Category Archives: Myth

Remembering Robert Bly

Posted on by
4
Robert Bly, at “Poetry Out Loud MN,” March, 2009, by Nic’s Events, CC BY-SA 2.0

Robert Bly died on November 21, at the age of 94, but I didn’t find out until yesterday. The local paper published an obituary the week after his passing, but I missed it. Bly never got much media coverage, and when he did, it was often dismissive, accusing him, in his own words,of telling men to “run around in the woods and beat drums.”

He was an activist, author of more than 50 books of poetry, an editor, and a translator, but he’s best remembered as the author of Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990. The book grew out of a series of men’s conferences he co-hosted with James Hillman and Michael Meade. Those gatherings, along with the Power of Myth conversations between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, mark the 80’s as a rare time when large numbers of people were attuned to story, dream, myth, imagination, and soul.

Perhaps noting how quickly the moment had passed, in 1996 he published The Sibling Society, in which he argues that we have become a nation of adolescents who resist growing up because it’s too hard. The book wasn’t well received by critics, who faulted his discussion of causes and solutions as fuzzy, but it’s impossible to look at the headlines of even the past week without recognizing the core truth of his premise.

Robert Bly created a life in which he could follow his passions and inspire those able to read his work as expressions of soul and imagination. He lived to be 94, and according to his son, died peacefully, surrounded by family.

His was a life well lived!

Fear in a Handful of Dust

Posted on by
3

T.S. Eliot, 1934. Public Domain.

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in handful of dust.
— T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land,” 1922

For me, the phrase, “fear in a handful of dust” signifies that sense of nameless dread that can arise without an immediate cause. Anyone who hasn’t experienced such a sense of impending doom sometime this past year was not paying attention!

The poem from which the line was taken, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste land, is considered one of the most important early 20th century poems, announcing the ascendency of modernism in poetry – there was little appetite for 19th c. romanticism after the First World War. At the same time, as Eliot made clear in extensive notes, he drew heavily on an ancient legend, that of The Holy Grail, a central image in the Arthurian legends, but with roots stretching back to the Bronze Age.

Like Eliot before him, Joseph Campbell wrote extensively of the Waste Land. The legend revolves around Sacred Kingship, where the health of the land and the health of the sovereign are one. Behind the ailing Arthur is the Fischer King, with a wound that will not heal. The land is waste and can only be healed by the recovery of the Holy Grail. (The Masks of God: Creative Mythology).

Quest for the Grail, Creative Commons.

In Christianized tellings the Grail was the cup of the Last Supper, but in Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s Parzival, the version most quoted by Campbell, the Grail is a stone: “Its name is ‘lapis exiles,’ which is one of the terms applied in alchemy to the philosopher’s stone.” The gifts of the Grail are different for each person, corresponding to their deepest desires.

In Wolfram’s telling, to redeem himself and the land, the Grail seeker must ask the right question: “Whom does the Grail serve?” For all my fascination with the Grail legend over the years, I’ve never been able to understand that question. Until maybe last year.

Sheltering in place, cut off from most ordinary activities, there was plenty of time to reflect. The most important reflection was probably, “What is most important?” What matters most to me? What do you say to fear in a handful of dust, or fear in the darkness when you wake up at 3:00 am during a plague year?

At this moment in time, I’m old enough to say I know. For now. Answers change as we change, but answers may not be the main thing. To redeem the Grail what matters most is asking the right question.

Cycles, Gyres, and Yugas, Part 2 – Why Do We Fight?

Posted on by
1

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again; and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. – T.S. Eliot

In the previous post, I discussed the current “dark time,” or Kali Yuga, from the view of time as a series of ascending and descending ages, without beginning or end. The post ended with video clip from Peter Brook’s Mahabharata, where a young man asks, during a brutal civil war, “If the times are hopeless, why do we fight?”

Past critical turning points in history, involving the rise and fall of nations and empires, often hinged on battles. “Why” may have been the central question then, but now, as climate change marks an inflection point for the whole planet, we also face the questions of “Who (or what) do we fight?” and “How?” For us, these may be even more difficult than why, although that is the issue I will consider first.

As a college freshman, working my way through The Iliad, I had to get a handle on the concept of arete, meaning virtue or honor. Because this was the epic of a decade long war, in The Iliad, arete meant martial courage and prowess. The Vietnam war was raging then, and arete sounded too much like the prattle of those politicians who wrapped themselves in the flag to drum up dwindling support for a war that was a horrible mistake.

Now I understand arete from a wider perspective. The word meant “‘excellence of any kind.’ The term may also mean ‘moral virtue.’ In its earliest appearance in Greek, this notion of excellence was ultimately bound up with the notion of the fulfillment of purpose or function: the act of living up to one’s full potential..” 

Arete means seeking to do what is right in every circumstance.
Continue reading →

Last night I dreamed Roy Rogers died…

Posted on by
3

Roy Rogers was my first boyhood hero. For a time, around the age of three or four, I refused to answer to “Morgan,” insisting that my parents call me Roy.

Me as Roy, probably age 4.

No matter that any residual appreciation for him collapsed during the Vietnam war, after he came out as a hawk – Roy Rogers was the first person who carried for me, the imagination of what a life well lived might look like.

Upon waking, it seemed strange that I should dream of his death as a present day event, when it happened 20 years ago. Not so strange, after a moment’s reflection, as the nation watches, in real time, the complete collapse of any remaining shred of heroism among our ruling class and their paid minions in Washington. We still live in the world T.S. Eliot described in “The Waste Land.”

There is no way this ends well!

For 20 years, I followed the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952), a Hindu master who moved to this country in 1920, to found an international organization that teaches the core unity of all religions and gives instruction in meditation practices to enable people to make this discovery for themselves.

In May, 1940, he gave a talk that was later published as a pamphlet called World Crisis. In it, he said:

“a great crisis is going to come, a crisis such as never before has hit this country…There is a world revolution going on. It will change the financial system. In the karmic firmament of America I see one beautiful sign; that no matter what the world goes through, she will be better off than most other countries. But America will experience widespread misery, suffering, and changes just the same. You are used to the better things of life, and when you are obliged to live simply, you won’t like it. It is not easy to be poor after being rich. You have no idea how this change is going to affect you through the years. Never before in the history of this land has there been so deep a contrast in living standards as will visit this country – the contrast between riches and poverty.”

I remember in college, how I used to marvel at the tragic heroes and their flaws, in Greek Tragedies and in Shakespeare – how their every action to escape their fate led them deeper into the jaws of the trap. We are seeing in real time, how a nation can tread the same course to disaster.

Last night’s dream reminded me of the discussions one of my latter day heroes, Joseph Campbell held with Bill Moyer’s in the mid 80’s. In their dialog on the “Heroes Adventure,” there was this exchange:

MOYERS: “Given what you know about human beings, is it conceivable that there is a port of wisdom beyond the conflicts of truth and illusion by which our lives can be put back together again? Can we develop new models?”

CAMPBELL: “They’re already here, in the religions. All religions have been true for their time. If you can recognize the enduring aspect of their truth and separate it from the temporal applications, you’ve got it…One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.”

MOYERS: “Not the first cause, but a higher cause?”

CAMPBELL: “I would say, a more inward cause. ‘Higher’ is just up there, and there is no ‘up there.’ We know that. That old man up there has been blown away. You’ve got to find the Force within you.”

No single suggestion seems more relevant for our times: “You’ve got to find the Force within you.”

A change coming

Posted on by
2

Sir Galahad, the Quest for the Holy Grail, by Arthur Hughes, 1870, public domain.

I’ve been enjoying the recording of a discussion at a conference with James Hillman and Michael Meade on literal, psychological, and mythological modes of understanding.

Hillman, a former director of the Jung Institute in Switzerland, has been the most prolific and influential of post-Jungian thinkers. He spent his life as champion of psyche, soul, and imagination in a world that has too few such champions. Hillman took particular aim at literalism, which he called “an idol that forgets it is an image and believes itself a God, taking itself metaphysically, seriously, damned to fulfill its task of coagulating the many into singleness of meaning which we call facts, data, problems, realities.” (Revisioning Psychology).

When I think of literalism, I recall the last lines of a poem a brilliant young poet I knew wrote about his high school principal:

His triple-breasted chin, arranged in folds upon his chest,
He blunts my life with a technicality.

Hillman also takes aim at much psychological thinking in books like The Soul’s Code. In this conference, he points to the 20th c. understanding that “The Gods now live in the psyche,” as a core statement of one of our greatest collective problems: the world and nature have lost their connection to the divine, and as such, are ripe for exploitation by greedy men who have traded their souls for profit. If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all,” Ronald Reagan famously said when he was California’s governor.

Michael Meade noted that one of the hallmarks of myth is a sense of abundance. The current miasma of scarcity thinking – that there isn’t enough to go around, so you better get yours while you can – is a clear indication, if we need it, that we have no myth, no shared stories of who we are as a people. Continue reading →

The Summer of Love, Repression, and Stuff.

Posted on by
6

USA. Washington DC. Seventeen year old Jan Rose Kasmir, confronts the National Guard outside the Pentagon during the 1967 anti-Vietnam march. This march helped to turn public opinion against the war in Vietnam.

Dissatisfaction with the status quo gave birth to our nation, and has been part of our heritage every since. Fifty years ago this summer, this undercurrent burst into the loud and colorful limelight as 100,000 people gathered in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury with mottos like Timothy Leary’s, “Tune in, turn on, drop out.”

I was a high school kid in San Jose, wearing torn jeans and love beads, reading the literature of discontent by authors such as Thoreau, Sinclair Lewis, and Nathanial West. After Saturday excursions to the head shops on Haight Street, with their incense and posters of Lakshmi and Ganesh, I bought a copy Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a book I still have, and one which, fifty years later, I more or less understand, because doing so became one of the core priorities of my life.

“We are all outlaws in the eyes of America,” sang Grace Slick, and in the explosion of new music, art, literature, and the ideas of change embodied in The Whole Earth Catalog, there was a sense of expansion, a sense that we could stop the war, and we could leave the world of ticky-tacky houses, and create a nation where Peace and Freedom would reign as supreme values.

We didn’t understand our own shadows. We didn’t knew that Charles Manson was roaming the Haight during the summer of ’67, winning friends and influencing people with techniques he had learned from Dale Carnegie’s book, which he studied in prison. We didn’t know that “Do your own thing” was a double-edged sword, and that we would see bitter fruits of that motto fifty summers later.

*****

When I turned 40 in 1990, I was halfway through a Masters program in Psychology, which I’d entered in part because in the wake of the Summer of Love, I’d discovered Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Tolkien, and I couldn’t get enough of that stuff. And also because, the ethos of “Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll” doesn’t really work very well.

Yet when in that course of study, we came to look at the psyche’s defense mechanisms, most of us thought repression was a bad thing, inhibiting self-expression and individuation. I gotta do my own thing, man!

“Don’t be so fast to put down repression” said the instructor. “It’s one of the glues that holds a culture together.”

I’ve thought of this statement many times since then, never more so than when I read a woman’s letter to the editor in the local paper sometime in the mid-nineties, reporting on an incident she’d seen at a local multiplex. For whatever reason, no one was behind the concession counter, so some of the patrons clambered over the counter, help themselves to popcorn and drinks and then dash into the theaters.

That’s not quite what we meant by “Do Your Own Thing,” but it’s a pretty telling, canary-in-the-coal-mine kind of snapshot of the kind of societal breakdown parading through our streets this summer.

One of the four major functions of a living myth, according to Joseph Campbell, is “the sociological function,” which teaches us the norms of living together. “Thou shalt not kill,” for instance. Other roles are more dicey – gender and class roles for instance. These get rigid as times change, and are then modified by pioneers or movements, or in extreme cases, by revolutions if leaders are really stupid and tell their starving masses to eat cake.

Perhaps with enough acts of popcorn theft, large and small, because we feel entitled and we want what we want and we want it now – perhaps the kind of president we have was inevitable. Sooner or later, just as inevitably, he’ll go.

What will we do then? Will we be sickened enough by current events to turn in another direction together? What does a culture do when it’s fragmented by so many contradictory stories that Campbell’s sociological function of myth has completely broken down? What will it take to restore a genuine sense of “us” in our national life, a sense that we’re all in this together? The most obvious and frightening answer is a shared disaster.

Ironic to realize that the youthful idealism that brought us the Summer of Love, and two years later, the high water mark at Woodstock, carried the seeds of its own demise, partly because of the self-righteous sense of “us and them” that still drives our national life. And yet, it is profoundly valuable to review those youthful ideals, that sense of a better world within reach. Without such dreams, we are left with little better to do than rail at each other on social media.

“It’s been a long time coming,” sang Crosby, Stills, and Nash. “It’s going to be a long time gone.” It will come around again, sooner or later, but the question is, how long a time will that be?

Notes on Truth, June edition

Posted on by
2

The Washington Post reports that Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, has assembled a team with expertise in fields ranging from constitutional law to money laundering. This suggests that the just-announced criminal probe of the president for obstruction of justice may be only the beginning.

This is clearly bad news for the president, a congenital liar, and the GOP, which has risen to power by enabling him. Too bad their mothers never told them what mine did – that lies eventually get found out. My mother was not into philosophical subtleties with the truth. When she asked if I’d pulled the head off my sisters doll, I couldn’t duck the question by citing “alternate facts.”

It’s still a tossup whether our Liar in Chief and his minions will manage their corporatist takeover of the government, or whether our constitutional protections will bring them down first.

This effort means much more than simply removing a malignant leader from the helm of our once-great nation. It will be even harder to restore a respect for Truth in the public sphere. Politicians have always lied and voters have always know it it, but in a culture which values truth more than greed, liars are punished when discovered.

The natural world doesn’t care about our opinions. “Truth will out,” as Shakespeare said. Melting glaciers, rising seas, extreme storms, fires, and droughts don’t listen to climate change deniers.

This idea – that natural law wins in the end – brought to mind songs and stories from many traditions that echo that theme. I have only a vague recollection of most of them, but I am motivated to go on a search for two key reasons:

First, the old stories and songs reflect our collective experience, shaped by the wisdom of generations. They are comforting, like stones worn smooth, and it’s good to remind ourselves of what our ancestors knew for generations – lying doesn’t work in the end.

My second reason for digging into these stories is that it is likely a healthier pastime than checking social media morning and night to see what fresh outrage the Republican party has done.

I already have in mind a first example, one of my favorite old ballads that Garrison Keeler once called, one of the gloomiest songs ever written. That makes it just right for one of the darkest times our nation has ever endured.

Notes on Truth

Posted on by
7

George Washington and the cherry tree

One time when I was four or five and caught in a lie, my parents admonished me with the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. I do not know if they thought the event really happened. I suspect they did, although historians have long known the story was invented by Washington biographer, Mason Weems.

Such stories are part of the fabric of the myth of American exceptionalism, and here I use the word “myth” as Joseph Campbell did. One of the four main functions of myth for Campbell was the sociological view,”supporting and validating a certain social order.” At their best, such myths can inspire us to greatness.

Many sociological fictions are not benign, which motivated Time Magazine’s current cover, and its cover story, “Can Trump Handle the Truth,” by Michael Scherer (Time, Apr. 3, 2017, pp 33-39).

Scherer says, “Trump has discovered something about epistemology in the 21st century. The truth may be real, but falsehood often works better.”

Except when it doesn’t…

As a sometimes writer of fiction, I remember a news report from the seventies, when “The Six Million Dollar Man” was a popular TV series. A five or six year old boy jumped off the roof of his home, believing that if he sustained serious injuries, he’d receive bionic limbs and implants like Colonel Steve Austin (Lee Majors) in the series. The news report said the boy was in traction, but expected to make a full recovery. He discovered something our president and many politicians have yet to learn – that physical reality enforces it’s own truths.

The most important truths of life, truths of the spirit and truths of the heart, are non-material and non-visible, yet to enjoy them, we need to survive, and this involves understanding the truths and laws of a material universe:

If we jump off a roof, we’ll get hurt, and no one will spend six-million dollars to make us bionic.

Oil pipelines leak, and oil trains sometimes explode. Climate change is not a Chinese hoax. The US just killed at least 112 civilians in airstrikes in Mosul.

The man who used the “birther” lie to launch his career in politics does indeed seem incapable of appreciating the truth, and as a result, is propelling this nation, at breakneck speed, into the very “loss of greatness,” he promised to turn around.