The correct response to uncertainty is mythmaking. It always was. Not punditry, allegory, or mandate, but mythmaking. The creation of stories. We are tuned to do so, right down to our bones. The bewilderment, vivacity, and downright slog of life requires it. And such emerging art forms are not to cure or even resolve uncertainty but to deepen into it. There’s no solving uncertainty. Mythmaking is an imaginative labor not a frantic attempt to shift the mood to steadier ground. There isn’t any.
But—a major but—maybe there’s useful and un-useful uncertainty. The un-useful is the skittish, fatiguing dimension. The surface of the condition. The useful is the invitation to depth that myth always offers. Because if there’s uncertainty, then we are no longer sure quite what’s the right way to behave. And there’s potential in that, an openness to new forms. We are susceptible to what I call sacred transgression. Not straight-up theft but a recalibrating of taboo to further the making of culture. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
In a Hebridean story I call Cinderbiter, a serpent is wrapped four times around the world. Its head is a few miles offshore from a Scottish island. The only way to appease it has been to supply the creature with sacrifices. To satisfy a killer with killings, goes the stressed-out daytime logic. But this cannot continue, the island is running out of victims. The exhausted islanders are all out of ideas. Sequestered in the drama rests a boy who lies by a fire dreaming. Hearing of the many attempts to meet this peril, the lad uses night intelligence, not day, to save the island.
He steals three things.
He steals his father’s speediest horse.
He steals three embers from an old crone’s fire.
He steals the king’s boat and strangely allows himself to be tipped into the belly of the beast. He then locates the liver. He cuts the liver open and places the crone’s embers inside. The serpent then ejects the boy and dies flamboyantly. As he collapses, his teeth become the Faroe, Shetland, and Orkney Islands, and his liver becomes the still smoking island we call Iceland.
Cinderbiter’s unconventional instincts save the day. His transgressions, forged in his dreaming state, have a genius that the islanders can only gawp at. And we swiftly move from a story of insurmountable dread to a creation story: the formation of the Scottish Islands and Iceland. It’s a refreshing narrative and only possible with openness to unexpected approaches. The warriors have been dealing with the outside of the situation, but Cinderbiter navigates it from the inside.
So when we face uncertainty, we should be open to the quixotic and the unconventional. Culturally we need to be Cinderbiters at a moment like this. It’s the Cinderbiter in us that would query the word “uncertainty” anyway. So, let’s re-imagine it.... (cont reading...)
#Martin-Shaw #writings #mystery #uncertainty #mythmaking #reimagining
