John Moriarty - Nostos: An Autobiography

W hen it was still a typescript I gave this book to some friends of mine. They were, all of them, much irritated by its recurrent regression to myth. Alerted, I reminded myself that, generally speaking, we here have to do with myths of two types, myths that are self-portraits, self-enactments, of our instincts , and myths that institute the basic elements of culture, fire for example, and bread. Keeping this in mind, I asked myself, how otherwise than by unwinding an Ariadnes skein of myths, each myth an initiation into who we are, can we come home to the deeper and more difficult reaches of our psyches? Also, how otherwise can we re-open the road to culture? More urgently: given the havoc that has attended our efforts hitherto in this regard, how otherwise can we open an alternative road to an alternative culture?

Looking back in particular at our Western efforts to set up a world for ourselves , it is clear that we have persistently done the wrong thing. At this stage, it isnt only an albatross that is hanging from our necks. From Tiamat to Moby-Dick , every dragon and monster we have attempted to slay is hanging there. And so, if we were sapient, we would stop to take breath. And to take stock, all the way back to Marduk doing disastrous business in great waters.

As a consequence of something we might do, having taken stock, our karmic inheritance might fall from our necks, but, whatever else, the human unconscious will not fall out of the human psyche. Nor, in obedience to revolutionary fiat, will it sink into inanition.

What then? Where then? By what road then?

This side of The Voyage of the Beagle, the theranthropic is officially back in business. For some people at least it is agonistically back in business. Hence the road south to the Minotaur, the road south to Coatlicue, the road south to the Canyon.

But a little way down any one of these roads, we will have come to see that revolutionaries who set up their ladder without looking to the Labyrinth are fooling themselves.

Next time, Jesus having pioneered the way for us in Gethsemane, we must attempt to bring the whole psyche with us. It is in acquiring a capacity for the whole psyche that we acquire a capacity for the whole Earth.

Keeping this in view, a more enlightened Enlightenment will suggest that our Discourse on Method is not a sufficient substitute for the Mabinogion, nor is our Principia Mathematica a sufficient substitute for a Principia Mythica.

A Principia Mythica we will continue to have only when someone is willing to live it, or be lived by it, myth after myth. In this regard Aeschylus is exemplary , for he doesnt only retell the myths as he finds them. In retelling them he harrows them and he therefore also harrows the assumptions on which our culture is founded. Sometimes of course no amount of harrowing will suffice, for, faced with consequences, we come to see that what we need are new myths that imagine and validate new ways and these we either import or beachcomb the shores of unconsciousness for.

A Positivist will not agree, will rather suggest that we proscribe myth, and that for objectively good reasons. But then, Nietzsche discovered that dinosaur and trilobite werent only instinctively active in him, they were active in his thinking and dreaming, loving and hating. In its own way, of course, Greek myth knows that this is true of all of us, figuring it for us in Centaur and Minotaur . Since Centaur and Minotaur are outcrops of who we phylogenetically are, it would be unwise not to include them in an account of who we are, in an estimation of who we prospectively can be.

Even when, with the help of myth, we come to see and accept who we are, we can still mismanage who we are. Culturally, we can get off to a bad start, as I believe we in the West did. Given the ecological havoc inside and outside ourselves , it behoves us, claiming to be sapient, to do something about it.

Marx insisted that the task of philosophy is not to interpret the world but to change it. That might well be so in relation to our constructed, socio-economic world, but in relation to the natural world our task is to emancipate our eyes and minds from cultural predetermination and prejudice. Where necessary, that means emancipating ourselves from the myths and metaphors that have become forms of our sensibility and categories of our understanding. As such, whether consciously or unconsciously, they validate behaviour. It follows that if I am to heal myself I must do so all the way back to Mesopotamia, because it was there that my instincts, eyes and mind underwent their primary edification into a cultural norm. That norm I long ago experienced as a Babylonian captivity of instinct , eye and mind, and in order to flourish as a person, and to give the earth a chance, I had to emerge from it, meaning by implication that I had to emerge from Europe. This is the least we must demand of ourselves now that we have seen the earth from space. That sunlit wonder has been voyaging for four thousand , six hundred million years, and what a sadness it would be if, for want of refounding ourselves psychically and culturally, we became the iceberg into which it crashed.

What I have in mind when I talk about refounding ourselves psychically is that we would walk out of an order that has its origin in Marduk reaching for the sword and would walk into an order, not yet inaugurated, that has its origin in Jesus reaching for the karmic cup. That way, civility might cease to be a seedbed of savagery more frightful because more poisoned than anything we are likely to encounter in the wild. That way also, we may well be removing the reason for Enkidus revenge, seen so spectacularly for the first time in Nebuchadnezzar regressed to all fours.

Thought of which should bring us to our senses. To our pre-civil as well as to our civil senses.

To a Positivist continuing to object, I would further say that in voyaging with the Beagle, science itself has voyaged back to myth. Going ashore at Punta Alta and on Galapagos, there is something we unexpectedly see: as well as the revolutionary task of replacing an outer socio-political ancien rgime that will engage the energies of a particular people of a particular time, there is the evolutionary task, continuing and common, of integrating our inner phylogenetic ancien rgime, a depth of us which, as noted, has outcropped in Centaur and Minotaur.

Unlikely it is that Centaur and Minotaur will sing our Marseillaise with us or that Coatlicue will do instant and reverent obeisance to the statue of Reason that we have set up in a secularized Notre Dame.

Nietzsches discovery and subsequent collapse is portent. In its portentous vicinity I hear the Fools question. Unhoused not just out in the heath, unhoused at home, I hear it:

How now, nuncle?

Wallace Stevens called for a new intelligence. So far so good. In this book, as in my life, I have run the risk of myths that would redispose us to ourselves and to our world, that would make us available to further, indeed to final, evolution.

One last plea. My hodos has been a mythodos, a road measured not in miles but in myths, sometimes in many myths simultaneously. It has been so by need and necessity of nature in me. In no sense therefore are the myths I rehearse so many interruptions in a personal narrative. On the contrary, at stopping-off places as difficult as Mycenae, Pasiphaes calving ground, Blackfoot dancing ground, Tenochtitlan, the Grand Canyon, the savannah under our city and the Grene Chapel, they are personal narrative, imagining me and mediating me to myself, more often than not without hope of ex-machina reprieve. Without myths I would be what Ajax was before his battle with Hector, a land-fish, languageless.