A Myth

Studio Vacuüm / Mees Vervuurt 

Essay by philosopher and dramaturg Roel Meijvis. For every performance, he writes an accompanying essay that weaves questions, thoughts, and inspirations into a poetic invitation. These words serve as a bridge, guiding you to explore your own feelings and uncover new depths of meaning within the work, and the world we live in.


A Myth is a musical performance with and in space. By means of sound, air, light, voice, cloth, breath, time and body, it examines the question how we humans relate to our surroundings. What does it mean to be present? How do I relate to the world around me? What is the role of language, of myths and stories, in understanding that world? And are other ways of relating possible?

‘It fills us. We arrange it. it decays.

We re-arrange it, and decay ourselves.’ 

                                  (Rainer Maria Rilke)

/ §1.

For the premiere at the O. Festival in Rotterdam, we find ourselves in a 12-metre-high former grain storage, called the cathedral; a large concrete space that feels unwelcome and cold. The space has something cloed and heavy, like a bunker, a hiding place, but without the warm intimacy of a hut in the attic. It is a place that is not meant for people, and that you can feel.

Outside, it is light. Outside, life goes on. But here, we are in another world. The fact that grain has not been stored here for a long time indicates that time has passed. We are in a ruin, a remnant of a time and a world that no longer exists. This coming and going of worlds, this cyclical succession of gods, eras and seasons, is a characteristic of many mythological stories.

These stories are our primeval stories about existence; about the beginning (and often also the end) of everything. In these stories, people often precede gods, and gods themselves often precede titanic primal forces or cosmic energies. In the beginning, there is nothing. But nothing is always at the same time everything. Later does unity become multiplicity, eternity a moment and life itself a living thing, an individual. Then you are suddenly somewhere. But where?

And so we enter this dark space, carefully, with slow steps and pricked ears. We hear something in the distance. Or is it close by? I choose a spot and remain standing. Here I try to see what I hear, and to hear where I am. Slow tones stretch out before me like a landscape from which a new mountain rises with every sound. Figures emerge from the darkness, respond to the call from the deep. A world awakens. Unique voices – are they voices? – human and inhuman at the same time, are outlined in the sound that was once one. I am able to distinguish more and more from each other. I search, I grasp, I arrange. But does this help me to be present?

/ §2.

A Myth examines relationship and relating. The role of the spectator is essential to this. And so is my role as spectator, for how do I relate to all this? In what way am I part of this work or experience?

We see a figure moving through the musical landscape, curious. She too seems to wonder where she is. Together we encounter a world that is closed, but not hostile. We try to grasp it, understand it, be part of it. But is that possible? And how?

‘Our first experience is, remarkably, of a disappearance, writes the German-Russian writer and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé in her autobiography. ‘A moment ago we were everything, undivided; any other being was indivisible from us.’

Salomé describes the moment when a crack arises between the individual and the world. According to her, this break arises at the moment when a child starts to speak and learns to say I. In this way, we humans are born twice. We are born into the world on the day we come to earth, but we are also born out of the world when we develop a sense of self that distinguishes us from the things around us.

How do these two fit together? Is something lost with this second birth? And is it possible to go back? Not to a romantic ‘state of nature’, but to a unity, a fullness, in which I experience the wind in the world as breath in me, and my breath as an extension of myself in the world, with which I mingle with everything and everyone.

Breath and wind are important motifs in this performance, as they are in the work of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. With these concepts, Rilke always refers to our participation in the unity and fullness of the world. When we breathe in, we take from it, and when we breathe out, we give space back. In this way, we create space. But it is also something that happens unconsciously, without thinking about it. Breath is the absolute source. The Hebrew word Ruach (רוח) from the Bible can therefore simultaneously mean breath, air, and (God's) spirit. It is a movement of air, a manifestation of the world in its purest form.

Despite this, Rilke shares Salome's worldview, in which man stands opposite to things. That is what Rilke says to be our fate in his Elegies of Duino (1923): ‘That’s what Destiny means: being opposite, / and nothing else, and always opposite.’ And so he sighs in this same poem: ‘Here all is distance, / there it was breath. Compared with that first home / the second seems ambiguous and draughty. / And we, spectators always, everywhere, / looking at, never out of, everything!’

Banned from unity, banished to our second home, we are doomed to be spectators and to live in a world where everything is at distance. That is the fate of man. Is that also our fate here, as spectators? Or could there be a moment, in the absorption in music and space, in sharing of the same breath, in which another relationship is possible? And who, when I am absorbed in my surroundings, then relates?

/ §3.

This being-opposite as a result of our consciousness, is also at the basis of how human beings are understood in French existentialism. For instance Simone de Beauvoir also acknowledges this tragedy of human fate. But on the other hand she also points to the joy of it. Only because we are distanced from the world, we can also experience it. In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) she writes:

I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.

In the works of the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector this ambiguity is also expressed, but in a different way. In a diary entry she raises the question ‘what would things and people have been like before we had given them the meaning of our human hopes and visions?’ For Rilke and Salomé this is the stage before the break with the world. It is the world of the child, as they both call it; a state of being to which they both also try to return.

Lispector’s answer to her own question, on the other hand, is precisely that it must have been terrible:

It rained, things got completely wet and dry again, and then they burned in the sun and were scorched to dust. How frightened I am when I do not give the world our human meaning. I am afraid of the rain when I separate it from the city and raised umbrellas, and from the fields that drink themselves into the water.

Without human meaning, without language, there is no sense. It rains. You get wet. And that's it.

In her novel The Passion According to G.H. (1964), her character expresses this as ‘the fear of the silence with which life is made. Fear of the neutral.’ It is a fear of that pre-verbal state of the world, the silence of an unwritten musical stave, untouched like a pack of snow without footprints. She presents this as undesirable, something one wants to escape from. ‘In order to escape from the neutral, I had long ago exchanged my being for the persona, for the human mask. By humanizing myself, I had freed myself from the desert.’

The escape from this silent originality occurs by naming things, by indicating them, and by giving ourselves a name as well, an identity, by becoming a person. This is where her humanization consists of. By naming ourselves and things we enter the linguistic, symbolic world - the world of myths – and with this, the world and we become human-like. That ‘terrible’ other world, that desert, where nothing refers to man, is abandoned, and that has something of a liberation.

But – and this is important – with that liberation, we also lose something: ‘I had liberated myself from the desert, yes, but I had lost that too! And I had also lost the forests, and I had lost the air [!], and I had lost the embryo in me.’ By being born from the world, by becoming an individual that can relate to the world and others, I have detached myself from the unity of being, but with that, that unity is also gone lost. Everything has become opposed.

This ambiguity seems to be at the core of the human condition; of how we are on this earth; banished from unity, opposed the world, of which we are nevertheless a part.

The wandering figure relates to the other performers as to a landscape. Sometimes affected by its beauty, which seems to ask to be observed, sometimes almost desperate, excluded by its rigid indifference. Then she looks at me with that same look. I shiver. Am I too nothing more than outside world, in the eyes of the other, and ever so?

/ §4.

Is A Myth actually about language? Is language, and everything that comes with it, our primary relationship to the world? Is perception always a form of reading, understanding and interpreting? And what kind of grammar and logics does that perception adhere to? ‘Language is the house of being’, writes the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his Letter on Humanism (1947). ‘In its home human beings dwell.’ On the other hand, that house is a so-called ‘second home’. Can that house really be a home? Is there room for everyone? And is there a possibility for man to leave that house? Are there still places free of myths? Spaces free of meaning and message? Do deserts still exist? And is that perhaps what is being sought in this performance?

In his standard work Mythologies (1957), the French philosopher Roland Barthes defines myth as speech, and in particular: a way of signifying, a form. It is a form of appropriating the world. By naming things we incorporate them into the human structure. A tree is a tree, he writes, but a tree seen with our cultural gaze has long since ceased to be just a tree. It is a decorated tree. We have a certain image and feeling about it, it refers to something, it is no longer a strange object that is silent.

What is precisely characteristic of myth is that it conceals the fact that it is a myth. It presents itself as a natural fact. And so myth becomes political. Barthes therefore does not study the myths of classical antiquity, but the French myths of his time: Citroën, cycling and steak frites – each and every one supposed to be “truly French”. Together, these myths form the prevailing ideology about what it means to be French. But because it only exists in these myths, it is never openly proclaimed. It expresses itself apolitically, claims not to be an ideology, but claims to be an expression of ‘common sense’, of how things simply are.

When someone appeals to common sense (which we hear happening again in politics today), we should always pay attention. Things that are simply the way they are, are rarely so. ‘One can imagine myths that are very old, they are not eternal; for it is the history of people that transforms reality into speech.’ Barthes too makes a distinction between reality and speech; our first and second home. There is the desert, the neutral silent empty space, and there is the imaginary, built-up world, the busy city, inhabited by man and its myths.

But if it is true that man does indeed live more in the world of myths, then it is all the more problematic that myths are not innocent. Especially when we forget that they are just myths. It is therefore not without reason that the phenomenon of myth recurs so often in various emancipatory studies.

For example, in her main work The Second Sex (1949), De Beauvoir devotes a large part to myth as the source of inequality between men and women. Not only the content of the myths are crucial, but also who invented them. If the reality in which we live is written, then the question is always who wields the pen. De Beauvoir: ‘Males have shaped the great virile figures for their own exaltation: Hercules, Prometheus, Parsifal; in the destiny of these heroes, woman has merely a secondary role.’

And the myth also often recurs in the essays on racism by the American writer James Baldwin. Baldwin focuses on exposing the myth of white innocence of the white American and the white European, which are precisely the result of a mythologization of their own past.

Baldwin is therefore, like De Beauvoir, always concerned with an inequality that is not based on reality, but only exists in our stories and in our speech, in our myths. This does not mean that this inequality is not real, for this ‘invented’ difference creates a real oppression in society, which in turn causes inequality in our lived reality. According to these thinkers, liberation therefore consists exposing and dismantling myths.

/ §5.

According to the English (former) environmental activist and writer Paul Kingsnorth, the current ecological crisis that threatens all life on earth, is also a consequence of the stories that underlie our civilization; stories that have always been invented by people and in which human beings are central.

In his eco-art manifesto, Kingsnorth therefore writes: ‘We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’.’ And, he adds here, following Barthes: ‘These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.’

Kingsnorth therefore calls for us to uncivilize ourselves through new stories. We must ‘throw off our mask’ and return to that ‘desert’ Lispector writes about. But what does that desert look like? And if we were allowed to start over from that emptiness, what would we hear there? How would that feel? And would we be closer to the truth there, closer to who we really are, or would we be lost instead?

According to Kingsnorth, an important task is reserved for art. According to him, the climate crisis will not be solved by continuing to believe in economic growth and technology, whether or not it is sustainable. We must dig deeper and revise and rewrite our myths, the myth of human centrality and that we can use the earth to our content. For this he puts his hope in poets.

And he is not alone in this. Heidegger calls ‘thinkers and poets’ the guardians of our dwelling of being. Barthes calls poetry the opposite of myth, because it does not impose anything on reality but seeks inalienable content. According to him, poetry is ‘a kind of spatial, tangible analogue of silence.’

The English writer Jeanette Winterson takes a broader approach in her essay Art Objects (1996) and also includes non-linguistic art forms:

It is necessary to have a story, an alibi that gets us through the day, but what happens when the story becomes a scripture? When we can no longer recognise anything outside our own reality? We have to be careful not to live in a state of constant self-censorship, where whatever conflicts with our world-view is dismissed or diluted until it ceases to be a bother. Struggling against the limitations we place upon our minds is our own imaginative capacity, a recognition of an inner life often at odds with the external figurings we spend so much energy supporting. When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.

Is that what A Myth is trying to do? Is this performance trying to break with the primal myth of our contemporary civilization? Is it trying to break with the form of myth itself? Is A Myth also a-mythical? Or is that a myth itself? Can we stand outside the story? Or can we only try to rewrite our stories? Or could we perhaps, sometimes, in a single moment of absorption in all this, on the top of a mountain, in silence or in beauty, be somewhere else, closer to the truth, more real, deeper, after which we must always return to our familiar or unfamiliar home of language?

/ §6.

A hurricane of sound and movement rushes past us. ‘Fling the emptiness out of your arms/ into the spaces we breathe’, writes Rilke. It fills us. Like a wind that blurs the lines of my body and blows me to all corners of the space. The space I am, the space we are. A final attempt, and the feeling that something has been overcome.

Then, the silence after the storm. The descent after the climb. Relief. A new space, or: as new in space. And only now do we see where we really are – or, only now do I see that space that we think we indicate with that little word. Light. Height. Width. Here I am. Here we are.

It could be a beginning.