On the subject of personal myth.

[aquabean]

Over on her lj permetaform has put up a post about personal mythologies.

And it made me think. And then ramble on for a bit.

I come from a family of storytellers. There is an oral tradition that isn't just limited to family anecdotes, but to any story we come across. We are a family of people who read out loud -- share it the instant we find it, even -- compulsively. My father and I are the worst offenders, he having gotten the trait from his mother and me, from him. To this day there are authors and stories, Thurber and Merton, and The Hobbit, that will always sound in my head exactly the way I first heard them in his voice.

I am a ridiculously visual person. Pictures, photographs will remained tattooed in my mind forever. I spoke once of how much Ken Burn's series, The Civil War, affected me. The images have tainted forever the way I view war, the way I look at young people around me, the way I view uniforms as a whole. It's a kind of mythology I appropriated and made my own. It's not about the patriotism, or the "nobility" of the sacrifice, but the sacrifice itself. It's about the youth, and the disregard for life, and if there is nobility, it is the nobility of the individual. Maybe this is why some fandoms (FMA, and Saiyuki come to mind), hit me so hard. It comes back to this sense of others, older, and with no regard for the lives they place in front of the cannons, sending youth out to "save the world." Even when maybe the world doesn't need saving. This, at least in part, why our current political state of affairs bothers me so much.

But even this, these stories that are new, if they hit that note, I hear them in my father's voice. My creation always begins with a Father. A father with a voice that told a story, that made the world and gave it light and life because he spoke it and loved it. It feeds into the Christianity I was raised in, certainly, and perhaps that's why I find my faith to be such an important part of my life. The creation story never really meant much to me, except in the context of the telling of a story to create the world. God spoke the world into existence. Pretty phenomenal way to go about things. Having read Cornelia Funke's Inkheart, where a girl's father can actually read a story to life, I found myself, all these years later, realizing that maybe that just want I was waiting for my father to do. It's what I'm still waiting for myself to do.

Comments

[nightengale.livejournal.com]

Dude. I can't even touch the simple depth of all that. But I hear it, and you've gotten me spinning in thought as well.

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

You remember how I said I hate being read to? This actually ties into that. When I was little, I knew that if I learned to read the story, then I was a part of it. I would have the power of the words, which yes, definitely ties into my own background as a Christian. And telling the story, writing it down, tied in even more closely still.

I wanted it to be my own voice bringing my world into creation.

[permetaform]

ohhhhh, but that was neat and beautiful! Thank you!