Refusal of the Call, Tantalus, and a younger me

On the way home to Brooklyn on the F train, I began the Campbell reading for week 3 which begins with the chapter entitled Refusal of the Call.  A couple of passages immediately jumped out at me (for reasons I will explain momentarily), specifically:

“Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative…the subject becomes a victim to be saved.    …Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his Minotaur.”

and

“One is harassed, both day and night, by the diving being that is the image of the living self within the locked labyrinth of one’s own distorted psyche. The ways to the gates have all been lost, there is no exit.  One can only cling, like Satan, furiously, to oneself and be in hell; or else break, and be annihilate at last, in God.”

Why did these words reach out and grab me like they did?  In 1991, at 26 years old, I wrote a poem which I titled “Tantalus’ Dream”.  If you’d asked me at the time, I would have told you that the title was arbitrary, Tantalos Pax was a pseudonym that I’d used any time I didn’t want to use my real name – my ‘alter-ego’ I suppose.  However, at the time, I had a juvenile obsession with mythology, and especially with the figures of Tantalus and Icarus… I didn’t see then how this fascintion influenced the poem, but I see now that it did. Anyway, here’s the poem – I’ve bolded the parts that the Campbell passages remind me of.

Weep me a nation
Lower East Side Sunday morning
Silt whirling through the multitudes of loss
Caught in his slumber of youth, the flying boy
Will cry like a hungry babe when he awakens
Will the dawn ever come?
Weep no more for me
Jailed beneath the darkest dungeon of myself
Shitting scared on the granite floor
My house, my body, arena of destruction
These eleven years or more.

Weep no more for me
Homeboy shiny boots of black
Pancake thin at heel from eleven years or more
Of angry stomping on the golden dance floor…
DANCE, MOTHERFUCKER, DANCE!
Lose yourself among the pretty willows
Of your own weeping riverbed
Do you believe I have never trod
A broken mile or two with my own three feet
Stuffed in those boots of black engineer leather
Six sizes too small for me today, Daddy-O
Yet on and on I trudge, a flaccid mule
Tho the mud has long since crystalized
Hard up to my waist and six sizes too small
Blister pus on my aching heels to match
The scabs on my cock-scarlet mosaic
Product of ten thousand lonely nights

Weep no more for me
Acid tears wept dry reveal the youth:
Thin as a hungry dog, ponytail hair,
T-shirt billboard exclaims: “NEVER GIVE IN!”
Never give in! my comrades in arms,
Do you know what your words will wear
When you too, yes, you, are older than me
And the prison guard has gone home with the key
Give in and weep no more
Give in to give out
And give out to get the fuck out

I see you still every night
Tears looming in your bleary eyes
WE, who wouldn’t give up the poetry,
Weep no more! Dry the tears of gin
Look and listen
Poetry waits silent still
The world is sad still
And sleeps inside you.

The story of Tantalus is a story of a man who did worse than simply defy the gods… he fucked with them!  He invited them to his house and fed them human flesh!  As punishment, he was condemned to live in the underworld in a pool of water, with food and drink just outside of his reach.  Clearly, the story of Tantalus, and the refusal of the call were simmering just below the surface of my 26 year old psyche.  Did I refuse a call to adventure?  Have I answered it yet, or does it lie ahead?

Tagged as: Campbell, Hero(ine)s, poetry, writing