According to Legend

Myths rarely end in surprise. I am speaking of the Greco-Roman myths, the ones I grew up reading, the ones so often adapted by authors of the Western cannon. We do not read them for their unexpected twists and turns. Like classical tragedies, many of which are based on myths, we fall into them and they lead us back.

Myths have an interesting relationship to time. They posit origins, offering us the stories behind the things we can't not remember being part of our lives. Their writing necessarily post-dates the objects they create. There was no myth to explain the Earth before the Earth was here, and even once it arrived, how could there be a myth without people to tell it and people to hear it? All myths explain, then, at least indirectly, why we are here. We are here so someone would tell the story of how we got here.

I have been rereading recently Ted Hughes' translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis, called "Tales from Ovid." The first time I read it, a year ago, I was fascinated by the idea of people enacting rhetorical figures: the lean, ragged man, as fierce as a wolf; the willowy, tearful woman, as clear as a stream; the vain, young hunk, beautiful as a flower. I decided that some of the heroes' transformations were metaphors and some similes.

A metaphorical death was sudden, it would cast you up into the stars. Your constellation had little to do with a particular attribute. Rather, one minute you were a person, and the next, a cluster of stars. Your forever arrived swiftly.

Metamorphosis by simile was the gradual process of your new shape engulfing you inch by inch, first grabbing a finger and then slithering up your arms, over your head. Your new form was either a punishment or a gift, but it stemmed directly from whatever was most true about you.

Two rhetorical figures, metaphor and simile, like two sides of a silhouette with one meaning: the afterlife of fiction is reality.

Now I am more interested in the fact that a myth is not just the story of a thing but the story of that thing's name. It is etymology personified. Are they really separable, a thing and its name? Or are they two sides of the same coin, two incarnations of the same being? Narcissus was a man, long ago, and now he is a flower. Or was there a flower, long ago, and now there is the story of a man? Can you recall which you heard about first -- the flower or the man? Are they really separable, a thing and the story of how it got there?