I just read Henry Miller going off on myth.
"By retracing the paths to the earlier heroic life . . . you defeat the very element and
quality of the heroic, for the hero never looks backward, nor does he
ever doubt his powers. Hamlet was undoubtedly a hero to himself, and
for every Hamlet born the only true course to pursue is the very course
which Shakespeare describes. But the question, it seems to me, is this:
are we born Hamlets? Were you born Hamlet? Or did you not rather
create the type in yourself? Whether this be so or not, what seems
infinitely more important is — why revert to myth ? . . . This ideational
rubbish out of which our world has erected its cultural edifice is now, by
a critical irony, being given its poetic immolation, its mythos, through a
kind of writing which, because it is of the disease and therefore beyond,
clears the ground for fresh superstructures. (In my own mind the thought
of 'fresh superstructures' is abhorrent, but this is merely the awareness of
a process and not the process itself.) Actually, in process, I believe with
each line I write that I am scouring the womb, giving it the curette, as it
were. Behind this process lies the idea not of 'edifice' and 'superstructure,'
which is culture and hence false, but of continuous birth, renewal, life,
life, ... In the myth there is no life for us. Only the myth lives in the
myth . . . . This ability to produce the myth is born out of awareness, out
of ever-increasing consciousness. That is why, speaking of the
schizophrenic nature of our age, I said — 'until the process is completed
the belly of the world shall be the Third Eye.' Now, Brother Ambrose,
just what did I mean by that? What could I mean except that from this
intellectual world in which we are swimming there must body forth a new world;
but this new world can only be bodied forth in so far as it is conceived.
And to conceive there must first be desire, . . .
Desire is instinctual and holy: it is only through desire that we bring about the
immaculate conception."