Epics, Fake Epics and Charlton Heston

I've lived for a long time with the suspicion that something is lacking in our contemporary relation to words, that some dimension of our language is impoverished, that the meanings of words have been perverted or misapplied in a way that shrinks our experience of the world. The most obvious abusers are political speech and the language of advertising, both of which appropriate words like freedom and use them to sell cars and wars, but I think there is a deeper and more invisible process at work. It is not simply that so much language is polemical and wielded with the intention of convincing us of something, getting us to buy something or otherwise manipulating us. Our language as we typically use it lacks the dimension of metaphor or myth that properly connects us to a world larger than the hustle and scuttle of dailyness. Most of the time our words refer merely to some event or object elsewhere in the present tense of our culture of instantaneity—something occurring right now—while the historical or mythical freight that a word might carry remains unacknowledged. For some reason this occurred to me the other day as I was writing about something unrelated, and I began thinking about Charlton Heston. I have no idea why I began thinking about Charlton Heston, but it led me to the difference between the word epic as it might be applied to the Book of Exodus and epic as it applies to the film The Ten Commandments and, more commonly today, any historical drama with big stars and a bad script. The resonance of the original Biblical story—its quality of epicness— and its meaning for religious (or even not so religious) people is basically mocked by its reduction to Hollywood spectacle—far from being a metaphorical vehicle for ideas of exile and return, it becomes Wow look at the shit we can do with these moving pictures—and the idea of epic becomes even more hollow when it is used to describe Brad Pitt playing Achilles in a film that alters the story of Greek myths to fit a producer’s marketing needs. And strangely, everyone involved continues to take themselves very seriously. (In a weird coincidence, my roommate just came home from the beer store down the street (one of those high-end places where the guys who work there know what they’re talking about) and reported that when they didn’t have what he was looking for the counterguy recommended a pale ale from Avery Breweing Co. in CO and described it as “epic.” I’m not sure if this helps or hurts my argument.)

One way around this or further into the obscured baggage words carry is by their historical roots. I read an essay called “Words as Eggs” by a Jungian analyst, Russell Lockhart, who explored the etymology of the word consider, part of which is composed of the root word sider, which is the root word for star or heavenly body. Thus the act of thinking is connected to the night sky or the movement of the heavens, which makes sense when, well, considering that the ancients rigorously scrutinized (or does the word scrutinize imply rigor?) the sky for signs from the gods and believed the arrangement of heavenly objects portended earthly events and shaped destinies. Obviously these days we have sentenced astrology to a sideshow role in the contemporary circus, but nonetheless there is something in the act of thinking—in opening the mind and reaching through the universe of mental space to link thoughts together and draw conclusions—that feels a lot like laying beneath the ocean of night and watching the stars rise and turn around the Earth (though I recognize it is really the Earth that is turning, thanks). Both possess an element of spaciousness that, conveniently enough for the purposes of this blog post, corresponds to the spaciousness and resonance that every word, properly conceived, possesses in the invisible dimensions of its history and, further, in its connection to the limits of the visible universe around us.