From: Erin (macavity11@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Mar 30 2005 - 23:39:16 BST
Platt,
I was trying to think of how to express the difference between healthy approach to biological value and in my mind "unhealthy" Victorian sexual repression something J. Campbell talked about came to mind. When I first heard this, this really struck a chord with me and I think that is why I the Victorian approach doesn't sit well with me.
The Power of Myth
CAMPBELL: He asks his father to bring food for the bird, and the father doesn't want to feed a mere bird, so he kills it. And the legend says the man killed the bird, and with the bird he killed the song, and with the song, himself. He dropped dead, completely dead, and was dead forever.
MOYERS: Isn't tha a story about what happens when human beings destroy their environment? Destroy their world? Destory nature and the revelations of nature?
CAMPBELL: They destroy their own nature too. They kill the song.
SKIP A PART
MOYERS: Is this why we so ealisy dominate or subjugate nature---because we have contempt for it, because we se it only as something to serve us?
CAMPBELL: Yes. I will never forget the experiene I had when I was in Japan, a place that never heard of the fall of the Garden of Eden. One of the Shinto texts says that the processes of nature cannot be evil. Every natural impulse is not to be corrected but to be sublimated, to be beautified. There is glorious interest in the beauty of nature and cooperation with nature, so that in some of those gardens you don't know where nature begins and art ends--this was tremendous experience
There was another part but I can't find it now but it was about somebody saying man vs nature, nature vs man, funny religion (actually maybe he said universe can't remember it now). When I think of Victorian I think of that man vs nature mentality. (this I think creates internal conflict and problems, NOT just chemical imbalances). The idea of sublimation seems a more harmonious approach to nature.
Actually rereading those chapters you mentioned, the part about calling the Big Apple was from a worm perspective made me laugh, forgot about that part. Sometimes when you talk about nature/natural impulses it sounds kind of "wormish" perspective too.
Erin
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