Braid – Holy Wood vs. Hollywood

The distinction between the Holy Wood and the Hollywood: lived myth versus simulated myth, participation versus spectacle. The Mythica only features people who arrived in the Holy Wood — who appeared on the actual quest, in synchronicity, as characters in the Great Story — never people by virtue of celebrity or the Hollywood machine.

Proof-episode: 2003’s “Kings & Heroes” — Peter and Dan Walsh encounter the actor Pierce Brosnan in the Kalalau Valley on Pierce’s 50th birthday. The significance is precisely NOT that he is a movie star: it is that he arrived in the Holy Wood, in the sacred valley, on the quest — and that in the Mythica, Pierce is an actual Bardic King. When Peter, wandering through the darkness helping friends in the band The Omega Project, is told by Pierce’s wife ‘You don’t need any help,’ he agrees — ‘No, I don’t need any help. You guys just enjoy Pierce’s birthday’ — the recognition, even then, of being an avatar of story requiring no assistance from noble beings of the bardic arts. The intended future beat: calling Pierce to say what the Mythica is, because he is part of the story — not because he’s in the Hollywood, but because he’s in the Holy Wood.

The braid also carries the media thesis: the Mythica builds the media of the Holy Wood by witnessing the actual synchronicity of events — pattern recognition, pattern literacy — as against the manufactured spectacle of the Hollywood. Cross-links: The Art of Arriving, Landscapes of Legend — Sideway Highways (Holy Wood cartography), The Story Cloak (protection against shadow media), Many Worlds Within the World.

Constellation: Building the Mythica