27 AUGUST MISUSE OF THE MYTHOPOETIC
All the other entries in this series have a dual purpose: to move recent events backwards and forwards between localised particulars and their wider significance as expressions of the human condition; and to enable you, dear reader, to move yourself back and forth between the level of personal experience and private existence, and the level of public life and our common humanity. By commuting each of these for the other, it is hoped that the contradictory character of human actions can be grasped in its specificity by those temporary non-actors (readers) who are themselves contradictory.
These ends are achieved (if at all) by means of words composed as both plain speaking and heightened speech. Insofar as this form of words succeeds in realising these aims, human experience on the point of being discarded, i.e. soon to become ‘yesterday’s papers’, may be transformed into stories we can live by; and we ourselves may be re-formulated, integrated into that common humanity which story-telling can compose out of the atomised individuals which we would otherwise remain. Also, if ‘stories we can live by’ amount to myth, and ‘heightened speech’ approximates to poetry, then the further aim of these entries is to identify the mythopoetic in human actions and to highlight common humanity as the constituent element in a modern version of the mythopoetic. Relieved of the fetishistic components previously inherent in it, this version of the mythopoetic is finally true to the contradiction which is our defining characteristic; namely, that each of us co-exists as an autonomous subject and as the object of forces beyond our control.
Today’s entry is different. It is exceptionally prosaic because it addresses an event in which the most prominent speaker has misguidedly introduced the mythopoetic, perhaps without meaning to but undoubtedly re-fetishising as she did so. Earlier today, when Brenton Tarrant (29) was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for the murder of 51 Muslims in Christchurch in March 2019, New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern responded by saying “Today I hope is the last where we have any cause to hear or utter the name of the terrorist….His deserves to be a lifetime of complete and utter silence.” By refusing to say ‘Brenton Tarrant’, Ardern intends to silence ‘the terrorist’. But by making him the unnameable, she puts him on a par with the Jewish myth of God, who in Hebrew normally remains unnamed and is referred to only euphemistically as ‘Adonai’ (Lord) or ‘Ha Shem’ (The Name). In Judaism when God is made unnameable, he is said to be present throughout his Creation. Similarly, when Ardern renders Tarrant unnameable she enters him into a mythopoetic realm which may be common to us all. This is the exact opposite of the close confinement which she sought to consign him to.
Moreover, Ardern’s version of the mythopoetic is a reversion to the superhuman. Echoing Judge Cameron Mander’s description of Tarrant as ‘inhuman’, Ardern presents us with a story to live by in which the protagonist is none other than the Other – something in human form which is as incomprehensible as it is unnameable. The effect is to make Tarrant into an enormity. Rather than diminishing him, a woefully inadequate human being is fetishised instead.
The Ardern approach also has the effect of diminishing us: it is not for the likes of us to decide when to talk about Brenton Tarrant and in what terms. Even those who were wounded or bereaved as a result of his heinous crime, are not to judge for themselves how to refer to him. Accordingly, on the day that Jacinda Ardern has invoked the mythopoetic in such an unhelpful way, it is only right that today’s piece should avoid the poetic and stick to the prosaic.
Wishing that such slaughter will never happen again, and if it does that we will know better how to describe the perpetrator(s) Yours truly The News Poet
