aid for the despairing hero

After yesterday's post I wandered around a bit more, wondering what to do, what to read. In the past, when I have sunk to low levels of inspiration, I have turned to Joseph Campbell. So that's what I did again: I came down and pulled my old 1979 copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces from my bookshelf and decided I'd try reading that (again) over tea. Since I've already read the book so many times, I wasn't really expecting to find anything new.

I was wrong. It felt as though I'd never read it before. I started in, just reading the highlighted text (my own condensed version of the book). I was stirred by his opening remarks about myth and its centrality to the human experience. On page 16 I came to this paragraph:

The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death--the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be--if we are to experience long survival--a continuous "recurrence of birth" (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence is a snare.

Yes, I thought: anything set fast is death. By means of our own victories Nemesis works; the very things we work to establish choke us to death if we cling to them. I wasn't exactly sure what this had to do with me or my situation, but I sense a river of inspiration running within me somewhere deep.

On to the next paragraph:

Theseus, the hero-slayer of the Minotaur, entered Crete from without, as the symbol and arm of the rising civilization of the Greeks. That was the new and living thing. But it is possible also for the principle of regeneration to be sought and found within the very walls of the tyrant's empire itself. Professor Toynbee uses the terms "detachment" and "transfiguration" to describe the crisis by which the higher spiritual dimension is attained that makes possible the resumption of the work of creation. The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat from the desperations of the waste land to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within. We carry within ourselves all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life. The first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i.e., give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C. G. Jung has called "the archetypal images."

Notice the phrase in there, "the crisis by which the higher spiritual dimension is attained that makes possible the resumption of the work of creation"? That sent a jolt through me. What am I concerned with now but the resumption of the work of creation? Have I not said that I feel I'm in crisis? Here it is, spelled out.

My hiatus is a retreat to the causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside.

I'll run with this, I thought this morning. I opened a document in a different folder, labeled Lifewriting, titled "Theme Notes". I pasted in the 2 Campbell paragraphs and started writing thoughts about my own life: my past, my development, finding the moments when my mind and life changed direction. This is actually a project I've been going at, off and on, for several years. I intend to write stories about my life, but I'm taking my time discovering how to approach it.

The typing flowed. Things I've been thinking about, looking back over my life, I wrote down. I was writing what I wanted to write, so it went smoothly. A sample selection:

The "retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche" was exactly the meaning of "The Hermit". The story was of the character's choosing of an unconventional life; he quit school. That was my manifesto. The Tarot symbolism I used and embraced as part of a turning away from rational causality and conventional thinking generally.

What were the forces in tension leading up to that choice? What was the nature of the crisis?

And so on.

Am I saying that I'm a hero? Yes. We all are, more or less. But the artist has a greater obligation to live as a hero, and must equip himself with the hero's qualities: integrity and courage. Only a few manage to do that fully. Joseph Campbell was one, and his work was the boon brought back to revitalize humanity, to help those of us lying famished and hopeless in the waste land.

I see my struggle in a different light, and my hiatus especially. I'll let the creative work take its own course.