This month in the MythBlast Series, we’re exploring the relationship of blurred boundaries to heroism. Anyone who has ever been in psychotherapy is likely to be familiar with the no-nonsense injunction to have clear, defined boundaries, to prevent others from “invading” or ignoring your boundaries. The idea is that those solid, clearly defined boundaries are the key to a mentally healthy life. Indisputably, when it comes to emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, creating good boundaries are a necessary (but not solely sufficient) step in stopping abuse, as well as the prevention of further abuse. But I’d like to bracket serious pathological issues such as abuse, setting them aside for the moment, and instead explore boundaries from a less dire perspective. Encountering boundaries is an inescapable feature of being human, and we should remember that boundaries are not simply human creations. Geologic features create boundaries: mountains, seas, and forests have all at one time or another been regarded as boundaries. Time, space, mind, and body are organically connected to boundaries. The very existence of nations, states, and municipalities are predicated upon boundaries. Perhaps the most interesting are the boundaries between inner and outer, and those are the boundaries I want to work with in this essay. In her remarkable novel The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch wrote that “being a real person oneself is a matter of setting up limits and drawing lines and saying no. I don't want to be a nebulous bit of ectoplasm straying around in other people's lives.” Like Murdoch’s character, Bradley (one must appreciate the irony), we want to be able to imagine ourselves as single and singular individuals. We want to believe that if the limits are clear enough and the lines drawn are incisively and bold enough, we can prevent others, and even the world, from “straying around” in our own lives. We’d like to think that boundaries are mostly unambiguous, self-evident, and inevitable. And yes, they certainly contribute order and clarity to the living of life, but we can’t escape from the messiness, the straying around in, and the sordidness of life to enter into a discrete, ordered, well-bounded life with aspirations to an undisturbed hermetic existence—nor should we want to. I can’t help but wonder if we would benefit from less reliance on boundaries and let ourselves sink a bit more into the disarray and blurriness of life. Boundaries are ambiguous; what’s inside and what’s outside depends upon which side one’s perception lies. So, it follows that one culture’s hero is another’s terrorist, one’s treasure is another’s trash. Additionally, where there are boundaries there are defenses, and again, depending upon where one is positioned and the better those defenses work, the more easily they can become self-imposed prisons. For Joseph Campbell, the hero’s adventure was all about moving beyond boundaries, and the primary mise en scene for the hero’s adventure is found within one’s own inner world. It seems that the inner world, particularly the unconscious, simply demands blurring movements among, across, and around boundaries. This is perhaps why, in the mythless, unheroic age of contemporary life, Campbell emphasizes that the Hero’s journey is primarily an inner one, and the boon achieved is that of an expanded consciousness. In his introduction to The Hero’s Journey, Phil Cousineau put it this way: As a mythologist with a metaphysical slant on life, a doctor of things-beyond-appearances, [Campbell] dedicated his life to mapping out the experience of plumbing those depths, which is the journey of the soul itself. The cartography, as he drew it, was the geography of the inner or underworld, showing perilous territory to be traversed not by the faint, but by the stout of heart. If myths emerge, like dreams out of the psyche, he reasoned, they can also lead us back in. The way out is the way in. It is a movement beyond the known boundaries of faith and convention, the search for what matters, the path of destiny, the route of individuality, the road of original experience, a paradigm for the forging of consciousness itself: in short, the hero’s journey. (xxiv) William Blake insisted that there is the known and the unknown, and in between them, there are doors. I would suggest that myths are the doors between the known and the unknown, and serve to make such boundaries as the known and the unknown blurred and permeable. Myth is perpetually blurring boundaries, and I would argue that the singular quality of myth is its ability to do just that. Myth constantly smudges the edges of ourselves and the world, it blurs boundaries between the material and the immaterial, between gods and humans, between past, present, and future, between ethics and morals, and between emotion and catastrophe. Myth peregrinates through all these and more, leaving one to conclude that the body of myth is itself a unifying symbol. As C.G. Jung wrote, a unifying symbol is: […]running its course in the unconscious of modern man. Between the opposites there arises spontaneously a symbol of unity and wholeness, no matter whether it reaches consciousness or not. Should something extraordinary or impressive then occur in the outside world, be it a human personality, a thing, or an idea, the unconscious content can project itself upon it, thereby investing the projection carrier with numinous and mythical powers.(Civilization in Transition, Vol 10 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung) Myth, because it exists and functions between opposites, becomes an important point of entry, not just to imagination and the unconscious, but to the discovery of the capacity and potential of the human being. But mythology can assume this function only if we cease to understand myth as a relic, as a curiosity, a just so story, a religion, or any other clearly defined, bounded concept; to the contrary, it moves in and through and around life, disclosing that Will ‘O the Wisp quality of the vital spark, the élan vital. Mythology is not merely a museum-like repository of normative or once-orthodox narratives. Mythology is the final destination of singular thought and experience; the sublimely confounding creations that cannot be repeated, and which are diminished by attempts at replication. That’s why when we read myth, it matters little from where the myths come nor their historical context, we never fail to be moved by them. Thanks for reading,

In this MythBlast, I want to contrast the words of the dancer Isadora Duncan (as quoted by Joseph Campbell in The Ecstasy of Being) with my own thoughts on rhythm. Rhythm in art and in the art of life is essential. Rhythm imprints its patterns into our body, mind, and very souls. This incorporation builds strength and resilience in ways that our everyday cortex awareness is never able to fully grasp. And if it does detect these imprinted patterns, it rarely appreciates them. Rather, our left brain’s general default tendency is to judge, compare, and doubt their worth. When I was fifteen years old and I realized that there was no teacher in the world who could give me any help in my desire to be a dancer, because at that time the only school that existed was the ballet, I turned, as I had noticed all other artists except dancers do, to the study of nature. [109] On all levels, long and protracted arrhythmic conditions are life-destructive. Rhythm, in all its various manifestations, is one of the most healing forces on the planet. It’s why when we’re anxious, we’ll also often feel “off beat.” And almost everything that we say out of our mouths will come out at the inappropriate time, even if what we’re saying is valid. Put simply, we are “out of sync” with ourselves and our surroundings. So being in rhythm—in body, mind, and soul—conduces an alignment both within ourselves and our wider world. We feel centered and settled, at home in ourselves and in the world. Woman is not a thing apart and separate from all other life, organic and inorganic. She is but a link in a chain, and her movement must be one with the great movement which runs through the universe; and therefore the fountain-head for the art of the dance will be the study of the movements of Nature. (109) And when we center ourselves in nature’s rhythms, we’re afforded some immunity from the incessant, unsolicited noise and friction that presses upon us from the outside world. To be centered in these rhythms provides us with the space to rest more comfortably in our own true nature, without the threat of violation, and we can enjoy the bliss of our own harmonics. When we’re aware of the rhythms of the universe, we may also recognize that even awareness itself is a lemniscate of unbroken exchanges between our interior rhythms, and those of our outer lives, which contain invariable encounters and duties. We also better sense how life calls forth different experiences at different times. For example, certain flowers in a garden will bloom first, or the fruits of one tree will ripen before the fruits of another, and so we too will also meet people who are naturally late—or early—bloomers. We ought not to hurry beyond our natural pace, nor hurry the pace of the natural world, which has its own patterned rhythms. For the last four months, each day I have stood before this miracle of perfection (the Parthenon) wrought of human hands. I have seen around it sloping the Hills, in many forms, but in direct contrast to them the Parthenon, expressing their fundamental idea. Not in imitation of the outside forms of nature, but in understanding of nature’s great secret rules, rise the Doric columns. The first days as I stood there my body was as nothing and my soul was scattered; but gradually called by the great inner voice of the Temple, came back the parts of myself to worship it: first came my soul and looked upon the Doric columns, and then came my body and looked – but in both were silence and stillness, and I did not dare to move, for I realized that of all the movements my body had made none was worthy to be made before a Doric Temple. And as I stood thus I realized that I must find a dance whose effort was to be worthy of this Temple—or never dance again. Neither Satyr nor Nymph had entered here, neither Shadows nor Bacchantes. All that I had danced was forbidden in this Temple—neither love nor hate nor fear, nor joy nor sorrow—only a rhythmic cadence, those Doric columns—only in perfect harmony this glorious Temple, calm through all the ages. (110) There’s an encapsulation of the natural world within us, or as the ancient alchemists would put it, the elements of nature—earth, fire, water, air, ether—are naturally embedded within the fibers of our being. We can trust the rhythms of life with certainty, for we are the very rhythms of life. A microsystem of the rhythmic macro field. However, we usually only arrive at a state of soul equilibrium through a disharmonious passage... by the way of first living with all the struggles and lessons, which arise through discord. In this, we’re in a constant movement between balance and imbalance, relative composure and relative dissonance, and always within the alternating states of the psyche. We can only arrive at a comparatively unified level of consciousness through the ceaseless rhythm of integration and disintegration. When we can recognize this, it’s far easier to ride the patterns with insight and artistry and embrace their pulsating beauty. And then, through the employment of rhythm as an art, we’re invited to dance with both the visible, tangible world and the invisible, ethereal realms in an invocation. For many days no movement came to me. And then one day came the thought: These columns which seem so straight and still are not really straight, each one is curving gently from the base to the height, each one is in flowing movement, never resting, and the movement of each is in harmony with the others. And as I thought this my arms rose slowly toward the Temple and I leaned forward – and then I knew I had found my dance, and it was a Prayer. [111]

In the first essay of his collection The Ecstasy of Being, “The Jubilee of Content and Form,” Joseph Campbell writes that after fairy tales and folklore were shoved to the wayside in favor of “modern, scientifically-grounded disbelief” that “the great problem of the artist became that of coping significantly with the materials of the world of common day” (16). Campbell then highlights the job of the collective subconscious in giving mythological visions relationships to these contemporary materials: Mythology, in other words, is not an outmoded quaintness of the past, but a living complex of archetypal, dynamic images, native to, and eloquent of, some constant, fundamental stratum of the human psyche… While our educated, modern waking-consciousness has been going forward on the wings and wheels of progress, this recalcitrant, dream-creating, wish-creating under-consciousness has been holding to its primeval companions all the time, the demons and the gods. (18) Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven (now also an HBO Max series of the same name) shows the work of both load-bearing archetypes and industrious artists under extreme duress. The post-apocalyptic story centers on the bravest survivors of a devastating pandemic: The Traveling Symphony, a group of Shakespearean actors and classical musicians making their life on the road. Why Shakespeare? “People want what was best about the world,” an actor explains in the novel. (Station Eleven 38) In the series, a line echoes across various characters’ voiceover monologues, before and after the plague: I remember damage. Kirsten Raymonde is eight years old the night the pandemic reaches Toronto. The airborne, flu-like illness kills rapidly— within 24 hours—and indiscriminately. Kirsten is performing a bit part in a production of King Lear, which features a famous film actor in the titular role who drops dead on stage mid-madness. Twenty years after disease decimates the world’s population, we rejoin Kirsten. She’s with The Traveling Symphony, running lines from Lear with another actor, preparing for a performance. The Symphony moves through a dystopian landscape, stopping in the various settlements that pass for towns on and near Lake Michigan and completing a full tour of the area once a year. At a time when most survivors are attempting to send their roots deep into the rocky ground to claim some normalcy, the Symphony stops only for a night or two before moving their show to the next outpost. The roads are dangerous: the troupe navigates fire and bandits, landmines and cultists. While towns can be fortified, the Symphony’s horse-drawn caravans are a constant potential target. A line from the series captures the tension in an exchange between Kirsten and Katrina, an older woman settled fairly comfortably at what was once a country club, when the latter makes an awed comment about the Symphony’s apparent lack of fear. “We’re artists,” responds Kirsten. “We’re terrified.” It’s a great line, and to my added delight it’s in the episode called “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead.” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the Fools of Hamlet who offer goofball fodder but don’t survive Act V, make a similarly treacherous voyage to reach Elsinore Castle. Tom Stoppard shows us their trek in his absurdist play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966). Stoppard shifts full focus to the clowns and finds, amid the comedy, a font of surprisingly heady philosophical questions, most which are presented without any attempted answer, curiosities unto themselves. The two characters have many encounters but, like the Symphony, are only passing through. They only engage each other, two halves of the same ghost. Terror and treachery. So why do it, then? Why rush into danger? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are on a ship at the end of the play, themselves and the narrative now abandoned by Hamlet. They realize their voyage has become pointless, but do not yet know that the letter they’ve been tasked with delivering orders their own execution. The Fools reflect: GUILDENSTERN: We’ve traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.ROSENCRANTZ: Be happy—if you’re not even happy what’s so good about surviving? We’ll be alright. I suppose we just go on. (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Act III) The Symphony is also prepared for this question, and answers more pithily with a line from episode 122 of Star Trek: Voyager they’ve adopted as their official motto: “Because survival is insufficient.” Campbell writes, From the earliest times, the dancer has been the human symbol of life-indestructible. The Dionysos-dance of annihilation is at the same time the dance of the fire of creation: [...] It is a basic principle of aesthetics that art is produced not out of fear, or out of hope, but out of an experience transcending the two, holding the two in balance[…]. (The Ecstasy of Being, 5) Archetypally, The Fool is the soft wax tablet waiting for experience to be imprinted upon it. And to call someone a fool is to say they’re inexperienced at best, dangerously naive at worst. But what Campbell is pointing out in the quote above is quite the opposite: the Fool-ish artist has not only experienced damage, but remembers it, accesses it, and holds both hope and pain in permanent tension, a tightrope that requires constant balance and focus. The Fool knows that effective art comes from the presence of this tension, not the lack of it. The Fool may be hopeful, but they are not naive. The Fool may be terrified, but they are not paralyzed. The Fool remembers damage, knows to anticipate more, and still keeps moving forward.

To begin, I offer you two words: Atychiphobia. Kakorrhaphiophobia. Dive into them past the vague gloss of vowels and consonants as we are wont to do with unknown words; say them aloud, and you will find that they roll off the tongue rather resonantly. If words have umami, they’ve got it. And a certain onomatopoeia, too, as they are both words for the fear of failure, and induce a slight twang of fear about pronouncing them correctly. Atychiphobia springs from Ancient Greek tuche for luck, with that quiet negating prefix “a,” meaning, literally, fear of misfortune. Kakorrhaphiophobia emerges from the Greek kakos, meaning “evil or bad;” the same root as the word cacophony. Specifically, this fear is rooted in the fear of embarrassment and ridicule. It is not simply a worry about misfortune, but instead, a projection of the cacophony of scornful laughter that echoes when we have publicly failed, whether in our imagination or reality. Some etymological thought connects atychiphobia with an Old French word for scorn that means to literally “break off someone’s horns.” This is the fear of being made smaller and powerless, of being laughed at, and ultimately being seen as a fool. For people who are stricken with an extreme form of these phobias, they can become crippling barriers to almost any action. Few of us are completely immune, even if not haunted by clinical levels of phobia. Feeling foolish is a particularly powerful invitation to shame, and can too often keep us from exploring, daring, or creating. The archetypal hero seems to be the antithesis of this fear, and this foolishness, at least at first glance. To be heroic is, most often, imagined to be confident, and competent, and conquering. However, in the manner of archetypes that contain their opposites, even mythic heroes struggle with whether they want to be heroic. One of the steps Joseph Campbell articulates in the hero’s journey is a refusal of the call to adventure. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell suggests that what might keep a potential hero from answering the call to his or her journey are the tendrils of an ordinary life, entwining with a stasis that dulls the sound of the call. He writes: Often in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered for it is possible to turn the ear to other interests. Walled in boredom, hard work, or “culture,” the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. While boredom, or hard work, or culture might be convenient excuses to turn away from adventure, I believe that they are actually camouflage for something deeper: fear of failure. Atychiphobia. Kakorrhaphiophobia. How often do we turn away from a true desire because we convince ourselves that we have something more important to do? Even though that “something important” is ultimately small and prosaic? “I can’t turn to write the article I’m enticed by because I need to clean my oven.” (As an aside, I bought oven cleaner today.) That is the responsible choice: work before pleasure. Commitments before audacity. Even though we are ultimately dulled by that choice, we can relax into feeling virtuous, and silence our desires. But, if we tug apart the instinct for the seemingly principled, unselfish choice a bit further, what lies underneath it is fear. Fear that we will not succeed. And that we will be a fool to even try, and the world will laugh at us as we fall on our face. So we clean our ovens, refusing the call to be something grander than ourselves, and lose our opportunity to bring gifts and insights back to our communities. While few of us are likely to strap on swords and quest after a mythic challenge, one of the most literal calls to action we can feel is the urge to create. As we struggle with the journey of making—be it a dance, a piece of writing, a business—we brush up against the metaphors of the hero’s journey. To answer the call of the imagination, we must find the courage to push past the fear of ridicule. Several years ago, rather awestruck as a former modern dancer, I interviewed choreographer Twyla Tharp for a radio show I hosted. We talked about what makes good art, and specifically, good dance. She was passionate that modern dance should be about courage and audacity, echoing painter Henri Matisse’s aphorism, “creativity takes courage.” She continued: “Modern dancers should be doing things no one else is doing, and it should come from the gut. Desire is the first thing a modern dancer should have. Skill can be developed. But if you don't have desire as a modern dancer, forget it.'' In The Ecstasy of Being, as he is critiquing modern dance that fails at its goals of transcendence, of the expression of “life-power, life-courage, and the ecstasy of being,”  by becoming overly intellectualized, Campbell asks irascibly, “who can but wonder why our dancer has to be letting the insipidities of her unimpressive brain come between the fountain source of her genius and the marvel of that all-expressive body on which she has been laboring the better part of her life?” I think, in that connection between the intuition of the body and creativity, both Tharp and Campbell begin to articulate how we might find that audacity. What breaks open when we answer the call to create, leaving rationality behind, and instead follow our guts into that call when we are making? Rather than heroically defying our fear of scorn, we instead embrace it? While the cool Apollonian discipline of technique and structure underpin creativity, art begins to articulate, as Campbell says, the “ecstasy of being” only when it opens up into the irrational. When it celebrates, like Erasmus, the delights of folly. Our metaphoric heroism becomes Dionysian at that moment, sensory and uninhibited, and genuinely fearless. The fool in his fullest form has no fear of laughter, but instead evokes and invites it. In that moment we can, as Robert Johnson says in Ecstasy: Understanding the Psychology of Joy, we are ex stasis—standing outside oneself: “If I say, ‘I am ecstatic! I am simply beside myself!’ I mean that I am filled with an emotion too powerful for my body to contain or my rational mind to understand. I am transported to another realm in which I am able to experience ecstasy.” (25) For me, this is one of the most tangible ways that we might enter into the mythic power of the archetypal hero: by entering into the metaphor of a foolish hero as we create, savoring all that evokes; that is truly answering the call. And if we’re very lucky, it might just grant the boon of ecstasy for those who meet what we create.

The Joseph Campbell Foundation MythBlast Series has spent March musing about The Adventure and reading Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss which, let’s face it, sounds exciting: filled with presentiment, and descriptive of that happy flow state you can taste when deeper truths appear out of nowhere as you race through town hitting nothing but green lights. It harks to that experience of being in the slot, surfing the curl, on the glidepath with the gods helping to taxi you in. “Woohoo, I’m on The Adventure now!” you hum to yourself as the world brightens and the qi flow turns the dull miasmic stone soup of every-day-life into an iridescent thrill ride. Well, for a while, anyway. You know what I mean. Everything is going great and then you get interrupted by some seemingly petty piece of daily life. It jumps into your lane and suddenly you’re hitting nothing but red lights. It chokes off the oxygen. The world turns from a wonderland into a dull blizzard of busywork and endless lists. Irritability flips a switch and turns all that sparkle back into shades of tedious, deathly gray. Now, we all know that these periods of normal (mundane, pedestrian, dreary, tedious, dull, routine, commonplace, prosaic, uninspired) life happen all the time, but knowing this intellectually doesn’t help. Boredom puts out your fires and all you can do is gather kindling, pile it up and, with whatever hope you have left, smack flint and steel together and pray something catches. “Spiritual dryness happens” should be the flipside of every “Follow your bliss” bumper sticker. Right. But if real life intrudes on the adventure, sometimes adventure intrudes on real life. So for my MythBlast this month I was trying to piece together something on The Adventure and Pathways to Bliss and how the adventure requires bliss or how bliss is the endpoint of the adventure and what all of this has to do with Aristotle’s observation that wonder provides access to the architecture of the universe… but seriously, I just wasn’t feeling it. We’re years into covid, we hear the inexorable drumbeat of wars and rumors of wars, our politics has become exhaustingly tribal and, more immediately, I'm in the tumbling and disorienting process of moving in with my amazing significant other. Moving should be a time of excitement, a pathway to bliss all on its own, and metaphorically rich— “you’re in motion!” —but I'm pooped.  Moving is boring and relentless and repetitive.  Moving requires cleaning up the place you’ve left and preparing the place you're headed. Painting, countertops, plumbing, all sorts of stuff. I don't want a metaphorically rich experience, dammit. I just want it to be done. At times like this, life can feel so mundane that you wonder whether you’re on an adventure at all—or whether you’ve ever been on an adventure. If you’re like me, this is when you start whining: “What about my damned adventure?  Why do I have to do all of this boring stuff?  And where did all of this junk come from?  And why does the end of the packing tape keep disappearing into the roll??” With Charlie Brown I howl, Aaugh! I was bored with the remorseless persistence of all the trivial, annoying, but mission-critical details that had to be taken care of—and, right on cue, the final straw arrived when my significant other noticed that the floors in the new place were a mess and that maybe we should pick out new ones. Great, I thought, one more thing to add to the endless list. But with that breathtakingly mundane observation the adventure, as it tends to, intruded on my real life. It's embarrassing to say this, but it must have taken two weeks before I realized that we were picking out new floors for our relationship. I’ll repeat that: A new relationship needs new flooring. I hate it when it’s this obvious. The observation was metaphorically rich in ways that could not be ignored and, boom—all the fires roared back to life. Suddenly I found meaning again, a new pathway to bliss, and all it took was to notice the myth, the metaphor, hiding in plain sight—in the literal sense of picking out new floors. Suddenly the flooring was no longer something in a List of Sisyphus; it became symbolic: transparent to transcendence, in Campbell’s language. Picking out new flooring became more than flooring. It became an acknowledgement that our new lives needed a new foundation and, just as suddenly, picking out a new garbage can became a search for the Holy Grail. That's what I mean about the adventure intruding to remind you that, as dreary as the world can be, meaningful adventures and pathways to bliss still lurk around every corner—and under every floorboard. Thanks for musing along!

In 1968, singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson tried to make a phone call and heard a sound familiar to anyone that remembers the age before cell phones. Beep, beep, beep, beep. The sound not only informed the caller that the party they were trying to reach was currently engaged with someone else, but it also announced with incessant alarm that your attempt to connect with another soul was rejected and hopeless in that moment. For the time being, you would remain alone. As Nilsson sat listening to the rhythmic reminder, he thought about the isolation the moment created. He considered the loneliness of the experience. He kept listening and eventually imagined the tones as the opening of a song. He would later scratch down lyrics to accompany the experience describing how the number one was the loneliest number. Less than a year later, the band Three Dog Night would make famous Nilsson’s song about the experiences we have when we are alone. Of course, some experiences are best had by ourselves, and some adventures can only be undertaken alone. Since Joseph Campbell introduced his ideas about the Hero’s Adventure in 1949, untold scores of people around the world have found a framework for understanding the challenging journeys so present throughout literature and history, and their own journeys as well. The journey that Campbell described was that of an individual. Though the journey involved the participation of helpers, mentors, and others, the journey itself was a solitary one. Campbell tells us that “Myths derive from the visions of people who have searched their own most inward world. Out of the myths, cultural forms are founded.” (Pathways to Bliss, 24) Campbell goes on to say: For myths, like dreams, arise out of the imagination. Now, there are two orders of dream. There is the simple, personal dream where you get tangled up in your own twists and resistances to your life, the conflict between wish and prohibition, the stuff of Freudian analysis, and so forth…But then there is another level of dream, which we call vision, where one has gone past one’s personal horizon and confronted the great universal problems, the problems that are also those rendered in the great myths. (25-25) We might then say that while our personal journey is undertaken alone, there is a larger, parallel journey undertaken by society. Campbell’s ideas about the journeys of the individual have transcended almost every human boundary and transformed the lives of thousands, if not millions. As our world has continued to get more complicated since Campbell’s death in 1987, cultural conversations have not only expanded how the individual’s journey is understood, but also progressed to include a conversation about our collective journey together—a journey that expands beyond humanity to the ecological and all living entities on the planet. Could Campbell’s ideas about the journey of the hero also be framed for the benefit of our collective evolution? To be clear, the collective heroic will never subvert the importance of the journey of the hero, the heroine, or anyone that does not embrace those binary labels. In a sense, this collective journey has been with us since the beginning. The individual journey is always, in fact, contained within the collective journey. We see the collective journey depicted in the ancient myths and right up through Dorothy and her companions on the yellow brick road. Of all the superhero stories that Marvel has told in the past 25 years, the largest box office draw was when they sent all the heroes on a journey together in Avengers: Endgame. There seems to be a recognition of the importance of undertaking the adventure together. Bob Walter, President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, has been sharing ideas about this journey of the collective heroic, which he terms the heroic ensemble, for decades. The need to embrace the shared journey we travel together has only continued (and will continue) to grow. Many realities about life that once would have been deemed alien to us are now part of our ordinary world, which is the first stage that Campbell describes in the heroic adventure. While we see mass disagreement about how a good or bad story is defined in this ordinary world, few would argue that there is likely a better story out there for us. There seems to be a universal dissatisfaction with our ordinary world—the type of dissatisfaction that inexorably pushes individuals and cultures toward the next stage that Campbell described, the call to adventure. While we might struggle to articulate it and argue about the language that should be used around it, our collective society is sensing something like a call—a call to adventure. The great universal problems that Campbell spoke of are still very much with us, and they only seem to be becoming more complex and intense. The dark reality of these problems creates a call that echoes in each of us. That eternal, unending beep that inspired Harry Nilsson years ago was the signal of a refused call. But a new urgent siren is sounding. It is the call to collective adventure for our heroic ensemble. May we answer it with courage—together.

Myths do not ground, they open. (James Hillman) In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Campbell revealed the myth of the hero's transformation and invited us to locate our lives in this myth. When you enter the metaphor of the hero's adventure, you discover new possibilities and meaning. Stories have the power to transform a wide range of life situations. Your response to a story can provide insight into the story, your culture, and yourself. Are we willing to be transformed by our myths? The fairytale "The Frog King" can be an experiment. Like Campbell, we'll approach this story as a hero's adventure. Here's the story in brief: A beautiful young princess has a prized possession, a golden ball. She often sits by a deep spring in the woods, where she tosses the ball up into the air and catches it. One day the ball falls into the spring and is lost. She begins to weep. A frog comes up from the spring and asks about her troubles. He proposes to retrieve her golden ball if she will let him be her companion. "Let me eat from your plate, sip from your cup, and sleep on your pillow," he says. The princess can't imagine any such thing and yet she outwardly agrees to this bargain. She wants her ball. The frog dives down and brings up the golden ball. The princess takes it and runs back to the palace, leaving the frog behind. The following evening at suppertime, the frog appears on the doorstep. He insists that the princess keep her promise. Now the king learns of the agreement and takes the side of the frog. She is compelled to follow through. Barely concealing her disgust, the princess lifts the frog to her plate on the table. She finds this revolting enough, but when they are alone in her room the frog presses her further. "Put me in your bed," he says, and threatens to call upon the king if she refuses. Pushed to her limit, the princess angrily throws the frog against the wall. Splat. A handsome prince emerges from the wreckage. Marriage follows. The happy couple return to the prince's kingdom, which brings great joy to his loyal coachman. Who is the hero? Maybe the frog is the hero. The story's title steers us in this direction, and the princess seems like a brat: self-absorbed, ill-tempered, and deceitful. She obeys her father but her compliance is superficial. Worst of all, she tries to murder the frog in a fit of violent anger. She is not nice. And some of us actually like frogs. At first blush, the frog is more likable and possesses more heroic potential. He's helpful and fulfills his end of the deal in good faith. His appeal to the king's authority may be a bit slimy, yet what other options did the poor guy have, given her refusal to behave as agreed? Granted, the princess was especially vulnerable when he found her weeping. She was desperate. His dive down to the bottom of the spring didn't cost him much, but what might their bargain cost her? Flipping over the lily pads, so to speak, makes the initial character assessment a bit more complex. Maybe the frog was a bit of a creep. But does a hero have to be likable? And is this view of the princess or the frog definitive? It's easy to spin this story to cast aspersions on the princess or question the integrity of the frog. The characters are simple. They don't even have names, for example, and very little inner life. The relative lack of emotion and descriptive details allows us to provide them. What we attribute to the characters and their actions reveals our biases and fantasies. We can see ourselves. Much of this is unconscious. Some of the spinning is intentional. The simple scaffold of a fairy tale leaves it open to manipulation. The history of this form reveals the propensity to tweak these stories in service to a particular worldview. In the case of "The Frog King," the violent splat in the story may have come as a surprise to you. In the more recent, popular version of this fairy tale, the princess transforms the frog with a kiss. Love is powerful, but is it a woman's sole power in the world? And does the kiss distort the story's structure? The princess may have had a spiritual awakening. Compassion is frequently the result of such a transformation. Does the action in the story support this conclusion? Is the kiss part of the story's logic or symbolic of a collective preference for peaceful women? What is the significance of your preference? Where is the transformation in this story? The frog undergoes a dramatic metamorphosis. What about the princess? The most common interpretation is "she got married." Campbell takes this approach in Pathways to Bliss. (124-126) Marriage in the outer world is often transformative. Here, marriage is between two aspects of the psyche. In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell employs the Jungian terms animus and anima, the inner masculine and feminine, to describe this event. The inner marriage of feminine and masculine is essential to Jungian individuation. In this story, Campbell explains, it's part of growing up. "Marriage" is a common metaphor for the union of opposites. I also read this story as a description of internal psychic process, but I have a difficult time separating "marriage" from the cultural ideas that have defined it—the belief that a woman needs a man and marriage to fulfill her destiny, for example. As for the transformation, I think it's the splat. The splat. The moment that the princess acts in spontaneous accord with her nature, as Campbell would say. That moment of power. The splat reveals the true nature of the frog and the princess, two interlocked aspects of her psyche. The girl that refuses to act with decisive, even violent authority slides down the wall with him and there's no taking it back. The subsequent marriage would be confirmation of a lasting transformation. This brings us to the final stage of the hero's adventure, the return. At the end of this story, the newlyweds are on their way back to the prince's kingdom. The coachman's joy swells his heart and breaks the iron bands that bound it. The marriage will be important to the renewed life of the community, as well as the individual. But what will come next? We are left with the task of imagining the particular shape of the "happily ever after" that belongs to this story. What might this kingdom need? Many of us long for a renewal of the kingdom these days. We feel limited by the dominant stories and yet, we unconsciously perpetuate them when we turn to myth for validation of our existing beliefs, and overlook their power to unsettle and open us. The co-evolution of myth, culture, and human needs is always and already underway, and we are all participants. The golden ball has fallen into the spring. How will you respond?

Heroism and Adventure, the theme of this month’s MythBlast Series essays, seem to me to be a linked pair. Reflexively, I think, we imagine adventure as a going out, an extension into the world, a leaving of the known, familiar world of domestic routines for the unknown, unpredictable, unmanageable world. This, doubtless, constitutes the often invasive bearing of the hero. But the word adventure has its roots in the Latin word advenire, which means to arrive, to come to, a perspective that can be understood to be a bit more aligned with those who experience the arrival of the hero and the effects of the hero’s exploits upon them and their communities. One of my most beloved books is a first edition copy of The King Who Saved Himself From Being Saved. It’s a poem written by John Ciardi that was first published in the November 14, 1964 edition of The Saturday Review, and published as a book in 1965, charmingly illustrated by the marvelous Edward Gorey. To get a sense of this satiric poem’s chiding of heroism, let me quote from the inside of the book jacket: The King was dozing and thinking about his money. The Queen was pampering a cold with aspirin pies. The Princess was safely in her tower listening to a lark. The Giant, a gentle creature, being at the moment unoccupied, was sprawling beside the brook smelling a flower. The castle, the Royal Family, and the Kingdom were at peace. And then the Hero arrived, sheathed in armor, breathing flame, looking for a villain and a castle to save. He scared the lark. He woke the King. The Princess cried and the Giant hid in the closet. But the Hero went on stamping around and making heroic noises. The Hero, who in this case mistook a noble calling for a mere career, was making a general nuisance of himself and creating big problems in a place where before his arrival, there were none. “All over his head was his helmet,” Ciardi writes, “and in his head was, of course, a fight.” The King warned the Hero that he should move on, that he doesn’t want his Kingdom “saved in two,” and gave him to the count of ten to leave or be subjected to the business end of a cannon the King deployed to emphasize his seriousness. The Hero persisted, the cannoneer fired, and the King remarked, “Well, I tried to tell him. But I guess Heroes are hard to tell.” Ciardi writes, “The Kingdom was saved from being saved. The Giant was saved from a fight. The King was afraid that he had behaved in ways not entirely right.” Reflecting on the Hero’s demise the King went on to say, “As Heroes go he was brave enough, but I’m not sure he was bright.” Moving out of one’s familiar sphere of existence and into situations, people, and environs with which one is not familiar, while at the same time stubbornly clinging to familiar values, mores, and dogmatisms, almost always results in catastrophic misadventures, as Ciardi’s intrepid, yet fatuous, Hero demonstrated. In myths, however, the movement from the known into the unknown is what Joseph Campbell called “crossing the threshold. This is the crossing from the conscious into the unconscious world, but the unconscious world is represented in many, many, many different images, depending on the cultural surroundings of the mythos.” This threshold crossing is, Campbell goes on to say, “simply a journey beyond the pairs of opposites, where you go beyond good and evil.” (Pathways To Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 114-115) We are commonly given to the understanding that space is wide and time is deep. We too often associate adventure and the heroic with space—it happens here, across these territories, at those places, etc. So where are we going when we go “beyond good and evil?” We are going, I think, to a place that feels entirely foreign to us, beyond distinctions between space and time, a place beyond individual will, where conceptual faculties like logic, reason, and differentiation are rendered powerless and we, perforce, achieve awareness of the fact we are an aspect, an artifact, of the dynamism of life. It's not simply going beyond good and evil, beyond concepts. It is nothing less than, as Fredrich Nietzsche said, a revaluation of all values. “Crossing the threshold” means the achievement of a psychophysical awareness in which one experiences a transcendent overfullness. I imagine that the sensation is akin to William Blake’s sublime vision: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And Heaven in a Wild Flower/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an hour.” Crossing the threshold means using one’s imagination as a vessel to explore the universe without and within. I’m reminded of the pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides, who insisted that that which is not cannot be thought about. Conversely, anything that can exist and be thought about must exist. In other words, if something can be thought about, it actually does exist. The ungenerous reader may call this nonsense, but I would prefer to call this an example of mythic thinking, mythopoesis even, which expands and opens the universe rather than diminishes it. Isn’t the capacity to abstractly imagine a universe beyond concepts and oppositions—beyond good and evil—enough to encourage us to at least try to rethink, redefine, and reconsider what it is to be a self, what nature is, and who others are in the field of experience? Of course, the Sufi poet Rumi got there a long time ago and, I think, got it exactly right when he said (as translated by Coleman Barks): Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense. Isn’t the real adventure to attempt to be so present, so attuned to life, as to experience the overwhelming fullness of the world, the self, the world-self even, with all dogmas, illusions, and oppositions dropping away? In this way, the heroic adventure is always at hand. Anytime is the right time for threshold crossing if you simply say yes to the conditions of life and to imagination, making the effort to affirm things just as they are in each of the moments you happen to occupy. Thanks for reading,

Jean Marion Erdman (Feb. 20, 1916 – May 4, 2020) was a dancer and avant-garde theatrical artist who was married to Joseph Campbell for 49 years until his death in 1987. In celebration of Erdman’s birthday, we can examine the unfolding and fulfillment of her artistic career. Throughout her life, Erdman accessed the collective unconscious and manifested its attitudes, memories, and impulses into stunning new images for the 20th century stage. Her most complex and memorable work was Coach of the Six Insides (1962), an interpretation of James Joyce’s literary masterpiece, Finnegans Wake. While Campbell, with Henry Morton Robinson, opened the treasures of Finnegans Wake for readers with A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Erdman daringly translated it into a production of total theatre. She returned art to art through a presentation of dramatic action, dance, mime, and multi-layers of Joycean meaning illuminated by the capacities of myth. The main character, danced by Erdman, was Anna Livia Plurabelle. The character transmuted into many forms, most commonly Ireland’s River Liffey, which represented the female psyche and archetypal woman, and we can compare Erdman’s life to this river. The Genesis of Jean Erdman began in the Garden of Eden on the Island of Oahu, Territory of Hawaii. She was a fifth generation islander. Erdman had a charming personality and retained the distinct family values of humility, honesty, and full commitment to ethical ideals. A sense of adventure was surely in Erdman’s blood, and her passion for the theatrical arts began with her family. A natural spring was significant to Hawaiian mythology and Honolulu’s Punahou School, which Erdman attended as a child. At the school, Erdman received dance instruction in the free and natural modern style of Isadora Duncan. Erdman also studied American tap and centuries-old Japanese odori. At ten, she witnessed a performance of the great classical Chinese dan actor Mei Lan Fang. Jean stated, “I know that experience actually shaped my creative imagination.”(Jean Erdman Papers, New York Public Library, 5:6) Erdman learned ancient sacred hula, its rituals, and chanted poetic texts (mele). She attended to the prohibitions (kapu) delineated for performers because, it is believed, performers may be possessed by Pele, god spirit and hula patroness. Erdman had association with one of Hawaii’s most noted authorities of ancestral knowledge (kapuna), Mary Kawena Pūku’i. At age 18, Erdman and Pūku’i made two sound recordings of ancient mele of the ‘āla’apapa domain, thereby preserving repertoire of the Kamehameha dynasty. (Stillman, A. K.  Sacred Hula: The Historical Hula ‘Āla’apapa, 63, 70) From the Punahou bubbling spring, Erdman carried her wisdom and dance expressions to foreign realms. She “took herself” to a New England prep school, where she encountered a puritanical attitude toward the hula. Upon graduation in 1934, Erdman sought the open-minded and welcoming climate of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. Erdman “followed her bliss” by studying theatre, dance, religions, and aesthetics. She also encountered mighty forces that further molded the “river course” of her curiosities. Young Erdman was receptive to advice offered by respected authorities, especially tutor and professor Joseph Campbell and dance pioneer Martha Graham. Erdman flowed through life in a way that mimicked the Liffey traveling between the guardian Wicklow Mountains. Erdman left college to tour the world with her parents in 1937-38. At each port, Erdman beheld the authentic dances, which made an indelible impression upon the young artist’s sensibilities. Erdman’s time away from New York proved difficult for Campbell. The lovely Jean charmed him in a way he had not expected. The arrangement of the two lives was soon to be intertwined in a plan that only the universe could contrive. Upon her return she married Joseph Campbell, on May 5, 1938. She subsequently edited drafts of his work, and he would often carry her suitcases on performance tours. She was soon dancing professionally with Graham’s group. Graham cast Erdman in roles that utilized Erdman’s unique vocal, acting, and dancing abilities, which were necessary for parts in Every Soul is a Circus (1939) and the 1941 masterpiece Letter to the World. During summers, Erdman studied with modern dance pioneers at the Bennington College School of the Dance in Vermont. There she experienced the strengths and contradictions of various dance training methods. Although Graham strictly stressed contraction and release of the muscles, Erdman also appreciated Hanya Holm’s focus on inner motivation and Doris Humphrey’s “fall and rise” sequences. This was a period of discernment. Instead of a technique invented to honor a personality, Erdman desired to select movements that corresponded to choreographic intent and stirred the senses of the viewer. During the late 1940s, Erdman joined the New Dance Group, a collective dedicated to social justice. Ultimately, Erdman broke away from both Graham and the New Dance Group with a commitment to create her own work. Erdman’s calling seemed to embrace the prophetic words of poet William Blake: “I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” (Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion) The River Liffey is iconic to Dublin and likewise Erdman was central to the development of the American modern dance movement. Beginning with her earliest dances, the “River Erdman” carried travelers into streams of pervasive primordial connections, inspirations, and explorations of feminine principles presented with contemporary aesthetic sensibilities, as shown in The Transformations of Medusa (1942), Daughters of the Lonesome Isle (1945), Passage (1946), Hamadryad (1948), and Changing Woman (1954). Solstice (1950) incorporated masks, marking a step toward a total theatre concept. With correspondences to Campbell’s work, Erdman frequently highlighted aspects of the monomythic cycle. She continued to integrate dance and theatre with Pierrot the Moon (1954), using mime and props. Both Twenty Poems of e.e. cummings (1950) and Fearful Symmetry (1957) utilized voice. In early 1955, Erdman toured as a soloist to Japan and India. Audiences deeply appreciated and understood her art; they were enamored with her. Her artistic diplomacy paved the way for other American artists to follow. Erdman was drawn to the transcendent in dance and life. While in the East, she was spiritually stirred to the extent that Joe suggested to his wife: “We should take a kind of Vow of Bodhisattvahood, which will compel us to live in a world of radiance…” (Larsen, S. and R. A Fire in the Mind, 392) Late in the 1950’s, Erdman conducted tours across the U.S. while maintaining a school in New York City. Her dream-like dances reflected the influences of places and friends throughout the years, from the Swiss Eranos conferences, caves of France, and Native American pueblos to theories of Carl Jung, experimental filmmaking of Maya Deren, and Zen masters Daisetz Suzuki and Alan Watts. The “River Erdman” swirled these philosophies within the intricacies of her mind. Using the entire range of human movement possibilities, she aimed her work to an aesthetic end. With her life and work, Erdman demonstrated a proto-feminist stance, showing us a new mythology for the modern times. Erdman remained a dramatic artist of exquisite beauty and brilliant virtuosity throughout the 1960s. Receiving critical acclaim, Coach of the Six Insides twice toured the major cities of the world. Subsequently, she and Campbell founded the experimental Theatre of the Open Eye, encouraging others to be creative. Through the remaining years, Erdman continued to produce shows, including reconstructions of earlier dances. Upon the passing of her husband, Erdman served as founding president of the Joseph Campbell Foundation. With a Joycean twist in the final stages of her life, the fluid and feminine “River Erdman” made its final course to the sea, circulating back to her homeland, where she lived out her days near the source of the Punahou spring.

In a crisis our life often feels out of control, as if we have lost our quintessentially human dignity of character. But how can we retain our dignity while also building the courage to move forward without first experiencing oblivion? We all blunder into the Grail Castle, exactly as Parzival did, before we can even hope to formulate and ask the question that ends the exile. Along the way we travel through realms of wilderness, and it’s this very experience that allows us to develop an active interest in the soul lives of other people. “For Parzival it is to be an ordeal of five lonely years, as he searches through the forests,” Joseph Campbell writes in Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth. For, like the fairy hills of Ireland, the lake with its two fishermen and the castle of sorrowful knights and ladies lie hidden, though everywhere there is a haunting sense of their presence. This is the Forest Adventurous, where we meet our adventures when we are ready for them. The forest brings forth our own world, and here, in this attitude of hatred, rejection, ego, and pride, Parzival rides. And something becomes ready in him during this time. (58) In the forest thickets of our lives, a harrowing introspection of our psyche’s distress is required. All our apparently immutable, enduring reference points vanish or are rendered totally inadequate. “The world’s become a desert through him [Parzival], and he himself has become a desert in quest of regeneration,” Campbell states. [58] This wasteland is stark and extreme so as to strip us of any sense of false identity and ego inflation. Only when the dark gets seemingly impregnable, and the familiar known and safely habitual are sacrificed, may we navigate the new terrain of soul ... even though its realms and rules are foreign to us. There’s no guide, no instruction manual, and we feel as naïve and pure a fool as young Parzival did. In this we must teach ourselves, or we are not taught at all. Essentially, it’s a heuristic path of initiation. It’s common in this experience to feel abandoned, especially if we believe that our primary caregivers did not place us on the “‘right”’ path in our formative years. While orphaned in the forest, however, we’re never actually alone. Something... a hidden, inner presence, as it were, walks with us. We sense its protectorship, promptings, and guidance. Campbell reminds us that “there is a Buddhist saying: This world with all its ills, with all its horrors, with all its stupidities, with all its darkness, is the golden lotus world.’ This is the golden lotus world, right now as it is. And if you cannot see it as such, it is not the world’s fault. What must be corrected is not the world, but your own perspective. And so we find in the Grail legend that everything needed is all there, only it is not being seen. And what the hero is to do is to clarify the situation. (154) The wandering of our soul in its quest for clarity and authenticity seems endless and without resolution. Grasping at our lost yesterdays, we recognize some paths that we’ve walked are now closed to us. But we haven’t necessarily missed our destined path. It’s crucial to relinquish the thought that if we didn’t make a correct decision in the past, that it’s all over now. Nothing is ever lost. While we might not be able to undo the past, we can bring greater experience and awareness to our present choices. The fruits of this journey are earned through effort. They are not freely given. And in the silent shelter of our deeper soul, we accept this. It’s why it’s essential to first develop knowledge of ourselves and of the world around us, before we can expand beyond the force of social opinion and return to the instinctive and intuitive self. It’s in this liminal space where we come to realize that there’s always more to be revealed, and the potentiality for a new soul disposition and direction can emerge, and moreover, awaken in us the Bodhisattva realization of compassion for all suffering beings. His [Parzival’s] nature prompted him many times to ask the question, but he thought of his knightly honor. He thought of his reputation instead of his true nature. The social ideal interfered with his nature, and the result is desolation. The bald woman says, "You are a curse on the face of the earth, and you have cursed the earth; it has lost its fertility and the whole world is desolate; the castle has disappeared, and you will not find it again!" He says, "I will repair this." But she says, "You can’t. No one can ever visit the castle a second time." (53) But he does. Parzival teaches us that what appears as a misstep, may actually be the very necessary step of destiny. Everything can be redeemed. Every new moment offers the possibility of a new beginning. Previously we didn’t have the soul maturity and consequent awareness to make different choices in the earlier episodes of our lives (whether it was two decades ago or last week). And while we may want to blame others like Parzival’s mother, who kept us innocent in the hope of protecting us, or the old knight Gurnemanz and his misguided instructions—“Don’t do this, don’t do that, and above all, don’t ask too many questions"—we eventually move into the growing light of hard-won insight. A genuine compassion then touches our heart, together with an acceptance that everything occurs in its own divine time. He [Trevrizent] says, "This is a miracle that you [Parzival] have worked. Through your own will you have caused the Trinity to change its mind, to change its rules." [...] He is saying, that is, through your own integrity, you evoke your destiny, which is a destiny that never existed before. (79) And in this, our freshly won selfhood is a new creation for the world.

At first glance, the frivolous dilettante seems an unlikely aspect of the archetypal hero. In the outcome-driven culture that most of us inhabit, dilettantes are creatures of a certain derision: we see them as dabblers, superficial and affected, interested in things that don’t really matter. Hardly the serious mien of a hero with a big job to do. But by assuming that the hero must both create and reflect the gravitas of the culture they benefit, we have lost the serious magic of lightness. We have forgotten the delight of the dilettante, unfurling from the Latin delectare, “to allure, to delight, to charm.” At its heart, the dilettante is enchanted by the enticement of delight. When Parzival arrives at King Arthur’s court early in his bumbling quest to become a knight, foolish, innocent, and so very earnest, he is greeted by laughter. The Lady Cunneware de Lalant laughs at the sight of him. It’s one of those moments that feels like an anxiety dream: we’ve shown up somewhere ill-dressed, unprepared, and utterly vulnerable, only to have the polished people around us burst into laughter at our absurdity. Parzival is the everyman in this moment, defenseless against the brutal judgment of an elegant court well aware of its role as the best reflection of civility and accomplishment. But Cunneware’s laughter is sweet. Delighted. It is not the laughter of superiority, but instead, it’s what philosophers of humor define as the laughter of incongruity; that moment when what we perceive is not what we expected. A young man, little more than a child, dressed absurdly, announcing that he has come to be Arthur’s knight; the epitome of absurdity. In Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant writes: In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction). Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. This transformation, which is certainly not enjoyable to the understanding, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment for a moment. Therefore its cause must consist in the influence of the representation upon the body, and the reflex effect of this upon the mind. (First Part, sec. 54) Kant continues, though, insisting that as the absurdity resolves, our expectation is transformed into nothing. He insists, “We must note well, that it [our expectation] does not transform itself into the positive opposite of an expected object… but it must be transformed into nothing.” He suggests that this laughter does nothing for our reason. In this insistence, he finds the delight of the dilettante, but consigns that delight literally to a pleasurable physical response; it feels good to belly laugh, but there is nothing else to be gained by it. It is simply an enjoyable diversion. The exquisiteness of this moment in Parzival’s hero’s journey is that Kant is totally wrong about meaning. Cunneware’s delighted laughter is the antithesis of a silly girl laughing at a silly boy that just feels good. It is, instead, the moment in which Parzival’s destiny is realized. Her laughter is prophetic, as she has vowed to never laugh until she sees the finest knight that ever will be. Rather than shaming Parzival, Cunneware anoints him with her laughter: And the maiden Kunnewaaré she sat there, the fair and proud,And never, that man might wot of, had she laughed or low or loud.For never she vowed, an she died first, would she laugh ere her eyes might seeThat knight, who of knights the bravest or was, or henceforth should be.As the lad rode beneath the window she brake into laughter sweet. (Eschenbach, Wolfram von. Parzival: A Knightly Epic. Translated by Jessie L. Weston. Lines 686-690) Cunneware “sees through” Parzival in a deeply mythic way. Which in itself is compelling, but I think what happens next underscores the importance of this lightness in understanding the hero. Sir Kei, Arthur’s seneschal (who has, incidentally, already been extremely scornful of Parzival and urged Arthur to send him to fairly certain death against the Red Knight), is outraged by her laughter, and publicly beats her for what he perceives as her insult to the court: For I wot well unto King Arthur, to his court and his palace hallMany gallant men have ridden, yet hast thou despised them all,And ne'er hast thou smiled upon them—And now doth thy laughter ringFor one knowing naught of knighthood! Unseemly I deem this thing! The seneschal in a medieval court is charged with administrating the court, holding the center of the community and the institution. Kei is within his rights to punish transgressors who break the rules of courtly behavior, but he is heavy-handed and heavy-minded. He does not “see through,” as Cunneware does, and is only capable of perceiving what is in front of him. His attack on Cunneware is distressing to those who watch it, but no one lifts a hand or voice to protect her, with one exception. Sir Antanor the Silent, thought a fool because he does not speak, is, like Cunneware, moved for the first time to break his silence as he watches Kei’s violence. He turns on Kei and announces his own prophecy: Parzival himself will destroy Kei’s joy in his self-righteousness. Kei, of course, responds by beating Antanor as well. No one in the court protests on his behalf. These two marginalized members of the court—a young lady, without protective brothers around, and the knight seen as a fool – not only recognize Parzival’s destiny as a great chivalric knight, but set his quest truly in motion. Their lightness, their lack of power, moved by enticement, all like the dilettante, become the strength that pushes against what threatens to be the stale, self-satisfied heaviness of both Kei and Arthur’s court as a whole. Parzival is horror-struck by what they suffer on his behalf, and even in his own marginalized inexperience, sees through the rigidity of how the knightly code of honor is being lived. He understands that his greatest quest is to find what medievalist Marcus Stock has called “mutual compassionate recognition” rather than dominance. This sets Parzival on the path to becoming the Grail King, in what Sebastian Coxon, of University College London, describes as Parzival’s first instance of “privileged status as the object of laughter.” He has learned, in this first moment of interaction with what he has most desired—to become a knight of King Arthur—that the soul of this desire lies in the deepest and most pure understandings of what a great knight must be. The point is not the constructs of civilization’s expectations and failings, but instead, an unfailing commitment to doing what is most right, most compassionate. In Romance of the Grail, Campbell writes, “In Parzival, you are to follow your own nature, your own inspiration; following someone else will lead you only to ruin. That is the sense of Parzival’s journey…” This is the way of the dilettante hero: to follow the enticement of delight, in this case, moved by the lightness of laughter, to what enchants you most deeply. That is the pathway to the boon.

Welcome to another New Year, still in its childhood—a toddler beginning its adventure. Popular culture routinely portrays the New Year this way, as a Child watched over by a kindly and fatherly Old Year, usually in the form of an Old Man with a flowing white robe and wielding a razor-sharp sickle or scythe. It looks so innocent. Sweet, even. “Look there, it’s Old Man Time handing off the year to the cherubic little New Kid on the Block, barely on its feet but ready to take over.” Sure—but to my eye, Old Man Time looks suspiciously like the Greek Titan Cronus (or, in the Roman version, Saturn). He’s always shown carrying a scythe with which, we assume, he’ll sweep away the old to bring in the new. Again, I can’t help but remember the rest of that story. Remember this?: Cronus ate his children. Suddenly not so innocent, eh? Of course, he didn’t eat all of them. Zeus was saved when his mother swapped him out for a stone wrapped in swaddling. Eventually the boy-god grew up, snuck his father an emetic (causing his dad to upchuck the swallowed siblings), and then imprisoned him in the bottomless pit of Tartarus. In one story he eventually pardoned his father and put him in charge of the Elysian fields. Well, you can probably already see the mythological punchlines from here: It’s important for the New Year not to be consumed by the Old Year. Following the story line, we might also imagine that the New Year must then rescue any siblings, any other lives, the Old Year has already swallowed. We’ll come back to this in a sec. The mythology has a few wrinkles worth mentioning because it demonstrates the overlapping and interweaving of origin stories, how they evolved and co-evolved over time. There are two Greek deities with names close enough to give one pause: Chronos (Xronos) and Cronus (Kronos). The first is associated with the harvest and, explicitly, with time. (You can see the root of chronometer in his name.) He is usually shown carrying a sickle. The second one is Cronus the Titan, who also carries a sickle—the one he used to castrate his father, Ouranos/Uranus. Tracking down whether Chronos and Cronus are different, or the same deity in different eras and areas, is as tricky as following the ongoing revision of origin stories in the modern superhero universes. Even in the ancient world, scholars like Petrarch weighed in to suggest that these were one and the same. At any rate, as you can see above, their names are spelled closely enough in Greek for the purposes of today’s musings. Back to the New Year. The theme of the old eating the young shows up in myths from around the Mediterranean basin and it does a lot of work for us here in terms of hinting at how any New Year is related to the Old, or how any new phase of our lives is related to what has passed. It suggests that the Old Year always threatens to consume the New Year: that old habits, loitering inclinations, and lingering desires are more inclined to kill off or absorb new projects, or any new life, than move on. I think we’re all having this issue with the pandemic right now: will the past year eat us alive in the New Year? Or can we get past it? We also just passed the anniversary of the January 6th riots at the US Capitol. Will the politics of the past continue to eat us up in the coming year? These are the kind of provocative, but fruitful, questions each of us must consider. Right now, for instance, I’m just getting over a terrible cold, one that started a few days before New Year’s and one that looked exactly like the omicron variant of COVID. Turns out it was just a lousy cold, but my concerns about spreading COVID prior to testing negative ate me alive, day and night, for a week. Then I remembered this handy bit of mythological New Year’s narrative and started thinking about how to avoid being chewed on by the past year. I confess I’m at a loss regarding how this myth helps us avoid being consumed by the Old Year. Typically you can follow out the story line to see where it goes, but in this case it runs smack dab into a couple of opaque metaphors. The story of Cronus and Zeus seems to say that in order to avoid being eaten by the Old Year, we’d have to feed it a stone as a substitute for ourselves (whatever that would be) and force it to release the mythological siblings in our lives (whatever in the world those would be). You could argue that this is why our culture encourages getting stoned at New Year's Eve parties. Or why we tune in to watch Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin' Eve. I’d even like to say that these ideas are obviously anachronistic, but with Chronos hiding there in plain sight, both of ‘em seem a bit too obvious. Maybe the solution is simply not to let the Old Year catch you in the first place and, instead of handing yourself over to a past that wants to consume you, smack it upside the head with a rock—direct, but doesn’t strike me as a terribly sophisticated interpretation. One solution, however, is clear from this story: you cannot confront the Old Year as a child, even though that is how we meet it. Like Zeus, the Child needs to be nurtured and set on the path of its adventure, its trek toward authenticity, in order to acquire the strength, insight, and experience necessary to confront a past that wants to devour it.  Maybe the idea is that, in our own lives, we have to find that Inner Child and put it on the road to finding itself. But maybe you’ve seen something here that pulls all these pieces together more clearly. Let’s tag team The Old Year!