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Star of the Sea: The Gravity of Homecoming in MARIS’s Discography
Coming home
Five years ago, I exited a career of over twenty years and moved from California back to my hometown in Nebraska. The sojourn was brief, but I constantly reflected on the nature of the Return in the Hero’s Journey. I was returning to the corner of the world I had left decades before, with a distinctly different set of values. I anticipated a Tolkienesque conclusion to that chapter: fanfare and victory. My expectation misread the Return.
Throughout that trek, I listened over and over to a very new (and, at that time, unsigned) artist named MARIS. She is, musically and visually, a bricoleur, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s maker who builds from the scraps and remnants at hand. Her stage persona is decorated with pop-tab earrings, dollar-store stars (Davidson), and a set of football shoulder pads from a thrift shop. She does the same with sound, “Voicemail” being the prime example: a song stitched together from ringtones, operator messages, and the scratchy pops and jitters of a poor cellular signal.
A concoction of Freddie Mercury and Punky Brewster
I should admit the oddity of that soundtrack. I was a near-fifty-year-old man returning to rural Nebraska, and the voice that accompanied me belonged to a queer pop princess from Missoula, Montana. And not the polished kind—MARIS is no Sabrina Carpenter or Taylor Swift. She is Punky Brewster trainwrecked into The Rocky Horror Picture Show: glitter tears on her cheeks, an unfinished star drawn across her eye. My way into her music was delight. Her voice is far more mature than her reputation suggests (I’m not alone: Elton John has compared her to Lady Gaga and Freddie Mercury [“MARIS”]). What kept me listening was the wound. Where so much pop sands down the edges of pain, MARIS keeps turning toward the hurt at its sharpest, sings it whole, and asks the entire room to hold it with her.
The moment of violent grief
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell’s hero returns “with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (Campbell, 23). The Return is usually portrayed as a victory lap. But Campbell didn’t stop there: “The returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world” (194). This is the heart of the Return: collision with the unchanged world. C. G. Jung, in “On the Nature of the Psyche,” writes: “Individuation does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself” (Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, par. 432).
Campbell’s returns are full of reluctance and loss. Oisín rides home from Tír na nÓg believing he has been gone three years and discovers it has been three hundred. In the Gospel of Luke, Christ states plainly, “No prophet is accepted in his own country” (Luke 4:24), and his neighbors attempt to throw him off a cliff (4:29). (My return home was far less eventful.) The Return does not promise acceptance. If the Journey accomplishes anything, it is often the release from the need to be accepted by others.
A fiery re-entry
MARIS has explored the pain of the Return since her first EP. Gravity, at its core, is about the force that pulls the hero back down. “Heavenly Bodies” was born from her own return to Montana, written as she sifted through old memories and artifacts (“MARIS Delivers”). On stage, she plays an astronaut crash-landing on an alien planet (Cihak). “Crashland” painfully acknowledges that re-entry is often violent. The hero returns through fire, and something breaks upon impact.
Homecoming hurts because, so far into transformation, home is no longer home. MARIS’s “Chameleon” pauses on that wound. The Montana child encounters the pretense of Los Angeles and embraces the changes it requires. It’s a ballad of transformation that brings its shame home with it. Mid-song, MARIS asks the audience to wrap their arms around themselves (Davidson). It was the most honest framing of the Return as I had lived it: no elixir, no parade. Just a changed self that has learned to hold what it has become.
Homecoming hurts because, so far into transformation, home is no longer home.
In “Adaptation, Individuation, Collectivity,” Jung argues that individuation separates a person from the collective and carries a guilt that must be redeemed by giving back (The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings, pars. 1095–99). The boon the Return requires is payment, not promise. Delivering it acknowledges the debt to our beginnings and brings freedom from a home that no longer feels like home. The Return is not the end of the story. Instead, we find ourselves in an interlude, and leaving home again is a new threshold.
Stella Maris
MARIS’s name derives from Stella Maris, star of the sea: the light sailors steered by to find their way home (Davidson). A guiding star provides direction but not acceptance. Days after this is published, on November 10, MARIS will give a concert in her hometown of Missoula (“MARIS Announces”). I’m not sure what that Return will cost her. If it is anything like mine, Missoula won’t have changed; she will have. And the boon we give is the courage to stand, unswayed, in a world that never accepted us in the first place.
MythBlast authored by:
Jason D. Batt, Ph.D., is a technological philosopher, mythologist, futurist, artist, and writer specializing in mythologies of space exploration. He co-founded Deep Space Predictive Research Group, Project Lodestar, and the International Society of Mythology. He has authored three novels, edited four fiction anthologies, and his short fiction and scholarly work have appeared in numerous publications. Jason currently serves as Senior Editor for the forthcoming Journal of Mythological Studies, Co-Managing Editor of the Beyond Earth Institute Space Policy Review, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Space Philosophy.
This MythBlast was inspired by the Return stage of the hero's journey and The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
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Joseph Goldstein is one of the pioneering figures in bringing Buddhist meditation and insight practice to the West. A cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Barre, Massachusetts, Joseph has studied and practiced meditation since 1967 under the guidance of teachers from India, Burma, and Tibet. He has led insight meditation retreats around the world and is the author of numerous books, including Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, A Heart Full of Peace, One Dharma, Insight Meditation, and The Experience of Insight. He has also coauthored books with Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield. In this conversation, Joseph reflects on the unexpected beginnings of his own path - from his first encounters with Buddhism as a young Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand to years of intensive study and practice in Asia - and on what insight meditation can reveal about the nature of mind, suffering, and impermanence. He shares the Buddhist teaching that “things are always becoming otherwise,” and offers a striking way of understanding dukkha, or suffering, as “the inevitability of unwanted experience.” We also explore the life of the Buddha through Joseph Campbell’s understanding of the Hero’s Journey. Joseph reflects on the power of myth to “universalize the particular,” allowing the Buddha’s ancient story to become a map for our own lives. Together, we discuss renunciation, conditioning, the figure of Mara, and Campbell’s memorable description of the Buddha beneath the Bodhi tree: “And the mind of the Great Being was not moved.” The conversation ultimately turns toward the fruits of practice in everyday life: the difference between craving and wholesome aspiration, the importance of generosity, and the relationship between wisdom and compassion. Joseph shares one simple question that has become a guiding principle in his own life: “How can I help?” It is a conversation about awakening, myth, the stories and habits that shape us, and the possibility of meeting life with greater clarity, steadiness, compassion, and freedom.
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"Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether. You don’t ask what a dance means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what the world means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what you mean . . ."
-- Joseph Campbell
Myths to Live By, 102
