For PJS ~ A Reposting On the Anniversary of His Birth
I have been listening to Joseph Campbell lately. I have been reading myths and fairy tales as well. I have been thinking of my own myth, after all, and seeing it in the perspective of universals is comforting to me, so... well, no big surprise.
Now, I have a friend who will begin his personal new year as his clock strikes midnight tonight. I was chatting with him recently and said I would write him a letter. I think he'll give me a pass when I forward him this post.
Campbell, in his Power of Myth retells an idea found in Schopenhauer's essay "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," in this way:
...when you ...look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order ... as though composed by someone. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and occasional or as if by accident turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, the whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else...it is as if our lives are the dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters are dreaming , too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature. It’s a magnificent idea – an idea that appears in India in the mythic image of the Net of Indra, which is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems....
The friend who celebrates his birthday tomorrow is someone, in truth, who I have barely known. Our paths crossed--- we've literally been in the same place and face to face ONCE , but the people we know know us. And I feel very close to him, indeed, because of conversations and pivotal moments we have shared and the influence he has had on me in them. Someone we both know says of friends "you're in my soup" which I suppose can be interpreted as you give me nourishment, warm my belly, and make me feel good. I say "you are on my roselle" and mean you balance me, you point me in the right direction, you help me find my way when I am lost. But I also see him as a character in the order of my consistant plot. He's in my story, he's in my dream, he's in my soup, he's on my roselle, he's in my net, and, indeed, he is a gem. And I wish him every good thing in his new year!
[originally posted 9/1/10]
