Before I get tied up in my nightly visual indulgences, having decided to skip the caucuses, I wanted to comment on impartiality. This week, I am sitting on a jury for the first time - enthusiastically, I might add - and the issue of impartiality kept coming up during the jury selection. I am reminded of a comment one of my professors made, which alleged to a degree that the mythologist’s role is that of impartiality in all cases. I agree and I disagree with that assertion. On the one hand, a degree of impartiality towards myth is critical for the comparative approach to work properly. If I hold onto a particular perspective, such as such and such religion is evil or primitive and therefore less worthy than my own, it will slant my interpretation of that particular religion. Any degree of slant takes the mythologist out of the realm of comparison and makes him or her more of a theologian or other specialist in that particular myth.
I can already think of at least one of my cohorts disagreeing, which is perfectly fine. There is no wrong way to approach mythology. I only speak of my perspective.
The other hand requires a degree of partiality for the mythologist to function as a citizen. If I were not partial to such and such candidate, then I would be unable to make a sound, reasonable vote in the election. For the record, I was impartial/undecided until about 2 weeks ago.
I don’t find many people pointing out that Joseph Campbell wasn’t exactly impartial himself. When reading his essays, many of them go back to the same fundamental themes: Hinduism and eastern philosophy, Native American folklore, myth and history, and the perspective that myth is dead in Western culture.
Or maybe, it’s just not being vocalized (both a mythologist’s and Joe’s respective partialities).
Sorry folks, but it’s time for my indulgences. The TV schedule isn’t going to wait for me to work this out.
Blogging amazes me. Once upon a time, namely when I was an undergraduate with far too much spare time on my hands, I used to sit down in front of my livejournal and just gab away, mostly about myself and things that happened during my day. That was in 2000. Now it’s 2008, and I find blogs being used for other purposes: to self-publish essays, to comment on something or other, or even to write one’s Great American Novel. It’s as though our digital age has allowed any ole person to become “published” in an alternative category of “blogger.” And you know what? There are actually professors who will accept a blog as a source (within reason of course) on a paper!
I envision my blog getting to that point someday. The day when I can self-publish some essays I have been meaning to edit or a place to comment on something or other that I find genuinely meaningful (I might make my formal Internet political endorsement once we see who gets the nominations). I want this place to also function as my “Myth Journal” and as my RoundTable RoundUp source. But real life keeps getting in the way, so we will have to be satisfied with Meta-Blogging until I get a chance to make some life adjustments (or graduate, whichever happens first).
So in the meantime, allow me to recommend something to read/look at: Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” comics. The “Sandman” is none other than Morpheus/Dream, and the series personifies dream and myth in a way that only good storytelling can. Imagine: the collective unconscious were controlled by a group of myth characters who call themselves the Endless. The dreams we experience each night, those powerful, symbolic, archetypal dreams Jung loved to ponder, are governed not by a pool of symbols but by a personification. What if that personification just didn’t want to, or couldn’t, operate for awhile? What would happen to dreams? What would be the boundaries between sanity and psychosis?