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If, as you say, our shared insights have helped you resolve some internal issues, I will add not one word. Except a word of thanks for this experience of engagement with friends.
The graveyard is also a “crisis point” in the New Testament. Mary of Magdala shows up, discovers the body of Christ is missing and two angels—not unlike Dickens’ three interlocutors heavy with helpful exposition—give her the explanation which will be repeated to the Apostles: “…go to my brethren and say to them, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God.’”
The empty tomb becomes the theological pivot point for a whole new soteriology. In Matthew (28:5-8) others are encouraged to come to the tomb and see for themselves. “Come, see the place where the Lord lay, and go quickly and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead…”
I do not know why our conversation has had a synchronicity with your own life, why you should simultaneously be engaged in my Reflections Upon a Hawaiian Graveyard and the passing of your own mother five decades ago, but your thoughts are so utterly and nakedly human as to bring you to the big questions about life’s purpose and death’s function. And in your speculations you remind me of Campbell himself, at once open to genuine transcendence, a universe in which nothing is lost, nothing is wasted and who, later on, will be dismissive of any sentimental notions that he will in some way survive death. On the one hand he will say, “Myth induces a realization that behind the surface phenomenology of the world, there is a transcendent mystery source. Through this vitalizing mystical function, the universe becomes a holy picture.”
A “transcendent mystery source?” It borders on the acknowledgement of a universe in which the sacred and profane are two sides of a shared coin. Both are real. Then he turns around and says he’s actually never had a mystical experience in his life. Remember that? Kind of shocking. It was in an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove: “I’m not a mystic, in that I don’t practice any austerities, an I’ve never had a mystical experience. So I’m not a mystic. I’m a scholar and that’s all I’m doing.”
Not a hint of regret. He reacted to the Abyss more with curiosity than terror.
I remember sitting across the table from my wife and asking what I thought was a rhetorical question: How come people don’t wake up every morning and just start tearing their hair out when they realize they are going to die? And she said, “Because we’re a reproductive species.” And then she asked if I wanted more mashed potatoes. It’s that kind of marriage.
We are a reproductive species. And we are very brave and have been notable for our bravery ever since we first turned to the graveyard as a way to respond to the inevitable and frame it in terms we find palatable.
Mary of Magdala went to the tomb and walked away with a whole new church in her clutch. Your brother will return from his visit to the grave of your mother and perhaps he, too, will have something new to contemplate and perhaps even to share.
Stephen recalled his experience of Memorial Day some years ago at Moana Park in Oahu. He wrote:
“I don’t mean to discount official Memorial Day military ceremonies, which I’ve attended before in my hometown – but I found this massive, collective participation ritual that combined joy, reflection, grief, and nature (releasing souls back into the abyss of sea and sky) particularly moving, joyful, and life-affirming. The focus wasn’t just on war dead (though they, too, were celebrated), but on family, and the embrace of this inevitability as part of the natural cycle.”
The subtext to every memorial and every memorial ritual across a multiplicity of cultures is always the same: Let us never forget.
The direct objects of that admonition spring to mind somewhat chronologically for me, admittedly with an American or Euro-centric bias: The Alamo, Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, the twin towers.
But the truth is forgetfulness is built into the human condition. We are a reproductive species and those memories which cannot hitch a ride in our genes are always in peril of being lost to time, vast, implacable, indifferent time. The system is stacked against remembering. One generation must constantly be reminded of what the previous generation held dear, even sacred. It is why we have the Seder and the Eucharist and the Hajj. It’s a dilemma that Campbell saw so clearly and described so well, in terms of religion but he might as well have been speaking about any epochal event in the stream of human history.
“You cannot export myth. Either through space or through time…. Here is a mythology that grew out of a social context that is so far away from what we have now that it is not servicing our psyches. It always has to be interpreted to us” (Hero, p.243).
With this in mind, I faced the usual dilemma of a music teacher on Memorial Day some twenty-five years ago. My high school students had no reaction to the patriotic music in our library. I judged them harshly for that. Okay, the Star Spangled Banner doesn’t get their blood pumping. How about a setting in five-part harmony? No? Nothing. What about She’s a grand old flag, she’s a high flying flag and forever in peace may she wave? America the Beautiful? Most of these students had no experience of war or military service and exhibited an indifference to the idea that freedom is bought and paid for by the sacrifice of others. I don’t blame them. They have only known freedom. It is like a fish being asked to get excited about water. A sensible wide-mouth bass might logically ask, “What’s water?” If water is all you know it remains unknowable.
Freedom and its absence must be, as Campbell saw clearly, interpreted. The farther downstream from Valley Forge—or Pearl Harbor—the more challenging the task. My Canoga Park High school choir and I ended up writing a song and I recall the lyrics quite well.
In your darkest hour, America, I’ll be right there with you
In your times of trouble, America, I will come through.
I seldom say it, how much I love you and in your darkest hour
I will be red, white and blue.
That was the chorus. It was written a couple of years before 9/11, which makes it somewhat prescient. Their verses had some charm and caught the essence of one generation’s indifference to the mindset of the past.
I can never find my flag on the fourth of July
Never had to stand at attention when the general walks by
When I sing the Star Spangled Banner, I never cry
but there’s something inside me that can’t be denied.
In your darkest hour… etc.
The past is continually lost but is, as Eliade pointed out, partly recoverable through ritual and liturgy. And, from my point of view, those who do not remember history are condemned to sing it.
Thanks for the reminder, James, that this is indeed memorial day weekend and would be pretty heedless of me to reflect upon my graveyard experience in Oahu without this context.
What is a cemetery if not a curated set of mnemonic triggers, as you called them, designed to summon to our waking sensibility those we have lost to the deep sleep of death? Where we lie, in the end, says a lot about us. Usually, it is the last piece of real estate that matters and there is usually an unhelpful platitude or two, like a caption, meant to capture the essence of the person. Faithful spouse. Loving father. Beloved grandpa. None of these are real triggers though. Or, if they are, they are powered by their own inadequacy. Every spouse falls short in some way, every father has his missteps. Well, let me bring this strange thought into the realm of your response.
I wrote for M*A*S*H (hey, how cool that one of credits has little stars between each letter) as a direct result of my father’s lessons in writing. He didn’t teach me a lot of life skills. He never showed me how to swing a bat or field a grounder. He did not give advice about guns like “aim high, then lower you sight.” We never played poker. I don’t think he knew how. And he never yelled from the sidelines, “Play through the pain.” But he did tell me that a story is told through its subplots. And he did tell me to “hide the exposition.” And he also told me that if I can’t hide the exposition, give it to a subordinate character.
I would like to visit Dad’s grave today but I’m in the last day of isolation from Covid (I promised myself not to mention that but two weeks confined to quarters is really getting to me…).
Dad’s epitaph reads: “Written By Joseph Bonaduce.”
I kid you not, James. I chose it. My family had no objections. I would have ordered a plate which read “Beloved Father,” but I think that does not quite say it. It is not the mnemonic trigger I want and need to conjure the man. There is an intended pun, though unarticulated because, you see, we television writers are either featured in the “opening” credits or the “final credits.”
Obviously, this was indeed Dad’s “final credit.”
Folks like Campbell and Jung can “go to their graves” content that, in Horace Mann’s words, they have contributed something of value: “Be ashamed to die,” he said, “until you have won some victory for humanity.” What a colossal burden for the rest of us to be ashamed to die until we have actually brought some great boon back from the journey. Campbell, who described such boon givers, qualifies as does Jung.
I guess that was not the only grave I visited that weekend. I went to the Pearl Harbor memorial. And, again, there is a relation between the intention of the memorial and its greater meaning. The men who lie forever entombed in the steel carcass of the Arizona call upon our deepest patriotic sensibilities but what a shame if that is where we stop. We are always ready to concretize the mystery in some half-way house of shared values like Patriotism, and, well, that’s good for memorial day weekend. No need to trip ourselves up unnecessarily with the bigger questions of war and peace. The correct optic is a fluttering flag, no bigger than a page from a paperback. A cub scout saluting. Only the meanest spirit would find fault.
But Campbell’s idea of a memorial, which he described eloquently in one of his late lectures, quite literally involves a pointing finger. Literally, a finger pointing to the sky as if to say, “Yes, that is where it came from. That is where the atom bomb fell on this sad town of Nagasaki.” The peace memorial was a place where, in Campbell’s estimation, recrimination had no place and where the aftermath of war is never reckoned in winners and losers but in the resolve that no power on earth should ever be used against another people.
Again, James. Thanks for the context. This is my way of observing Memorial Day from the isolation of quarantine.
Thank you, Stephen.
I turned to myth out of desperation. I once had a thriving little career going as a television writer. It was sort of a family business and my Dad, hugely successful back in the day, got me in the door, taught me a few things and turned me loose. I found it difficult work, well-paid but anonymous. The William Morris Office sent me out almost weekly to barter my ideas into lucrative contracts for episodic television. I could not understand how the other writers could come up with story elements so quickly and arrange them so effectively. I had no system, no paradigm, no off the shelf formats. Why was I the slowest kid on the block?
Campbell seemed to provide a solid answer back in the 80’s. Everybody in the industry was reading him or pretending to. I liked what he had to say about structure (the Hero’s Journey) and about character (available archetypes just itching to join your little narrative). At some point, my interest in story form was completely superseded by the subject of myth itself to which I have devoted several decades of research in pursuit of questions somewhat larger than “How will Aunt Bea react to Opie’s fishing rod theft?”
This is good, framing the question that way: Where have I encountered the collective hero. Well, we could start with the American people and I’m not saying that just to get you teary eyed. Seriously, the whole frenzied push across an entire continent and just taking over everything and pushing everybody else out as if they were so many Canaanites. Boy, those Canaanites must have been pretty terrible to deserve such utter desolation.
But yes, the same archetype of the collective hero cited so beautifully by Campbell seems to animate the western push of the American people who also had a certain sense of divine entitlement. One man’s Promised Land is another’s Manifest Destiny.
So if the colonization of free peoples ruins the scenario for you, let’s consider a different exodus, a different heroic journey. How about that marvelous eternal pull that drew people across the Atlantic to the New World. How can you beat that kind of adventure. A New World? Now there’s a story, and there’s a world class McGuffin. A new world drew the ancestors of present day United States in vast, sweeping waves of migrations.
My Great grandfather came to America in 1900 thereabouts and he did not like it. And he went back to Italy where he died. But his son, my grandfather, had the bug and he made his trip to the New World. He was on his solitary adventure. Picture Odysseus, only instead of Phaeacia, Philadelphia. Washed up on shore, naked, exhausted, and in need of kindess. That was my grandfather, Nonno. What made him so brave? How could a kid in Rosetto Italy get his teenage butt on a steamer and make it to America in time for his 18th birthday. He was so brave, so singular. And yet he was part of a phenomenon. A wave of young Italians risking everything to somehow end up in a “new world,” an Italian dream which must have some similarity to the Pure Land visualizations in Mahayana Buddhism. Something they experienced individually and yet as a collective, a collective unknown to itself. These young poor people, restless upon the face of the earth.
So I’m glad you brought this whole concept to our collective attention. And, as a bonus, I liked Campbell’s gloss on the correspondences between Adonis resurrection, Easter and Passover. His point being that there was a heroic equivalence between Adonis and Jesus as individuals, and the Jews as a people.
The popular heroes of my childhood, the very ones described by Brad in his reflection, were analytic blanks, devoid of the shadow elements we have come to expect in the modern anti-hero iterations. I think back to the fifties and sixties and wonder at my champions’ lack of psychological complexity. Mostly male, they seem to have no emotional pulse. They could lift entire planets but found it impossible to sit still and reflect. They could subdue evil but remained incapable of introspection. I cannot imagine the Lone Ranger sitting by the camp fire, and asking, “What’s it all about, Tonto?” Or Tonto musing, “In a way, Kemosabe, aren’t we all wearing masks?”
Superman, at least, was possessed of a longing for his lost Krypton, as, it is said, we are all longing for our lost village. My own sense of displacement as a recent migrant to California at age 11 made it easy to identify with the Man of Steel. I identified with his isolation. But DC comics also gave us the antidote to the lonely protagonist: in the Justice League of America, individuals came together as a team as opposed to the solitary I-Alone-Can-Fix-It sort of demigod. They gathered to promote the good as they understood the good. A noble concept.
I do not pretend to be an expert on the illustrated fiction of that era but thanks to DC the idea of a woman superhero was not beyond imagining–not just Wonder Woman, either. Supergirl was very important to many young readers. And Marvel’s response to DC’s Justice League brought us the invisible woman. (I know Stan Lee is sacrosanct these days but did he really have to make his single female paladin invisible. American society of the fifties had enough invisible women already.)
Importantly, the Fantastic Four also brought us the wounded healer archetype, each of its Fantastic Four members dealing with what amounts to a kind of super-disability. The Thing, especially, has the fate of Hephaestus, the hobbled god, imposed upon him and only through overcoming his resentment, does the former “Ben Grimm” ascend in Campbellian style to acceptance of the call. Like Achilles he sulks. He must be lured out of his tent.
The hero archetype is alive and evolving in the Marvel Universe. Can’t wait, as the teaser on the comic book’s back page used to say, “for our next exciting issue!”
First time I have responded here in Conversations, so I will try to be respectful of its norms, chief of which, I imagine, is an undefended heart.
Your Ariadne delivers really practical miracles. Can’t get more practical than a spool of thread which will show both the way in and the way out of the Cretan death trap. I understand your Ariadne as science personified as she guides the skilled hands of the surgeons toward your husband’s relentlessly hungry minotaur with an inerrancy bordering on the miraculous. Is it a problem with our society that we no longer turn to Ariadne with an open heart? I find that many people today are rejecting the Ariadnes. Entering into the labyrinth of a global virus (can you tell I’m tired of writing the word “pandemic?”), unburdened by experience, unburdened by the acquired knowledge of centuries, unburdened by Ariadne’s freely given gift.
