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STRATEGY FOR THE DAY: unfold

This is a partial transcript (close, but not 100% accurate) of a conversation between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell on the subject of the troubadours and their crucial role in determining the shape of western civilization. The troubadours' belief in the value of a person's own experience of love and pain was the precurser of our modern ideal of individualism. I have long thought of the troubadours as the originators of today's love songs, but I have never taken the idea as far as Campbell does. It's a very interesting road trip.

I've just finished writing a song based on a troubadour melody and the concepts of love they wrote about. Here's a link to streaming audio versions of the song BLUE FLAME. You can listen while you read the transcript. (It may take a few seconds to load up.)

Blue Flame (streaming HiFi, high speed access)

Blue Flame - mono (streaming LoFi, 56K modem)

Bill Moyers: Let's talk about love but where should we begin?

Joseph Campbell: The troubadours in the 12th century because they're the first ones in the West that really considered love in the sense that we think of it now... as a person-to-person relationship. ... It's the 'seizure' that comes in recognizing, as it were, your soul's counterpart in the other person. And that's what the troubadours stood for and that's what it means in our lives today.

Prior to that, love was seen as Eros, love that excites you to desire - the erotic, bological urge, the "zeal of the organs for each other." The personal factor doesn't matter. This is not the person-to-person thing, the falling in love as the troubadours understood it. ...Then the other love, the Christian love, agape, spritual love, love thy neighbor as thyself - again, it doesn't matter who the person is. It's your neighbor, you must have that kind of love.

But the kind of seizure that comes from 'the meeting of the eyes' as they say in the troubadour tradition, and the purely person -to-person thing, as far as I know, it originates as an ideal to be lived for with the troubadours.

Moyers: You've said that what happened in the 12th and 13th centuries was one of the most important mutations of human feeling and spiritual consciousness, that a new way of experiencing love came to expression and it was in opposition to that ecclesiastical despotism of the heart which required people, particularly young girls barely out of adolescence to marry whomever the church or their parents said. So the idea of real person-to person marriage was very dangerous.

Campbell: It was heresy.... For instance in the Tristan romance - that's the crucial romance - Isolde is engaged to marry King Mark and they had never seen each other. Isolde's mother prepares a love potion so the two young people will have real love for each other. Tristan and Isolde drink the potion, thinking it's wine, and are overtaken by this love.. ... The nurse sees what has happened and says to Tristan, "You have drunk your death." And Tristan said, "If by 'my death' you mean this agony of love, this is my life. If by 'my death' you mean the punishment we are to suffer if we are discovered, which is execution, I can accept that. But if by 'my death' you mean eternal punishment in the fires of hell, I accept that too." What he was saying is that this love is bigger even than death, than pain, than anything. This is the affirmation of life, in a big way!

Moyers: This is sort of the beginning of the the romantic idea of the western individual taking matters into his or her own hands....

Campbell: Absolutely, you can see examples in oriental strories of this kind of thing but it did not become a social system. It has now become the ideal of love in the western world.

It's a very mysterious thing - that electric thing that happens - and then the agony that follows that the troubadours celebrate. The sickness the doctors cannot cure, the wound that can only be healed by the one that inflicted the wound. That's the paradox.

Moyers: What did you mean when you said that the triumph of Tristan's kind of love was the libido over credo.

Campbell: Well, credo is 'I believe, and I believe not only in the laws but I believe these laws were instituted by God and there's no arguing with God.' And libido is the impulse to life, comes from the heart. The heart is the organ of opening up to somebody else. That's the human quality as opposed to the animal qualities which have to do primarily with self-interest. Opening up to that which is Other is the opening of the heart. And that's what the troubadours saw....

Moyers: So the courage to love became the courage to affirm against tradition, whatever knowledge is confirmed by one's own experience. Why was that important in the evolution of the West?

Campbell: Well, it was important in that it gives the West this accent on the individual, that he should have faith in his experience and not simply mouth that which has come from others. I think that's the great thing in the West - the validity of the individual's experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are against the monolithic system.

Moyers: When we say "God is Love" does that have anything to do with romantic love? Does mythology ever link romantic love with God?

Campbell: Love was a divine visitation and that's why it was superior to marriage. That was the troubadour idea. If God is love, well, then love is God!