"Perseus freeing Andromeda" by Piero di Cosimo
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas
In the end there is only what came at the beginning,
creation bottled in jars before the apocalypse—
the inception gnawing at the gut of the Reaper.
Egyptians talk of the Nile like God incarnate
and so they yoked their calendar across its shoulders—
proving God visible in water’s violence.
And Northmen tremble at the Great Gallows’ many nooses,
transforming the upward motion into fiber and splinter—
the Tree fell in cold blood at Ragnarok.
And Incans praised Viracocha’s devastation as genesis,
Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo for Order—
the world ending flood steered by crooked plows.
Atop bestial precipices, mythology batters a black anvil.
Creation whelming and pandemonium swelling
and breaking in blood and bone at the end of the world.
We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect the a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God.
- J. R. R. Tolkien
I love this Tolkien quote. It gets to the heart of what this poem is about. Myth—the myths of all people and culture—all capture a common thread: humans are fighting against an evil force, or in other words, there is a larger narrative at work than the temporal one we interact with every day.
Question: What’s your favorite myth?
Have you read Tolkien’s “Mythopoieia?” Do.
This might come as a surprise, but I quite enjoy the Lovecraftian mythos—the idea that there are huge alien forces which see us humans as nonentities, as insignificant as the ants we humans step on while walking down the sidewalk. I most certainly do not believe that Lovecraft was describing the real state of affairs at all, but as a thought experiment his ideas are often very interesting.