The Myth Of The Eternal Return
From Fragments To A Mirror
Bagpuss Wakes
It’s a lovely thing when your library starts to talk to you.
I’ve been finding myself padding about in the moonlight recently, woken by books crooning at me from the shelves. I make Stone Henge style piles all over the place, still half asleep, then go back to bed. In the morning I see these rascally old friends stacked up and daring me to open their yellowed pages. Head-wreckers they are. Isn’t it interesting when some old obsession sneaks up and taps you on the shoulder decades later and says, Hey, me again. In these books it’s the same words and not-at-all the same words.
There’s the gang
As a kid I loved a TV programme called Bagpuss about a toy cat. Amazingly there were only thirteen episodes. It seemed to run forever. When he went to sleep, everyone else did, when he woke, so did everyone else. For some Bagpuss is just a silly old toy, but as every episode used to announce, I must tell you this is not the case, he is:
"The Most Important, The Most Beautiful, The Most Magical, Saggy Old Cloth Cat in the Whole, Wide World."
Well, there’s a few Bagpuss books in my library that have decided to wake up, and in doing so there’s all sorts of other books stirring and shaking off their dust. As loyal shepherd of my library I wander around with my lantern and follow the bleats.
This morning I’m back with one of the strange old fellers of the 20th century mythological world, Mircea Eliade. He’s telling me off in a Romanian accent and saying I let him sleep too long.
Wake up you dozy pillock! shouts Eliade
One of the areas these midnight rambles have been leading me towards is thoughts about time. Historical time, poetical time, wretched time, delightful time, under a time, above a time, out of time, in time, all the times. I exist in a reality where all sorts of centuries are crashing into each other and myth time is my foreground most of whatever-kind-of-time this moment is.
I’ll likely expand more on this next week, but let’s begin with a few thoughts on the notion of sacred and profane time, from Mr. Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return.