Myth returns us to the sacred, mythic roots of our profane stories. We are, so long as we tell stories, opening ourselves to the possibilities of myth.
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"We are storytelling animals. As our primitive ancestors sat around the fire carving spearheads and eating blackberries they told stories which in time were woven into a tapestry of myth and legend. These tales were the first encyclopedia of human knowledge. They explained where the world came from, why there were people, why snakes have no legs, why corn smut stops birth hemorrhages, why conch shells are sacred, why coyotes howl at night, and why the gods put fire and death on earth. In the dramatic telling the triumphs of heroes and the antics of fools came alive again. Stories told the people of a tribe who they were, where they had been, where they were going, and how to stay friendly with the spirits." [Sam Keen & Anne Valley-Fox, Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life Through Writing and Storytelling 1 (Los Angles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1989)] We use myth to bridge the safe stories we inherit and claim as our own with those stories we dread, stories that visit us with alarm and threaten our chosen way of being. We are, to ourselves, a host of stories: "cover stories," fictions, rememberings, myths. A life is held together, gains coherence and form, through narrative plots and mythic motifs. The fiction of self is the story I weave as I live a narrative with its disjointed illogic of action, circumstance, experience, feeling, memory, and imagination. Stories embody the accidental and fragmentary; myth collects our story fragments within a larger enfolded (nestled) structure that tugs on us from afar. Story-telling is a kind of myth-making. When we are telling, talking, tattling, teaching, we come close to myth; we become myth-makers. Myths are the ancient pre-histories of the stories that appear as plots of our lives. Fairy tales are the folk expression of myth. They are stories with a mythic dimension. As we gain insight into our own stories we can see how one story embodies the stories of others, secular stories wrapped around sacred stories, personal stories entangled in cultural narratives, media stories, and institutional stories, and cover stories fronting for stories of another sort that have not been told. Eli Wiesel, author and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his evocative literary accounts of the Holocaust, is reported to have said that "God created men and women because he loves stories." "[W]hen elements in uniquely personal stories become cognitive structures in the consciousness of the individual, they may assume mythic proportions, functioning as personal myths—stories according to which our happiness, unhappiness, and pathologies are lived out individually. In other words, we live out and out of curious scripts according to stories that even we ourselves may hide so well from ourselves that we need help identifying the essence or troublesome heart of the story, or myth, that guides our unhappiness or incompetencies." [Sara Dubin-Vaugh, Stories from World Mythology and the Growth of Individual Consciousness, 18(2) Humanist Psychologist 188, 189 (1990)] Lawyers too are story-tellers and story-makers and we might begin to see myth as one kind of story that we lawyers tell, one kind of story that we live and find ourselves in. Lawyers listen to the stories of clients, re-tell the stories to other lawyers, to judges, administrators, politicians; anyone who will listen and help the client. The law itself is composed of stories, of scared narratives built around Constitution, rules, old cases. In telling stories, being party to stories, and perpetrating the story (and stories) of law, we constitute law and legal consciousness. We are to ourselves stories, cover stories, fictional stories, mythic stories. A life is held together, gains coherence and form, through themes, plots, and myths that we embody in our lives. The themes and subplots for the life we live as adults are consciously and unconsciously derived from the stories we have grown up with as children, the stories we have concocted for ourselves as adults, but these stories are always mediated by the stories we no longer tell, the stories of the imaginal and archetypal figures left to us from mythic stories. Every discipline and discourse constitutes an anthology of stories that show how we are bound to law and how we might, with law, make a more decent and humane world. It is the mythic genre of legal narratives that would have us imagine law as the bulwark of order, tradition, and culture. Miraculously, and simultaneously, law is also the myth by which we free ourselves from the shackles of history and participate in the march of progress. In the shadow of these culture-bound mythic narratives in which lawyers practice their craft, listen to the stories of their clients, refashion the stories they hear (or the one's they imagine they hear) to fit the language of the law and the law-culture story. (It is of course too simplistic to imagine law as one myth, or that lawyers live a prototypical lawyer myth.) Legal narratives of a mythic strain give credence to the image and reality of the lawyer as a patron of justice. The myth of lawyer stories lies in advocacy that evokes a sense of justice and the claim that with law a client can speak truth to power. It is in the myths of a legal profession that lawyers invoke skills and knowledge to transform unjust features of the world we inherit and inhabit into a simulacra of a just world. The stories of lawyers also reveal the illusions and failures that accompany the myth of law. It is in our stories, particularly stories of failure, that we get a glimpse of the shadow side of professional life, and the unnamed, unattended pathologies associated with a life in law. Robert Cover used the image of law as a bridge, a bridge from the reality of the world as it now exists to an imagined world-that-might be, a vision of the future. Law focuses our visions of the future. This image of law, Cover argues, "is not a definition of law, but a plea to understand law in a certain way." Bridges, like law, are traveled by way of "sacred narratives," "learned and expressed through sacred stories." The narratives of law, secular and sacred, have their mythic qualities. "It is the canonical myths that supply purpose for history. They are the stories we would write and would live if we could." [Robert Cover, The Folktales of Justice: Tales of Jurisdiction, 14 Cap. U.L. Rev. 179, 181 (1985)] |
storytelling animals