From the recording Family Portraits (Volume 1)
What tale ever stays the same in the telling?
"Mythologies" is about the way we all embellish our stories. Especially family lore...and myths.
My wife complains that I embellish my stories (which I absolutely do!) but I think there is a certain inevitability about that. Tales grow taller in the telling.
(Post modern literary theory has dedicated an entire oeuvre to the notion -- which even I find a little too much -- but the point remains valid: where is the "truth'? Does there need to be an "absolute truth"? Immutable, for ever? Or could truth just be a point in time?)
The song name-checks a modernist theorist (Roland Barthes, whose highly engaging collection of essays "Mythologies" furnished the song title) and post-modernist theorist Jacques Derrida, whose "deconstruction" of "The Myth of Theuth" posited the idea of multiple voices (or "traces" in his vernacular).
The song also references two literary pieces (one perhaps more a piece of oratory): Plato's "Republic" in which, in Book X, Socrates argues for the "banishment of the poets from the (idealised) Republic" on the grounds that they peddle their trade on the premise of falsity, imitation, mimesis; and Friedrich Nietzche's 1872 essay "On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense" in which he argues that all truth is necessarily metaphoric in nature. In other words, a narrative.
Lyrics
Mythologies
So…you don’t much care for
Adornment and embellishment
You like your stories accurate
You like to stick to fact
No discrepancies, please
Metaphors and similes
In your eyes
Are all just little white lies
So what if the tales that are told are full of holes?
Ain’t that what makes them colourful?
Memories are but lies
Facts are fictions over time
If everything is relative
Where does that leave your narrative?
We all have our own tales to tell
They ebb and flow and grow and swell
In a bar
Roland Barthes is talking to Jacques Derrida
Spinning yarns
And yards of ale
Telling tall tales
In the myth of Theuth there is no truth
Only traces of you
But you don’t care so much for
Literary theory
It’s such a bore and so obscure and unnecessary
All this truth and falsity
Paraded with false modesty
Memories are but lies
Facts are fictions over time
If everything is relative
Where does that leave your narrative?
Yeah, we all have tales to tell
They ebb and flow and grow and swell
So...you will not read
A thesis on mimesis or Mythologies
But rather kick
Out the poets from the Republic