This is where I'm going to write about my experiences as I read Joseph Campbell's awesome books.

I'm going to start with Pathways to Bliss, a book that I've been reading over and over for the past, oh, two years. It's a collection of his lectures, and there is a staggering amount of useful information therein. It'll probably take me some months to get through it all here. Let's begin.

To know others is wisdom; to know yourself is enlightenment; to master others requires force; to master yourself requires true strength.

...begins the book, a quotation from Lao-Tzu's Tao-te Ching. I was rather taken with Taoism in high school, and went so far as to walk around barefoot whenever I could because, at the time, that's what I thought Lao-Tzu would do. He certainly wouldn't wear sneakers, at any rate; and when I couldn't pad around with denuded soles, I settled for sandals. At one point, a leering fag who taught Latin at my high school took me aside to describe the historicity of sandal-wearing; he thought that I was interested in feet (as perhaps he was as well, since after all he had a time-line of sandals at the tips of his fingers), and I was too mortified by his attention to retain what he was telling me. But I was only marginally aware of my bare-footedness -- when people would make a big deal about it, I was genuinely confused and a little annoyed: didn't they see how ancient and Chinese I was being?

Taoism eventually lost my interest when I hit a ceiling of understanding, above which I simply could climb no further. (It was low.) But there was something about it that grabbed me, and something about Joseph Campbell's lectures in Pathways to Bliss that grabs me now; and I think that they are both the same thing.

The idea is that there is a little doorbell in your mind, and a door that opens onto something new that is somehow familiar -- "ah yes, that's what I've been looking for all this time" -- and then you are content. Oh but what is that? What does it mean, really? Where's the doorway? How to you open it and walk through? That hunt for the door has always fascinated me; and now, the more I look back on the fun I've had trying to pry open paths, I realize that I've been lounging happily on its threshold all the time.

I have not even yet reached the book's table of contents. Did I say months?

In the Editor's Foreword, David Kudler recalls some words from Mr. Campbell about how, as he reviewed his work toward the end of his life, it became apparent that his career had had a thesis: that myths permit fulfillment -- that "understanding the ways that myths and symbolds affect he individual mind offered a way to lead a life that was in tune with one's nature -- a pathway to bliss."

I find it helpful to think about what "myth" means here, because we're going to be dealing with ideas like mythology and transcendence soon, and those can very quickly turn into crunchy new-agey frocks that feel very nice but aren't much help when the weather gets cold.

The value of myths -- as I tend to think of it -- is in the telling of meaningful stories. Whenever you receive a story that hits you, emotionally: good, that means you found a clue. It's waving a flag, giving you a signal, pointing out the way to go: "follow him! He went that way!" Study it.

That's why we're doing this -- telling stories, sighing in pleasure, and then turning around and saying, "that was nice, can we do it again? And can we make it better? How does it work, anyway?"

The foreword also lists a number of other valuable texts, in particular The Collected Words of Joseph Campbell. And it lays out a roadmap:

- Part 1: A history of how individuals needed and benefited from myths
- Part 2: What it is in the human mind that makes us need myths
- Part 3: Using the monomyth of The Hero's Journey as a guide for one's own personal search for meaning

It just occurred to me that it was only in seventh grade that they started teaching us about metaphors -- before that year, I'd never even heard the word in a class. Oh, public schooling, you hide every key.

There are a couple of key concepts in the Introduction to the book. (Can you believe we're still on the Introduction? The real show hasn't even started yet.)

First, there's a little anecdote about how there are businesswomen in our society, but they have no mythic role model. In olden days, there'd be a female homemaker myth; and there'd be a male hunter myth; but now there's new jobs that have never had, for example, patron saints. And that's a challenging state of affairs, to have to make a life for yourself without the roadmaps that myths provide. It's up to the mythwriters of today to make new stories out of our contemporary situation, stories that grip us and also feel familiar.

The reason this is necessary is because myths -- stories -- are like a set of instructions. Or at least, a set of suggestions. Here Joseph uses the metaphor of a mandala: a maze that has been unscrambled and made orderly, with symbols all around and YOU there in the center, the universe within arm's reach. Without the arrangement of the mandala, you're living in a labyrinth, with no idea where to turn or what's waiting for you. Of course this sort of life can be very fun, if you've got enough money to bribe the minotaur into not hurting you too badly.

So, to summarize:
- Maze = Self-myth in disarray; what am I? Where am I going? We've all felt this way at some point.
- Mandala = All is clear. Hopefully we'll feel a great deal more of this than the maze going forward.

Another author for the reading list: Karlfried Graf Durkheim (a fascinating Wikipedia subject, and not to be confused with Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist). K.G. Durkheim continued the work of Jung and Neumann (ack, more authors to read!); his position, as described here, sounds like a lot of poofiness to me. Some words about manifestations of mythic power appear, and my eyes glaze over as they roll.

But here's the good part: humans have a sense of belonging to something MAGNIFICENT, though we have a hard time defining exactly what that magnificent thing is. I have a sense that we tend to pin that feeling on a god or a cult or World of Warcraft or gays in the Castro (or whatever) because we like to have a name for that feeling. Joseph refers to that as our energy being bound to a "commitment."

And apparently that's a problem, because we become fixated on that local commitment. (I'll write more later about his very specific use of the word local; it would be more accurate to use Adolph Bastian's term volkergedanken, meaning the concrete, of-the-moment imagery of a single time and place. But "local" is easier to type.)

Anyway: becoming occupied with our "commitment" is precisely what we do not want, as it is not actually what is meaningful to us. "The psychological problem," Joseph says, "is to make yourself -- and here is the phrase -- transparent to the transcendent."

Ugh, I can't tell you how long it took me to figure that out. "It's as easy as that," the book goes on, but what does it mean? Well, think about the word transparent: it means see-through. You need to become see-through, so to speak, so that transcendence passes into you like sunlight into a fishtank. That Magnificent power (the one that we all like, but can't quite name) needs to be able to move all the way through your skin into your very center, instead of bouncing off, deflected by a local commitment like algae on the glass.

Confusing, I know. The more you think about it, the more it makes sense. I hope.

Another handy analogy is that of a compass -- the kind that you use to draw circles. The sharp point of the compass sits on a very fine point indeed, and the outer leg orbits in a distant arc. You can think of your myths as having one foot on something transcendent, and the other on something familiar. And your job, as a transparent compass, is to make sure that point and the circle can see through you to each other. Or as Joseph nicely puts it, "one leg in the field of time and the other in the eternal." Pretty.

This "transparent to the transcendent" business in kind of important, so make sure you've got it.

One problem with the phrase is: what exactly is this "transcendent" business? It's kind of a hard word to relate to. I tend to think of it, from a storytelling perspective at least, as a synonym for "emotionally meaningful." That is, if it makes the audience feel something, then it's probably transcendent.

"Feeling something" is the trick, though -- it's something that you either know how to do for an audience, or you don't. A good rule of thumb for determining whether your story is "feely" is how well it fulfills the four functions of a myth. I'll write more about those later, but to sum them up, they are:

- Inspiring a sense of awe
- Describing a model of the cosmos
- Organizing a sociological order
- Guiding us through the phases of our lives

And now it's getting a bit late, so I'll leave it there for now.