Thursday, March 19, 2009
Adhesive Legends
So, post-Alice Major and Erin Knight, I started thinking about the mythology of cities, and what it means to them. Mythology, to me, means a group of stories about heroes-made-to-be-superheroes, demi-gods, and other, largely infallible beings. Individuals like Hercules and Romulus or Spartan titans like Cleomenes are common ground the people of yore would bond around, secure in their fellow hero worship. A city needs, or needed, these archetypes,these 'perfections', to prove their validity as a people and as survivors of whatever terrible struggle or affliction that could be cast upon them. Without them a city seemed tenuous, impermanent, and vulnerable. Fast-forward to the modern age, and we still have that desire for ideals, but without an institutional ignorance to basic physics and lacking a traditional system of oral history, we simply can't conceive them anymore. So, we fill the top-spot in our social-hierarchy role model system with people like Nellie Mcclung and Wayne Gretsky, who, while being really amazing humans, still have faults one can easily identify, introducing far too much doubt into the equation. This weakens, or severs all together, the common glue of hero worship, leaving us alone and quite scattered, forced to pick and choose the attributes of our leaders and idols we think are virtuous, and thats a dangerous formula indeed.
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I agree with your post but I also feel that heroes were to serve to as the ideal while gods were more a tool on which to blame what went wrong and to explain why life sucked for us humans.Today we still have religion but heroes really are a thing of the past.Even the most impressive celebrities and leaders now-a-days are dissected until any small fault they have is revealed and suddenly, they are just like you and I.
ReplyDeleteThe last two sentences of your blog really resonated with me, although I don't think their faults are always easily identifiable. For instance, most people don't know that Emily Murphy wrote a book, The Black Candle (1922), in which she claims Chinese men facilitate an opium-laded lifestyle for white women that allows them to live a ruined life.
ReplyDeleteWhen I found this out it definitely "weaken[ed], or sever[ed] all together" my sense of hero worship towards her... do I still applaud her other efforts or do I disregard her as a "hero" figure because of her faults?
Brilliant, I agree and disagree. Its just like Homer's Iliad. It was one of the most told and known stories in the Ancient Greek world (which goes far beyond Greece, as I am sure you know). Why do people band around these stories? Because we love to glorify perfection, even if it isn't perfect. Straight-up Hero worship gives us sense of security and ease to know they exist. Its as if they do enough good for the world and so everyone else can sit back and relax, not having to take responsibility
ReplyDeleteHowever, finding out our heroes have weaknesses isn't exactly a terrible thing. In fact I find comfort in it. I means they're human just like me. They have faults but they can still do amazing things.
I find that more empowering than acknowledging their super-humanness. The power to overcome is something even more incredible than just being Heroic naturally. Like Batman.
I think that heroes in cities appear in different ways--in less epic ways--than mythology. Even less obvious than famous people. I think that by the connections we make in our communities create our own personal heroes. It could be a friend, a teacher, or a coworker. In Hagen's book his hero was Lulu and she had more meaning to him than any political face, celebrity (Well, Lulu was a celebrity too), or a sports star, ect. I think that local heroes manifest in the relationships we make throughout our daily lives in the city and they bring us together.