Well, here we are, in the middle of the story. I can never quite break away, in Holy Week, from the idea of being in the throes of a tale unfolding, of being in some kind of real-time replay. And in fact we are: it's spring, and the old exhausted winter must be put to death so new life can be born - whether everlasting or merely until around October is up to you, really. (Of course, I say this now: and it's snowing outside, which for London is just ludicrous of course. Though I'm sure I can remember at least one other Easter when it snowed here.)
One of the oldest and most human of all human attributes is our need for stories. They do literally explain us to ourselves; they also explain the world. Little Miss B was raised, for example, on Greek myths, which were explained to her as the attempts of ancient people to explain the attributes of the world, which is one reason why the myths and legends of different civilisations can be so similar: they are - in the sense that applies only (for all we know) to our own world - universal. This is why Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces was such a seminal book, after the adolescent shock-to-the-system that is The White Goddess: long before Christopher Booker's back-to-basics Seven Basic Plots, they showed us something about how we work. Imagine my joy unbounded when, aged something-or-other, I discovered that the wife of Bragi (the Norse god of poetry) was called Idun, and she had a precious store of apples which helped the gods to stay young. At some point she is lured by Loki out of Asgard, and without her apples the gods age visibly; great means have to be resorted to in order to get her back and restore their eternal youth.
Campbell and Booker are both Jungian in their philosophy, though Booker also bolstered himself with an epigraph from Johnson, just to be on the safe side. And while we don't want to turn "The world's plots into a narrative sludge," as Adam Mars-Jones pithily said in his review of Booker,* it is a good idea to get over this idea that we're somehow more clever than the people who went before us, or that our world is somehow full of things that weren't in theirs, and sometimes to respect something precisely because it's a story, not in spite of it. We're concerned here wih plot, but also with scenario, character and symbol.
Sorry, I'm tying myself up in knots here. I know there are problems with Jung. Jaysus. There are problems with everything. In a minute you'll see how that's the only way we can possibly understand that everything is okay. And no, I don't mean that the Holocaust's okay! We are allowed to have some things, the things that are okay, be okay - I'm trying to say that the point of the story - any story - is to figure out how they are, and which ones they are, and what went wrong when it did go wrong.
Basically, I think what I'm getting at is that although everything is itself - gloriously, beautifully so, as Henry James might have said - everything also represents something else. This is the case if someone who unaccountably disturbs you suddenly reminds you of the bully at school, or if the colour of the wallpaper in a hotel room makes you feel weirdly sad - or happy - and maybe it's the same as in your favourite room in the house where you grew up; or, you know, the stars twinkle out at sea... People talk about symbol being pretentious (eg in discussions of poetry) but all it is is something reminding you of something else, and harnessing or assuming some of the properties of power of that other thing. Hence, in dreams, if you dream about money it represents your "values," aka "what you treasure." Hence eggs mean new life. Also, though the ancients didn't really know it yet, aren't they universe-shaped? Hence also eg female=vessel, male=the thing that goes in the vessel. Smut!
Anyway, so here we are in the middle of a story. When I started writing this last night we were in a very sad bit of the story. I always feel, with Easter, that one should help to act out this story, but maybe only because it's traditional. Then again, why not be traditional? Acting out a story, following it to the point of empathetically becoming part of it, is a good, cathartic thing for us humans. It's why we like movies better on the big screen and why we think 3D is an improvement. (Hm. Maybe I'm the exception.) It's why, as Booker says in the intro to his Seven Basic Plots book, "we take it for granted that the great story-tellers, such as Homer and Shakespeare, should be among the most famous people who ever lived."
On Thursday, after a week of increasing tension and uncertainty, though with great reviews in the popular local press, Jesus sat down to a meal with his friends and followers. The authorities were after him; they didn't like his brand of insurgence and they were frankly annoyed that it was such a hit with the very people they were trying to keep under control. Okay? Then we have the betrayal by the best friend. In the Gnostic Gospel of Judas Jesus even reveals to us, in a touch almost worthy of (though, frankly, subtler than) Italo Calvino, that we are in a story: he says to Judas words along the lines of, "Yes, off you go; you have to betray me, because that's just what you do, and it's the story."
On Friday Jesus is duly taken away by the authorities, driven through the streets and then executed in a particularly nasty, humiliating way - humiliating, on top of everything else, because it is usually reserved for the lowest sorts of thieves and gangsters, horrible people - though, in this story, even they are not allowed to be without their redeeming qualities. I think we don't need to be reminded of the power this part of the story has for us poor humans, who have suffered thousands of years of political and personal oppression, who have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, who have been silenced and misrepresented, who have so often known we were not what we were made through circumstances to seem. Part of the power that this story has is that it is so universally applicable, to large-scale political events - due to the civic nature of Jesus' protest - and also to small, personal disasters. The fact is that this story of Jesus has provided comfort and example to many.
In fact, at the time when he was executed, at 3pm, there was a fearful storm (or was it an eclipse?) and the whole sky went dark. The people who had come to sit vigil with him - or to watch for fun, as there were no movies in those days - were terrified. So although he is stripped of his public pride and killed, there is a hint even here of the power he possesses. He is, of course, Everyman, literally, in that he is God (and the son of God) and, according to this model, God is all of us. So he, God, and all of us, dies and is put in a tomb by his friends.
Of course he rises again! On the third day. That's early today, this morning. The friends went to the tomb to look after his poor body, and discovered the stone in the doorway rolled away, and no body inside. In some versions he speaks to them, says everything is all right, and he's going to work. In some they are left to infer all this. In yet more, the naughty ones, he goes away to Egypt and lives a life of sybaritic pleasure with Mary Magdalene or similar - that's the Alec Guinness version. But whichever it is, today we're all wearing nice clothes and eating hot cross buns and chocolate, and singing songs, because we're acting out the happiness of the friends when they found that their dead friend was alive again, which also meant that they were alive again (because when someone you love dies you do feel as if you too are dead, don't you), and of course it was spring, and Persephone was freed from the Underworld, so everything could grow again and they would all eat in the summer, and in fact everything is in its place and all's right with the world.
Unless you had the story of everything going wrong, how could you possibly know it was all right?
* By the way, in case any of you read the review, I'd just like to say that I think his view of the role of the anima and animus is fundamentally flawed, by being partial. The mistake he seems to be making is to view the thing literally - a very common failing de nos jours - and looking from the dark bottom of the well we know as the politics of gender and sexuality. It just ain't so that because the hero is a male character, seeking to incorporate his anima in the person of the heroine, the reader or viewer must be literally male! Just as she is the anima of him, he is the animus of her. The story is admonishing all of us in the same way.
I'm certainly not above a feminist rendering of a story, and I know there are problems with Jung, but I think on this one we can just let it rest. The ancient stories allow women more power than the ancient world did, and often more than our newer stories do.
