Mythopoetics

La noción de Ursprache, una lengua primigenia que supuestamente habló el ser humano, presupone una monogénesis de los diferentes lenguajes de nuestra especie. Esa unidad de origen, oculta la pluralidad comunicativa en la que se fundamenta la comunicación emocional animal. Sólo si pensamos que lo que hablaron los primeros seres humanos es el resultado de un don divino que establecía una discontinuidad en las comunicaciones de la vida con la vida, tal monogénesis tendría interés para el estudio filosófico. De lo contrario, ese primer lenguaje humano, no sería más que un elemento más de una secuencia de eventos que llevó y sigue llevando hacia formas cada vez más complejas de comunicación humana y desarrollo psicológico. Las emociones básicas serían entonces un proto-Ursprache, que podría a su vez ser remitido a formas más básicas de comunicación orgánica y celular. Comunicamos emociones, y no sólo entre los organismos de nuestra especie: la vida se entiende con la vida a través de las

La semántica emocional de las estructuras mítico-rituales que aglutinan y cohesionan la vida de una comunidad humana es aprendida e interpretada por sus miembros a partir de la forma secuencial que tiene toda experiencia biológica, y la efectividad de la comunicación emocional específica depende de la falta de ambigüedad del mensaje transmitido y de su memorización. De esta última, se encarga el carácter repetitivo compulsivo que tienen la narración mítica y el ritual, tanto en sus periodicidades generales, como en las fórmulas verbales y gestuales que se recitan y actúan una y otra vez 1 . El contenido no ambiguo de la secuencia depende de la protocolización adecuada de las emociones. La diferente duración y alcance que tienen cada una de las emociones básicas condiciona la forma en la que son comunicadas, ya que los sistemas neuroquímicos emocionales guardan entre sí diversas relaciones agonistas y antagonistas que se potencian o limitan 2 . Como la homeostasis social

Según los lexicógrafos de la Real Academia, una aventura es un acaecimiento, un suceso o lance extraño, o también una casualidad y una contingencia, y por último, un riesgo, un peligro inopinado y una empresa de resultado incierto. Por su parte, el diccionario Webster de la lengua inglesa, dice que la aventura es un encuentro con el peligro, una empresa peligrosa y excitante, o también, una experiencia inusual que conlleva un cambio, y que a menudo es de naturaleza romántica, para acabar diciendo que también es aventura un riesgo o especulación en los negocios y las finanzas. Común a los dos diccionarios, es la idea de riesgo, peligro y resultado incierto. La diferencia más relevante quizá sea, que en español la aventura tiene una dimensión de casualidad y contingencia que no ven los sajones, una fuerza ciega y azarosa trabajando en la aventura. La vieja diosa romana, Fortuna, pervive escondida en nuestros conceptos, trabajando subrepticiamente en la idea de un orden divino ajeno

There is an interpretation of the myth of Antigone based on the concept of civil disobedience, i.e. in terms of the tension between myths of the human law and myths of the universal law. Has the universal law or law of the gods (the God) prevalence over human law (civil law)? The question is so confusing that it barely makes sense. Curiously enough the universal law is so embedded in our most basic valuations that we mistake it to express the essential human nature, and feel human law as a mere human all too human appendix of the profane ways of the meaningless modern world. From this point of view, just like Thoreau did by refusing to pay taxes to a Government which condoned slavery, Antigone refused to comply with a law which condemned the corpse of her brother to be the plaything of the crows and a banquet for the dogs. The primitive or metaphysical determination which orders the burial of corpses clashes against the functional or economic determination that denies any entity

A golden sandstorm engulfed the arian chariot opening up the cloud of orange dust on the top of a deep blue hill. Down in the valley, the fighting armies facing each other. Your family and your friends fight in both sides. Arjun wants an explanation for the nonsense of life, of battle. Reality seems simply like a cosmic mistake, an error. What shall we do with our lives? How are we going to live them? Simple basic questions. One direct path is the “Path of Beauty”, to move from fear to wonder, to awe and amazement. Beauty leads the restless and tireless navigator in you to pursue the fugitive horizon, the threshold of Greatness, and leads the horizon to be the rising Light, and answer to the desire to navigate. An arrow might kill us tomorrow, but today we have the wine of love and poems of old epics, when the gods rumbled the earth, Krishna and mighty Vishnu, drunk and starving rishis dreaming the heavens. So pour some more wine from last night and sing for me that

Old Norse: awe is agi , a feeling of great respect and liking. Let’s add: a sense of expansion and greatness, a blissful state which includes surprise, and the arousal of the will to play, for awe is active…the conscious creation of an identity by expressing objects and actions which produce awe. In the fight for Hastinapura, Prince Arjun transformed fear before Brahman into awe before existence, awe before the experience of the sublime .

 The Kantian way: sublime is the starry night above us, the unending ocean, whatever overcomes our sense of individuation.  Beyond that: “Sublime” is a very complex emotion. It is the experience of dissolution into something greater, ampler, wider, newer, everlasting.  In the Bhagavad-Ghita, the sublime as Brahman, with and without attributes produces the reaction of the deepest fear, the fear of dissolving. But there is also awe and wonder  The experience of the sublime is overwhelming and dissolves the ego, which surrenders before the beauty of the fleeting spring of the rose, the slow streaming strings of Mahler at the end of the summer, the flocks of birds at sunset.  The concept of the “sublime “ is related to traditional religious experiences. Can we free our experience of the sublime from the images of the past? Falling star The frog from the lotus Into the bottomless instant

 The idea of a literary canon is a variation of traditional censorship that makes only sense in the general processes of enculturation and development of narratives of domination. It certainly helps the teacher to reduce the number of candidates to be read on a classroom, but does a poor service to creativity endlessly repeating a transcendental pattern of inspired geniuses giving the law (literary or otherwise) to an ignorant humankind. When some years ago Harold Bloom made his famous top-ten hits in the History of Literature, leaving  Hamlet  and  Don Quixote  to play a very disputed final, after a disqualifying process of other literary works, he was consciously marking a censorship general reference, a  nihil obstat  for future works that creates an unreasonable mortgage for future generations. Media industry (publishing houses and general audiovisual ones) benefits from this trivial pursuit endeavors as much as the lover of literature is impaired. We do not read the way people re

 Over the past century, the performing arts have tried to abandon the traditional social settings in favor of new scenarios for the representation of the work of art. This simple action increases the liminality of performance, for the ritual needs closed and well established scenarios. The resistance to such changes comes mainly from the general public, which needs to identify the performative actions within a mythical-ritual axis in order to give it credit. Such an authority valuates art from the point of view of ancient mythological actions. This produces a curious paradox. On the one hand, the general public desires and looks for the unanimity of criteria in relation to the work of art, it is the desire for a universal law. We need judgments like: “Beethoven's immortal symphonies”, even when we never took the time to listen to all of them in order to justify such a criterion. On the other, we want the artist to be original, which implies the impossibility of a consensus in relat