Malouf and the classroom

Our class deals with relating classical myths to our time; making their stories relevant to what we're living through. We find patterns, recurring themes. We have fun. I think Malouf's book ties in with all that because he's basically doing the same thing we're doing, except in book form. Using Ovid's life, Malouf gives us a myth we can parallel to our own time of living in rationality while believing in mystery and looking for new truths.
Narrating in Imaginary Life, Ovid doesn’t believe in the gods and he’s not that big into rituals. Even when he participates with the “savages” he lives with, he treats it like it’s a game, despite his happier or lighter feelings. He denies any deeper, spiritual connection with the traditions and beliefs, but he likes learning about them to get a richer understanding of the people he lives with. I think we approach myths and religious beliefs in the same kind of way. We live in such a rational world, where everything can have a scientific or reasonable answer if we look hard enough. It’s like we’re too smart to get fooled by these little stories about heroes and creation. But maybe it’s really upside down; maybe we’re just too full of ourselves to keep an open mind. I’ve always liked myths from any culture. I always thought they were fun and interesting ways to think of the origin of the world, but I never considered them to be factual, and I still don’t; however, I am not sure facts necessarily mean something is true. For the women in Imaginary Life, they believed the Child had an animal spirit in him and that the animal spirit was trying to find a new host. They associated his presence with the illness and bad luck in their hut. They didn’t quite say the Child himself was evil, but rather that he possessed an animal nature that wreaked havoc. Looking at it from one way, I’d say it was a coincidence, but looking at it from another, I could see some truth in their beliefs, and whether Ovid admits it or not, I think he could see it too.
Often times when Prof. Sexton tells us a Greek myth or some kind of relative tale, he assures us that it is a “true story.” I always laugh when he says this, because rationally, I know he’s lying, but at the same time, I know he’s right. Truth on this level, I think, is just a term for something we choose to believe in because we like it. The area around myths can get so fuzzy because they deal with a time we never lived in or never experienced. We’ll never really know what happened until we’re dead, so in the meantime, we have to come up with the details on our own. I think that’s one aspect that’s so appealing about them- they’re a mystery. Ovid’s fascination with the Wild Child is fueled a lot by curiosity about why the child is the way he is. He tries to convince himself and others that the child is just a child, but sometimes when he looks at him, his heart tells him there’s more to it than that. The mystery surrounding the boy (and other old heroes and times) is what makes him a living myth, something supernatural and beautiful and unexplainable.
I hear sometimes, that just because something isn’t true, it doesn’t make it any less real. I think that same phrase could work the other way around too. I don’t really think myths are real or factual, but I think they contain truths that continually pop up in the recurring cycle that is life.