I learned of the recent death of my grade 9 English teacher, Dan Patterson. I wouldn’t describe him as my favourite teacher; I reserve that distinction for one of my high school crushes (which I shared with most adolescent males in my class)—Jane Sokoloff, also an English teacher. But in terms of influence, Mr. Patterson was at the top of the list along with a handful of others who, oddly enough, all taught me in junior high school.
While I did end up doing my first degree in English, I don’t think Mr. Patterson can be held responsible for that decision. I regard him as influential for another reason. He introduced me to the foundations of everything important in how I think about the world. He introduced me to Shakespeare (Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice); he introduced me to the tricks of rhetorical practice; he introduced me to good novelists like Nevil Shute, John Wyndam and George Orwell; he introduced me to the essay; and he made a fuss over me when I composed an essay that particularly pleased him. And, perhaps most importantly, he introduced me to classical Greek myths along with tales by Ovid. Again, while I have taken the trouble to gain a working knowledge of both Greek and Latin, I don’t think Mr. Patterson can be held responsible for that decision. Nevertheless, he helped establish an imaginative framework that will haunt through all my life.
We tend to be dismissive of ancient stories. Often these tales use a strange and stilted language and feature characters with odd names, and the stories unfold in formulaic ways that jar with our 21st century sensibilities. Sometimes we see no points of intersection with our life today. What concern is it of ours that some long–dead warrior had a bum heel, or that twins were suckled by a she–wolf and went on to found a great city. I think most of us have the same response to the biblical myths. Many of the stories seem impenetrable—a talking snake in a garden, a man getting his hair caught in the branches of a tree, a warrior slaying an army with the jawbone of an ass.
But by the time I was in university, I had begun to cultivate a fascination for these tales, particularly those of a classical ilk. Moving into adulthood, I found myself appropriating some of those tales for myself. Some of them spoke to me across more than 2500 years. You might say that I breathed new life into them dry bones.
Here are a few that have held particular meaning for me:
1. Alexander and the knot of Gordium.
When I was setting up a law practice, my partner and I decided that we needed a logo for our business cards & stationery. We worked with a friend of mine who is a graphic artist, & settled on a design inspired by the story of Alexander in the kingdom of Gordium. After Alexander had entered the kingdom, he appeared in the court of King Gordius. The king presented to him a knot which was reputed to have been so cleverly tied that no one could ever untie it. Alexander contemplated the problem for a little while, then drew his sword and cut the knot in two.
2. Theseus and the labyrinth of Minos.
When the isle of Crete was ruled by king Minos, there was a labyrinth where lived a Minotaur, a creature half man and half bull. No one had ever entered the labyrinth and survived. As part of a tribute to the kingdom of Crete, the Athenians had to provide 7 young men and 7 young women to be fed to the Minotaur every 9 years. Theseus volunteered to go in place of one young man and promised to slay the Minotaur. But before he entered, the king’s daughter, Ariadne, gave him a ball of thread and told him to play out the thread as he went deeper into the maze. For even if he slew the Minotaur, unless he could find his way back to the entrance, he might wander aimlessly through the labyrinth until he died of starvation. Theseus did find the Minotaur and destroyed it, then successfully emerged from the labyrinth.
I take this as a tale about the value of history. To survive, we must remember where we’ve come from.
3. Daedalus and Icarus.
Daedalus, the clever, was the man who had designed the labyrinth for king Minos. To keep him from revealing the secret of the labyrinth, Minos locked him in a tower with his son, Icarus. Daedalus collected the feathers of birds and used them to fashion wings which he and his son could wear in order to escape from the tower. The larger feathers were sewn together, but the smaller feathers were joined to the wings with wax. Before they took flight, Daedalus warned his son not to fly too high. Naturally, Icarus wanted to soar higher, but as he approached the sun, its heat melted the wax and he fell into the sea.
This can be read as an admonition against any number of behaviours—like placing too much faith in science and technology, or like underestimating the power of natural forces.
One of the things I find odd is that we dismiss these meaning–laden tales as the silliness of a primitive culture, yet we are willing to accord absolute authority to similar tales that arose from an equally primitive culture. So, for example, rather than inquire about the meaning of the story about Herod and the slaughter of the innocents, we expend ridiculous sums of money trying to verify the factual accuracy of the story. For me, the value of this story is twofold. First, its sets up a resonant echo with two mosaic tales—the story of Moses placed in the basket as an infant, and the story of the passover. Matthew is signalling that we must read his account in light of the Hebrew scriptures. Second, it is a tale of estrangement. Like the banishment from Eden, and like the Jews carried off to Babylon, a great evil precipitates a separation. In this instance, it is the separation of Jesus from the Jewish people through exile in Egypt. Like the divided identity of Adam and Moses, and all the Jewish people for that matter, this tale signals that Jesus’ apprehension of the world is forever marked by an identification with those in exile. He is for the innocents who suffer.
But this begs an interesting question: where does the story’s meaning reside? The most common (and least helpful) view is that a story’s meaning resides in its correspondence to reality. Hence our obsession with verifying the authenticity of the Turin Shroud and the ossuary of James, brother of Jesus, until we find ourselves financing small armadas of scholars scurrying about like rats on their sinking intellectual ships. Even in the case of fiction, we esteem those works which bear a verisimilitude. The character was “real,” we say, or “true” or “fully realized,” which means that if we didn’t know it was a novel, we might mistake it for biography, whereas it is far more likely that everything we have ever read under the guise of biography is, in fact (so to speak), fiction. After all, a biography isn’t worth reading unless its subject matter was a “character” or “larger than life.”
Another suggestion people make is that a story’s meaning can be discerned by reference to its author’s intention. Although slightly more sophisticated than the “correspondence to reality” notion, it doesn’t get us very far. If people want to know what Christopher Hitchens “really” meant when he wrote his latest book, God Is Not Great, they can interview him and ask him to elaborate. And, as it appears from the spate of clips posted on YouTube, Christopher Hitchens is only too happy to oblige. If pressed, I’m sure he might tell us what he was eating when he wrote a particularly acerbic remark, or what personal disaster in the bedroom motivated the gloomiest of his chapters.
But there are a number of problems with this approach. First, Christopher Hitchens will die. All authors will die. And once dead, they will no longer be available to elaborate upon their writing. Ultimately, all writing must stand (or fall) alone and all the interpretive responsibility finally rests with the reader. Even in the case of my humble blog posts, should someone a hundred or even fifty years from now desire to know what I really meant, they will be SOL since I will be DEAD. The meaning of this post cannot possibly reside solely in my head, any more than the meaning of the book of Matthew resides solely in Matthew’s (thoroughly dead) head, since I nevertheless find meaningful passages in the book of Matthew despite his death and expect (or at least hope) that you can find meaningful passages in my posts with or without my presence on this planet.
A second problem is not so much a problem as an observation. By analogy, God is often styled the author of all creation. However, if the analogy is to hold, then even if we say that God is the author of all creation, and even if we say that God is the author of all our scripture, nevertheless, all the interpretive responsibility still rests with us. One could argue that since God is a living god, that it is possible to “interview” such a god and get an elaboration on what God “really” means in the same way that we can interview Christopher Hitchens for a similar purpose. However, if such a god insists on setting us straight and keeping us from developing our own interpretive capacities, then such a god is, in Freudian terms, extremely anal and emotionally insecure. (This observation applies to Christopher Hitchens as well.)
I would go so far as to suggest that God (or at least God as understood by the authorial analogy) is thoroughly dead. The god of our traditional mythology has a single purpose—to serve as a provisional locus of our meaning. Since that meaning can only ever be located within us as we “read” our world, God is only a living god so long as we apply our minds in the act of seeking meaning. I don’t think this is a reductive view of God—just different.
And I find it amazing that the journey which takes me to this point had its beginning in a grade 9 English class with Dan Patterson’s introduction to mythology.