From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Jun 15 2003 - 00:04:17 BST
Rick, Sam and all:
RICK said:
Is the irony apparent yet? Yes, the very same person-to-person model of
love and family ...was itself once the "heresy". It was the heresy when
the Giant REALLY controlled our family life, when our marriages were
arranged, when the people getting married had no say and the marriages were
made for political and financial reasons. By whatever accident or design
that bound up the Troubadour's Love with the Manichean resistance to the
Church, Romantic love became the vehicle of FREEDOM from existing static
patterns of marriage, family, religion, and from the very relationship of
the one to the whole of society.
dmb says:
The vehicle of freedom. Yes. I think that's right. There was an actual
historical shift in attitude and there were practical effects in terms of
personal relationships, but there was something bigger and deeper going on
too. If we look at the legends of the period, such as Abelard and Heloise,
Tristan and Isolde and even the legend of Lancelot and Guinevere, from a
mythological and psychological perspective we can see that the actual and
practical effects are a result of a kind of deep spiritual impulse. If we
see the hero as a representative of the culture itself, then his lover
represents the aspirations of that culture, the desired direction of
evolution. She is like the anima figure, a symbol of what the dreamer would
most like to become next, except at a collective level. It was not just a
personal dream. It was a movement. It was an event in our collective
development. The troubadour movement was a collective dream that motivated
the waking consciousness of the whole culture.
We see a tacky, watered down version of this in today's romantic comedies.
Is she going to marry the inane and superficial rich guy or the regular guy
with a good heart? Its not really about choosing a spouse. Its about
choosing value systems. Are you going to be a shallow and materialistic
person or a genuine person? That's always the real question in those movies.
Its not really about finding a mate so much as one's own identity. That same
kind of thing is true of the musician/lover heros too. Its not really about
the girl, its about following your heart, your own experience. As the man
said, "...the
courage to love [is] the courage to affirm one's own experience against
tradition..."(Don Quixote marks the end of this age.)
Rick said:
I believe that the continued evolution of family and romantic models is just
a continuation of the transformation of love initiated by the Troubadours
long ago. Increased freedoms from marriage (ie. divorce) and the bonds of
biology (ie. sperm donations, cloning, surrogacy, etc) are simply the modern
manifestations of the same individuation of love that freed us from archaic
patterns of church and culture.
dmb adds:
Right. The traditional models just don't cut it anymore. Since we have the
ability to control reproduction and marriage is no longer a social or
economic necessity, people get married as a matter of choice. Hopefully the
reasons that compell a couple to join go beyond reproduction and shared
expenses. Many people expect more than that from a marriage now. The
liberation of women has to be among the most important social changes. I
mean, the high divorce rate is due, in part, to old school guys who still
want their wives to act as some kind of domestic servant/wet nurse. Old
school guys who beat their wives are now finding themselves alone and broke.
This is a good thing. Nobody should have to get beat up at home. There's
plenty of time for that at the office. :-)
Thanks.
Bill Moyers:
So the courage to love became the courage to affirm one's own experience
against tradition- the tradition of the Church. Why was that important inthe
evolution of the west?
Joe Campbell:
It was important in that it gave the West this accent on the individual,
that one should have faith in his experience and NOT simply mouth terms
handed down to him by others. It stresses the validity of the individual's
experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the
monolithic system....
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