Rio Gonzalez
Dr. Michael Sexson
Mythologies
11/30/2010
Gonzalez the River King
Walking from my apartment near the soccer fields on Lincoln to the International Coffee Traders coffee shop off 10th and College, the sun is shining down on me and I’m listening as Joe Barrett tells me how terrified Henderson is of Atti upon first meeting, and I thought how incredibly connected to everything this book is; not “just” to this class but to life, everything.
I cross the street next to Howard Hall and skirt the rain pocked duck pond. The leaves falling off of the tree to the rhythm of the wind and I think; Eugene Henderson follows the path of the Hero, separating from Lilly, and from the Arnewi. Initiation happens repeatedly, he is initiated into the Arnewi by wrestling Prince Itelo, the love of Queen Willatale and then came his failure with the cistern of frogs. He comes to the Wariri and tosses himself head-first into an initiation as Rain King and King Dahfu helps him to transform from the pig he was, and was trying to get away from, into a lion. Finally, after several trials and the tragic death of King Dahfu he is made king of the Wariri and barely escapes from this debacle with his life, Romilayu, and the lion cub reincarnation of his friend Dahfu. The cub is King Dahfu through representation, shared conversations, experiences with Dahfu and Atti, knowledge and respect of cultural beliefs and Henderson’s willingness to “suspend disbelief” in order to maintain something more important; Henderson gets to keep a real connection to his mentor and friend King Dahfu and the things he learned from him through the cub symbol and allegorical reminder. To Henderson, the cub is Dahfu’s “Mememoreme.”
The snow is falling as I walk into I.C.T. thinking about how Henderson was initially terrified of the lioness Atti but is now carrying a lion cub home and telling a small child about life, and nothing, and playing. He is coatless in the ice and cold in Newfoundland, vivified by his new found voracity for life, however it may meet him; and then, as now, I was stunned by the uncut beauty of what I was “reading.” Every time I listened it was like that idiosyncratically gruff Henderson fellow was opening the barrier between this world and the world of myth. As if, when I was listening, there were little Fairies reading over my shoulder, grabbing some of the more important ideas and phrases right out of the air and pushing them into my ear to ensure I didn’t miss them. My favorite story, I reflect, must have been the initial meeting of Henderson and the bittah Queen Will - a - tale and her Omphalos; pushing Henderson’s face down into her navel, a sign of great affection. Now every time I see a navel I think, “there’s a little omphalos, supporting the world and keeping things going.” It made me wonder about navel lint and what stories it could tell, like Harold Crick’s wristwatch perhaps, though I’ve never heard of lint saving anyone’s life.
The knowledge that Eugene, as Harold did, had to remember who he was in order to become what he was, he had to un-forget his lion and relieve his pig, this apocalyptic anamnesis being the “want” that he had. Henderson attempts to describe his “I want, I want, I want” as for something real, reality, but finds that reality is subjective and that “it is no longer a question of a false representation of reality but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.” as Jean Baudrillard states in Simulacra and Simulation. He tries to convince himself that he wants freedom but finds freedom in bonds, or at least in the middle of nowhere with no quick escape, and then he finds that he simply wants to be himself, to follow his own wants and let go of all of the other wants that surround him but are not of him, the wants that, due to propriety, he’s felt pressured by, and catered to his whole life. Henderson becomes the lion in order to become himself and not have to become what everyone else wants him to save Morpheus, or rather King Dahfu. He saves his own reality instead of attempting the Herculean feat of holding up the whole. He, on his way home after Romilayu ensures his safety to the plane, finds himself running and sighing and exhibiting a great liberation from the life he had though he is returning to it. He is now the hero, he has the treasure and is returning to, infectiously, share this secret of life with his family. He has finally had his bite of the real and is, like we all do, glowing from the savory flavor of it.
Saul Bellow wrote a modern Ovidian myth, slightly longer, quite nearly as gory and plenty potent enough, allegorically. It suddenly surfaced in my mind that this is yet another giant ribbon wrapped around a Sexson class. No wonder he emphasized this as the final paper, it’s the earlobe for his necklace, to prove, like a ticket stub, our admission into the Sexsonian Mysteries; this book wasn’t narrowing our final paper possibilities, it was opening them up through framework. The axis mundi is, like Atlas, ever supporting the world while the heavens rest upon its shoulders. The omphalos may be the spiritual center we find in and through ourselves. Our navels are the axis mundi’s many navels. Our trip, voyage, journey, story, and mythos, is our logos, our ethos, our “fire and [our] rose are one.” We are enthusiastically hugging the Heliades. We have had our voyage through the beginnings, the middles, and the ends and have cyclically a-riverrived, “via commodius vicus of recirculation back [at] Howth Castle and Environs”, a.k.a. “In my beginning is my end … And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”
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