Joseph Campbell, Art, and the Sublime

I've spent the last few evenings revisiting Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth series with Bill Moyer, a six-part interview with Campbell over the last two years of his life.

I couldn't recommend it more.

I've been a devoted fan of Campbell's work since I found his seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in the St Kilda library many years ago.

Like countless others, it was a book that profoundly resonated with me and altered my perceptions of life, my place within it, and many of the shared patterns and threshold experiences we all undertake in some form at some point or another.

For those interested in Campbell's lifelong study of the archetypical pattern of the Hero's Journey, I highly advise reading his work. Campbell's life, after all, embodies the cycles of the Fool's Journey as much as any historical figure, and his contributions to and analyses of the universality of myth have inspired many artists and intellectuals of the 20th and 21st centuries.

For now, given the confines of an article, I'll discuss one of his ideas that most captivated me during this recent return to his universe: Art's capacity to reconnect us with the Sublime.

Campbell suggests that what true art gifts us is not simply an aesthetic harmony, beauty, or emotive motifs but a reconnection to something forgotten, archaic, something beyond language and mental constructs.

"I tell you, there’s another emotion associated with art which is not of the beautiful, but of the sublime. And what we call monsters can be seen as sublime. And they represent powers too great for the mere forms of life to survive. Prodigious expanse of space is Sublime."

Here, Campbell uses "monsters" to refer to the great Unknown mysteries of life. Mysteries our ancestors were no more confounded by than we are:

Time, Life, Death, Infinity, Space, Suffering, Darkness, Violence, and the unnerving force of nature. The seen and Unseen.

If you consider that each of these has universally been personified by a myriad of deities, a pattern emerges: we are eternally wrestling with the need to quantify the terrifying unknown and unite with the Sublime.

This is where art emerges as the bridge between the self and the Other.

It's the impulse I imagine first captivated our ancestors as they began to create the great epic poems and regaled them across generations beside sacred campfires eons before their transcription.

On hearing the Mahabharata or Ramayana, we can't help but momentarily cast thought and memory aside. We're stupified by something greater than ourselves: The monumentality of the human experience.

It's something we've all felt. The majesty of a sunrise, the terror of potentially infinite space, the pain of a loss that momentarily jolts us out of normal awareness and into something or somewhere else.

This potency of art within civilization is something we intuitively recognize. It's the unanimous quality of all great masters: the ability to present the mundane with such subtly and sensitivity that they suspend our certainty and render us speechless and childlike again.

We've all listened to a hauntingly beautiful piece of music, a masterfully crafted sentence, or observed an artwork and been fleetingly, powerfully hurled beyond the looking glass. Campbell describes it as a phenomenon where "the less there is of you, the more you experience the Sublime."

This is Caravaggio's ethereal use of light, Joyce's mesmerizing linguistic deconstruction in Finnegans Wake, the haunting melancholy of Fado or the Armenian Duduk, and Van Gogh's ability to paint his bedroom and have you fractionally lost in no-thing.

In these moments, as Campbell explains, we "break past a screen and a whole new horizon opens out. And somehow with the diminishment of your own ego, the consciousness expands. This is the experience of the sublime. Another experience of the sublime is not of tremendous space, but of tremendous energy and power. And I have known a couple of people who were in central Europe during the saturation bombings that were conducted over those cities, and there was the…you just have the experience of the Sublime there."

It's why the first victim of dictatorship is always censorship.

When asked to cut funding to the arts to aid the war effort, Churchhill famously quipped: "Then what would be fighting for?"

So, to keep it brief, artistic expression, pushed to its zenith, shatters control paradigms and hurls us toward the realization that we are suspended within a Mystery so profound that pretty well everything seems absurd.

It's a terrifying prospect for those who yearn to subjugate. Here, as Francis Bacon said, the artist's role is not to explain but "to deepen the mystery.”

Therefore, art's potency, at its most transformative, is in its ability to remove our buffers and re-connect us with the tremendous energy of life.

After all, as Campbell again espouses:

"That’s what poetry is for. Poetry is a language that has to be penetrated, it doesn’t shut you off, it opens, it’s the rhythm, the precise choice of words that will have implications and suggestions that go past the word, is what has to happen. And then you get what Joyce calls the radiance, the epiphany. The epiphany is the showing through of the essence, what Aquinas called the quidditas, the whatness. The whatness is the Brahman."