Photo by Jeff Petry
“A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society's dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.” — Joseph Campbell
Dreams become myths and stories that in turn inform more dreams. The transfer of individual imaginings into collective realities has predicated the history of our existence. We are constantly dreaming our way into a more expansive view of the world. Has there ever been anyone who was totally in accord with the society they lived in? We could assume that everyone is on an adventure in the dark forest, but some report in, while many don’t. We are currently living in a timeless realm in which the communication between private myths and public dreams is unprecedented in its access, proliferation, speed and media. Some of us are swimming, while others are drowning in a sea of thoughts and information. There are many who really can’t see the forest for the trees. Never before have we all had the access and ability to share our private world with the public one. We live in an age of unprecedented expression in all of the arts, and in all aspects of personal communication. There is much to be learned from those who have come before us, the dreamers who were compelled to share their discoveries with others. We have decided to venture back through recent history to revisit some writing that comes from the dark forest and feels as informative today as when it was first recorded. Pockets of words from Aldous Huxley in 1931, J.D Salinger in 1951, Marshall McLuhan in 1967, and Michel Foucault in 1980, that reveal how our present and future myths are built on the dreams of the past. A refresher on what shape the forest has taken, and a reminder that everything we know, and all we’ll ever know, are dreams that have come true through expression.
The activities of our age are uncertain and multifarious. No single literary, artistic or philosophic tendency predominates. There is a babel of notions and conflicting theories. But in the midst of this general confusion, it is possible to recognize one curious and significant melody, repeated in different keys and by different instruments in every one of the subsidiary babels, it is the tune of our modern Romanticism. — Aldous Huxley, THE NEW ROMANTICISM (1931)
1931, 2009, and every minute before and after has been the romantic era for all of us. The hardships of the 1930’s created an explosion in all of the arts, an urgency for self-expression and creative innovations. This was a time when society actively looked to the artist to provide a safe passage from the realities of war and depression. When theatre, film, painting, music and literature flourished as both forms of escape and transcendence. This latest era we can call Romanticism 4.0. The forest and its inhabitants have grown exponentially. The babels have expanded in all directions and the chorus has never been stronger in numbers and in opportunities. Never before has technology enabled dreams and the imagination so many channels to reveal their discoveries; provided a platform for higher aspirations to find their voice and dispel the realm of hungry ghosts. As was true in the 1930’s, we are living in the midst of ‘conflicting theories’ and ‘general confusion’ and there is still a melody soaring through our atmosphere. The tune now is no different than the one playing then. There is the same impulse to escape from confusion and create new worlds of experience and expression. To repeat that curious sensation we receive when we experience or create a piece of music, a performance, an image, a novel, or perhaps even a magazine. Romanticism occurs whenever you feel something higher than yourself and something higher within yourself. Whenever you are allowed to share in the imagination of another. It is the record of the private myth accessing the public dream. The history of the ability and desire to share in both the beauty and the sadness of the internal and external world. The journey through the dark forest is well documented and as such, we have never been better positioned to help each other find evidence of the dreams and myths that light the path.
Many, many men have been as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal relationship. It isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry. — J.D. Salinger, THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (1951)
Interesting that Salinger went silent. What compels one to tune out their relationship with the world and themselves? What drives another to express their troubles as literature and art? How do we transform private myths into public dreams, to allow the imagined to become real, and leave a record for others to use? The Egyptians wrote, “That which can be named must exist”. We manifest our ideas into existence by naming them, by employing language as a bridge between the thought and the action, the imagined and the real. Writing is an act of magic in both the transmission and reception of the formative idea. The history of literature reveals a journey that is well defined yet still infinite in its possibilities. Despite all that has been recorded, much of our world is still waiting to be named. Writing down our thoughts and dreams is our ongoing defense against anonymity and suffering, and the collaborative evidence of our collective existence. Our current ability to share our experiences and learn from one another is our greatest asset. We have created social networks and virtual databanks that provide solid evidence of our insatiable desire for communication and knowledge. We are romantics who seek confirmation of our private thoughts in the public realm. The modern world is a construct of those who had something to offer, connecting with those who were open to learn. Future worlds will be formed from this same exchange, from the sharing in the record of our troubles. From the dream to the myth, from romanticism into literature and art, this is the path we’ve always been on. This is our history and our poetry.
