Work[s] on Myth
“Did myth work up the terrors of an unfamiliar world, with which it was confronted, into stories, or did it produce the terrors, for which it then also had palliatives to offer?” (Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, translated by Robert M. Wallace)
Work[s] on Myth began a while ago, without me initially realizing it. I started creating mini pocket-sized accordion booklets titled Little Stories of Horror and Cheer and mailing them out to people. Each one is filled with shapes and no words, each one unique. The shapes, the glued fragments - bits and pieces of all sorts of variations - are repositories for one’s stories. Their meanings are boundless. Perhaps they are suggestive of the mystery of one’s life, the pieces of which can be shuffled, shifted, hidden or exposed. The exceptional exists in every life. Sometimes we need to reframe our own personal myths.
This initial making evolved while reading Hans Blumenberg’s Work on Myth (for which this series is titled). Blumenberg (1920-1996), the German philosopher, had a radical take on myths. I am still making my way through his ideas. We need to reconsider and recreate the cultural myths that are lazily embedded in our collective consciousness. Reality is unpopular. But myth is not a construct. It is an interpretation. To borrow an idea of Blumemberg’s, it is reality woven in its improbability.
