Something Campbell said https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/t1228 Runboard| Something Campbell said en-us Fri, 29 Mar 2024 06:08:18 +0000 Fri, 29 Mar 2024 06:08:18 +0000 https://www.runboard.com/ rssfeeds_managingeditor@runboard.com (Runboard.com RSS feeds managing editor) rssfeeds_webmaster@runboard.com (Runboard.com RSS feeds webmaster) akBBS 60 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p9136,from=rss#post9136https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p9136,from=rss#post9136I come back to this thread from time to time. Guess I am still trying to figure through something. Or perhaps I am looking for a lead. Upthread, dated 10 Mar, I post a side note pointing to the Black Madonna phenomenon that I think began in the 12th C in Western Europe. Her appearance was sudden and inexplicable. I found an online site that gives some examples of her. Perhaps mentioned already, but in Spain the Roma are particular devotees of her, seeing in her the source of fertility. On the other hand, for people such as the late Pope John Paul she is associated with the Greek Sophia, the woman's face of mystical wisdom. Interesting, yes? http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/resources/blackm/blackm03.html#usa A better link: http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/resources/blackm/blackm.html#tab Terenondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Sun, 12 Jun 2011 23:32:10 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8726,from=rss#post8726https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8726,from=rss#post8726Yep. Terenondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Mon, 09 May 2011 22:25:32 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8725,from=rss#post8725https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8725,from=rss#post8725Agreed! I can’t argue with that. Which must be why I wrote this sonnet:            Wisdom When once the changing world we understood, whose laws we knew were permanent and clear, when once distinct the shades of bad and good and fear was all we thought we had to fear, when once a narrow path before us lay, straight and unobstructed by illusion, when once our destination was plain as day and we were never troubled by confusion it was then that we were young and then we knew a simple world observed with simple eyes, but as we lived and learned and older grew, the less we understood and so grew wise. For wisdom is no more than finding true that, after all, we never had a clue. Copyright 2005 – Evolving – Poems 1965-2005, Gary B. Fitzgerald nondisclosed_email@example.com (GaryBFitzgerald)Mon, 09 May 2011 22:07:15 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8719,from=rss#post8719https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8719,from=rss#post8719Article read, Gary. If I don't buy it reason may amount to a perversity on my part. When it comes to the numinous I resist names and definitions. Was Campbell a pantheist? I don't think so. Was he a deist? Still don't think so. Was he persuaded of some kind of transcendance of whatever we are all supposed to transcend? That is not my reading of his thoughts. So what does Campbell leave us? I think he leaves us, deliberately, with nothing definitive. So I'll keep with thinking him agnostic. The act of naming cheats us into thinking we know the thing. The act of poetry gets us behind the name, inside the thing. This is something I figure Campbell could have chewed on. Terenondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Mon, 09 May 2011 00:06:54 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8718,from=rss#post8718https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8718,from=rss#post8718So now go read it. Then we'll talk. (Cut to chase: Campbell was a Pantheist, just like us.)nondisclosed_email@example.com (GaryBFitzgerald)Sun, 08 May 2011 22:50:16 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8717,from=rss#post8717https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8717,from=rss#post8717There you go, good buddy. And thanks. Terenondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Sun, 08 May 2011 22:36:55 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8716,from=rss#post8716https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8716,from=rss#post8716I don't know why my links never paste here as 'hot' links. Maybe you guys can fix it. Otherwise, just copy and paste into Google. Garynondisclosed_email@example.com (GaryBFitzgerald)Sun, 08 May 2011 20:00:30 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8715,from=rss#post8715https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8715,from=rss#post8715Tere said: “I've often wondered what name Campbell might have given to his own faith or belief system or whatever one might label it.” The following essay is worth a close reading, or even reading twice. I think it might answer your question. http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2009/06/what-did-joseph-campbell-believe.html If it’s any consolation, Tere, Gaia will be just fine. Just ask the dinosaurs. My dog had fleas once. The fleas are gone, the dog is fine. Campbell was, in fact, a Taoist. He just didn't know it :-) GBF nondisclosed_email@example.com (GaryBFitzgerald)Sun, 08 May 2011 19:57:42 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8711,from=rss#post8711https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8711,from=rss#post8711I need to admit straight up I am in a heavy mood today. On facebook I find a post made by Credo Mobile. It involves the case of a cheerleader in TX raped by a basketball player. Boy pleads guilty to lesser charges and is sentenced to do so many hours of community service. Subsequently, at a game the cheerleaders are told to chant his name when he is about to make a shot at the free throw line. The girl refuses. School disciplines her for her refusal. A lower court sides with the school, saying she is a representitive of the school in her cheerleader role, not entitled to First Amendment free speech rights. Court orders her parents to pay school's legal fees. On appeal, the Supreme Court refuses to hear the case, calling it frivolous. That's right. Frivolous. I call this another small skirmish in the planetary, not so undeclared war on women conducted in India, Southeast Asia, on the continent of Africa, and in the Americas. Facebook again. A poet living in South Africa, involved in trying to stop a highway from cutting through the Serengeti, posts a link concerning a Yemeni poet whose tongue gets cut out. I am assuming the act is committed by Saleh's regime. Not so. Deed done by the opposition. Then there is Gaia. It becomes overwhelming sometimes. The affronts and insults to the earth. Japan's earthquake disaster was not a natural disaster. It was man made. What stupidity to build a nuclear power plant on a well known, well defined fault line? Haitian earthquake disaster also man made, not natural. Shoddy building, absolute absence of building codes, killed the people of Port au Prince, not an earthquake. Macondo spill another man made disaster brought about by hubris ridden engineers and profit driven capitalists. Niger Delta oil saturated. Rivers of Bolivian mountains scummed with oil in a spill ongoing for over a decade. And now the Mississippi flooding. Another man made disaster that will end in increasing the size of the Gulf's dead zone and that will seriously compromise marsh lined oyster beds. Levee system not built by beavers. Built by men. By now Katrina flooding is old news. Still a man made disaster. The global war on women. The silencing of poets and artists done blatantly in Yemen, institutionally, insidiously done in the United States. And the rape of Gaia by a swan too enamoured of himself. It's all interlocked. It's all the same assault. Moyers asked Campbell how bad he thought the present crisis is. Thinking on it for a moment, Campbell said the worst yet. He thought that ultimately the crisis is spiritual. I am satisfied he didn't mean spiritual in the way a Christian, Islamic, or Jew might mean. By pointing to the Troubadors as giving the lead he was pointing to a union, a sacred marriage as the alchemists understood it. Maybe Solomon saw the same in his marriage psalm. Maybe Hafiz and Rumi did too. Maybe so did Blake, Whitman, and Lawrence. My mood is seriously black today. Tere nondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Sat, 07 May 2011 16:20:06 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8382,from=rss#post8382https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8382,from=rss#post8382"Madonna, wife, mother, whore: the roles women play are sometimes mistaken for the woman, even by the woman herself. What interests me as much is who a person is, when as Campbell said, you don't owe anybody anything. A rare gift and opportunity that life doesn't often offer, n'est pas, as you would say?" Very ture, Kat. Situation analogous to how, as they say, a man can become his job. And what a huge area it all opens up, huh? How becoming the role must end in dimininshment of individuation. And then the question of who gets to assign the roles both men and women are forced to play. Or how they themselves define the roles they play. On yet another side note I've often wondered what name Campbell might have given to his own faith or belief system or whatever one might label it. Do you know? My hunch is that he would have been most comfortable thinking of himself as an agnostic. I must note the close relationship between the words agnostic and gnostic, of gnosis, what points to an intuitive knowledge of spiritual truth. An agnostic is often mistakingly associated with the atheist in the crowd when, in fact, the agnostic's position is that, while there is a spiritual truth, it can never be fully apprehended. All that can be known are the masks as Campbell might say. Terenondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Sat, 26 Mar 2011 14:03:39 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8367,from=rss#post8367https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8367,from=rss#post8367Tere, These stanzas resonate with me: "what I didn't tell her as we talked, or while she released her breath on sleepy air of the thing I saw at the theater, when the thing I saw was in the words I heard when the lawyer said, when the lawyer who is reputed to make a hundred grand in dollars a year; and the lawyer talking when the show was ended, and watching her when the players mingled, and he being the public's defender, the community's reasoning, well regarded leader, who said while keeping his eyes on her, "I preferred her slut to her other parts." Just the prayer coming in the gentling, in the magic coming through words quilting for her: dearest actress, dear heart's trusting friend, if the daily in your drama drags you along to where if ever you must break the still in birdie flight, never let that one cover your twilight, or cast you in the dark of his townhouse door." Madonna, wife, mother, whore: the roles women play are sometimes mistaken for the woman, even by the woman herself. What interests me as much is who a person is, when as Campbell said, you don't owe anybody anything. A rare gift and opportunity that life doesn't often offer, n'est pas, as you would say? nondisclosed_email@example.com (Katlin)Wed, 23 Mar 2011 15:52:56 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8318,from=rss#post8318https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8318,from=rss#post8318Hadn't seen the thoughts in that light, Kat. Thanks. Terenondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Sat, 19 Mar 2011 13:18:56 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8311,from=rss#post8311https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8311,from=rss#post8311"Even though I remember the dream as if it was yesterday I'll not try to describe it." Tere, I like the mystery of this: '85 Goodness, but that was a hard year. One of the three worst I've made it through so far. Anyway, I saw her. As real to me as any waking sight. I will say this about her. She can hold you like a baby and never once let you see her face, only let you sense a smile. nondisclosed_email@example.com (Katlin)Fri, 18 Mar 2011 22:34:20 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8274,from=rss#post8274https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8274,from=rss#post8274In several different threads, over two forums, some of us are trading in, delving down into, or touching on the stuff of myth-making. The Actress poem I posted to the board in Poetry Spectrum last Sept. and frankly had forgotten about. It strikes me as germane to the discussion. As said elsewhere the poem is less a product of my imagination than a journalistic report on a theater production. Not only did I watch the play three times, but I filmed it for the father of the lead actress. Also as mentioned elsewhere, I knew the lead actress well. Here is something I think I get. When you enter into a myth, say its a theater production, you lose yourself. You become that myth's mythogem. This is probably as true now as it was in the species' first village, ritualistic enactments, no matter how advanced, modern, or removed from our origins we've become. To me this is huge. I am not quite sure what it says about myths. But it does point to a power of some sort myths have over the individual, likely archetypal or elementary in nature. And it isn't theoretical. I saw the transformation of the actress, a woman I knew intimately, first hand. She was not herself. She was the myth making produced by her enactments. All just fascinating to me. Tere The Actress She plays the parts assigned to her in the dreamscape of the spotlight upon the stage where the play gets played in the theater next the theater next where dramatic of action crystal collects in active verbs signing the words as she entrances believably, rhythmically, believably. She draws on the audience's dark unsaying soul, the whole of theater's soul she carries up in her first epiphany of the forever feminine's whitening woman, the morning star of Sailor hope, the resident queen presiding over dreams and giving the gift of promise to return just as the curtain implicates her in its folds. (Then she's gone and daily dramas drag on.) Then she returns as she said she would, only now she is masked, wearing the part of the slumming man's, the darkdoor man's whore, the one who wants the answering slut bending to his self-love, his stranger charge, his unrelieved lust to abase her. But she who slips away still standing. (Once again gone while daily the drama drags on.) And once again she falls into the spotlight in the stormy night when lips enlarged are red, and her hair is wildmare black and she is the life-blood beauty whom half-hearts haunt who cannot follow the rule she knows when the beauty rule requires the whole of the haunted soul who wills to walk with her in the bright night's distended light bottoming through the catacomb womb in true beauty's unkempt measure. But soon she goes when the haunted show how they cannot fully fall to her. (And stilling she's gone when daily dramas drag on.) Only, somehow she returns when she's become the wilder woman in the artist girl who is the self-conversant, self-acting, selfing sister joy birthing the greening boys in flowering form she draws in calligraphy written large in life weave of honey wine and tendril dream as too soon she hides inside undrawn regions. (And gone again while rope and pulley drag down the daily drama on.) And the play will come to its final scene when hers is to initiate the neophyte into life's unsecured mystery. How else should she seem but as the Minoan serpent queen for whom the plain secret is in the solitary dance, in the wild, in abandonment, in the anciently young, circling mandalic, the hilltop ceremonial where the truth she decribes is in the storied lives twining through before and after, pressing up inside the dramatic now, as the curtain calls and the players bow to the audience seeing only seeing her (just before she's gone and daily dramas drag on). But now it's time to play real, since, the actress of whom I speak when the show is complete will come the way home with me. We are lovers, you see, and we are friends. And we will talk of how the part played, of how she forgot three lines, of how she entered into the stirred, the illusions up on the stage, of how it went through the hall, of how the audience fell inside her spell, of how ... But then she will talk herself still, ready to fall folded to our small home, our warm home where the damper downs, and the wood stove rounds the edge of chill as she settles in the spin of soft sleep while I hold her from under, and she burrows into my side as I keep a late watch on worrisome things watchers will see: what I didn't tell her as we talked, or while she released her breath on sleepy air of the thing I saw at the theater, when the thing I saw was in the words I heard when the lawyer said, when the lawyer who is reputed to make a hundred grand in dollars a year; and the lawyer talking when the show was ended, and watching her when the players mingled, and he being the public's defender, the community's reasoning, well regarded leader, who said while keeping his eyes on her, "I preferred her slut to her other parts." Just the prayer coming in the gentling, in the magic coming through words quilting for her: dearest actress, dear heart's trusting friend, if the daily in your drama drags you along to where if ever you must break the still in birdie flight, never let that one cover your twilight, or cast you in the dark of his townhouse door. Terreson nondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Sat, 12 Mar 2011 18:15:13 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8265,from=rss#post8265https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8265,from=rss#post8265Thank you, Kat. Again you bring good intel to the table. Thank you also for helping me to dot an i and cross a t. While I've tried to touch on the thing 2, maybe 3 times in both prose and poetry, I've since realized that words can sometime end in a diminishment of sorts. Eventhough I remember the dream as if it was yesterday I'll not try to describe it. The year was '85, a year I've mentioned in response to your question about the story, The White Rabbit. I did not know then a tenth of what I've come to learn about related matters. It would be another 7 years before I studied Campbell's big books, for example. By which I mean the dream could not have been reading induced. Goodness, but that was a hard year. One of the three worst I've made it through so far. Anyway, I saw her. As real to me as any waking sight. I will say this about her. She can hold you like a baby and never once let you see her face, only let you sense a smile. About conservatives and such. We don't much talk politics here, which is probably just as well. Viewed socio-culturally, however, I've felt for a good 20 years our epoch is characterized by a decadent patriarchy in the heightened, scared days, a harbinger of its final decline. The increase in violence committed against women world-wide, even the institutionalized violence against womens rights here at home, proves my point. The Fathers are running scared. On a gut level they know they've lost control. I can almost feel sorry for them, for the desperation, the tone of which is shrill, but not quite. Good reason why Merlin is my hero. As Jung said: the archetypal son to the Great Mother. Terenondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Fri, 11 Mar 2011 20:27:23 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8264,from=rss#post8264https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8264,from=rss#post8264Tere, Your mention of the Black Madonna put me in mind of Marion Woodman, a Jungian analyst who wrote Leaving My Father's House. She said she got the title of the book from something Bly said during a Great Mother conference. She says her book is a "contribution to Sophia's book" and begins this way: "The eternal feminie is thrusting her way into contemporary consciousness. Skekinah, Kwan Yin, Sophia, whatever her name, she is the manifestation of the divine in matter. Among her many faces are the Black Madonna, White Buffalo Woman, Shakti, Kali, Aphrodite." The book was published in 1992, and I remember her saying that the Black Madonna was appearing in a number of women's dreams around that time frame. Campbell probably made that comment to Moyers you refer to sometime in the mid-80's, so I think you are right to make the connection to Sophia. Leaving my father's house is another way of saying leaving patriarchy. I recently read "What Conservatives Really Want" by George Lakoff. Here is some of what he says on the topic: "The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. His job is to protect the family, to support the family (by winning competitions in the marketplace), and to teach his kids right from wrong by disciplining them physically when they do wrong. The use of force is necessary and required. Only then will children develop the internal discipline to become moral beings. And only with such discipline will they be able to prosper. . . . In conservative family life, the strict father rules. Fathers and husbands should have control over reproduction; hence, parental and spousal notification laws and opposition to abortion. In conservative religion, God is seen as the strict father, the Lord, who rewards and punishes according to individual responsibility in following his Biblical word." And there's more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/what-conservatives-really_b_825504.html Conservatives claim to value individual responsibilty, but you can't be an individual if you have no choice but to be under somebody else's authority. Same old story. Second verse, same as the first. And to quote Cohen, "Love, aren't you tired yet?" nondisclosed_email@example.com (Katlin)Fri, 11 Mar 2011 16:42:59 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8259,from=rss#post8259https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8259,from=rss#post8259Home from work today. Not entirely satisfied with yesterday's response. There is another, larger, aspect to Troubadour poetry and the values it expressed. But a side very difficult to attach words to. At the same time the Troubadours flourished there was a religious movement widely accepted in Provence. It even enjoyed the patronage of many of the region's nobility, some of whom were active practitioners. Adherents were variously called Cathars, Albigensians, and, with some confusion, Waldensians. To the extent that the faith accepted and followed the teachings of Jesus Christ it could be called Christian. But it was a gnostic form of Christianity, similar to what had flourished in Egypt in the first centuries A.D. As such many of its tenets were at variance with the doctrinal teachings of the Church. Gnosticism is complex, very difficult to describe. The main thing is that, while gnostics tend to believe in a transcendent God, they also believe that evil in the world is not because of a human "fall" but because created by God. In a sense there view of good and evil is Manichean, that the duality is absolute. There is also a very spiritual aspect to the belief. Wisdom, gnosis, is not found by worshipping God but by following Sophia, the mother of mystical knowledge. Cathars did not have priests, nor was acceptance of its tenets required for personal salvation. They did, however, have prefects. These were men and women who had renounced all worldly pleasures and were celibate. But anyone could stand within the Cathar framework without fear of damnation for their "sins." As pertains to Troubadour poets specifically, what they took from the Cathars was this sense of gnosis, of, spiritual awareness through mystical knowledge. And since the face of mystical knowledge was a woman's face, Sophia, the Trobadours saught the same in their idealizations of love between a man and a woman. It was a kind of union the spirituality of which became emphasized. Here is the key to, and the right context for, understanding the Troubadours idealization of love. This, Kat, is what I finally got, what I am all but certain Campbell got and why he said our present spiritual crisis could be addressed by following the Troubadours' lead. I've probably said this inadequately. Around certain things and experiences it is very, very difficult for me to wrap words. And words such as spirituality, gnosis, mystical wisdom to me are just gross approximations of something that is ultimately numinous and immanent. At its most I figure this is what Troubadour poetry was after. Two asides: On this same cusp of time when the troubadours flourished and the Cathars held sway in the south of France and north of Spain there were these spontaneous appearances both through out the region and as far east as Poland of a phenomenon since known as the Black Madonna. All of a sudden she was there, mostly in cathedrals, and no one could explain it. Statues of the Madonna in black. It takes no leap for me to associate her with the mother of mystical wisdom, Sophia. In time, after the Roma entered the area, they would worship her, give her offerings, viewing her as a fertility figure. I've read somewhere that the late Pope John Paul was a devotee of the Black Madonna whom he had encountered in Poland when a young man. This in the 20th C. Side bar note two and speaking of popes, Pope Innocent III viewed the Cathars as heretics dangerous to Church doctrine. Because of this, some historians say because Provence was also a prosperous region and ripe for plundering by the northern French, a crusade was ordered against the Cathars and that would involve the whole of the south of France. It is known as the Albigensian Crusade. Albi being a principal city and a center of the Cathar faith. In 1209 crusaders entered the area. They did what crusaders did with Church blessings and dispensation given beforehand. They murdered, raped, plundered, destroyed whole cities and castles. From Albi there is the story of Troubadour poets on the ramparts and hurling poetic insults at the invaders. Also from Albi there is the story of one knight coming to the Crusade's spiritual father, telling him not all the residents were Cathars, that some were Catholic, and what should they do with the latter. The Bishop said something like: Kill them all; God will sort it out. But by 1209 the Troubadours had done their work. Their ideas and ideals disseminated. Man, I've really garbled the tale. Just darn hard to talk about some things. Terenondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Thu, 10 Mar 2011 15:53:05 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8257,from=rss#post8257https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8257,from=rss#post8257An aside. Mostly Bly's reading of the Flamenco poetry case tallies with mine. His syncretic source appears to be the same as mine: Lorca. If my memory serves me, correct me if I am wrong, Lorca never said the cante jondo of flamenco stems from Christian, Jewish, and Islamic origins. He said it stems from Iberian, Jewish, and Islamic origins. The distinction is huge and gets larger. Iberians were only nominally Christianized for one. And a Jew from Spain, a Sephardic, is not exactly the same kind of Ashkenazic Jew, whose dialect is Yiddish, and whose value system is a little different. Sklarew was briefly outlining what she sees as Bly's roots and the traditions he draws from. I didn't read the quote the way you did with regard to Lorca, but I am sure you are right about him. Thanks for the info; it's good to have. nondisclosed_email@example.com (Katlin)Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:17:45 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8254,from=rss#post8254https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8254,from=rss#post8254So love coming home to posts such as these, which are not at all far afield. Very germane actually. Kat I know a fair amount about the 11th and 12th centuries in Europe. One historian has called the 12th C. a century of renaissance. It was the century which saw the first universities, for example. The Mauresque conquest of the Iberian Peninsula brought with it the fruits of an Islamic Civ still flowering. You mention Averroes and Avicenna, two Arab language philosophers. But the Moors brought much else. The latest in mathematics, astronomy, medicine. It was through the Moors, by the way, Aristotle was reintroduced to the West; a huge moment in philosophy to say the least. They also brought with them a poetic tradition going back to the Persian poet, Hafiz. So many ideas that got introduced, transmitted through a region of the world, Western Europe, absolutely barbaric, feudal in the worst sense of the word, cruel, a world that viewed upon serfs and peasants as not entirely human. In the main, Troubadour, or Troubador, poets are associated with Provence in the south of France. At the time Provence enjoyed the highest level of material civilation in Europe, and with good reason. It was a region in close, mercantile, contact with all of the Mediterranean. Catalonia which, to this day, considers itself autonomous from Spain was also a wealthy region. There was much commerce and close contact between the two regions. The Troubadours did not originate in Provence alone. In my library I have a number of Troubadour poems coming from south of the Pyranees. The Troubadours were smitten by many Arab world ideas and ideals. They were also smitten by prosodic means particular to Arab world poetry and, again, going back to the Persian poet, Hafiz. (Just to be clear, Persians are not Semitic, but Indo-European just like you and me.) Through the Troubadours a certain set of ideas, ideals, and (the big one) values got introduced into Western Europe. Following on the heels of the Troubadours, taking their lead, were the Trouveres of northern France and the Minnesingers of Germany. There were also such northern Italian poets as Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and Dante. An aside. Mostly Bly's reading of the Flamenco poetry case tallies with mine. His syncretic source appears to be the same as mine: Lorca. If my memory serves me, correct me if I am wrong, Lorca never said the cante jondo of flamenco stems from Christian, Jewish, and Islamic origins. He said it stems from Iberian, Jewish, and Islamic origins. The distinction is huge and gets larger. Iberians were only nominally Christianized for one. And a Jew from Spain, a Sephardic, is not exactly the same kind of Ashkenazic Jew, whose dialect is Yiddish, and whose value system is a little different. Value system. What brings me back to Campbell's insight. Chivalry. Courtois Amoire. Gender equality. The notion that every individual has the right to personal happiness free of coercion. That is what Campbell took from the Troubadours. Dante did too. As I do. I guess I call the present assault against the insistence a spiritual crisis. Terenondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Wed, 09 Mar 2011 20:48:24 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8252,from=rss#post8252https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8252,from=rss#post8252Hi Tere, I'm back again. Lots of synchronicity in my online reading today. This is from a review Reaching Out to the World: New & Selected Prose Poems by Myra Sklarew: "ANOTHER INTRIGUING ASPECT OF Bly’s investigations and creations occurs in his translations, to be dealt with only briefly here. It is no accident, Bly’s attraction to the Spanish poets and in particular to Federico Garcia Lorca. His journey to and absorption of the poetry of Rumi and Ibn Hazm bears a strong resemblance to the underpinnings of Lorca’s poetry built upon the cante jondo, the “deep song” of Andalusian gypsy art and 11th century Arabic poetry, the casida. Bly’s reach is long and deep. He returns to a period in our history when Christian, Jew and Muslim shared a stable existence, a period of great flowering in art, literature, medicine and science, the likes of Averroes and Avicenna, a golden age of poetry in Iberia, writings in exquisite forms on subjects ranging from the metaphysical to the erotic." http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2011/03/bly-in-prose/ I hope I haven't gone too far afield from your original intentions for this thread! If so, you can always double back. nondisclosed_email@example.com (Katlin)Wed, 09 Mar 2011 16:55:20 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8249,from=rss#post8249https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8249,from=rss#post8249Tere, I first heard the name Henry Corbin a few years back when the poet Li-Young Lee mentioned him at a reading. Although I had never read Corbin, it turns out I had read people he influenced as well as, I suspect, people who influenced him: "He was a champion of the transformative power of the Imagination and of the transcendent reality of the individual in a world threatened by totalitarianisms of all kinds. . . . He introduced the concept of the mundus imaginalis into contemporary thought and his work has provided much of the intellectual foundation for archetypal psychology as developed by James Hillman. But Corbin’s central project was to provide a framework for understanding the unity of the religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. His great work Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi is a classic initiatory text of visionary spirituality that transcends the tragic divisions among the three great monotheisms. Corbin’s life was devoted to the struggle to free the religious imagination from fundamentalisms of every kind. His work marks a watershed in our understanding of the religions of the West and makes a profound contribution to the study of the place of the imagination in human life." I discovered today that Robert Duncan and Charles Olson were among those Corbin influenced. Here, for example, in response to "as scathing and dismissive review of H.D.s Tribute to the Angels, Duncan quotes Corbin": "In the Moslem world as well as in the Christian world this concept of being united with the divine reality by a love union with the Angel who is present in the person of the Beloved becomes a prime heresy." http://henrycorbinproject.blogspot.com/2009/05/henry-corbin-american-poetry-part-2.html I am also reminded just now of something Campbell said: "Nature intends the grail."nondisclosed_email@example.com (Katlin)Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:49:38 +0000 Re: Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8248,from=rss#post8248https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8248,from=rss#post8248But I never quite got what Campbell got. I do know. Hi Tere, What is it that you never quite got but finally got now? And why now? As you might imagine, I have a few thoughts on this topic myself, but I'd like to hear about your revelation(s). For now, I'll just say that I am reminded of something Jean Houston wrote in The Search for the Beloved: "It is our yearning that will take us to our edges so we will fall into the imaginal world where our destiny as co-creators lies. We are tricked into the imaginal realm through a trick of the heart, for the heart will trick most people faster and deeper than will the games of the mind. . . . Blessed are the lovers, for they are willing to be such fools that they will be tricked--tricked into evolution, tricked into angelhood, tricked into bringing the transformational information into the world of space and time."nondisclosed_email@example.com (Katlin)Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:30:42 +0000 Something Campbell saidhttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8246,from=rss#post8246https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p8246,from=rss#post8246Maybe I should post this in Discussion II. Somehow it seems more fitting here. I can't remember the exact quote, something Campbell said. Can't remember who posed the question; might have been Moyers. He was asked what will save humanity in its present spiritual crisis? His answer, quick and certain, surprised me. I've had to think on it long and hard in order to get it. I finally got it. He said it will be the same as what saved Western Europe in another set frame of spiritual crisis coming to a climax in the 12th Century. He then pointed to the ideals, radical at the time, embodied in Troubadour poetry: chivalry, amour (as opposed to eros), gender equality, and the proposition, still radical, that every individual has the right to pursue happiness. I know Troubadour poetry better than I know the poetry of many 19th C. poets. But I never quite got what Campbell got. I do know. http://chivalrytoday.com/joseph-campbell-chivalry/ Terenondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Tue, 08 Mar 2011 17:11:24 +0000