Joseph Campbell was the world’s foremost mythologist. Early in his long life, he combined Sir James George Frazer’s discovery that strikingly similar motifs show up in the folktales of all the world’s cultures, with Carl Jung’s notion that myths are metaphors created to illuminate human experience. Thus, doubly inspired, Campbell became a maverick scholar, his books and lectures often scorned by academicians but adored by poets, painters, and enlightened psychoanalysts. His genius was not so much in his exhaustive scholarship, however, as in his intuitive recognition of the importance and relevance of myth to every living soul.
If “the proper study of man is man,” then mythology is the lens through which man is properly examined. Yet most of us, including the ostensibly well-educated, wouldn’t know a myth from a Pentagon press release. We’ve been taught to equate “myth” with “lie.”
In actuality, myths are neither fiction nor history. Nor are most myths—and this will surprise some people—an amalgamation of fiction and history. Rather, a myth is something that never happened but is always happening. Myths are the plots of the psyche. They are ongoing, symbolic dramatizations of the inner life of the species, external metaphors for internal events.
As Campbell used to say, myths come from the same place dreams come from. But because they’re more coherent than dreams, more linear and refined, they are even more instructive. A myth is the song of the universe, a song that, if accurately perceived, explains the universe and our often confusing place in it.
It is only when it is allowed to crystallize into “history” that a myth becomes useless—and possibly dangerous. For example, when the story of the resurrection of Jesus is read as a symbol for the spiritual rebirth of the individual, it remains alive and can continually resonate in a vital, inspirational way in the modern psyche. But when the resurrection is viewed as historical fact, an archival event that occurred once and only once, some two thousand years ago, then its resonance cannot help but flag. It may proffer some vague hope for our own immortality, but to our deepest consciousness it’s no longer transformative or even very accessible on an everyday basis. The self-renewing model has atrophied into second-hand memory and dogma, a dogma that the fearful, the uninformed, and the emotionally troubled feel a need to defend with violent action.
The potential for violence is especially high when humanity stands, as it does today, at a crossroads of myth and religio-political fanaticism. In twelve years we’ll enter a new millennium. On the millennial threshold, hordes of overly susceptible people tend to become swept up in feverish visions of “the end of the world.” The desire for a fresh start, for an end to worry, work, and personal responsibility, mixes with mad prophecy and with what author Eleanor Munro has called “faith in the Pilgrim Lord’s millennial return,” to produce volatile psychological anticipation.
In the past, humankind on the whole has successfully weathered those storms, but whenever a segment has failed to comprehend the essentially symbolic nature of apocalypse (as in Judea at the waning of the last millennium BC), genocide has resulted. Prophecy self-fulfilled. Munro asks the chilling question, “How far does this myth still affect political destiny, by implanting structures in the minds of millions that must be fulfilled in historic time?”
In other words, if we expect and/or secretly covet Doomsday, we can make it happen. Those strange bedfellows, the rigid ignoramuses of the religious right and the comet-chasing, earthquake-fancying, harmonic-convergence-befuddled innocents of the New Age, share a misinterpretation of eschatological legend that is downright scary in intensity and scope. In its passionate if misguided longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that characterize life, it strikes me as a death wish on a global scale—but one that could be reversed with a basic understanding of mythology.
The Moyers–Campbell series does not deal with the millennialism issue in any direct way, don’t let me mislead you, but by simply reintroducing us to the mythic underpinnings of our culture and consciousness, it can help yank us from the jaws of the dragon and set us down once more in the magnificent labyrinth whose twists and turns it is our sacred privilege to go on negotiating for millennia still to come.
In Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, you will hear extraordinary stories told by a master storyteller, and you will see temples, art objects, and ceremonies you may have never seen before, as well as the antics of familiar heroes and heroines: astronauts, artists, actors, and athletes. Which is to say, the programs are entertaining as well as edifying.
They do tend to be visually static at times. It’s the nature of the medium. And while Moyers and Campbell play off one another fairly well, they’re not Wally Shawn and André Gregory. Nevertheless, there’re moments when Moyers, resembling a puckish George Bush, does seem to be having his mind blown during a scene from My Dinner With Joe. As interviews go, these are more conversational, less confrontational than many, but a subtly crisp dynamic does emerge.
What does not quite emerge is Campbell’s true personality. Oh, we get his twinkle, his halting eloquence, his robust but ever courtly assertiveness (a former world-class runner, he provides all aspiring octogenarians with an image to shoot for), but his private dimensions are left draped in opaque silks.
Well, so what? Perhaps we don’t need to know that Campbell was a dignified neo-Victorian gentleman, minus any trace of the sexual hang-ups associated with the type. Or that for the last forty years of his life he refused to read a newspaper and did not attend a motion picture until the day before his eightieth birthday when he sat through the entire Star Wars trilogy, one picture after the other. Or that socially he was barely to the left of William F. Buckley, harboring a withering contempt for the clamorings and phobias of the mindless masses. (Upon our return from Mexico, he vowed he’d never again set foot South of the Border: it was just too funky for him, too awash in lurid emotions.) He could appear haughty at times, but at his age and with his knowledge and accomplishments, he may be excused for not suffering fools gladly.
(And speaking of fools, you may have heard that there are thought police from our academic left who would tar the myth master with the anti-Semitic brush. This is hogwash. Far from attacking Jews, Campbell, an honest, uncompromising scholar, simply made the observation—non-arbitrarily and in proper context—that the ancient Hebrews failed to establish a high culture as did, for example, the Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, Romans, Aztec, Inca, et al.; a nomadic people, they produced no great art, architecture, science, or centers of learning. What the Hebrews did do was engender, embellish, codify, and amplify Levantine legend, legend that still impacts the modern world, legend that Campbell spent a lifetime interpreting, if not always to the satisfaction of the sanctimonious.)
Despite his disappointment in contemporary humanity, however, Campbell maintained an enormous, contagious enthusiasm for what he called “the rapture of being alive.” That enthusiasm flares in the PBS series like a bonfire in a Druid glade. In fact, Campbell insisted that the Moyers interviews were not about meaning but experience, an experience of life in its whole geometric array of facets and phases.
So you watch this enlightening series, beginning to end. And after the final episode, you turn off your TV set. Moments later, a woodsman’s ax with blue eyes and a mossy handle flies in your bedroom window. Don’t be alarmed. True, it may want to marry you. On the other hand, it may have dropped by to invite you to the coronation of the Ant King. Accept, in either case. After all, as Joseph Campbell was fond of pointing out, “The myth is you.”
Seattle Weekly, 1988
Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg
Play for us, you big wild gypsy girl, you who look as if you might have spent the morning digging potatoes on the steppes of Russia; you who surely galloped in on a snorting mare, bareback or standing in the saddle; you whose chicory tresses reek of bonfire and jasmine; you who traded a dagger for a bow: grab your violin as if it were a stolen chicken, roll your perpetually startled eyes at it, scold it with
that split beet dumpling you call a mouth; fidget, fuss, flounce, flick, fume—and fiddle: fiddle us through the roof, fiddle us over the moon, higher than rock ’n’ roll can fly; saw those strings as if they were the log of the century, fill the hall with the ozone of your passion; play Mendelssohn for us, play Brahms and Bruch; get them drunk, dance with them, wound them, and then nurse their wounds, like the eternal female that you are; play until the cherries burst in the orchard, play until wolves chase their tails in the tearooms; play until we forget how we long to tumble with you in the flower beds under Chekhov’s window; play, you big wild gypsy girl, until beauty and wildness and longing are one.
Esquire, 1989
The Genius Waitress
Of the genius waitress, I now sing.
Of hidden knowledge, buried ambition, and secret sonnets scribbled on cocktail napkins; of aching arches, ranting cooks, condescending patrons, and eyes diverted from ancient Greece to ancient grease; of burns and pinches and savvy and spunk; of a uniquely American woman living a uniquely American compromise, I sing. I sing of the genius waitress.
Okay, okay, she’s probably not really a genius. But she is well-educated. She has a degree in Sanskrit, ethnoastronomy, Icelandic musicology, or something equally valued in the contemporary marketplace. Even if she could find work in her chosen field, it wouldn’t pay beans—so she slings them instead. (The genius waitress is not to be confused with the aspiring-actress waitress, so prevalent in Manhattan and Los Angeles and so different from her sister in temperament and I.Q.)
As a type, the genius waitress is sweet and sassy, funny and smart; young, underestimated, fatalistic, weary, cheery (not happy, cheerful: there’s a difference and she understands it), a tad bohemian, often borderline alcoholic, frequently pretty (though her hair reeks of kitchen and bar); as independent as a cave bear (though ever hopeful of “true love”) and, above all, genuine.
Covertly sentimental, she fusses over toddlers and old folks, yet only fear of unemployment prevents her from handing an obnoxious customer his testicles with his bill.
She doesn’t mind a little good-natured flirting, and if you flirt with verve and wit, she may flirt back. Never, however, never try to impress her with your résumé. Her tolerance for pretentious Yuppies ends with her shift, sometimes earlier. She reads men like a menu and always knows when she’s being offered leftovers or an artificially inflated soufflé.
Should you ever be lucky enough to be taken home by her to that studio apartment with the jerry-built bookshelves and Frida Kahlo posters, you will discover that whereas in the public dining room she is merely as proficient as she needs to be, in the private bedroom she is blue gourmet virtuoso. Five stars and counting! Afterward, you can discuss chaos theory or the triple aspects of the mother goddess in universal art forms—while you massage her swollen feet.
Eventually, she leaves food service for graduate school or marriage, but unless she wins a grant or a fair divorce settlement, chances are she’ll be back, a few years down the line, reciting the daily specials with her own special mixture of warmth and ennui.
Erudite emissary of eggs over easy, polymath purveyor of polenta and prawns, articulate angel of apple pie, the genius waitress is on duty right now in hundreds of U.S. restaurants, smile at the ready, sauce on the side. So brush up on your Schopenhauer, place your order—and tip, mister, tip. She deserves a break today.
Of her, I sing.
Playboy, 1991
Ray Kroc
If cows watched horror movies, everybody knows who their favorite monster would be.
Imagine that it’s Friday midnight down on the farm and the Guernseys and the Angus are gathered around the barnyard TV, spellbound by the rerun of that classic bovine chiller, Teats Up, when suddenly the lights flicker, organ music swells, and onto the screen ambles a chesty, cherubic octogenarian in a business suit, swinging a cleaver and flashing a mystic ring with symbolic golden arches on it, and, oh, a terrified moo rises from the herd and there is much trembling of udder and tail. At that moment, a little bullock in the back is heard to ask, “Mommy, on Halloween can I go as Ray Kroc?”
To cattle, Ray Kroc is the franchise Frankenstein, the Hitler behind a Hereford holocaust, a fiend who has sent about 550,000 of their relatives to the grinder, grinning all the while and encouraging his henchmen with his macabre credo, “Remember, ten patties to the pound!”
It’s scant comfort to the cows that Kroc has also doomed fifty million cucumbers to be pickled and chopped, or that he’s boiled more than half a billion potatoes in oil. Apparently, potatoes and cukes don’t mind. They’re said to like being processed. It’s their idea of emancipation.
Botanists, especially if they’re Catholic, might argue that since cucumbers are, in fact, the ovaries of the cucumber plant, they can be fulfilled only through reproduction, but the truth is, many such vegetables are sick and tired of being regarded as sex objects and baby factories; they want to break out of the mold, to travel and meet people and be appreciated for themselves, and Kroc gives them that opportunity. If pickles wore sandals, Ray Kroc would be Moses. But that’s another story.
Whether one chooses to mourn with the meats or rejoice with the veggies is a religious decision and nobody’s business but one’s own. The point here is not that Kroc has wiped out considerable fauna and flora, nor that he’s become thunderously wealthy in the process, but that the manner in which he merchandises his victims’ remains has transformed the United States of America.
Kroc, of course, is the man behind McDonald’s. He was a middle-aged milkshake-machine salesman out of Chicago when, in 1954, he called on an account in San Bernardino and saw the future. Its name was fast foods.
Curious about how a little California drive-in could keep eight of his Multi-mixers running continuously, Kroc found a restaurant stripped down to the minimum in service and menu, a precision shop turning out fries, beverages, and fifteen-cent hamburgers on an assembly line. The brainchild of the McDonald boys, Mac and Dick, it combined speed, simplicity, and edibility to a degree that made Kroc giddy, especially when the brothers readily agreed to sell him the rights for national development. It was as if Henry Ford had married Mom’s Apple Pie and adopted Ray as their son and heir.
Mac and Dick McDonald, never overly ambitious, were more of a hindrance than a help, but Kroc, an energetic dreamer, built a $7.8 billion empire of 7,400 drive-ins and somewhere along the way named the Big Mac double burger after one of the brothers. (Since these are “family” restaurants, it’s easy to understand why it wasn’t named for the other one.)
Modern America is dominated—environmentally, culturally, and psychologically—by freeways, and it has been McDonald’s and its imitators (Go Burger King! Go Wendy’s! Go Jack in the Box!) that have nurtured our freeway consciousness and allowed it to bloom. In the past, hungry motorists could look through their windshields and pick and choose from a glorious ongoing lineup of diners, truck stops, and barbecue pits, but such an array of roadside attractions would defeat the purpose of a freeway, as would the time and trouble involved if a driver had to exit at random and search an unfamiliar neighborhood for the unfamiliar restaurant that might suit his or her schedule, pocketbook, and taste.
Thanks to Kroc, the migrating masses simply aim their protruding stomachs at the landmark arches, sinuous of form and sunny of hue, and by the first belch they’re back on the road, fast fed and very nearly serene, which is to say, no cashier has cheated them; no maître d’ has insulted them; no temperamental chef, attractive waitress, or intriguing flavor has delayed them; they’ve neither gagged on a greasy spoon nor tripped over an x in a oie roti aux pruneaux. With McDonald’s, they’re secure.
That’s the fly in the Egg McMuffin. Rather, the fly is that there never is a fly in an Egg McMuffin. The human spirit requires surprise, variety, and risk in order to enlarge itself. Imagination feeds on novelty. As imagination emaciates, options diminish; the fewer our options, the more bleak our prospects and the greater our
susceptibility to controls. The wedding of high technology and food service has produced a robot cuisine, a totalitarian burger, the standardized sustenance of a Brave New World.
McDonald’s not only cooks with computers, assuring that every tiny French fry is identical in color, texture, and temperature, but its “specially designed dispensers” see to it that the Big Mac you may scarf today in Seattle has exactly the same amount of “special sauces” on it as the one your cousin gobbled last month near Detroit. If that extreme of uniformity doesn’t ring your alarm, you’ve already half-moved into the B. F. Skinner anthill.
And yet… We still live in a pluralistic society, where there are probably more than enough French-cooking classes and Mexican fusion sushi bars to satisfy the educated palate and the adventurous tongue. Moreover, “gourmet” burger chains, such as the Red Robin and Hamburger Hamlet, are on the rise.
So what if democracy tends to sanctify mediocrity and McDonald’s represents mediocrity at its zenith, its most sublime? Fast foods are perfectly suited for America, for a population on the move; a fluid, informal people, unburdened by a pretension or tradition; a sweetly vulgar race, undermined by its own brash naïveté rather than by Asian stoicism or European angst. Today there are McDonald’s in Tokyo and Vienna, but they don’t blend in and never will. Here, they are at the heart of the matter, reductive kitchens for a classless culture that hasn’t time to dally on its way to the next rainbow’s end.