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Thomas Alexander uses the term "mythos" to denote "an important story that helps establish the meaning of the self, a people, and the world."[1] Mythoi are narratives about our particular inhabitation of a particular world--the ways we are in it and the ways it is in us. Unlike a myth, however, a mythos is not a "false story," nor is it necessarily fantastic. How did you end up living where you do now? How did you end up in your line of work? The answers to these sorts of mundane questions will contain elements of a mythos, for the stories they tell (however well or not) are interpretations of the qualities of one's experience in the world that make it THAT experience and THAT world. They are, in a certain sense, stories that imaginatively appropriate the present in terms of the past and future--in terms of what is and what could be.
I have been playing music for most of my life, and in all that time, music has not only come to occupy a significant amount of my thought, but my experiences with it have fundamentally changed the way I wonder about the world. My aim here is to discover and express some sense of myself, my folk, and my world through an exploration of the various experiences, thoughts, and feelings related to music that have had a formative impact on me and my perspective of the world. Over the past year or so, there have been many life-changing incidents and dynamics that have ultimately pushed me to reorient myself through an exploration of my mythoi--some having to do with music, and some not.
To be clear, though, I am not articulating what I believe or desire to be my personal "mythos," nor do I assume that a mythos is something that can be objectively grasped (or that it is ever really "complete"). What I am trying to do here is more of an informal autobiographical or autoethnographic research project, but I hesitate to call it that. I see this undertaking as being more of an art project than anything. I am not interested in collecting and analyzing data to deduce or induce any general facts or conclusions...about anything. In contrast, the process of the sort of inquiry I am pursuing is mostly abductive--a kind of initial wondering that, through the construction of narratives, is taken as the primary means of sense-making. I want to think through the significant stories of my experiences with music in order to discover potential ways of being in the world (or, alternatively, to discover potential worlds to be in). This process, as I understand it, is an ongoing cultivation of a craft or art of wisdom, in the ecological sense of an adaptability, or sensitivity and responsiveness to the qualitatively extended environment one inhabits. The construction of narrative mythoi, being an exploration of the ways one and her environment interpenetrate each other, IS a realization of a world and a sense of being in it--a realization of wisdom.
I prefer to use the plural, "mythoi," because it more accurately describes the nature of narratives and the meaningful ways they interpenetrate human existence at large. Narratives are always plural, and the meanings they contain and through which they are constructed and conveyed, are anything but static and monosemous. Think about the things you enjoyed, hoped for, despised, and wondered about as a child--think about how the world felt at that time, the way it seemed, and they way it seemed like it would be in the future. What happened to all of those stories you lived that WERE the sense you made of the world? What happened to that world? Of course, everything changes; life goes on and stories are retold or forgotten. But those feelings, those thoughts, those views, those worlds still do exist in some form for us, and, importantly, their relationship to the present is not and cannot be linear. "Where they went" is not a question that can be answered easily (if at all), for "where they were" in the first place--as we lived them--was never something so simple that it could be immediately grasped in symbol. If this were true, we would all be clairvoyant architects of our own destiny. The development of time in human experience is a creative process, and the construction of narratives is a sense-giving activity that grasps at the significance of the events through which time is formed.
Narratives are not explanations of the conditions of phenomena, however. They are attempts to express the currents of the dynamics of experience as they are felt and undergone; that is, they are interpretations of the past, present, and future in terms of each other. They are primarily aesthetic in nature, sharing closely the structure of conscious experience itself. In other words, narratives are not definitions, they are perspectives--points of view. They are more accurately regarded as positions than they are propositions. They are sketches; provisional, partial, and irreducibly situational.
In exploring the ways I thought and felt about music at different times and in different contexts, my goal is not to uncover the contours of some over-arching mythos that encompasses all of these experiences. I think this is beside the point, if not totally irrelevant! Such a thing could only be constructed through a process of selection anyway, which to me, is the more interesting and compelling purpose of exploring myhtoi--to wonder THROUGH these stories, not for the sake of definition, but perhaps more accurately for denotation. In other words, these sketches of musical mythoi shall form a kind of "thread through the labyrinth" that does not explain or define anything as such, yet expresses something that cannot be deduced from any of these stories or their details in isolation. Indeed, this is what a narrative is! You cannot get the story, the sense it gives, by taking its elements in analytic isolation! They have to be put together, arranged, discarded, emphasized--and all of this requires concrete choices. The experience of walking the labyrith has no substitute.
It is in this sense that I aim to explore the various mythoi involved in my musical experiences. At the end of the day, the desired outcome is not some theory about my life with music, the world, or my ideas about it (although, you can expect many rants about these too!). Rather it is to express the perspectives in which all these vastly different and even contradictory narratives and experiences coexist. It is in that exploration and expression of literal interest, I believe, that a genuine wisdom about the world and oneself may be realized.
On the outset of initiating this project, I have a few different formats already in mind:
Of course, there will be lots of stories told. Things like, how I first started playing music and all the fun shenanigans that came along with learning guitar while also going through puberty, ruminating on memorable musical experiences, etc.
I have a lot of what might be called critiques of various albums, songs, artists, etc., but I prefer to call them "relistens" rather than reviews. I am not interested in the arbitration of taste or any kind of judiciary assessment of the worth of musical works. But I want to talk about certains songs or aspects of songs that have been significant in my life. This involves stories about certain times, places, and people in my life at a given time that make the songs in question what they are for me. Even though these are specific to my experience, I believe they contribute to an appreciation of the music itself, and are likewise meaningful "critiques" in the ordinary sense of the term.
I am never lacking fuel for speculation, especially when it comes to music. The various musical and cultural ideals and aesthetics I've pursued and entertained over the years are primary colors in the palettes of my mythoi. These are largely philosophical ruminations relating to music theory, aesthetics, and ethnomusicology.
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[1]: Alexander, Thomas M. The Human Eros: Eco-ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence. Fordham University Press, New York: 2013, pp 13-14.
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