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A Quieter Music For Louder Times
- Craig Deininger
- Apr 19
- 7 min read
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry”
In recent months, clips of war and war-training exercises have begun to find their way through my otherwise airtight defense against the media onslaught that pours from my screen. In them I see not only the ruin of people and their lives, but also of our shared home, tracts of land, buildings, trees—flattened or simply erased. And while I’m tempted to write more on all the good reasons I should look away—and on all the good reasons I should look more closely—I will refrain.
Likewise, I will leave alone the ever-ambivalent entanglements of governments, industries, banks and media, who seem incapable of de-escalating not just war, but economic inequity, the revocation of basic human rights and residences, and the list goes on. Surely, it’s easy to feel insignificant or even useless in the shadow of these titanic forces and events, compelling one to fairly ask, “What can I do in the face of these? And in the present context, what can myth and music do?
We know that mythology is highly effective in identifying patterns and themes consistent with human contexts through the medium of story. It also provides tools for navigating these patterns. As for the world problems listed above, their shared theme is one of discord. But then, discord is always present in the myths, prompted by that one unavoidable element in all stories: conflict. And shortly, we’ll see how conflict is a necessary ingredient to harmony.
In ancient times, cultures looked to their myths to preserve the harmony of their communities, or to restore it when things went awry. Often, the myths were sung aloud or accompanied by instruments to enrich the medium the narratives rode on. Music provided a tangible element for the listeners to be touched and moved by. After all, music communicates directly to our emotions. In modern times, however, we’ve turned to abstraction, conceptual language and logical deductions, to help sort things out. As effective and necessary as this process is, abstraction specializes in bypassing emotion by extracting concepts from their “bodies” and leaving the latter behind. And so, a great power of influence is lost.
These days, we simply read the myths, or speak them rather plainly. Nonetheless, the music has not departed. It has simply settled into a quieter register—one that requires poetic sensibilities to access. One poetic device in particular that makes mythic language so effective is imagery. Within this domain falls not only visual content but any content perceptible to the five senses, making the description of the fragrance of flowers an olfactory image, and the sound of wind through trees—or music, for that matter—an auditory one. Why is this important? Because images are bodies that render a very basic, primal kind of experience that abstract information cannot. And, just as music’s body is composed of sound, so it is with plain language—being the sounds of the words themselves touching the ear, or the “inner” ear when we read silently to ourselves.
The body of poetry and pattern
Why poetry? Because it’s the most specialized system we have for understanding the dynamics of sound within so-called “plain” language. All myth is poetic if not poetry itself. And by “poetry,” I don’t mean that silly Hallmark, roses-are-red-violets-are-blue drivel, but rather the far-deeper things it accomplishes—like its ability to unify disparate phenomena through pattern.
That said, the sounds in poetry rely on patterns to work their magic through the matchings of near-likenesses such as rhyme, and equally, through contrasts—which we might call “mini-conflicts” (again, applicable to the larger world-picture). The relationships among these sounds constitute the connective tissue of poetry’s body. They are its musical notes and phrases that coalesce into “song.” But unlike in music, the “notes” (sounds) of poetry are like islands that have drifted apart—but not so far apart that no pattern is made. Due to its degree of sparseness and of fineness, the pattern’s subtlety deepens, and its reach extends. Attentiveness to this subtlety can help us navigate the bewildering complexity of the times.
Over the last century, poetry has grown significantly more subtle. Rhymes no longer fall like bricks at the end of every line. They have spread to every other line, or every third, or have become near-rhymes, or have given way to the quieter connections established through consonance, assonance and meter.
Consider, for example, the consonant pattern of the following “liquid” syllables (containing the r and l sounds) in Hilda Doolittle’s description of waves breaking against a forested shore: “Whirl up sea . . . hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir.” Notice how we feel the texture and music of these particular sounds as distinctly liquid-like.
And what’s music without rhythm? Consider the following from Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”:
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
In particular, the third line (a string of anapests—feel free to look it up) seems to gallop across the page, while the first two lines provide contrast. I included them here for the sake of contrast—to give that third line a substrate to leap from.
What’s music without rhythm?
The contrast (or conflict) in harmony
As a youngster, I once endeavored to capture a particular moment in a song where the harmony was so rich, so beautiful, that I wanted to extend its duration. Equipped with two lousy cassette players from Radio Shack, I was able to isolate the precise note and loop it into continuous succession. As you might expect, the project was an utter failure, as I quickly discovered that in removing it from its surrounding environment, my once glorious note had lost all its former magic. In short, my (literally) one-note wonder needed to inhabit a pattern with other notes to interact with, to mirror in likeness, or to gain traction on via contrast.
On that note (sorry), harmony is not something you can drop into an environment from the outside. Rather, it requires a plurality— to make a union of differences. Joseph Campbell turns to Heraclitus to address the complexity of harmony in the context of myth: “The figures worshiped in the temples of the world are by no means always beautiful, always benign, or even necessarily virtuous … for as Heraclitus has declared: ‘The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony, and all things take place by strife’” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 36).
In this light, harmony is more like a recipe built from the ingredients at hand, placed in a pattern of right ratios—which is quite different from dividing the ingredients into equal portions—demonstrating that harmony supports equity over equality. It accounts for context.
Mythological applications
Okay, we’ve made the leap from music to poetry through sound. And the leap from sounds to the patterns they make which, if well-crafted, give rise to harmony. Now, like poets, we can apply those concrete instances to the notion of harmony in the contexts of mythic and lived experience.
In Greek mythology, harmony (Harmonia) is the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite. That Aphrodite would have a part in harmony is no surprise. But Ares? Where is the harmony in a god of war? Or in the admixture of love and war, regardless of ratios? Well, that’s the complexity and mystery of harmony. And, if the hopes of the people are to make harmony out of the chaos, then here we have our Ares and Aphrodite, our conflict of love and war.
So, to return to the question “What can I do in the face of these?” Well, relating to the separation stage of the hero’s journey, I think we just need to back out from the noise a little and recalibrate to a finer frequency. And then return—step back into the pattern, freshly tuned and equipped with the encouraging knowledge that so little can go so far in the business of cultivating harmony: a pinch of this here and a dash of that there . . . et voila.
MythBlast authored by:
Craig Deininger has been writing for the JCF Mythblast series since 2018. He has taught at Naropa University, Studio Film School in Los Angeles and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he earned an MFA in poetry. He also earned an MA and PhD in Mythology and Jungian Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. He has counterbalanced his studies with manual work in fields like big ag farming, landscaping, commercial fishing, trail-building, framing houses and so on. He is grateful to have somehow made it to later life after too many outdoor misadventures in backpacking, rock climbing, hiking and, especially, trying to get too close to wildlife that doesn’t want to be gotten-too-close-to. His poetry has appeared in several literary magazines including The Iowa Review, and his first book of poetry Leaves from the World Tree was co-authored with mythologist Dennis Patrick Slattery and published by Mandorla Books.
This MythBlast was inspired by the Separation stage of the hero's journey.
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Myth and Meaning, 111-112
