A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)

by Joseph Campbell

  The mystery of art is why one rhythm fixes you in esthetic arrest and another doesn’t. Music is nothing if not rhythm. Rhythm is the instrument of art. Music is the organization, not only of rhythm, but of scale and of the notes played against each other: quarter notes, half notes, and so forth. If you are playing a C-Major chord and move to a dominant Seventh, that’s an organization of the relationship of one note to another. It is really space.

  It’s wonderful to see a jazz group improvise: when five or six musicians are really tuned in to each other, it’s all the same rhythm, and they can’t go wrong, even though they never did it that way before.

  The Pygmy people have little pipes that each sound one note, and a bunch of them sit around, each piping one note, and when they get going, something darling comes out: like birds, like forest noises.

  Indian music never has a beginning and never has an end. The music represents a plane of consciousness and is going on all the time. When you go to a concert, it’s the strangest event. They’re fooling around with the instruments, tuning and zinging them, and this may go on for a half hour. Then presently they’re playing. It is as though the music were going on continuously, and the musicians simply dip down, pick it up, play with it for a while, and then leave it. It is altogether different from western music: there is not only no tension or release, but no beginning and no end. It’s always there.

  There’s a relationship between musical organization and architectural organization. All architecture is an organization in space. It happens to have a function that is also related to space. The Century Club in New York was built by Sanford White, an important architect, around the end of the nineteenth century. The building is an historical monument. The lounge floor is very harmonizing: a room so proportioned that it puts you at peace. But why this happens is mysterious.

  The only answer I can think of is Cezanne’s: “Art is a harmony parallel to nature.” There are, of course, two natures involved: Nature, the world out there, and the world of nature within. That is to say, when it is the artist’s intention is to arrange “a harmony parallel to nature”—and any other intention probably involves didactics or pornography—then that harmony resonates with something inside you, fixes you in esthetic arrest, and you have that big “a-ha!” experience. So it is the function of art to open the consumable things of the tangible, visible world, so that the radiance—the same radiance that’s within you—shines through them.

  I think one feels this harmony most powerfully in Japan, where your own nature is constantly invoked, and you don’t know where Nature ends and art begins. When a garden is constructed, the man who composes it tells his son when to bend each branch: “When it grows out to here, bend it”—so that it looks like Nature. It is art: Nature that has been harmonized with the nature within. That harmony is the first stage of this rhythm. This is basic. Abstract art, any kind of art, has to be thought of in terms of this rhythm. Choosing what verse form you are going to use in poetry in relation to what it is you are going to say, the echoing of one consonant against another: it is all rhythm, to be conceived of in terms of sensuous rhythmic effects that touch you. Certain rhythms render certain responses.

  And the two kinetic movements that block this harmonious rhythm are exactly the two temptations of the Buddha: desire, which draws you to possess the object, and loathing or fear, which turns you away from it. When you move to possess or to turn away from an object, you are reacting to the world of delusory appeals and terrors that māyā has projected. And esthetic arrest, the condition of the heart or spirit or whatever not being moved by desire or fear, is precisely the counter-part of the experience of the Buddha under the tree of the immovable spot. It is the immovable spot. It is a psychological stasis with respect to your relationships to the forms of the world around you.

  The biological urges to enjoy and to master (with their opposites, to loathe and to fear), as well as the social urge to evaluate (as good or evil, true or false), simply drop away, and a rapture in sheer experience supervenes, in which self-loss and elevation are the same. Such an impact is “beyond words;” for it is not such as can be explained by a reference to anything else. The mind is released—for a moment, for a day, or per-haps forever—from those anxieties to enjoy, to win, or to be correct which spring from the net of nerves in which men are entangled. Ego dissolved, there is nothing in the net but life—which is everywhere and forever. The Zen masters of China and Japan have called this state the state of “no-mind.” The classical Indian terms are mokṣa, “release,” bodhi, “enlightenment,” and nirvāṇa, “transcendence of the winds of passion.” Joyce speaks of “the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure,”138 when the clear radiance of the esthetic image is apprehended by the mind, which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony. “The mind,” he says, “in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal.”139

  So the esthetic vehicle, the instrument of the rhythm of beauty that induces esthetic arrest, is the revealing power of māyā.

  One application of the artist’s craft is in doing something like making a turkey dinner, another is in creating art that is of no use whatsoever except esthetically. When I use the word “art,” it has to do with “divinely superfluous beauty” and esthetic arrest. There’s no esthetic arrest in eating a turkey. That’s life in action, doing what it has to do, namely eating some-thing that’s been killed, putting it into your system. It’s totally different from esthetic arrest and recognizing the radiance. Are you going to look at the object or eat it? Eating the object is related to desire and loathing.

  The distinction between the two has to do with whether it is the projecting power of māyā or the revealing power that is present when you look at the object. It’s very important to make a clear distinction between the two. If you’re concerned with prospering or failing with the object, eating or not eating it, your perspective involves desire and loathing, the temptations of the Buddha, the projecting power of māyā.

  This bringing together of Joyce’s esthetic theory with the māyā idea was a wonderful illumination for me. I just woke up this morning and said, ”My god, I have finally got it after eighty years.” I have known the implications of esthetic arrest, but I’d never linked it up to the māyā idea. It is your mental attitude that determines whether you experience the projecting or the revealing power. The world is there in both modes. It is not that the world changes, it’s your consciousness.

  Esthetic arrest is the result of this change of focus. “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.” You see it in esthetic arrest. But to develop the inward depth experienced through this change of focus, those who seek to achieve fully the goal of life should set aside a sacred space. The sacred space, when you think of where it appears in traditional cultures, is for initiations and meditations. If you are so fulfilled already that no further initiations are necessary, then you can do without such a space. But, insofar as you’ve not struck the ultimate depth and are interested in enriching and building the interior, in addition to the external aspects of your life, then you have to have some place, some way, to practice this.

  All the world will open up when you’ve achieved this inner depth, and your play in life will be informed by this radiance. The Grail Castle is in the field that is adventured in the way of experiencing esthetic arrest. The Grail is the sense of total rapture and spiritual fulfillment that comes from your experience of this hermetically sealed field. It is like probing for oil: you put a pipe down, strike oil, and then realize the oil is under everything. But you first have to go down somewhere to find it, and this is the field of this plunge.

  I think if you imagine yourself taking the position of esthetic stasis, you’ll understand about withdrawing fear and desire for what happens, and about samsara being nirvāṇa, the still point in the midst of the turning world. That’s all there is to it. Then the world becomes a display of things from which you are disengage
d, and yet, voluntarily, you can become engaged: “joyous participation in the sorrows of the world.” It is very different from being compulsively linked.

  The change of consciousness from stasis to kinesis is the Fall in the Garden. The bondages from which the Buddha disengaged—desire, fear, and social duty—are temporal matters. You can engage in them voluntarily, but compulsive engagement is linked to māyā. If you have gotten that, you have gotten all I can give you.

  Now Ramakrishna, speaking of brahman and Sakti—or Devi, the Goddess—says that brahman is the still point, the milky ocean experienced as stillness; Sakti is the movement, the joy and the pain; and the two together are one. That’s the idea of the Yab-Yum. One thing after another was coming together last night in terms of this simple analysis that Joyce has given us.

  Then, in Joyce’s analysis, we have the emotions of pity and terror. Now, terror is not the same as fear and loathing. It is the realization of both the transcendent operating principle and the effect of the passage of time: the sorrows of the world. It’s static, a still terror, not the terror of flight. It is the realization of compassion: identification with the human sufferer: not the poor sufferer, the black sufferer, the Communist or Fascist sufferer, but the human sufferer—which eliminates the sociological didactic. You identify with ”the suffering servant,” you might say, and the terror goes past all movement to the still point of Goethe’s “schaudern”: the shudder of realization of the mere phenomenality

  of the world. That’s the whole story.

  One might add that, in the way of either lust or love, the female enables the male to make the transit: the seductress lures him to the world, and the virgin—the Virgin Birth mother, Mary—introduces him to the transcendent, the Christ principle that transcends individualism. It seems to me that everything falls right in-to place with this very simple realization.

  My life has been one job, one wife, one image: the Grail. This is known as conservatism. There is a won-derful line in the Portrait, where Stephen’s friend, who’s been hearing all this heretical stuff, asks if he intends to become a Protestant. “I said that I had lost the faith,” Stephen replies, “but not that I had lost my self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?”140

  * * *

  Buddhist art before the first century was mostly narrative: the life of the Buddha and similar discursive art, although the Buddha himself was never depicted. However, with the Mahayana realization that samsara is nirvāṇa and all things are Buddha things, the earliest Buddha images, and other images, began to appear—all presented as revelatory of that realization—and the art object itself became a revelation of Buddha consciousness. It became transparent to the radiance, claritas,. which is what we have been talking about.

  In Christian art, by contrast, I don’t think you have that concept, because in the orthodoxy tangible things are not regarded as being informed by the Christ. It is only in the Thomas Gospel that we read, “Split the stick, there am I. Lift the stone. I am there.” And so, in the Christian tradition, one finds only anecdotal. art. The Crucifixion is an anecdote of Jesus’s suffering on the cross. It’s not a revelation. It doesn’t induce esthetic arrest. It’s didactic. Early Christian art was meant to be didactic, because nobody could read. In the Gothic period, the story of Christ and his apostles and disciples was rendered as when you go to Chartres Cathedral.

  I’ve been there five times. Once I used a guidebook to identify every figure in every window. They are all references to anecdotes of the Christiian tradition, and I could get the whole of the Christian doctrine there. The Rose Window, however, does reveal the radiance. It is magnificent art. Looking at it, one experiences esthetic arest. And the cathedral itself is an art object.

  …within the field of a mythology, the symbolic details reflect, indeed, a local material history and environment, yet they are of an order of the mind, and to be interpreted by the faculty of reason as expressions of a spiritual insight.…The idea of a temple (or European cathedral) is what is here announced, an enclosure wherein every feature is meta-phorical of a connoted metaphysical intuition, set apart for ritual enactments.

  The heart in such an environment is at home, as it were, in its own place: removed from the chaotic spectacle of the world of waking consciousness, at rest and at peace in the recognition of a harmony (which is of one’s own nature) informing the whole terrible scene of lives forever consuming lives. And the function, then, of the ritual is to bring one’s manner of life into accord with this non-judgmental perspective in the way, not of crude ego-maintenance in a world one never made, but of synergetic participation in a phantasmagoric rapture.141

  The town of Chartres lives around that cathedral, just as ancient temple cities used to be centered around the temple, which represented the spiritual information the entire city lived by. We have nothing comparable.

  I had the most marvelous experience at Chartres. I had been there for several days going through all of this, and the concierge came to me and asked if I’d like to help him ring the noontime bell. Well, you bet. So we went up the north fleche to where there is a great big bell. The bell is down below you, and there is a seesaw-like thing above it with a little railing across. He stood on one side, I stood on the other, and we hung onto the bar between us. He gave a push, this thing started to move, and our hair was blowing, and then, underneath us: “Bong! Bong!” We were on that damned thing four or five minutes. It was tremendous. Then he brought me down and showed me where he lived.

  Now, in a cathedral of that kind there is a nave and a crossing. Then there is an apse and a choir screen that runs around it. That choir screen was wide enough for a little room to be in there. He had his bed in that little room in the choir screen and lived there. You could see out between the figures, and right there was the Black Virgin. Oh, I tell you, he had a privileged life in that place. Everything went together: the imagery, the architecture, the rhythm of the day, going up to ring the bells. It was a beautifully coordinated existence.

  In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there was a body of stories known as the Miracles of the Virgin that included some wonderful little Romances. One of the cutest—years ago it was turned into a miraculous play in New York—was of a nun who was assigned to scrub the chapel floor just when she had a date with her lover. The imaged Virgin comes down, takes the scrub-brush and pail, and says, “Go on out and have your day.” She did not play by the rules of the Cardinals.

  Art, then, is the Virgin’s medium. Art is the vehicle of the revealing power of māyā, the vehicle by which we go from the earth to the transcendent. One can always see the Goddess in the world of art.

  In the Protestant community, where Mariolatry is abominated, there is no art. Go into any New England chapel and you’ll see that it is very pretty, but hymns are the closest things to art that you’ll find. I was raised a Catholic and married Jean, daughter of a Protestant minister, so the first Protestant service I went to was with her. We were standing there singing hymns, and I said to her, “You Protestants do not have images, but just look at the images in this hymn: God coming to my little room and all that kind of thing.”

  One of the most interesting and amusing services I have experienced was in a beautiful church with marvelous stained-glass windows in Grand Rapids, where I gave a sermon entitled “Trick or Treat,” for Halloween, the Celtic festival of All Souls. In the middle of the service, the doors opened, and in came all the children of the congregation wearing masks. The big ones led the way, followed by smaller and smaller kids, until, finally, in came these tiny little tots with these absurd masks. The masked children represented the spirits about to be born. Then they all lined up near one of the upright pianos and sang, “I’ve been working on my costume, all the live long day.” It was really a spiritual experience: the children, the choir—just members of the congregation—it was simply sublime.

  Then
I got up in this pulpit and, my god, I tell you, the pulpit is a weapon. Now there’s art for power: just the placement of that thing—where it is in relation to everybody else. Unless you’ve stood in a pulpit, you don’t realize what you have on your side. When you stand there, nobody can hurt you. You are at the prow of a ship, poised to plow right through that sea of faces down below. I did it twice in two years. The first time, I was a little in awe of the pulpit, but the second time, I really knew how to use it.

  * * *

  An artist, to me, is a person who is a competent practitioner of an art. Somebody who just gets up to splash around is not necessarily an artist. One definition of an artist that I heard someone seriously give is: “anybody who, in the telephone book, calls him or herself an artist.” I do not go along with that. Even in the practical arts, the principle of perfection in work is a basic expectation.

  An artist is someone who is completed an art work, not a person who merely intended to. Whether or not it is saleable either this year or next affects neither its intrinsic value nor its intrinsic definition as an art work. Van Gogh never sold a thing, but a couple of his works can make a museum. He was in great psychological trouble, but that man was an artist.

  The word artist is used in a number of ways, the two principle ones, the two extremes, being: (a) one competent in performance and (b) an artist in the fine arts. You cannot be an artist in the fine arts unless you are competent in performance, but you can be competent in cooking or acrobatics or whatnot. But the experience of esthetic arrest has to do with the fine arts. One doesn’t seek esthetic arrest in looking at a good plumbing job. Its real function would be missed.