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Return: The Idé Fixe
- Bradley Olson, PhD
- 1 minute ago
- 8 min read
Perhaps I came to classical music a bit late in life. I had little exposure to it growing up. In my midwestern 1960s house, it was country music mostly, and what always seemed to me a strange musical mashup: popular standards sung by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, or Peggy Lee, and restrained, smooth jazz á la Stan Getz or Chet Baker that was the music du jour.
Before proceeding, I would like to focus this MythBlast on the Return portion of Joseph Campbell’s notion of the hero’s adventure. This year, we’ve explored Separation and Initiation, and now, to complete the cycle as we circle back to another calendrical beginning—rather like James Joyce’s Liffey River circles back, connecting to itself in Finnegans Wake—we come to the Return.
Joseph Campbell writes in Creative Mythology, “The self is void, the world is void; heaven, earth, and the space between are void: in this rapture, there is neither virtue nor sin” (60). The Rapturous void, a lovely nothing, Joyce called it, constellates the energetic rivers of life running in and around and through us, creating and sustaining life everywhere, circulating back into and through the void from which it arises. The void isn’t an absence of something, or a lack. Shadows and holes have locations and even qualities of temporality, but they don’t consist of matter. Nothing is not a negativity contingent on some positive something.
Joseph Campbell borrowed Joyce’s term monomyth to describe what he would eventually call the hero’s adventure. Joyce, incidentally, used monomyth exactly once—in Book III of Finnegans Wake, shortly before he describes HCE’s unravelling ego dissolving into the larger flow of Dublin history, language, and the Liffey River he uses to symbolize the eternal return or recurrence. Nothing remains itself for long in this book, but all of it returns transformed.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in with all her matter-of-fact about MythBlast themes and monomyth, it wasn’t until I was an undergraduate that I listened, really listened, to a piece of classical music. I’d taken a liberal arts elective class called “Music Appreciation.” It was a one credit course taught by a middle aged man who was clearly handsome once, but by that time seemed to have gone to seed. He was tall and slim, with a shock of steel-gray hair, a deeply lined face, and spoke in a hypnotically sonorous voice. Though he was very wry and funny, a whiff of sadness wrapped itself around him and seemingly threatened to extinguish an already guttering flame.
On the first day of class, that marvelous voice informed us that there would be no exams; the only way to earn less than an A in the class was failing to show up or failing to respond to his question if he happened to call on you during class. All he wanted, he explained, was for his students to listen. He then placed an album on the turntable, and I was transfixed from the first delicate, lyrical notes of the flute. The Moldau, the German name for the Vltava river, has been one of my favorite pieces of music ever since. Its recurring theme reminds me that a return is the beginning remembered in the light of experience. This thought reminds me that I’m always already on the heroic adventure.
The cycle of six symphonic poems collectively called Má Vlast, The Moldau being one, is Bedřich Smetana’s musical love letter to the Czech nation and her people. The Vltava River flows across northern Bohemia, through Prague, and is sometimes referred to as the Czech national river. The piece opens with a soft, warm, yet lively lyrical flute, soon to be joined by a clarinet evoking the image of two bubbling springs. These emerge from the mountainous Bohemian forest, running through the Czech countryside, through Prague, finally merging with the Elbe River about 48 kilometers north of Prague, passing through Germany on its way to the North Sea.
The flute and clarinet begin to develop the main theme gently, smoothly, as the river grows and continues its way through the wooded countryside. Soon, horns and trumpets sound a brief fanfare that diverts the listener from the theme just long enough to interrupt the river’s musical flow. What’s being hunted along the river’s bank remains unclear. The tonal shift may feel confusing or startling; one might even wonder for a disconcerting moment what’s being pursued by the hunters—is it me as I flow along with the river? Perhaps the river itself is being pursued? Strange thoughts swirl for only a moment until one realizes the hunters are martialling toward the flushed game.
Such a fanfare in classical music has long signaled a hunt. It’s the sort of symphonic shorthand in use long before Smetana, but as his program notes names the section as a hunting scene on the riverbank, no guesswork is required.
After the hunt’s brief interruption, the music returns to its familiar theme—its Idé Fixe, gathering to itself the influences of Czech culture, growing and surging, becoming more robust as it travels along until we witness a wedding scene. The wedding section is a polka that takes us off the river to join in the celebration. This is not random or incidental to the theme or the river’s flow. This symphonic poem is a celebration of Czech culture and proud national feeling. The polka is a Czech folk dance—its origins are Bohemian, mid-19th century, right around when Smetana was writing, and where his family is from—so using it here isn't filler, or "look at the peasants enjoying life" music; it's a specific national image that his Czech audience would recognize immediately as their own.
The music leaves the river's perspective for a while and joins the village; it’s the last "ordinary human world" material before the piece becomes darker, more interior and strange as we return to the river and move into night, encountering water nymphs and the strange shadows cast by moonlight. Not only the music, but our listening selves, too, have crossed a threshold. The world we’ve entered is strangely enchanted, populated with ethereal forms and nymphs—the nocturnal, mythic middle of the piece. But joy comes with the morning and the main river theme returns, although it soon breaks into tumultuous dissonance as the river enters the St. John’s Rapids.
The rapids no longer exist, long submerged under a large reservoir, but in Smetana’s symphonic poem we can still experience the chaotic, churning whitewater brought back to life by the dissonant notes of woodwinds and brass, whirling strings, crashing timpani and cymbals, and tumultuous unresolved chords. Smetana composed this piece while Czechoslovakia was living under Austrian rule, and he wanted this section to musically evoke the hardships, oppression, and battles that faced his countrymen and the Czech nation.
Just as the dissonance reaches a crescendo, the familiar main musical theme returns transformed; a major key swells majestically as the Vltava enters Prague—the same tune, yet not the same. Experience, the energy of a country and her people, and memory have transformed it.
The Vltava flows beneath Vyšehrad, a historic, tenth-century fort that local legend says is the first settlement on the site that would eventually become Prague. The castle was sacked during the Hussite Wars in the fifteenth century, eventually falling into disuse and ruin. It underwent a renovation in the seventeenth century following the Thirty Years' War, after which the Hapsburg monarchy took over Czech lands.
This reminds me of the poet Rainer Maria-Rilke and his Eighth Duino Elegy, in which he writes:
And we: spectators, always, and everywhere,
turned toward everything and never outward!
It overfills us. We arrange it. And it falls apart.
We arrange it once again and fall apart ourselves.
This, to me, is the essence of the human project: to be transformed—sometimes undone—by experience and then return to the always-ongoing project of living. One powerful yet often overlooked return is to remember the beginning in the light of experience. We will then see, perhaps, ourselves as a different creature, holding memories of the old, certainly, but with a renewed vision for the future, and the realization that life itself—like the river—is transcendent. The falling apart is inevitable, but so is the return to being, the inevitable return to ourselves.
The falling apart is inevitable, but so is the return to being, the inevitable return to ourselves.
This is the brilliance of Smetana’s composition. The heroic return needs no narration. It is simply a melody carrying an archetypal, mythical pattern through thirteen minutes of orchestral time. The theme returns and returns, yes, but enriched by experience each time. As do we.
Thanks for reading.
MythBlast authored by:
Bradley Olson is a writer, depth psychologist in private practice, teacher, speaker, and Director of Publications for the Joseph Campbell Foundation. His work explores the status of myth after belief—what it means to take myth seriously in a world where its metaphysical claims no longer hold in any straightforward way.
He is the author of The Mythopoetic Impulse and a Skeleton Key Study Guide for Pathways to Bliss. His current writing pushes against the dominant tendency to treat myth as a repository of timeless meanings or archetypes, arguing instead that myth functions as a form that brings the mind into contact with its own limits—where coherence breaks down and the desire for explanation remains.
Before his work in psychology and mythology, Olson worked as a police officer in North Dakota and Arizona. There, he encountered the world less as a smooth narrative than as rupture—moments of consequence without clear origin, human situations that resist explanation or moral symmetry. That experience continues to inform his understanding of myth—not as a system that resolves the world into meaning, but as a form that emerges in proximity to what cannot be made coherent.
In both his clinical practice and his writing, Olson is interested in how people live with those limits—how meaning persists, not as resolution, but as a problem that cannot finally be solved.
This MythBlast was inspired by the Return stage of the hero's journey and The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
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In this final installment of The Occidental Tradition, recorded during Joseph Campbell’s 1973 visit to the Blaisdell Institute, Campbell turns toward the role of myth, symbol, and ritual in modern Western life. In a wide-ranging and conversational exchange, Campbell explores the symbolic traditions embedded in Christianity, art, American history, and even the imagery of the dollar bill. He reflects on the gradual disappearance of shared ritual in modern culture, the enduring human need for ceremonies of belonging and transformation, and what can happen when that need is left without meaningful forms. From the funeral of John F. Kennedy and the rituals of political life to football games, protest movements, religious imagery, and the work of artists and visionaries, Campbell argues that our symbolic inheritance has not entirely disappeared. The symbols, he suggests, are still all around us—we have simply forgotten how to see them. In his closing commentary, host Bradley Olson considers what it means to live among the remnants of older symbolic worlds, and whether myth can still help us give form to the mysteries of death, grief, love, belonging, and the experience of being alive.
This Week's Highlights
"So that stream, that running stream which is the running stream of time, the River Ganges, the River Liffey, the River Jordan, whatever river you want, becomes symbolic of the flow of time. And so it’s given commonly a feminine name. And when you go into the water in baptism and come out again, it’s like going into the mother womb and coming out in rebirth. The water is the Goddess."
-- Joseph Campbell
Myth and Meaning, 54
