Myth

(Photo by Alexander Hammid)


I was saying that the point of departure in understanding the movies of Maya Deren should be her meaning on the myth.

Myth is facts of the mind made manifest through a fiction of matter. Joseph Campbell, wrote in his preface to the book of Maya Deren: Maya considered myth as facts of the mind made manifest through a narrative of matter.

I should try to start from here and to advance on her line of thinking. If myth express our need to give a concrete shape to the facts from within our mind (i.e. to give expression to meaning), it follows that it is our need to replay the myth again and again: because that reality from our mind remains actual for ever. We replay the myth by ritual, which is not something in-memoriam, but it speaks about living reality, because time is not a dimension for the universe of myth.

And dance is gesture, i.e. sublimated ritual.

(Maya's Song)