know now that we are truly sisters and brothers, at last in the same family.

  Index

  abortion, women’s assertiveness and, 195

  action, supremacy of, 237

  Adam, 27, 42, 146

  Adler, Alfred:

  background of, 68-69

  early childhood memories studied by, 68,69–70

  on social interest, 69,165

  on spoiled child syndrome, 181

  women’s equality advocated by, 289