Mythology

On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 was about six billion kilometres from the Sun, beyond the orbit of Neptune and leaving the planets behind, when its camera was turned around for one last series of pictures. Carl Sagan had pushed for the shot for years, against engineers who saw no scientific value in it and some risk to a camera pointed so close to the Sun. In the frame that came back, Earth occupies less than a pixel: a point of pale light caught in a scattered sunbeam. Nothing could be measured in the Pale Blue Dot that had not been measured better from closer up. The picture existed to be seen, and then to be shown. …

I pick up the phone to check one thing, the weather or the time of a train. When I look up, forty minutes have passed. Nothing dramatic happened in them. There was a notification, then a video someone had shared, then the next video, then a headline, then a small red number that needed to go away. No single moment felt like a loss of freedom. The hour was made of ordinary moments, and none of them was mine. …

Most people who grew up on the Disney Cinderella believe they know how the story ends: midnight, the glass slipper, the wedding. That belief is not wrong so much as it is late. It arrives already several centuries and several continents downstream of where the story starts, and the version that feels most original is usually just the version we happened to receive first. Underneath a great many familiar characters sits an older, stranger engine — one the polished surface was built to manage rather than replace. …

The modern job is not only a contract for labor. Increasingly, it is a story that has to be kept alive from one day to the next. The image is Scheherazade in The Thousand and One Nights. She survives by telling the king a story so compelling that he postpones her execution to hear the ending. The story is never allowed to close. Each night buys another morning. No employee is literally Scheherazade, and a layoff is not an execution — the analogy would collapse if pushed that far. But the structure of uncertainty transfers cleanly: survival depends on keeping an authority interested in a future that has not yet arrived. The new project, the strategic initiative, the quantified productivity gain, the skills acquired in a spare evening, the enthusiastic email to a manager — all of it functions as an installment in the same ongoing narrative. The worker is not merely doing the job. The worker is continuously proving there will still be a reason for the job tomorrow. …

Every telling of the dragon myth ends at the same place: the sword goes in, the beast falls, the hero walks out with the treasure and the story stops. But the oldest versions of this myth don’t actually stop there, and the part that keeps going is the part worth reading now. The dragon was rarely a dragon from the beginning. In the sources that predate Wagner’s opera and Tolkien’s paperback, the monster guarding the hoard is a person who got there first — someone who loved the gold enough to kill for it, and who changed shape because of what the gold demanded of him. The sword that ends him doesn’t end the pattern. It just reassigns who gets tempted next. …

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey has already opened, and I still haven’t gone to see it. I probably won’t reread The Iliad or The Odyssey beforehand either, and I certainly won’t reread Ulysses — Joyce’s hundred-year-old rewrite of the same walk home — just because a director spent a reported quarter billion dollars and two years of 70mm IMAX film getting the wine-dark sea right. I’ll do what most adults do with the classics: let the adaptation take the first pass. But the more useful confession isn’t about the film. Even without a fresh reading, I already know what’s changed in how I encounter Troy. It isn’t the plot. It’s the algorithm I run over it. …

You cannot kill a narrative by killing its bearer. This is the oldest lesson in the history of power, and it is still not learned. The jester speaks a truth the throne cannot tolerate. Power silences him. But the moment the silencing happens—the arrest, the exile, the execution—something shifts. The jester is no longer a living person you can contradict or embarrass. He becomes a martyr. He becomes untouchable. The public, having witnessed the drama, begins to resurrect him. In protest signs. In whispered stories. In the coded language of the oppressed. The throne meant to kill the jester. Instead, it created an eternal symbol. …

Almost everyone past forty knows the type. The man still operating, in some quiet operative sense, as if he were twenty-four. The woman whose romantic life consists of the same three patterns it consisted of in 2009. The friend whose career has had the right surface motion — promotions, titles, perfectly photographed dinners — but whose inner question, who am I when no one is watching, has not seriously been asked since adolescence. They are not failures. Some of them are extraordinarily successful. They are simply, in the part that matters, not yet adults. …

Rereading Cien años de soledad after many years, I found myself less drawn to the Buendía dynasty’s epic sweep than to two characters at opposite poles of the novel: Remedios la Bella, who ascends bodily into the sky while folding sheets, and José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch who dies tied to a chestnut tree, speaking Latin to the ghosts only he can see. Both escape Macondo. Both leave ordinary reality behind. But they do so from diametrically opposite directions — one upward into serenity, the other downward into madness. The more I thought about it, the more this looked like a question Buddhism has wrestled with for centuries: what separates enlightenment from craziness, and are they really opposites at all? …

The book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis got me into thinking about the Minotaur, but at the same time I couldn’t help but think about Kirtimukha. I decided to write a piece comparing the two myths and how they relate to capitalism. Capitalism: A Labyrinthine Monster or an Eternal Hunger? Throughout history, economic systems have been compared to great forces of nature, war machines, or living organisms. But if we turn to mythology, two figures stand out as powerful metaphors for modern capitalism: the Minotaur, a monster lurking in an inescapable labyrinth, and Kirtimukha, a self-consuming face that never disappears. …