The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [128]
CAMPBELL: This is why clowns and clown religions are helpful. Germanic and Celtic myths are full of clown figures, really grotesque deities. This makes the point, I am not the ultimate image, I am transparent to something. Look through me, through my funny form.
MOYERS: There’s a wonderful story in some African tradition of the god who’s walking down the road wearing a hat that is colored red on one side and blue on the other side. When the farmers in the field go into the village in the evening, they say, “Did you see that god with the blue hat?” And the others say, “No, no, he had a red hat on.” And they get into a fight.
CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s the Nigerian trickster god, Edshu. He makes it even worse by first walking in one direction and then turning around and turning his hat around, too, so that again it will be red or blue. Then when these two chaps get into a fight and are brought before the king for judgment, this trickster god appears, and he says, “It’s my fault, I did it, and I meant to do it. Spreading strife is my greatest joy.”
MOYERS: There’s a truth in that.
CAMPBELL: There sure is. Heraclitus said strife is the creator of all great things. Something like that may be implicit in this symbolic trickster idea. In our tradition, the serpent in the Garden did the job. Just when everything was fixed and fine, he threw an apple into the picture.
No matter what the system of thought you may have, it can’t possibly include boundless life. When you think everything is just that way, the trickster arrives, and it all blows, and you get change and becoming again.
MOYERS: I notice when you tell these stories, Joe, you tell them with humor. You always seem to enjoy them, even when they’re about odd and cruel things.
CAMPBELL: A key difference between mythology and our Judeo-Christian religion is that the imagery of mythology is rendered with humor. You realize that the image is symbolic of something. You’re at a distance from it. But in our religion, everything is prosaic, and very, very serious. You can’t fool around with Yahweh.
MOYERS: How do you explain what the psychologist Maslow called “peak experiences” and what James Joyce called “epiphanies”?
CAMPBELL: Well, they are not quite the same. The peak experience refers to actual moments of your life when you experience your relationship to the harmony of being. My own peak experiences, the ones that I knew were peak experiences after I had them, all came in athletics.
MOYERS: Which was the Everest of your experience?
CAMPBELL: When I was running at Columbia, I ran a couple of races that were just beautiful. During the second race, I knew I was going to win even though there was no reason for me to know this, because I was touched off as anchor in the relay with the leading runner thirty yards ahead of me. But I just knew, and it was my peak experience. Nobody could beat me that day. That’s being in full form and really knowing it. I don’t think I have ever done anything in my life as competently as I ran those two races—it was the experience of really being at my full and doing a perfect job.
MOYERS: Not all peak experiences are physical.
CAMPBELL: No, there are other kinds of peak experiences. But those were the ones that come to my mind when I think about peak experiences.
MOYERS: What about James Joyce’s epiphanies?
CAMPBELL: Now, that’s something else. Joyce’s formula for the aesthetic experience is that it does not move you to want to possess the object. A work of art that moves you to possess the object depicted, he calls pornography. Nor does the aesthetic experience move you to criticize and reject the object—such art he calls didactic, or social criticism in art. The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object. Joyce says that you put a frame around it and see it first as one thing, and that, in seeing it as one thing, you then become aware of the relationship of part to part, each part to the whole, and the whole to each of its parts. This is the essential, aesthetic factor—rhythm, the harmonious rhythm of relationships.