Joseph Hirsch's Blog - Posts Tagged "monomyth"

“Myths,” someone once observed, “are not things that were never true, but are things that are always true.” Certain tales as old as time contain basic elements that get rediscovered and used to retell certain stories, again and again, for successive generations. But myths are not only true; they sometimes end up literally enacted, somewhere besides onscreen or on the page, or told by some griot at the village fireside.
Take the real life story of Cus D’Amato and Mike Tyson.
You don’t need me to tell you who Mike Tyson is. Every sentient creature on Earth knows him, or at least recognizes his scarred mug, his scowl, the signature lisp. Tyson was, for a time, viewed as the ultimate instantiation of the gladiator. He was someone whose viciousness to his opponents in the ring revealed fascinating and unpleasant things about our own bloodlust. He was the apex predator in a sport that prided itself on being called “the hurt business,” a hardman who made other hardmen quit.
For a time there, almost everyone (except for hardcore boxing fans and experts) thought he was invincible. Even the most egotistical and bravado-exuding among us never pretended that we could beat him in a standup fight.
There are exceptions to the rules that govern old-school concepts like manhood: i.e. “Men can cry after winning championship games,” or “Men can embrace after a sporting victory.” Tyson’s very existence required new carveouts, the main one being, “It was inappropriate, weak to admit fear, except of Mike Tyson.”
Halfway through his ascent through the ranks, his original nickname, “Kid Dynamite,” was swapped out for the more formidable but simpler sobriquet of “Iron Mike.” He gave postfight interviews in which, after dispatching a man in seconds rather than minutes, he bemoaned failing to drive his opponent’s nosebone through his brainstem. When most youths his age were obsessing over the opposite sex, Mike was poring over tomes about the bloody conquests of Genghis Khan. Or sitting in an attic eyrie watching Jack “the Manassa Mauler” tear through opponents in grainy footage projected onto a white canvas.
Tyson was the product of a broken home, a son of the ghetto, a feral child who lived in the abandoned tenements and blasted-out buildings in Crack Boom era Brownsville, Brooklyn. His ascent was meteoric and his fall even more precipitous. He went from the youngest heavyweight champion of the world (a record still not matched) to being imprisoned, to finally becoming a laughingstock after biting another man’s ear off.
For a time it seemed he was the plaything of the Gods, the very cynosure of their eyes. They gave him everything and then took it away, or rather they gave him the means to acquire everything, and the hubris to lose it.
The Tyson Myth is cemented in popular consciousness, and hardly needed the recapitulation I just gave it.
Cus D’Amato might need a little more introduction, especially to those not familiar with the Sweet Science. Constantine “Cus” D’Amato is the old and squat Falstaffian white man you see in many photos of Tyson from the mid-eighties. He has the strangely childlike face that a lot of very tough old men have, the innocent boy within imprisoned by time and pain somewhere beneath the accreted scars. Mostly it’s in the eyes, but a bit is in the mouth, pulled into a tight smile more guarded than ironic. Cus is having a ball, but he doesn’t want you to know it, and so hides it beneath a gruff, crotchety exterior.
Cus had already had a storied career as a trainer before he met Mike Tyson. His prize pupil was Floyd Patterson, a smallish heavyweight with lightning speed and a host of insecurities and psychic weak spots too numerous to list here. Later Cus trained light-heavyweight champion Jose Torres and took him to the Promised Land as well. In between these two champs, Cus had many other fighters under his tutelage. Many of them went on to greater things, but only after forsaking him to join deeper-pocketed syndicates or less demanding, more malleable trainers.
So much betrayal made Cus bitter. Extensive corruption in boxing—including fights fixed by the Mafia and violent reprisals against those who didn’t play along—then turned him paranoid. By the time Mike Tyson met him, he was no longer just bitter or paranoid. Batshit crazy was added to his character makeup, and truthfully probably predominated over all preexisting traits.
Tyson was mystified by some of the old man’s habits.
Cus cut the pockets out of his pants to prevent his enemies—real and imagined (but mostly imagined)—from planting drugs on him. He positively refused to interact with any attractive woman who showed an interest in him, believing it was a honeypot, or some kind of ruse to get him to otherwise lower his guard.
Many nights Tyson recalls stumbling home to the house in Catskill, New York where he lived with Cus, to see the old man lying on the floor, with the lights off. What was Cus doing? Usually commando crawling with a rifle in his arms, avoiding windows and even well-lighted patches of linoleum in the kitchen, lest snipers see him.
Mike loved Cus despite his madness—or maybe because of it—and in his own words made himself Cus’s devoted slave. Their meeting, it seemed was foreordained.
Cus terrified Tyson the first time he saw him. At the time, Tyson was serving a stretch at the Tryon School for Boys, a reformatory where Tyson was imprisoned for various offenses in his old stomping grounds. His hobbies included knocking men out and soaking their hands in the snow to loosen the rings from their fingers. He also enjoyed offering to help old ladies with their groceries, accompanying them to parking lots and then snatching their purses and any lose jewelry.
He most likely would have graduated from such petty crimes to more serious felonies and finally murder. Ultimately he would have ended up a blotter statistic rather than a legend, except for divine (or perhaps unholy) intercession.
Cus, you see, had been on a quest to find his third champion, after Patterson and Torres. He was convinced, as well, that this third champion would be a heavyweight. He was further convinced that said-heavyweight would be the youngest champion in the history of the division. Tyson recalls their meeting thusly:
Cus took one look at Mike, stared and grinned, silently.
Tyson initially suspected the weird old man was some kind of chickenhawk, an older, usually wealthy gay man who preyed on young and vulnerable boys.
Finally, though, Cus ceased smiling and finally spoke.
“It has taken me a lifetime to conjure you with my mind.”
Imagine being told such a thing, while young and impressionable, by a bizarre, craggy-faced little sloop-shouldered man, who, despite his humble appearance, seems entirely without fear.
Cus got Tyson out of Tryon, rescuing him from the pit, so to speak, but asked for Tyson’s loyalty and trust in return. Tyson initially balked at the man’s bargain, and bridled even more at the rough training regimen he was subjected to. Like the hero in the monomyth of Joseph Campbell, Tyson resisted the call to action, the path to adventure. But the wise old tutor eventually found the weak spots in Tyson’s psyche—just as he had with Floyd Patterson—probing them but also shoring them up.
He made Tyson stronger—both physically and mentally—and also gave him the tools to see himself through in his quest alone after he had passed his initiation test. Tyson went from distrusting Obi-Wan and refusing he had the ability to wield the force to eventually loving the man and in turn discovering his own greatness.
Then the old man died, and the curse of bitterness was passed on from the old to the young. Tyson grieved for a short time, but mostly just raged, outside of as well as in the ring, at the world, at opponents, at his own shadow. These rages in the hadal depths are also part of the hero’s quest, though.
And the young hero became a conqueror, but then lost himself in the wilderness. He went to prison (confined to the dungeon) where he was forced to regain humility and focus, and rediscover the wisdom of his master’s tutelage. One wonders if Cus’s holographic shroud appeared to Mike in his cell, much as the flickering images of Obi-Wan and Yoda appeared to intermittently to offer additional guidance to Luke Skywalker.
Yes, young George Lucas had the Campbellian monomyth very much in mind when he decided to make his space opera. There’s a reason that taproot he discovered still bears sweet water, all these decades later.
Tyson had more triumphs and heartaches in the ring and outside of it. He regained his crown but found that all that glittered was not gold, and so forsook the things of the world, including the accolades and his image of himself as a conqueror.
For a time he disappeared, letting his body and mind wither, gaining hundreds of pounds, and losing his daughter in a tragic accident.
At last Tyson came back, disproving Fitzgerald’s old saw about American lives and second acts, reinventing himself as a professional monologue artist, motivational speaker, and podcaster.
Now Tyson is older, wiser, and in the position of guru for any who might care to listen. He spends an inordinate amount of time in his rookery filled with pigeons, a pastime he picked up as a youth in Brooklyn. Birds were easy pets to keep even in the claustrophobic experiment in racial and cultural anomie that is the American ghetto. The birds also gave Mike a pretext to ascend to the roof of his brownstone, where he could be alone with his thoughts, the birds, the sky with its clouds.
And despite Tyson’s massive footprint in popular culture, even to this day, he has about him the aura of a holy ascetic, or a hermit shadowboxing in his platonic cave, the ultimate loner.
I won’t bother going step by step through the “story beats” or stops on the cycle as delineated by Joseph Campbell in his works on comparative mythology. Nor will I recapitulate the details of Tyson’s life in any greater detail than I already have. Suffice it to say that if you place the monomyth of Joseph Campbell alongside the real life of the mythic figure of Mike Tyson, the overlap is uncanny.
The only thing that could make it all even more eerily serendipitous would be if Tyson were to be approached by some young, angry lost man, the way he approached Cus all those years ago.
I know I said Cus approached Mike, not the other way around, but in such fatalist exchanges who “finds” who is academic. Both were walking toward each other on the fate’s tightrope, the only difference being that Cus knew it (or conjured it) while Mike was busy raging at his shadow, conjuring nothing but trouble, and—if he kept going—his own premature self-destruction.
Still, I can see Mike seeking the boy out, rescuing him from some pit where he is currently languishing.
It really wouldn’t surprise me if things came full circle, that the myth was immanentized again, the story instantiated as flesh once more, just for symmetry, to say nothing of shits and giggles.
The myth is much realer than what we recognize as reality. It’s just that the gods rarely find one of us a worthy vessel to prove it. They’re sparing with their most rarified brands of anima and pneuma, and only ensoul those vessels which occupy that liminal space between man and god— demigods, Mischling offspring of gods and mortals who somehow manage to hot potato that Promethean fire until they develop strong calluses on their able hands.
I suppose we should be thankful, though, that most of us have not earned the scrutiny of such Olympian deities. Sure, the highs are high, but the lows look abysmal, and burn as many men as they forge with their fire.

I try not to write about politics, even in these throwaway blog entries.
And still, sometimes I find myself dealing with the political, if only the metapolitical, and how narrative structures that appear in art also appear in life.
I won’t club you over the head with a recapitulation of Joseph Campbell’s various archetypes and their shadow selves. If you’ve ever seen a Star Wars movie or a Pixar movie, or played a million different roleplaying games, you’ve encountered this stuff. Suffice it to say that most works that mine Campbell’s “monomyth” usually stick to the Hero’s Journey. This follows a protagonist on their arc from a sheltered youth to a reluctant fighter for some cause. They grow into someone—who through trial by fire and aided by a wiser, older figure—reaches adulthood, having passed various tests and found their mettle not wanting.
Notice, in that rough thumbnail description, that seeming throwaway bit about the “older figure.” This is your Merlin, your Yoda, your Mister Miyagi, the sage who must train the impetuous youth for their ordeal.
The Wise Old (Wo)Man has their work cut out for them, as the young person is so eager to right various wrongs that it’s hard to teach them anything. And they need a crash course that will at least give them a fighting chance, if nothing more, when facing an incredibly powerful foe. This foe, of course, is the shadow archetype of the benevolent wizard, the sorcerer to his mage.
What about after the young hero slays the dragon/evil king, emerges from their katabatic journey into victory? Do they rest on their laurels? Live “happily ever after,” stroking the golden fleece they liberated from the hydra, or having babies with the princess they saved from the wicked sorcerer’s enchanted keep?
Presumably, they become a wise old king themselves, enjoying the fruits of their labor, the spoils of war. Their hair grows grey, their beard grows longer, and they watch their grandchildren wander around the throne room, the kingdom finally at peace, at least for a time.
If there’s one thing a story can’t stand, though, it’s stasis. Even the old must finally change.
That means it’s time for the hero to assume the role of wise old man. He must, as Yoda once counseled, lose everything he fears to lose, in order to grow. He needn’t just drop his crown and head off to the woods to fashion himself a woodland hermitage made of sticks and mud. Nor must he retreat to the mountains and begin quarrying rocks for a cairn to heap upon his own grave. It needn’t be so dramatic; he can even remain on the throne for a time, as long as he is training the next generation to assume control.
But what if he doesn’t do this? What if he refuses to recognize that his time is nigh, that some foes (like mortality) not only shouldn’t be fought, but should actually be embraced? Just as the hero can refuse the call to action—succumbing to the shadow archetype of coward—the old man can reject the final transformation that comes with death. If he refuses this ultimate transformation, he becomes the inverse of the archetype to which he has dedicated his life to instantiating up to now. He becomes his shadow archetype.
Rather than seeing the next generation as his rightful heirs, he sees them as potential usurpers to his throne. Like the ancient dowager in an old Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, every time he hears his grandchildren laughing from the other room, he thinks they’re plotting his demise. He may be dependent on them to prepare his meals, but he’s also convinced they’re poisoning him so they can get their inheritance faster.
As for the approach of death, the Sorcerer doesn’t see it as the natural coda to life, something which should make him grateful for the great respite. This is not the old bluesman’s “burden” to be laid down, when all hard trials are over. He has grown accustomed to life’s pleasures, ensconced in his castle where the pain can’t get to him.
He may begin to think about the catalog of his sins, and greatly fear that he may have to pay for them in the afterlife. Conversely, his faith in whatever religion he espoused throughout life may be waning, or may have always been a front, and he fears the eternal void. He is bitter, and rather than viewing death as universal, he anthropomorphizes it. He personalizes it, claims it is picking on him, shouts at shadows like Scrooge hiding his face beneath the bedspread and urging the ghosts begone.
Fear of death and pining for one’s lost youth are natural emotions. It’s when the Sorcerer begins casting about for a way to escape Death’s clutches, and begins bargaining, that things get bad for him. If he succeeds in conjuring the Devil—or Mephisto, or the Dark Side of the Force—he will sign a deal written in blood, in exchange for his soul. What does he get? More life, or even eternal life, in exchange for allegiance to this evil which promises to bend the rules for him.
He may even need a sacrifice to give in exchange for this gift; it may even be the hero themselves. Think of the way the evil Emperor in The Empire Strikes Back used Darth Vader as a kind of helpmeet to lure Luke to the bargaining table. Or the horrific (and hopefully apocryphal) story of Pope Innocent VIII drinking the blood of three young boys on his deathbed in a vain effort to gain their lifeforce.
I bring all of that up now to get back to my original point: I try to stay away from politics, even in these blog entries, but sometimes it’s hard. Especially when that politics is metapolitical, and it goes so far as to even touch on the mythopoetic.
Right now America’ s ruling class is top heavy with geezers. I’m not the first to note that we’re living under a feckless gerontocracy. It’s also obvious that while many of us lack conviction, the worst of us are on twitter, filled with passionate intensity. And that contingent usually consists of shitlib boomers like Rob Reiner and Stephen King, sanctimoniously claiming the moral high ground and demanding the rest of us fall in line.
There’s no question, that in the time of Covid, their cohort was hard hit, and they certainly have as much right to their feelings on the subject as anyone else. It’s also certain that if the disease had wreaked havoc on the young and healthy, we wouldn’t have seen the nationwide hysteria and disruptions we were forced to endure. The Boomers are so used to being the fulcrum upon which the world turns—the cynosure of everyone’s eyes—that we were required to shut down society on their behalf. It’s no surprise or coincidence that Lysenko-like apparatchik Anthony Fauci was a Boomer, or that Trump, arrogantly touting his efficacious “warp speed” vaccine, also hails from this cohort.
And on the subject of Trump, their monomaniacal obsession with him has become, as comedian Kurt Metzger pointed out, a bit like Ahab’s suicidal quest against the White Whale. I’m convinced that if these Boomers were faced with incontrovertible proof that a second Trump term might’ve averted war over the Donbas, they wouldn’t care. A man who offends them viscerally but might have spared a few hundred thousand lives just isn’t worth it. They’re only concerned with harpooning him from the heart of their very own self-made hell.
If you have these obsessive Boomer types in your life, you know they don’t care. They don’t care that the coterie of advisors surrounding the Child Sniffer in Chief has brought us to the brink of nuclear war. Nor do they care that America’s borders have become so porous and dysfunctional that even the most xenophilic progressives are starting to quietly, privately, grow uneasy.
In a way, it makes sense that the Boomers would be more reticent to admit their time is over than previous generations. The Silent Generation and Greatest Generation before them generally had much harder lives. Youth culture and the concept of a teenager didn’t even exist in their day. It was a result of postwar mass affluence that touched even the working classes. The Boomers were doted over, studied as a cohort, fretted over when they flirted with juvenile delinquency. They were catered to in the culture and in the music and told for decades that they and their heroes and historical figures and their wars were the most important thing in the world.
They mocked the aged of their own day and hubristically declared that they themselves would never get old. And as they grew into institutional power, those same Boomers who regarded the Vietnam War as unethical became neocons and supported what amounted to genocide. It was a genocide, by the way, that Trump publicly decried, in South Carolina, the supposed home of the most rabid and warmongering among us.
Jim Morrison only got it half-right in Five To One. His generation has the guns and the numbers.
And it has hurt them greatly. They can’t admit to the human condition, age gracefully, admit, even into their eighties, that they are no longer teenagers. Nor can they admit that they’ve deliberately selected their replacements (in politics and everywhere else) for their fecklessness. Their fear of being usurped has ensured that anyone who comes after them is too incompetent to even administer the state or govern correctly, even if they wanted to.
I believe it’s this fear of death—a death which was much less hidden and better understood in the days of generations past—that caused their apoplexy over covid. Death is terrible, and that the aged can be killed by a flu seems unjust. But the solution to this problem is not to lock children in their homes, isolating them so that not only their immune systems, but language acquisition and facial affect reading skills suffer.
To do that is to behave as Cronus in Greek myth did, or Saturn in his Roman derivation, to swallow one’s child in the attempt to hold back time.
Tying this back into Campbell’s taxonomy, it’s important to note that not everyone hits every one of the arcs, from the hero to the mage. It isn’t just a matter of ageing through the various stages of herohood. One must make the right choices, take rather than refuse the calls to action, lest they become in some way stunted.
I could speculate on what makes our rulers so immature, what rites of passage they shirked in order to become such mockeries of sages in their declining years. Maybe it was the draft deferments—the five Biden got for asthma, the who-knows-how-many Trump got for bone spurs.
But I’m done speculating for now, and done with this unsavory subject. Suffice it to say that even calling these gormless old men evil is to impute too much depth and nuance to them. Biden is not Emperor Palpatine, standing before the threshold to eternal darkness, tempting the Hero to make the same Mephistophelian bargain he made. He can barely stand up, or go two minutes without flirting with the nearest twelve year-old girl in the audience unfortunate enough to endure his withered gaze. And his son’s an influence-peddling crackhead whose penchant for recording every moment of his perfidy means not even the most nimble twitter-fingered Boomer can hide the truth.
Which is that, when they look at Trump they see themselves, and that is why they hate him so.