Understanding the Mythologization of The Self and Others
Another Entry Into My Codex of Twine*
*
A Codex of Twine is the name of probably my longest lasting, most enduring darling that has yet to truly die. It is the title of what would have been (or perhaps one day will be) a collection of short stories about time travel and alternate realities revolving around my alter-ego Professor Micah Dresny, who was actually originally created by my friend. The titular codex is a universal constant that allows the reader to determine what decisions came to pass in a particular thread of reality.
It’s also a very unsubtle metaphor about choice.
A Prologue
The following musing is inspired by a recent, specific incident. This singular incident plays into a larger narrative about my life. And the only way to truly tell that story would to tell every other story that came before it.
The problem there is that not all of these stories are mine to tell. In their place, there are absences, there are a fabrications, there are shadows.
So instead of trying to do that, this is an explanation of the monomyth of myself, and by extension the obscured myth of all those who have existed, exist, and will exist in my orbit.
In simpler terms, this is a woven thing. A long, meandering woven thing, but a woven thing nonetheless.
[A Needle]
My second ever tattoo was of the 12th Arcana, the Handed Man, on my right wrist. Amongst the many things that the Hanged Man represents, it represents perspective. It represents self-sacrifice. It represents the putting of one’s self into a difficult position to find something that could not be found otherwise. It’s the tattoo that is most readily visibly to myself when I travel and hence the tattoo that ends up grounding me the most when I am out and about in the world having a whole body.
My artist used something called a “shovel” which was just a series of five needles meant to pack in all of the purple. It was a painful process for sure (not the most painful though), but in some way or another, it was a reminder that a needle has constantly proved my own existence, whether tattoos or shots or daily pinpricks to check blood sugar.
The monomyth of myself starts the simplest of asserts. I exist and…
[I Am Looking For Something That Does Not Exist…]
I’ve been listening to this particular version of Stick Season since it came out earlier this year.
The key lyric regardless of version is “And I’ll dream each night of some version of you / that I did not have / but I did not lose.”
I haven’t dated a lot. I’ve fallen for a lot of different people over the course of my life. Or maybe, I’ve fallen for their shadows? I think I’ll defer to my high school analog of Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, which of course is Fall Out Boy’s Hum Hallelujah.
“I thought I loved you but it was just how you looked in the light.”
And it is here perhaps you can see the intersection of the mythology of self and the mythology of others. It is here you can begin to glimpse on the people shaped voids in the story, the names I am not comfortable putting out into the world even if I am willing evoke their essence and cast a long shadow of the lessons I’ve learned.
Paramount of these lessons is that we exist in context, not in vacuum. We exist because of our interactions with each other. It’s a lesson I also learned from Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I’m not ashamed of that.
I am not a historian or an archivist. I can’t tell you tell you dates of things. I don’t keep a comprehensive records. I am a lore keeper though. I have retained a shocking amount of knowledge of all the media I’ve consumed and all the ways I’ve influenced others and how other influences me. I keep trinkets and tchotchkes and I can tell you the story behind them. I have a mental mapping of who recommended what to me and why, how I learned about that show or this band, the reason I have this DVD or that piece of vinyl. And in the tracking of all of this, perhaps I am hoping to find a path to whatever the end goal is.
[Everything I Write Is A Love Letter]
Right before I graduated undergrad way back in 2013, instead of properly studying for my electrical engineering final in a quiet space where I could pay attention and try to retain knowledge, I went to the student cafeteria with my textbook and mindlessly copied equations and annotated them poorly for 30 minutes before spending the rest of the night talking with my friend Sam (I ended up barely passing that finale and got a C- in the course, but that was enough to pass with a whole other bachelors, so I guess it all worked out).
During that night, we spent a lot of time discussing my observations of our spoken word poetry group and how everyone’s writing was driven by something. And I don’t remember the exact assessments I gave, although I can very confidently state that this idea of drive did eventually evolve into the heading you see today.
I am truly at my best when I’m writing about things that I love. And I don’t always get to that, but the things I am most proud of are ultimately different types of love letters. Projects of passion and projects of persistence.
And it’s far too recent for me to reasonably spoil, but I really think everyone should watch all of Misfits & Magic S1 and S2 because the ultimate interpretation of magic is very much rooted in a very sincere spot, but I can’t really say more than that.
[A Thread]
In racing and strategy games, a “line” is the a series of actions that produce an optimal outcome. In strategy games, this is not something easily visualized. In racing games, there tends to be an overlay. As silly as the Gran Turismo movie was, I very much enjoyed it and I very much enjoyed having the protagonist visualize the lines.
In many ways, I also try to visualize the line (read, the thread, the twine, the series of choices). I, like many others, don’t like not knowing the outcome so I try to get a sense of it by imagining the lines, by looking down the road.
It’s not a reasonable thing to do constantly. It lends itself to a ridiculous degree of catastrophic thinking. It has managed to navigate me out of some potentially messy situations.
Sometimes the line is easy to see. Sometimes the line ends abruptly, but it does not matter, because ultimately, we have to accept the outcome no matter what it is. And sometimes, the line is just wrong because it is not actually feasible to account for the universe.
[This Story is (Probably Not) About You]
Back when Barnes & Nobles or Borders was the preferred way to get my books, I remember picking up a copy of The Five People You Met In Heaven by Mitch Albom.
The premise of the story is simple. When you die, you meet five people in heaven that had a significant impact on your life. I had forgotten this book exists until I started thinking about the complex nature the myth of self and the myth of others and also maybe after coming cross this shirt from Welcome to Night Vale.
Ultimately, it is a story about impact, expected and unexpected. Ultimately, I think there are a lot more than five people who I’d like to converse about their influence when it’s all said and done.
I’m fortunate enough to have forged many bonds and even while I seek for something a little more precise, I do take comfort in knowing that I’ve done some measurable good if nothing else.
[…Yet. It Does Not Exist Yet.]
I don’t think linearly. I think in cycles and circles. I believe very much in causality and cascades, but I’ve found that the only way I know how to tell sometimes story is to tell all other stories in an order that makes narrative sense which is crucially not always consistent with the chronological sense.
One of my prized possession is a gifted copy of Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (an aside, The Things They Carried was one of the few books in high school English that I remember fondly). Going After Cacciato is a story about pursuit. A soldier recounting his squad’s chase of an AWOL soldier.
It it a journey, it is a chase, it is a hunt, it is a modern myth. One of self, one of others. All of these things, disparate as they are, displaced in time and place as they are, they are all connected.
[A Tapestry]
The mythologization of self and others is a story of synonyms. We are grand things. We are not unique in the gravitas of our story, but we are special in the lessons we take and the lessons we teach.
It feels only fitting to end this prolonged entry to my codex of twine talking about a classic myth.
I, like every other child, loved Greek Mythology (hell, my social media handle is directly inspired by the Chimera) although one of my more poignant attachments was to the 1997 TV adaptation of the Odyssey on NBC (a sentence that very much feels like a fever dream to say out loud).
Now the part of the story that stuck with me the most was not the journey through magical islands, but the dedication of Penelope: the careful weaving and unweaving of the tapestry every night for years, the preservation and dedication to the myth/memory of Odysseus, and when the facade falters, a thrown gauntlet in the form of an arrow (perhaps foolishly we too can call this a needle).
We mythologize ourselves and the ones we love. Sometimes to a fault. Sometimes to a greatness. I suppose living is the process of divining through what is myth, what is reality, and what is the truth hiding between the woven lines of both.