An essay on myth, fairytale, and dream. It introduces my new epic poem “What’s Hid Beneath the Bones of this Great Tree.” The essay not only offers background on the poem; it also provides an overview for understanding why mythopoetic material is the material of soul-work and how things like poems, tales, dreams and even artwork are necessary to help us consciously take the “journey of the soul.”
In the dark winters of my childhood, my mother would gather us around our wood-burning stove for story time. It wasn’t as long ago as that sentence makes it sound. I was born early in the 1960s at the feet of the great Rocky Mountains. Boulder, Colorado’s winters were cold; its social environment hot. My parents carried me to anti-war marches on their backs, and trundled me along when they walked door to door promoting progressive politics. I felt my mother’s grief when JFK was killed; I knew her despair when MLK and RFK were cut down, the way she tried to keep her hope alive in the midst of such loss. She and my father raged against the war machine and campaigned for civil rights. But my father also raged about other things, and I knew in my bones what it meant not only to fear the outside world, but what it was like to be afraid within the walls of my own home. From late spring through early fall, my brother and I played outside as late as we could, making use of the light, But in the winter, when it was dark and cold, mother gather us around the crackling fire, nestled us beneath wool blankets, and read the fairy tales of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. I wonder now if the stories were for her as much as they were for us.
Fairy tales are designed to inspire and shape our lives; they embolden us with the assurance that when the night is darkest, when fear threatens to lock us up, and when our hope seems most fragile, we can find the strength, courage, and creativity to overcome whatever threatens us.
In the darkness of my childhood winters, The Ugly Duckling, Cinderella, Snow White, and Hansel and Gretel all shimmered with the light of inner hope against the backdrop of violence, evil, and darkness. Later, as I grew up, I transitioned from fairy tales to larger epic myths. I drank hope from epics like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Le Guin’s Earthsea stories. There was real terror in those tales, heroism too. I can remember, even now, the fear I felt when Tolkien’s Frodo found himself deep inside a Barrow-wight’s mound, and then the thrill when Tom Bombadil brought him out of the darkened grip of death. Then I stalked the dark labyrinthian tombs of Le Guin’s Atuan with the young wizard, Ged, as he faced his fear and came so near to death, a hero seeking the one ring that could bring healing to the world.
Disney has since sanitized the fairy tales, misshaping them with sentimentalism and an eye for profit through entertainment. When the tales are told today they seem to pander to the fears of parents who want to shelter kids from the things that hide in the dark places of our world and souls. And then there’s Hollywood’s take on the more mature epic tales of literature turned to film. They often make too much of the violence of the tales and too little of how to integrate the darkness in our world and in ourselves. The truth is, kids need the fairy tale, dark and troubling as they may be. Fairy tales and their kin—myths and dreams and epic poems—help our imaginations metabolize the trouble of our inner lives, the predicaments that trip us up. They speak the language of our souls, using symbol and metaphor to offer meaning for our lives and initiate us into patterns and processes that integrate our lives and move us toward the kind of mature wholeness we need.
Myths and fairy tales bear the deeper kinds of meaning our lives need; this is why they’re passed from generation to generation. They witness to a timeless principle: facts are often soft surrogates for the hard, deep truths fiction can tell. The contemporary teller-of-tales, Neil Gaiman, says: “Fairy tales are more than true.” They don’t try to convince us that dragons exist, instead they inspire us to know that “dragons can be beaten.” This is why they fascinated and strengthened me as a child on those cold, dark winter nights; they offered meaning and stirred my courage, and made me know I wasn’t alone—I wasn’t the first or last child to feel afraid. I think my mother read them to energize her inner resources at a time when her dragons were trying to swallow her whole. I often drowsed while mother read, and when I stirred, I found her still reading, engrossed, impervious to the sleeping of her children.
Far back as we can trace, our race has turned to tales like these not only to inspire and shape our children, but to embolden us all to know that when the night is darkest and when our hope is most fragile, we can find the strength to defeat whatever dragons may rise against us. Facts, though not unimportant, simply don’t have the moral and spiritual muscle of myths for the shaping of our lives.
Says Gaiman: If someone says: “We have investigated—there was no Snow White”, I'm not going to go: “Oh no, my story is now empty and meaningless”. The point about Snow White is that you can keep fighting. The point about Snow White is that even when those who are meant to love you put you in an intolerable situation, you can run away, you can make friends, you can cope. . . . even when all is at its darkest, you can think your way out of trouble.
Something more happens when fairy tales and myths are rendered in poetic form. Take children’s books like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. The best, most memorable and enduring books spread their text upon the page in the spare and artful forms of poetry, they play and dance in the ear with cadence and rhyme, settling in the soul like seeds.
This is true for adult tales too. From the Epic of Gilgamesh, millennia ago, through Homer and Virgil, the Ramayana and Firdawsi and Beowulf, Dante and Blake, all the way down to Anne Waldman’s recent Iovis Trilogy, it’s poetry that works not only to speak our deepest truths but to alter our consciousness, interrupt, and change history—especially at times of great tumult in our world and in our lives—through the courage, resourcefulness, and resilience of those who read them. About the Velvet Revolution in Vaclav Havel once said: “[In the face of Czechoslovakia’s totalitarian regime, we created] our parallel society. And in that parallel society we wrote our plays and sang our songs and read our poems until we knew the truth so well that we could go out to the streets of Prague and say, ‘We don’t believe your lies anymore’—and communism had to fall.”
James Baldwin, one of our greatest contemporary writers, once said, “The poets (by which I mean all artists), are finally the only people who know the truth about us.” Poets are those best able to “know the truth about us” because they write what comes to them from a place our thoughts can see from far away but can never go. Thoughts, and the words that give concrete shape to them, are artifacts of a deeper wisdom that can never be fully described by any language. They float like flotsam on the sea, carried along by deeper currents. Something—an impulse; a sensation of love, hate, fear, loss, or hope; a flickering light of a star against the dark of night; the darkness itself nagging to be noticed, felt, and revered—it’s this inner something, the soul itself, that stirs us to think thoughts and form words. They are like our children, born of our deep and wordless impulse to make love. In ways like that, the soul gives birth to thoughts and words that are always mere approximations of the wisdom from which they come. It’s this truth that poets know and work from; too few of those in power do.
The soul’s confusions and pains taught James Hillman, the acclaimed psychologist, require language—thoughts and words—which are able to provide a mirror for what’s going on inside. Abstract language and positivistic prose, is generally impotent to meet the needs of our souls. The inner language of our souls is best mirrored outside us by art, fairy tales, myths, and especially, poetry.
Poetry alone is a “mythic, metaphoric language,” says Hillman, “speech of ambiguities that is evocative and detailed, yet not definitive, not productive of dictionaries, textbooks, or even abstract descriptions.” Poetic language is a language resonant with dream, fairy tale, and myth—figurative, metaphoric, symbolic, evocative. This kind of Language is the only medium that’s up to the daunting task of expressing what goes on in the deepest places within us, guiding us toward meaning, and helping us make conscious what otherwise would remain buried within, hidden inside the unconscious. “If you bring forth what is within you,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, “what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
Take violence. When is a violent act not the outer expression of some inner trouble or suffering that’s not been faced or healed? Violence is always an outer act sourced from within the perpetrator. When there’s no means for metabolizing the darkness within us, that darkness doesn’t slink away and hide, it hides until it finds a way to express itself. Unless we transform the trouble within us, we’ll make trouble outside us.
The dream-like vision that became this poem came to me just as my life entered a season of great personal tumult, loss, a new encounter with brutal violence, and my uncontrollable slide into what felt like a very dark and inescapable place.
At the time, I was beginning to come to terms with the violence of my childhood—the buried terror and trauma of my father’s violence and abuse. I was facing up to the reality that, early on, I not only suffered, but had to grow up; I’d thought I had to be a protector to my mother and my younger brother—even when I couldn’t protect myself. I was coming to realize that when I was six or seven years of age, a part of me, violated and terrified, went underground, so to speak. That boyish animation, liveliness, and playful innocence that’s what every child ought to know and be, got locked up—ostensibly, by some part of me, for safekeeping. And so, I grew up too quickly, became quite serious, dutiful, and good, becoming what I thought a man was supposed to be long before true manhood could come to me—all the while trying very hard not to be a man in the way my father was.
Dream and visionary work became a vital way for me, accompanied by a Jungian analyst, to explore what the trauma of my childhood had done to me. Working this vision into a poem, giving voice to the language of my soul through symbol, metaphor, and myth, was the way I made some kind of sense of the Arid Plane I’d been riding through for most of my life. The work helped me find the courage to go down into the dark and find a way to reclaim what I’d lost—to make conscious what was hidden but never actually passive within me.
I was doing this work between 2015 and 2019 at a time when toxic masculinity was assaulting the world with new forms of aggression. The #MeToo movement was outing patriarchal, misogynist, and abusive white men for their predatory assaults on women and girls. At the same time, angry white men kept shooting innocent people. Our political process was gridlocked, our nation bullied by a dysfunctional masculinity that held just about everything in its grip, and we were all in one way or another, engaged in a most uncivil intra-national war.
Then one night, on my way home from work, I walked into the wrong place at the wrong time. I stood by, powerless, as yet one more angry white man put a dozen bullets into the body of a brown woman—she, a rookie young cop named Natalie Corona. Three months later, as I was still reeling from what I’d witnessed, my younger brother, unable to deal with the violence of our childhood, drank himself to death.
This vision-become-poem became one of the ways a part of me, long locked up, crawled out of a cell, deep in the earth, where the sands of time and the memories I’d rather have forgotten might otherwise have put me six feet under.
What’s Hid Beneath the Bones of this Great Tree isn’t a myth—it’s not public or common to a clan or culture. But there’s mythos in it, and it shares much with fairy tales. The language is figurative, metaphoric, symbolic, evocative—the kind of language that can express what goes on in the deepest places within us, guiding us toward meaning, and helping us make conscious what otherwise would remain buried within, hidden inside us. As a revelation of my own soul in a time of crisis it will likely resonate with the larger human experience, and, perhaps, provide companionship for others who sense, in the language of the poem, that there’s something hidden deep within, something they can feel inside their bones—but do not know yet what it means.
There’s evidence that this kind of journey is perennial. Since the dawn of time, our race has sought ways to transform male aggression and violence (common enemies of all that’s good) into creativity and justice (allies of the common good). Like us, our ancestors wondered how a man could be moved from his basest instincts to more noble virtues. Between four and five thousand years ago, The Epic of Gilgamesh, imagined that such a journey would require a man no small amount of loss and grief, fear and courage and the good luck to survive it all somehow. If he did, then, like the ancient hero, Gilgamesh, he would uncover the beauty of his soul, and, according to the ancient poet, bring wholeness to the Earth. There’s no question that something of the same is required of a woman. It’s a journey required of all of us as humans. For too long now we’ve all lived, regardless of our gender, too violently upon the Earth. We’ve presumed, like the gods we’ve shaped, to live over the Earth and in domination of it. In our hubris or ignorance (or both), we’ve disentangled ourselves from the Earth—the planet that’s home to all the things that make up this unusual blue orb spinning in this vastness of space. We’ve failed to understand our place within it all. Finding our souls, I think, requires a deep descent back into That from which we’ve come. And when we find our souls we’ll know ourselves to be part of a much greater Whole, wondrously entangled with it all.
The vision given me, that has ever since possessed me, and now the prose poem that tries to put it into words, points toward the path before us. Maybe it can help guide modern souls into the wholeness that can only be found in the deeper places of Being, both spiritual and physical, and that will require of us a real life-and-death struggle and the courage to suffer the journey.