The Blue Melon

Mythologizing Adonis -stephanie pope

There is always a story before a story begins. Mythic perspective thinks like that. It is always creating from things that come before.  The poem storied, A Mirror for Adonis, (see link below) takes place somewhere. The place is a garden. An ephemeral one. Like the one that came before.

Personal, social, and pedagogical realms all resurface as part of mythic function and action and are efficient cause in stories told. Yet, what every story may want apart from us seems to remain hidden behind or beyond all our saying. The Big of Man leaves the garden.

In both senses of leaves the Plant-Man comes and goes and spirits through us in being with us.  In the garden, spirit passes like time passes.  Comes and goes. Comes and goes. It leafs a trace of itself in leaving that shadows each of our own lives and shades in values relational to each other's lives. The story takes place. Somewhere. But, only 'a mark' of it remains. Adonis is like that.

The trace remaining of which every story is re-built (the myth)is the one we talk about after having spent time together in the garden. We tell the story of what went on there. Who knows what went on there? And so, the story I'm now telling you is in foliage and garden very much my own.

I have an older brother. His name is Mark. A certain moment with my brother is where this poem of Adonis begins exploring a certain kind of misogyny toward a certain kind of reality, the reality of imaginal mind. My imaginal mind went in quest of the irrational for answers. What is this value of the irrational and how is it valuable as a legitimate faculty of mind on behalf of logical life?

The poem doesn't say. The poem tries to envision that certain moment and almost immediately re visions it. For the story words other presences flashing in a mythical mirror—divinities dancing a dazzling and troublesome struggle toward understanding human desires and their motivations. His. Mine. Ours.

I think of this re visioning as the mark Mark leafs—not as my brother, Mark might leave it, but as the mythical man left it. The one I saw leaving that night.

It is July 4th. Family is gathered at OZ (a place like no other!) Just at dusk the fireworks start. Since we create our own displays, these fireworks are the grand finale and signal the close of the picnic. Some folk with little ones pack and leave after sparklers. Those are handed out early so moms and dads can take little ones home and put them to bed. The works progress in color and noise and the end is almost endless till it finally does. It is just as all this begins to settle into a smoky darkness my brother approaches. I think it is to say good-bye, which it is. I reach up to kiss him and he leans down as if to kiss me. Instead he whispers in my ear, "MYTHoPOETRY! Alot of writing about nothing. Too bad you spend all that time on it!"

I think of this moment as a mythic mark marking off space and making that space capable of receiving images. This space becomes receptacle to image-ideas willing to work (as in work the work.) Every garden requires that sort of will now. Because somewhere along, the story-line changed. Now it is by sweat of brow it all happens. It's become tough stuff to think about.

My eyes, in that moment try to see how Mark's comment sees soul-making. Mark turns to leave and as he does, that smoky darkness begins to leaf an archetypal body as he moves away from me. It seems that just as the eye of my own consciousness sees how Mark sees soul-making my own eyes also are willing to imagine how soul-making sees Mark. And so, Mark is restoried as a plant-man leaving. This begins my remembering again other images of other vegetal gods. Psyche creates her own displays, too.

Stories are receptacle for a mystery-relation they cannot contain and through which voice falls silent precisely at such moments they are most lit by inspiration breaking through from outside and which conveys in depth-vision the remarkable want that complexes a story. In each of our own stories we may suddenly be confronted by what is tearing through our own sorrows' tears not to mention in the larger social body tearing lives apart precisely at points where it becomes most difficult for each of us to grasp and to language. We each find ourselves alone with a story's largesse. Let alone, who is the owner of such want?

Adonis and Myrrha belong to a storying of spice myths. The muddy core contains in its secret action a mythical hunt for union with a divine nature, an unio mystica, and employs certain means to attempt this.Mythically speaking, the myth of Adonis employs an image of seduction through imaginal postures belonging to life outside culture's civilized forms in the name of that mystery beyond it which it seeks to touch again. In seeking, every logic will quarry what its heart desires using itself as prey. 

Through the imaginal shape of images, myth (re)shapes a spirit-body in its quest for celestial earth, its home, and, likewise, differentiates the logical eye of sciences. (sciences such as botany and astronomy during the fourth and fifth centuries, for example, are sciences homologous to the first appearances of the current form of the myth of Adonis) Such imagining we have called a "civilizing" of the garden—i.e. Earth, our home.

A Great Spirit for Life is heard always like a call.  Every call to life, no matter how seemingly deadened and defeating, calls imagination into play. Imagination calls down. What soars high swoops low for the singer within a hunted heart. "My god, my god! Why have you forsaken me?" What sores low brings down a mysterious thing that is nowhere found. Such a thing, in the myth of Adonis, is the Spice Bird.

Lament itself is spice. Is a spiritual call. Calls down the Spice Bird (the capacity that flies into the Beyond and back) of the imaginal art whose amazing mythologems differentiate the eye of sciences (such as botany and astronomy)  and evolve axioms of thought as well as helps logical life distinguishing various levels and meanings operating in social codes. Imaginal mind is not adverse to belief. Not to beliefs that promulgate science and not to those that promulgate religion. Logos is not. Not sparring antithetical to mythic mind. Nor is Beauty's interests dead.

For the myth of Adonis see Marcel Detienne's The Gardens of Adonis.