Back Into the Dark (Part I)
My friend Karl grumbles that there's really no good reason for the year to begin January, but really, it seems to me utterly self-evident why we begin and end our years in darkness, just as it strikes me as equally obvious why we choose that time to celebrate the birth of the Savior. This is, really, rudimentary symbolism, the kind that's hardwired into our brains: The time of year when the shadows are long, and snow covers the ground; the time of year when nothing grows, and the air's so frigid it burns your skin. The time of year when you light candles and wait for the land and sun to be born again, and all the fervent hope that we, too, have a resurrection ahead of us. That there is a spring beyond the winter of the body.
I'm teasing poor Karl a bit, of course, but he makes my point so well. We get so literal-minded sometimes that we fail to grasp the symbols and metaphors we first carved to make sense of the world. The ones we're still soaking in, centuries later. The ones that make up the very syntax of how we relate to nature, to each other, and to the hypothetical God. And of course there's someone reading this right now, some sensible aetheist, who's muttering to himself that we don't need these symbols anymore. They're just relics of the past. We understand how the world works now. And maybe he has a point, but then, I'm no atheist, and I have trouble believing that we understand how the world works when I live in a New England city that's consistently surprised each winter when it snows. Make no mistake, the mind is an amazing thing, and the light of reason has banished many demons. But we're not entirely reasonable creatures, are we? No, there's always some small part of us huddling against the dark in some desolate cave. Perhaps, the, it's easy to see why why our culture is awash in depictions of sex and violence, why we're captivated by them, and the two inevitabilities they promise us: birth and death.
We're born in the dark and, eventually, we head back into it. This is the simple, salient fact of our existence, and not a one of us can do anything but guess as to what, if anything, happens on either side of that short equation. I'm not inviting a theological debate, mind, I'm just pointing to the simplest truth of why we are the way we are: We are, always, surrounded by darkness, and the entirety of human civilization is nothing but a sort of Christmas -- a brief flicker of light amid the dark and cold, and no matter how much we instill ourselves with faith and reason, we know with every thump of our caveman heart that, eventually, we'll each of us, at the end, face that darkness alone.
So we create symbols to deal with all of that, to communicate on that level, to speak to that place that only understands emotional aggregates. And sometimes we call those symbols heroes and monsters, and we let them war inside our skulls to remind us of the darkness, and how we overcome it, over and over, perpetually striving for the distant promise of spring. And sometimes we let our heroes also be monsters, because that, too, is an old and necessary thing. Sometimes what we need from our heroes changes, and so we rewrite our stories accordingly. But it's worth remembering what they sometimes were, because those old stories are always rumbling beneath the new ones. Greek myths are filled with "heroes" who commit atrocities, who lie and murder. Sometimes, they're barely better than the monsters they stand against. Of course, sometimes a little better is better enough, especially when the young of your city are bing fed to the Minotaur. Who cares about Theseus' ill treatment of Ariadne, or his being so self-involved that he forgot to change the color of his sails?
No, they're not exactly the qualities we look for in heroes in today's literature. Except we do. Because nobility and justice are only one set of priorities. There are others -- the ones that give us westerns and samurai films, and the nascent heroic images rising out of the American urban ganglands, from John Wayne films to the brilliant anime series Afro Samurai, the place where personal and familial honor hold sway above all else, and were vengeance has actual currency.
