Once and Future Myths. Phil Cousineau
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not afraid to die,” he said. Then he gave us the sequel: “I just don't want to be there when it happens.” He had, in fact, just given us Woody Allen.
After the laughter Joseph grew more pensive. “It's for you folks to carry on…” he said, and I immediately had one of those uncanny frissons to which the author of Once and Future Myths is also prone (we use them to know when a moment is, well, “momentous”). To both Robin and me it felt like there was the passing of a mantle of some kind, but to whom, and how? There was also a hollow feeling. It deepened as we saw the spooky play that night, which invoked those delicious ghostly presences that haunt Japanese folk mythology. Our good-bye that night would be our last. Joseph passed away on October 30, 1987.
So what of that mantle he was passing on? Where did Joseph Campbell's influence go, we wondered, as the twentieth century was grinding to a close? We were to find out two years later as we undertook to write A Fire in the Mind, Campbell's authorized biography, which would be published in 1991.
We had already seen The Hero's Journey, the moving documentary film on Campbell's life by Stuart Brown, William Free, and Phil Cousineau. Even though Campbell had a distinct aversion to lionization, during his latter years he had realized that he too would achieve mortality in his own lifetime. Invaluable footage of Campbell in his eighties was taken for posterity by Free, Brown, and Cousineau. The “Mythos” series made from it would come to supplement and deepen the popular “Power of Myth” series made with Bill Moyers. (The latter was one of the classics of educational television in America, attracting millions of viewers in the late ’80s and ’90s.) In 1990 Cousineau had created a companion book to the film out of the raw footage of Campbell's autobiographical reflections, but we had not yet met him.
Our first meeting was to be two years after Campbell's passing, in an old Victorian hotel in San Francisco. Phil and I “sized each other up,” cautiously, as students and protégés of Campbell. We seemed to be rather different people. Would our biographies compete with each other? But Robin's and my task was to interview Cousineau for the book we were writing. As we began, so did a magic web of story. Joe had mentored Phil in as unique a way as he had mentored each of us—me in writing and Robin in her art. As we listened to each other's tales we were filled with a mutual and overwhelming gratitude for the mentorship. Our friendship began then, and has continued ever since.
Cousineau writes beautifully and movingly of mentoring in this book, and surely it is one of the most important mythic themes of all time: Aeneas to Odysseus, Merlin to Arthur. As we interviewed for A Fire in the Mind each of the uniquely creative people that Campbell had mentored, Robin and I realized that we were truly part of an intellectual and creative family. Though we had a common legacy in Campbell's approach to myth, we were very different people and had followed our own path in the forest (in one of Campbell's favorite images from the Grail literature). Perhaps Joseph Campbell was a prophet of sorts, but he failed to start an orthodox priesthood of initiates. Instead he empowered a generation of uniquely creative spirits. Poet Robert Bly, himself in turn a mythic mentor to a whole generation of creative questers, has spoken gratefully of the mentorship he received from Campbell. Also mythically inspired psychologist Jean Houston, novelist Richard Adams, filmmaker George Lucas, dancer and tai chi master Chungliang Al Huang, philosopher Sam Keen, anthropologist Joan Halifax, musicians Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, and David Darling, and many others were mentored in some special and personal way by Campbell. (In this family there can be no sibling rivalry because the new mantle is a rainbow garment; we don't compete with, but complement, each other's creative colors.)
What I love about Phil Cousineau's tapestry, especially as woven in this new book, is its autobiographical flavor—while somehow entwined with the wisdom of the ages. Cousineau takes personal mythology in a different direction than that taken by Sam Keen in Your Mythic Journey, or by Stanley Krippner and David Feinstein (who also drew inspiration from Campbell) in Personal Mythology. In a uniquely creative development including the mythologies of place, time, creative struggle, athletic striving, journeys, music (jazz particularly), writing, and parenting, Cousineau shows us once again that myth is “something that never was, yet always is,” through the unique prism of a life lived with intelligence and compassion. And he demonstrates how myth relates to life in a wonderful variety of ways. There are quotable sections and juicy quotes from world literature throughout.
Cousineau's chapter on the mythology of time would by itself make the book worthwhile. As he presents it, sacred time and sacred space are the defining landscape of the soul. We visit the Detroit of his childhood at the same time we join him on a present-day return to the city—a quest to introduce his young son to his father's history, and a moving exploration in personal mythology. The diamond of baseball, the mythic American game, becomes a symbolic matrix for athletes to touch the hero-journey of all time—a veritable Field of Dreams. Cousineau uses these interlocking time-strands to weave together a brilliant excursus on the mythology of the city, the athletic agon conducted in its stadia, and the ways in which the psyche is fascinated and ensorcelled by such metaphors. His essays in this volume migrate from smoky San Francisco jazz cabarets to the cafés and bookstores of Paris in illo tempore, that timeless time when it was exploding with avant-garde writers and artists. Paris emerges, as it did for Joyce and Campbell, as the paradigmatic city of the creative soul in search of its destiny. (Campbell was there in the legendary 1920s when the city was exploding with artistic and literary creativity, a period of time which Cousineau also mythologizes as the apotheosis of the creative impulse.)
As the book unfolds we get to visit the eerie stone moai, the giant “gods” of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) with Cousineau, and in this section I almost felt as if I were on one of Phil's legendary guided tours. I love the textured way his narrative weaves geography and journey metaphor, soul reflections and poignant biography, along with the mythic nuggets to be found lying around everywhere in the living landscape of his prose. Indeed Phil Cousineau, through his many films and books, has helped to introduce a new genre in spiritually informed journeying (see The Art of Pilgrimage and The Book of Roads) to the modern world.
Cousineau's reverence for the landmarks of the inner journey is as great as that of the outer (see Soul Moments: Miraculous Stories of Synchronicity and Meaningful Coincidences from a Seemingly Random World and Soul: An Anthology). In these forays into the realms within, Cousineau developed the multidimensional vision that informs this book. When we encounter the world with mythic senses aroused, it invites a galvanizing response, and life becomes a mysterious and magical adventure that leads you along. Phil Cousineau has grown into a unique fulfillment of the task that Joseph Campbell laid on us in that cab: “It's for you folks to carry on….” (“Take what I have given you, make it your ‘bliss,’ your own, and see if the universe doesn't respond Doors will open for you that you didn't even know were there”—those synchronicities Cousineau writes about so intriguingly!) Campbell, with his last words to us, was speaking to an entire creative generation yearning for inner fulfillment—and yearning to make a creative contribution to life.
This book fills me with awe for the creative fire glowing within my mythic brother and fellow scholar as he walks his creative path, with books and films that guide the soul and instill life-affirmative values. And I think of the words of mythically informed psychologist Jerome Bruner, who said that, “Not until we tell ourselves a story can we make sense of our experience.” This book is woven of stories; and when we share stories a profound communication takes place. We experience the archetypal realm through a personal journey in it. Once and Future Myths is a remarkably intelligent and intriguing walk through the world with mythic sensibilities open and tingling. Let it guide you past the twin gateway monsters of materialism and meaninglessness, and you will find yourself on a new kind of journey that both reveals the timelessness of life and brings out the best in you: a hero's journey. Read on!
1 In a speech delivered by Hillman at the National Arts Club of New York, on the occasion of Campbell's receiving the Gold Medal of Honor for Literature.
2 Quoted in A Fire in the Mind by Stephen and Robin Larsen. Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, in The Masks of God (New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. 545.
INTRODUCTION