The Richness of the Quest

I took a break midway through writing this post, and when I glanced at my Facebook news feed, it contained this quote from Joseph Campbell: "[I]f you follow your bliss, you'll have your bliss whether you have money or not. If you follow money, you may lose the money, and then you don't have even that. The secure way is really the insecure way and the way in which the richness of the quest accumulates is the right way." (courtesy of the Joseph Campbell Foundation).

Thanks for the words of wisdom from beyond the grave, Dr. Campbell. You, sir, are my hero. I'm stealing a bit of your quote for a post title.

A few days ago, Dr. Jon F. Wilkins announced his intention to start up the Ronin Institute, a non-profit research institute for independent scholars. I was immediately very excited by this idea, so I sent him an email asking if there might be a way for me to get involved. He replied positively and inquired about my current status, goals, and plans. What follows is a modified and greatly expanded version of my response, which contains more of my personal backstory than I thought Dr. Wilkins would want to have dumped in his inbox.

I have a B.A. in anthropology from a major university with a respectable department, but at present, I am working as the office girl at a local funeral home (following a miserable stint in college admissions at said university and an enjoyable and rewarding but exhausting stint as an EMS dispatcher, also at said university), and I have been out of graduate school since 2009.

I was already contemplating my escape, in the form of either a semester off or a change of degree program, for a variety of reasons; the singleminded, all-or-nothing focus of the academic department was already wearing thin for me, as I had begun graduate school with two jobs and volunteer commitments as a trainee recovery diver, a SAR technician, and an EMS dispatcher, all of which were either necessary (the jobs) or valued and important (the volunteer gigs) parts of my life, and none of which I was willing to give up to fit in with the all-nautical-archaeology, all-the-time, and-nothing-else-matters culture of my department.

I was, and am, deeply interested in the history of seafaring and captivated by the idea of the physical connection to it offered by archaeology (which, incidentally, I just read a great article about today), but I increasingly balked at the idea of defining my life and my worldview by that and restricting my interests to nothing else.

It also, to be brutally honest, became quite hard to take seriously as a life's work; my classmates' and professors' single-minded focus began to seem sheltered and elitist, especially on the days when I stumbled into class after being up all night sending ambulances to deathly ill or injured people or out all night/weekend/both searching for a missing child who more often than not turned up dead if at all; I could still hear the panicked voices on the other end of the phone, see the bodies floating the in lake and the worried, distraught families huddled at Incident Command- that was the real world, and my classmates knew only their ivory tower, and I began to think of them as naive. I began to see that branch of archaeology as fascinating and fun, something I would like to pursue avocationally, but not something I could dedicate my life to in a serious way after those experiences.

I considered taking a semester off in the fall of 2008 to complete a paramedic's license, having taken the EMT-Basic course concurrent with the end of the spring 2007 semester and the subsequent summer, but I debated and wavered until I ended up sticking with graduate school for another semester. I missed a lot of class (and a lot of my paying job) in the fall of 2008, first putting in long exhausting shifts at EMS helping dispatch ambulances to unload medical evacuees from Houston in advance of first Hurricane Gustav and then Hurricane Ike and ferry them from the DMAT shelter to the local hospitals as needed, and then after Hurricane Ike, out in the field with my SAR team at Bridge City, Crystal Beach, and Anahuac, scrambling over debris and demolished houses searching for the remains of the missing.

That was a pivotal experience in my life, and to this day it's the thing I'm most proud of- not my Cum Laude degree from Texas A&M, not my admission to graduate school, not my involvement in projects while there, but those few weeks in the fall of 2008 when I worked my ass off, walked through hell with a few good friends and colleagues, and made a difference.

I felt a need to make a real difference, not an indirect theoretical greater-good-of-humanity difference but a real, conrete, direct difference in the lives of actual individuals, as I said a few months ago in my response to my SAR team leader's blog post about our reasons for doing SAR work. After Hurricane Ike and a few more missions, my mind was made up; I wanted to do forensics, specifically human remains detection, but I still had hopes of combining it with Nautical Archaeology to work on submerged remains, with the most likely application being POW/MIA recovery (which is also a cause I have long had a soft spot for).

Unfortunately, early in the spring semester of 2009, a very close friend, who I usually describe(d) as my brother, died in a car wreck; the loss and my failure to cope well with it left me too distracted, depressed, and generally useless to finish out the semester, though I muddled through an unsuccessful attempt because I wasn't sure what else to do and wasn't thinking clearly enough to consider it.

I never even formally left. "Oops" might be an understatement.

At present, my intention is to return to school for an eventual doctorate in physical anthropology, but both finances and geography are a challenge; my husband is in the Army, so we don't get much choice about our location, and committing to a traditional academic program at this point would be highly impractical even if we could afford it. My hope is that within the next few years we can some financial issues sorted out and perhaps even get stationed somewhere near a university with a suitable program, and then I can work quickly enough to complete a degree before we get sent elsewhere again. In the meantime, I find that I miss the academic community and involvement in research and the exchange of ideas, even more than I expected that I would. Once I get this graduate school thing sorted out, I hope and intend and plan and want to work in my actual field; I would enjoy working for JPAC, maybe, or an ME's office wherever we end up, but I do not forsee an academic career in my future- I'm not willing enough to sacrifice the rest of my interests and goals for it- but I do forsee and hope for continued involvement in research.

Where and how I see myself in terms of goals, ambitious, and interests has come into focus in a much more useful way in the past few months, so that I have a good idea of what I want to be doing, and who I want to be, in the short term, on the way to my return to school, and how I would like that to fit into the transition back into a degree program and the shape I would like my career to take afterward. I am beginning to finally take to heart the advice my father once gave me when he said that I shouldn't try to make a career out of every passing interest- but I'm mingling that with my own recent discovery that inability to make a career out of an interest doesn't make it any less a valid and important part of my life, my work, and my identity. I'm a happier person, and a more productive one (in whatever sense you want to define "productive", which I'm learning is also a highly variable word) for that combined realization.

It really is about what Joseph Campbell called "the richness of the quest," and productive endeavors are endeavors that contribute to that for me, whether or they're professional, paid, and/or institutionally supported.

SAR will always be one of those productive endeavors for me. I enjoy the occasional adventure, the fieldwork, the camaraderie, and the dogs; I thrive on the sense of purpose. It's what I live for and an essential part of who I am.

Another of those endeavors, which suffered somewhat during my time in graduate school and which I am only recently returning to in any serious way, is writing. I have wanted to be a writer since third grade; I remember almost the exact moment when I discovered writing was fun, and I have been obsessed with telling stories and shaping words ever since. I need the creative outlet, and I find that I am happier and feel better about myself on days when I get a substantial amount of writing done; only recently have I figured out that I have to let myself see this as a valid productive activity so I can give myself the time for it and feel good about getting it done and proud of the results.

Blogging is sort of an extension of that; it's a different kind of outlet, which lets me tell slightly different stories- true ones- in more appropriate ways; it also gives me a place to vent, a place to put ideas that aren't fully developed enough for other venues and may never be, and a way to stay at least somewhat connected with an intellectual and academic community.

I do miss that sort of connection, and I miss involvement in interesting research. My research interests are somewhat scattered, but my primary interest, the one I hope to focus on in my eventual career, is human remains / clandestine grave detection. This is primarily an outgrowth of my volunteer work, as several years of observations and experiences in the field have both given me theoretical curiosity about these things, and emphasized the need for answers to certain questions and improvements in certain methods and procedures. I can easily see a life's work in finding the missing, bringing closure if not comfort to the bereaved, and maybe even bringing the bad guys to justice.

I have a secondary set of research interests, which I mostly intend to be avocational, in mortuary iconography, gravestone and historic cemetery documentation and preservation, and historic grave detection and documentation. At the moment I'm finding an outlet for that through Find-A-Grave and my related blog Last Words; this is also a much easier area to pursue independent research in than forensics,
so I am currently working on a couple of independent projects on changes in iconography patterns across time and region.

None of that alters or replaces the basic fact that I have to earn a living, and that my husband and I both would like to be living a bit more comfortably than we presently are, so as much as I might like to, I can't abandon all monetary concerns and become a self-unemployed bliss-following writer/researcher/emergency responder/philosopher. That does sound like a lovely retirement plan, but in the meantime, I've come to some realizations about work, as well. First, I can be essentially content with my life, if not my work hours, doing even the relatively unfulfilling, degree-irrelevant sorts of work that Liberal Arts and Humanities BA's often get stuck with, so long as I have those other productive, fulfilling aspects of my life to give me a sense of identity, progress, involvement, purpose, and self-worth.

Second, it's easier than I originally thought to find interesting and/or fulfilling work now that pays decently, even if it doesn't directly bear on either my current or future degree; that's where having a diverse set of interests helps. My job at the funeral home, for instance, has its challenges, but it's not the sort of thing anyone needs a degree of any sort for, and it's solidly below the level of responsibility that I'm technically qualified for- but it's interesting work, and it's deeply fulfilling to go home at the end of the day knowing that I have helped someone, even if only in a small way, at a moment when they badly needed it, so I am content; this is a good place to be for now, on my way to another eventual destination.

In A Pirate Looks at Fifty, Jimmy Buffett commented that when he was a child, a frustrated adult demanded to know what he wanted to do with his life; the young Buffett replied that he wanted to live a damned interesting one.

Me too.

Musings on Myth

Reposted from my personal blog,One Day at a Time.

So, it's a slow day at the funeral home, and I'm settled in here at my desk with Joseph Campbells's Transformations of Myth Through Time which is actually much less dry than the title makes it sound.

Campbell is an anthropolgist focused on myth and comparative religion, brilliant and insightful and engagingly articulate. The book itself is a collection of fairly informal lectures, so the writing style is a little more casual than I was expecting, as you'll see in the bits I quote below, but it's every bit as fascinating and challenging as I had come to expect from Joseph Campbell.

As I read Chapter 2, certain pieces really got me thinking, and I decided to share some commentary. A lot of it is likely to stir up some controversy and get me called some unpleasant names, and I apologize in advance to whoever I might offend. /disclaimer

[. . .] "And when it came to this problem of explaining what this Buddha-consciousness or Christ-consciousness was, I looked up at the ceiling for an inspiration and I found one. I said, 'Look up, boys, at the ceiling and you will see that the lights(plural) are on, or you might also say the light (singular) is on, and this is two ways of saying the same thing.' In one case, you are placing emphasis on the individual bulb, in the other you are placing emphasis on the light.

[. . .] Now when one of those light bulbs breaks, the superintendent doesn't come in and say, 'Well, that was my particularly favorite bulb.' He takes it out, throws it away, and puts another one in. What is important is not the vehicle, but the light.

Now, looking down at all your heads, I ask myself, of what are these the vehicles? They are the vehicles of consciousness. How much consciousness are they radiating, and which are you? Are you the vehicle, or are you the consciousness?" -p. 29

The underlying assumption here is that each lightbulb emits a light quantitatively- and more important, qualitatively- equal to the bulb it replaced and the bulb which will replace it, not to mention the bulbs surrounding it in the meantime. The individual bulbs are identical and interchangeable, and so is the light they emit; so is its effect on the total Light in the room. An individual bulb's light contributes nothing to the Light but quantity; it has no special characteristics that make an impact on the whole shared Light.

By extension, the analogy asserts that human beings are vessels and vehicles for consciousness in the same way that light bulbs are vessels and vehicles for light; it also asserts that the consciousness contained in and expressed by each individual human (components of a univeral Consciousness which our myths strive to make us aware of and in connect us to) is not only quantitatively equal to that of every other individual, but quantitatively equal and interchangable as well. There is nothing unique about any one individual, no special contribution or effect on the Consciousness or the Universe which can be made by that individual and that individual alone. The next bulb in the row produces an identical light.

A certain interpretation of the Buddhist philosophy expressed in the analogy could assert that the personality and uniqueness that define each of our worldly selves as individuals are actually part of the earthly vessel rather than part of the transcendent consciousness to which Campbell refers. My Western individualism rebels against this notion.

White light, from a physics standpoint, is made up of all the colors in the light spectrum; to produce white, these colors must be mixed in equal amounts- an imbalance produces a bluish or reddish or greenish light. Suppose for a moment that, if we continue Campbell's analogy and represent human consciousness as light, each individual's unique qualities- the things that make my soul a similar thing to your soul, but definitely not the same soul- are represented as variations in the color of that individual's light, and the combination of various-hued lights from the bank of bulbs merges eventually into a white spotlight.

Just a thought.

"Now I want to go back to the main myth of the Navajo. [. . .] It is of the first people having come up from the womb of the earth through a series of four stages, and they go from one stage to another. Some accident happens in the lower stages; a flood comes as a punishment for impropriety of some sort, the breaking of a taboo or something of the sort, and they come on up. And finally they come to the top level, the earth on which we are now." - p. 32

This account could be viewed as approximately parallel to the Biblical account of Man's "fall" and subsequent divine punishments. Adam and Eve's banishment from the Garden of Eden could, in the Navajo context, represent a forced climb up from one stage to the next. The aftermath of the flood in Noah's day could represent another (Campbell doesn't mention whether the Navajo account includes an attrition rate).

Does anyone with more Biblical knowledge than I possess want to see if we can figure out which events there might parallel the Navajo's four stages? It could be an interesting project.

"Furthermore, the land is the holy land. And the land where you are, not the land someplace else. Not only the body, but the specific landscape in which the people are dwelling is sanctified in these old mythologies. You don't have to go someplace else to find the holy land." -p. 29

"But there is a difference between the science of 2000 B.C. and the science of A.D. 2000. And we're in trouble on it because we have a sacred text that was composed somewhere else by another people a long time ago and has nothing to do with the experience of our lives. And so there's a fundamental disengagement.

[. . .]An article from Foreign Affairs called the "Care and Repair of Public Myths" says that a society that does not have a myth to support and give it coherence goes into dissolution. That's what's happening to us." -p.46-47

While I personally do not subscribe to the claim that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation, any halfway astute observer has to admit that our social structure and the public concerns which become political issues have been influenced heavily by Judeo-Christian philosophy, beliefs, and writings, and that our public is predominantly at least nominally Christian.

That means that a significant portion of America's culture and public life are based heavily on writings and thoughts and laws written thousands of years ago in another place and another culture. We have no native, American myth tied to this place and this culture and this societal reality- all the belief systems tied to American soil and American settings were systematically wiped out with only a few scattered, aging, and mostly disregarded survivals. We are, as a culture and as a nation and as a people, mythically and philosophically displaced. We have no roots of myth or belief to call our own- we're still clinging to someone else's and trying to make them fit.

Campbell's commentary about the land flows from a discussion of how most Native American belief systems, and others around the world, both drew their myth from the landscape around them and, if they relocated, resituated their myth onto the new landscape. They made their home itself the Holy Land. Most modern Americans (and many modern Europeans) don't consider their home the Holy Land. Their myth- our myth, is not tied to our home. It's tied to another place and another culture thousands of miles away on another continent. This has produced not only a sense of cultural displacement, but some very expensive political entanglements out of the resulting sense of obligation to some foreign place most of us will never see, let alone live in and truly identify with.

It occurs to me that this "disconnect" Campbell mentions between our culture and that from which we try to draw guidance may be the source of so much of the cultural polarization and strife today. We have no roots, we have no direction, and of course we're at each other's throats, because trying to hash out a common identity and a common philosophy without that is a nasty process.

The solution? I don't honestly know. I'm not foolish enough or arrogant enough to declare anyone's religion outdated or wrong, and that's not at all what I'm trying to say here. Certainly we can't do a quick edit of the Bible and change some place names and update some cultural references. One, it's terribly disrespectful at the least, and two, someone's going to notice, you know? So what do we do?