Light and Silence

This is definitely a different sense of "logos" from John 1:1. To understand how that is, one would have to go back to the Greek.

That issue aside, I sympathize with readers' ambivalence and conflicted feelings about Karen Armstrong's work (feelings that may express themselves as rejection) because I share them -- without even having been exposed to more than the passing article or interview. The reason for this unease is the same as the reason why I distrust this "mythos/logos" distinction: it's too neat, too facile, it presumes to explain too much. In a word, it's too "logical", and to the extent that it isn't (to the extent that this discrimination participates in the mythic), the meaning it conjures up in me is one I dislike and distrust, a fake or false "aha", a sense that oh-the-world-is-so-simple, If Only One Understands. But it isn't. I'm sure I'd have no problem with Karen Armstrong as a person and a thinker; as a dinner companion I'm sure she'd have much to share. But the "Karen Armstrong" offered by the media and the marketers as such a wonderful salve to the world's soreness -- that, I distrust, and the bits of her arguments I do run across aren't reassuring. Here, I wonder when the "when" was (since the discussion is couched in the past tense) in proposing these terms. What authority, ancient or modern, is she actually citing? On what basis, I wonder, is "logos" associated with the practical and pragmatic, whereas "mythos" is subtle and subterranean? One suspects masculine vs. feminine is not far behind: a deconstructionist would have a field day.

But the issue itself, it's true, is enticing. The thing is, we do seem to mean at least two different things when we say "meaning". On the one hand, we mean how a word or idea or expression participates in a system of such words or ideas, its formal activity, the way we can parse, decode or resolve it, say by looking it up in a dictionary, thereby reducing and exposing it while simultaneously revealing its relations with other things represented by other words or ideas or expressions. This sort of formal and "logical" meaning is really important, as the systems in which words or ideas work are marvelously intricate and complex and, sometimes, revealing, having evolved over time to have considerable powers to represent, to signify, and to elaborate themselves in representations and significations. And we know that to work in this way, examining and weighing concepts in themselves and apart from local incidentals and contingencies, is itself quite a formidable achievement, requiring from us real, substantial discipline: openness, humility, equanimity, acceptance of things as they are so we can see them and not make them out to be something different, not distort the world in our wish for it to be different from what it is. Yet at the same time -- and this is why we learn (or at least, those of us who are paying attention learn) to distrust it -- why the "logos" half of the split comes to be denigrated as useful-but-flawed -- such meaning is also, oddly, meaningless, merely a formal exercise, about the token as it participates in a system but not about what the token represents. It turns out that local incidentals and contingencies actually matter. If you work with computers or technology you learn this: a command or instruction doesn't "mean" anything at all in any "meaningful" way. It just kicks off a process; it's fundamentally arbitrary. Typed onto a command line, "del" doesn't mean anything at all, except in the sense that it is bound to a certain behavior (say, file deletion): as cause, it comes to "mean" its effect. But the real cause isn't the "del" but the programming behind it and the user who invokes it, and "del" doesn't really mean "delete" any more than long hot days "mean" summer. They just happen to go together, is all.

The other sense of "meaning", the sense the "mythos" side invokes, is the larger meaning that emerges when we relate the token or form outside and beyond its participation in the merely formal system -- the contingences and connections to human purposes, expectations, and to the emotions that seem inevitably to go with these, both positive and negative. This kind of meaning is the meaning people crave (and it is a craving, no different from any other, as any self-aware watcher of daytime TV can tell you). And because we crave it, we say it's good, and the other kind of meaning is unsatisfactory for us.

But to say that mythos is good because it connects us, it makes us feel alive, is to neglect how logos is also about connections, and about how the disinterested, ego-less connection of logos might itself be good, indeed a necessary basis for a deepening of the capacity for mythic connection in a way that, because it is not so caught up in the small and short-lived demands of self or tribe, will not turn out to be soul- or world-destroying. Thus, to understand that long hot days mean summer because of the angle of the earth's rotation as it circles the sun, is not to deny what "summer means long hot days" means for the earth's creatures, up to and including those pleasant evening hours spent telling stories on the front porch, but rather to recognize how it is we can all be in this together, to see something about Summer and the connection between the great tipped earth and the small animal waiting in the shade for dusk. Logos and mythos, properly understood, require each other: there can be no system without stuff to be systematic.

Given this reading, I don't think American culture per se is biased towards "logos". I think discourse itself is, especially poorly thought through, half-baked, insensitive discourse intolerant of paradox, irony or complex interdependency. But American culture loves mythos too -- it's just that it's riskier and harder to get right, entailing as it does a sensitivity to context and boundaries and an appreciation of how little we actually control. Yet, perhaps convinced by a weird tribal myth that nothing but good can come of it and blinded by our faith in the power of PR, supposing mythos is as easy to manipulate as the ratios we know, we Americans are also ready and eager to cross boundaries into mythic realms of big significances. This gets us into trouble. Sometimes, big trouble.

But Simon, when you tried breathing meditation with the instruction of recognizing the breath as what connects you, as spirit, to your world, that was Logos as much as Mythos. You were essentially rewiring your understanding of breathing, as part of that one particular system of lungs, alveoli, blood, O2 and CO2. With this exercise, "breathing" became integrated into a new context, and it doesn't surprise me that given its emotional valences, you could synaesthetically sense a soft white glow -- as the glow is itself a symbol in a system of meanings, and here, also, an effect resulting from a cause -- breathing, connection, spirit. It took your brain to do this, recognize the validity of that connection, and how there is more to breathing than exchanges of gases across semi-permeable membranes. But we don't just "mean" with our brains, however that fatty organ may be mysteriously capable of logical operations. We mean with our entire selves.