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.