September 5th: Swans, storm clouds, the world disappearing, &c.

"All of our life is a playing-out of myths, we just don't realize it."


FRONT MATTER:

- At some point everyone will be sharing a story of supreme suffering. 

- Be preparing for your three-minute creation story, to be presented on the 12th. 

-  Note that at some point everyone will be taking an old myth and rewriting it as real; a realistic displacement.


IMPORTANT TERMS/INTERESTING TIDBITS:

'Jupiter and Io' by Antonio da Correggio

created 1532–1533

- The three parts of myth:

• Separation (Everything harmonious, unbroken, beginning)
• Initiation ('And then something happens,' a break, pain)
• Return  (What we strive to replace, the attempt at restoration, ends)

- Cosmogony: How the world was born,

- 'In illo tempore': 'In the beginning', 'in the great time'.

-  The Story of Leda + Zeus (as a swan)
= Castor & Pollux
= Helen & Clytemnestra

- The Story of Daphne and Apollo, wherein each is struck by an arrow of repulsion and attraction, respectively. Daphne, in fleeing Apollo but comprehending her inability to outrun him, begs to Zeus to change her to a laurel tree, and Zeus complies. Apollo, overcome with attraction even to this, her new form, makes the laurel tree his tree, and imparts to it great meaning.

- Simulacra (sing. simularcrum) - Copies of a thing.


ET CETERA:

"What is a gadfly? Sometimes the things that torment us are the things that teach us."

"Io says (to Prometheus), 'I know you're a prophet, you can see things; what's going to be my future?' And he says, 'I'm not even going to tell you, it's going to be so bad. You don't want to hear this.
And she says, 'But I do. I do want to hear it.'"

"Look at the moral that seems to be coming out! If these things--these terrible, terrible things--hadn't happened, we wouldn't have the stories."

"A SUDDEN blow: the great wings beating still

'Leda' (1510-1515), by Leonardo da Vinci

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?"

- 'Leda and the Swan', by William Butler Yeats"



"We are currently in the middle of our own mythological story.

It's really hard in the middle.We don't know what we're doing. We're alone."

"Everyone in here is going to die. 

Sorry about that."

"This is one of the greatest things about classical mythology. It is so merciless."

 

"You okay? This is storytelling. What happens in storytelling?

The world disappears.

When you're in the presence of real stories, you're in the world of the story."