A Ha!

Now I know why I’ve been reading so much Joseph Campbell lately! Originally, I picked up Hero With a Thousand Faces because so many screenwriting people have been reading Christopher Vogler’s book The Writer’s Journey, which uses Campbell’s mythic outline as a template for writing scripts. It seemed to me, why read Vogler’s take on Campbell when I can just read Campbell himself and draw my own conclusions? Which is certainly a valid point of view; but about midway through the book, suddenly I discovered that all of this reading about myth was really so that I can finish The Salamander.

The Salamander is a novel I started writing a couple years ago. And, before I go any further, let’s go ahead and make this my third excerpt, after Thereby Hangs a Tale and “Absinthe”:

At 2:30 in the morning somebody knocked at my door. He had to knock very hard and very long for me to hear him at all, but he did that, he knocked very hard and very long so eventually the sound reached me. I moaned something that wasn’t quite in English, and even from that far away he heard my moan, and he knocked even louder, even more insistently.

I disentangled myself from What's-Her-Name and went through, around and down to the front door. Where I found it was Alan, my sometimes-friend Alan, standing there knocking, with a shoebox in his free hand.

"Morning," he said, frowning as usual. "Merry Christmas." He held out the shoebox. Something scuttled heavily inside.

“Alan, for fucksake it's 2:30 in the morning. And it's June."

"Apogee, perigee, who cares. Here."

"Whuthefuck is this?"

"Just take it. Telling you would spoil the opening."

I took the box and the something scuttled again, back to front, so that I damn near dropped the box and now my heart was going. "Alan! There's something alive in here!"

"Yes." He stood there, his beard very black in the black night, looking more than a little Mansonesque, but you get used to that eventually.

I stood for a moment, completely at a loss, but at 2:30 nothing seems quite so absurd as it would in daylight, so I put the box down, opened it, and looked inside. Something livid and red stared back at me, hotly appraising.

"You gave me a lizard," I said.

"I gave you a salamander," he said back. "Merry Christmas." And he turned and left.

I stood for another minute, watching him disappear into the dark, and said something useless like “Oh.” Then shut the door, went into the kitchen and put the box down on the floor. The whatsit, the gerrymander, would surely be fine till morning, and I could deal with it then. Or it’d scare the shit out of Maria when she came in to clean, whatever. I put a chair against the door to make sure it kept closed and went back upstairs.

Climbed into bed and What’s-Her-Name mumbled. “Hey,” I said. “Wanna see my lizard?”

“Yeah, sure, Billy” she said, so I climbed on top of her.

* * *

Maria’s scream woke me up. What’s-Her-Name was already gone, good. I went down, making sure my robe was good and tight because Maria was already freaked, and found her sitting in the dining room, opposite the closed kitchen door, staring at it and gibbering in Spanish--something low and dark, and in the middle of it she was definitely taking my name in vain. “Blah blah blah Señor Ward blah blah blah.” The chair was lying on its side. I tried to tell her it was okay but she wasn’t listening.

I went into the kitchen and found only this: the box had been reduced to ash. Scorch marks extended halfway across the faux marble floor then stopped in the middle of nothing. The lizard was nowhere to be seen.

Shortly after this, Billy Ward is working on a script on Catalina Island when a unicorn shows up. Then he begins to discover some peculiar links between geology and alchemy, and it turns out that the producers of the film he’s writing might just have a peculiar interest in these mythological beasties who’ve been showing up. I was having great fun writing it, setting up the story, but then I bogged down badly—because now that the story was set up, I found I didn’t know what the story was. In scriptwriting terms, I had the first act and an idea about the third act, but no second act at all. And since the second act is the bulk of the story, really the story itself, that’s kind of a problem.

I needed to think something through, but wasn’t even sure what that something was supposed to be. And in the meantime I got involved with other stuff, and time passed.

Then I read the following in Hero With a Thousand Faces:

Heaven, hell, the mythological age, Olympus and all the other habitations of the gods, are interpreted by psychoanalysis as symbols of the unconscious.... The constriction of consciousness, to which we owe the fact that we see not the source of the universal power but only the phenomenal forms reflected from that power, turns superconsciousness into unconsciousness and, at the same instant and by the same token, creates the world.... The adventure of the hero represents the moment in his life when he achieved illumination--the nuclear moment when, while still alive, he found and opened the road to the light beyond the dark walls of our living death.

In other words, if I’m reading this correctly, all myths and stories are reflections of our unconscious group mind (the many ways in which humans tend to think like other humans no matter where they’re born). The world we see around us is not the world but a reflection of it, condensed and simplified so that we can grasp it (indeed, I once had a vision while listening to The Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” that led me to exactly this conclusion), but the hero’s task is to find his way to this real world in such a manner as to reveal something of its nature to everyone. (Finding the “magic elixir” or the Golden Fleece or whatever it is that represents the deeper truth is one thing; but it’s useless if the hero doesn’t bring the elixir/Fleece/whatever back home.)

All of which means that Billy Ward has to go on a pure hero’s journey, right into the heart of myth and magic. Now, with that little nugget in my head, now I know how to get started. There’s plenty of work still to be done, and a lot more about myth that I need to understand better before I can start constructing my own version of it, but now at least I know where the beginning of the road is.

Now all I need is the time to do all this in....

Another Review

I hadn’t ever visited culturevulture.com before, but now that I have, I like it a lot. This review, by Les Wright, may be the most accurate yet--one of the few reviewers who dared to assume that maybe Marc actually knew what he was doing when he made Zen Noir, that he had a reason for his choices and that, even if this decision or that one did or didn’t work, still it was done for a reason. Perhaps the best review we’ve had so far.

The Trouble With Studio 60

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is, never mind its awkward, too-long title, a good show that frustrates because it ought to be better. There’s the pedigree, for one thing: the Aaron Sorkin-Thomas Schlamme pairing that gave us Sports Night and West Wing. Now this show clearly owes more to Sports Night than it does to West Wing, focusing as it does on the backstage shenanigans of a sketch-comedy show; but the feel of it all is more like West Wing, and that’s a problem right there. I find myself wondering whether maybe Studio 60 should have been a half-hour program, like Sports Night was. It would force Sorkin to write tighter and leaner, and there would be less of a tendency to try and fill time with storylines like the one last night, where the studio president (Amanda Peet’s character) walked into a dressing room and declared “I don’t have any friends.”

(For the record, I think Sorkin has written himself into a corner with that character: a studio president simply would not spend that much time with the people from any one show, she just doesn’t have that kind of time. People come to her, not the other way around, otherwise she undercuts her power and fritters away her energy--not to mention becoming so attached to the creators that she might not be able to judge their work dispassionately. So increasingly, Sorkin is going to have invent excuses for her to be there if Jordan McDeere is to be anything more than a recurring character; but if last night’s episode is any indication, that situation is already getting desperate.)

Obviously, the quality of the sketches-within-a-show is the biggest problem. I finally realized: Sorkin simply doesn’t have the skill set required to write sketch comedy. What he writes is often very funny, but it’s always situational and character-driven; sketch comedy is the opposite, it’s concept-driven. A good sketch takes a crazy idea and wrings it dry, preferably in less than three minutes. There’s no time for character development, no time to set up where people are and why they’re there. “Two goofballs in their basement doing a cable-access show” is about as complicated as you can get in a sketch; even better if you’ve got something extremely high-concept, like “Julia Child cuts her hand and can’t stop the bleeding.” But high-concept has never been Sorkin’s strength, and that’s fine--except when he creates a show that depends on it. I’ve read that he brought on Mark McKinney, from Kids in the Hall, to help with the sketches, but that was the wrong choice: McKinney himself readily admits that he likes to write more character-driven, actor-y comedy, so all Sorkin has accomplished is to bring on someone who approaches comedy like he does. He needs to buckle down and steal someone from the real SNL, that’s really all there is to it--then get out of that guy’s way and let him write sketches.

But with the exception of the Amanda Peet problem, last night’s episode was the first one all season that I’ve really liked. I think Sorkin may have stumbled at last into what the show is about, its reason for being: why is comedy important? On the one hand, there was Simon (D.L. Hughley), desperate to rescue people from the same kinds of dire circumstances he grew up in, dragging Matt (Matthew Perry) to a comedy club to see a black comic, only to find that the comic was regurgitating the same sort of self-hating stereotypes that perpetuate narrow racial stereotypes. On the other hand, there was Nate Corddry’s character, showing his sheltered parents around the studio when clearly they don’t share any of the same references he does, and don’t revere anything that he reveres. They’ve never even heard of “Who’s on First,” perhaps the most famous sketch of all time. I’ve seen a lot of people online complaining that this storyline seemed far-fetched to them, but believe me, I’ve had just that conversation many times, both with family and friends. Now granted, it’s usually someone who hasn’t heard of, say, John Gielgud, but the principle is the same: someone whose work seems like bedrock to me is almost unknown in our fast-moving culture: Gielgud has been dead for years now, and if he hadn’t done Arthur, he would probably be almost entirely forgotten except for high-culture aesthetes like me. But in the context of the scene and the show, it was the disconnect itself that mattered: Nate Corddry loves what he does, but his father shuts him up cold by firing back that his younger brother is fighting in Afghanistan. And then on the third hand, there was the completely welcome appearance of Eli Wallach, playing a writer on a Studio 60-like show from the 1950s who got blacklisted after writing only one sketch--a clear reminder that not so long ago, comedy was considered so subversive that the government got people blackballed for it.

This, I think, is what the show wants to be about. And certainly Sorkin’s been talking around the question since the first episode, beginning with the Judd Hirsch Network-style tirade on the struggle between art and commerce in which “commerce is kicking art’s ass.” But here’s where his problems with writing sketch comedy are actively interfering with his ability to tell the story he wants to tell: the value of comedy, which here stands in for the value of art, should speak for itself. We shouldn’t need a character to tell us why comedy is important, we should be able to watch something carefully crafted that demonstrates exactly why it matters.

Personally, I think stories are an essential need for mankind; on the Maslow hierarchy of needs they may come behind food and shelter and sex, but not far behind at all; personally, I’d put our need for stories fourth on that list. And Sorkin could certainly have a character actually say something like that in an episode, but then he’s just lecturing us, he’s just writing an essay; he needs to find a way to show us, and since his sketches aren’t very good, the crucial part of the puzzle isn’t working.

That’s a great big howling problem, and that, I submit, is why so many people are finding this show unsatisfying.

Where the Time Goes

I used to have time to read, but then I moved to Los Angeles. And bought a car. This machine for speedy transit, it turns out, has just about killed off one of my chiefest pleasures. And sure, the fact that I've got a movie out and there are a billion things to do has contributed as well, but this loss of reading time has been going on ever since I moved out here. Now it's worse because of the other demands on my time, but it's really just a matter of degree.

In Boston and Chicago, I took public transportation. Walked to the T or the L, found a comfortable place to stand amidst all the other rush-hour commuters, and opened up a book. And I wasn't reading lightweight fluff on these trips, no, I read Beckett's trilogy almost entirely on the subway, and most of Proust's a la recherche du temps perdu. My other best reading time was the lunch hour, and even that has been reduced now--after all, who can keep his weight in check if the only places available are either too expensive or too fast-foody?

Reading at home really doesn't work: too many distractions. (And now there's something that is being referred to as "TiVo guilt," as your TiVo playlist gets longer and longer.) Of the books I said I was reading when I first started blogging, back in July or so of 2005, I'm still working my way through two of them: the Gore Vidal essays and the Bill Clinton biography. (Granted, they're both huge.)

Put it this way, though: last night my free time was taken up at dinner with a friend who just turned forty; tonight there is a "check disc" of Zen Noir to look at, the prototype of the DVD, and we have to press every button, listen to every track, watch the movie multiple times to make sure it all works as it's supposed to; tomorrow night is a dinner at a club called Aqua with, supposedly, a bunch of production-company people and managers and agents and whatnot. Plus, somewhere in all this, I have to pull scenes from the movie that TV stations can use as clips if they run a review of the DVD. Time, time, time, can anyone please send me the gift of a little more time?

All of this is, of course, in aid of the big push, the fierce quest to finally achieve what I've been wanting to achieve all my life. What does it mean, though, that reading time, one of my greatest pleasures, was the first thing to be sacrificed?

Things Officially Get Worse

Remember this moment, when all the fat cats smiled and applauded as the dream of America was officially dumped into the trash:

Poverty and Peace

I have written before about my growing awareness of the poverty problem, and its link to violence. Today the Nobel Peace Prize committee has made that link explicit yet again, by awarding this most estimable of prizes to Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who pioneered microcredit.

I won't repeat my arguments about the crucial importance of poverty from July, except to add that nothing I've learned since then has changed my opinion--unless deepening that opinion constitutes a change. (And by the way, this is completely gratuitous, but Stephen Baldwin's idiotic rantings that efforts to end global poverty and violence are "stupid arrogance" just leave me breathless with stupefaction.)

I happened to catch the 60 Minutes report in 1989 about Dr. Yunus, and the self-evident brilliance--and inspired simplicity--of the microcredit idea were immediately impressive, even though at the time I had not yet had my "conversion" to the depth of the poverty problem. So I was just plain thrilled this morning when I heard the news--it was pretty much the first thing I heard when my radio/alarm came on--and of course it's no surprise at all that Dr. Yunus has already pledged to use the prize money for the furtherance of his work.

For years, it was the Literature prize that most caught my attention. But there's been a little change in my perspective lately, and now it's the Peace prize I'm most interested in. And this year's selection, with its implicit recognition of the links between poverty and violence, and how fighting the one fights the other, is dead right.

Diplomacy and Bluster

Who's at fault for the current North Korean problem? Ultimately, Kim Jong Il is responsible. You cannot fairly say it's Clinton's fault or Bush's fault because really, Kim is the one who made these decisions and took these actions and who now pretty much holds every card he ever wanted in his relations with the rest of the world.

But of course, with proper diplomatic efforts, Kim might have been guided toward making different decisions, and that's part of what we're arguing about nowadays. To a certain extent it's a pointless argument: who cares how we got here, the point is that we're here and now what do we do? But at the same time, an examination of how we got here offers strong indications of what we ought to do next (assuming that anything can be done anymore). It also might suggest what we might do about that other looming problem, Iran's quest for a similar nuclear capacity. Because make no mistake, Iran is watching closely how the U.S. responds to North Korea's crashing of the nuclear party; and if North Korea gets away with it, nothing will stop from Iran from doing the same.

So: is it Clinton's fault, or Bush's? There is definitely blame to be spread all around, as there usually is; but judging by the limited research I've done so far, the most convincing timeline of what happened and why is Fred Kaplan's in the May 2004 Washington Monthly. Is it slanted toward Clinton's side of things? Of course it is: the title is "Rolling Blunder," and the subtitle is "How the Bush administration let North Korea get nukes." But opinions aside, the facts as they are laid out suggest some interesting conclusions.

One conclusion: diplomacy does work, and should not be automatically dismissed as appeasement. (By the way, an interesting note about Neville Chamberlain's much-reviled appeasement policy toward Nazi Germany: as this BBC biography suggests, appeasement might have gotten a bum rap--"Current thinking has shifted, however, believing Chamberlain to have shrewdly agreed to appeasement to give the British armed forces the time they desperately needed to prepare for full-blown war.") Appeasement, then, in those circumstances was not an end in itself but a quiet recognition that war was inevitable and that time was desperately needed to prepare conventional forces for what must surely come. Given that we are now in the nuclear era, delay doesn't really serve much purpose anymore because the aim is not to match North Korea in firepower--we already vastly outmatch any other nation in firepower, both conventional and nuclear--but to prevent even one use of a nuclear weapon by anyone under any circumstances.

Enter diplomacy. I think it's fair to argue that technologically, the nuclear genie is right now escaping from the bottle, and that this was bound to happen someday, that no president, no nation, no ideology can prevent it from happening. Any technology eventually becomes pervasive. So the only policy that really helps in the long term is persuasion, i.e., diplomacy. Give a country, a nation, a rogue state, whatever you want to call it, an alternative to nuclear war and, because MADD isn't altogether a bad idea, that nation will probably take the alternative. But if you back that nation into a corner where it believes there are no other alternatives, and it has a nuke in its pocket, chances are the unthinkable will happen. And I'll tell you, when I was watching Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech and heard him drop the line about the Axis of Evil, I cringed. I knew in an instant that this could only lead to desperate trouble down the line, as indeed it has.

Because Bush & Co. only seem to understand the persuasive powers of force; it's the only weapon, so to speak, in their arsenal. We already know that the Bushies never really believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that--in keeping with a long-standing neocon theory about spreading democracy in the Middle East--as soon as September 11th happened, the Bushies knew they had all the excuse they needed and, despite all Bush's blather about exhausting diplomatic options, really they had settled on war pretty much from the git-go. (We know this because Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill, among others, have told us so.) But so far, all their saber-rattling has only resulted in spectacular failures: the now-endless war in Iraq, the rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a powerful spokesman for the Muslim world (precisely because of his bellicose opposition to Washington's bellicosity, a clear-cut case of like spawning like), and now North Korea's development of nuclear weaponry. Benjamin Franklin's definition of insanity is "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." With their one-note response to every situation, the Bush administration certainly seems to meet that definition. (Contrast with the FDR administration, wherein Roosevelt would, famously, try absolutely anything to see if it would work; if it didn't, he dropped it and tried something new. When have you ever seen George W. Bush abandon any idea and try something new?)

In Mr. Kaplan's timeline (there is an update of his positions here, dated yesterday, in Slate), it seems to me that one moment stands out more than any other: on October 21, 1994, after Clinton sent Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang to negotiate with Kim Jong Il, Carter came back with the Agreed Framework, under which, as Kaplan writes, "North Korea would renew its commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, lock up the fuel rods, and let the IAEA inspectors back in to monitor the facility. In exchange, the United States, with financial backing from South Korea and Japan, would provide two light-water nuclear reactors for electricity (explicitly allowed under the NPT), a huge supply of fuel oil, and a pledge not to invade North Korea." This is the agreement that the current administration claims has failed, thus leaving them no choice but to pursue other options--when they say that "bilateral talks failed," this is what they're referring to.

But it's interesting to note the timing: October 21, 1994, only a couple weeks before the "Republican Revolution" that swept control of Congress away from the Democrats. With their new power, as Kaplan writes, "Since the accord was not a formal treaty, Congress did not have to ratify the terms, but it did balk on the financial commitment." (Check out this interview with Robert Gallucci, the chief U.S. negotiator with North Korea at the time; about halfway down, he talks about the Congressional reaction to the Agreed Framework.) Thus the agreement was crippled from the start, and once the North Koreans saw that we weren't honoring the agreement from our side, what possible reason did they have to honor it on theirs? In fact, no matter what you're hearing today, it is not the North Koreans who first broke their word, we did. The newly-Republican U.S. Congress did.

Then, almost immediately upon taking office, the Bush administration started upping the ante. The Axis of Evil, and so forth. Leading us to where we are now.

And what do we do next? Well that's the billion-dollar question, isn't it? But from my consideration of all the above, I have to think that sitting down at the table with these guys, even if it's exactly what they want, must be a pretty good idea. I'm not sure whether we have any good carrots or sticks anymore, but it sure as hell seems obvious that threatening the North Koreans just ain't working and we desperately need to try something different.

And if we should reach some sort of compromise, howsabout this time we actually keep our word?

Catching Up

The Movie

It's going fine. Still playing in Colorado, and will continue there as this weekend we add Austin, Texas. Marc will fly out to Austin for some Q&As, so if you live in the area, stop on by. So far we're averaging two weeks at each location, so if you want to go, it's probably best to go sooner than later.

And yeah, we've been losing money (which is to say, we're spending more on advertising in toto than the film has taken in), but we always knew we were going to lose money, that's how these things work nowadays. A couple years ago I attended a seminar conducted by Peter Broderick, who explained that with the exception of the really big Hollywood blockbusters, all theatrical releases these days are really looked upon as "loss-leaders" for the DVD. That definitely opened my eyes: the idea that a theatrical release is really just advertising, designed to raise awareness of a movie so that people will buy the DVD. With that in mind, all along we knew we were going to lose money by putting Zen Noir in theaters; our budget always reflected a loss from this release.

Still, there's a difference emotionally between understanding a thing intellectually, and watching the reality of the numbers as they come in every week. But hey, that's when you do a gut-check and keep your eyes forward.

The DVD, by the way, will probably be released fairly soon. I can't make the announcement yet, but believe me, when I can, I will announce it loudly.

Starstruck or Just Plain Desperate?

Last week I went to an event at The Egyptian sponsored by the No-Budget Film Club, during which director Christopher Nolan screened his first film, Following, and then previewed his new one, The Prestige. Nolan stood up with Peter Broderick (what, him again?) to introduce his movie; the second he was done, as he headed for his seat and the lights started to dim, some guy hurtled up the aisle with something in his hand. So now all those people, in their hundreds, had to wait till this guy was done wasting Nolan's time; but no sooner had Nolan somewhat grudgingly accepted whatever it was this guy had foisted upon him, than the guy started to actually pitch a project. In the aisle, as Nolan tried to get to his seat, this guy actually starts nattering on about whatever the idea was that he hasn't been able to get anyone else to listen to. So one of the event's organizers warns the guy that he's gonna have to return to his seat or get thrown out, and there's a little tiny scuffle, and then the guy finally retreats--all the way out of the theater. As he harrumphed up the aisle, he started shouting something about "this goddamned incestuous industry" not letting the average guy get a break, then he punched a wall and was gone.

And of course he's right, but still. Behavior like that will get you exactly nowhere, ever. If this guy can't figure that out, he might as well just go home now.

Post-Robbery

The hard part is fighting against the almost overwhelming impulse to cast blame. I know perfectly well that the crime against me was not a Latino crime just because it was committed by Latinos. I knew that before I got robbed, and I know it after. But that deep, awful reptilian part of our brains wants very much to cast a wide net so that anyone who is like the robbers becomes a robber. And once that process starts, it only ever expands. I was walking around the other night and my internal radar was pinging like crazy off practically everyone. Dark corners got darker; innocuous alleways suddenly loomed with danger. I refuse to give in to this sort of thing; still, it can't be accidental that lately, most of my walks have come during the daytime because, you know, I had errands to run and they were all fairly close by so why not walk? And of course these places are closed at night so what can I do but go during the daytime? And so forth and so on. This is how we explain things to ourselves so that we don't have to admit that we've become a little more fearful than we used to be.

At the same time, there is the still-astonishing example of the Amish. And with that shining before me, fear is forced to retreat back into those dark dingy corners. It's been an interesting internal struggle lately, the light and dark more fiercely at odds than usual.

Roger Waters

Given all the above, the recent series of Roger Waters concerts at the Hollywood Bowl was well-timed. Great music, well-played, in a great venue. I went with Marc Rosenbush (who then went twice more, catching all of the L.A. shows with different people), and at one point Marc commented that Waters needs two guitarists to recreate what David Gilmour can do by himself. True enough; but at the same time, having two guitarists opens up some Lynyrd Skynyrd-like possibilities that produced some great results--particularly when Pink Floyd's drummer, the great Nick Mason, came onstage for the second half of the show. (I've now seen all four! Yay!) That meant two lead guitars and two drummers working away, as the sound filled the space and made my chest vibrate.

The political content has been controversial, but in Southern California there were no complaints--and the floating pig, with "Impeach Bush" written across its ass, was greeted with delight. (Check the link above for a photo.) My real complaint about Waters, though, is that for some reason he has abandoned metaphor in his songwriting. It's not like "All in all you're just another brick in the wall" was terribly subtle to begin with; but now even that level of metaphor is gone. He performed his new song "Leaving Beirut," and it's a completely straightforward, on-the-nose number that says exactly what it says and nothing more--prose rather than poetry. On top of that, he had artist Bill Sienkiewicz (whose work I've always liked a lot) put together a comic strip to illustrate the story of when Waters was a young man visiting Beirut. Put that together with the overtly-political flying pig which was being walked around at the same time, and you get three layers of obvious when one would have been enough.

Still, nothing beats "Comfortably Numb" for closing out a nice evening of music.

Awestruck

Everything I've heard about the nightmare in the Amish schoolhouse has simply knocked me out--on the one hand, I simply cannot comprehend what would ever have possessed Mr. Roberts to act as he did, and the details of his communications only make it more unfathomable; on the other hand, the response of the Amish themselves, both during and after the crisis, has been exemplary.

But this, this sends me to my knees:

Young Marian Fisher, only 13 years old, "asked the killer to shoot her first in an apparent bid to save the younger girls."

I have nothing to say. I could attempt to draw some lame comparison about how our leaders ought to blah blah blah, and we could all learn a lesson from blah blah blah, but it all pales next to this example of love in action. So I think I'll just stand here in silence and marvel at it, and hope that the ravages of daily life don't ever knock it from my head.

The Divorce of Love and Hate

I hope the Joseph Campbell estate will forgive me for quoting at such length from Hero With a Thousand Faces, but what I read yesterday was so marvelous, and so directly applicable to our current world situation, that I just can’t bring myself to edit it down to something pithy yet incomplete. It’s from the “Apotheosis” section of Chapter 1:

...Hence, too, the irresistible compulsion to make war: the impulse to destroy the father is continually transforming itself into public violence.... A new and larger paradise is thus established. But this paradise does not include the traditional enemy tribes, or races, against whom aggression is still systematically projected. All of the “good” father-mother content is saved for home, while the “bad” is flung abroad and about: “for who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?” “And slacken not in following up the enemy: if ye are suffering hardships, they are suffering similar hardships; but ye have hope from Allah, while they have none.”

Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love; they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. The rest of the world meanwhile (that is to say, by far the greater portion of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his sympathy and protection because outside the sphere of protection of his god. And there takes place, then, that dramatic divorce of the two principles of love and hate which the pages of history so bountifully illustrate. Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world. The laws of the City of God are applied only to his in-group (tribe, church, nation, class, or what not) while the fire of a perpetual holy war is hurled (with good conscience, and indeed a sense of pious service) against whatever uncircumcised, barbarian, heathen, “native,” or alien people happens to occupy the position of neighbor.

...Even the so-called Christian nations--which are supposed to be following a “World” Redeemer--are better known to history for their colonial barbarity and internecine strife than for any practical display of that unconditioned love, synonymous with the effective conquest of ego, ego’s world, and ego’s tribal god, which was taught by their professed supreme Lord....

The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently to demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children. Such comparatively trivial matters as the remaining details of the credo…are merely pedantic snares, unless kept ancillary to the major teaching.... One would think that we had been called upon to decide or to know whom, of all of us, the Father prefers. Whereas, the teaching is much less flattering: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” The World Savior’s cross, in spite of the behavior of its professed priests, is a vastly more democratic symbol than the local flag.

And we need look no further for an illustration of this love in action than yesterday’s horrific murders in the Amish schoolhouse. The Amish community is shocked and devastated, yes; but as a USA Today article quotes an expert saying, “They’ll try to express to their forgiveness” to the gunman’s widow. In a time when sorrow and tragedy can be found in every direction, only the Amish seem to have remembered the truest teaching of their religion.