Story Frame 66 – Slaying Inner Dragons with Joseph Campbell & a French Gypsy

Or, why Star Wars is especially relevant today

The cameras were rolling in the late 1980s, when veteran journalist and former White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers sat down for a series of conversations with Joseph Campbell, the foremost interpreter of the world’s mythologies and the stories humans have told one another since the dawn of their existence to explain the mysteries of the universe.

That this happened in the library of Campbell’s good pal, film director George Lucas at his Skywalker Ranch, made it all the more intriguing to me.

Despite nearly four decades as a highly regarded professor and writer and for having collaborated with Lucas on the “Star Wars” trilogy, Campbell was relatively unknown at the time.

“If it hadn’t been for him,” George Lucas told a New York City crowd gathered to honor Campbell at the National Arts Club in 1986, “it’s possible I would still be trying to write Star Wars.”

Theirs was a mutual admiration society.

“Star Wars is a valid mythological perspective,” said Campbell. “It shows the state as a machine and asks: is the machine going to crush humanity, or serve humanity? Humanity comes not from the machine, but from the heart!”

“I think it was in The Return of the Jedi when Skywalker unmasks his father,” Campbell said. “The father had been playing one of these machine roles, a state role. He was the uniform, you know? And the removal of that mask, there was an undeveloped man there, there was a kind of a worm. By being executive of a system, one is not developing one’s humanity. I think George Lucas really did a beautiful thing there.”

Campbell’s status as a relative unknown changed when Joseph Campbell & the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers aired on PBS in 1987, the year Zoë was born.

Described as ‘a vibrant collection of extraordinary stories spun by a great storyteller,’ the series fired the imaginations of millions of people and became one of the most popular TV series in the history of public television.

Even the critics loved it.

“(Campbell) skips nimbly from one culture to another, from one concept of God to another, pointing out the differences and deftly drawing together the similarities … between peak experiences and epiphanies, between the beautiful and the sublime,” commented The New York Times.

“If you crave exhilaration,” wrote The Los Angeles Times, “here’s your fix.”

In the spring of 2012, twenty-five years after its premiere, PBS was re-releasing Joseph Campbell & The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. And luckily for me, I was asked by Al Perlmutter – the producer husband of Joan Konner, the journalist/filmmaker who’d compared me to a sheepdog – to promote the most popular PBS series ever to stations across the country.

In the series, Moyers and Campbell compare creation myths and discuss how religions and mythologies need to change and evolve in order to maintain relevance in peoples’ lives.

“Joseph Campbell’s most profound teaching was that each of us can slay the inner dragons that imprison us,” said Moyers, “so that we might experience fully the rapture of being alive.”

The rapture of being alive was not something I was feeling at the time.

I loved the house I’d bought when we moved to Asheville, but a 100-year-old Dutch barn-style house in the downtown area had just caught my eye. It was an architectural mash up with crazy appendages and porches added on, like an aging dowager who can’t decide what jewelry not to wear to the party.

Located next door to a women’s homeless shelter, there had been a “For Sale” sign in the front yard off and on for the better part of a year. It was offered at a price significantly lower than what I could sell my house for and I realized I could use the difference to pay off what I owed for both kids’ college tuitions.

Slightly tipsy on visions of the transformation I could make, my infatuation turned me into a house-stalker. Every drive into town was calculated to detour me past her so I could slow the car down, make sure she hadn’t yet been sold and gaze longingly at her. At night I dreamed about how I would someday walk through her rooms – even though I had yet to see them –and how I would decorate those rooms. How I would create gardens around her old stone walls and give her a new paint job.

There were ruins of an old house around the corner that had burned down when squatting crackheads accidentally set it on fire. And only a few blocks away, neighbors complained that a former lawyer was now dealing drugs out of her vintage two-story wooden house, causing all manner of annoying traffic at night.

But I didn’t know any of that yet. All I thought was what a great walking neighborhood it was for me and the dogs.

Before I could buy my lovely old dowager, however, I had to sell the house I was currently living in. My realtor told me I couldn’t make an offer on her until I did.

Asheville in 2012 was still mired in the fallout of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, the most severe worldwide economic crisis since the 1929 Wall Street crash and the Great Depression. The previous year, statistics showed that median household wealth in the US had fallen 35% since 2005 – the year we moved to Asheville.

One day in early summer, after a particularly hot and physical yoga class, I decided to ignore my realtor’s advice and approach the owner of the house myself. This strategy had worked back in my married days when I bought the Money Pit house, that little wreck of a mid-century modern house. So, why not?

I rolled up my mat and, still in a slightly post-yogic trance, drove over to the house without stopping to change out of my sweaty yoga clothes or tidy my appearance.

Moments later, I was standing on the faded dowager’s old wooden porch. Up close, there was a faded linen aura of weariness about the blue gray paint with black trim, but it was still magical to me. I hesitated only a minute before raising my hand and knocking on the front door with its long glass panes covered by lace panels. It wasn’t long before I heard footsteps.

The door opened slowly, revealing a man perhaps in his mid 40s. His slender but muscular body was clad in a dark t-shirt and jeans. He had dark hair, a neatly trimmed mustache and short beard. Tattoos covered his arms. The word "Gypsy" was inked in large flowing script across his throat.

“Yes?” he said, scowling at me.

"Hello," I said politely. "I would like to buy your house."

His dark eyes, devoid of any expression, regarded me for what felt like a very long moment.

I waited nervously for him to speak, counting his tattoos, pondering their meaning.

"Would you like to come in and see it?" he asked finally. I thought I detected a slight French accent. He opened the door perhaps an inch wider.

"Thank you," I replied. “I would.”

And with that, I followed the tattooed French Gypsy inside, leaving the sunshine and safety of the outside world behind me.

Campbell’s life mission was to understand the power of stories and legends, especially the common themes and deep principles that had energized the human imagination throughout the ages.

“Basically, myths serve four functions,” Campbell told Moyers. “The first is mystical … realizing what a wonder the universe is and what a wonder you are….

“The second is a cosmological dimension with which science is concerned – showing you what shape the universe is but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through.

“The third function is supporting and validating a certain social order,” he said. “The sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world and is out of date.

“But there is a fourth function of myth – and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to. It is the pedagogical function of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.”

What I found inside the French Gypsy’s house astonished me. I stepped into a book lover’s dreamscape – a romantic living room lined with floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases on one wall reaching all the way up the 11’ high walls. Cozy furniture had been arranged to encourage conversation in front of a patterned brick fireplace decorated with a strand of twinkling fairy lights. A Persian rug covered part of the old wooden floor. Dark wooden antiques furniture accented the room. Family furniture from France, the Gypsy told me, pointing to each piece.

Dazed with delight, I followed him through the large wooden sliding pocket door that separated the living room from the dining room, the walls of which had been painted an attractive dark olive-green. Strings of small lights danced along the tops of the walls. There was a little hill of brightly wrapped presents piled up on two chairs. Today is my two-year old daughter’s birthday, he said, seeing me looking at them.

“And see that table?” he asked, pointing to a beautifully handcrafted long table made of finely sanded and polished wooden planks at the center of the room. I nodded.

“I built that so my wife and I could dance on top of it the night we got married.” He said this with a wry smile that I couldn’t quite decipher.

We moved through a small hallway, and I think I may have gasped out loud as I walked into the light-filled kitchen with its large window overlooking a small deck where a child’s colorful tea service was set up on a small round table. A piece of pretty blue & white batik fabric was strung above the window and blue & white teacups hung in a row underneath old glass-fronted pine cupboards. There were cement countertops, a hidden pantry, and the light-filled back room with its walls of windows overlooking more gardens. The French Gypsy pointed to a small Fisher Paykel “dish drawer,” or dishwasher, cleverly tucked into one of the pine cupboards, making sure I saw it.

I followed him back into the living room through a different door and up a broad set of wooden stairs to a landing decorated with hanging plants and a large piece of stained glass over the window, then up to the second floor.

Upstairs, under the eaves of the Dutch barn roof, there were three light-filled bedrooms with high ceilings. The French Gypsy led me into the master bedroom where a four-poster bed crafted of slender, finely wrought pieces of dark wood dominated the space.

“People say that what we’re seeking is a meaning for life,” said Joseph Campbell. “(But) I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking.

“I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that the life experiences that we have on the purely physical plane will have resonances within that are those of our own innermost being and reality.

“And so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us to find within ourselves. That’s what people want, that’s what the soul asks for.”

In the master bedroom, the French Gypsy pointed up to the ceiling. With its soft blue background and hand painted golden stars of various sizes, it could have been in a chapel in Ravenna, Italy.

“I painted that for my wife, as a surprise when she was away one weekend,” he said. “It was a reminder of the night I met her, which was also the first time in my life I saw a shooting star.”

A former ‘sleeping porch’ on the back of the house and adjoining the bedroom had been converted into a bathroom, complete with jacuzzi. Three sides of the room had small paned windows that opened up over the gardens. In the distance, I could see some of the buildings in downtown Asheville. I felt like I was in a treehouse.

Room after room, I followed him through his house, listening to his stories. I had fallen hard in love – not with him, of course, but with this house, its amazing architectural details and, most of all, its stories. This wasn’t just a house, this was a home.

I’d never responded with such physical sensations to a house – but then, I’d never experienced a house like this before. Being inside this house made me feel alive, rapturously alive. I knew I had to live here.

But first I had to sell the house we were already living in.

“Eternity isn’t some later time; eternity isn’t a long time; eternity has nothing to do with time,” Campbell told Moyers. “Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking in time cuts out. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.

“It’s a wonderful, wonderful opera,” he said, “except that it hurts.”

What followed was the eternity and the opera of selling my house – six long months of frustrations with more than sixty showings and multiple offers that, for a variety of reasons, failed to go through.

Each month, I paid the French Gypsy not to sell the house to someone else. If I was able to buy it, those payments – eventually six of them – would be deducted from the sales price of the house. If not, I would not get that money back. That’s the deal we cut. That’s how in love I was. It seemed to take forever.

“I think of (mythology) as the homeland of the Muses, the inspirers of poetry,” Campbell said. “And to see life as a poem, and yourself participating in a poem, is what the myth does for you.”

“What do you mean by a poem?” Moyers asked.

“I mean a vocabulary in the form, not of words,” said Campbell, “but of acts and adventures.”

Perhaps the Muses conspired to help me out, for the 66th showing resulted in the 4^th offer which finally resulted the sale of my house. A few weeks later, I was clutching the keys to the house of my dreams tightly in my hand.

Of course, there were a few things the French Gypsy didn’t tell me about – like the little girl’s grave I would soon discover in the backyard, the upstairs closet with its terrible secret past, and the realities of living next door to a homeless shelter with all of its inherent drama. All this, and much more, would be mine to discover over time.

Working on The Power of Myth series was yet another documentary experience that re-arranged my mind. For many years, I had internalized the social issues of many of the projects I’d worked on in addition to my own struggles as a single parent without steady work. As a moderate progressive, I felt it my responsibility to worry obsessively about them.

That changed when, not long after, I happened to see a purple bumper sticker at an incense boutique in downtown Asheville. I stared at it in amazement, for here was the answer I didn’t know I’d been seeking. And, as if fate had placed it right in my path, it was a quote from Joseph Campbell.

You cannot cure the world of sorrows, but you can choose to live in joy.

Reading it, I finally realized all of my harboring of the world’s problems was not helping anyone – least of all me – and that I could make a better contribution to the world by trying to live in joy. It was permission to be happy. Tears filled my eyes. I hadn’t understood how much I’d needed that.

I bought it and stuck it on the back of my Subaru, where I would be sure to see it each time I put my dogs or groceries into the rear compartment and be reminded to live in joy. That it was okay to live in joy.

Because joy, it turns out, is just as contagious as fear, but a much better contribution to the lives of everyone around me.

Kristin Fellows is a published writer, world traveler, and a well-seasoned documentary film consultant. When not writing, Kristin can often be found listening to someone’s story or behind the lens of one of her cameras.

More about Kristin @ kristinfellowswriter.com