Snow, Myth, Wire and String

February 10, 2010

The nice thing about being trapped in my apartment for the last three days has been the productivity it’s forced upon me. I’ve been working on my myths stories, reading and researching like crazy, reading through my monsters, myths of the world, and ritual books, plowing through myth motifs online, and also reading (finally!) Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String. And though I realize I’m the only person in the world who hadn’t read this book already, I’m about to hold forth on it anyway. It is my blog.

As most of you have probably discovered for yourselves, the magic of Marcus’s book is in the slow but steady construction of a new/old world–it is/isn’t us, we are/aren’t the “members” in Marcus’s text. Right away the book was familiar, as it will be to anyone who’s studied anthropology, myth, religion, ritual, or history. It’s a guidebook to a civilization, with motifs and terms and testimonies. At first, it was just a bit of a slog because of course it reads nonsensically; but very shortly–after just one or two motif descriptions–the wording was so perfect, the constructs so precise and careful that I absolutely started to believe this world. I didn’t quite know what I was believing, but I believed in it just the same. It was kind of like being a very small child; you understand little of the world around you, but you never doubt its existence. And like a child, when I read Marcus’s book I began to catch small truths, then large truths,  emotions that I recognized, that rang true underneath the names given to banal objects.

If you’ve studied much history at all you know that religion eventually becomes myth, and myth becomes folktale or legend. This is true for all societies and civilizations, everywhere. So it the smaller pieces of Wire and String read like folktale, the larger pieces like myth. The religion, the world, we know to be a primitive one–or do we? How easy to see the realness, the need for worship, of a Thompson or a bird or a Perkins or–especially–a Father.  As I read further, I was drawn in deeper to this world like a looking glass placed against ours, topsy-turvy and frightening but also somehow ours, somehow real, somehow the only real. The inverted glass in the inverted glass.

The writing is brilliant, and often funny. “The Food Costumes of Montana,” for example, was one of my favorite funnier chapters. But just as you’re sucked into the craft and phrasing, the wordplay and games, you come across a definition like this one:

WESTERN WORSHIP BOXES      The smallest structures, designed to fit precisely one body. They are rough-walled and dank, wooden and finely trimmed–the only areas of devotion.

No mistaking the despair or futility there. The recognition of death and the only final place to be complete and completely loved.To worship at one’s self, forever. Ouch.

The family relationships are also recognizable and poignant, particularly the relationship between father and son. The father in Wire and String is a changing, vast concept: leader, patriarch, disciplinarian, playmate, disappointment, cruel fiend, taskmaster, beloved.  I found, though, the most aching sadness in the relationships between brothers, echoed over and over again throughout the pieces, often opposed, absent and present, partly present (one leg left over from the dead brother) or present but a premonition of absence keenly felt.

Reading The Age of Wire and String was a transformative experience, and was so immensely helpful to my current project that I can’t possibly overstate the fact. Reading it was like dozing off while reading The Golden Bough,  to find an equally strange yet entirely recognizable ritual taking place in the grove, in the space between dreaming and waking. The book really pushed, really encapsulated for me the exact spot where religion, myth, folktale–the stories of our past, of humanity–mix and merge and tell some fundamental truth about all men that has never faded, never dampened, never died. We have and always will make the stories and the structures, give our words and actions and loved ones meanings beyond their meanings because we must, because to stand armed with nothing and face just the blank end, the box, would be unbearable. So we build instead. And this book understands that better than maybe any other I’ve read.