Living Your Myth 2: Living And Embracing Ego

By James Curcio
Living Your Myth series.

There is a question that I left floating under the piece I wrote about suicide, Mishima and Hunter S Thompson. It was raised to me by several people, though it was a conversation with Rudy Rauben that got me thinking maybe I should fill in that silence rather than just leave it hang in the air.

(And dealing with it, filling that silence - maybe this is the ego of the writer, which refuses to just shut up and let you take that extra step. And I'll get to that in a second.)

Photo Rachel Reynolds

Why is it so important how they died? We are interested because of how they got there, yet we fixate on the end. Thus we see our fixation on ends; the culmination, finish, or goal, the idealized future, and also the ends to means.

This future-fixation, as I discussed previously, was dealt with in an essay by Alan Dundes. I won't repeat that, especially as I've reworked it in the process of compiling The Immanence of Myth.

But I do want to direct our gaze towards living rather than dying, for those who might interpret what I said as advocacy of suicide. There are, maybe, many people this world could use less of. The likes of Hunter S Thompson and Yukio Mishima are not amongst them.

Maybe the literary nature of the suicides of authors, we can for instance add Hemingway to this list, should not be especially surprising. As every story, we believe, must have a beginning middle and end.

There is the end, and if we are so committed to a particular identity, or if our body simply will no longer bear us forward into a new story, then that end will be literal.

But what about this identification with character?