Guest Post: What Mythology Means to Me by Alex Epstein

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A native New Yorker, Alex Epstein studied Computer Science and English at Yale University. After a year in Paris, he studied filmmaking at the University of California, Los Angeles in the School of Theatre, Film and Television, finishing with an MFA.

Throughout the 1990s, Epstein worked in the motion picture industry as a development executive. His first book, Crafty Screenwriting, came out of his experiences developing movies.
Epstein moved to Montreal in 2000 and began his career as a professional screenwriter. He co-created the comedy series Naked Josh, which ran for three seasons, and co-wrote the hit buddy cop comedy Bon Cop / Bad Cop.

Epstein lives in Montreal's Old Port with his wife, Lisa Hunter (author of The Intrepid Art Collector) and his two children.

 What Mythology Means To Me

by Alex Epstein

The two hardest things in the world to learn are how to walk and how to talk. Walking without falling over is hard – ask any two-legged robot, or any two year old. Learning to talk is harder. It takes kids years to learn to talk. If you wonder about why grownups can’t master other languages, think about how many hours you spent learning to speak. If you spent that kind of time learning to speak French, how good do you think you would be?


The only reason learning to talk is even possible is because our brains are hard wired for it. There are no visible structures in the brain, just a bunch of brain cells with billions of connections. But babies will learn to speak just from hearing people speak because they have a region in their brain called Broca’s region, that enables them to parse language. There also seems to be a region that enables people to tell faces apart, and another region for numbers. We know that because if something bad happens to your Broca’s region, you can’t make sense of language. If something happens to the part that controls faces, you can’t tell faces apart. You can tell a black person from a white person, but you’re no better at telling faces apart than telling rocks apart. The average person is about a thousand times better at telling faces apart than rocks.


The reason I’m talking about all this is because I think stories are also hard wired. Human beings are compulsive story tellers. We tell stories to each other all day long. We see our lives as stories: I was there, I came here, I’m trying to go there, but this is in the way. If I get there I’ll get this, if I don’t I’ll lose that. It’s all the elements of story.


We tell fictional stories to make sense of our lives. The first stories were probably How Og Escaped the Tiger. You listened, and imagined the tiger, and imagined escaping the tiger. And next time you were out in the tall grass and you thought you saw something big moving quietly out there, you did what Og did… and survived.


Later on you watched a comedy about an adulterous wife and a blockhead husband, and realized what was really going on in your own marriage.


I think this is hardwired. I think human beings have to tell stories. It’s how we understand our lives. My Facebook quote is:


I think human beings have evolved to appreciate narrative, in the same way that we have evolved to learn language. What is narrative, after all, but a kind of super-language, where stories, like words, are ways of encapsulating information?


Which is a fancy way of saying the same thing.


Literature is news that stays news. We keep telling the story of Hamlet, not just because the play is pretty good and the language is poetic, but because indecisiveness can still kill you. We keep telling the story of the Trojan War because we still get in decade-long wars that do terrible damage to the winners, even if the losers are devastated. The King Arthur legend is all about the cost of lust, and the danger of forgiveness, and faith and treachery and adultery – and these are still important facts of life.  Morgan is a fascinating character to us because we long for revenge when we’ve been slighted, but revenge comes at a steep price.


Stories tell us how to see our lives. Myths are the foundation stories of our culture. They tell us what it means to be a hero, and live a righteous life, and what happens when you don’t. Myths are stories that stay true, in some way, for the life of our whole culture.
 

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How did an exiled girl become the most powerful witch in legend?
Britain, 480 AD. Saxon barbarians are invading, pushing the civilized British out of their own island. Morgan is the daughter of the governor of Cornwall. But when her father is murdered and her mother taken as the King's new wife, she has to flee to Ireland to avoid being murdered herself.

But Ireland is no refuge. She's captured in a slave raid and sold to a village witch. As Morgan comes of age, she discovers her own immense magical powers. She falls in love with a young Irish chieftain, and makes him powerful.
But will her drive for revenge destroy her one chance for love and happiness?

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