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Authors: Neil Gaiman
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infidelities or accountants or distant wars, but ghosts and such things that donât exist, and even if they do, can do nothing to hurt us.
And this time of year is best for a haunting, as even the most prosaic things cast the most disquieting shadows.
The things that haunt us can be tiny things: a Web page; a voice mail message; an article in a newspaper, perhaps, by an English writer, remembering Halloweâens long gone and skeletal trees and winding lanes and darkness. An article containing fragments of ghost stories, and which, nonsensical although the idea has to be, nobody ever remembers reading but you, and which simply isnât there the next time you go and look for it.
----
This was written for, and published in, the October 31, 2006, issue of the New York Times .
----
Some Reflections on Myth (with Several Digressions onto Gardening, Comics and Fairy Tales)
A s a writer, and, more specifically, as a writer of fiction, I deal with myth a great deal. Always have. Probably always will.
Itâs not that I donât like, or respect, mimetic fiction; I do. But people who make things up for a living follow our interests and our obsessions into fiction, and mostly my interests have taken me, whether I wanted them to or not, into the realm of myth, which is not entirely the same as the realm of the imagination, although they share a common border.
I remember finding a copy, as a small boy, of a paperback Tales of the Norsemen and delighting in it as a treasure, reading it until the binding broke and the pages flew apart like leaves. I remember the sheer rightness of those stories. They felt right. They felt, to my seven-year-old mind, familiar.
âBricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories,â said Lord Dunsany.
He was right, of course. Our imaginings (if they are ours) should be based in our own lives and experiences, all our memories. But all of our memories include the tales we were told as children, all the myths, all the fairy tales, all the stories.
Without our stories we are incomplete.
I
THE PROCESS OF composting fascinates me. I am English, and share with many of my countrymen an amateurish fondness for, frankly, messing around in gardens: itâs not strictly gardening, rather itâs the urge that, last year, meant I got to smile proudly at the arrival of half a dozen exotic pumpkins, each of which must have cost more than twenty dollars to grow and each of which was manifestly inferior to the locally grown produce. I like gardening, am proudly no good at it, and do not mind this at all.
In gardening, the process is most of the fun, the results are secondary (and, in my case, usually accidental).
And one learns a lot about compost: kitchen scraps and garden leftovers and refuse that rot down, over time, to a thick black clean nutritious dirt, teeming with life, perfect for growing things in.
Myths are compost.
They begin as religions, the most deeply held of beliefs, or as the stories that accrete to religions as they grow.
(âIf he is going to keep killing people,â says Joseph to Mary, speaking of the infant Jesus in the apocryphal Gospel of the Infancy, âwe are going to have to stop him going out of the house.â) *
And then, as the religions fall into disuse, or the stories cease to be seen as the literal truth, they become myths. And the myths compost down to dirt, and become a fertile ground for other stories and tales which blossom like wildflowers. Cupid and Psyche is retold and half-forgotten and remembered again and becomes Beauty and the Beast.
Anansi the African Spider God becomes Brâer Rabbit, whaling away at the tar baby.
New flowers grow from the compost: bright blossoms, and alive.
II
MYTHS ARE OBLIGING.
When I was writing Sandman, the story that, in many ways, made my name, I experimented with myth continually. It was the ink that the series was written in.
Sandman was, in many ways, an attempt to
And this time of year is best for a haunting, as even the most prosaic things cast the most disquieting shadows.
The things that haunt us can be tiny things: a Web page; a voice mail message; an article in a newspaper, perhaps, by an English writer, remembering Halloweâens long gone and skeletal trees and winding lanes and darkness. An article containing fragments of ghost stories, and which, nonsensical although the idea has to be, nobody ever remembers reading but you, and which simply isnât there the next time you go and look for it.
----
This was written for, and published in, the October 31, 2006, issue of the New York Times .
----
Some Reflections on Myth (with Several Digressions onto Gardening, Comics and Fairy Tales)
A s a writer, and, more specifically, as a writer of fiction, I deal with myth a great deal. Always have. Probably always will.
Itâs not that I donât like, or respect, mimetic fiction; I do. But people who make things up for a living follow our interests and our obsessions into fiction, and mostly my interests have taken me, whether I wanted them to or not, into the realm of myth, which is not entirely the same as the realm of the imagination, although they share a common border.
I remember finding a copy, as a small boy, of a paperback Tales of the Norsemen and delighting in it as a treasure, reading it until the binding broke and the pages flew apart like leaves. I remember the sheer rightness of those stories. They felt right. They felt, to my seven-year-old mind, familiar.
âBricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories,â said Lord Dunsany.
He was right, of course. Our imaginings (if they are ours) should be based in our own lives and experiences, all our memories. But all of our memories include the tales we were told as children, all the myths, all the fairy tales, all the stories.
Without our stories we are incomplete.
I
THE PROCESS OF composting fascinates me. I am English, and share with many of my countrymen an amateurish fondness for, frankly, messing around in gardens: itâs not strictly gardening, rather itâs the urge that, last year, meant I got to smile proudly at the arrival of half a dozen exotic pumpkins, each of which must have cost more than twenty dollars to grow and each of which was manifestly inferior to the locally grown produce. I like gardening, am proudly no good at it, and do not mind this at all.
In gardening, the process is most of the fun, the results are secondary (and, in my case, usually accidental).
And one learns a lot about compost: kitchen scraps and garden leftovers and refuse that rot down, over time, to a thick black clean nutritious dirt, teeming with life, perfect for growing things in.
Myths are compost.
They begin as religions, the most deeply held of beliefs, or as the stories that accrete to religions as they grow.
(âIf he is going to keep killing people,â says Joseph to Mary, speaking of the infant Jesus in the apocryphal Gospel of the Infancy, âwe are going to have to stop him going out of the house.â) *
And then, as the religions fall into disuse, or the stories cease to be seen as the literal truth, they become myths. And the myths compost down to dirt, and become a fertile ground for other stories and tales which blossom like wildflowers. Cupid and Psyche is retold and half-forgotten and remembered again and becomes Beauty and the Beast.
Anansi the African Spider God becomes Brâer Rabbit, whaling away at the tar baby.
New flowers grow from the compost: bright blossoms, and alive.
II
MYTHS ARE OBLIGING.
When I was writing Sandman, the story that, in many ways, made my name, I experimented with myth continually. It was the ink that the series was written in.
Sandman was, in many ways, an attempt to
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