Weaponized

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  

Weaponized is proud to announce the publication of ‘The Ravens Head’ a powerful new book by author Craig VI Slee. 

Once upon a time, the first story was told – somewhere deep within the fields of memory, a vision was transmitted from one person to another. Once upon a time, a tale touched you and changed your world. It transported you somewhere else and left its fingerprints upon your life, and then when others saw the marks, you told of how they came to be. Over time, you wrapped yourself in stories, tattooing them upon the skin of your existence to make sense of all that happened. When others offered you stories, you took them gladly and spliced them with your own, until you could no longer discover where yours ended and theirs began.

Who exactly is it that tells your tale, guides the monologue and direct your actions? How much of your world is actually your own, and how much of it is painted scenery put there in the years before you were born? What is actually wallpaper over Plato’s cave walls, put there to soothe humankind and conceal the bare, unyielding rock?

What happens when you boil it all down and you are left with ash, ground down to the bone and struggling under the weight of loss and incomprehension?

Welcome then, to The Ravens’ Head.

A story about stories, about the search for the language of the birds, the tongue of the Angels – it chronicles the life and work of a man engaging in the oldest quest. The quest to become more human than human, and recover his nature from the mob-spectacle known as “reality.” 

The Ravens’ Head is part travelogue, part mythic narrative and part journey inward into the depths of consciousness itself. Written by a figure steeped in mythic landscapes and tales, it presents a unique take on life and the notions of disability and impairment.

Focusing on the inescapable notions of physicality and sensation, it examines the conventions of power and control – revealing them to be nothing but stories and charms to ease the discomfort of life in an indifferent universe. 

A furious exploration of the connections between poetry and communication – between stories, myth and magic, it serves as a gateway into the world behind the wallpaper; through the metaphors of ancient myth and personal experience, it opens doors for the reader to examine their own life and partake in a glorious phantasmagoria of inspired creation. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 
CRAIG ‘VI’ SLEE or MR. VI if you’re feeling formal, lives in the North of England in a place charmingly nicknamed ‘Hanging Town’. Crazed spastic: poet, storyteller and philosopher, he embraces a peculiar life of furious seizure. 

Gripped by the ecstatic awe and dread known by the ancients as wôdh, he makes deals with the grandfathers of ravens and counts the Furious Host as blood brothers. He sits at crossroads in the middle of the night and knows the scent of blood and frost as well as he does mead and woodsmoke. 

He’s more than a little bit dead. He drinks dark ale and smoky whisky and can send you places by the power of his voice. The waters of the dream-sea flow in his veins and pain is the herald and gateway of his vision. 

He made a deal with the Devil in the grounds of a thousand year-old church, giving up his soul for skill with words. Or he conjured up the Headless One and ignited the immortal fire, and he walks without walking, striding through your dreams and over the graves of giants. 

At least, these are some of the stories they tell of him. He has a beard and a hat, and if you asked about them and called him a sorcerer, he couldn’t possibly comment. But he does like cats, which is nice. 

ABOUT WEAPONIZED: 
Weaponized publishes experimental forms of fiction, prose and art that offer new ways to experience stories and myth. They are passionately committed to finding unique narrative hybrids that challenge, engage, inform and inspire readers. 

The imprint was founded by FoolishPeople, FoolishPeople create film, theatre, music and books and curate and engineer immersive experiences that have the power to raise the numinous within the spectator. FoolishPeople are currently in post-production on ’Strange Factories’, a ground breaking immersive film that will be toured and presented within an immersive event created by FoolishPeople that explores the early history of cinema and film via the touring traditions of Phantasmagoria and theatric arcana. 

Since its launch in August 2010 Weaponized has published FoolishPeople scripts ‘Cirxus’ and ‘Dead Language’ by John Harrigan, ‘The Sparky Show’ by Xanadu Xero and ‘Forum’ by Richard Webb and ‘Citizen Y’ written by John Harrigan and James Curcio and ‘The End of the Word As We Know It’ by Wes Unruh.

‘The Ravens Head’ is published by Weaponized late 2012. 

Artwork by P. Emerson Williams 

PRESS CONTACT 
For further information please email press@weaponized.net

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 
London, May 17 - Weaponized is proud to announce the publication of ‘The End of the Word as We Know It’, a cycle of poetry composed by Wes Unruh. 

In this work Wes Unruh writes about our relationship to text, tied as it is into the restlessness, of the unburied dead and the impressions our words leave on the as yet unborn. Contained in these pages is a poetry cycle wrapped in the neither/nor initiation of self as an event and consciousness as a cascade.

‘The End of the Word as We Know It’ was written over the course of several years, but the bulk of the work was completed during the tornado outbreak of April, 2011 while the storms raged outside. Each poem in this cycle sets the stage for the next, an extended meditation on what text, words, and even letters mean. The book begins with the poem the title of the book is taken from, previously published as a lyrical element of Unquiet Mind’s 2004 album TEOTWAWKI, which situates the rest of the book at the crux between time and death where the great engine is fueled by us, as we seem to be meaning.

Outcry this Dark Story is narrated by Thorn, a letter, a giant, a whirlwind force of nature called up by the anger of the displaced and unburied dead. Thorn itself is subsumed into a morpheme, and the wind dissipates. 

Additional poetry thorughout the book establishes the neither/nor construct of signifier without sign, balanced between what does matter and what mind does. The energy that continues throughout this book criticizes the present for dishonoring the dead, yet flowers into an appreciation for the bewilderment and sorrow of the coming generations of humanity.

John Harrigan, one of the founders of Weaponized comments: “The End of the Word as We Know It’ is a rare and important book that examines the wonder and horror of being part of humanity’s procession through time. Wes Unruh is a gifted, talented writer who understands his true role as not only a writer, but as a seer for past and future generations. 

The End of the Word as We Know It’ will be published by Weaponized and available in print through major retailers and in Kindle and other eBook formats from July 2011.

About Wes Unruh:

Wes Unruh has previously published stories and poems in several collections and journals, including several poems published in the playbook for Terra:Extremitas. Wes is co-author (along with Edward Wilson) of the non-fiction book ‘The Art of Memetics’ and he has written for a number of online publications including Alterati.com, ModernMythology.net, and FoolishPeople.org. This is his first widely available book of poetry, and he is currently working on several novels which further develop the themes present in this collection.

About Weaponized:

Weaponized publishes experimental forms of fiction, prose and art that offer new ways to experience stories and myth. They are passionately committed to finding unique narrative hybrids that challenge, engage, inform and inspire readers.

The imprint was founded by FoolishPeople, a group that has been creating theatre, collaborative events, live art, books, music and film for over fifteen years. FoolishPeople combine mythology, shamanism, drama therapy, strategic forecasting and open source collaboration in the creation of this work.

Since its launch in August 2010 Weaponized has published FoolishPeople scripts ‘Cirxus’ and ‘Dead Language’ by John Harrigan, ‘The Sparky Show’ by Xanadu Xero and ‘Forum’ by Richard Webb.

Leading up to the publication of ‘The End of the Word as We Know It’ in July, Wes Unruh will be publishing Unrelated Thoughts, past poems which did not make it into this collection as a supplemental to the work featured in ‘The End of the Word as We Know It’.

www.wesunruh.com

PRESS CONTACT
For further information please email
press@weaponized.net

In the case of the myths that resonate with the multitude on a level deeper than entertainment, the anxiety that underlies the wholesale exchange of the profane for the sacred can produce a throwback to the “old time religion.” The mythic aura of a yesterday that never existed drives such cultural movements as we see demonstrated in the movie Jesus Camp, and this trend is evident in many revivalist and reactionary groups across the world, not just Christianity. It is also the basis of many American myths that sprang out of the 1950s, of idyllic family values, which reach from that time, and before, right up to the present.

This defensive reaction, to look backwards in times of chaos, cannot be restricted to one ideology. It is one of the forms of modern mythology that we most frequently encounter. As Samuel P. Huntington explores in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, the coming world conflicts will be driven along ideological and cultural fault lines, even if underlying motivational factors in some cases include more material concerns, such as territory or overburdened resources. In other words, even resource-driven conflicts are likely to be painted in ideological terms, especially in regard to the motivating force presented to the people who make up the backbone of any military force. The idea of the US as a “global peacekeeper” is such a myth as well, as much as the idea that jewels could be cut from the bellies of Muslims, a story ostensibly propagated during the third crusade.     

The drive behind fanaticism, and fascism — which is an affliction not unlike fanaticism — is psychological, not material. William Reich explored this in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Consider this, taken from a chapter appropriately named Ideology as a Material Force, “Those who followed … the revolutionary Left’s application of Marxism between 1917 and 1933 had to notice that it was restricted to the sphere of objective economic processes and government policies, but that it neither kept a close eye on nor comprehended the development and contradictions of the so-called ‘subjective factor’ of history, i.e., the ideology of the masses.”      

10 Many rhetorical devices of modern news broadcasts utilize a knowledge of the power of mythology with startling effect, crippling the rational capacity of the audience with the use of a few well times key words and some ideological hand-waving. Fox News is most well known for this approach, but it is at its core a methodology without any inherent political stance. A “liberal agenda” is as easily served by this approach as any other. If you’re preaching to the choir, amplification both further indoctrinates and further excites the converted. 

The extremists driving ideological conflicts are borrowing from mere echoes of myths originating thousands of years ago, catalyzing the existential fear, hate, or desire latent in a culture, and more pointedly, within the individuals that comprise that culture. Again borrowing from Reich’s study on fascism, or Deleuze and Guittari’s examination in Anti-Oedipus, the principles of personal psychology also control mass-psychology. The fascist of the state is the fascist within. This alchemy produces poisonous splinter factions, fundamentalist groups that cause many of the pathological habits our cultures otherwise exhibit, in concentrated form. The atrocities perpetrated by the State far exceed those any one individual could account for, but the will to those ends must be spread through a sufficient body of a public to maintain integrity.

Far from being in the exceptions, these splinter groups have been responsible for much of the history of the 19th and 20th centuries that has made its way into the books, whether we are speaking of the rise and fall of Soviet communism, the second World War, or the ongoing strife in the Middle East. Though exploring politics or even religious ideology as the only lens to gaze at myth in modern forms is misleading. We want to look at the very mechanisms of myth, not how it manifests in just the relation of nations, or corporations, or individuals, or the religio-politics of previous era. It is nevertheless worth noting that the mythologies utilizes by these groups have all been re-purposed, whether we speak of the selective use of scripture by religious fundamentalists, or the more bizarre relationship between National Socialism and occultism, which underlined the rise of the Third Reich despite Hitler’s professed abhorrence for the occult. These fringe elements are at most times culturally inert, but have the potential to overcome the whole of a culture during crisis points, as the Nazis did after World War I.      

However, myth as a whole cannot be considered a result of such use. Nor can myth be “killed,” in any event. It can be a healing, as well as destructive, force.  But we’ve only given the first, most tentative glimpse of the role myth plays in our lives.

James Curcio

 Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

 
To anyone who winces at the thought of a story being just fiction, the relegation of myth to the status of untruth should appear incredibly unfortunate. Myths have been the lifeblood of culture since the birth of civilization, and they live on in all of the beliefs that structure our experience of reality. So the modern definition, “a commonly accepted but untrue belief,” is not at all what we mean when we say “myth” in this book. However, the common definition tacitly defines the predominant myth of our times, our cultural stance in regards to spirituality, our dependence upon fact as our only source of psychological nourishment. (It also belies our misunderstanding of the purpose of a symbol, but that will have to wait until we dig a bit deeper.)     

The value that myth provides is demonstrated in the fact that it has been with us since the birth of civilization. The myths, art, and religions of antiquity sprung into existence together. The earliest artistic artifacts are religious, or is it the other way around? It is hard to say. Myth and art, still nearly inseparable terms, provide a distorted mirror for us to regard ourselves in. We see ourselves in a new light, the best artists showing us existential truths through the distortion or even complete abandonment of empirical truths. Thus artists, and the myths they weave from their own lives, direct our eyes inward, both as individuals and as a culture, in a new way.     

It is a self evident fact that myths speak to our humanity. They convey meaning. This was clear to me from an early age. As a youth I remember staring at the television in befuddlement as documentaries would attempt to discover the supposed “historic truth” of a myth. Did giants actually walk the Earth before the time of King Arthur’s court? How did Noah manage to get every species of animal aboard a single ship? These are the wrong questions to ask, and for the wrong reasons. Myths speak to the narrative, the qualitative, to the emotional side of us which quite simply need stories and images, both grand and mundane, for us to relate ourselves to. It can provide psychological nourishment, and cultures that are devoid of the ability to distinguish myth from literal truth suffer for it. Such a thing could hardly be called a culture at all.      

If you bear with us a moment in the premise that myth is something vital to our nature, then an absence of it, or more accurately, an absence of the ability to recognize it, would be a deep cultural and existential crisis. A quick glance at current events makes it clear that we are in just such a position, even though no solid connection between the two has yet been drawn. This is a feeling that I experienced very strongly as I passed through adolescence, and I quickly discovered that it was something many others were feeling, though few were inclined to voice it. I tried to convey this in my first novel, Join My Cult!,  

“Spiritual, cultural apocalypse is much more subtle than mushroom clouds, fallout, and radiation burns. People can deny it. No statistics can prove it. The only evidence we have is a feeling of profound loss, and hope for a future that does not reduce the qualitative values of life to quantities, and for companions to share these stories with so that they can have value, and pass on to our children in the next world. ”  

Apocalypse literally means “lifting the veil.” (Greek: Apokálypsis.) I’m using the more modern version, but maybe not without a hint of the possibility for great transformation in times of uncertainty and turmoil. And lurking in even the most mundane hearts lies the possibility for transformation, however distant. The symbolism of the Blasted Tower trump in the Major Arcana of the traditional Tarot deck reflects this idea nicely, that moments of revelations most often occur at the points when all previous expectations have been utterly destroyed. Emmanuel Kant even hints at this with his aesthetics which include the sublime. The sublime of course can include what we commonly associate with it, but at the same time, it can include the powerful, horrific forces of nature and the psyche. This is apocalypse, and it is an idea closely linked with the sacred, as we will see moving forward.       

Neil Stephenson’s novel Anathem deals with the modern crisis of the sacred as well. The following passage is especially relevant, 

“So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same each day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer other to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.”      

An obvious conclusion of modernity is that we have no unifying myth, as Georges Bataille proposes: we live in a myth which is an absence of myth. Our world is a fast-paced, materialistically oriented, cultural melting pot, in which it seems that any need for mythology would quickly boil away.  Even amongst the ranks of those who are generally most sympathetic to the psychological value of myth, there has been increasing question of if myth has any place in our modern lives. For instance, Michael Vannoy Adams presented this material at the “Psyche and Imagination” conference of the International Association for Jungian Studies at the University of Greenwich, London, July 7, 2006,

“Recently, one Jungian, Wolfgang Giegerich, has argued that, at this stage in the history of consciousness, myth no longer has any psychological function… Ancient mythological figures, he contends, “do not suffice.” They are insufficient because, he says, “even though they may display certain formal similiarities” to the modern situation, “they are incommensurable” with it. …Giegerich, however, maintains that the modern psychological situation is utterly without precedent, without parallel. It is so radically different — or, as he says, so logically different — from the ancient mythological situation that any similarity is merely formal and thus insignificant. Giegerich says that the modern situation has “fundamentally broken with myth as such, that is, with the entire level of consciousness on which truly mythic experience was feasible.”   

Often the most obvious conclusion is often not the most poignant one. We do have myths, though they often exist in mediums not surrounded by the aura of the sacred. This will be demonstrated time and again throughout this work, as it is demonstrated in our daily lives if we know what to look for. Modern myths are so pervasive that they are nearly invisible. Those that are considered archaic, that is, they have ceased to function in the manner that they were meant to, become more apparent to us. We call our relics “myth.”     

On its face it certainly feels more accurate to say that we have lost touch with an understanding of the sacred rather than with myth, though exactly what that means, and whether it is ultimately accurate, also remains to be explored. It is far more likely that we have lost a sense of the sacred, but we cannot as a race lose our myths — certainly not before such a point that we have no beliefs or culture whatsoever. The history of civilization is, at one and the same time, the history of myth. Mircea Eliade explores this subject in The Sacred & The Profane. For our purposes at the moment it should be enough to highlight that the sacred represents not a single idea, but rather an entire category of ideation — a world-view. It is a world-view that perceives the world manifest to our senses as itself symbolic of an invisible world. “By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to be itself. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguished it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality.” (Eliade, Sacred & The Profane.)      

This conception of the sacred seems to demand the transcendent, the invention of the supernatural. This category is required for no other reason than to draw a contrast with the profane. It stands to reason that everything is natural; even if the universe is unexplainable, it would still remain “natural.” Forgive the tautology: nature is what is. The distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” is only relevant, only meaningful, in the context of the profane when contrasted with the sacred. Needless to say, inventing the “supernatural,” a new category of being to house the sacred, creates its own slew of problems that must be dealt with, such as superstition.    

In Eliade’s conception, and I believe it is a point well taken, a sacred object is so because it is a symbol, a link, with the archetype standing “behind” the physical, profane object. A sacred canoe is not just a canoe, it is “canoe,” or it is a canoe within the context of a specific myth pertaining to canoes, or the sacred river, etc.  This distinction also cuts across experiential boundaries. The sacred and profane shows themselves not only in the perception of things but also in the perception of time. For instance during a sacred festival, a concept that we have mostly lost touch with in our purely profane holidays6 — one enters into the time before time, recapitulating the birth of the world, or some other mythological event which occurs outside of profane time. The phrase “time before time” is an odd approximation, a metaphor created from within the field of time. Sacred time and sacred objects do not truly stand “outside,” “behind,” or “before” their profane counterparts; they are distinguished as occupying two separate ontological categories simultaneously, and there may even be some kind of exchange or interplay between the two, as sacred festivals and rituals demonstrate.7     It is to that point, the crossroads of the sacred and profane, that this work is ultimately aimed; for it is in this intermediary zone that myth actually occurs. The constructed supernatural realm loops back into the otherwise inaccessible elements of our own being, as a piece of psychological sleight-of-hand that allows us to conditionally stake a claim in the ever-shifting, dark chaos that is the true nature of reality, un-sculpted by human sensation, consideration, and expectation. The condition we must

6. All of the major holidays in the United States, for instance, are profane: means of re-enforcing consumer behavior or an excuse to drink. They borrow iconography, of course, most commonly from Christianity, many of those symbols themselves taken wholesale from Pagan sources.

7. This is to some extent shown in the distinction between kairos and chronos, the time of experience which stands on its own, divine or sacred time, perhaps even an “eternal” moment, and chronological time.

accept when engaging with myth is that we pretend the shadows on the wall, the image on the screen, or the entities in our dreams represent some type of reality.      

It may come as a surprise to some that we are never too far from the trappings of mythology in our daily lives. They are in movies, books, our mutually created narratives on the Internet, even on television. They can be insightful or vapid. The very drive for people to make complete fools of themselves on reality TV is also the attempt to fulfill a mythic need. To be famous is to be externally mythologized. The thing that many of us find so repellent about these trends in pop culture is the complete and utter lack of the sacred. Myth is not absent.      

We relate with these stories differently than people who lived in a world before the computer, television or typewriter. There seems to be something different about how we experience stories, even though the analogy of campfire storytelling and Internet communication is occasionally drawn.

8. Modern myths of this nature often don’t strike their audiences as deeply because they are perceived as just stories, or movies. The lights come up in the theater and the illusion is dispelled. Or, more frequently nowadays, we lose attention entirely mid-stream and surf to another channel or web-page, to take another fragment into the bricolage of our wandering consciousness. In a capitalist society, myths too take on a capitalist bent. Further, they serve its ends. They are more readily consumed than engaged with, but this does not mean that they do not leave their mark. All of this hearkens back to the lack of the sacred, rather than of myth. The formative or even subliminal effect of the media we’re steeped in is hard to say, but certainly the multi-billion dollar industries of marketing and advertising would be useless if it was not far-reaching.
9 There are many examples of what could be considered modern myths embodied in media: rather than saying that The Lord of the Rings is a modern myth, though clearly it is, it is more relevant to say that every piece of media available contains layer upon layer of myth. Further, any given myth is implicitly built upon other myths, and myths are used to make them readily accessible to us. For instance, there are a variety of common myths which allow access to the viewership of a news broadcast with a particular political agenda. The broadcast can further establish or re-establish these myths, and build new ones, but it is already working upon…

8.  The Virtual Campfire: An Ethnography of Online Social Networking, Jennifer Ryan. Unpublished Master’s Thesis.

9.  A note about characterization, and the usage of terms such as “capitalist society.” It should be obvious that, within the contexts we are beginning to explore, “capitalist society,” “existential philosophy,” “corporate culture,” and so on are all myth-structures that we’re essentially presupposing. Like any other myth they may or may not relate to a series of facts, but more important the effects of the characterization is real. In other words, there are sufficient people that believe in such a thing as “capitalist society” as to make it worth talking about, even if, speaking very strictly, there may be no such thing. Even “culture” can be considered a myth in this sense. This applies equally to phrases like “world-view,” a term which has become fairly commonly even outside anthropological writing. Terms like this sometimes create more questions than they answer. What exactly does it mean? Is it a passive or active process? Can it be willfully changed, or is it provided fully-formed? We will attempt to engage with as many of these terms as possible, but there must be a level of approximation in using such terms, or else we would be footnoting every couple words, and the book in front of you would be thousands of pages long. Let us say that it could be either of these things, in different contexts, and move forward. 

…certain expectations. So, you don’t find many polyamorous bisexuals watching Fox News in rapt attention. In other words, media acts both as a mythic amplification and sorting device.10 It even affects evolutionary selection processes, but for that’ll have to wait to explore throughout the Immanence of Myth, upon its release.

James Curcio

 Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

There’s always a side of the creative process that remains in shadow. We used to call it “behind the scenes,” but the angle shot from behind the scenes has become the new normal. The actor playing the character is, if anything, more at the forefront of the viewers consciousness. 

As an example of this, here is me playing the actor JC, who played the character JC in Clark:

(More on that project in a second.) 

Maybe we can see “behind the scenes” if the project has not yet been produced. I want to share a bit of a project with all of you that, so far, has not seen the light of day.



If it hasn’t seen the light of day, why should you care about it, you might ask? 

Because it is a story more common than you might think. Because it is the norm rather than the exception. The number of things you haven’t seen far outweighs what you have. For every Picasso there are millions of other painters, some excellent and some awful, that you never happened upon. And of the artists you have heard of, except for when they are put under the microscopic scrutiny of historians, there are probably works in progress that never made it. 

Some of these projects are abortions, some are miscarriages, and some, fighting all biological possibility, simply remain in a kind of limbo space, maybe to manifest at some point in the future, and maybe not. 

The project I’m talking about is Citizen Y, and it is an example of the latter case, neither an abortion nor a miscarriage, but instead, as the blueprints of the experience we developed are soon to be released, it is something that exists as many ideas and myths exist, an unmanifest possibility. Time will tell, as it always does. 

This is how conception went. In 2007, I went to the first Esozone in Portland. At the time I was senior editor of Alterati. I had the chance to meet a number of people I had been talking with online, even working with, but who I had never met in “meat space.” You can write a book, produce an album, or talk for hours with people halfway across the globe. But there is something unique about being in person with them. Something very different about the experience. 

After seeing FoolishPeople perform, Joseph, John and I talked and we decided we wanted to work on a project together. Probably a live event slash film. We didn’t know what yet. We just knew we wanted to do it. 

A year of writing and bouncing ideas around later, John and I had a workable script. The script itself was futuristic in content but written with a tone that is almost reminiscent of Greek tragedy, if it was parsed through the brain of someone like Philip K Dick. It is not a tone that I usually use. To an extent I was taking John’s lead with that, and to an extent it was just what came out of the chemistry of that moment and that interaction.

We had a few concept artists onboard, and we were in the process of planning the event. First we had our sights on LA. At the last minute - though thankfully before we announced, if memory serves - that angle fell through. We then spent some more time refining our creative materials, regrouping, and we conceived of doing it in London, after FoolishPeople pulled off yet another successful event there in the Abattoir.

We had new hoops to jump through when pitching this time. A few months of work got us all lined up, and with things seemingly in place, we made an announcement. We started taking pre-orders, were negotiating with venues. Actors were jockeying to get cast. It seemed like we were locked in. But then things took a turn south again: there wasn’t enough confidence from the involved production companies that we’d turn a profit, rightly or wrongly, and it was determined that losses should be cut. 

This is a familiar story for anyone who is familiar with the film production process. For every movie you see, there are countless movies that got shelved or died thanks to a merger, or any number of other things that can happen through no necessary fault on the part of any of the involved parties. 

“It’s just business,” we say, and so far as business is concerned, that is true, but as creative work like this is also something that is not just business, it hurts. It hurts when things get canned, when you’ve put years of work into them, sometimes, and no one is going to even be able to hear or see it. Because these things get made, or not, based on business evaluations. But the work itself is not “just business.” 

It has nothing to do with business. Sometimes, contractually, you aren’t even allowed to talk about the projects that fall through the cracks. “What have you done the past three years?” could be a very difficult question to answer in such situations. By some manner of thinking, you could have sat in a corner masturbating for three years and produced the same result. 

But all artists - I have an aversion to the word “artist” sometimes because of the implications that a capitalistic mindset paints there, but I don’t have a better word - know better. We know that every project is an experiment. Life, itself, is an experiment. And there is no such thing as failure, aside from “failure to get back up again.” 

That doesn’t mean we don’t do our share of crying and whining from the mat. That’s fine. Some people are ashamed of that. 

Don’t be. It’s part of the process. But if you aren’t driven to get up again, despite your better judgment, go out and get a “real job,” son. Art is an addiction. Whether or not it immortalizes you, it’ll certainly kill you. Just a matter of when. 



I learned a few things from this experience, and several other projects I worked on between 2005-2009. That is that limitation is often what defines an art form. If you have a guitar with one string and can’t afford six, develop a style that shows off what you can do with one string. I wasted so much time and effort trying to bring on “money people,” and though we often got very close to sealing a deal, it often fell apart right when things seemed finally on track. I think this is most fundamentally because the kind of work that we do doesn’t make any sense to “money people.” 



It doesn’t render in their worldview. From my point of view, if a piece of work breaks even - and by that I mean the people working on it are paid out as well - that is a magnificent success. Most of these people want to see huge returns on their risky investment. We’re not going to see eye to eye. They won’t understand the burning necessity that the piece has for you, and more importantly, they won’t care.

This has been a turning point for me in terms of approach. 

Since then, I have worked on Clark, a Gonzomentary series which we literally produced with a DV camera, light kit, and the money we could squeeze out of our pockets. It was conceived as something that could be done in that way. We have plans to edit the 100 or so minutes of good footage we shot into a Spinal Tap style movie, and finished a season. If we had tried to pitch the thing for funding, we’d still be running around, trying to jump through hoops. “We want a summary.” “We want a script.” “We want you to shoot an episode.” “We want you to show us 10,000 facebook ‘likes.’” 

This is how it works, by the time you’re done jumping through all those hoops you may as well have just done something you can do on your own.

The truth is that the “money people” will only be interested once you are already making money. Then they might be interested in helping you make more so they can make some themselves. Otherwise, they could really give a flying fuck about your “vision.” The sooner you get that into your head as an artist, as a writer, as a musician, the better. Look to your work, look to your audience. If you bring in a publisher, a label, or so on, think of them as a partner in the venture of reaching your audience. But chances are, you’re not going to bring in a partner who can really expand your reach before you’ve already gone halfway to the moon yourself. 

Since then, I’ve written a novel, and I’m jumping through some of those expected hoops to look for a publishing partner. I’ve co-produced an album, and am co-producing a second. We’re publishing an enormous amount of material and research on modern myth through Weaponized in The Immanence of Myth. (June 2011) 

These are all things where there are collaborative elements, but none of them depend on “money guys” to come into being, or even any other creatives. They are open to, but not dependent on them. 

I mention this - “open to collaborators but not dependent on them” - because during this time I also wrote the scripts for 3 comic issues that were to be compiled as a graphic novel. After going through two artists who had to cancel a little ways in - one because of paying contracts taking his attention, the other due to his day job taking his attention - I re-wrote it in prose format with the intention of having accompanying full page illustrations/images. This format of collaboration is also on hiatus due to the other commitments of my collaborator. People have jobs, families, illness, they die. Priorities shift, people go homeless or get hit by an Earthquake. I’m not speaking in the abstract here. 

Again, I am not pointing blame but pointing rather towards the realities of producing material like this. Not only is it challenging, not only do you have to convince the world that it is worth both their time and their money, but you also have to contend with the demands being made on the time of all the people you are working with. 

We will be publishing the Citizen Y script, along with some of the concept art that we created while planning out the production design. I see it very much as a ritual blueprint, based on the unique methods we planned on using both live and for the filming. I hope you come along for the ride, and that the lessons I’ve learned might help you in your own work. 

James Curcio.

“Everything is flux.” Heraclitus

 It may seem that the word “myth” has lost its meaning to us as a psychological or spiritual term. No, the situation is more drastic than that. Myth has become the opposite of fact, something that is generally accepted but untrue; “it is a myth that reading by flashlight ruins your eyesight.” The popular television show on the Discovery Channel, Myth Busters, uses this definition, attempting to disprove “myths” with something vaguely resembling science. The myths of antiquity are looked upon as quaint stories, despite the fact that they have shaped our cultural history. It is neatly overlooked that myths remain at the center of the bloody stage of modern religious, national, economic or ideological dynamics, not to mention our personal and everyday lives. 

    The fact that the word “myth” has become synonymous with untruth belies an underlying shift in the Western epistemological focus over the past several thousand years. This is clearly a sweeping generalization, and in these we are also inventing a myth, but bear with me. We have become, in this juncture of time and culture, a great deal more concerned with verifiable facts and less concerned with existential experiences which have little relation to fact. This progression ties into the Enlightenment focus on rationality and the scientific method, but perhaps more pervasively, we can see this following from the needs of industrialization. 

     This shift, though not concocted as some conspiratorial scheme, does serve a purpose. As we will see, fundamental business principles rely on actions that are easy to reproduce, and which produce similar (if not identical) results with each repetition. This cultural homogeneity promotes an economy of scale that is absolutely necessary for so-called big business. Similarly, the myths of a culture must ultimately serve the best interest of industry. The evolution of such co-related myths is often symbiotic, for instance, it is through the spread of industry as the backbone of a civilization that myths which better serve it spread. These in turn effect the further growth and spread of an industrialized infrastructure. 

     Living within the confines of the reality sculpted by the history of industry, we must come to terms with it, but only once we have first explored the rough contours of myth itself. Like much of what we touch upon in this intro, I can only point out the various directions our future exploration will lead. File this away in the back of your mind. We will certainly return. 

    The expectation that myth is a failed epistemology seems to come as a by-product of the industrialist-capitalist worldview

, and provides a certain cultural insight that we will be exploring throughout this book. In its proper sense, myth has no necessary relation to fact whatsoever. Asking if a myth is factually true makes as much sense as asking if your elbow can play Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the key of purple. Perhaps, myth is true insofar as it renders a psychological effect, and false insofar as it doesn’t. This is not to say that historical or empirical fact has no bearing on myth, however. Far from it. That the inner and outer life appear as mirror images of one another, separated by what appears to be a vast divide, is another issue that we must contend with. It has mythological repercussions, as do all points at which we must re-orient or interpret much of anything that does not fit a pre-established order.

    The present idea that myths are merely untrue beliefs also exists within the archaeological approach to mythology, originating in the 19th century. It has remained there, in many cases, ever since. For example, consider this quote from the introduction to the 1897 edition of Andrew Lang’s Modern Mythology, 

The essence of myth, as of fairy tale, we agree, is the conception of the things in the world as all alike animated, personal, capable of endless interchanges of form.  Men may become beasts; beasts may change into men; gods may appear as human or bestial; stones, plants, winds, water, may speak and act like human beings, and change shapes with them. Anthropologists demonstrate that the belief in this universal kinship, universal personality of things, which we find surviving only in the myths of civilized races, is even now to some degree part of the living creed of savages.  Civilized myths, then, they urge, are survivals from a parallel state of belief once prevalent among the ancestors of even the Aryan race.  But how did this mental condition, this early sort of false metaphysics, come into existence? (Emphasis mine.) (Modern Mythology, Lang.)

    However, an academic approach towards the study of myth generally presents a different attitude than the common idea that myths are false. A scholar of comparative mythologies attempts to maintain a so-called objectivity towards the subject. In other words, the truth or untruth of the myth is, or at any rate should be, entirely irrelevant to them. They are studying, comparing, and uncovering myths as if they are empiricalobjects. A clay pot or rug from the 4^th century BCE is neither “true” nor “false,” it simply is, and from it, we may be able to ascertain things about the people who made it. 

     The idea that myths are false seems distinct from this, though as it turns out, there may be a connection. Jaan Puhvel gives us a brief history of the word “myth” in the introduction to Comparative Mythology,  

There are many notions that the ancient Greeks not only defined but named forevermore, such as “hybris,” [sic] “irony,” and “tragedy.” Another such is “myth.” No modern language has a substitute — the word comes with the concept. … In Homer and the tragedians it can also mean “tale, story, narrative,” without reference to truth content. But starting with prose writers such as Herodotus, the word muthos [sic] takes non a polarized image of “fictive narrative,” “tall tale,” “legend.” As such it contrasts with logos, another term for “word,” which came to denote “true story” to Herodotus; the father of history had no compunction about terming his own hodgepodge of legendary “Logoi” and reserving the term muthos for things that not even he could believe. From Plato onward a technical sense of “myth” begins to emerge in muthos, while logos takes on ever more rational, philosophical, and even transcendental overtones. … It is in retrospect ironic that modern usage has managed to defeat such exalted semantic monopolies and revert at least to the pre-Platonic colloquialism of the ancients. “It’s a myth” means to the average American that there is not a shred of truth in it. 

    This distinction between mythos and logos isn’t necessarily a clear one. In this distinction, we come to the issue which is probably paramount in many of our minds: the imagined division between myth and science. Though this may come as a surprise to some, science is also a mythology in a general sense. This is not a new observation, so rather than belabor the point, I’ll refer to one poignant instance out of many. Mauthner’s Critique of Languagedeals with this topic in no uncertain terms, 

Mauthner’s Critique thus appeared to have dire consequences for science. … Mauthner considered hypotheses to be good guesses — successful “shots in the dark,” so to say. The foundation of all science is exceptionally good inductions; the so-called laws of nature are nothing more than historical generalizations, and Mauthner spared no effort to explain the historical origin of the notion that physical laws are inexorable.

 (Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Janik and Toulman.)

    Mauthner clearly has certain concepts about the nature of myth that we are availing ourselves of, as his work was a product of his time as much as this is a product of ours. However, the point is nevertheless valid in regard to the deification of axioms and principles in science. 

    Compare that with the following, 

Any study of myth that does not recognize myth’s potential to be alive and existentially powerful, even in modern life, has missed something. Myths are not truth in any scientific sense — nor are they true philosophically, theologically, metaphysically or ontologically. Myth’s power arises from its ability to articulate the existential need for identity. (Hindu Mythology, Williams). 

    George Williams point is well taken, especially in regard to an understanding of the  vitality and primacy of myth. But it also overlooks an underlying complexity, that the models and stories rendered by science, theology, and so on are all essentially mythological, even if they aren’t accepted as myths in the traditional sense.

Science must begin with myth. As Karl Popper writes, 

Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices. The scientific tradition is distinguished from the pre-scientific tradition in having two layers. Like the latter, it passes on its theories; but it also passes on a critical attitude towards them. The theories are passed on, not as dogmas, but rather with the challenge to discuss them and improve upon them. (The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Popper.)

    This is where most concepts about the nature of myth immediately run aground, as science attempts to deal with the empirical world (far-flung theoretical physics notwithstanding), and the real function of myth is to be found in the more artistic, or at least more subjective, intersections between self, culture, and world. Their intended functions differ.

3 The continuation of this quote is worth including, “…He considers that the term “law of nature” is a metaphor left over from the bygone days of mythological explanation, when Nature was personified in the endeavor to comprehend it. He traces the origins of the notion back to Plato and Aristotle, and particularly to Lucretius, who first used the phrase explicitly. In the Middle Ages, the notion became incorporated into theology as the “natural law” of God. With Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura it became secularized, along with much else that had earlier belonged exclusively to the sphere of theology. Thus did the myth of the “laws of nature” pass down to the present time; the phrase began as a metaphor and later became reified and universally adopted by scientists.”

4 Also see pg. 60-64 of Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy Of Symbolic Forms Vol 2 for some very relevant ideas on the relationship between mythic and scientific thought.

Scientists teach their intellectual children at a early age to be wary of the wily Personification. Should Personification appear — in any of its several guises of animism, anthropomorphism, and projection — it should be treated as an evil, to be avoided or stamped out. The Particular is also not to be trusted. It can mislead. Those in the charge of nomothetic science quickly learn to banish The Particular by immediately labeling it, then ignoring it. These anathematizing labels include: merely anecdotal, a single case, an n of one, a single data point, an uncontrolled observation, a single instance, an exception, a suggestive indication, an interesting possibility to be followed up by more careful study. (Braud, The Ley and the Labyrinth) This is the clearest distinction one can draw between what has been misapprehended as the opposing spheres of the scientific and the mythological viewpoints. I say “misapprehended” because, of course, science is a mythologizing process along with being a method, and myth is derived from experience — psychological if not physical — in a way which makes the modeling processes used in science useful for analyzing it, as well. Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms explores this distinction clearly, but did not seek to find their unity, how they apply one to the other. Theoretical physics has implications not just in terms of cosmology but also mythology. It may be beyond the scope of science-as-method to derive a meaning from the big bang theory, for instance. Science does not, as it has been pointed out to me, concern itself directly with “why?” However, a scientific theory still has a cultural effect and value, and it will generate myths, especially if the theory permeates the culture thoroughly enough. Relativity had a dramatic effect on the art that followed it, for instance. If it is scientifically postulated that the universe is structured a certain way — or that for instance every star will eventually burn out — it’ll have implications and effects that go far beyond the strict scope of the scientific method. Science models, myth generates narrative. The method of science is not inherently mythic, but when the results of that method enter our world, when we interpret it, when we frame it and build beliefs from it, this matter becomes confused. We try to remove the scientist from science, and say that, should we still see the fingerprints of the scientist in their work, then they have done us all a disservice. Is there science without scientists? Of course not. Science, derived from and used to represent nature, is, yet again, a form of mythology. But there’s still an important distinction to be made between a model which can be tested, and a narrative, which cannot. So, upon first glance, the distinction is one of iteration and function. The scientific method depends on the ability to repeat an experiment. It leaves room for improvement in the demand for repetition. Experiences which seem mythical are by their very nature entirely unique. They cannot be reproduced or repeated, or at least, if they can be, it doesn’t add or subtract from their value as a myth. You cannot ask that lightning to strike the same place twice. (Though of course there’s no reason to assume that it can’t.) Some of the functional axioms of the mythology of science — especially that of pure physics — make it quite dissimilar from other forms of mythology. Mathematics and formal logic are able to unearth fact and truth axiomatically, without an actor, and serve as the requisite tools for a mythology unlike any previously known to Western Civilization.5 It is a myth so uniquely suited to modeling the empirical world, and of removing and reducing the consciousness of the minds in which it occurs to nothing, that we have almost completely lost sight that it is still a mythology at work. This is where we can begin to see the import and significance of muthos shrinking in regard to logos. On the other hand, we mustn’t forget the representation inherent in all models posited by science, or of the removal of the subject so as to derive any clearer view of a world, which of course requires a mind to call it into existence. “The world is my representation” is, like the axioms of Euclid, a proposition which everyone must recognize as true as soon as he understands it, although it is not a proposition that everyone understands as soon as he hears it. To have brought this proposition to consciousness and to have connected it with the problem of the relation of the ideal to the real, in other words, of the world in the head to the world outside of the head, constitutes, together with the problem of moral freedom, the distinctive character of the moderns. (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Part I) Of course, there is no singular “myth of science” but in fact countless scientific myths supported on the back of a few basic axioms and suppositions, and many of them are anything if not aware of — or at least burdened by — the lurking shadow of the subject, of the hall of mirrors or infinite regress posed by consciousness and its own self awareness. This point is more important to make in regard to concepts of “science” held by the general public, rather than most professional scientists, who regard “science” as nothing more than an iterative method for testing and refining theories. However, it has nevertheless been made apparent that science is presently facing its own post-modern crisis. This crisis is well summed up by Hawking and Mlodinow in the September issue of Scientific American, These examples bring us to a conclusion that provides an important framework with which to interpret modern science. In our view, there is no picture — or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we adopt a view that we call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. (“The Elusive Theory of Everything”)

5 Though let’s not suppose that there is one universal set of axioms that can be applied to all of mathematics — see Godel’s incompleteness theorum.

 Even if Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is frequently misunderstood as a thought experiment, it poses the useful insight that experiments cannot be conducted free of bias and perception. Theories of cognitive science that don’t presuppose a static, underlying strata of materialistic or positivist myth are all burdened with similar levels of uncertainty. Only in those corners of belief where a claim has already been staked can certainty of any kind be defined. It is, in other words, tautological.

    This, too, further muddles the unity and distinction between mythology and science, and narrative and model. Referring back to Barthes’ essay “Myth Today” once again, he says “…myth in fact belongs to the province of general sciences.” Can we safely say myth and science are one and the same? No. But can we untangle them and say they are entirely separate, as some would have us do (possibly misleadingly) with painting and mathematics? Again, the answer is no.  

    However, these quandaries don’t seem to permeate deep enough to cleanse the modern psyche of the certainty of an intrinsic materialism. In a culture fixated on the external world it is no wonder that myth became misconstrued with untruth. We will begin the exploration of these intersections, and the problems that will undoubtedly arise from our approach, throughout the Immanence of Myth.  

James Curcio

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

This issue, being the third since their conception in May 2010, takes you right into the heart of Death - the collective believes strongly that to deal with Life they must get close to Death.

Featuring warped perspectives, fantastical ideas, truths/lies on the subject, bizarre yet practical tips for homemakers (look out for its supplement created by Cookie St James which is a zine in itself), and showcasing artists the world should know about (Facundo Torrens, Marc Blackie, Jose Macabra from ANTAGONY and many more), this issue (also comes with a double cover) is uniquely designed by Bettina Fung, where the concept of the design itself also deals with Death.

This issue forces you to look Death in the face then come out the other side embracing Life.

Enjoy the ride!

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I am relieved that you believe. 
I am relieved that you believe in things you cannot see and places you have never been. I believe it can be a miracle machine, this belief of yours, a way to see into the mind of everyone,  and fish out something spectacular.  

When I was a young boy, I was given a book by my father, the Srimad Bhagavatam. It was a very interesting little book, full of wonderful pictures. There was one that had a sick old man having his soul torn out of him by hairy demons as his oblivious family damned him by crying over his corpse. When my father died, I cried over his corpse. Do you think I damned his soul to be borne on the backs of hairy demons into hell? I’d like to think I didn’t. That’s just my belief. 

In the book there was also a picture of a man, at varying stages of his life. They were all lined up next to each other: an embryo, a baby, a boy, a young man, a mature man, an old man, a dying man. A little wisp of white that was supposed to be his soul held them all together in a big circle. “Creative people, these Indians,” I chuckled to myself. There were cities flying through the air, and men with several heads riding on the backs of fabulous beasts. Incredulously, I asked my father if they were real. “Of course,” he said. “Those were different times, five-thousand years or so ago. People had more powerful minds. They could do things like make flying cities.” I loved my father. 

Do you suppose he kept going after his body broke down? I sure hope so. Joseph Campbell said a lot of things about the meanings in our lives and how they relate to myths held by many people. Before his body broke down, that is. I don’t suppose he says a hell of a lot, now. Everyone is a myth, or at least, the best people are. I want to tell you a personal myth of mine. It’s about magic. This myth happens to be true. It’s also a story about a fish. Isn’t the universe awfully cruel? 

Somewhere around the time my mom got real sick, in New Mexico, my father and I were hiking through a canyon. We walked until it was all muddy everywhere, and the crows kept bothering us, and we got upset by this and crowed back at them in disgust. We turned around and came upon a crevasse in the cliff side. There was a small creek flowing through the canyon, and part of it went under this crevasse. You could barely fit a finger through it, but my dad said he saw a fish in there. “I’m going to see if I can get his attention,” my father said. He picked up a little pebble, and tossed it into the crevasse. 

An enormous long fish came hopping out, splash splash, just like that. We gaped at it for a moment as it flopped about, trapped in our alien world. My father didn’t at all suppose the fish would come out, much less be shocked clear out of the crevasse. “I figured he would be much smaller than that to fit in there,” is what my father said. It- he was the size of my father’s foot. So my father scooted him back into his crevasse with his shoe, lest the little guy die of too much air. 

This is the sort of thing we make myths out of. Sometimes we tell people about it, sometimes we don’t. But it informs how we live, because it shows us the world is much stranger than we’d ever hoped for, and sometimes, this is a good thing. Unless you’re the fish, in which case, you’ve had a fairly terrifying experience indeed.

Stephane Griswold

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

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METAPHYSICS AND MECHANICS IN THE NUDE, WITH SEX AND DRUGS!

   

The Sparky Show read by author Xanadu Xero in an exploding dossier of words and photography of a doomed and perfect relationship, retrofitted with psilocybin. A report from the trenches of love post culture, mid-life, reminiscent in its gonzo style and ‘take no prisoners’ attitude to Hunter S. Thompson. Not your average empty-nest Beverly Hills Mom.

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INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION To Be Published by Weaponized June 2011.

“Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men’s reality. Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of “the rat race” is not yet final.”
Hunter S. Thompson

My essays for this book, though varying in scope and content, all deal with the overarching concepts of myth and art, and all of the issues that invariably are tied into them: from the nature of representation to issues such as that of initiation and its psychological and social roles.
    Much of this material expands on the ideas I first presented in “Living The Myth,” my contribution to the Generation Hex anthology, published by Disinformation Press in 2005. The idea of “living myth” implies at once two interpretations: that myth is in some way alive, and that we can live it. These two are, to use a cliché, like two sides of a coin. This idea underlies everything else that is to follow.    
    This is a concept that has guided all of the creative work I have done. However, as I have collaborated with other artists over the past decade, I came to realize that I was not at all alone in a mythic approach to art, even if all of our processes differ somewhat. (Ed. note: throughout this book I often use the word “artist” when I mean to include filmmakers, writers, musicians, and so on all under that term, because there is no better common term. The same is true for the term “art” which could just as well mean any myth with an intended aesthetic dimension.)
    This book began as a purely solo endeavor, a collection of essays based around the issues and ideas that arose naturally as I worked on various collaborative, mythic art projects. Eventually, it dawned on me that I should open this process up to others who might contribute their own thoughts on the subject of modern mythology. In retrospect, it is almost self-explanatory that an anthology such as this one would need to come about.
    In many ways this is a sideways glance at an art movement possibly already well underway, which, even with the release of this book, will likely remain somewhat in the shadows. “Man’s world is manifold, and his attitudes are manifold,” Walter Kauffman writes in the prologue to his edition of Buber’s I-Thou. “What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple. Men prefer to forget how many possibilities are open to them.” It is for this reason that I expect there will be some who find this exploration frustrating, as I do not present final solutions in any sense. If anything, I seek to open up the floor for more possibilities. Myth is never closed; it is the enemy of intellectual or ideological tyranny, even if it is a tool often used by tyrants.
    Perhaps it has always been underway. All art, except the exceptionally conceptual or technical, is at least partially mythological. Yet, to be blunt, much of the modern art world has lost touch with a conscious sense of this mythological foundation. Instead it wanders endlessly in a hall of mirrors, a kind of neurotic self-analysis. Perhaps it all comes down to a misunderstanding of Duchamp’s urinal, “Fountain.” The urinal is not art, unless everything is. The message of the urinal is: the art world is a farce. If you place a piece of garbage in a gallery, it has been magically transformed into art. This comments on the nature of galleries and how we view art as a commodity far more than it does on the actual nature of art. In much contemporary, abstract art, signifier and signified are externally decoupled; the piece becomes completely self-referential, a conceptual ouroborous with no real entry or exit point back into personal experience.
     A piece such as “Fountain” also raises the question, “why does something require a point?” Right now, an artist I live with is building a four foot tall pink penis in the living room. This became the spring-board for the gonzomentary series “Clark.” Everyone is drawn to ask what the motivation behind something like this might be, what purpose does it serve? On the surface, its point is perhaps that it has no point. There is an argument to be made that much art in the past fifty years asks this question, “why do I need a purpose, an underlying narrative? Why can’t I just be?” This changes nothing: we still mythologize these pieces and the lives of the artists that make them, even if they exist entirely without inherent purpose or narrative. A purposeless piece of art without a surrounding myth can be of interest to no one. Additionally, no work of art can actually be purposeless any more than any utterance can be. The subconscious plays a key role in the creation process. We’ll discuss this at length later.
    An art world quarantined from everyday life is also a myth that may have outlived any imaginable purpose that doesn’t have to do with art industry. As I discovered in my gonzo journalistic forays while working as editor of Alterati in 2007, much of the “real” art scene is isn’t happening in the galleries. It is often occurring on the street, in seemingly abandoned factories, or behind closed doors in small studios. Art needn’t be obsessed over either self-commentary or being terrified into proving its worth in the face of blind industry. There is much more to explore in the psyche, which is where art excels. If there is a universal bias in this work about the nature of art, it is that.
    Though I’ve gone through an editorial process with contributing authors, and editorial involves some amount of re-writing, I’ve attempted to preserve their ideology rather than make sure that everything coheres into a single system. As you will quickly discover, that approach would be entirely contrary to our position. Our methodology, tone, the very mission of this work is at once singular and multiplicity. It may be at times too scholarly for the average reader, and at others too congenial or crass for the average scholar. Maybe it was written by and for iconoclasts, although that was not the intent. It is my sincere hope that for many, it reaffirms and expands what you already know, and perhaps gives you a little more courage in the pursuit of your own myths.
    We will be exploring this subject from many angles, through articles, essays, and interviews from a variety of people actively engaged in mythic work and research. As our exploration progresses from chapter to chapter, we will move from a rather abstract view of myth as an existential dimension to increasingly specific instances of personal myth. Much as with the experience of viewing a painting, at twenty feet, ten feet, five feet, and up close, our experience will vary. It may even seem that the painting changes forms, as you’d see with an impressionist like Monet. This methodology and format will also shift to match our ongoing change of perspective. Keep this shifting scale in mind as you read through, as it should provide a frame of reference.
    The book is broken into four parts. In part one, we will take on a big picture exploration of immanent mythology as a philosophical concept. Many of these investigations will come from the initial materials I prepared for this book. In part two, we will take a look at  examples of modern myth in a variety of fields. Part three will open up yet more personal perspectives on immanent mythology, and the final section of this book is composed of conversations that I’ve had with artists and other would-be myth-makers.
    As you progress, you will likely discover that many of us have similar perspectives, framed in slightly different ways. Some of us may, on the other hand, flat out contradict one another. (Though, amongst the contributors of this volume, this happened so infrequently that it seems worthy of note.) Though the purpose of this introduction is to comment on the book itself, rather than myth, it seems an opportune moment to make this preliminary point. Variety is the nature of myth. Myth is naturally idiosyncratic. No one can expect a truly homogeneous tradition to arise, as myths naturally do, from life experiences in one location, and then another. The task of building a homogenized syncretism from a diverse tradition like Hinduism is not a mythological impulse, even if it’s the bureaucrat’s dream.
    All of this answers why I organized and wrote this material. Next, of course, is who is it written for? That’s where you come in. The Immanence of Myth was written for anyone who wants to explore the possibilities myth provides, but especially for creative artists who, like myself, wish to inform their work with knowledge of the internal world that myth connects us to. It is this internal current that I hope to both amplify and emphasize. Together we will explore some of the endless possibilities provided by myth as a creative dimension, even if an essay must necessarily remain in the field of didactics. For those that work in some creative medium, it is my intention to assist you in shaping genuinely mythic experiences for your audiences.
     The next and final question that follows from our reportorial trinity: what is mythically inspired art? What is myth? That’s a great deal more difficult to answer. At the outset let me say this: let’s propose that everything we know about myth is wrong, or at least, subject to re-interpretation. Mythology is itself a myth. Admittedly, this is putting the cart before the horse, but it is the only way that we can resurrect what so many seem to consider dead.
    We are nowhere with this word “myth” until we can determine what its personal and cultural function is, and where the points overlap between these various elements. In other words, we need to build a map of a cognitive terrain that is not necessarily a “where” or even a “when,” and so this book is dedicated towards exploring an ideological topology of myth. You might even say that such a topology might serve as a rough map of the potential elementary ideas of divinity. Even if, to that extent, a book such as this can only serve as a doorway rather than a destination. From these fragments we can begin to piece together the Gods of our image.
    It is worth noting that many books already exist which provide a systematic philosophical analysis of the history and function of myth. Though in various ways this work is indebted to those, my ultimate mission is not to explore what myth has been, except inasmuch as that can shed light on what its function is at present, nor is it to merely further the thesis of these works.  Indeed, there is no system at all. Rather, it is my aim to continue a movement already well underway, namely, the re-legitimization of myth and myth-making as one of the principal — if not the principal — means of human creative representation. (Borrowing in part from the scholarship of many that you will find quoted and alluded to throughout this work, including Jung, Campbell, Eliade, Kerenyi, and many others.)
    The approach we take nevertheless flies in the face of the majority of scholarly works in comparative mythology in the past. That is, in part, because the intention of this book is contrary to a historical, anthropological approach to the subject. It is invariable that some will encounter this work and write it off much in the same way Jaan Puhvel writes of Claude Levi-Strauss,
“The obvious danger is that the approach is by nature generalist, universalizing, and a-historical, thus the very opposite of text-oriented, philological, and time conscious. Overlaying known data with binaristic gimmickry in the name of greater “understanding” is no substitute for a deeper probing of the records themselves as documents of a specific synchronistic culture on the one hand and as outcomes of diachronic evolutionary processes on the other. In mythology, as in any other scholarly or scientific activity, it is important to recall that the datum is more important than any theory that may be applied to it.”
    This leaves no room for differing intentions, and presupposes only one method of inquiry. His research in Comparative Mythology has been of use to me, but this is a different endeavor. I am not interested in a broken record written in cuneiform on a block of clay unless it can be used to shed some greater light on who we are right now, and furthermore add a deeper understanding to our own understanding of the world. It would appear that most of the contributors to this volume would agree with me. The chronological view of comparative mythology is not the only approach one can use to engage in a study of myth, though it is a valuable one.
    What you have before you is something quite different: an unconventional whisper in a dark room or the amplification of a movement. Only time will tell.

—James Curcio, March 21, 2010. The Immanence of Myth