Stop for a moment and examine more closely the world in which you have enmeshed yourself.

a world in which we find ourselves

Of course, it is reasonable, functional, even necessary to describe yourself and your surroundings in the language of the prosaic. By prosaic, I mean that we read the world the way we read language found in a dictionary. If you happen to be in a law school (where I am located), or a law firm, the people with whom you work, and even the work itself, can be imagined as fully scripted, as role dictated, the work described in functional terms.

We are so often inscribed by our roles, and self-imposed claims of necessary, that Reality becomes the trump card. Reality trumps Myth, and then begins to look like its own form of Myth. Students of law know this transmutation first hand. Law school represents the stuff of Reality: Roles, Rules, Adversarial Zeal (put to use counseling the wronged and the angered), Reading (an endless diet of judicial opinions). Becoming a lawyer requires one to knuckle-down, get real, and drink heartily of bottled necessity. Rules become Reality. In learning to become a lawyer, the analytics, instrumentalism, and objectification are quite real. Reality is sought and worshiped, before the costs of our reality worship are assessed.

Who dares question Law as Reality?

Look again. Look at what is happening around you. Reflect on the classroom where you learned to be a lawyer, on your own relation to law and your clients, the politics of law you discuss with your colleagues, and the newspaper despairing news of your profession. One might see in the many private and public accounts of law and lawyering a titanic struggle to control, expand, and deconstruct—that is, to give meaning to—the myths we find in law and in our lives as lawyers.

When titans struggle, watch for cracks in the seamless presentation of necessity, in assumption about reality, watch for the underlying tensions that expose our secular conceptions of law, a world of law that knows no myth.

Look again at these days, outside and beyond the buildings in which you have studied and practiced law. When the days tumble into years and the sense of immediacy gives way to time, you may find that the daily press of necessity has collapsed into a story, a familiar one, or a strange one. Our lives, given time and memory, seem bigger than the boxes we construct for them, more expansive than the descriptions we dole out to others when asked—what are you doing here? A chronicle of the days, and a ledger of doings cannot capture or explain the years of my comings and goings in law.

Take a closer look, enter your own house by the back door, watch carefully as you attempt and fail to make sense of your life in the language in which you now define it. There may yet be myth lurking in what you do, in your phantasies of the work you have taken up, in your understanding of what brings you to the work (and keeps you doing it), in the future you once imagined for yourself.

In the pattern you have created with a life of work and play, movement and statis, engagement and withdrawal, confrontation and acquiescence, hope and despair, is there no sense that you may have been guided, or seized, or resisted some myth or other?

If you are curious and puzzled by what you find around you, find you are surrounded by much that is unknown, then you may be closer to myth than you would have suspected.

If you work with Law, digging in the historical ruble of legal cases, searching for rules, stringing together lines of judicial authority, charting the "progress" of legal doctrine, then you live one kind of myth. Archaeology is your discipline. If you see in Law the governance of business and economic life, Economics is your discipline. Law, if it is not to be the handmaiden of a single discipline, may best be imagined as an intellectual crossroads where economics, psychology, sociology, political theory, literature, philosophy, religion, and popular culture cross paths.

Do you believe in Law? Celebrate its wonders? If so, you have become a Believer. If you conclude, based on what you know of law, that it fails too often in its great promise, then you are a Doubter.

Traditionalists and Critics are bound, in a jurisprudence of memory and loathing, to mythic struggle; they stand watch for an enemy—dissolution, disorder, chaos— feared but seldom sighted. We fear what we do not know and seek security in Law and Order. For the security minded conservative, a system of rules will be paramount. The Critic watches, ever vigilant, as law perpetrates a cruel and unjust hierarchy of have's and have not's, legitimating itself falsely as a servant of justice.

Law is one of those complex tools we invent and pass along as a cultural inheritance. Law is a cultural Movie, an up-dated version of Greek tragedy.

Take another look at the Ordinary around you, the prosaic within. What do you see? Can you say with confidence, "I just have no interest in myth. I'm a firm believer that we've gotten past all that."

who are you?