the indextronaute

8.17.2011

7.07.2011

Books at My Desk. A Renewed Investigation. Myths To Live By.

Sooooo I can't help but bring back all manner of interesting things from storage to my little cubical-nest. And sometimes, like now, I actually have a little time to go through the piles and see what I have randomly brought back.
Here we have Joseph Cambell's Myths to Live By, Viking Press, 1972. I used to own a copy of Masks of God--it must have been volume 1, Primitive Mythology. But I have never really read much else by JC, and I'm not likely to read this book straight through anytime soon either. But I did just flip it open, and the quote to catch my eye (partly because someone had lightly penciled a double underlined ?! in the margin (I disapprove for the most part of marginalia in library books but there are grudging exceptions)) was this one spanning the end of page 102 and the top of 103:M

Ask an artist what his picture "means," and you will not soon ask such a question again. Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the types of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and *words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether. You don't ask what a dance means, you enjoy it. You don't ask what the world means, you enjoy it. You don't ask what you mean, you enjoy yourself; or at least, so you do when you are up to snuff.*

(Asterisks indicate the point of penciled marginalia. I would have tended to pencil the following paragraph, were I the sort to do such a thing, which I assure you I am not--not in library books, anyway)

But to enjoy the world requires something more than mere good health and good spirits; for this world, as we all now surely know, is horrendous. "All life," said the Buddha, "is sorrowful"; and so, indeed, it is. Life consuming life: that is the essence of its being, which is forever a becoming. "The world," said the Buddha, "is an ever-burning fire." And so it is. And that is what one has to affirm with a yea! a dance! a knowing, solemn, stately dance of the mystic bliss beyond pain that is at the heart of every mythic rite.