The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [112]
CAMPBELL: That was Bernard Shaw’s idea, and really Dante’s idea, also. The punishment in hell is that you have for eternity that which you thought you wanted on earth.
MOYERS: Tristan wanted his love, he wanted his bliss, and he was willing to suffer for it.
CAMPBELL: Yes. But then William Blake says in his wonderful series of aphorisms The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “As I was walking among the fires of hell … which to angels look like torment”—that is to say, for the people who are there, who are not angels, it’s not the fire of pain, it’s the fire of delight.
MOYERS: I remember in Dante’s Inferno, as Dante is looking on the great lovers of history in hell, he sees Helen, and he sees Cleopatra, and he sees Tristan. What’s the significance of that?
CAMPBELL: Dante is taking the Church’s attitude that this is hell, and that they’re suffering there. Remember, he sees the two young lovers from the Italy of his day, Paolo and Francesca. Francesca had a love affair with Paolo, the brother of her husband. And Dante, like a social scientist, says, “Darling, how did this happen? What brought this about?” And then come the most famous lines in Dante. Francesca says that Paolo and she were sitting under a tree in the garden reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. “And when we read of their first kiss, we looked at each other and read no more in the book that day.” And that was the beginning of their fall.
That this wonderful experience should be condemned as a sin is the thing the troubadour just says no to. Love is the meaning of life—it is the high point of life.
MOYERS: Is that what Wagner meant in his great opera on Tristan and Isolde, when he said, “In this world let me have my world, to be damned with it or to be saved”?
CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s exactly what Tristan said.
MOYERS: Meaning, I want my love, I want my life.
CAMPBELL: This is my life, yes. And I’m willing to take any kind of pain for it.
MOYERS: And this took a courage, didn’t it?
CAMPBELL: Doesn’t it? Even to think of it.
MOYERS: “Doesn’t it”—you put it in the present tense.
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: Even now?
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: You have said that the point of all these pioneers in love is that they decided to be the author and means of their own self-fulfillment, that the realization of love is to be nature’s noblest work, and that they were going to take their wisdom from their own experience and not from dogma, politics, or any current concepts of social good. And is this the beginning of the romantic idea of the Western individual taking matters into his or her own hands?
CAMPBELL: Absolutely. You can see examples in Oriental stories of this kind of thing, but it did not become a social system. It has now become the ideal of love in the Western world.
MOYERS: Love from one’s own experience, taking one’s own experience as the source of wisdom?
CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s the individual. The best part of the Western tradition has included a recognition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.
MOYERS: But what happens to institutions—to universities, to corporations, to churches, to the political institutions of our society—if we all just run off and follow our love? Isn’t there a tension in this? Individual versus society? There has to be some legitimate point beyond which individual intuition, the individual libido, the individual desire, the individual love, the individual impulse to do what you want to do must be restrained—otherwise, you’d have tumult and anarchy, and no institution could survive. Are you really saying that we should follow our bliss, follow our love, wherever it leads?
CAMPBELL: Well, you’ve got to use your head. They say, you know, a narrow path is a very dangerous path—the razor’s edge.
MOYERS: So the head and the heart should not be at war?
CAMPBELL: No, they should not. They should be in cooperation. The head should