The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford. A biggie. Weighing in at 680 pages this is the kind of book that a colleague of mine, a former raver and current father of a nine month old who once felt the need to kick his brain into gear after a good few years’ overindulgence in drugs and did so by reading the myths and legends of various cultures, would breeze through. I continue of course, to be embarrassed by my own inability to read not only such books as this, but also the majority of books that I buy, those slender volumes that many people would breeze through in a sitting or two but which take the wind out of my mind all the same like a few flights of stairs does to a fat man with a few bags of shopping.
A few colleagues began to talk about the myths of goddesses and the like a few months back, and inspired me. The worship of goddesses was once far more commonplace. At a time when societies were less hierarchical and disciplined, womanhood and femininity were naturally revered as the basis of fertility and the natural order. Only later did male Gods reign supreme in a way that was once completely alien, and this new view of the world led to the development of the Hobbesian Leviathon that we see today. As I pointed out at the time there is a struggle of worldviews now with the idea of Gaia being grasped by ecological thinkers. To me, of course, this view did not in any way necessitate a deistic worldview.
Nick lent me a book that he said outlined the scholarship on this subject and I looked forward to reading it. It may have been during the period that the ending of Anna Karenina, in which Levin finds religious faith, had seriously depressed me, and a trip to Venice and Florence from which I returned having, like an old car with bad timing almost starting on a winter morning before definitively giving up the ghost, almost got some momentum going with some religious thinking before feeling alienated by it and despondent. I felt for this reason that in some way the book I was, am, attempting to plan and write had become already so large that it needed a philosophy to support it, and certainly to end it. Short stories of the kind I had always aspired to write (I sometimes think 9/11 put the nail in the coffin of that idea pretty conclusively), may begin and end understatedly, but novels which have become a microcosm of the society they are set in only become more artificial by cutting off mid-scene as if those lives which they contain, though they may have undulated and experienced so many vicissitudes should cease somehow to develop from a certain point in time, or become in that instant so much the more representative of the whole. Thinking about it (and this is the first time this thought has hit me, I don’t think it demonstrates the evolution of the idea at all), Nat, who I felt would discover something comforting and beautiful in the myth of the goddess, comes upon it now in a way not dissimilar from the way that Nick himself perhaps did, that is, in turning away from the stoner stagnation of her boyfriend, Nettles, and his housemates with their hamsters in mocked-up Marshall stack amplifiers, toilet lids that flip up like kitchen dustbins with a press of a broken old bass drum pedal, and their disultory, deluded and frankly inadequate way of trying to work towards their dreams.
I wish I had a better record than this of the developments of my thought with this novel. I don’t now know, for example, how far Chris and Nat developed as a conscious echo of Levin and Kitty, with a not entirely dissimilar thematic relationship to Eddie and Danielle as in Tolstoy’s novel which at certain, perhaps near-hypomanic stages of the development of the novel, I tried to emulate. What I do know is that, whether or not it might be said that Levin and Kitty destabilise Tolstoy’s novel, causing him and the reader to lose focus, Eddie and Danielle have indeed lost centrality in the conception of the novel I carry around in my head. Though Eddie and Danielle’s story will become more involved once I start looking into the difficulties they experience once Danielle finds out that there was a rape on the stag night and they start looking, temporarily, to move away from the area, all of these developments are little more than intellectual concepts for me, and have been now for months: though it is all plotted out, and though I have ideas for scenes here and there, this is nothing against the solidity and vibrancy of Chris and Nat, not to mention the humour of the scene in which they get together. I have worried at times that whilst we see Chris’s development as a character, his maturation and how he becoming depressed and embittered, and then becomes more interesting as a result and falls in love in front of our eyes (or, more realistically, behind my own), Eddie’s development happens almost exclusively as his backstory. It occurs to me in writing this that he perhaps needs to fall off the wagon. Something must happen to him to balance this out. At any rate, what I’m saying is that it would be right that Nat’s own philosophy matures and becomes in a sense the surrogate of the novel itself.
And so, this book was to be a critical stepping stone towards the progression of the novel.
I have reached page 61, or 4500 BC.