Ambrosia
What makes for a delicious fable?
When I write fiction, I'm trying to strike at the heart of something, and even though I don't always know exactly what that heart belongs to, from my approximation the best approach is to create a narrative. A story that weaves together tropes and concepts in a way that it spells out some deep knowledge that would be inexpressible otherwise.
This is mythology. These are stories we tell ourselves so that we may better know ourselves, with symbols representing thought, and characters representing ideals. There are obvious examples of mythology, whether it be the heroic tales of the ancient Greeks, or the medieval drama of the Knights of the Round Table. But it's more than that. If you're willing to look, you can see it in our religions, our politics, and our greater culture at large. Ideas can take flight as it's passed from one mind to another via our tongues and symbols. And it can go even further...
We are mythology that is writing itself.
We even have a name for the language: Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, the instructions for our physical form, written chemically, cascading through time, mixing and mingling, to create new forms. New narratives. New myths.
Who is this writer anyways? A deity? A feeling? A vague relationship with an ancient man whom everyone calls by a historically inaccurate name? Or is it Nature itself? What does that mean? What does it solve by using one symbol over another?
What are this God and Nature anyhow?
One cool dude who thought about this, and stirred the cultural pot in so doing, is Richard Dawkins. Now, a lot of people know him as a prominent atheist, but it's his scientific work that will be remembered. He introduced an idea... An idea to explain ideas actually:
The Meme.
The Meme is a very alluring data point, once one acquires the totality of it's implied meaning. The idea that our thoughts are like genes and propagate thusly. Genes encode our bodies, but memes encode our minds.
Religion makes a lot more sense with this understanding. All of mythology does actually. And once understood, you begin to see it everywhere. In television and film, books and magazines, music and poetry; even in media, propaganda, salesmanship; stories we tell each other, stories we tell ourselves.
Our ideas shape reality and our stories shape a collective understanding of our connection to something more, a bridge from our functions to our forms. From our minds to reality.
When I write characters, they're generally based on a meme of myself; an echo of a resonate thought or a circus mirror. They are ghosts; reflections on a mote of being. Perhaps by analyzing these isolated thoughts, and seeing how they play with one another, I may find something more than the sum of their parts. An answer... An idea...
Maybe even a tasty new mythology.
