Prometheus: the autobiography - book review | Poem

Soren Kierkegaard observes: "Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards." And, if the observation is linked to myths, a creative writer like Uncle River, who is unconventional by nature and has acquired distinction in American Science fiction writing, can view the past as not behind us but ahead of us, as it can be grasped with imagination and made to stand before our eyes.

In his Prometheus: the autobiography (2003), Uncle River seeks to make historical sense of the mythical biography of Prometheus and "stretches our sensibilities and sense of the credible" as he reconstructs his thoughts, feelings and experiences in the mode of speculative or science fiction. Uncle River, who has published his cultural Science Fiction Stories in Asimov's Science Fiction, Analog, Amazing Stories, Interzone, Absolute Magnitude, and Transversions, among other magazines, and is included in Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies more than once, keeps intact the original image of Prometheus as the creator and patron of human race, as the wisest with 'foresight', as the mighty champion of men's interests, and as their defender in face of arbitrary rule. He imbues him with adult ego (p.43) and individual consciousness (p.23), motivated by compassion, but does not alter his suffering thousand times in the hands of Zeus, a wily megalomaniac, who made thinking a crime (p.37) and uses sex as a Power trick (p.l36) to enslave and torture him and eat his liver out (p.34), because, as we know, he had seized fire from Olympus and carried it secretly to earth. Uncle River finds in the sufferings of Prometheus the characteristic history of the entire Western civilization, attitude, and personality structure marked by alienation as well as light of consciousness.

"Zeus simultaneously declared himself God, King of Heaven, and forbade you to look upon the face of God, and enforced both these commands by such terrifying means including what he did to me that you haven't looked, in so long that you have mostly lost adult competence to deal with what you see if you do look...or even if you get swatted like Saul on the road to Damascus." (p.61)

Prometheus maintains that Zeus was not nice to him and he didn't like him as he (Zeus) made Earth a living hell where those who did ot learn to live with him died. (p.28) Zeus demanded individual consciousness from Prometheus and despised it too. This self-contradiction appears central to Western history just as the values of consciousness and compassion have ended up in suffering and torture.

Uncle River provides an inlook to the Greek gods and goddesses -- Hera, Herakles, Hephaestus, Mardock, Rhea, Gaia, Agamemnon, Priam, etc.--that configure psychology, history, power, and personal experiences. The tale of Prometheus through many messy mixed metaphors helps him structure the fact that what Western culture has done to so many others in recent centuries, it has, in fact, first done to itself. He exposes Zeus' politics through Prometheus' narrative. Ego is at the center of all his action and reflection, revealing success and suffering, or friendliness and alienation almost simultaneously.

River sees the genesis of many of our problems today in the forgotten past, just as he exposes negative notions and false beliefs with a critical sense. He has his own motivation, psychic distance, self-consciousness, historical sense and perspective to spin his narrative of the four thousand years of Western civilization through an assemblage of fallacies and trickeries a la experiences of Prometheus.

He is motivated by his desire to communicate and participate in continuing reality besides creating a life-view and world-view, discovering humanity's spiritual self-knowledge and demonstrating several strands of the myth that bear important messages about life in general and life-within-society in particular.

Uncle River uses the Prometheus myths as "symbols of transformation", to use Carl Jung's phrase, and shares his interpretation of the deeply-rooted spiritual concerns in different aeons as part of collective development of the West. The story of Prometheus, who calls himself an "exotic visionary" (p.16) and Shaman, is important because his giving fire to humans to make their lives comfortable is marked by an evolutionary curve: "I just carried fire in a hollow reed from the volcano, where Hephaestus and his forge had not yet been born to live, to fabricate handy metal pots to carry fire in, or I would not have needed that hollow reed. I just carried fire, to enhance, and simultaneously to represent Life, as in its Time the Goddess's grain would sustain and represent Life" (p.128), reflects Prometheus, the older-than-Time protector of Earth and discoverer of technology (p.44).

As Prometheus tells his tale, apparently in the shape of oral narrative, the author looks back and forward, in Zig-Zag, sweep, loop, or spiral, saying something that happened earlier, and then digresses off into something that he thinks of, by way of interpretation of the ancient/European politico-religious system and other developments, touching upon technology, authority, power, ego, persoalities, motives, cogitive and cultural 'pulls' and physiological 'push', alienation, subjugation, war, corruption, urban and rural institutions, democracy, agriculture, environment, food, hunger, sex, diseases, fate, dreams, church, priesthood, rites, ceremonies, virginity, homosexuality, racial and ethnic tension, consumerism, love-needs, self-actualization, population explosion et al, and then again returns to the main thrust of the tale. River fuses biography and history, merges individual and group identity, mixes reality and fantasy, encloses human and nature, and constructs vision and spirit of Time, cosmic Time (which is father of Zeus), as events recur in its cyclical rather than linear passage.

The technic helps him, as well as the readers, to relate, to understand our predicaments and possibilities in perspective, to know our so called modern civilization, and speculate about our future. The objective is to learn to grow up as responsible adults (p.58) vis-a-vis insanity, fraud, corruption, conflicts, tensions, manipulation, meaness, sadism, and politics of power, authority, control, ego, crippled technology, and rising burdens on nature, as symbolized in Zeus. In other words "...it is not just a retelling of the tale in a new cultural context" (p.19) but a critical reflection on the fraud committed on humankind by the likes of Zeus.

Uncle River applies psychology's startegies on scores of issues - cross-cultural, sociopolitical, religious; nature, nurture, ego; and power, control, technology - and relates to cultural history, world of nature, unconscious thoughts, and individual personality that shape the moral and social life of a commuity. He deals with the game of obedience and authority, native versus colonial identity, and "Zeuses holler" such as human rights, market forces or respect for authority, and Salvation, Second Coming and Original Sin. The interface between him and Prometheus is a psychological projection of the spiritual condition of human beings against what appears as technological growth or natural evolution of the society's materalistic concerns. As it is, the unsustainable excess resulting from success in the West has affected everyone the world over and people of various heritages are trying to reconcile disparate elements of life into some coherent whole.

Like Prometheus, Uncle River tries to look ahead in his "historical meditation" and present possibilities after the current "way of life" comes to an end. Though he makes no prophesy, he sounds prophetic. Our planet may or may not survive, the world order may or may not change, but the writer is enlightening and communicates the direction the Western civilization, nay, the whole world, has taken. One only needs to learn to see through paradoxes.

Prometheus emphasizes that nihilism, ethnic cleansing, and war and weapon production that Americans support will not change the world order or reduce social, economic or population stress. Designating humans as 'consumers' is also a fatal blasphemy. Outlawing spirtual independence of thinking people, invoking Christian litany of Love or twisted version of the fall story, or equating independent moral consciousness as affront to God, and the existence of sex as proof that one is intrinsically a sinner is simply self-indulgent moral abdication (pp. 133-134). Love, to be discerning and positive, needs to transcend ego/power as organizing principle in life/existence.

Uncle River is convinced that there is no glorious kingdom of the Lord going to descend on us all. With Talibanization of politics and society and "the miscellaneous array of world terrorists" that precipitated post-Sept. 11 American policies, including invasion of Iraq, the Earth life is unlikely to be divinized. In fact, it is "only the beginning of an abyss" we are descending into, not coming out of (p.149). "The Millennium is, however, a handy handle on to which to project the quite-real fact of a time of rapid, intense, and scary change." (p.147)

His sense of the future makes him materially negative but spiritually positive: "Destruction, like imbalance, is an intrinsically self-limiting facet of existence. The Dance of Kali may well be a significant and fast-approaching facet of resolution in the current change of Aeon." (p.127)

Uncle River's book makes up a new myth-like fiction with interpretation of the conflicts between Prometheus and Zeus in terms of personality structure, power, and control at different junctures of history, or social, technological and economic development. It explores identity with spiritual interpretations psychologically. Moving "from personal to symbolic, from fact to fantasy, from events of a particular individual in a specific time and locale to generalized view spread through centuries and millennia" (p.99), River himself speaks as Prometheus, explaining how history happened at different points of time with unique psychic structures, and pleads for continued learning for moral sanity (p.28) in a democracy which is so corrupt, blasphemous, and full of fraud (cf.pp.64-65).

Through the mask of Prometheus, he seems to articulate his own existential and moral dilemma and exposes his self-analysis mythically, historically and biographically. At places he reminds us of Salman Rushdie's Saleem Sinai in Midnight's Children in his postomodernist rambling which highlights his own personal story and confusion, linking historical events to personal and communal incidens. Uncle River persuades us to believe the fictionalized (or rationalized) historical and personal narrative, even as his views about or interpretations of the Catholic religious events, Buddha's enlightenment, Hindu myths/legends etc are debatable. While one may not question his interpretation of religious/literary symbols - Snake (as "transcendent wisdom") or Gilgamesh, Trojan Horse etc., or meanings of political events at different points of time, obsrvations such as: "Dump the concept of original sin" (p.160), "the Buddha's enlightenment...it's a joke" (p.29), "...Arjuna's vision in the Bhagavad Gita... 'Holy Shit!'..." (p.47), "mystical puffery" (p.55), or "Any God your rational self-importance can debunk is not the Creator of the Universe..." (p.59), or perhaps the entire chapter on 'Psychology of God', may be resented.

Further, the end of Cold War may have temporarily enhanced the American pride, but it is no guarantee of their political, economic and technological power supremacy in the 21st century nor can it trumpet the end of Zeus' rule or Prometheus' helplessness. Self-awareness is no doubt good and helpful in maintaining ones inner balance today, but the outer world continues to remain anarchical, whatever the reigning political beliefs, economic doctrine, or system of governance. Uncle River is right that there is no collective solution for any problem, as it once did, in a world of both opportunity and threat. The game of convenience continues.

Prometheus: the autobiography acquires a numinous character from the way he conceives and develops it with foresight and insight, philosophical conviction, psycho-analytical skill, and grasp of contemporary man's response to certain key issues of our time. Even if Uncle River offers no concrete solution, he favors change of outlook to outgrow "blind obedience and blind self-assertion", (p.161) and transcend power and ego so that one becomes a self-aware personality, recognizing each other and all creation simply as existing. This is a sage attitude.

For a copy of Prometheus: the autobiography contact Info@crossquarter.com

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