“Of these adventures, Muse, daughter of Zeus, tell us in our time, lift the great song again.”  Homer’s Odyssey

Sometime in 1986 Dad explained to me the myth of The Journey of the Hero.

It was the only six weeks I spent with my parents after leaving home when I was seventeen. My younger sister did not feel that starving myself into a coma while working in a strip club in San Francisco was a good post-graduate choice. So she sent me home for some parental guidance.

Dad was teaching a class on ancient Greek tragedy. He was lecturing on Joseph Campbell. It’s usually a male myth, he said, facing me, the oldest of his three daughters, with his typically inscrutable expression.

I was instantly catapulted  into the advanced state of rage in which I spent most of our overlapping lifetimes.

It goes like this, he told me.

The hero doesn’t start out as a hero.

He starts out as just some guy, living somewhere.

But then he has to leave his home, and go on some big adventure, and accomplish something. There have to be difficulties, plot complications, the retrieval of sacred relics, many headed monsters who can’t be killed. There have to be surprise visits from supernatural goddesses of war who were sprung in full armor from their father’s foreheads, and so forth, before he can come home. When he comes home, then he is a hero. He has to go on a journey in order to be a hero.

That’s why it’s called The Journey of the Hero.

I sat there silently, wondering if the same thing applied to heroines. 

He said not, but I was pretty sure it did.

 

 

THE JOURNEY OF THE HERO

Thirty years later,  I got in my rental car and I headed out across the country on I 80 North, alone.

I need to reclaim two original paintings by Kenneth Patchen that are now mine. The secret history of the 1960s is unfolding across my computer screen like a spiked drink that can never be put back in the bottle. I yearn to hit the road and revisit all those scenes.

With only the ghost of a beatnik father for company.

After that last fight with my boyfriend, who, I think,  is being brainwashed by the right wing radio talk show he keeps glued to his ear while he sleeps, Left and Right have once again split like a sharp sword in front of me, and I must navigate on the razor’s edge.

I gaze down that long ribbon of highway.

I can hear Daddy’s typewriter clicking.

“The Journey…of the Hero…”

I can see the jazz drifting down from the clouds.

I can even smell his pipe smoke.

The hero doesn’t start out as a hero.

He’s just some guy, some kind of artist.

Working in some university.

Working in a succession of universities. Starting in 1959. A government building in the historical center of Mexico City in 1963. An old schoolhouse that doesn’t really have a job for him near Monterey in 1961. Stanford. UCLA.  Research Triangle in North Carolina. There are more.

Working to support his family.

Living in America.

During the 1960s.

Protesting The War.

He spent the entire Vietnam War counseling young men on how to legally declare themselves conscientious objectors and avoid the draft. He had experience. He was raised in the Brethren-In-Christ church- first cousins to the Amish. He had been a C.O. during World War II. In fact, as my brother once had to explain to an enraged Vietnamese refugee in the back of a hot kitchen in New York City, all my male ancestors back to the Revolutionary War were conscientious objectors.

1967

When I was nine, Dad walked me over to one of the bookshelves in the living room. He pointed to a row of books by Anais Nin, placed in between Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, just as they sit now in my apartment north of San Francisco.

“When she was nine years old,” he said “This woman started writing a letter to her father, who was on the other side of an ocean. It turned into all these books.”

The other side of an ocean…

The other side of an ocean…

The other side of an ocean…

1999

The last book I saw Daddy reading was The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It kept turning up on the coffee table in Bisbee, or in that big comfy chair every time I wanted to sit down. Or in the cafe where he had his photo snapped with David Dellinger.

Finally I took the cue, and I asked him what it was about.

He gave me a long look through his horn rimmed glasses,

took a drag on his cigarette and,

after a beat, he said

“An archipelago

is a group of islands…

In an ocean.”