Answering the Call

For those unfamiliar with the phrase, it was Joseph Campbell who first introduced it to me. First from his famous interview with Bill Moyer (The Power of Myth), and later from his first book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”. It was there that he laid out the common elements found within the Hero narratives throughout our history, and at the core of each tale the young hero must respond to some dilemma or crisis and after facing a monster, dragon, or villain, emerges from the encounter transformed.

I have known the basic archetype for many years now and have read several books that make excellent use of the theme. In fact, the “Star Wars” franchise, created by George Lucas, was specifically inspired by Campbell’s exposition on the Hero’s journey, particularly the readiness the hero has for the adventure, as we clearly saw in Luke Skywalker. There we watched as he was presented early in the story with the challenge of joining the rebellion, to answer the call, that circumstances had placed in his path. If the ‘call’ is ignored or refused, the price will be a compromised life, and life affirming potentialities will die along with it. And that is the key note I wish to sound here, the potential for the hero to be transformed by accepting the challenge.

But first I want to take a moment to lay down some necessary ground work, because it’s important to keep in mind that mythic tales are not merely action stories with moral advice thrown in as window dressing and neither do they require some epic clash of titans, where body and soul hang in the balance. They are vehicles for growth, in and of themselves, and are crafted around the emotional or psychological needs of the protagonist, or as Campbell explained, “the adventure is the one the hero is ready for”, meaning the adventure provokes the very qualities, consciously or not, the hero is seeking. Or as he deftly framed from another book, “the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

That all sounds fairly obvious, of course, but prior to the adventure, there is ‘the call’, which is the intended bullseye for this note. As I mentioned earlier, this “call” doesn’t require some epic drama playing out in our lives, such as the examples told in the various myths we read about, nor will it beat on our front door demanding that we respond. Instead, the “call” can be a purely personal matter and is typically so subtle that it can easily be missed.

To illustrate that point, I recall an example from Carl Jung, who described treating an elderly women suffering from a crippling depression. This was long before pharmaceuticals, of course, so his treatment involved psychanalysis, or “the talking cure” as it was called. After months of Jung’s probing questions, exposing layer after layer of the woman’s neurosis, she finally recalled, as she told Jung, being a girl walking along a path in the woods when she heard what sounded like a beautiful melody of voices floating on the breeze and was curious where it might be coming from. But though she was intrigued and considered searching it out, she had other things on her mind and went about her business. Yet for many years afterward, she often dreamed of that moment with a sense of regret. Jung, of course, recognized her memory for what it actually was, the mythic ‘call’, along with her failure to respond. She even admitted as much when telling Jung that she felt as if she had lived the wrong life.

Of course, there is no way to know what she heard, or whether it was real or imagined, but that distinction is irrelevant when the moment arrives. The key was that it appeared as an ephemeral song, or message as if for her ears only and felt like an invitation. Had she allowed her curiosity to lead the way, endless possibilities may have awaited her. In her search, she may have met a young man who could have change her life’s trajectory, or perhaps experience something along the journey that revealed an important quality about her character, like the courage to follow her own path. It could have been any number of things, and all had the potential to enlarge her life, but with that missed opportunity, a potential was never realized.

The reason for this coming to mind is due to realizing that I experienced my own ‘call’ many, many years ago, and like Jung’s example, I could have easily missed it. Curiously, I had never considered it in this light before. It wasn’t until this week while listening to an audio book titled, “The Science of Storytelling” by Will Storr that its framing hit a nerve. There he brought up Campbell’s theme of the “call” as a literary device, particularly regarding the transformation of the hero. Storr explained the basic theme as involving an invitation or expectation  the protagonist is meant to follow. Then after navigating through various trials along the way, the young hero returns altered by the experience in some profound way.

It was within that framing that my own ‘call’ came clearly into view, for it had the same characteristic of Jung’s patient, meaning that I alone, apparently, had the ears to hear it, and was so subtle that it could have easily been missed. My ‘call’ came on December 8th, 1980, with the death of John Lennon.

I vividly recall being nineteen years old, on a double date with my future wife and while sitting in the back seat listening to the endless tributes playing on the radio I heard it, the “call.” It was not an audible voice, of course, but rather an intuition that seemed to scream up from a depth I had never known before, as if a tuning fork had struck a magical tone, unlocking a secret door I wasn’t even aware of. I clearly sensed a deep significance to what was happening to me, there was a gravity to it that I understood could not be ignored. And along the fringes of that intuition, I could feel a hint of something else, a sense that answers awaited….. but only if I responded. It was just a faint whisper, but I distinctly felt that I had stumbled upon a path that would lead to a sort of homecoming. 

In an essay a few years ago I related that moment to a scene from “The Wizard of Oz”, when Dorothy discovers Oz for the first time. As we all know, the movie is initially presented in black and white, and there we were shown her farm, along with chickens, goats and pig pen, with workmen doing their chores, all of it uninspiring and provincial….. hence, my life before the call. Then suddenly a door presented itself and once I stepped through, a world I had never dreamed of was before my eyes in splendid color.

Now up to that point, I had never cared one wit about John Lennon, and only vaguely understood that he was even a Beatle, so his death was not some final tipping point toward an existing interest. That is not how it happened at all. Instead, with no warning at all, a voice inside gave me an assignment, a task to educating myself about the man. It was that simple. So I literally went to the school library the very next day and secured a book on the Beatles and was shocked to discover that everything I read about him resonated down to the marrow in my bones. To borrow a line from Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue”, “…..every one of them words rang true, and glowed like burning coal”. The more I read, the more “I” became. And as I continued, the person that I was always supposed to become, came to life before my eyes.

Of course, the fruits that emerged from the change were not immediately apparent to those looking on, but the shift inside my mind had turned on a dime. The shorthand that I often use to describe it is that I was one person before and another person after. A surprising level of self-awareness immediately came on-line, and with it, life took on a different hue, and a new version of “me” stood up and looked around. For the first time I saw myself as a distinct identity, almost as if seeing myself in third person. It felt like watching a stage actor playing the role of me as he lived out his life, while the real me, separate and removed, was in the audience being entertained by it all. Quite simply, another person entered the room…and it was me.

One clear oddity came when discovering that I loved to read and soon began devouring books. My appetite was insatiable, which was certainly not in my play book before. Initially, the change involved only books on the Beatles generally, or Lennon specifically, but my curiosity soon branched out like a giant Oak, with limbs of curiosity branching out in all directions. My reading became organic, meaning that I allowed one book or author to lead the way to the next. If I enjoyed a writer, or valued their work, I would search out the writers who inspired them and would follow that line of thought. If a quick snapshot would help illuminate this point, consider; before Lennon’s death, I had not read a single book that I can recall, nor was I interested to do so. Yet within a year I had read Thoreau; within three years, I had read Dostoyevsky.

My mind was on fire.

Another unpredicted byproduct was that I developed a deep love affair for words, and began to consider sentences as forms of art. From there I developed a surprising passion for writing, particularly the need to capture all the sparks flying from the pyrotechnic show that had exploded in my head. New thoughts and ideas were coming so fast that I could not keep up, so I began to scribble them down in small note pads, mingled with thoughts and ideas of my own. I still have those note pads actually, nearly forty years later, and although reading them now causes a certain flush of embarrassment, it’s clear those first initial steps of self-expression kindled a fire that has yet to relent; I never grew out of that phase. In fact, the pace has only accelerated as I have aged, to the point that as I sit here at 61 years old, I have calculated my journal to contain north of a half million words all together. 

Did I mention a mind on fire?  

In order to bring this to close, I’ll reframe from diving further down that Lennon induced rabbit hole, because it’s a story I have covered before and the effects it had can be seen first-hand by reading the other essays presented here.

I guess what I really want to convey here is the sense of… I don’t know….destiny, that I feel about the whole thing. I answered the ‘call’, and as a result stepped into an entirely new skin. Had it been Paul McCartney, or Ringo, or anyone else for that matter, I would have been unaffected and would have lived out a far different life. Specifically, it was Lennon’s thoughtful skepticism that affected me. It was his insistence to call bullshit on outdated traditions, his deep intuitions on art and aesthetics, and later his passionate demand for social justice, as well as dozens of other topics that had my mind reeling from seeing the world with a new set of eyes.

Perhaps the single most important change was that early on I developed an unrelenting ethic to allowed myself the complete freedom to chase any idea that was uncovered, to go wherever my mind wanted to go, to fear no dogma, to shrink from no expectation to conform, nor blindly cling to any (religious, or otherwise) tradition. In other words, freedom of thought became the source code to my internal operating system.

Looking back at it all now, forty plus years later, my “call” feels perfectly normal now, even pedestrian in hindsight. To a certain extent it feels to have been destined, but that is only because of the time scale at play. Once my house lights came on and realized that I was following someone else’s path, I stepped off and began following my own. That original “I” that stood up years ago has weathered every assault the vicissitudes of my life has thrown at it. I still have all the same passion that exploded at the very beginning, the same curiosity, the same drive to learn. The “potentialities” suggested at the outset have now become my norms. At eighteen, there was no way I could have predicted that half a million words would eventually leak out of me…..but leak they have.

Since I plan to be cremated, hence no headstone, I  nonetheless plan to have the following quote presented at any post-life obituary, or funeral service. It is a quote from  Campbell that beautifully embodies precisely how I feel about this life of mine……which all resulted from answering the “call.”

” The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are”