You are listening to the MythMaker Podcast Network.Welcome to the Joseph Campbell Foundation podcast, Pathways with Joseph Campbell.I'm your host, Bradley Olson.
On this podcast, we share archived audio lectures given by Joseph Campbell over the course of his teaching and lecturing career.And today we're listening to a lecture Campbell gave at the Cooper Union
one of America's oldest and most distinguished institutions of higher learning.The Cooper Union is located near 5th Street and 3rd Avenue in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, about a 15 minute walk from Joe's apartment on Waverly.
In my mind's eye, I can picture him walking there through Washington Square Park on a pleasant December afternoon.In my mind, it's an afternoon lecture.
Perhaps wearing the overcoat that I recently handled in the Opus Archives at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, carrying a briefcase containing his lecture notes, perhaps wondering how large the group in attendance might be and how he might choose to introduce his talk.
Professor Campbell was a frequent lecturer at the grand old Cooper Institute, which was founded in 1829 by Peter Cooper, one of the richest industrialists of the 19th century.
Cooper came from an extremely modest working class family and had only one year of formal education.And his ambition was to give talented young people the one thing he lacked, a good education.
To that end, he funneled the bulk of his wealth into supporting Cooper Union, which he insisted remain, quote, open and free to all, unquote.Cooper strictly forbade any discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or gender.
Campbell's lectures at Cooper Union places him among other luminaries who spoke and who continue to speak at Cooper Union, such as Henry James and Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Native American intellectuals like Red Cloud and Little Raven, as well as many U.S.
presidents, not the least of which was at the time, anyway, a relatively unknown Abraham Lincoln.In February of 1860, Lincoln, unknown in New York and not having yet announced his presidential bid, arrived by train in Manhattan.
Apparently, no one was there to meet him.And like most first-time visitors to the city, he probably wandered around the streets of lower Manhattan, window shopping and people-watching.He was keenly interested in photography.
and had Matthew Brady, whose studio at the time located at Broadway and 10th Street near the Cooper Union, take what would become arguably the most famous portrait of Lincoln.
Lincoln's speech later that evening was a stunning success and it catapulted him into the national spotlight.No man ever made such an impression on his first appearance to a New York audience, wrote the New York Tribune.
Lincoln himself credited the speech at Cooper Union with a major role in his rise to the White House, saying, Brady and the Cooper Institute made me president.
I think it's fair to say that the Cooper Institute contributed to making Joseph Campbell's reputation too.
So without any further ado, and in the words of the Cooper Institute host, John C. Fairchild, who introduced him on this day in 1967, here is the world-famous and delightful Joseph Campbell.
Well, what a wonderful theme Dr. Fairchild has proposed to me.And what a wonderful world of mythology one encounters in celebration of this mystery.
You recall that the Greeks regarded love, the god Eros, as the oldest of the gods, the creator of the gods and the universe, all of which is an inflection of his power.
And love also is the youngest of the gods, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every loving heart.There are two orders of love according to the Greeks, according to the manners of the manifestation of Eros in his terrestrial aspect and his celestial.
And Dante, following this lead, saw the power of love spanning the universe all the way from the pits of hell to the highest seat of God.
One of the most amazing images of love that I know is in a Persian view, a Persian Muslim view of the devil, Satan, as the greatest lover of God.You will recall the legend when God first created the angels, He told them to adore none but himself.
And the prince of the angels, Lucifer, so deeply and fully loved God that he found that very congenial to his temper.Then God created man, whom he regarded as the highest of his creatures. And he bade the angels bow in reverence before man.
And Lucifer, because of his love for God and in obedience to the first order that God had given, found it impossible to bow before man.He could not.And because of this act of disobedience, God expelled him from heaven.
cursed him to exist forever out of sight of that one whom he loved, namely God.And he threw him forth into the pit of hell, and there Satan abides.And he abides there deprived of the view of him whom he loves.
simply because he loves him and could not bow before anybody else.And this deprivation is infinitely painful and yet he cannot bring himself to be quit of his love to the extent of bowing before man.
And the Persian poets ask, what is it that sustains Satan in this exile, this eternal, infinitely painful exile?Because the deepest pain of hell is not the fire or the stench, but the deprivation of the true love of the soul, namely God.
And the answer with respect to this Satan is, he is sustained by his recollection of the sound of the voice of God when God said, be gone.
This to me is a terrific image, an extreme statement of that exquisite thing that is at once the pain and the delight of love.There's another Persian image. of the great Saint Al-Halaj, 9th century Sufi mystic, crucified for his love of God.
It was he who said, I and my beloved are one.My beloved is God.I am one with God.I am God. and he was crucified.And the image that is given of his love and of his joy in having been crucified is of the love of the moth for the flame.
The moth one lovely evening saw this marvelous thing and he flew into it and seared his wings and came back to his companions and told them of the marvelous thing he had found, this flame.
And the next night, he wished to be joined to it and to become one with it.And he flew right into the flame and himself became the flame.These images do speak of a mystery that we all, one way or another, deeply or not so deeply,
have felt or suspected.Love also has another aspect.There's a wonderful Persian story of the first human couple.They grew from a reed kind of tree, and they were so closely joined that they could not be told apart. And then in time, they separated.
And then they united.And a child was born.And they loved that child so much, they just ate it up.And God said, this won't do.And so he reduced the love 90% so that we wouldn't eat our children.
Now this image of love as the dynamic of the world is beautifully rendered in an Hindu, an Indian image of the creator.This creator is a little different from one that you might have in mind because you can't have this one in mind
This is a being that is no being.You can't say it is, you can't say it is not.It is beyond all conception.And this mystery being that was no being, one time that was no time, said, I. And as soon as the word I had been pronounced, there came fear.
into his spirit, fear that someone would kill him.And then he reasoned and thought, well, since I am the only one there is, how can anyone kill me?
And no sooner did he think, I am the only one there is, then he had this second thought, I wish there were another.And with that thought, he swelled and became two, a male and a female. And then he begot on the female all the creatures of the earth.
And when they were all begotten, he beheld the earth and the world, and he said, this am I. And so according to this story, this being who felt first fear and then love, that desire, let me say, is the inherent power, the energy of us all,
And the next part of this image is that through our own experience of love, we participate in the experience of that ground of our own being, our separateness here in space and time, our multitude is but a secondary aspect of our nature.
Our individuality, each of us separate, is the secondary aspect of our nature.The primary aspect is our oneness in that being.And we feel that oneness.That's to say we go out of ourselves, we go past the bounds of ourselves when we experience love.
Schopenhauer in a wonderful paper, a wonderful essay, on love as the moral principle, speaks of this remarkable experience.When an individual, forgetting himself
sacrifices his own safety, not thinking of himself, in order to save another person, as though that other person's trouble, that other person's danger were his own, he has actually participated in that ground substance of being which supports us all.
This, says Schopenhauer, is the only moral principle there is. This actual experience, this, he says, is an actual experience of the truth.Namely, that we are not separate from each other.
That we are all participating in, or rather, we are all totally, each of us, that being which is the being of beings.And it is the emotion of love that enables us to experience the truth of that. We actually lose sense of ourselves and participate.
I think of this very often when on the TV these days.One sees these marvelous helicopter rescues of men who have been wounded and under fire, their companions absolutely forgetful of their own safety, risking everything.
as though their life were that life.This is a rendition of the mystery of love.Now in the Indian religion of the Vishnu sect, there is a wonderful gradation of love in five stages.
Through love, we move toward God, which is to say, in the Indian sense, we move to our own divinity.We find in ourselves that divine principle which said, I am the world.The first grade of love is that of servant for master.
This is the normal attitude of the religious person.Oh, Lord, you are the master.I am the servant. Let me know thy law, and I will obey."The second grade of love is that of friend for friend.
And this, in the Christian tradition, is typified by the relationship of Christ and the apostles.They were friends.They could actually discuss things and even quarrel. implies a deeper religious readiness than that of the servant to master.
In the Indian tradition, this is represented by the love of Arjuna for Krishna and Krishna for his companions there in the forest, the god Krishna.The third stage of love is that of parent for child.
And this is the love represented in the Christian tradition by the Christmas crib.One, in a sense, is cultivating in oneself the child, which is one's own divinity, bringing it into fulfillment, fostering it.
There's a wonderful story of the saint, Ramakrishna, of the last century.A woman came to him and said, oh master, I cannot say that I love God.I do not.I do not honestly feel love for God."
And the master said to her, is there nothing that you love in this world?And she said, yes, I do love my little nephew, this little child.Well, said Ramakrishna, there is your divinity.
In your service to the child, you are in the service of God, and therein your blessing.The fourth degree of love is that of husband for wife and wife for husband.This, in the Catholic tradition, is symbolized by the love of the nun for Jesus.
The nuns wear a wedding ring.They are brides of Christ. But also on the human level, the love of husband for wife and wife for husband is a degree of experience of the divine.But now, as I've said, there are five degrees of love.
And what, according to this Vishnuistic view, is the highest?And the answer is illicit love.There, you are really overtaken, assaulted, assailed, by love and nothing but love.In marriage, one has the prestige of the community.One has a job.
One has respect.One has the world and one has love too.But with illicit love, one loses everything the world can give.And one gives up everything for this wild passion.And again, to quote Ramakrishna, he says, when you have loved God this way,
or when you have loved the world this way, giving up everything for it in madness, dropping out, you can say, oh God, come through now and show yourself and let me partake of your being fully.
And in that, there is ultimately the intention to dissolve in love and lose yourself.This wild, illicit rapture, beyond the law, is represented mythologically in the love of Krishna, the God, the incarnate God, for an earthly woman, Radha.
She, a married woman.You all know the story probably of Krishna as a young youth playing his flute in the forest of Vrindavan.
And the wives sleeping by their husbands would hear that flute song and they would sneak out of bed and slip off into the forest and dance the dance of heavenly rapture with Krishna.The notion there again is of the illicit nature of love.
It goes beyond the law. And when one reads the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th century, celebrating the love of God, the love of the Virgin for God, and of God for the Virgin, we hear echoes, really, of this Oriental theme.
In fact, the dates for Bernard and the Oriental stories are exactly the same, that wonderful 12th century of the Troubadours. The same theme is represented in Christ, in his crucifixion, in certain interpretations of that mystery.
It has always been a great problem in Christian theology why Christ was crucified.He accepted crucifixion, according to the belief, voluntarily.And I won't go into all the various theories, but the one
that is most impressive in the 12th century and from there on, is the idea that this was a demonstration of God's love.Love for the world, which itself is a crucifixion of the spirit.You know the old saying, the body is the tomb of the soul.
The soul, as it were, is imprisoned in the flesh. That is a negative approach to the mystery of the spirit in nature.But when one thinks of the voluntary coming of the spirit into the world, we have a different picture.
This is an affirmation of the crucifixion of the spirit, the anguish.It's as though it were another way of saying that Satan, in his love, and because of his love is bound in hell or in the flesh.
All of these images inflecting the mystery of love one finds as one seeks, as I sought, the imagery for this talk tonight.They inflect in various ways the great mystery.
In the Orient, the highest symbol of this, I believe, is in the imagery of Buddhism.You know the theme of the Buddha?He came to the tree of the World Center and sat there, having reached the point of immobility, as it's called, the immovable point.
no longer threatened by fear, no longer threatened by desire.That is to say, he had come to the point through which that original being who said, I had come.
The Buddha sat there and the original being of whom I spoke earlier came before him in three forms.The first form was the form of love, the God of love, the God of lust, love in its earthly aspect.
And he paraded before the seated saint, his three beautiful daughters.And if the Buddha had thought I, he would have thought they, but there was no I there.So there was no experience of they, he had transcended that temptation.He was unmoved.
Then the lord of lust, whose name is karma, meaning love or desire, turned himself into the lord of death, of fear, of aggression.These are the two great motives of life.And he hurled against the seated one his army of monsters.
But there was no sense of I there.There was absolutely no fear.And when the weapons of various sort came into this sphere of non-ego, They were transformed into lotuses.And then this tempter turned himself into the lord of duty, like a sociologist.
He comes and says, what are you doing sitting here, you prince?You should be in your palace governing the world.Don't you know there's a world?There are troubles.There are things to do.
Well, what do you do when people talk to you that way, when what you're seeking is wisdom and the source of even social virtues?The Buddha did the only thing that was necessary.
He simply touched the earth, nature, mother nature, from which even society comes. And the goddess Earth herself said, this is my beloved son, who through many lifetimes has already given of himself.So let him alone.
And the elephant on which this god of duty was riding bowed before the saintly one.And in the course of that night, illumination came.Now what is the nature of this illumination?It is the realization
of the truth that I've already spoken of, namely that we are all manifestations of one being who is no being.It is a transcendent mystery.
And along with that, and the realization that it is somehow a mystical zeal that has brought the universe into being, sends the planet spinning and holds everything going,
the realization that this is the truth and that we are all manifestations of the joy, of the bliss, of the zeal of life, then looking around and seeing how everyone is suffering, thinks he is suffering, because he is tied to his own little ego, whereas in depth he is in bliss, but doesn't know it.
At that moment, realizing that there is no cure for this,
except the realization that this sorrow and this suffering is just a surface flicker on a permanent bliss, this realization fills the heart with compassion for all these beings who feel that they are suffering, whereas one level deeper, they are in bliss.
There's a very paradoxical mystery here. Also involved in this is the realization that two beings fighting each other are the same being, and that life inevitably manifests itself in this duad, so that a battle is in a certain sense a love affair.
And this is the sense of the mysticism of war in the old traditions.There is a respect for that other. But it is actually through duality that the universe exists.So what are you asking for when you ask for the world to stop its suffering?
That is the end of life itself.And if that's the way you feel about it, well then pull out.But don't annoy us by telling us that things should be the way you think they should be.
There's a wonderful medieval poet, Gottfried of Strasbourg, and he says, they tell me there are people who wish to live in bliss alone.God give them their bliss.Those are not the people for whom I am writing.
I write for those noble hearts who live in sorrow and bliss at the same time. the bliss of their sorrow, and the sorrow of their bliss.
And this double buzz, this double agony, so to say, in joy, is the essence of that love mystery which is symbolized in the devil in hell, and in Christ on the cross, and in any moment of love.Now the Buddha idea of compassion is comparable to the
Christian idea of agape or charity, when Christ says, love thy neighbors thyself, or when he says beyond that, and this I take to be the high word of the Christian doctrine, love your enemies.That doesn't mean that they are not your enemies.
They are. And that double experience is another aspect of this that I am speaking about.Now these are the great traditional religious approaches to love.Love as that dynamism of life in which we participate through our experience of love.
Love then as that higher, heavenly, spiritual compassion, which is, as it were, a trance formation or sublimation of the primary earthly passion into a heavenly one.The idea of these is impersonal.It is indiscriminate.
The love is to go forth to all the world.But there is another idea that comes along in that wonderful 12th century with the troubadours.And I want to give a little time to this.It seems to me the typical
and great statement of the European as opposed to the other Asiatic ideas of love of which I've been speaking.In this case, we have a company of poets, the 12th century troubadours.
In the Middle Ages, marriage was largely, as it is for most people even now, a social affair. One marries according to one's family relationships and what the family expects.
And then the church comes in and sacramentalizes this and talks about the two are one flesh and all that, whereas actually it's two bank accounts that have become one bank account.That's about all it is.
The experience of love can come into this kind of situation as a disaster.And it certainly did in the Middle Ages, where For adultery, one could be burned at the stake.
And one believed that one would burn also in hell, but love would come just the same.
And the theme of the Troubadours was the celebration of this passion, this infusion of a divine power which, according to their view, was higher in dignity than the sacraments of the church, higher than marriage.
And they spent a great deal of their poetic concern analyzing psychologically this emotion.And it is epitomized in a beautiful poem by the troubadour Giroud de Bournay, which states, love is born of the eyes and the heart.
Now this is a very important point.It is not indiscriminate. It is not love thy neighbor as thyself, whoever he is, agape or charity.It is not just the dynamism of life and the zeal of the sexual organs for each other.
It is the perception by the eyes of a particular human being, a specific person, this one, and the communication of that image to the heart. to what was called the gentle or the noble heart, the heart capable of the emotion of love, not simply lust.
What then was the nature of this specific love?In the mysticism, the erotic mysticism of the Orient, whether of India or of the Near East, Islam, The woman who is beloved is, as it were, a manifestation of a divine principle.
Not so among the troubadours.She was a woman, that woman specifically, and the love was for her.And the emotion experienced was that agony of love.The agony, the anguish,
because love can never be totally realized without the kind of extinction that that moth experienced, the experience of the anguish as well as the bliss of love.And this is the emotion that Gottfried of Strasbourg celebrated in his Tristan.
This poet, Gottfried, regarded love itself The goddess in Middle German, Minne, the Minne singers were the singers of Minne, love, regarded love as a divine being, as a divine power.
And this, when it assailed Tristan and Isolde, when they had drunk the potion, became, as it were, a complete torrent that overwhelmed them so that they lost their individual control.
And when Brangain, the maid who was responsible for them drinking the potion, shocked at what had happened, they drank it when she wasn't present.She sort of left the potion around.
She said, knowing what was going to happen, this drink is going to be your death.And Tristan said a wonderful thing at this point.He said, what kind of death are you talking about?
If this delight and loss of myself that I experience with these alts is what you're talking about, I will accept this death.I will also accept eternal death, and for the 12th century that meant hell.
I will gladly experience hell, fire forever, for this love.There we have the same theme that we had before in Satan.
And when I read Dante's description of his passage through hell, you remember the first scenes there where he sees Paola and Francesca, the two famous lovers in hell.And again, like a sociologist, he stops and asks, how did you come to this?
Francesca very politely answers, tells him how they were reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. and at a certain moment in the story looked at each other and read no more in the book that day.And he thought they were in agony there.
They certainly were.They were in hell.But he had the point of view of a sociologist.This isn't a comfortable place to be.They had the point of view of lovers.This is exactly what we want.Because the point about hell is you're exactly
where you want to be.Now, Sartre brought that point out in his wonderful play, No Exit.Do you remember?Here are these three people in a room in hell, and on the mantelpiece is an image of Eros, the god of love.The first person is a male.
He had been a collaborator, and he felt that that somehow wasn't what he should have been, but that if people would only comfort him and say, oh, you couldn't have done otherwise or something like that, he would get rid of this sense of guilt.
That's what he needed.The next person who enters the room is a lesbian, very intelligent woman,
could certainly, if she wished to, if she felt any love, any compassion, have alleviated his pangs by telling him, oh, yes, that would have been all right.But she was just hard.She would have nothing to do with him, nor he with her.
Then there enters a little sort of floozy.She's got her eye on the man. But she can't give him what he needs, namely the spiritual compassion.The woman has her eye on this younger woman, who doesn't know what she's talking about.
And so you have these three people, each stuck with his own system of love, without any compassion, any opening for the other.And they are held to each other.And that scene goes on and on and on.And you think, well,
Anything would be better than this.These people would be glad to get out of here.And just as you're perfectly convinced that anything would be better than that for them, the door of the room that they're in opens.Just surprisingly opens.
And they don't go out.Why? There was nothing but blue out there.It was the void.They didn't know where they would be if they were there.They knew where they were here.They were in hell.Okay.
Bernard Shaw makes this point also in A Man and Superman, that wonderful scene where this little woman is walking around and she finds she's in hell, which she thought she was in heaven.It was so comfortable to her.
And she meets this gracious gentleman, and she says, where's God?Oh, he says, he's just over there.But you wouldn't like it there.It's kind of boring.It's like sitting in the opera.Stay here where all the jazz is.
And so she had her good time in hell.Hell is the place where love isn't big enough to encompass the total depth and mystery of it all.Well, now I come to a final theme.
In the Middle Ages we had these two principles, social life, living as one ought, and love, which ripped one out of this.This was the situation that in the grail legend is represented as the wasteland.Life is a fake.
People are living in a manner that is not that of their nature. They are living according to a system of rules.And this is represented by a wounded king whose wound turns the whole country into a wasteland.
And the aim, the quest, the aim of the grail knight is to heal that king. How can that king be healed, that wounded king?Wagner, in his Tristan and then his Parsifal, identified the wound of love with that wound of the wounded king.
What kind of love would heal this wounding love?The king was one who had not earned his kingship, He had been installed by a ritual.That's to say he wasn't a true king.Love had come into a life that was a mockery of a life.
The only way to heal the wounded king, says Wolfram, is to lead your life, live your life courageously out of your own center. Not doing as you are told, but doing what your nature moves you to do, but let it be a noble nature.
Not a nature gross and raw, but a nature refined by sensibilities, by suffering, by pain, by quest, by isolation, and so forth. And every time the grail knight does as he is told to do, things get worse.
But when he follows his own volition, even to the extent of denying God, of hating God, of denying his friends, he's on the track.Finally now, when the grail quest is achieved, a most remarkable occurrence takes place.
This knight in Wolfram von Eschenbach's version, the Grail Knight Parsifal, has a brother who is a Mohammedan, a half-brother who is a Muslim.And these two, these are the polar enemies of that period.
You might say like the United States and Russia now, that the two poles of the world, the two antagonists in the world scene.These two brothers, half-brothers, meet in combat.And both, in this case, are noble youths, very strong fighters.
They battle each other furiously.And the poet says, if one wished, one could say that two men were fighting here, but actually they are one. This is quite a statement for that period, to say that the Muslim and the Christian were one.
This is the idea of loving the enemy.But Wolfram didn't say they should stop fighting.He said, and out of loyalty and courage and resolution, they are doing each other much harm.And this is the way of the world.
in this mythology of which I'm speaking.Now, I want to conclude with a modern person, a modern author, Thomas Mann, who has dealt with this problem from one side and the other.
And there's a charming short story that I'm sure a short novel many of you have read, Tony O'Kirger, perhaps you remember this.This is the problem of love in literature, love in the writer, love in the intellectual's heart.
Tonio was born in North Germany, and he loved his little friends there.And he was particularly susceptible to blue-eyed blondes.But he was a rather sensitive youth, and the girls he always got were the dark little ones who fell down when they danced.
He was destined to be a writer.Presently, he leaves his town, but he has dedicated his heart to the blue-eyed blondes, who simply symbolize here the simple, naively living human beings of the bourgeois existence.
He goes to the south of France, where he gets involved in the bohemian life there. And there's a interesting Russian girl named Lizaveta who becomes his principal mentor there.
And of course, as you know, in such circles, the vocabulary is one of complete disdain for the blue-eyed blondes, these squares.And Tonio feels just as uneasy there as he felt in the other context.
And so he calls himself the lost burger between two worlds.And finally, he writes a letter to Elisabetta when he has left that part of the world.And he says, the word can kill.
And it is the duty of the writer to find the right word and to name people. It's as though you were to ascend an arrow.But on the point of that arrow, you must have the balm, the sentiment of love.This he calls erotic irony.
And that comes out of this a very interesting principle.What is lovable in a person is not his perfection, but his faults.The perfect person is a bore. may be quite cold, does not evoke the heart.The eye and the mind can see the fault.
And in finding and naming the fault, you have named exactly that which is lovable about the person.And there's a way to do this so that one feels the love.But there comes a problem here, which Thomas Mann found out a little later.
As to say, those blue-eyed blondes turned out to be, from his point of view, quite monstrous.Now what do you do?Well, St.Paul tells us, love bears all things.This is a deep and terrible mystery.Love is as strong as life.
And when life produces things like that, you may go into battle against them.But the principle of love must not be lost.Otherwise, one loses one's own humanity.Only today, one of my students brought me a report on a short story by Hawthorne.
And in that, there was a sentence. from our own Puritan author, Hawthorne, that just epitomized this.And I said to myself, the God of love has given me this word with which to conclude my talk tonight.
And it was this, man must not disclaim, man must not disclaim his brotherhood even with the guiltiest.And with that, I'm going to close.
Love is, and will continue to be, alongside the mysteries of death, the greatest mystery of human existence. Love is not merely an experience of life.
It's a mystical experience, an experience not only of empowerment, but of raw commanding power, while at the same time, an experience of surrender, of powerlessness, of insufficiency and vulnerability. One of my favorite poets, W.H.
Auden, addressed this mystery of love with a marvelous combination of curiosity, tenderness, and humor in his poem, Oh, Tell Me the Truth About Love.And I want to take a moment just to recite this poem.It's really marvelous.
Some say love's a little boy, and some say it's a bird. Some say it makes the world go round, and some say that's absurd.And when I asked the man next door, who looked as if he knew, his wife got very cross indeed, and said it wouldn't do.
Does it look like a pair of pajamas, or the ham in a temperance hotel?Does its odor remind one of llama's, or has it a comforting smell?Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is? or soft as eiderdown fluff?Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
Oh, tell me the truth about love.Our history books refer to it in cryptic little notes.It's quite a common topic on the transatlantic boats.
I've found the subject mentioned in accounts of suicides and even seen it scribbled on the backs of railway guides. Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian or boom like a military band?Could one give a first-rate imitation on a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?Does it only like classical stuff?Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?Oh, tell me the truth about love.I looked inside the summer house.It wasn't ever there.
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead and Brighton's bracing air.I don't know what the blackbird sang or what the tulip said, but it wasn't in the chicken run or underneath the bed.Can it pull extraordinary faces?Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races or fiddling with pieces of string?Has it views of its own about money? Does it think patriotism enough?Are its stories vulgar but funny?Oh, tell me the truth about love.
When it comes, will it come without warning, just as I'm picking my nose?Will it knock on my door in the morning or tread in the bus on my toes?Will it come like a change in the weather?Will its greetings be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether? Oh, tell me the truth about love.Well, there's the work of the great Winston Hughes Auden.In our hearts, I think we want life to consist of clear rules and duties.
We would like life to be orthodox, a straightened notion, a comprehensible idea rendered comfortably livable by correct teaching. We're comforted by the stubbornly human idea that there's a right way, a correct way to live.
We expect life to be undeviating, linear, and progressive.But life isn't an orthodoxy, and love especially is never orthodox.In this particular case, I struggled to find an appropriate antonym to orthodoxy.
So I made one up by combining the Greek word for bent or crooked with the Greek word for teaching and came up with kleizodoxy.Life and love are kleizodoxies.While the orthodox is neat and tidy, kleizodoxy is bent, crooked, and messy.
I've mentioned in a recent podcast that the poet William Butler Yeats called love the crooked thing. It's hard to navigate.It's hard to hold on to.It's hard to understand and make sense of all that erotic irony.
For love to work, there has to be a surrender of the self, a surrender of the ego, at least to the degree that the annoyances, insults, and wounds to one's pride may be forgiven without continuing to harbor resentment, anger, or reprisal.
Eventually, I think, We all love badly to one degree or another.And that's why this idea of a noble heart, a gentle heart, is so very important in love.It's the noble and gentle heart that sees through pain and unrequited longing.
The noble heart is brave enough to go on even though it bears wounds and scars.These scars record the pains and delights of love. And the gentle heart can, as Campbell said, span the pits of hell to the highest seat of God.
Taken together, pain and delight create the condition of ecstasy. the ecstatic union of the lover with the beloved, of the moth with the flame.
It's important to remember that the moth doesn't simply lunge forth unabetted into a passively burning flame.The flame bends towards the moth with equal intensity.And the desire for self-immolation is in reality the desire for self-transcendence.
For that nanosecond of time, which is eternal in the experience of the moth and the flame.Both the moth and the flame become something else, something unimaginable, ineffable, something invisible in their union that transcends individual mothness
that transcends the single flame of which the ash or brief diminution of light and thermal energy are merely the physical evidence of the sacramental metaphysical union.
This ineffable state, this ecstasy, may well be the aim of love, and it certainly is its bliss.In the Christian myth, Jesus transcends himself through this same self-immolation, the same sacrifice to love, and that's the symbol of the crucifixion.
In psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud insisted that the death wish is a subconscious desire to return to an inorganic state, that the death instinct will lead an organism to seek activities that eventually cause its demise.
But I think the death instinct is, at its heart, a wish for self-transcendence, a wish to transcend the burden of being a human being and a sense of alienation from others and from the world itself.
But in the end, much to our dismay, most of us find that we cannot or
Perhaps it's more accurate to say we will not be immolated by love, that we're not able to be freed from this human, all too human self that is still inexorably rooted to the earth and unquestionably tied to a maddeningly personal and ultimately unsayable experience of our own singular perceptions and sensations.
Most of us are left with the bitter disappointment of the knowledge that ultimately, and in some fundamental ways, we remain unchanged by love.But there is, if we're very lucky.
a hidden treasure to be found in this failure to be transformed into something super or superhuman by love.And that, my friends, is no small consolation at all.
Love, this powerful affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined, the commitment, the intimacy that love allows us to experience becomes the ongoing reciprocal consolation for being the people that we inescapably are.
And yet, over time, love transforms us and turns us into the fullest expression of ourselves, the people we could not have become were we left in the echo chamber of our own singledom.
Now, immediately after discussing the moth's consuming passion for the flame, Professor Campbell tells us of what he calls a Persian tale of the first couple who grew from a reed.
Apparently they had a child and they loved it so much that they quite literally ate it up.Campbell humorously says that God reduced the degree of love by 90% so that ever after this we don't eat our own children.
But this isn't entirely strange, is it?We often hear another adult, one who may be beguilingly absorbed in a baby or even a puppy or a kitten, say, I just want to eat you up.
It's as if the creature we behold is so adorable that we simply cannot stand it.Looking into this a little more deeply, as I tend to do on these podcast episodes,
There's a disappointing poverty of scholarly articles addressing this very powerful sensation.And in the literature that does exist, it's called dimorphous emotion.
Examples of dimorphous emotion are those experiences such as laughing in a serious situation, perhaps like at a funeral or when facing something fearful, or crying when one is happy.
or quote-unquote cute aggression, which occurs when one feels the urge to squeeze, pinch, bite, or even eat someone or something they love.
Research in this regard tends to tie this to an evolutionary response and believe it's a way our brains cope with an overwhelming emotional overload.
In this case, the overload would be being flooded with and potentially paralyzed by positive emotions that leave us unable to care for or protect our children or ourselves.
The urge to squeeze or pinch could be a way of preventing us from getting lost in an oceanic feeling of love and bliss, while simultaneously simulating protective behavior without actually harming the object.
And all of this serves to remind us to be good parents.Now, personally, I think there are many more interesting things going on in this emotion and this experience than that.
Even if that theory is correct, the simulated protective behavior, the pinching, crushing, eating, is directed at the object of love, which seems to me to suggest that the love object is itself, unconsciously at least, assumed to be some kind of threat.
And of course it is.It is a threat to our own sense of individualism.Our sense that our fate is not tied to another, that we're free agents, that as separate, distinct individuals, we control the circumstances of our lives.
Indeed, Professor Campbell rightly remarks shortly thereafter that our sense of individuality is a secondary aspect of our constitution. The primary aspect, he says, is oneness.
And especially in relationships of love, we have the potential to go beyond ourselves and discover that we're not at all separate from one another.The emotion of love gives us the opportunity to experience the truth of that idea.
In many mythological rituals, there's often a symbolic, and sometimes even literal, consumption of the sacred object. This can be seen as a way to internalize or connect with the divine in a very personal, very intimate way.
Similarly, so-called cute aggression, which by the way, I find to be a silly and even dismissive term for something so potentially important, something that's so deeply symbolic, working in and through psyche,
Something that may extend even so far as to include types of homicides we typically call crimes of passion or the violence attached to mimetic desire based on rivalry.
And as it intensifies, it can escalate into even greater mass violence when the focus shifts from obtaining the desired object to defeating the rival. But I'll refrain from going down that rabbit hole in this particular commentary.
You may read more about that by looking into the work of Rene Girard.But back to the ritual consumption of the sacred figure.
This phenomenon might be a way of symbolically consuming or incorporating the perceived beauty, innocence, and perfection of the infant that we subjectively seem to lack, and while we're holding it aware of this lack, incorporate it into ourselves.
In other words, becoming one with it, being transformed by it, while at the same time transcending the limited, imperfect, suffering self that doesn't understand that we are, as Campbell said, of one being that is no being.
I always enjoy it when Joseph Campbell brings up the work of Thomas Mann in his lectures. This time he mentions Mann's novella, Tonio Kroger, and his constantly conflicting feelings.Now, Mann implies that
These inner conflicts have been with Tonio since his birth.He lets us know that Tonio's father was a northern German merchant and his mother was a quote-unquote southern named Consuelo and had artistic talent.Man's own mother was born in Brazil.
to a German father and a Brazilian mother, and bears a strong resemblance to Tanio's mother, just as Tanio himself bears a strong resemblance to Man.
In Tanio's remarkable observations and self-reflections, Man seems to be constructing his own theory of love.Central to this theory
is his notion of erotic irony, which Campbell describes in this lecture as the understanding that a person's faults are the very things that make them lovable.
But in his later work, The Magic Mountain, we find that Mann has the newly arrived Hans Kastorp attending one of the weekly lectures at the sanitarium given by the resident psychoanalyst, Dr. Krokowski, titled Love as a Force Conducive to Illness.
Dr. Krokowski insisted that repressed or, quote, unsanctioned love reappeared in the form of illness.Any symptom of illness was a masked form of love in action, unquote.Now here's erotic irony at work.Love inflicts wounds.
This heart's happiness brings pain.Perhaps one can imagine that an opening of the heart may also be experienced as a wound.
After all, physical wounds are quite literally openings, and wounds to the heart or the soul have the corresponding energetic signature of a lesion.
When we care for someone, we make ourselves distressingly vulnerable, and love always brings with it more than we expect, or oftentimes want. The nature of relationships is often homeopathic.The one I love has the power to heal me.
And if love can create that miracle, I understand that it's not a stretch to intuit that love also has the power to cause me grave suffering and may even kill me.
In fact, in notes from the underground, Dostoevsky writes, to love is to suffer, and there can be no love otherwise. I think I'd like to bring my commentary to an end by remembering a 13th century poet by the name of Immanuel of Rome.
He was a poet who wrote both in Hebrew and Italian.And he's the only author, the only Jewish author of his time, whose Italian language works have survived. And he wrote what I think might just be the last best word on love.
"'Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch, to love, to hope, to dream, and, oh, to lose.A thing for fools, this love, but a holy thing to love what death can touch.
For your life has lived in me, your laugh once lifted me, your word was a gift to me.To remember this brings painful joy.Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death can touch.
As always, I am so grateful for this opportunity, and I want to thank you for listening to this episode of Pathways with Joseph Campbell.Please visit jcf.org and check out our other offerings available on the MythMaker Podcast Network.
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If you're interested in learning more about my own work, please visit bradleyolsenphd.com and discover what's mything in your life. And please join me right here next month for another brand new episode of Pathways with Joseph Campbell.
Pathways with Joseph Campbell is a production of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the Mythmaker Podcast Network.It is produced by Tyler Lapkin, executive producer John Booker.Your host has been Bradley Olson.
Editing and audio services provided by Charles Mallet.All music exclusively provided by APM Music.For more podcasts and information about Joseph Campbell, please visit jcf.org.
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