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Comparative Mythology has been my entrance to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Joseph Campbell was the kind of teacher to always point you to many other books. And in the Internet age, it has been generally easy to locate those books or other authors besides Campbell himself.
Bill Moyers in 1988:
He continued all his life to read books about the world: anthropology, biology, philosophy, art, history, religion. And he continued to remind others that one sure path into the world runs along the printed page. A few days after his death, I received a letter from one of his former students who now helps to edit a major magazine. Hearing of the series on which I had been working with Campbell, she wrote to share how this man's "cyclone of energy blew across all the intellectual possibilities" of the students who sat "breathless in his classroom" at Sarah Lawrence College. "While all of us listened spellbound," she wrote, "we did stagger under the weight of his weekly reading assignments. Finally, one of our number stood up and confronted him (Sarah Lawrence style), saying: 'I am taking three other courses, you know. All of them assigned reading, you know. How do you expect me to complete all this in a week?' Campbell just laughed and said, 'I'm astonished you tried. You have the rest of your life to do the reading.' "
She concluded, "And I still haven't finished -- the never ending example of his life and work."
For this reason, cross-referencing his ideas to other people who have shared in public, I did not make a point to read everything Campbell wrote. A few points on that
Copyright of Campbell's work harms accessibility. If I had my way, I would have all his books in a searchable text. But I have been discouraged by copyright from organizing his work into topics / keywords.
I have found mistakes in his work. For example, in Power of Myth the story of Chief Seattle telegraph wires is false. There are some others. But nobody can write as much as Campbell did and not make some mistakes
I do not agree with Campbell in Power of Myth on good. People ask me, "Do you have optimism about the world?" And I say, "Yes, it's great just the way it is. And you are not going to fix it up. Nobody has ever made it any better. It is never going to be any better. This is it, so take it or leave it. You are not going to correct or improve it." -- I think we can and people do eliminate hate. And teaching, be it James Joyce sharing his mental patterns, or Campbell/Moyers sharing theirs, we can make the case to eliminate hate teaching and praise of hate. I'm not saying eliminate pain and suffering, because life itself / the cosmos / can induce suffering in the form of "natural disasters" or "acts of god", but I think acts of mankind can be changed.
His view that life is "the way it should be and nobody can change it" contradictions his very own attitudes towards learning and teaching. If anything, I have experienced the Russian IRA and Cambridge Analytica and the social media platforms before and after advertising domination. I believe the brain is programmable, and Campbell's metaphors about computers and mythology as software - with different signals is something I've experienced in my world travels and generals of media (War and Peace in the Global Village). Sadly, the aggression of marketing, the insertion of selling ideas into the middle of web-pages and YouTube presentations and even AstroTurf middle of comments and Tweet threads... corrupts who we are. ToDo: edit / expand
Now some interesting things about Campbell and my supplemental perspective:
Power of myth was supposedly way more hours than the 6 or 7 that were aired. The book has Great Seal content I can't find in the video, etc. And book says it has additional content.
Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi do not come up in the book or video of Power of Myth, unless I've missed them for years. But John Lennon does come up. Now why wouldn't you cover Martin Luther King in 1986 when he had died in 1968? Regardless, Campbell is just a single person. I have supplemented my learning extensively with MLK Jr. And perhaps because I was born in Georgia not too far from MLK's churches and homes. Since age 27 or so, I have come to agree with much of what Martin Luther King Jr says - and I think a person who studies the teachings/words of MLK Jr's approaches Power of Myth differently... as Campbell in 1986 tends to shy away from declaring things outright "good". And I feel there are factually good things (not tricking each other with corrupted food via marketing, causing obesity/diabetes/heart disease for one, Edward Bernays and smoking marketing, etc)
Science Fiction is mythology to me. he cosmological aspect that Campbell defines. And Campbell of course associates himself with Star Wars. But Campbell didn't have time to get into Phillip K Dick's personal mental disorders ("essential schizophrenia as Campbell's 1970 lecture would describe it) and mythology symbols.
Power of Myth doesn't get into Edward Bernays. I find it interesting they were both in New York City, and I consider Edward Bernays. Campbell invokes Frued and Jung, but not Edward Bernays and AA Brill. And the role of advertising/marketing which I considered a mythology system people have faith of - and when they have no religion, it is the default mythology of USA - with many creators/participants. Disney selling and marketing, Pepsi/Coke (Michael Jackson Pepsi), etc.
Howard Bloom in NYC isn't discussed in Power of Myth.
I'm exhausted mentally writing this. I may or may not revisit it, but I was motivated to at least mention MLK Jr + Campbell, and not just Campbell alone, so I scrubbed this in a rather poor mental sate.
I didn't even get to the title point yet, to quote Campbell about flowering out of humanity, not supernaturally imposed. And my 2024 thoughts on how mind-fucked we are as a world - and not seeking goodness in each other, over-competitive. Marshall McLuhan on competitiveness. makes us more alike. Putin/Trump competing against NATO, and China competing to take over Taiwan and USA trying to match Taiwan with computer chips - what a mess. Mutually assured destruciton (MAD) and new innovations in military hardware / technology to kill. If we develop some new physics to kill remotely or drones even become cheaper/easier/trivial (AI driven drones that memorize torrain and can go without radio? - set target, launch, no wireless signal... what a nightmare as new kinetic weapons and some other physics advancement of killing by humanity are my vague nightmares. Too many people want to use violence/killing to show their ego power)
blah, I wrote even more poorly, brain damage pain is really bad right now.
Morning, Saturday, February 24 2024
Shortly after leaving this page, I found this Twitter. Another person's words about out-group hate going on all around me. Mock Mock Mockery....
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