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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (27622)	1/5/1999 1:53:00 AM
From: Krowbar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

X, I guess that I am just cut from a different cloth than most people. I wonder why people waste so much time and effort with the make-believe world when the real world is so much more fascinating. These stories do absolutely nothing for me, but I wouldn't think of preventing other people from getting something from them. Let's hope some new mythology is not taught in our schools as fact, to replace the creation myth. I am intrigued by different philosophies btw. I am appalled at the number of people who won't start their day without looking at their horoscope and the poor understanding of the sciences displayed by most Americans. I sometimes wonder how we end up with some of the best technology. Del

To: epicure who wrote (27622)	1/5/1999 9:33:00 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

I think a myth can be "real" in the sense of being meaningful without being believed as being absolutely real. Put another way, some stories can have deep, resonant symbolic meaning to us, move us, touch us- and yet we do not have to believe in them. Don't you think that when people DO believe in the stories factually, they wouldn't classify them as myths-that they then are become belief systems-such as Christianity? A myth is generally accepted as not being literal truth, but as containing some symbolic truth that appeals to a group and is agreed upon as having some truthful element. Myths aren't individual stories, but as CAmpbell says- "the individual has an experience...which he seeks to communicate through signs; and if his realization has a certain depth and import, his communication will have the ...force of living myth." (THe Masks of God) I've been reading Women as Mythmakers by Estella Lauter. She posits (and I would agree) that women have been left out of much of the mythmaking process. MAsculine gods, woman as seductress, the male quest--we have to take these and reframe them for ourselves or else see ourselves always as peripheral. Carolyn Heilbrun (and others)asserts the same thing about language and women writers: that the words women must use are those of men, reflecting man's experience and that because of this, we have had a much harder job of writing in the past. Of course, writing has always been much more difficult for women than men anyway and has often been accomplished only by a severe break between "normal" society and the female writer. In many ways, women have been pretty second-class citizens and have had to make do with what's been handed to them by men. There is a lot of rejection of females in these old myths and so women have become revisionist mythmakers as they struggle for meaning and value in their lives. They take the old myths and rewrite them from different angles, or strip them of the original meaning and add new and if what they find reverberates in other women, it can become a new truth. I bet the guys are looking at this and thinking -yeah sure. But even outside of mythology, this secondary status repeats-- in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, even Descartes--women are relegated to an emotional, irrational lower plane. Remember the terrible insults John Galt and terry would hurl at us because we were female? I thought of this today when some of the men on the Mike Burke thread rather condescendingly referred to a not terribly serious argument between Cobalt Blue and Happy Girl as a "cat fight". (Their discussion had a few insults, yes, but on the whole, was certainly as fact-filled and valid as any of the men's.) When men insult, I think they see themselves as cyber-warriors. Sometimes it may seem that women are trying to dominate, to intrude and overthrow, to annihilate, but I don't think that's so. Heilbrun seems to try to solve this dichotomy by creating an androgynous person, but personally I am fine with being separate and different --and equal.