mythology and its absence part II

I am tired, so the following is all over the place.
This post assumes two things: 1. Stories aren’t superfluous, but vital, and not in some mamby pamby sort of way: “oh but they awaken your soul (don’t let me forget about this, because I’m making fun of it, but I think there is some real meaning to it)” kind of crap. Stories are vital in the same way that thumbs are vital—no thumbs, no survival. 2. There are many kinds of stories, but the two categories that I want to talk about are entertainment stories and pedagogical stories. Entertainment stories is a loose category into which I’m throwing everything from funny personal anecdotes to most movies. The only things that really designate an entertainment story an entertainment story is that it is in some way captivating, but if it were to be forgotten the next day, there would be no real consequence. So in other words, entertainment stories are fun and useless. Pedagogical stories are necessary in the same way that thumbs are necessary. Like entertainment stories, they should be captivating enough to hold the attention of the young and easily distracted, but also because captivating stories are more likely to be remembered (the content of pedagogical stories isn’t easily acquired from the raw, so it must be preserved with high fidelity and as if it were to exist forever). Ok, I think I covered the two assumptions.
My argument is that mythology is in the pedagogical category, and that literature should serve the same pedagogical function that mythology serves. If that’s true, that mythology and literature, though each expressing themselves differently, serve the same pedagogical function, then the only thing you have to figure out about any piece of literature is what it’s intending to teach us. For mythology the basic outline of many stories is “this is how we were created, this is who we are, and this is what we do, and this is what happens when we stray from what we should do.” It’s a description and a prescription. I think literature does the same thing, and in today’s world where the authentic is quickly but hopefully not permanently being supplanted by the artificial, its role is just as important. It describes us, it holds a mirror up to our face and shows us for the first time what we truly look like, and it presents us with the scenario of what we should be doing, and/or what’s going to happen to us if we aren’t doing what we should be doing (Benny doesn’t need stories because he only has one program: catch mice. But humans are the animal defined by their ability to act on any number of programs, so stories help them choose the best ones.)
So a pedagogical story is a survival guide. I was talking with mom about how a real story would have to exist beyond itself and its reader, it should help us navigate the world. A real story should be able to take a table and make some relevant comment on it. Long story short, a table is made from trees and humans directly depend on trees for our survival and if we don’t understand our relationship with trees then we are at risk of destroying them and thereby ourselves. No joke, it’s a fact of life directly relevant to our own lives seeing as how we breath air and stuff. New mythologies must include technology because it is now part of our survival.
Anyways, modern authors have a doubly difficult job; not only are they mining the content of their stories from raw ore, but they are also working against an pseudo-mythology that is kept in place so that a few people benefit greatly from our ununderstanding of how we were created, who we are, what we do, and what we should be doing. Modern authors’ first task is to disassemble this pseudo-mythology, hopefully explaining to us that we’ve been duped. They then have to tell us who we really are and what we really do, what we should do if we hope to survive and thrive (someone whose soul is awake realizes the true nature of their humanness, and the true nature of their relationship to other humans and the environment, sees the interdependence and so is less likely to harm either).
James Welch’s book gets at this, I think. He realizes that the white culture that the native Americans are buying into bases its existence on machines (yet doesn’t understand them), on nonsymbiotic relationships with other humans, on short-lived thrills, etc. Basically on a way of life that won’t thrive or even survive for very many generations to come. They don’t understand their own nature, that their nature is one and the same as nature’s nature, and most importantly, they don’t have a survival guide. But I think Welch’s book holds up the mirror to native americans’ faces and white people’s faces (at this point our fates are shared), disassembles the pseudo-mythology, and with the help of Yellow Calf, starts to build a new survival guide that will maintain us indefinitely.