A Question Without an Answer

"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, continued, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic."
— John F. Kennedy, Yale Commencement speech, 1962

I’m reminded of this quote after reading a couple reviews of Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth. Kennedy’s use of the word myth was modern & skeptical: myth = the untrue. Armstrong’s idea is ancient, spiritual, and rehabilitative. She writes (as quoted in The New York Times), that myth “is about the unknown; it is about that for which initially we have no words. Myth therefore looks into the heart of a great silence.” “All mythology speaks of another plane that exists alongside our own world, and that in some sense supports it.”

I wrote elsewhere about how Bix Beiderbecke’s biography has been overwhelmed by his myth, which portrays him as the quintessentially self-destructive genius, the Young Man with a Horn as played by Kirk Douglas. For the 74-plus years since his death, scholars have struggled to pry the two apart, to isolate the facts and to flush away everything else. In the process, the myth (myth in general) has become the enemy (see “‘Bixing’: Myth, Lies, and Political Correctness in Jazz Research” for a particularly impassioned example of what I’m talking about).

But genius is a mystery; Bix’s music is a mystery. To fully understand either, we need not only facts but also myth.

“There is a kind of anguish in listening to certain pieces of music, which is unlike any other sensation,” wrote Ralph Berton in his memoir Remembering Bix. “It acts upon some inner sense with a force intangible and penetrating . . . awaken[ing] in us a yearning, profound, inexpressible, for we know not what: it is a question without an answer, leaving us with a subtle sense of mystery and loss.”