In a sense all literature is biography (or autobiography), speaking as it does of the lives of men and women, or of the life of the author. Even the most abstract treatise tells something of human relationships. In another sense, every biography is ultimately myth. The biographer draws lines between stars, constructs a figure, animates the silence.
The narrow line between two words splits the brain itself in half. What distinguishes myth from reality? What is fact and what is fiction? The world is as it is: beyond words, before words, after words. Yet, we choose not to live in silence.
The sciences, too, can begin to sound oddly like a new mythology. The lexicon of quantum mechanics includes terms such as quark, gluon, quink, beauty, bottom, charm, up, down and strange. The job of naming things has always been reserved for those who create, or discover, new worlds. What is fact and what is fiction or, for that matter, what is a fraction and what is friction?
Up down, all around, strange beauty.
The British physicist, Sir James Jeans, once said: “Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”
Words too have their lives, their histories, their biographers. Exposing the roots of words reveals a mythopoeic structure beneath language, a past that is not lost but is the actual hidden foundation of the present. In the mechanics of mind, the word plays the role of the atom: break the words open, release the light.