The View From Above
I’m not sure why I was re-reading my writeup of the most recent Jamin Winans film earlier today, but I was, and as autistically happens sometimes I was idly imagining a conversation about it, in the course of which I realized I had a few things more to say.
First, here is how I described the film’s titular myth, which we see projected by a so-called Prophet.
In this myth, the Creator is shown descending to the world from an exploding meteor, painting the world into existence, then creating a child whom he imbues with life through music that emanates from two horn-like instruments behind his head and into those behind the child’s own. The Creator then departs back to his meteor, leaving the child to find its way dancingly through the beautiful world—until a monster appears and chases the child through the woods.
Defeated and dying, the child collapses and sends music from her horns into the sky toward the meteor.
Nothing happens. No one comes.
The child dies, alone.
The Creator then descends and retrieves the child only after it is dead.
Looking back, I might have undersold the existential despair of what seems to be the founding myth of the world in Myth of Man, and so, too, the tragedy that Ella spends so much of her time in pursuit of living out that myth for real.
The child here is alone, abandoned by the Creator to find her own way through a world that although filled with beauty also inevitably brings fear and eventually death. There is no one to help her withstand the darkness of the forest, and no one to comfort her as she dies, but also no one with whom to share the skies and the fields and the birds. It’s a myth that ascribes to the world a definitive solitariness, of separateness. There is not even the idea of solidarity here, because the myth says you are in it all by yourself.
As I noted when writing on Charlotte Fosgate, the only way out of the struggle is through, and the only way through is together.
None of us get out of here alive, and the point is for us to see us for the divinities that we are, all of each other. I’d been thinking about this as Bluesky has been standing vigil for Stovey, a longtime user who in the service’s early days made a point of methodically liking as many posts by as many people as she could, something that, as related by Joshua J. Friedman, “became a benchmark: anyone exceeding the ‘Stovey threshold’ could safely be assumed to be a bot”.
As she did this, Stovey in essence was recognizing this shared, very mortal divinity, and doling out tiny acts of solidarity en masse.
It’s true that I travel in different Bluesky circles than Stovey, but I was familiar with the “likes lore”, as it were, and I spent the other night doing my best to believe in her. Her posts just prior to her injuries were eerily similar to the last things Fosgate ever posted: a view of a river, a remark about the view from above. This only ever could accentuate the ache, even if, like mine, it was felt from a distance.
There’s something I should make clear: I’m not a religious person. I’m not a spiritual person. The divinity I think we need to see in one another isn’t metaphysical. It’s derived, in fact, specifically from our shared, material, and finite natures. We really do only have each other for the while we are here. This isn’t, for me, the divinity of some immaterial soul’s spark but the divinity of matter that somehow has come to think and to feel.
That memorial I recently and very suddenly discovered for a longtime friend and acquaintance of mine who recently passed after an illness is tomorrow. I struggled with whether or not to go, for reasons beside the point at the moment. In the end, it was decided for me: we’re in a heatwave, and I cannot leave the house.
Someone close to Stovey has spent the last days keeping people updated during what eventually became her rescue, and continues to do so as Stovey recovers under care. She’s shared with Stovey the outpouring of support. Whatever happens next, I hope that it matters to her that those close to her fought to find her, and even those not close to her chose to believe in her during that fight and the one to come.
The myth Ella chases is the sort of myth upon which power structures are built, and indeed this explains why the Prophet’s art is sanctioned while Seeg’s receives sanctions. This is religion as opiate of the people, a deliberate attempt at keeping them from seeing each other and recognizing their shared divinity.
It’s in each other, after all, that the myth that is the film Myth of Man (as opposed to the myth that’s in the film Myth of Man) says we find the divine. That’s the myth Ella actually enacts and lives out during her misguided quest instead to live out and enact the one broadcast by the Prophet.
Everywhere she goes, Ella sees the divinity in other people, even if they don’t, whether at first or at all, see it in her in return. She doesn’t receive any help from these much-vaunted prophets peddling the religion of separateness. She does receive it from strangers who agree to sing for her.
So, too, is it for us.
It’s a myth that we are alone, that we must remain separate, that we go through this, in the end, apart.
As I suggested last June, the point is to make of “here” a place where the Charlottes, the Stoveys, and all of the rest of us, too, are able to stand above the river, remark upon the view, and then return safely home to the friends and family who know us and want to hear us sing about what we saw.