the myths that could save us
I spent a little time this morning with the already published bits of my Antiquities series--GRANATA and CLOVEN that take their roots in mythology. Part of it was a revisit after seeing a couple screenings of Chrisopher Nolan's take on The Odyssey and one of my favorite recent musicals, Hadestown, on screens for a pro shot stage production. Part of it was also the Calypso project, HERE BE MONSTERS, which I intended to lock in on this summer, but has put off until August in favor of a couple new play projects that are gobbling up my writing / revising hours.
As I was paging through GRANATA, I remember that it too, was a summer project. The summer of 2022, when I had just been freed from working full time, and by virtue of being able to schedule my paid writing gigs more loosely around more creative things, I was able to write a good bit of it. One of those paid gigs was the humantiies content for an online education site. I had been writing since the fall, which made up most of my income until I started more design-writing work later in the summer. I spent a lot of time writing Greek mythology and theater history related subject matter. As someone who had initially been hired to write strictly about literature as per my academic background, I'd also been permitted to take on myth/folklore, theater history, and because I was a practicing artist myself, visual art topics. Later, I wrote a lot architectural and design lessons, which gave me a solid launch into writing about decorating and design. But that summer, it was a lot of the Greeks, various lessons on The Odyssey, The Illiad, stage tragedies and comedies, myth in general, art in a mythological vein. I was also thinking about the idea of a female epic in the classical vein. Wading around so much in it for paid writing informed my creative writing and artmaking and soon, GRANATA, a series about Persephone and the Sirens was hatched, along with a series of collages I would complete in the next year. Of course, in 2024-2025, I would follow it up with CLOVEN, and something began to take shape. Not just these two collections of writing and art, but potential future ones that carried on that epic tradition. About Cassandra, Clytemnestra, Helen. Or Io, Leda, Daphne. (all possibilities for future series.) And of course, Calypso,the one I planned to work on this summer. I suppose you could also throw Ariadne/the Minotaur in that list, though TAURUS has always felt like something different. A contemporary retelling that takes a whole lot of liberties. Over the past week since seeing the film, I've been thinking about Penelope and Circe, and potentials down the line for projects centered around them as well, which also have a lot of fertile material.
At the same time, writing about myth seems really uncool as a subject matter. At least for poets. What do the Greeks offer us now? Maybe the answer is more than we think. Last night, I caught a glimpse of its powering nearly sold-out theater in the middle of downtown Chicago early on a summer evening when they could be doing literatally anything else. Granted, it had been a stormy afternoon and perfect for the cinema. But, turning my head, I saw the rapt faces of a large audience all in their recliners, inside a darkened theatre reliving a story that is thousands of years old. And that even in this anti-intelectual age, maybe the stories will make us okay, Not as a placebo or a distraction, but as a way to touch our shared humanity. To pluck it like Odysseus' bow. To make it hum.
Comments