Doesn't This Guy Ever Think About Anything Else?

I'm told obsessiveness is a good quality in artists.

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Gods live in the psyche. Even if initially sparked by survival stress, fear of death, or childhood trauma, the figures and occurrences of myth have evidently become permanent inhabitants of our bodies and minds. These phantoms, far exceeding their possible origins as delusional responses to the hardships of life, animate our whole experience of the world. As some children exceed their parents (quick: name Einstein's mother and father, or Da Vinci's), these figures are the stars, in every sense, of the imagination. The gods now imagine us.

They may not always appear as persons. Like the Biblical God, they may appear as natural symbols: fire, a whirlwind, darkness. They may appear as habitual thought-constellations: Ares within road rage or political partisanship, or Aphrodite lurking inside flirtiness or the delight in the lovely shapes of things.

I could go on and on, but you're better off just reading Jung and James Hillman.

However, aside from featuring mythic personages (which in this case is what I mean by "gods," including figures such as Orpheus, Odysseus, etc.), myths display processes. In all myths, the gods act. They do stuff. The story shifts from one to another and back again, then on to still another.

Narrative theory tells us that such stories are the way humans order and make sense of the world, which is not wrong. But what especially intrigues me about myths is the way they mirror psychic process, the way one thought merges into another and another and another. (And by thought, I mean any content of mind, whether intellectual or emotional.) And not just stories; lyric poems also have a progressive logic that is equivalent to that of story.

I have tried in the past (unsuccessfully) to find a way of representing this in language, switching between registers of diction and of feeling in order to parallel the shifts within the myths. Every myth is an interaction of multiple mythic figures in narrative-temporal sequence. What interests me is not just which archetypes are present, but how they interact, in the way that chemicals interact with each other. Two otherwise harmless chemicals, when combined, make a big boom. The same is true for gods.

This still seems to me a good basis for what I want to do in poems. I like to shift between various registers, and I'd like to somehow use myth (however loosely) as my template for how to best arrange these shifts, how to place them in relation to each other, how to let the various tonal sub-voices move throughout the poem.

Music also seems a promising model, but I don't really understand it well enough to use it (yet).

The project of reconciling active involvement with these myths while paying attention to the findings of the scientists is not easy. Lately, it is kicking my ass. The conclusion I keep coming to is that the needs of the psyche must be honored, whether or not they are found to be reducible to brain mechanics. So, this is how I preserve the gods. They remain the way the universe likes to imagine itself. What is necessary is not to believe, but rather to care. Without this care, we cannot imagine intensely. The best answer I have to the question of what to do with these myths: just sit back and behold them, participating when invited.