Joined: 23 Apr 2007 Posts: 11 Location: George Town Tasmania, Australia
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: In Memory of This Giant of Mythology Posted: 05-21-08 07:58am
ZONES
"Each individual," write Joseph Campbell,
"is the centre of a mythology of his own,
of which his own intelligble character is
the Incarnate God, so to say, whom his
empirically questing consciousness is to
find."1 For Baha'is, it seems to me, this
Incarnate God is the God within "mighty,
powerful and self-subsistent." It is the
"know thyself," from Delphi. This centre
of mythology is also an unfolding of
convictions derived from the effects and
expression of experience, the imprintings
of infancy and our peculiar and private
worlds. This is what Campbell calls our
"mythogenic zone." It is our interior life
and its communication with others. The
poem below explores the negative side of
the process across our global society.
-Ron Price with thanks to Joseph Campbell,
Creative Mythology, Viking Press, 1968, p.
93.
This poetic writing aims
to let the Word resound
behind words1 seemingly
endless words where
my mythogenic zone
is especially informed
by the metaphorical nature
of all of physical reality,
Baha'i history no less
and lived experience.
My innermost need
to express has its place
in my shaping of self
and civilization,
in my particular form
of intoxication.2
And a growing impoverishment
of symbols, spiritual poverty,
symbol-lessness fills the land,
liquidating our past,
with bleak substitutes.
A bland barrenness reaches
all the way to the stars
and history becomes a nightmare
of complex, anarchic confusion,
uninterpreted, unassimilated, alien,
and: a Waste Land fills their place.
1 ibid.,p. 93.
2 Frederick Neitzsche wrote that "for art
to exist there is a physiological
prerequisite: intoxication." Twilight of
the Idols, quoted in Campbell, p.355.
Ron Price
10 February 2002
(updated for eHealth Forum
21/5/0
