the book unfolds we get to visit the eerie stone moai, the giant “gods” of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) with Cousineau, and in this section I almost felt as if I were on one of Phil's legendary guided tours. I love the textured way his narrative weaves geography and journey metaphor, soul reflections and poignant biography, along with the mythic nuggets to be found lying around everywhere in the living landscape of his prose. Indeed Phil Cousineau, through his many films and books, has helped to introduce a new genre in spiritually informed journeying (see The Art of Pilgrimage and The Book of Roads) to the modern world.
Cousineau's reverence for the landmarks of the inner journey is as great as that of the outer (see Soul Moments: Miraculous Stories of Synchronicity and Meaningful Coincidences from a Seemingly Random World and Soul: An Anthology). In these forays into the realms within, Cousineau developed the multidimensional vision that informs this book. When we encounter the world with mythic senses aroused, it invites a galvanizing response, and life becomes a mysterious and magical adventure that leads you along. Phil Cousineau has grown into a unique fulfillment of the task that Joseph Campbell laid on us in that cab: “It's for you folks to carry on….” (“Take what I have given you, make it your ‘bliss,’ your own, and see if the universe doesn't respond Doors will open for you that you didn't even know were there”—those synchronicities Cousineau writes about so intriguingly!) Campbell, with his last words to us, was speaking to an entire creative generation yearning for inner fulfillment—and yearning to make a creative contribution to life.
This book fills me with awe for the creative fire glowing within my mythic brother and fellow scholar as he walks his creative path, with books and films that guide the soul and instill life-affirmative values. And I think of the words of mythically informed psychologist Jerome Bruner, who said that, “Not until we tell ourselves a story can we make sense of our experience.” This book is woven of stories; and when we share stories a profound communication takes place. We experience the archetypal realm through a personal journey in it. Once and Future Myths is a remarkably intelligent and intriguing walk through the world with mythic sensibilities open and tingling. Let it guide you past the twin gateway monsters of materialism and meaninglessness, and you will find yourself on a new kind of journey that both reveals the timelessness of life and brings out the best in you: a hero's journey. Read on!
1 In a speech delivered by Hillman at the National Arts Club of New York, on the occasion of Campbell's receiving the Gold Medal of Honor for Literature.
2 Quoted in A Fire in the Mind by Stephen and Robin Larsen. Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, in The Masks of God (New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. 545.
INTRODUCTION
The Splendid Prism of Myth
It is a late autumn evening. Lamplight is glinting off the bookshelves in the living room. I know every title by heart and exactly where my father placed each book. I see the way he caresses their bindings when he takes his favorite volumes off the shelf, ancient classics such as the Iliad, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and The Nibelungelied, as well as modern ones like Faust, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and The Great Gatsby. I hear his voice as he turns off the ballgame playing on the old black and white Philco television, pours himself a shot of J & B whiskey, and grabs his favorite edition of the Odyssey.
“We're going to read out loud together,” he insists, pausing dramatically. “As a family.”
When he hears me groan, his response echoes across the decades: “Someday you'll thank me, son.” I'm twelve. I have no idea what he's talking about. I want to watch Gunsmoke or the Tigers' game, but it's useless to argue. He's been stuck behind a desk all day at the Ford Glass House in Dearborn, Michigan, writing out a press release for some new sports car called the Mustang, and he wants to forget the corporate pressure that is bending his soul. He wants to enter a different world altogether. So we're going to read.
For the next few hours my father, mother, brother, sister, and I take turns reading a page apiece about the epic wanderings of the wily Greek hero, while my dad keeps a running commentary on why this family ritual is good for us. The night grows furtive; we fight to stay awake. My father can read till dawn and can't understand why we can't keep up with him. By eleven the others have trundled off to bed, and it's just the two of us. He pours another scotch for himself, sloshing it over crackling ice cubes. Then he winks at me and clinks his glass of whiskey against my cup of Vernor's ginger ale. Carefully, he reopens the book and turns to a new chapter about old heroes.
Did we read about the agony of Achilles or the courage of Hector that night? I don't remember the details, but something deep within me recalls our family voices merging together above page after page of fantastic voyages, magical transformations, and heartbreaking deaths on the battlements.
Slowly, over the course of that evening and many others like it, the nutrients of those books seeped into my bloodstream. Together, those stories have inspired my lifelong fascination with heroes and monsters, gods and goddesses, beauties and beasts, quests and explorations, distant lands and romantic adventures. That was a great gift I got from my father, but just as fine was the ritual he enforced as if he were a tribal elder.
After we completed each book on his classics list, my father found some way to bring it even more alive for us. When we finished reading Homer and Virgil, he drove us in the old Ford Falcon to the Detroit Art Museum so we could look at the Greek and Roman vases. Once we had turned the last page of Apollodorus’ rendering of Jason and the Argonauts, he insisted on seeing the movie version at the State Wayne, our hometown theater, and after gazing at a book about ancient Rome we ventured into Detroit to see Kirk Douglas lead the slave revolt in Spartacus. The first summer we spent in New York City we read Melville's Moby Dick, then sauntered down to the Village to see John Huston's movie version. The next day we drove out to New Bedford, Massachusetts, so we could experience the old seaport that had inspired the whaler-turned-author. There on the docks we ate chowder at an old clam shack, and then, with the creaking of the ship's mast in the wind to accompany us, as if to indelibly imprint the story in the wax of memory, we read out loud from my father's favorite passages.
My father, Stanley H. Cousineau, who worked in public relations for Ford Motor Company for thirty-three years, is seen here at the helm of Henry Ford's original Model T, at the Ford Rotunda, Dearborn, Michigan, 1957.
One of the most exciting results of my father's synesthetic teaching came about on the weekend we saw, at the Metropolitan Art Museum, some old Greek pottery and sculpture depicting the original Olympic athletes, followed by a game at Yankee Stadium. I vividly recall the frisson, the uncanny shiver down my back, from watching Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris glide through the same outfield that Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio had once roamed. It was the thrill of recognition combined with the fascination of mystery. When I mentioned to my dad that the way Mantle threw the ball home from deep center field reminded me of the statue of the old Greek javelin thrower I'd seen in the museum the day before, his eyebrows arched; he looked up from the newspaper he was glancing at, and muttered, “Hmm. You thought of that all by yourself?”
He didn't say he agreed or disagreed, but I could tell he was surprised that I had made a connection between the two. For a flickering moment he even seemed astonished that perhaps all the books and museums may have made a difference in my life.
I
