2 March 2009: "& I took a picture of u & U took a picture of me"

This post is about Northrop Frye. In his usual manner of indirection, Carles illustrates his theses narratologically; in this case he presents a myth of his own creation to call into question the idea of archetypes, or literature as secular myth, of criticism as a poetical rather than scientific mode of analytical truth-seeking. Carles reimagines the classic love myths -- Adam/Eve, Tristan/Isult, Heloise/Abelard, Orpheus/Eurydice, Ono/Lennon -- as a 21st century teenage romance, complete with trite references to contemporary cultural signifers. Has myth left our culture entirely, to be replaced by manufactured cultural product that serves archetypal functions? Carles directs our attention to the ephemeral nature of meaning in the nodal points of romantic love: "The night seemed to last forever–we had stolen a bottle of Boone’s Farm Wine, and eventually got so buzzed that there was no distinction between what was ‘meaningful’ and what was ‘idealistic tween banter.’" Meaning, as an earlier 20th century philosopher noted, "is the talk on the cereal box."

Carles' investigation into myth culminates in this elliptical passage:

& I took a picture of u & U took a picture of me
& if we had known that this was going to be our lasting memory
We would have done it all the same
We would have done it all differently

Here a perspective is opened up on the sublime in our midst; a heightened, irrational state in which opposites dissolve and images cease to be meaningful or necessary because a higher unity has been achieved. The mutual pictures are metaphors for the internalization of the imperative of love, which is itself is a figuration of eros as agape, love of one another as love of the eternal principle.