Darkfin Ripples

My other best friend passed this awesome article on and I thought I'd share it all with you -- try reading it all the way through!

Joseph Campbell Saves The World
In which the late, great master of myth reveals just how foolish all
our religious impudence is, again

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Friday, November 14, 2002

Essential items needed right now: internal fortitude, deep belly
laughter that defies war, juicy blasphemy, thick socks, nuanced
humanism in the face of raging and imminent oily conservatism.

Red wine, gleaming personal vibration, hope for the decimated
Democratic Party, sexy small cars, extra vibrator batteries, chocolate,
bomb shelters for the soul and carefully wrought, nimble perspective.

And Joseph Campbell. Lots and lots of Joseph Campbell. To fill that
last category. This is mandatory.

Such as PBS replaying the dazzling and still potently relevant 1988
"The Power of Myth" interview series with Campbell, the legendary and
wonderful scholar and teacher and author, maybe playing it over and
over again, drawing more viewers into its deep charm, its spellbinding
web of story and belief and religion and what, say, the virgin birth
really means. (Hint: It ain't exactly Christian.)

This is one of those series you wish would be immediately replayed
across all major networks, every week, for about a year, every year,
right during prime time.

Right when Middle America is sitting down to dinner, right when the
bulk of the wary and the fear-pummeled are ready to hunker down and
mutter those prayers and sit in grumbling silence at the table before
the kids scurry off to the PlayStation and the mall.

It should preempt Monday Night Football and preempt "CSI: Overacting"
and preempt "Everybody Loves Schlocky Dumb-Guy Sitcoms" so we can truly
revel, just for a while, just for a rejuvenating change, in the realm
of intelligence and story and mythology and belief and user-friendly
intellectual dialogue and true wonder. Can it be sufficiently
emphasized how desperately needed this sort of thing is right now? No
it cannot.

Campbell is the famous master of myth, the warmly articulate weaver of
cultural tapestry, the great professor effortlessly revealing, in these
luminous talks with journalist Bill Moyers, how every culture's
consecrated tales of gods and goddesses, heroes and monsters, angels
and demons, Jesus and Buddha and Allah and Yahweh and Yoda et al.,
simply represent and illuminate various elements of the human psyche,
the human heart, the human condition.

And, more important, he illuminates, gently, calmly, effortlessly,
without prejudice or bias, without spin or piousness or even heavy
resigned sighing, and without actually saying so, the dangerous
absurdity of a people taking these tales -- and gods -- way, way too
literally.

Of separating the stories and gods from their own lives and insisting
on seeing the culture's deities as something other than the mere
reflection, the personification, of their own internal lives and
spiritual journeys and the need to get off their collective ass and
quit being so hollow and mean and piously self-righteous and eager for
war.

There is no superior bearded father-figure God. There is no Heaven as
physical place. There is no literal reading of holy adventures and
Heaven/Hell battles and fluttery cute cherub angels with wings. It is
all story, all literary torque, all metaphor and analogy and
personification of emotion and spirit, a way for the human animal to
elevate toward greater and greater levels of compassion and love and
mutual understanding and enough with the pipe bombs and the indignation
and the hatred already.

The virgin birth did not actually happen. It is simply a metaphor for
the birth of pure compassion and spiritual feeling in the heart of man.
Christ's body did not fly out of a cave and rise to the pretty blue
sky. It is a symbol for man moving inward, opening to his spiritual
self.

Deities and demons do not exist "out there" in some other space where
we will eventually travel and hang out and romp giddily and watch porn
and eat all the pie and candy we want. They're internal, as facets and
aspects of our own spiritual beings. This is what Campbell teaches. So
simple. So beautiful. So radically misunderstood.

From the Bible to the Upanishads, the Koran to the teachings of the
Buddha, Greek myth to American Indian folklore, the similarities
between beliefs, their borrowed deities, their shared iconography,
their reinvented tales and common themes, are all revealed to be so
astonishingly interconnected, so obviously cut from the same internal
psychological cloth, and so beautifully a part of all cultures, that to
wage war in the name of one is to wage war on them all.

And to think of any one as superior to the others is to do violence to
the very ideas and energies they illumine, and only serves to isolate,
and enrage, and induce severe diarrhetic paranoia. Sound familiar?

That this revelation, this lucid insight comes so easily when watching
a 14-year-old public-television series is at once amazing and
heartwarming and reassuring, while at the same time it induces deep
sadness, a bitter sense of just how far away from this elegant approach
much of the world has devolved.

PBS has been rerunning the groundbreaking multihour series as part of
its recent pledge drive, noting throughout just how radical and
innovative the show was for its time, and how the show single-handedly
raising a few million dollars for public TV when it first ran, as
people were riveted to their screens, desperately hungry for luminous,
nonpious spiritual insight and knowledge. And lo, they still are.
Probably more than ever.

This is exactly what the culture needs more of. Fewer whiny pundits and
fewer talking heads and fewer spin doctors and analysts and
sniper-murder experts and child-molester psychologists and COPS and
Real World Las Vegas and Touched by a Face-Lift.

And more riveting, humorous, absolutely enthralling interviews with the
greatest and (hopefully) most controversial, nimble minds of our time,
religious teachers and writers and juicy poets and weavers of cultural
tapestry, artists and thinkers and myth makers.

But more than any of them, maybe all we really need now is a worldwide
broadcast of "The Power of Myth," with Campbell, who died in 1988 just
before the program first aired, reminding us all to get on our knees
and seek some serious divinity where it matters most: In ourselves.

OK, now it's NOVEMBER - will the damn clock stop ticking so damn fast this year???

Quick high points of last month:

ANGELS WIN - so sorry to my SF buddies who now owe me "fog" as a part of our bet - I'll let you know how creative they are in coming up with it!

Many thanks to JR, one of Darkfin's most generous and fascinating patrons, for the exquisite dinner at Valentino.

Also, here is some great news for those of us who are big Sea Dragon supporters:

The Aquarium of the Pacific is this year's recipient of the prestigious AZA Edward H. Bean Award for the successful propagation of weedy sea dragons! This award "acclaims the most significant birth or hatching of a species and/or subspecies or a significant propagation or management program contributing to the reproductive success of one or more species." Basically, it means that we've achieved American Zoo and Aquarium Association's highest recognition for the successful propagation of any animal species in any zoo or aquarium throughout the entire North American continent.

As many of you know, last year, the Aquarium of the Pacific became the first public aquarium in the world to successfully breed the weedy sea dragon (Phyllopteryx taeniolatus). Over 35 juveniles were successfully reared and distributed to other AZA-accredited aquariums throughout the country. The fact that the dragons were born at all is a major achievement for the Aquarium of the Pacific, but the truly amazing part is that we were able to successfully raise them to maturity!