Douglas Barbour wrote:
>
> >I put in my vote for C. J. Cherryh. Uneven writer - I found her Cyteen
> >series almost as boring as Doris Lessing's sf efforts - but Forty
> >Thousand in Gehenna and Wave Without A Shore are marvelous.
>
> Interesting choice, Frederick. I agree, & her recent series of Foreigner
> books is good too.
> >
> >Haven't read all this list but hope someone has mentioned Stanislaw Lem
> >- Solaris (source of the Tarkovski film), His Master's Voice etc. - and
> >Arkadi & Boris Strugatski, whose Roadside Picnic was the source of
> >Tarkovski's "Stalker."
>
> Yes to all of the above, not least the two films, which are masterpieces...
>
> Doug
>
>

Thanks, Doug. I've been speculating about what the appearance of this
thread suggests about the needs and desires of poets. I've always liked
science fiction and my own work is influenced by it. (My book Happiness
was reviewed not as poetry, but in the science fiction column of the
Washington Post book-page.) Four thoughts:

1. Ancient myths, perhaps mythology in general, are by definition of the
past, and have become thematically overdetermined by ages of cultural
use. Even when a poet tries to see them fresh - and there's a big new
anthology of recent poems on Greek myths - problems emerge: the stories
are suffused with patriarchy, hierarchy, fatalism, lack of historical
sense (or an assumption that history is circular). Many American
feminist poets have tackled the Babylonian myths of Inanna, but the
problem here is precisely that she is a goddess, not a mortal. To
psychologize myths - to see them as patterns of emotion rather than of
interpersonal behavior - doesn't rid one of their cultural baggage. (I
dislike Jung, and think that archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
are two of the worst ideas artists ever played with. While seeming to
flatter artists, they place the imagination in a ghetto and give it a
deeply conservative role. The only art they can't hurt is visual;
Jackson Pollock, some later surrealists benefited from their flirtation
with Jung. Because mandalas, once actually seen, are boring, and the
creation of "new, individual" archetypes disproves the theory.) The
best modern treatments of traditional myths invert and satirize them. (I
avoid the word "deconstruct," hoping it will die a natural death). Les
Mamelles de Tiresias, Gide's Promethee are examples. One of my sacred
books - I urgently recommend this - is Cesare Pavese's (prose) Dialogues
with Leuco, myth-treatments in which it is precisely hierarchy, sexism,
fatalism etc. that are under attack. However, using myth to critique
myth and its ideological baggage has itself become old. What artists
want are positive hints for themes and structures - a guide, as it were,
without a secret agenda.

2. Barthes was right to see advertising as modern myth. That's exactly
the function it serves - the aesthetic surround of everyday ideology, of
common sense. As such it can't be used well artistically; it can't be
dramatized. Satire of advertising falls flat, or is absorbed by it.
The cynical, self-mocking tone of recent advertising suffuses society,
and it's hard to say which reflects what; that tone is part of our
everyday ideology. (Increasingly, Hollywood and American television are
auxiliaries of advertising, but I don't want to get into that.) Myths
are morally and ontologically "thin"; they are visions of life for
people who don't have the time, ability, or desire to think about it.
(Philosophy from the beginning has mistrusted such visions and attacks
myth.) Only in retrospect, when they have grown obscure and haunting,
do they seem "thick." It wasn't until the end of antiquity that critics
tried to read myths, especially Homer's, as coded parables. What
Cultural Studies does with advertising is not that kind of reading; in
however small a way, it is philosophy. But for poets who want to
renovate both language and spirit, neither modern myth nor its critique
are very useful.

3. For me, science fiction is not mythology but its successor. Compare
the stock properties, the gimmicks of sci-fi - First Contact, time
travel, alternate worlds, robots, AI, Galactic Empire, mutants, etc. -
to the motifs of classical myth - lustful or vindictive gods, betrayed
humans, endless skeins of unintended consequence - and you see the
difference. The mechanisms of sci-fi are impersonal. They contain no
inherent social or moral injunctions and are not predicated on customs
or traditions. They suggest the primacy not of God, gods, fate, or even
nature, but, whether for good or ill, of human power. Most importantly,
they assume that history is open. They are blanks, into which writers
can insert whatever hopes or meanings they want. Those hopes and
meanings become, if only in imagination, effectual, rather than merely
the quirks of one's protagonist or the subjective data of lyric. The
idea of final darkness (from Wells' Time Machine up to Ballard and
Stephen Baxter) is itself only another content to be fit into a blank.
Only a few prose writers have fully utilized this freedom, this new
resource. Poets have so far barely noticed it.

4. I think, however, that there is an ethos - a hidden agenda, if you
will - in science fiction as a whole. It is: you must try to realize
the Alien. The poignance of this commandment is that it's impossible.
(So far. Perhaps in the distant future we'll have full telepathic
understanding of very different intelligences. And men and women will
talk.) Perceived clearly, it is the injunction of imagination itself,
which changes over time and always manifests itself first in despised
genres. In Greece, where lyric poetry was the lowest genre, the
challenge of imagination was to get in touch with one's feelings. In
the 17th century, while the novel was viewed as we view "Romance," the
need was to notice the social world. Our challenge, whether we like it
or not, is the Alien - whatever that might mean. I think here, of
course, of Lem, who said that the ruin of science fiction - what keeps
it from claiming its inheritance - is domination of the field by
Americans, "who are incapable of imagining the inhabitants of downtown
Warsaw, let alone those of Sirius III."