Joseph Campbell

[mnaz]

I found a room down in the desert,
on a naked sunspot where the book fell open,
nearly consumed in his princesses and knights,
swamp cooler rhythms and wasted bearings,
and rumors of his pen, dust storm to ink,
where I once read something like...

"The second law is survival.
The first is that you and the other are one.
The world is perfect; it's always been a mess.
To settle all problems is barking up the wrong tree.
Our job is to straighten out our own lives,
and awe is what moves us forward".

[stilltrucking]

comforting

[mnaz]

thanks Jack... was just reading JC and remembering that old desert lair where I first read the book, and that heat and that wobbly swamp cooler on its last legs....

[Arcadia]

the mitologist? (I have the feeling that I asked you that before..!)

[e_dog]

Pansy New Ager designed to get no one to think just folla yer bliss. Charles Manson without the drugs, fascism and massacres.

[mnaz]

better folla yer bliss than sell the farm to "thou shalt", no?...

that's only part of it anyway. he did that "mono-myth" theory and all, broke down the religions, etc...

JC prolly only a kinda "starting point", but i could think of worse ones.
awww, just reminiscing anyway....

(quotes paraphrased a bit). What was the name of that place, that road?.... I thought I wrote 'em all down....

[Totenkopf]

Charles Manson without the drugs, fascism and massacres.

Yeah Campbell, merely a jungian-hack, can't quite compare to Manson-Krenwinkle-style Praxis.

Haff a Holly Jolly Nichtmuss

[mnaz]

Yesss.... and a jungian-hack who pissed off a lot of serious Bible thumpers, let it be known. Seems he was fond of understanding religious symbols not as historical facts but rather as mythological images, whereby those symbols could perhaps take on deeper and more believable meanings...

And what any of this has to do with Mansonology remains a bit of a mystery to me, I confess.

[Totenkopf]

Most humans go through a myth-fetish stage methinks. I don't detest Campbell's writing --or that of Jung or Freud--as much as some, uh, e-marxists might. Bulfinch will do for a lot of that however, at least for moi. Or maybe a few passages from the Dhammapada...................

But I do understand some of the backlash against the new age jive: there was a tendency in the 70s-80s movement (Castaneda also comes to mind) to gloss over the real terrors and atrocities of the 60s (like Nam--or Manson, on a much smaller scale) if not the 20th century.

[mnaz]

Wasn't really thinking of any "New Age" angle. Interesting... I guess one has no real control over the labels that others may come to apply to one's scholarship. To me "New Age" ain't exactly the point here, well except if it may point out that religious symbology taken as concrete and historical ain't exactly the point ... or is it?!?... Well, the Bible thumpers certainly seem to think so. Antichrist and Armageddon, anyone?

Interesting that the horrific specter of the 20th Century keeps injecting itself into these types of conversations, but then that may be the point of all the searching-- to find an alternative, no? Perhaps it's not so much a "glossing over" as an attempt to expose.

[e_dog]

or attempt t' escape.
from real'ty.

Campbells's hero-worship with a thousand names. sounds awful new age ta me.

folla yer bliss.

rama rama om.

[stilltrucking]

good poem mnaz, it was comforting to me
but if I had a college degree it would have probably meant less to me.
I am not sure of what the mythology of the twentieth century will be yet.
I am sure some see it. The poets among us probably.

I would think that the accademics, the educators, would be highly critical of Campbell cause he was largely self educated, they would have to shoot him down cause he is a what ronald reagan was to the air controllers, a union buster.

I want to go back to college and get my degree, I don't want to be a paperback writer, I want to be a Po Mo pissant.


only thing I really know by him is The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers.

The chapter on Love and The Goddess
I used to live in NashvilleI
Some people call it guitar town, or music city
But it is also aka The Athens of The South.
Maybe because of all the universities there.
Or maybe because of the full size replica of the Parthenon
Built in the thirties by Rosevelt's WPA.
Forty foot tall statue of Athena
She sprung fully armed from her daddy's forehead
I think he had eaten her the week before because Zeus knew she was going to be a pain in the ass.

Athena made war so lovely
Men could hardly resist
The non phallic masculine

No final answers
no final solutions
just me howling at the moon

I am still googling for something that, anything that, Joe wrote about the holocaust. Surely there must be some metaphor for that.

I been thinking about grammar a lot lately, i know more about the syntax of hypertext markup language than I do about English.[/b]

I always thought I was born to follow
so why do people call me still Non sequituring?

[mnaz]

Campbell as New Age.... who knew? Eastern yes, but "New Age"? Dunno. He flashed onto my radar when I read some of his blunt criticism of religion for trying to concretize and historicize its central metaphors and symbology. He criticized Judaism, the notion of a "chosen people"-- perhaps the source of "anti-Semitism" charges leveled at JC? But he went after all monotheistic religions, not only the Jewish one, so go figure. Seems not an unworthy pursuit to me, especially in light of the "crusade" mentality pervading so much of our discourse and policy of late....

[e_dog]

only religion to go after is the church of Capitaliism.

worship the Dollar, praised be its greenity.

Dick Cheney is a minion of the Devil. Th'Axis o' Evil is Halliburton, Blackwater n the Pentagon.

[stilltrucking]

Joe did have that bit about star wars, I think he was looking there for a new mythology. That does sound a bit Jungian, you know the little book about UFO’s As a New Religion.

Speaking of star wars when the Saudi Prince or King visited Buckingham palace about a month ago the British Military band started playing Darth Vader’s theme song I forget what it is called, The Evil Empire National Anthem? According to the BBC they just liked the tune; the band was not making a political statement.

Anyhow, yes it is that evil capitalistic in god almighty dollar we trust that is to blame. Not the struggle against human nature itself.

Fight back covert your money to rubles.

Let me take you on a Sea Cruise baby, I can show the value of a planed socialist economy, bring your beach towel to the Aral sea.





When you got your filthy dollars converted to nice clean rubles, don’t forget that: Rubles Are a Girl’s Best Friend

Rubles Are a Girl’s Best Friend


By NATASHA SINGER
Published: December 9, 2007


MOSCOW

AMERICANS who love celebrities follow the escapades of Lindsay Lohan and Angelina Jolie. The British consume themselves with the romantic lives of their royals. But in Moscow, where raw political power and big money hold sway, it is the children and grandchildren of politicians and oligarchs whose love lives, fashion tastes and socializing are widely chronicled and followed.

They are women like Dasha Zhukova, 26, a doe-eyed brunette, who is the daughter of a Russian tycoon and reportedly the girlfriend of another, Roman Abramovich, 40, the billionaire who owns the Chelsea soccer club in London. She might turn up at a reception at Spaso House, the residence of the American ambassador here, or in Los Angeles with Mr. Abramovich to watch his team play David Beckham’s.

And they are women like the sisters known as “the Gorbachev girls,” Anastasia and Ksenia Virganskaya, 20 and 28 respectively, who are granddaughters of Mikhail Gorbachev and who recently appeared at a party here with Donatella Versace in gowns chosen by the designer.
These and other well-connected beauties are the It Girls of Moscow, part of a transnational jet set that shows up from Monaco to Ascot.

Entertainment programs on Russian television interview them. Local glossy magazines register their every heartbreak and hemline. And beginning next year, Tatler, the British society magazine, plans to start publishing its first foreign edition here, to focus on Russian socialites who, like Paris Hilton in the West, influence the handbags, the lap dogs and the taste in boyfriends to which other trend-conscious people aspire.

“We don’t have our own Angelina Jolie or our Britney Spears with the resources to wear fancy clothes,” said Ksenia Chilingarova, a poet and magazine editor. Ms. Chilingarova, 25, is an It Girl herself, the daughter of Artur Chilingarov, a deputy speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament and a polar explorer. (He gained international notoriety last summer for claiming a chunk of seabed under the North Pole for Russia.)

AT 11 a.m. on a recent Friday, Ms. Chilingarova was dressed in evening attire — a common sight in Moscow because constant traffic jams prevent people from going home to change at the end of the day — for a party that night to be given by the crystal purveyor Nadia Swarovski. “The reality is that the children of famous people are so popular because they have the money to dress up, wear jewelry, travel to Paris and London and be photographed doing it,” Ms. Chilingarova said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/fashion/09moscow.html