What I think you're describing is a distance from the symbolic/mythic in everyday life. Mantel is describing that multilayered sense that ordinary systems of interpreting the world are being overlaid with something else. It's the same thing for holy sites, manifestations of superstition, or important rituals of passage. It is possible to experience them as completely mundane moments, but it is also possible, in these more than many other things, to feel much closer to an entirely different system of meaning.
It reminds me (a person who has stood for hours in the freezing cold to see the Queen) of my high school graduation. Which was not, for me, a moment of myth and meaning. It was boring and occasionally ridiculous, and I just made sure I looked good for the pictures. It conferred, on me, none of that magical sense of accomplishment, fulfillment, transcendence, or passage which some of my peers felt. I saw it as a bunch of people in a concrete hall. But when my own private moment came when I could reach the tipping point in my personal journey, between It's over and What now, I felt a slight twinge at the lack of a crowd to applaud me.
Because we can make our own private meanings, but they are much more powerful when witnessed and scaffolded by other people.
So if I can offer a rephrase, the royals' function right now is to carry those myths that we call king, queen, prince, princess in a form we can have a living relationship with. Those myths denote a certain kind of behaviour, yes; but being stared at and having children is less important, in that function, than that they engage with the narrative of their myth while they do it. They can withdraw in mourning for decades, or die unmarried and childless, and yet still do their "job" as royalty.
For them to shed their cloaks of myth is to extinguish the light of that myth in the world. To diminish the possibilities of a dream. Or--maybe, that's just my take on it. I think people should be trying to make more myths, myths that describe and serve them for once, instead of stripping everything down to its literal meaning.
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Date: 20 Feb 2013 06:04 am (UTC)It reminds me (a person who has stood for hours in the freezing cold to see the Queen) of my high school graduation. Which was not, for me, a moment of myth and meaning. It was boring and occasionally ridiculous, and I just made sure I looked good for the pictures. It conferred, on me, none of that magical sense of accomplishment, fulfillment, transcendence, or passage which some of my peers felt. I saw it as a bunch of people in a concrete hall. But when my own private moment came when I could reach the tipping point in my personal journey, between It's over and What now, I felt a slight twinge at the lack of a crowd to applaud me.
Because we can make our own private meanings, but they are much more powerful when witnessed and scaffolded by other people.
So if I can offer a rephrase, the royals' function right now is to carry those myths that we call king, queen, prince, princess in a form we can have a living relationship with. Those myths denote a certain kind of behaviour, yes; but being stared at and having children is less important, in that function, than that they engage with the narrative of their myth while they do it. They can withdraw in mourning for decades, or die unmarried and childless, and yet still do their "job" as royalty.
For them to shed their cloaks of myth is to extinguish the light of that myth in the world. To diminish the possibilities of a dream. Or--maybe, that's just my take on it. I think people should be trying to make more myths, myths that describe and serve them for once, instead of stripping everything down to its literal meaning.