A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

by Joseph Campbell

  The power of a deity is that it personifies a power that is in Nature and in your nature. When you find that level, then you are in play. That is the work of art in general, because art really is a worship.

  * * *

  There are two approaches to choosing a profession. One is to study the statistics on the number of jobs that are going to be available in this or that cate-gory in the next ten years and base your life on that. That’s following the rim of the wheel. The other, is to ask yourself, “What do I want to do?” If you do that, then you are up against your decision. But if you say, “I am going to do what I want to do,” and if you stay with it, then something will happen. You may not have a job, but you will have a life, and it will be interesting.

  In the wheel of fortune,

  wisdom points to the center.

  Youth points to the rim.

  I have known dozens of artists, and most of them, unless they become commercial artists, live without knowing where their life is going or how it is going to be. You should see what kids in dance go through, and there are no jobs. If you really want to know what it is like in a profession where there are no jobs, go to an actors’ school. It is disheartening to see those young people come in full-of-beans and, boy, do they get it.

  The normal situation is that, perhaps for years, you work away at your art, your life vocation, your life-fulfilling field of action, and there’s no money in it. You have to live though, so you get a job, which may be a low-degree activity relative to what you are interested in. You could, for instance, teach people the art you are operating in yourself. So, let’s say you have a teaching job, and you also have sacred space and time to perform your own work. Your art is what I would call your work. Your employment is your job.

  Then, you are doing so well in your job that your employer wants to move you into a higher position. You’ll have to give more to the job than before, and you will receive a higher salary, but your new commit-ments will cut down on your free time. My advice is: don’t accept the promotion. Don’t accept anything that piles more on you than what you must do to earn your base income, because you are developing, not in your job, but in your artistic work. You can see on campuses all the time what happens with promotions: you move up, up, up, until you are in administration, and it uses up everything you’ve got. The artist must build a structure, not in the way of being of service to society, but in the way of discovering the dynamism of the interior.

  To do that, to keep up with your responsibilities and your fitness and still nurture your creative aspect, you must put a hermetically sealed retort, so that there is no intrusion, around a certain number of hours each day—however many you can honestly afford—and that time must be inviolate. You can allow yourself a few more hours than you think you deserve, but you must make certain you have enough energy and time left over to attend to whatever you have to take care of.

  It’s like doing your exercises: you set aside a time when you’re going to exercise, and that is a holy time. With your art, you should do the same: give a certain number of hours a day to your art, and make it consis-tent. Then, whether you’re writing or not, sit there for those hours: it’s a meditation on communication and expression, the two factors in the art work. What will happen, ideally, is that gradually—and it might not be this week or next or even this year—as your given responsibilities drop off, there will be an expansion of the time available to you for the practice of your art. The point I’m making is that your work—that is, your art—and your job must not contaminate each other.

  * * *

  The creative adventure is always reckless. That goes even for the simple thing I do in writing a book. Friedrich Schiller, a German poet in Goethe’s time, wrote an interesting letter to a young writer who had writer’s block—that’s refusal of the call in a writer. Schiller said in the letter, “Your problem is that you bring in the critical factor before the lyric factor has had a chance to express itself.” In poetry, for example, we spend our youth studying Shakespeare and Milton, and then, when we start to write our own pitiful little poem, we think, “Oh, my god.”

  When writing,

  don’t criticize the words coming out.

  Just let them come.

  Let go of the critical factor:

  Will I make money? Am I wasting time?

  My writing is of a very different kind from anything I have heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I’m writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can’t write unless that happens. It is like putting it into some kind of meat grinder that grinds it into a new thing and yet does not do violence to the material. It’s very exciting when it comes together that way.

  I don’t write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works. Usually, with mythology, you are almost cheating, because it is all in shape anyhow. All the elementary ideas are there. You only have to recognize them, and the work cooks. It’s the damnedest thing: you are going along, and suddenly you find you have said things you did not know you were saying, because it is all right there.

  When I’m writing, I think of the whole academic world: I know how they think about this material, and it is not the same way that I think about it. I just have to say, “Let the guillotine come down. You are still going to have this message.” I always feel as if I am going through the Clashing Rocks, and they are just about to close, but I manage to get through before I let that thought overcome me. It’s a very strange process: actually holding that door open and getting the sentences out. Do not think about the negative side. There will be negatives that are going to come down, but you have to hold the door open if you are going to do any-thing that has not been done before. You have to suspend all criticism to do your work. In writing, you have to do this all the time in order to get the sentence out. Suspending criticism is killing the dragon Thou Shalt. Kill him.

  Get the writing out first.

  Forget the critic and just write.

  Afterward, you can bring in

  the critical factor and prune.

  If you have trouble because you are thinking, “Who is ever going to see this?”—then think of someone you know who would resonate to your statement and write for that person. It is a great facilitator to have a specific person in mind, until you no longer need an audience. Think of little children, for example, with their tiny eyes looking up at you. Talk to them. Write to them. In a book, you will often see a sincere dedication to the person for whom the book was written. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for instance, was written for one specific little girl. When I started writing, I thought of my students at Sarah Lawrence, the actual people with whom I was dealing. I knew their thinking and the kinds of words that spoke to them.

  The two things, then, that I’d say are necessary for breaking through what’s called writer’s block are, first, to have a person to whom you are addressing yourself and, second, to set aside a couple of hours a day when, as it were, you’re writing letters of love to that person.

  Writer’s block results from

  too much head. Cut off your head.

  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 t
o 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, so 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 ex
cited 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.