“Wouldn’t that be cheating?” I asked.
“More like cribbing,” she replied.
According to Webster’s Dictionary, a myth shoulders this sweeping definition: “a traditional story of unknown authorship, ostensibly with a historical basis, but serving usually to explain some phenomenon of nature, the origin of man or the customs, institutions, religious rites of a people.”15
“Basically, some big stuff is explained through stories over a long time,” I said when I called Korinne back.
“And no one knows who started it or how it grew,” she said.
Mythology might match history; it might not. Myth begins with history, which might be true or might not, and then it’s layered with hyperbole anda believed by alot of people.
“Myth and the Roman and Greek religions,” Korinne said.
“The lessons of the Old and New Testaments are told in myth,” I said.
The Oxford Dictionary defines legend as a “traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but unauthenticated.”16 American legend tells heroic tales of George Washington and his cherry tree and of John Henry and the steam engine. Both myth and legend have an unverifiable basis, but missing from the legend definition are the big storms and the big-why. Legend is implied myth-light, yet legend and myth are often synonymous.
Both dictionary sources define folklore as “the traditional beliefs, legends, sayings and customs of a people.”17 Folklore can take the shape of anything from dresses to songs to stories to dances.
“If folklore explains the customs of a people, then myth can describe folklore,” I puzzled through with Korinne, “But legend’s part of the folklore list and legend and myth are synonymous.”
“It’s a logic equation gone way wrong,” she said.
The English language embraces little logic.
Legend and myth require loose historical mooring, and repetition of the story and the embellishments by the storytellers smudge the line between documentation and manufacture. Folklore must be laced with some skinny threads of history; it wasn’t created in a vacuum. But folklore doesn’t, by definition, require history; it can be completely fabricated.
“Total fabrication,” I said.
“I hope that folklore’s a mix,” she replied. “What?” She asked when I laughed at her hope. “I hope there’s some truth in it. There better be. John Henry did work for the railroad.”
“George Washington was once a boy,” I said.
“And cherry trees grow in Virginia,” Korinne riffed.
“And Big Liz’s plantation owner John Austin did own a plantation outside Cambridge during the Civil War.”
Folklorist George Carey includes legend among types of folktale: fairy tale, joke, song, tall tale and legend.18 There is no ghost story specifically in that list; tall tale might be its closest cousin. Like the missing, xenophobic, state nationalism word, the English language doesn’t have an exclusive word for the tall tale that is ghost story. It’s not surprising; ghost lore is mostly oral and not printed. The public doesn’t read much of the written versions of folklore-developed ghost story; the public mainly reads completely fabricated ghost stories. How can we believe the fictionalized version and scoff the folklore version?
Simple. Fear.
Like myth and legend, ghost stories are told over generations, have an unknown authorship or the shared group authorship of a community, sometimes have a historical basis, and occasionally involve the phenomenon of weather.
“But ghost stories don’t describe religious rites. Every day ghost stories . . .” I started.
“As opposed to Holy Ghost ghost stories!” Korinne laughed.
“Don’t fit easily into religious doctrine,” I continued, “unless the spirits are the poor souls trapped in Purgatory.” Regardless of denomination, some people believe that ghouls are stuck between life and death, trapped in denial at the spot of their demise. “Big Liz shuffling through the swamp could be in Purgatory,” I said.
“Sure, she could,” Korinne replied, “But you don’t want to think that dead Grandma banging around the attic or re-arranging the silver is in Purgatory! Grandma can’t be in Purgatory!”
Purgatory in the Roman Catholic doctrine is a transitory state of punishment for worldly sins.
Maybe because of its lack of specific religious affiliation, ghost lore forces us to question our individual concepts of spirituality.
“Like Rebecca who doesn’t believe in a god but believes in ghosts,” I said to Korinne.
My friend Rebecca is a pale, dark-haired stage manager and the distillation of all that is ironic and sarcastic. She was born in Massachusetts and reminds me of a Charles Addams character. “I’m a very logical person,” she once said to me, “and a card-carrying atheist, but I completely believe in ghosts. There’s no question about ghosts.”
She was on tour and calling a show from backstage of an old Philadelphia theatre. She was calling a complicated light sequence and she saw someone out of the corner of her eyes. She turned, thinking the person was a stagehand who had a question. She saw an older man with a sweet smile on his face and wearing an orange sweater, standing by the fly rail. As she opened her mouth to ask him what he wanted, he disintegrated, vanished into air. She kept quiet, afraid that the old union guys in the theatre would think she was crazy if she mentioned what she had seen. She realized that whenever she wore her orange sweater, the old man appeared and then disappeared. Right before the show left Philly, she finally asked the stagehands what was going on.
“Oh, that’s Babe,” they replied. “Were you wearing orange that day?” Babe had died by the fly rail and wore a lot of orange.
“I helped carry him out,” said one stagehand.
“You gotta believe in ghosts,” Korinne said. “Well, you do.”
“Maybe ghosts are memories come alive,” I speculated. “Is folklore fictionalized reality?”
“Reality is fiction” Korinne affirmed. “And what’s scarier than a once real ghost in an orange sweater that has the power to return?”
Regardless of the hair-splitting, myth, legend, folklore and ghost story are all subjective narrations of some reality, and their difference is that of process, how the account evolves, and that might create a different product.
Maybe folklore is the poor man’s history.
I asked my friend Terri the difference between a historian and a folklorist. She put down the newspaper she was reading and said, “A tie.” She’s from Brooklyn, and she speaks her mind. Even when she’s sleepy, she has fire in her eyes.
Written history is only slightly more reliable than oral myth. Read the newspaper; it’s laced with mistruths. Every day corrections are listed. Such are facts. Every day we journal the world and argue about which version is closest to what happened yesterday. Japanese history books still don’t mention the 1937 Rape of Nanking when over 300,000 Chinese were killed and 80,000 women were raped in six horrifying weeks. It’s so horrifying that they can’t acknowledge it. Regimes dictate history; the winners write it.
For as Winston Churchill said as he wrote his account of his war adventures, “History will be kind to me because I intend to write it.”
Maybe there’s no such thing as non-fiction. Everything is made up. Everything has spin.
Napolean said that history was the myth that man agreed upon.
There is no such thing as a completely objective reality. We are constantly all inside the personal film of our lives. We are producer, director, actor and audience for this constant film called reality. We all put spin