onegoodmove

Such as PBS replaying the dazzling and still potently relevant 1988 "The Power of Myth" interview series with Campbell, the legendary and wonderful scholar and teacher and author, maybe playing it over and over again, drawing more viewers into its deep charm, its spellbinding web of story and belief and religion and what, say, the virgin birth really means. (Hint: It ain't exactly Christian.)

This is one of those series you wish would be immediately replayed across all major networks, every week, for about a year, every year, right during prime time.

Right when Middle America is sitting down to dinner, right when the bulk of the wary and the fear-pummeled are ready to hunker down and mutter those prayers and sit in grumbling silence at the table before the kids scurry off to the PlayStation and the mall.

It should preempt Monday Night Football and preempt "CSI: Overacting" and preempt "Everybody Loves Schlocky Dumb-Guy Sitcoms" so we can truly revel, just for a while, just for a rejuvenating change, in the realm of intelligence and story and mythology and belief and user-friendly intellectual dialogue and true wonder. Can it be sufficiently emphasized how desperately needed this sort of thing is right now? No it cannot.

Campbell is the famous master of myth, the warmly articulate weaver of cultural tapestry, the great professor effortlessly revealing, in these luminous talks with journalist Bill Moyers, how every culture's consecrated tales of gods and goddesses, heroes and monsters, angels and demons, Jesus and Buddha and Allah and Yahweh and Yoda et al., simply represent and illuminate various elements of the human psyche, the human heart, the human condition.

And, more important, he illuminates, gently, calmly, effortlessly, without prejudice or bias, without spin or piousness or even heavy resigned sighing, and without actually saying so, the dangerous absurdity of a people taking these tales -- and gods -- way, way too literally.

Of separating the stories and gods from their own lives and insisting on seeing the culture's deities as something other than the mere reflection, the personification, of their own internal lives and spiritual journeys and the need to get off their collective ass and quit being so hollow and mean and piously self-righteous and eager for war.

There is no superior bearded father-figure God. There is no Heaven as physical place. There is no literal reading of holy adventures and Heaven/Hell battles and fluttery cute cherub angels with wings. It is all story, all literary torque, all metaphor and analogy and personification of emotion and spirit, a way for the human animal to elevate toward greater and greater levels of compassion and love and mutual understanding and enough with the pipe bombs and the indignation and the hatred already.

The virgin birth did not actually happen. It is simply a metaphor for the birth of pure compassion and spiritual feeling in the heart of man. Christ's body did not fly out of a cave and rise to the pretty blue sky. It is a symbol for man moving inward, opening to his spiritual self.

Deities and demons do not exist "out there" in some other space where we will eventually travel and hang out and romp giddily and watch porn and eat all the pie and candy we want. They're internal, as facets and aspects of our own spiritual beings. This is what Campbell teaches. So simple. So beautiful. So radically misunderstood.

From the Bible to the Upanishads, the Koran to the teachings of the Buddha, Greek myth to American Indian folklore, the similarities between beliefs, their borrowed deities, their shared iconography, their reinvented tales and common themes, are all revealed to be so astonishingly interconnected, so obviously cut from the same internal psychological cloth, and so beautifully a part of all cultures, that to wage war in the name of one is to wage war on them all.

And to think of any one as superior to the others is to do violence to the very ideas and energies they illumine, and only serves to isolate, and enrage, and induce severe diarrhetic paranoia. Sound familiar?

That this revelation, this lucid insight comes so easily when watching a 14-year-old public-television series is at once amazing and heartwarming and reassuring, while at the same time it induces deep sadness, a bitter sense of just how far away from this elegant approach much of the world has devolved.

PBS has been rerunning the groundbreaking multihour series as part of its recent pledge drive, noting throughout just how radical and innovative the show was for its time, and how the show single-handedly raising a few million dollars for public TV when it first ran, as people were riveted to their screens, desperately hungry for luminous, nonpious spiritual insight and knowledge. And lo, they still are. Probably more than ever.

This is exactly what the culture needs more of. Fewer whiny pundits and fewer talking heads and fewer spin doctors and analysts and sniper-murder experts and child-molester psychologists and COPS and Real World Las Vegas and Touched by a Face-Lift.

And more riveting, humorous, absolutely enthralling interviews with the greatest and (hopefully) most controversial, nimble minds of our time, religious teachers and writers and juicy poets and weavers of cultural tapestry, artists and thinkers and myth makers.

But more than any of them, maybe all we really need now is a worldwide broadcast of "The Power of Myth," with Campbell, who died in 1988 just before the program first aired, reminding us all to get on our knees and seek some serious divinity where it matters most: In ourselves.

© 2002 SF Gate