Nowhere Girl

I thought you said you wanted to get out of this town too.

Beverley Marsh :

Because I want to run TOWARDS Something, not away.

She's a real nowhere girl
Sitting in her nowhere land
Making all her nowhere plans for nobody

Doesn't have a point of view
Knows not where she's going to
Isn't she a bit like you and me?
 

Nowhere Girl, please listen
You don't know what you're missing
Nowhere Girl, The World is at your command

He's as blind as he can be
Just sees what he wants to see
Nowhere Girl, can you see me at all
 

Nowhere Girl, don't worry
Take your time, don't hurry
Leave it all 'til somebody else
Lends you a hand
Ah, la, la, la, la

Doesn't have a point of view
Knows not where she's going to
Isn't she a bit like you and me?
Nowhere Girl, please listen
You don't know what you're missing
Nowhere Girl, The World is at your command
Ah, la, la, la, la

She's a real nowhere girl
Sitting in her nowhere land

Making all her nowhere plans for nobody
Making all her nowhere plans for nobody
Making all her nowhere plans for nobody

BILL MOYERS: What about the female? I mean, most of the figures in the temple caves arc male. Was this a kind of secret society for males only?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It wasn’t a secret society, it was that the boys had to go through it. Now, we don’t know exactly what happens with the female in this period, because we have very little evidence to tell us. In primary cultures today, the girl becomes a woman with her first menstruation. It happens to her; I mean, nature does it to her. And so she has undergone the transformation, and what is her initiation? Typically it is to sit in a little hut for a certain number of days, and realize what she is.

BILL MOYERS: How does she do that?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: She sits there. She’s now a woman. And what is a woman? A woman is a vehicle of life, and life has overtaken her. She is a vehicle now of life. A woman’s what it’s all about; the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment. She’s identical with the earth goddess in her powers, and she’s got to realize that about herself. The boy does not have a happening of that kind. He has to be turned into a man, and voluntarily become a servant of something greater than himself. The woman becomes the vehicle of nature; the man becomes the vehicle of the society, the social order and the social purpose.

BILL MOYERS: So what happens when a society no longer embraces powerful mythology?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: What we’ve got on our hands. As I say, if you want to find what it means not to have a society without any rituals, read The New York Times.

BILL MOYERS: And you’d find?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the news of the day.

BILL MOYERS: Wars…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Young people who don’t know how to behave in a civilized society. Half the…I imagine that 50% of the crime is by young people in their 20s and early 30s that just behave like barbarians.

BILL MOYERS: Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: None. There’s been a reduction, a reduction, a reduction of ritual. Even in the Roman Catholic Church, my God, they’ve translated the Mass out of the ritual language into a language that has a lot of domestic associations. So that, I mean, every time now that I read tile Latin of the Mass, I get that pitch again that it’s supposed to give, a language that throws you out of the field of your domesticity, you know. The altar is turned so that the priest, his back is to you, and with him you address yourself outward like that. Now they’ve turned the altar around, looks like Julia Child giving a demonstration, and it’s all homey and cozy.

BILL MOYERS: And they play a guitar.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: They play a guitar. Listen, they’ve forgotten what the function of a ritual is, is to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time.

BILL MOYERS: So ritual that once conveyed an inner reality is now merely form, and that’s true in the rituals of society, and the personal rituals of marriage and religion.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, with respect to ritual, it must be kept alive. And so much of our ritual is dead. It’s extremely interesting to read of the primitive, elementary cultures, how the folktales, the myths, they are transforming all the time, in terms of the circumstances of those people. People move from an area where, let’s say the vegetation is the main support, out into the plains. Most of our Plains Indians in the period of the horse-riding Indians, you know, had originally been of the Mississippian culture along the Mississippi in settled dwelling towns, and agriculturally based villages. And then they received tile horse from the Spaniards, and it makes it possible then to venture out on the plains and handle a great hunt of the buffalo herds, you see. And the mythology transforms from vegetation to buffalo. And you can see the structure of the earlier vegetation mythologies under the mythologies of the Dakota Indians and the Pawnee Indians and the Kiowa and so forth.

BILL MOYERS: You’re saying that the environment shapes the story?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: They respond to it. Do you see? But we have a tradition that comes from the first millennium B.C. somewhere else, and we’re handling that. It has not turned over and assimilated the qualities of our culture, and the new things that are possible, and the new vision of the universe. It must be kept alive. The only people that can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another.

BILL MOYERS: Artists?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That artist is…his function is the mythologization of the environment and the world.

BILL MOYERS:: Artists being the poet, the musician, the author, writer.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Exactly, yes. I think we’ve had a couple of greats in the recent times. I think of James Joyce as such a revealer of the mysteries of growing up and becoming a human being. And for me, he and Thomas Mann were my principal gurus, you might say, as I was trying to shape my own life. I think in the visual arts there were two men whose work seemed to me to handle mythological themes in a marvelous way, and one was Paul Klee, and the other Picasso. These two men really knew what they were doing all the way, I think, and had a great versatility in their revelations.

BILL MOYERS: You mean, our artists are the mythmakers of our day?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The mythmakers in earlier days were the counterparts of our artists.

BILL MOYERS: They drew the paintings on the wall

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: —they performed the rituals.