I was lucky enough to spend my Valentine’s Day with this gentleman, Joseph Campbell. Sure, he’s dead, but in the reality that is a 1986 PBS special with a huge-glasses Bill Moyers that I just got from Netflix, he’s alive and kicking. And when I say kicking, I mean
kicking.
It has been so long since I’ve agreed with everything a man has said. Yes, he’s a privileged white guy who got to study in Paris, and his early interest in American Indian culture kind of bordered on fetishism (he even created his own tribe when he was a kid), but he is truly an amazing human being, albeit lucky enough to have been born white and middle-class so that it’s been possible for him to share his brain with the world. When Bill Moyers (I kind of hate Bill Moyers), in the second episode of the series, asks him whether or not the purpose of embracing myths today is a way of seeking life’s meaning, JC shakes his head as if to shake off the depressing notion that life has to have meaning. “No,” he says, “it’s about seeking the experience of being alive.” Seconds later he states that he believes that a human’s meaning is this: You are here. That’s it. Be here—put yourself in the middle of good and evil. The best way to live in the world is to LIVE in it, in the middle of the sorrow and pain and chaos and joy. All you have to do is live. And then, when talking about the Judeo-Christian culture we westerners have inherited, he says “All natural impulses are sinful unless you’ve been baptized or circumcised? Come on.” He’s created his own belief system out of the myths generated throughout HUMAN history, and makes this ok. His belief system seems to be about searching, and he’s perfectly ok with that. He’s also ok with someone whose belief system is about Jesus, or Buddha, or animals, or all three (I think I may fit in there somewhere). He is in the middle of all of it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more serene person.
I could go on and on. I felt so happy to have him in my living room as I got kind of drunk. The first time I really encountered him was when I taught at a summer camp for little geniuses a couple of years ago. The course I taught was called “Heroes and Villains” and it was a great experience for me to totally get my nerd on in a room full of mini-nerds who thought they were in heaven. We studied all kinds of myths, and used Campbell’s
The Hero with a Thousand Faces as a primary text. The kids really got into him, especially as we traced the hero’s journey through all kinds of media, both old and new. It was really cool to see how ideas of heroes and villains were already a part of these kids’ daily lives—instead of teaching, Campbell’s book seemed to be more of reminder of these archetypes that were already simmering in their 11-year-old unconsciousnesses. That’s why I love him, I think—it is wonderful to hear him speak words that are already a part of me as a human—it’s like he’s saying the words our souls would say if they could talk. Even sixth graders could feel it. Of course, sixth graders are pretty cool.
While I was watching the special, my 90-year-old grandma called. She said “Happy Halloween!” when I answered, and it wasn’t a joke, though she figured out pretty quickly that she had said the wrong holiday. She told me that she had made rhubarb sauce for dinner (which for old people in Iowa means at noon) out of rhubarb she had frozen last summer. She is blind in one eye and losing sight in the other, so we talked about how hard that is for her, though I clearly have no idea how hard it must actually be. She is almost finished embroidering a table cloth, but can’t finish the middle because she can’t see. I got tears in my eyes when she said this, because I know eventually she may not be able to see at all, and she has been sewing since she was a little girl: I have quilt squares that she made in 4-H in 1925. She is going to give the table cloth to my cousin in South Dakota so she can finish it. And for the millionth time in my life, I felt sad that I can’t sew like the other women in my family, that I am too lazy or uncoordinated or not Midwestern enough, as I desperately want to finish the table cloth for her.
It was weird to have this 10-minute conversation and then go back to Joseph Campbell. The Bill Moyers special was filmed about 2 years before Campbell died. I thought about this as I watched, and about how my grandma may die soon and how peaceful she is. A few years ago, the defeatist and pessimist I was would have thought, “All of that work and thinking about existence, and now he’s dead. What a waste.” Maybe I still do think that a little, but mostly because such a powerful life force here surely would help to make this world a little better. I think the best thing I’ve learned from him is that you must go to yourself to learn everything you need to know about being alive: what you think and feel is everything. For me, myself is where god is, it’s where the core and pleasure and pain of being alive are, it’s where my poetry comes from. Self-acceptance seems to be the key to self-peace, and a world full of people who are at peace with themselves sounds like a good place to live. This does not mean a world full of happy people. Fuck happiness. I mean people who have accepted that the world sucks and is also a source of beauty--they are at peace with the paradox. When Jung (obviously a huge influence on Campbell) was asked, “Will there ever be world peace?” he responded, “If enough people do their inner work.”
