I have no moral, or metaphysical doubts pertaining to such a statement: I am an anxious person disillusioned by the certainty of the unfathomable abyss (death), and all that exists in-between this statement—and that which I must inevitably encounter. This is of course a rather typical sentiment—and I know that I am far from being original by lending this idea its textual equivalent. Yet because this is such a typical sentiment—particularly in the field of literature, and literary theory (Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence in particular)—this subject matter is of course relevant in the contemporary study of myth.


So, for this blog, I will hopefully unveil why this subject matter is relevant, and where my ideas spawned from. To begin, let me start by documenting my morning.

This morning, I decided that I had adequate time to write a blog; yet I had no direction of where I should start, so I began reading Ovid. Consequently, a very curious thing happened to me while I was flipping through the pages of The Metamorphoses: it seemed as if I had been reading a text which was conceptually similar to something I had read recently. This déjà vu literary experience immediately prompted me to seek the work out. After a few scanning’s of my apartment, I found it collecting soot on my book shelf: Pablo Neruda’s Canto General. To affirm the parallel between Ovid’s text, and Neruda’s, I decided that I must finish Book 1 in The Metamorphoses, and then reread the first section of poems in the Canto General—A Lamp On Earth. Upon my completion of both texts, I found that the similarities were uncanny. So, this question begged to be asked: why was a text written 1900 years after Ovid using similar narrative motifs as Ovid. Because of this conundrum I had encountered, I decided to revisit an idea of Eliade’s that I had not invested very much time in.

At the beginning of the second chapter of Myth And Reality, Eliade states that: “EVERY mythical account of the origin of anything presupposes and continues the cosmogony. From the structural point of view, origin myths can be homologized with the cosmogonic myth.”

….This is of course a very intellectually loaded sentence; and because I care somewhat about the readability of my blog, and its eventual succession into the textual analysis of Neruda and Ovid, this quote will certainly benefit from an explication. To begin, it is perhaps necessary to define a few words. The first term I want to define is cosmogony: “any theory concerning the coming into existence or origin of the universe, or about how reality came to be (Wikipedia)”. The second is Homology: “Having structural likeness between corresponding parts of different plants or animals due to evolution from a common ancestor”. Quick note: while these two terms certainly have their place in the world of empirical study, the direction this blog needs to take will purely deal with the texts themselves, and the realties within the language. That being said, my interpretation of Eliade’s passage is this: varying origin myths do not attempt to contradict creation stories, rather, they extend the depth of the cosmogony by creating organic connections from a similar root. Eliade extends this idea by stating: “Every origin myth narrates and justifies a “new situation”—new in the sense that it did not exist from the beginning of World. Origin myths continue and complete the cosmogonic myth; they tell how the world was changed, made richer or poorer.”

…Finally I arrive at the textual analysis of these works through the filter of Eliade in this blog.

First, let us compare these two quotes:

My SOUL WOULD SING of metamorphoses. / But since, o gods, you were the source of these/ bodies becoming other bodies, breathe/ your breath into my book of changes: may/ the song I sing be seamless as its way/ weaves from world’s beginning to our day.

And:

Before the wig and dress coat/ there were rivers, arterial rivers/…Man was dust, earthen vase, an eyelid of tremulous loam…I am here to tell the story./ From the peace of the of the buffalo/ to the pummeled sands/ of the land’s end...My land without name, without America…word as yet unborn in my mouth.

Keep in mind these two quotes are just a few of the opening lines to both texts; yet parallel narrative motifs exist throughout both.

…And here it is: what my investigation has yielded me, and what my ideas on these prevalent parallelisms currently are: The reason these narrative motifs are similar, and continue to be similar throughout each work, is that each author earnestly believes in two things: 1. by setting the texts (the realties which they are creating in a mythic time of creation through the act of poetics, the works have the ability to transcend time, and arrive at a beginning where the authors are the god like figures who can for see, and construct all. 2. Both authors have a deep fear of the limited time that is allotted to them in life, so there seems to be a very active pursuit in securing existence as a supernatural being in some medium (literature in this case) which fuels the process of creating original mythic origin rather than merely just being the result of origin. By this, I mean the authors are aware of the homologizing effects that they command. Because these authors command this awareness, it seems that these works are not just collections of myths, and how the world came to be, but how they themselves came to be, and how they are ultimately apart of a cosmogony—time immemorial illo tempore.

If you don’t believe they have earnest hopes of living for ever read for yourself:

Ovid:

And now my work is done: no wrath of Jove
Nor fire nor sword nor time, which would erode
All things, has power to blot out this poem.

Neruda:

I am not going to die. I’m departing now,
On this day full of volcanoes,
For the multitudes, for life….
I’m staying here with words and people and roads
That await me again, and pound

On my door with their starry hands.