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?

Living Your Myth 1: Mishima And Dying For Your Convictions

By James Curcio
Living Your Myth series.

To die for an idea is stupid, people say. Ideas aren't real.

Nowadays, the posture of choice is disengagement. Sure, we'll discuss ideas. Especially if it has any hope of getting us laid. But commitment to an idea or an ideal is so... passe. That was something that died with the 20th century, along with a lot of things that we can happily say we've left to rot in the past. Intellectual is a synonym with ineffectual. Art is a pretense by definition. The highest art now is art that makes fun of itself, or so says the co-creator of just such a piece.

Well, I've talked a great deal on this site about the ways that ideas-as-myths are living as much as we are. The ways that they enter into the world, enter into "reality," especially through our actions. The ways they real-ize ideas, and how we re-ify the world through them.

Sounds like a lot of bullshit ideas to me.

A writer deals in words. Words symbolize ideas. They can evoke emotions. But what's in a word, really? When is it time for action, and what is that action?

What is the greatest act a person can make? Is it the greatest sacrifice? And how many of you think your ideas are worth dying for? Certainly the suicide bomber has been convinced of this. We look away in discomfort or snub our noses at such fanatics. Mostly, I'd say, rightly so. They've been duped. They've been sold a unicorn and paid for it with flesh blood and mortar, and not all of it was theirs to sacrifice.

But there's another side to this posture of disengagement and apathy. It turns us to good cattle, good consumers. Good slaves who do our master's bidding because it is easier that way, easier than challenging and possibly facing death as the repercussion of our actions. Maybe this was the future that Yukio Mishima saw for his dying Empire; a future so bereft of honor and dignity that the only thing he could do in response was shove a blade through his innards. The death of a warrior, not a writer. His suicide could then be seen as a final transformation: writer into warrior. Thinker into actor. But this transformation is only complete when it resonates with a culture. When those ripples reach outwards across the years, transform entire civilizations. We all know the power of a martyr.

This was not Mishima's fate. He was a man in so many ways out of step with his time, a relic. To mix metaphors, if a man can become a metaphor, he was the final gasp of a dying mythology. The modern narrative on suicide, even in Japan, is not what it was. To the West, his was the death of a coward. We even sigh sadly at the thought of Hunter S Thompson blowing his brains out, a sound not unlike a book dropping heavily to the floor, or so said his son Juan. What poetry, the final sound for a writer to make. A book falling to the floor. Or perhaps Juan was doing a little myth-making of his own.