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

by Joseph Campbell

  Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa

  when her head was cut off.

  You have to be reckless when writing.

  Be as crazy as your conscience allows.

  When you begin to get a sense of the material dictating the form, you will be writing. It may happen fast, or it may take you a little while to find the flow. When I started The Masks of God, I dashed off the first book, Primitive Mythology I was in a great hurry to get finished, because I had been given some money to go to Japan for a big session of the International Congress for the History of Religions, so I just churned it out. And then, the reaction to it was so impressive to me—it was a much better book than I thought I had written—that when I started to write Volume II, I was blocked for awhile, until I said, “Hey, listen, come off it. Stick your neck out and just write the book.” I thank God that I had read that letter of Schiller’s to the young poet.

  In religion, one speaks of the fear of God and the love of God. Fear of God will block you. Love of God will carry you on. If you can do something that you love to do without fear of criticism, you will move. You will find joy in it. You do not have to move more than an inch to feel the joy. Remember, the Buddha’s third temptation was dharma, duty, doing what people expect you to do. That’s the censorship fear.

  After you have written something, when you see it in typescript, you will want to fool around with it, because it will be different from the way it was in script. Then, when you are satisfied with the typescript, you send it to the publisher. He accepts it, and when he sends you the galleys, you will want to fool with it again. Every time it appears in a form that is not the one directly out of your hand, you get an objective attitude toward it. In a way, you become the reader instead of the writer, and you see it in a new light. This crafting is part of the process of turning something into a work of art. I think that many people today do not realize what it means to be an artist, instead of simply a person who is writing. I mean, there is a craft and an attitude and a willingness to recognize that, unless it is in form, it is not art.

  Let your darlings out,

  but murder them,

  or two years later,

  you’ll wish you had.

  * * *

  If you are going to stay in the village compound, the town will take care of you. But if you go on the adventure, it is prudent to go at the right time. This is a real problem if you are overcome late in life, if you have already taken on responsibilities when the light goes on: like Gauguin ,who made a total mess, not only of his life, but of his family’s life. But as he went to pieces, his art became greater and greater. He did not go into painting seriously until he was around forty-five-years–old, and then his life was in his paintings. His was a hero’s journey, but at a very high price. It is an ironic situation: you’d say he made a mess of it as a man, but as an artist, he was a triumph.

  Then there is the experience of coming back with your jewel and nobody wants it: the “don’t-throw-your-pearls-before-swine” sort of thing, lest people turn against you. Often there is not a waiting public. You know the story of the artist who is “ahead of his time,” the one who is only appreciated a generation-and-a-half later.

  During the 40s and 50s, Jean was working with some artists who were way out, and twenty years later they are top people. John Cage, for example, did music for four of her dances and nobody knew Cage. He was doing the most bizarre things, but he just hung on and knew and knew. Now, he is a major figure in the field.

  He also said, “Fame is of no importance.” The light of fame comes past, and one may be in it for three minutes, for thirty minutes, or never at all. But fame is not what the artist is working for. It’s the commercial artist who says, “Whatever they want, I am going to give it to them.” The real artist gives expression to a gift that has come to him, and the susception of the gift implies, “I have to put it out.”

  Sometimes, however, an artist becomes so enraptured by the creative plunge, that you might say “life drops off.” This is one of the problems in yoga also. When illumination hits, life drops off, and you can’t get back. That’s the effect that follows one who is an artist but has not gotten the realization into his or her life.

  In loving the spiritual,

  you cannot despise the earthly.

  Joyce was such a person: my god, what a life! When you read Richard Ellman’s James Joyce, his biography, you wonder how anyone could have lived such a life. You don’t know how that man stood it, how his family stood it, how any of his friends stood it. But look what he accomplished. I mean, if you have the eyes to see it.

  It took him twelve years to finish A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He began the project as an essay in 1904, but the novel wasn’t published until 1916. And if Yeats had not recommended him to Ezra Pound, who got him published, we would never have heard of Joyce. Meanwhile, he had written Dubliners and was at work on Ulysses, which he spent seven years writing. It’s as though he said, “There it is. I have to formulate this thing for my own realization of what it is.”

  The first editions of Ulysses were burned by New York and English customs authorities I think only one or two copies remain. Finally, he had to have it printed in France, and when I was a student, that was the only place you could buy Ulysses. People here in the United States did not even know it existed.

  He spent sixteen years writing Finnegans Wake, and you should have read the reviews when that came out: “What is this guy doing? Has he gone nuts? Is he just pulling a crazy job on us?” The first edition of Finnegans Wake was remaindered within two months. I bought four hardcover copies for fifty-six cents each. When a book is remaindered, the publisher is trying to get back the money for printing it. The author gets nothing.

  Joyce died three weeks short of his fifty-ninth birthday, with the final book he was planning left undone. He would not be my model for a life, but he is a model for my relationship to art. Thomas Mann said Joyce was probably the greatest novelist of the twentieth century. But, look what it cost him to do that.

  Joyce endured all these travails because his intention was perfection. Perfection is the fulfillment implicit in art, and he achieved it. Imperfection is life. All forms in life are imperfect, but the function of art is to see the radiance through the imperfection.

  The artist opens

  the forms of the work

  to transcendence.

  What I understand art to be, then, is the revealing power of māyā: the production in music, in dance, in the visual arts, and in literature of such “divinely superfluous beauty,” of objects for esthetic arrest which are of no practical use, but which open up dimensions within. And the projecting power of māyā, on the other hand, I take to be desire and loathing, which link you in phenomenal discourse to the object as object. It is as clear and clean as that.

  * * *

  In India, there are two orders of art: one is esthetic art; the other, temple art, is not esthetic in its aim. Temple art is concerned not with arresting the eye but with affecting a psychic transformation in the artist and the beholder. We’re into another kind of art here. The source of the image is a vision. Europeans for quite a while had a hard time appreciating Indian art. Indian poetry and philosophy were appreciated, but not the art, until they realized the images weren’t representations of things, but tools for psychic transformation.

  Now, with Joyce, I would say Finnegans Wake is a book that affects a psychic transformation in the reader. If the reader really works on it and finds out what Joyce is saying, there is a vision there that can transform one’s relationship to the world.

  Coomaraswamy has given considerable attention to the conception of an Indian religious work of art. Let us say an artist is going to do something on Śiva in the dance. First he studies the textbooks on Śiva: what the organization of the image should be, what should be in the god’s hands, and all that. Then he pronounces the god’s name, meditates, and brings forth in his own consciousness an image of the god dancing, s
o that what is presented has been derived from inner, rather than from outer, vision.

  Normally we look at the Nataraja Śiva with an esthetic intent: we see it simply as an art object. But the one who is devoted to Śiva lets that object become an opening of those centers in his own consciousness that correspond to the Śiva in himself: “I am Śiva.” That is very different from just looking at a Śiva image.

  One is often unable to experience Indian temple art in an esthetic way at all, because it has intended another kind of effect. You have to move into the god position to grasp what the image has given you. Indian temple art is not pornographic, because you are not excited to desire the object depicted. Say you go to an art gallery desiring to have an esthetic experience. It is static, and insofar as it affects a transformation of consciousness, it brings about a new stasis within you. There is a trans-formation just as there is a transformation with esthetic arrest. You are no longer the lecherous human being. You are stabilized in esthetic arrest. Temple art pushes that one dimension further, so that your consciousness with respect to all things in the world is changed. It’s a permanent change that takes place in you. Perhaps one could say that all true art is temple art, but there is a difference between art that intends esthetic arrest and art that intends psychic transformation. You could say the latter is not properly art. It is a religious device.

  * * *

  Some artists are in pain, others are not. Picasso had a run of wives and women that was just fantastic. What one wife did would not have mattered a bit. I do not think it possible to interpret Picasso’s life as one of pain. In the Picasso Retrospective, which I saw twice at the Museum of Modern Art, there was one room filled with about twenty-five paintings that he had done in one day. What was it that impelled him to this fury of action? He was certainly the type of artist in whom life is so abundant that the art is easily handled, which shows the great skill of his nature.

  I read Wagner’s autobiography—fantastic! That guy was writing three operas, carrying on three love affairs, and actually being resentful that the women’s husbands would not give money to help produce his operas! He was outta sight! His knowledge of mythology was way ahead of what any of the scholars in his time knew. In the Ring Cycle, he combined into one unit two aspects of Germanic mythology: the hero journey and the cosmic order—coming into the world and going out of the world. On top of that, at the same time he was writing the librettos, he amplified the orchestra to such an extent—using reeds and French horns and so on—that he effectively invented a whole new orchestra! And he designed what is probably the best theatre that Europe has had. I can’t understand how he did it all. I think some people justhave so much spunk that they cannot be judged in ordinary terms.

  I never knew an artist who didn’t want money, but they don’t pursue it. Their minds are elsewhere. Joyce begged everyone he knew for money. But he couldn’t make money and do what he did: sixteen years writing Finnegans Wake. Bringing that prodigious load into the “room of his life” was all that Joyce could manage.

  Schiller, a sensitive and intelligent student of psy-chology in relation to art, distinguished two types of artists: one, he called the “sentimental” artist; the other, the “naive” artist. He used as his models Goethe and himself. He was the sentimental artist: the one without great means, who did not pay proper attention to his health, for whom art was his life, not the other way around. Everything went into his art. Goethe, on the other hand, was the naive artist: a man of ample life, an important person in local politics, a person for whom art was but one aspect of his life. Some such people require a bit more instruction than others, but Goethe had fantastic intuition, great energy, and vitality. He was a masterly artist.

  Thomas Mann wrote an interesting paper called “Goethe and Tolstoy,” based on this idea of Schiller’s. He compared Dostoevsky to the sentimental artist, as Schiller had described himself, and Tolstoy to the naive artist. Tolstoy was a property owner, who used to put on a nice silk shirt, go out, and harvest the grain with his peasants. He would make believe he was a peasant, but that was all part of the game too.

  It’s interesting to compare the works of these two types of writers. The Schiller-Dostoevsky types tend to be highly hopped up. There’s a strong, dramatic conflict in their writing. Both Tolstoy and Goethe, on the other hand, are genial authors, and their works have powerful passages of epic proportions and a wonderful majesty. Conversely, in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment it is pain, pain—a life of inward, spiritual agony. These are two different ways, two different temperaments. The pain is not something sentimental artists strive for, it results from their giving all of their energy to divinely superfluous activity and not paying attention to the living of life.

  * * *

  We are to fill the sacred space, then, with art. And when I say “art,” I mean “divinely superfluous beauty,” not doodling and having pretty decorations in your house. The sacred space is where things are experienced as not being of any practical use. It is through the contemplation of something “thus come”—“divinely superfluous”—that the aspects of oneself that are not of immediate practical use can come forth. I think organic growth comes in that way, not in the way of going into a practical activity.

  The practical activity comes after the organism has stated itself in its maturity, or else it comes forth in a distorted way: the person thinks of himself as nothing but a plumber or something like that. That’s the problem in a traditional culture like India, where people from birth are cookie-molded into the dharma of their caste. And they are nothing but that. They never become human beings, individuals, but remain individuals: people that are elements in a larger structure.

  I think that is the big difference between the Oriental and the Occidental ideal for a human being. The person in the Orient is either a warrior, or a merchant, or whatever, and nothing else. In the West, however, the person is an individual. The Greeks had the idea of the total individual and held it up as being completely different from the Oriental idea of people being trained into a pattern of life in accordance with the necessities of society. I experienced this idea of the total individual at Delphi, where you see everything related: the oracle, the art, the theatre, and the stadium up on top.

  For most people, the life of art is an all-absorbing matter, and it requires a hell of a lot of work. What Ramakrishna said about illumination is also true about art: “Unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond, don’t pursue it.” It is too difficult.

  For women who marry, it requires a hell of an ac-quiescence on the part of the husband, too—I can tell you about that. I know so many young women who were in dance, then married, and the husband could not stand it. And, of course, it is difficult to have a family with an art that requires the kind of discipline dance demands. The thing about dance is that if you are not disciplined, it is damned evident the next time you get on stage.

  Jean once said, “The way of the artist and the way of the mystic are similar, but the mystic lacks a craft.” The craft keeps the artist in touch with the phenomenality of the world and in a relationship to it: a constant evaluation of the uniqueness of each event in the world. The mystic, by contrast, can be so darned abstract that there is no link to life except the begging bowl. Yet, sometimes those begging bowls can be very productive. Some of our gurus are pulling in millions of dollars. But that does not mean they are related to life.

  I have seen the training of artists in this country and in Europe. They are trained only in the craft. They are given techniques for rendering something, but they do not know what to do with the techniques. I’ve know many of them who just cracked up. Their art technique becomes a wall they cannot penetrate, so they try to think of anecdotes and narratives to render that show off their technique. They are so loaded with sociology, that they think they do not have an art object if there is not some kind of lesson in there for fixing the world or themselves. But, in fact, an art object by definition is “divinely superfluous
beauty.”

  Do you see in this the projecting power of māyā and the revealing power? As long as the motifs of desire and loathing are moving you, it is the projecting aspect. You are yourself the māyā-maker, and you are the one who opens the revealing power when your attitude is that of the Buddha. When I realized this, it was thrilling to me. I think that art and this knowledge of what art is can be the modern Western way to illumination. It will release you from all kinds of linkages. It will not keep you from practicing all those things you hardly believe in, but it will help you in achieving the esthetic before you become linked to the objects of your life.

  When you distinguish

  between good and evil,

  you’ve lost the art.

  Art goes beyond morality.

  The reach of your compassion

  is the reach of your art.

  JOYCE’S trick was

  seeing symbols everywhere.

  …Dr. John W. Perry has characterized the living mythological symbol as an “affect image.” It is an image that hits one where it counts. It is not addressed first to the brain, to be there interpreted and appreciated. On the contrary, if that is where it has to be read, the symbol is already dead. An “affect image” talks directly to the feeling system and immediately elicits a response, after which the brain may come along with its interesting comments. There is some kind of throb of resonance within, responding to the image shown without, like the answer of a musical string to another equally tuned. And so it is that when the vital symbols of any given social group evoke in all its members responses of this kind, a sort of magical accord unites them as one spiritual organism, functioning through members who, though separate in space, are yet one in being and belief.143