And I’ve seen all those kids on the soda pop ads
But none of them looked like me.
So I started looking around, for a light out of the dim
And the first thing I heard that made sense was the word
Of Mohammed, peace be upon him.
So begins the song John Walker’s Blues, by the great American songwriter-musician Steve Earle. Written not long after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, it’s the tragic and somewhat defiant story of John Walker Lindh, a young Californian caught fighting for the Taliban.
When I first heard the song, I was electrified. Here was Earle, hardly before the dust had settled in the rubble of the twin towers, affirming the life of a man most Americans would have considered a terrorist conspirator and traitor. With its mournful “There’s no God but God” refrain in Arabic, John Walker’s Blues was banned by radio stations and its writer roundly condemned.
Despite the outrage, the song is a classic on many levels. It tells the story of a spiritual seeker-warrior poetically and evocatively, but without judgement. Like all great art, what is left unsaid carries the most power: Walker Lindh’s certainty and religious passion is little different from the American ideal and the reality of many Americans, only he has the misfortune of being on the wrong side. Earle is provocatively asking the listener to see themselves in his protagonist, to identify with the enemy, the other.
What the song also does, as indeed all storytelling can, is elevate its subject or “hero” to myth. Through the power of story, a person or event can rise above the mundane to a region of mind that is eternal. The everyday suddenly takes on greater, richer meaning. Walker Lindh is no longer a mere two-dimensional figure described in news reports, he is magically transformed into a presence in the collective consciousness and memory, his life given depth and meaning. Earle, as the artist, is spinning myth.
This occurs in all the arts. In Australia, one can think historically of the myths of the bush and its independent, resourceful people in the work of nationalist writers like Henry Lawson and “Banjo” Paterson and the painters of the Heidelberg School. We can see the process of mythmaking in Sidney Nolan’s distinctive paintings of the armoured outlaw Ned Kelly. And more recently, examples can be found in the celebration of ordinary lives and everyday struggles in the novels of Tim Winton and the songs of Paul Kelly, and in the Indigenous fight for dignity and survival in the lyrics of Archie Roach and Kev Carmody.
In all these examples the mythmaking process meets with contemporary reality: these are no fairytales from a bygone era. Myth is connected to the complexity and tensions of the here-and-now, bringing its light (and darkness) to bear in the everyday world.
Not all stories reach the heights of myth. To get there, a story must have a quality of inspiration and aspire to the archetypal dimension of life, to the inner patterns of things. In John Walker’s Blues, Earle is working with the archetypes of the warrior, the martyr and the spiritual seeker. These are ancient, deeply resonant images in the collective human psyche, and their evocation is powerful.
Though some myths are enriching and enlightening, others may be disturbing or aligned towards separativeness or evil. All myths, no matter what their quality, reveal the inner workings of the human spirit in any given time. They link strongly to the energies of the psyche.
In our materialistic culture, we would do well with a greater awareness of myth and the mythic dimension. This would allow us to see beyond the surface, and get a sense of the inner stories that individually and collectively we tell ourselves and that are being told. We may come to know ourselves better and act with greater maturity. Perhaps above all, a greater appreciation of myth is invigorating and revitalising: it connects us with soul and replenishes the soul quality of the world. It allows us to drink from the deep wells of life and enter spaces of consciousness we rarely access in everyday reality, creating channels for those spaces of depth into the world.
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