The First Person Singular

22. Finding Our Own Voice

107 22 Finding Our Own Voice A myth is not simply the particular way a particular community organizes the environment into a meaningful pattern. It is not simply a map of the environment using more concrete symbols than those used in modern economics, sociology, political science, history, biology, physics, and astronomy . Myths are also visions, visions of visionaries and seers. Visions are not just overarching conceptual frameworks; they are visualizations. The visions of Dante, William Blake, and James Joyce, those of the Epic of Gilgamesh and theMahabharata, theIliad and theRing of the Niebelung present a transfigured and glorified world or the glowing ashes of an incinerated world. The visionaries and seers do not simply map out symbolically and consecrate the established economy and politics of a community; they present another world. Neither the visions of Isaiah, Homer, Milton, and William Blake nor those of Simón Bolívar, Che Guevara, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela simply make the existing environment intelligible . A myth does not extend its sway in multiple intellectual acts of synthesis . The Ramayana has for more than two thousand years been the dominant myth first in Hindu India, then in Hinayana Buddhist Myanmar , Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, in Mahayana Buddhist Vietnam, and in Muslim Indonesia. It is maintained not, as in “the religions of the book,” through reading and preaching but in dramatic performance. In traditional areas of these lands even today, the Ramayana is performed, from dusk to dawn, at prescribed auspicious dates. People do not go, like modern theatergoers, to watch the plot unfold and the motivations of the characters become clear; everyone knows the story from childhood. What draws them once again is also not a new interpretation, new staging, or new actors; the performers are indeed critically appraised, but in terms of the degree of their realization of timeless ideals. The people watch through the night in something of a trance state, in a state of possession, as Nietzsche said of ritual tragic theater in ancient Greece. The shamans and healers do not simply effect the castration that destines the troubled one to the pursuit of the objects that the symbolic system of the community designates; they consecrate his alienation from the community, they make his voice heard to the community. How could they be the agents designated by the community to integrate someone 108 T H E F I R S T P E R S O N S I N G U L A R stricken with idiosyncratic notions and physical unfitness into the reason and work of the community when the shaman is a heresiarch and a malingerer , when his or her visions improvise and his or her practices may be black magic? The visions of visionaries and seers call upon, call up powers that ordinary life in society does not awaken, that the symbolic system of the society does not elicit. Žižek first depicted fantasies as a bricolage of symbols that are fitted into flaws and inconsistencies of the symbolic system of the culture in which we find ourselves. That is to envision symbols statically, as pieces of a system. It makes the essential activity at the core of an individual an activity of elaborating meaning. But our individuality is not constituted by a ceaseless spinning of an ever-wider spiderweb of intelligible relations. InThe Plague of Fantasies, Žižek says that fantasies provide desire with its coordinates and thus structure, channel, our desires.1 More exactly, “fantasy space” is the template that converts the hungers and thirsts of life after what it needs into unlimited desires. The images in our fantasy space figure as symbols, symbols of the object a, of lack, of the irremediably absent object of desire. Invoking such an absent object, producing a symbol for it, would transform our wants and needs, always finite, always in principle satisfiable, into desire, desire for the infinite. This insatiable desire that does not know what it desires, that longs for the totality, for the infinite, is the Hegelian spirit in us. The spirit, thus conceived as a relay of the need that defines us as living organisms, is, Hegel said, negativity. But a living organism is not an abyss; it is a dynamo. In being healthy, in being alive, our organisms generate energies in excess of what we need to satisfy our hungers and thirsts. In so much of what we do, awakening because our body is recharged overnight, dancing...