Full Term Paper

Raven and the Light

Once Earth was bare and sunken into the abyss. And the light had not yet come to warm Earth and the animals wandered in darkness and the ice was never to melt and the animals were sad because of this. The light was guarded by Mole and Mole kept it and would not share it. The other animals asked Mole to share the light but the greedy digger did not want it to shine for his eyes were sensitive. “I will keep the light buried and hidden,” said Mole, “because it hurts my eyes I will keep it hidden.” Even though the other animals asked and pleaded mole would not let the light out so that he might share it and the Earth remained dark. Such was the nature of the world before the first Father of men.
In these times there was Mother Pelican and there was Father Osprey and they met in the darkness. And Mother Pelican did not know that Father Osprey was not a pelican because it was dark, but she loved him and Father Osprey loved her and they had a child who was black as night because he was conceived in darkness. Thus came about their child who was Raven and Raven was full of wit and tricks, but his heart was good. Since Father Osprey was of the land and the plains and the mountains, and Mother Pelican was of the seas and oceans, Raven was able to travel between them and be all places. This the other birds could not do, for while they were people of the sky they were still tied to the ocean or tied to the land.
Then one day noble Bear came to Mother Pelican and Father Osprey. Bear was the most noble of the animals for he was strong and brave, and he too wanted Mole to share the light so he came to Pelican and Osprey so that he might meet Raven. He said “Raven, you are full of wit and tricks, but your heart is good. You can trick Mole, I think, and free the light for all the animals to enjoy.” Raven pondered these things in his head. He was not an adventurer like the wolf, or a traveler like the goose, but his heart was good and he wanted to help so he said to bear “I am not strong but I am smart, and Mole is made stupid by his selfishness. I am not fearless, but my heart is strong, and Mole is fearful because he cannot love. I think that I can defeat Mole and free the light, but I will need help.”
Bear was glad about this acceptance. “Paint faced Salmon has left the stream, and gone to the sea, but she knows well how to find Mole,” Bear told Raven. “You must go to the sea and speak to her.” Then Bear began to sing:

“Over the waters
The secrets will lie
And to paint-faced Salmon
You Raven must fly!

Learn you the secrets
And the light you will find
And free from selfish Mole
To share with all kind.

So fly you now Raven,
Your heart it is strong
And teach the greedy digger
His selfishness is wrong”

At the end of the song Raven took off toward the sea to find paint-faced Salmon. Raven flew over the flat lands and over the mountains and over the forests and over the valleys until he came to the land of the cliffs where the ocean met the land. There he met Turtle who was wise. Raven asked of turtle “Turtle, you are old and you are wise, and you know the ways of both the land and the sea. Can you help me?”
Turtle who was wise spoke slowly, for his mind was ancient and knew many things. “I know that you seek paint faced salmon so that you may seek the greedy mole who is hoarding the light. I lay still all day and the winds have told me such things. Fly along the coast, over the water. Paint faced Salmon will be on the current, so fallow the current to where she is.” With thanks Raven took off from Turtle’s place on the cliffs in search of the current where he would find paint faced salmon. He flew and fallowed the shoreline passing both cliff and beach until he came across the current of which Turtle had spoken. He then continued to fallow the current until finally he came across a place where there were many fish and they feared him because he appeared as though he were fishing.
“Fear not!” said Raven, “I am Raven and I seek paint faced Salmon for she knows where I may find the light. I am not a fisher, but I am trying to free the light and seek the help of paint faced Salmon!”
Then paint faced Salmon came forward and spoke. “Indeed I can show you where Mole is, but only Mole knows where it is that he has hidden the light. To find Mole you must go to a mountain that no longer has a top. Near the mountain there is a tree that has no leaves and it has had no leaves since the mountain lost its top, and there is a pond by the tree that has been black with the soot of the Mountain. It is a land of darkness and of fire and it is where you will find the greedy Mole.”
Raven bowed and said to paint faced Salmon, “Both the Pelican and the Osprey are fishers and they hunt the fish, but in thanks to you I, Raven, shall never hunt for the salmon or the trout.”
Salmon thanked him saying “Raven, you are full of wit and tricks, but your heart is truly good. I thank you on behalf of my kind.” With that Raven took off in search of a Mountain that no longer had a top. He soon came to such a place. The cap of the mountain was white, but flat for it no longer had a top and the forest had fled many miles from the base of the mountain. Only one tree remained and it no longer had leaves and it was on the edge of a pond that had been made black by the soot of the mountain. Here on this pond it was said that Mole lived and Raven circled the banks of the pond until he came across the opening of Mole’s hole. Raven sang:

“Come forth greedy Mole
And share all your light.
You’ve hidden the brightness
But this darkness is not right!

Tell me greedy Mole
Where you keep the light
And share with all kind
So the days may be bright!”

Mole came forth and looked at Raven and said “Raven, the light is mine and it should not be released into the sky. It hurts my eyes! In huts my eyes and so it must not be in the sky. I have hidden it below the earth and below the earth it will stay because it cannot be in the sky!”
All these things Mole told to Raven, but Raven was full of wit and tricks and he planned to trick the light away from Mole. “Mole, I spoke wrongly! I too want to keep the light hidden, but your hiding spot is not good enough! I found it right away!”
Mole was shocked and he stammered “I know not how you found my hiding spot, but we will go there to see if indeed you know where the light is hidden. Then if we must we may hide it again.” And so Mole led the way to a hidden place at the bottom of the mountain that no longer had a top. “Here is the place where I hid the light Raven, but it does not seem that you have taken it.”
Raven answered “But Mole, how can you know unless you dig to see if it is still under the earth where you put the light?” Mole knew this to be true so he began to dig where he had hidden the light under the earth, but when he scraped away enough soil a radiant light came forth from the earth and shone in his eyes. Mole was blinded by the brightness, and he cried loudly and called Raven evil things at Raven and Raven knew that Mole could not be allowed to get the light back, so he took the light in his beak and carried it into the sky and placed it in the heavens where Mole could not reach because he was tied to the ground.
And so today we still see the light in the sky where only Raven can reach it, and we sing songs of Raven who was full of wit and tricks, but his heart was good and he shared the light, and we sing of Mole, who was greedy and selfish and is now blind.

Explanation: Why I’ve Failed
When I started writing this I was not intent on failing. I thought I would create something complete and almost magical in nature, but as I wrote it I realized more and more that this myth is a sham. I created it. I made it up. That alone may cause one to consider it a farce, but the real reason to call it that is because I wrote it. Ong tells us that in the oral tradition words are always going out of existence, but here I have immortalized these words using flash drives and laser printers. I composed it as a typographical piece and saved it as a Word document. It’s true that many myths have been recorded on paper and thus preserved, but that does not degrade them from their original mythical culture. Instead it removes them from the oral tradition. Something like an honorable discharge. This sham, this creation of mine never belonged to such a culture. Indeed, even though the motifs and themes borrow heavily from Native American culture, in the end this myth belongs to no culture at all.
Culture, in the end, may be defined more by a culture than anything else. Kane explains how myth can be defined as the song of a place to itself, (50). This quote may seem a little overused in our class, but it is still one of my favorites. A myth teaches peoples how to treat the land and how to live with the earth. Kane limits this feature to the myths of hunter-gatherer societies, but I think it is true of all cultures. For instance, the Norse societies would not have come to know the Deity Frey, a god of agriculture, if they were not an agricultural society, and the duality, or sense that the human realm and the natural realm are separate, can be traced to the creation stories. What though, can my myth speak to a culture of twenty-first century college students into which it was born? Almost nothing except that if one does a little background research on the traditional story form of Native Americans from the west coast that person can create a fairly realistic sounding myth.
That much I may have succeeded in. I did create something that could potentially fool someone that was unlearned in the traditions of oral cultures, but even one that was familiar would recognize the motifs of talking animals and a trickster hero making an epic journey. There is repetition and clichés and epithets and an overriding additive form, (Ong, 37) but that is not enough to create a successful myth. Here are a few reasons my myth falls short.
Kane tells us that myths are the products of dreams. (131) These dreams are more than the mere activity of the sleeping mind, they are gateways to truth and the metaphysical universe. They could be prophecies of what’s to come or stories of what has been, but the externalization of dreams is the realization of the potential to the actual. (Kane, 132) My story or myth is not the product of the dream world. If it were it would have been about a seagull saving a miniature person from a water dish, or a psychotic doctor chasing me with his robot arm. Instead, this story is not the remembrance of a supernatural or metaphysical dream, but merely the product of research and a meager idea for a term paper. I didn’t create anything real or honest or sacred. I was working and studying away to create a farce that is little more than a children’s story, when I should have been facing a wall with my eyes closed and dreaming. (Kane, 132)
Another failure is tied closely with the fact that this myth was not told but instead it was written. The problem with writing a myth is that myths are meant to be participatory and empathetic, (Ong, 45) but mine was created in solitude. Traditionally, in order for a story to exist there must be both a story tell and a listener. Without a listener the story fades into the walls and dies with the sound and is no more than noise. My story however, can exist without a listener because is composed not of sounds but of symbols, letters on a page. That is not to say that this story will ever be fully realized without a reader, but it certainly exists independently of either reader or listener. Most cultures have some sort of tradition surrounding the act of storytelling. The Finnish story telling culture (Finnish is very young as a literate language) involves one singer of songs and his helper crossing arms and holding hands as they and their listeners chant the stories of the Kalevala. I on the other hand sat alone on my laptop, or at a desk in the library, and composed a mock story that only a small and distant audience will read.
My myth, or be it a story since it has lost its standing as a myth, was created in the literate tradition. As we can see it does not satisfy the credentials to convey the truth and magic that would have made it a true myth, but at the same time I have not failed entirely. It could stand as a mock-up example of how a traditional myth might look. Here are some examples:
For the sake of discussion I would like to show just how my myth relates to a few of the psychodynamics of oralitiy that are presented by Ong, beginning with the notion that it is additive rather than subordanative. (37) I did my best to demonstrate this in the language of the myth by including introductory “ands.” This is a pretty simple concept but center your thought on how the language changes the focus in this example: “And the light had not yet come to warm Earth and the animals wandered in darkness and the ice was never to melt and the animals were sad because of this.” This example is sufficient in showing that because I use the word “and” I can undermine the fact that “the light had not yet come” should be a causal remark in relation to the other remarks. That “the animals wander in the darkness” is caused by the absence of light, but this fact is not bothered with in oral traditions, so it is not recognized in the language.
I also used many clichés and epithets, which is true to Ong’s second psychodynamic that the language of the oral culture is aggregative.(38) I have the “Noble Bear” the “Turtle who is wise” and the raven is always referred to as “full of wit and trick, but with a good heart.” On a related note, (related because clichés are reptative) my myth is Redundant, which is true to yet another of Ong’s psychodynamics (39). Take for instance the passage “‘I will keep the light buried and hidden,’ said Mole, ‘because it hurts my eyes I will keep it hidden.’” This is how the language, especially the dialogue functions in the myth, repeating itself and looping back to reiterate itself in a way that when read seems like it doesn’t function well, but when spoken has an actually pleasing effect on the sound and rhythm of the language.
Ong also says that the oral tradition is just that: traditional.(41) In order to recognize this I first picked a culture, namely the Native American culture of the present day Oregon and Washington coast. In these cultures animals are always personified and given voices. They are also revered in these cultures, especially animals such as the raven, who generally has a trickster personality, or the salmon, so I tried to work in these motifs that are traditional to a specific culture. I also added some verse in quatrain form with a pretty basic meter. I don’t think I need to describe what is conservative or traditional about the quatrain.
My myth is also devoid of the abstract or alien ideas, which keep it close to the human life world. (Ong, 42) The myth, which has not a single truly human element in it is still made entirely relatable to humans as it is a story, devoid of theories or lists or statistics, the types of abstract ideas that exist only in a literate culture. Part of being close to the human life world means that myths will be agonistically toned (Ong, 43) and this sense of struggle and conflict is real in my myth, even if it is a little underplayed. Raven has to struggle both internally and externally to reach his goals, concepts that can be abstracted from in a literate culture.
Ong brings up the ideas that oral societies are homeostatic (46) and situational rather than abstract (49) which quite frankly don’t translate will to my myth because they are more concerned with the culture itself than with the stories of that culture. Being homeostatic basically means that an Oral culture is willing to drop memory baggage if it is no longer relevant, and so the stories remain relevant to the present, while being situational means that things are taken to be concrete and are recognized, say, for what they do rather than where they can be categorized. For instance, Ong gives us the example of an illiterate man given pictures of a saw, a hatchet, a hammer, and a log. Remember how Sesame street always asks children which object doesn’t belong? Well in this case it’s the log because it is not a tool, but the illiterate man answered that it was the hammer, because both the saw and the hatchet could be used to cut the log while a hammer could not. Obviously this say more about the culture that their stories, so I will not attempt to apply it to my story.
That does it for Ong, but I would like to briefly relate to Kane and point out a few features that he introduces as relevant to myth and which I in turn attempted to apply to my own myth. One of these would be that there is practical wisdom hidden in the story.(Kane, 38) In mine I did my best to relay practical wisdom that Salmon leave the rivers at certain times of the year and go to the ocean to fallow the current. That is essentially the reason for the entire existence of paint faced Salmon. Or it could offer a moral. Mole was blinded because he was selfish, so it fallows that we should learn not to be selfish. It also delivers explanation for things which are taken for granted, which is another feature of myth. This could be the explanation for Raven’s blackness, for Mole’s blindness, of even something as mundane as why ravens don’t fish. We in a modern society would simply accept that a raven belongs to a classification of birds that do not eat fish, but that explanation by classification would not be acceptable for a society that might know a myth like the one I have written. They want to know WHY, not simply what.
This is all fine and well, but in the end my story falls short of the supernatural or magical quality of the myth. It is fairly well constructed and contains many of the features that are common in the oral tradition but in the end it lacks the most important quality: it was born out of and created in the fashion of a literary tradition. I am not trying to undermine the values of literature or writing as it has many cultural benefits and has allowed humanity to advance far beyond what it would have been without the invention of writing or even typography, and my story, trivial though it may be, can hold its head up high in this culture. It is a fine yet simple story, created with much thought and high intentions, but it is not a myth.