Lord, truly thy decree is first among gods.
Say but to wreck or create; it shall be.
Open thy mouth: the Images will vanish!
Speak again, and the Images shall be whole!
If history decomposes into images and not stories, then myth is the “royal road” to understanding the production and dissemination of said images, enabling our egress. Why myth? because for one it penetrates deeper as a narrative, enabling a broader, richer field of vision as compared to, say, mere legends and stories. For another, there is beauty in myth that lasts from the moment of its birth to its very dissipation into the river of images that is history at large. A surrendered beauty that sacrifices itself upon the rotating blades of empire, and thus is readily chopped into individual images along the perforations of every symmetry and axis. But what even is myth under this lexical microscope? simply stated a myth is an interregnum in production, not a halting of the presses but a scandal that is only yesterday’s news. Already we can see the formative characteristics of all awakenings inside such a break in the weather over nowhere - a place where only nothing lasts forever. A myth is a small segment of mono in an otherwise stereo recording, an ordering of memory arranged by the recessive hand of the arranging entity. One needs satisfaction in order to escape into satisfaction just as one needs capital to make capital, if one hasn’t found God without logic, no amount of logic or reason can assuade one but myth is one tool which short-circuits this circular dependence. People have found riches in myth beyond compare, just think of Alibaba or Alladin but material rewards pale in comparison to what a myth can potentially deliver at one’s doorstep, which is the might of the determination and the capacity to undo and even redo effects of determination on planes of constancy. A myth is the mask of masks as masks are myths within myths. Both simulacra and simulation follow mythical configurations and the life of dasein is aptly simplified as a monomyth, which isn’t far from the present treatment of life as pilgrimage though the word brings moralist if not religious connotations to the otherwise neutral sounding metaphors.
Our concern with myth here isn’t ontological but epistemethical, of course the escape from entropy needs to be ethical apriori, but also epistemological because it is a matter of not just mere evolution but transcendence.
To make this caper a successful one, we need to begin with the end in mind, but the plurality of myth in history makes this confusing - we need a myth stripped of as much historical baggage as possible. A myth that is as fresh in its first retelling and brand new on every subsequent telling. Risking prescriptive morality, the only such model of myth that comes to mind is a pilgrimage. Outside of pilgrimage, the only pure myth far removed from any agency is a dream, but dreams are brittle, fragile, and inherently unstable and thus don’t lend very well to exhaustive analysis. This isn’t to say that the comparison is analog versus digital, both dreams and myth are still analog machines but while a reverie is the uncontrollable fantasy behind power windows, a myth unfolds not unlike the granular, manual rotation of a crank shaft in the car door from within the moving vehicle - the slower, more mindful adjusting of air intake until the window is down all the way. This mindfulness is needed not only for one’s own safety through this transcendental enterprise but also, and more importantly, out of humility for one is after all fleeing a crime scene with dead bodies and machine carcasses strewn as far as the eye can see - without entropy there could be no escape from it, so a measure of deference is due throughout.
A pilgrimage is the the de-facto standard of all mythical progress. A slow slavish vertical movement across horizontal rungs is apparent not only in the linear ascent and descent over the holy mountain (the window pane going up and down) but even in the circumnavigation (rotation of the crank shaft) of shrines across religions. The only difference being that in the circumnavigation the rungs appear to be helical. The dogma around pilgrimages can only be shed to an extent because the historical overlay is immense, still it helps to define pilgrimage loosely. The movement of the Templar to and fro crusades is as much a pilgrimage as the one-way joyride of the Kamikaze aircraft destined to never return from the hallowed shores of Pearl Harbour - whether these pilgrims were successful in their respective aims is more debateable than the success of the pilgrimages of fat man and little boy - which were made in sheer anguish and godlike wrath. Having thus loosened the dogma, a violent detonation on a petty hill is seldom the aim of the pilgrim and the peaceful granduer of an inner ecstasy is more commonly sought. In essence, a pilgrimage is a movement into eternity, from a reproduction of fractured wholes to a multiplication into absolution - seeking in the production of productions an ultimate closure.
for all its protocol and paraphernalia a pilgrimage is not an appeal to a final ethicist but to common sense, an epistemological denouncement of reason for a more than reasonable cause. a final cry for help from within a tragedy unfolding between a rock and a hard place, ethics be damned. a successful pilgrimage then, is one where the consequences rendered are paradoxically or miraculously or naturally ethical - the production of fruitful pilgrimage is the cold image of profound justice. contrarily, a failed crusade leads but to lukewarm images of justification - which more often than not leads to the next ill-conceived, hastily cobbled together farcical mission to disneyland thus defeating the entire purpose of the trip. in other words, there can be no side quests, no plan-b if one is to emerge vindicated. thus a valid pilgrimage turns out to be ethical regardless of where it starts on the moral compass. determination and decisiveness then are the guiding principles behind our run.
nor is the leitmotif of a journey (and its imagined length) an important one, in the unitless land of no time, a single rotation of a rosary is pilgrimage enough for established pilgrims and their consecrated beads. if a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, a shorter one can end with it too. if one can make the near explicit enough, the promise of afar is within grasp - this again is not a flight of metaphyscial fancy but well established common sense recorded historically in proverbs such as “a stitch in time saves nine” etc. higher stages of transcendence further strip historical, moral, and religious baggage from myth leaving just the machine and its work - arrive, entelechy.