Commentary on Hope and Joy Once More
Thomas Johnson, editor-in-chief
I went out to Dimes Square by myself a couple months ago in August to sit outside in New York City. Nine months out of the year it’s too cold and the businesses shutter and there’s not a patio to be found anywhere around, and given the available time, I made use of a short opportunity.
Some of the bars and restaurants still take reservations even for their outdoor tables, but a few do not, and I found myself at Clandestino eyeing around waiting for a seat to pop open first-come, first-serve. I noticed a group of four young men paying their check and asked them if I could take their seats. They said they had received two beers for free, a mistake in ordering or something, and they said they were going to drink them. They didn’t say, “we’ll be done shortly” or “no problem, give us just a minute,” but they said something closer to “we’ve got new beers” and left it at that. The waiting was implied.
I went back inside and ordered a beer at the bar where the bartender asked me why I came back in. I told him. “Used to,” he said, “if someone had that happen, people would let you join them. Where’s the harm in making a friend?”
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In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, “The problem of mankind today,” Joseph Campbell says, “is precisely the opposite to that of men in the comparatively stable periods of those great coordinating mythologies which now are known as lies. Then all meaning was in the group, in the great anonymous forms, none in the self-expressive individual; today no meaning is in the group-none in the world: all is in the individual. But there the meaning is absolutely unconscious. One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is pro-pelled. The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two.”
People who move in ways that connect their existence with the surrounding world go in ridicule. My classmates and colleagues here think I’m strange. I tell jokes in the checkout lines and I’m generally a heckler at every turn. People have a hard time understanding that there are other people around them, and they have an even harder time understanding that those people exist in the same world as they. Or, more simply, those young men were not even capable of processing that I might join. They weren’t being rude, it’s just that the idea of community and joy didn’t exist in their world.
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I was reading Sally Rooney’s Normal People and I think it’s a checklist of traumas. In each chapter, Connell and Marianne work their own relationship struggles, but often and generally in the context of those around them, which waiver in increasing violence from sexual assault by a stranger, sex without consent, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, identity shaming, and on and on. Connell and Marianne maneuver their own nobility as a reflection from the goings-on of their friends and family, and the inculcating effect is, yes, first to create sympathetic characters, but second, to reinforce to the reader that the world is coming for you and your body and your spirit. Everyone else represents a danger. The joy of interaction and sublime existence in the physical plane is gone.
Later, I was carrying the book around at my part-time sales job in Soho. Someone made a remark and said they were in the middle of watching the wildly popular Hulu adaptation of Normal People. One way or another, these are the stories that people have selected, and by selection, these are the stories then adapted and spread around. Reinforcement reaches the masses.
“The hero-deed to be wrought is not today what it was in the century of Galileo” Campbell continues. “Where then there was darkness, now there is light; but also, where light was, there now is darkness. The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul.”
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But only just maybe two months before that moment at work, I rewatched Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. The main throughline is “be excellent to each other and party on.”
The films were low-budget, but still nonetheless Hollywood productions. They featured new and unknown actors playing two high school clouts who needed to improve their grade in English. They were noble and they moved nobly, if affably, through the beats of the film, without violence or confrontation. By the end, they were a success, and so too was the film – it grossed nearly $100-million and has remained a cult classic, so much so, that both Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter and producing Waiting For Godot featuring themselves and as the main actors. The unstated punchline is Bill & Ted Do Something Serious, but physical and ethereal transformation moves the participants (the audience) from the plane of “being excellent” to “waiting for god.”
The sublimation of joy takes over our past, even for those who are in on the joke. The problem with getting lost in the joke is, what people take in, they reflect back into the world.
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I think we could all use a little more being excellent to each other. If the movement of spiritual and individual meaning as shifted into the center, then the wellspring of JOY and HOPE can only emerge from out of us. This is a call to shutter our own walls to the stream of violence around us, not in neglect, but in mind and spirit.
What Campbell points to, in defining the movement of our individual hero journeys, is the abject effort required to remove ourselves from the world in order to put joy, hope, and meaning back into our lives: “The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding.”
From that movement, the community might respond. If there is a place of joy and hope still available in the world, and I believe there is, you have the choice, to echo David Foster Wallace, to choose how your perspective on everything that you encounter. “Maybe there’s some meaning in this I don’t understand,” Wallace extolls.
Rather than take in what the world is giving us and diminishing our spiritual springs, it is our job to move quietly in isolation and meditation in search.
Campbell ends with a call. “’Live,” Nietzsche says, “as though the day were here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal – carries the cross of the redeemer – not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”
I will not deny the endless suffering the world brings to us. But, we can still choose joy and hope once more.
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THOMAS JOHNSON lives in Hoboken, New Jersey and writes in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at The New School, New York, New York. Johnson grew up in East Texas, graduated the University of Texas at Austin, enlisted in the United States Army, lived in Germany, returned to the federal service, then moved to the east coast and received a Master of Arts in Writing from Johns Hopkins University, all in that order. He escaped Washington, D.C. by the skin of his teeth and is for the umpteenth time unemployed, but life remains beautiful.
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