I don’t know. Not really. It goes way back. We have ghost stories from ancient Egypt, after all, ghost stories in the Bible, classical ghost stories from Rome (along with werewolves, cases of demonic possession and, of course, over and over, witches). We have been telling each other tales of otherness, of life beyond the grave, for a long time; stories that prickle the flesh and make the shadows deeper and, most important, remind us that we live, and that there is something special, something unique and remarkable about the state of being alive.
Fear is a wonderful thing, in small doses. You ride the ghost train into the darkness, knowing that eventually the doors will open and you will step out into the daylight once again. It’s always reassuring to know that you’re still here, still safe. That nothing strange has happened, not really. It’s good to be a child again, for a little while, and to fear—not governments, not regulations, not infidelities or accountants or distant wars, but ghosts and such things that don’t 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 Hallowe’ens 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 isn’t there the next time you go and look for it.
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This was written for, and published in, the October 31, 2006, issue of the New York Times.
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Some Reflections on Myth (with Several Digressions onto Gardening, Comics and Fairy Tales)
As a writer, and, more specifically, as a writer of fiction, I deal with myth a great deal. Always have. Probably always will.
It’s not that I don’t 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.
“Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories,” 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: it’s not strictly gardening, rather it’s 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.
(“If he is going to keep killing people,” says Joseph to Mary, speaking of the infant Jesus in the apocryphal Gospel of the Infancy, “we are going to have to stop him going out of the house.”)*
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 Br’er 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 create a new mythology—or rather, to find what it was that I responded to in ancient pantheons and then to try and create a fictive structure in which I could believe as I wrote it. Something that felt right, in the way that myths feel right.
Dream, Death, Delirium, and the rest of the Endless (unworshipped, for who would want to be worshipped in this day and age?) were a family, like all good pantheons; each representing a different aspect of life, each typifying a different personality.
I think, overall, the character that people responded to most was Death, whom I represented as a cheerful, sensible sixteen-year-old girl—someone attractive, and fundamentally nice; I remember my puzzlement the first time I encountered people who professed to believe in the characters I had created, and the feeling, half of guilt and half of relief, when I started to get letters from readers who had used my character Death to get through the death of a loved one, a wife, a boyfriend, a mother, a child.
(I’m still bewildered by the people who have never read the comics who have adopted the characters, particularly Death and Delirium, as part of their personal iconography.)
Creating a new pantheon was part of the experiment, but so was the exploration of all other myths. (If Sandman was about one thing, it was about the act of storytelling, and the, possibly, redemptive nature of stories. But then, it’s hard for a two-thousand-page story to be about just one thing.)
I invented old African oral legends; I created cat myths, which cats tell each other in the night.
In Sandman: Season of Mists I decided to tackle myths head-on, to see both how they worked and how robust they were: At what point did suspension of disbelief roll over and die? How many myths could one, metaphorically, get into a phone booth, or get to dance on the head of a pin?
The story was inspired loosely by something the Abbé Mugnier had once said—that he believed that there was a Hell, because it was church doctrine that there was a hell. He was not required to believe that there was anyone in it. The vision of an empty Hell was one that fascinated me.
Very well; Hell would be empty, abandoned by Lucifer (whom I represented as a fallen angel, straight out of Milton), and as prime psychic real estate would be wanted by various factions: I culled some from the comics, took others from old myths—Egyptian, Norse, Japanese—added in angels and demons and, in a final moment of experiment, I even added in some fairies, and was astonished to find how robust the structure was; it should have been an inedible mess, and instead (to keep the cooking metaphor) seemed to be a pretty good gumbo. Disbelief continued to be suspended and my faith in myth as something fundamentally alive and workable was upheld.