Myth makes a connection between our waking consciousness and the mystery of the universe. It gives us a map or picture of the universe and allows us to see ourselves in relationship to nature, as when we speak of Father Sky and Mother Earth. It supports and validates a certain social and moral order. The Ten Command-ments being given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai is an example of this. Lastly, it helps us pass through and deal with the various stages of life from birth to death.
We have, consequently, the comparatively complex problem in educating our young of training them not simply to assume uncritically the patterns of the past, but to recognize and cultivate their own creative possibilities; not to remain on some proven level of earlier biology and sociology, but to represent a movement of the species forward.23
Basically, everyone needs a father. The father has a vital role. The mother represents nature, but the father introduces the son and daughter to social relationships.
From your mother you get your body.
From your father you get
your role in the social world.
The son has to play a role like that of his father, so the father is a model, either a positive or a negative one. You may be disgusted with the kind of life your father lives, but you have that model, and responding negatively to it will be your life. If he’s not there, it’s almost impossible to relate effectively from where you are in your family to the outside world.
For the girl, the father is the first intimate relation-ship to the male principle in some way or other. With the father gone, the mother must play both roles, and I think the child, down deep, blames the mother for there being no father there. It’s a sense of “you have deprived me of the person who would have been absolutely my guide and my messenger.”
MONEY is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities. You realize that the possibilities of life in an economically oriented society are really a function of how much money you’ve got.
On the other hand, money has never meant any-thing to me. I got back from my student years in Europe three weeks before the Wall Street crash. The only money I had was what I’d made playing in a jazz band in college. I’d earned several thousand dollars—which was a lot in those days—and that was what I had until it disappeared. I didn’t make another cent for five years. I found that, if you had no responsibilities, you could live wonderfully without any money. In fact, I thought anybody who worked for money was a fool. I took a vow never to do anything for money. Now, that does not mean that when I do something for somebody I don’t ask for money. I want as much as I can get, but that’s the secondary part of the game. My life course is absolutely indifferent to money. As a result, a lot of money has come in by my doing what I feel I want to do from the inside. If you do that, you are doing things that attract money, because you are giving life and life responds in the way of its counterpart in hard coin.
If you follow your bliss,
you will always have your bliss,
money or not.
If you follow money,
you may lose it,
and you will have nothing.
Being as I was, and given the field I was interested in, I had a certain disdain for people who gave their lives to making money. Now that I have made money, in dealing with it I’ve had to be in touch with people whose business is money, whose whole life has been in that field, and I’ve had an interesting and surprising experience: I’ve met some magnificent people.
Money experienced as life energy is indeed a medi-tation, and letting it flow out instead of hoarding it is a mode of participation in the lives of others. There’s a beautiful thing that can grow out of a life devoted to money that surprised me.
In the living of a life today, money is a facilitating energy source. With money in the tank like gasoline, you can get places you other wise couldn’t go.
You’ve got to use the advantages that you have cultivated. Otherwise, if you drop those, you are going to have a negative reaction in ten years or so. What I mean is, as you go from threshold to threshold, it must be the same you that makes the jump. You don’t go down again, you start from where you are. From that, more and more will blossom. The potentialities from your center are used for further extrapolation in the next venture.
From what I have seen in the history of the arts in New York, when money is poured on something it flowers. With money there has to be a flow. I had a beautiful experience of a man with money when I was a trustee of the Bollingen Foundation, which was founded by Paul Mellon, an enormously wealthy man. He and his wife had been in analysis with Carl Jung when the war came and they had to leave Switzerland. They asked Jung what they could give him in the way of a gift to express their gratitude for what he had done. He suggested they establish a foundation for the interpretation and study of symbols. That’s what they did, and it is an example of a lot of money being put to the right use. The influence of that Bollingen Series on the literature and science of America has been enormous. Without that money it would never have happened.
You have to have not only the energy, but also the capacity of mind that gives the model of the channel—with that, life really flowers. When you put the money in the wrong place. it can be devastating. Where is the money going and where is it coming from in the economy of a nation, the economy of a city? That’s one of the big problems. You can turn a flowering culture into a desiccating culture just by wrong channeling.
I always think you can translate sociology into psychology. It has to do with energy distribution. What are you going to do with your money? What factor in your own consciousness are you going to favor in the spending of the money? For instance, I have a seventy-five-dollar book coming out. Some people will say that is expensive, but those same people will spend one-hundred-and-fifty dollars to have dinner in a restaurant with another couple. So, is the money going up here in your mind or is it going down here in your stomach? Up here, you can’t replace the book I would have given you; but down here, you could have bought cheaper food that would have been just as nourishing.
IF you’re getting a degree to compen-sate for an inferiority complex, give up the complex, because it’s an artificial thing.
When you’re going for a degree, you don’t do what you want to do. You find out what the professor wants you to do to get the degree, and you just do it. If you want a degree so you can teach, the idea is to get the degree in the quickest, easiest way. When you have it, then you can expand and get your education.
I was given a fellowship to go to Europe, and I went to the University of Paris. I was working on medieval French and Provençal and on the troubadour poetry. When I got to Europe, I discovered Modern Art: James Joyce, Picasso, Mondrian—the whole bunch of them. Paris in 1927–28 was something else. Then I went to Germany and started studying Sanskrit and got all involved in Hinduism. I discovered Jung while in Germany. Everything was opening up—this way, that way. Well, my question then was, “Am I going to go back into that bottle?” My interest in Celtic Romance was gone.
I went to the university and said, “Listen, I don’t want to get back into that bottle.” I had put in all the hours necessary for the degree; all I had to do was write that goddamn thesis. They wouldn’t let me move into another place and continue my education, so I said to hell with it. I went up into the woods and spent five years reading. I never got the Ph.D. I learned to live on absolutely nothing. I was free and had no responsibilities. It was marvelous.
It takes courage
to do what you want.
Other people
have a lot of plans for you.
Nobody wants you to do
what you want to do.
They want you to go on their trip,
but you can do what you want.
I did. I went into the woods
and read for five years.
It was from 1929 to 1934, five years. I went up to a little shack in Woodstock, New York, and just dug in. All I did was read, read, read, and take
notes. It was during the Great Depression. I didn’t have any money, but there was an important book firm in New York called Stechert-Hafner, and I would write to them for books—the books of Frobenius were expensive—and they’d send me copies, and I wouldn’t pay. That was the way people behaved during the depression. They waited until I got a job, and then I paid them. That was noble. I really appreciated that.
I read Joyce and Mann and Spengler. Spengler speaks about Nietzsche. I go to Nietzsche. I then find you can’t read Nietzsche until you’ve read Schopenhauer, so I go to Schopenhauer. I find you can’t read Schopenhauer until you’ve read Kant. Then I go to Kant—well, okay, you can start there, but it’s tough going. Then Goethe.
The exciting thing was to see that Joyce was actually dealing with the same material. He never mentions the name of Schopenhauer, but I can prove he was a major figure in Joyce’s construction of his system. Then I read Jung, and I see that the structure of his thinking is basically the same as that of Spengler’s, and I’m putting all this stuff together…
I don’t know what it was during those five years, but I was convinced I would still be alive for a little while. I remember one time when I had a dollar bill in the top drawer of a little chest, and I knew as long as that was there I still had resources. It was great. I had no responsibilities, none. It was exciting—writing journals, trying to find out what I wanted. I still have those things. When I look into them now, I can’t believe it.
Actually, there were times when I almost thought—almost thought—”Jeez, I wish someone would tell me what I had to do,” that kind of thing. Freedom involves making decisions, and each decision is a destiny decision. It’s very difficult to find in the outside world something that matches what the system inside you is yearning for. My feeling now is that I had a perfect life: what I needed came along just when I needed it. What I needed then was life without a job for five years. It was fundamental.
As Schopenhauer says, when you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect. So, I have a theory that if you are on your own path things are going to come to you. Since it’s your own path, and no one has ever been on it before, there’s no precedent, so everything that happens is a surprise and is timely.
In the midst of my time in Woodstock, I decided I would look for a job. I had a little Model A Ford, and I drove it across the continent right in the middle of the Great Depression. I will never forget that drive. I’d pass automobiles on the road that had broken down with whole families in them. It was awful. People of today have no notion of what went on at that time.
When I started driving to the west coast from New York in that car, I drove down through Virginia and stopped at a beautiful natural bridge. I spent two hours just walking back and forth in that natural bridge area, thinking how George Washington was a surveyor here and all that kind of thing. Somehow I felt that it was teaching me something, that I was learning something. I put it in my diary as a very important experience.
When I arrived out here, there was no job, and when you get to California, you can’t keep driving west. On a boat back from Hawaii in 1925, I had met a girl who was living in San Jose. We’d kept a long-range correspondence, little postcards from here and there. I was going down to Carmel, so I thought, “Why not drop in on Idell and just say ‘Hi.’” So I dropped in—“Hello, hello, hello.” “You’re going down to Carmel? Let me go down with you. My sister Carol’s down there. She’s married a chap who wants to be a writer. I’ll introduce you.”
Her sister was married to John Steinbeck, so I met him. And I discovered a world of wonderful people sitting around wondering what to do next. The people in this crowd were John and Carol Steinbeck, Rich Lovejoy and his wife, Natalya—“Tal,” who was doing Steinbeck’s typing—and Ed Rickets—”Doc” in John’s novels. Rich and Tal are the couple in Cannery Row. By the way, that party in Cannery Row was given for me—Steinbeck put another cast of characters in it.
Nobody, except Ed, had a job or anything of the kind. Everybody was “without any strings,” you know, just flopping around. Steinbeck was writing and writing and writing. He’d just finished a book called Pastures of Heaven and was starting To A God Unknown. When I arrived, the first thing he said was, “Come, let me read you the first chapter of my book.” I was twenty-eight, and he was about thirty-four or -five. He found me a place to live, a tiny little house on 4th Street called the Canary Cottage, right next to a house owned by Ed.
When you’re at a loss, you’re really at a loss. I had no philosophy. I had no anything after Columbia—we had been studying John Dewey for God’s sake. In the Carmel library, my hand went up to a book in two volumes, Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, and, boy, that was the thunderbolt. Spengler says, “Young man, if you want to be in the world of the future, put your paintbrush and poet’s pen on the shelf and pick up the monkey wrench or the law book.” I said to Stein-beck, “Listen, you have to read this thing.” When I had finished the first volume, I gave it to him. He came back a little while later and said, “Oh, I can’t read this. Oh—my art.” He was knocked out for about two weeks and couldn’t write.
One day, after he had recovered from the paragraph in Spengler, he was walking around, rubbing his sides, saying, “I feel creative.” Steinbeck was always going around rubbing his sides. He loved to rub his sides. Another day, he came in and said, “I’ve sold Pastures of Heaven, and they want my next two books.” Well, I know now that every publisher who takes your first book wants your next two, because they’re not going to advertise you and then lose you to somebody else. That was a great day, so we had a party.
After I’d read Spengler’s book, which was a major experience for me, I said to Ed, “Say, Ed, you know, I’ve been saying ‘no’ to life all my life, and I think I’d better begin saying 'yes.’” He said, “Well, the way to do that is to get drunk. Let’s have a party." It was in the middle of, not only the Depression, but also Prohibition. He said, “I’ll use my laboratory alcohol, and we’ll put something together."
Jesus, that was a night! He mixed this concoction of fruit juice and alcohol in a bowl. Then he put that bowl in a larger bowl, and put salted ice around it to keep it cold. We started the party around four in the afternoon, and at three o’clock in the morning, a police car pulled up to the front door and two cops came in. They said, “What's going on here?” Well, Steinbeck knew them, so he said, “We’re having a party. Here, have a drink.” Now we had stopped drinking about an hour before, and meanwhile, the center bowl had shipped salt water, so it was now alcohol, fruit juice, and salt water. Well, when those two cops tasted that drink, they just looked at us as if to say, “What the hell are you people drink-ing here?” And that was that.
Ed Rickets was the only one who had work. He had a laboratory and collected sea cucumbers and little jellyfish and so forth for schools. He’d fertilize a group of starfish eggs, and then cut them off at different stages to show the whole series for a biology class. When the tide was low where there was good catching—for instance, up at Santa Cruz—we would all go off to collect these damned things for Ed.
He was great with animals. He had two rattle-snakes in a box in the lab, and he invited us all down one day to see him feed white mice to the snakes. Well, this was something. Steinbeck actually wrote a short story about it. Here’s this snake that’s been asleep for weeks—snakes with nothing to do are like that. Ed drops this white mouse in the cage with the snake, and we’re all gathered around to watch. Somehow, you’re automatically on the mouse's side. The little mouse sniffs around and goes up the length of the snake, and finally he gets the idea that this isn’t a good place to be, so he goes into the corner and sits there. The rattlesnake looks at the mouse, moves over, and—“Bing!”—hits it. Two little red spots appear on the mouse’s nose, and it just spins up and flops back. So, the mouse is dead, and the snake is alive, so now you’re on
the side of the rattlesnake trying to eat that mouse—the mouse is bigger around than the snake’s diameter.
Ed says, “Now watch him. He’s going to unhook his jaws.” He unhooks his jaws and begins injesting the mouse—you could see it changing shape in the snake’s mouth, because the saliva has digestive qualities. I tell you, you felt it right in your throat. The most absurd moment was when the rattlesnake got tired, and there was nothing left but two legs and a tail sticking out of its mouth. But presently that went down too.
Every detail of those years stands out in my memory. In Goethe’s wonderful book Wilhelm Meister’s Student Years, and again in Wilhelm Meister’s Wander Years, there’s the idea of bumping into experience and people while you’re wandering. You really are experiencing life that way. Nothing is routine, nothing is taken for granted. Everything is standing out on it’s own, because everything is a possibility, everything is a clue, everything is talking to you. It’s marvelous. It’s as though you had a nose that brought you into the right places. You are in for wonderful moments when you travel like that—for example, my putting up my hand in the Carmel library and finding a book that became a destiny book. It really did! That rambling is a chance to sniff things out and somehow get a sense of where you feel you can settle.
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living Page 4
