Culture

Wherever power gathers into a single pair of hands, a figure in motley appears beside it and begins to laugh. He is permitted what no one else is permitted: to mock the crowned head from arm’s length, to say over dinner what would cost a minister his own. We file the court jester under quaint medieval décor, somewhere between the falconry and the tapestry. He is nothing of the kind. He is a structural organ that grows wherever power concentrates — the way a callus grows where a tool keeps rubbing the hand — and he grows back long after we are sure we have abolished him. …

There are nights when Plácido Domingo has made me cry — real tears, the kind that arrive uninvited at the exact phrase where the voice opens and the whole room tilts. And there are other nights, more than I can count, when Domingo could do nothing for me, and what carried me across the road was a Vallenato by Diomedes Díaz, or Pedro Infante singing a bolero as if the song were a small lit room, or The Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road.” I used to apologize for this. I have apologized to people who expected me, at a serious hour, to reach for something serious — Mozart, Wagner, Philip Glass — and caught me reaching instead for Shakira, or Julio Iglesias, or Juan Gabriel. I am done apologizing. Not because my taste improved, but because I finally understood what the apology was confessing. …

I. The convergence — what Campbell and Jung actually claim In 1949, Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces and made a claim that, if true, should have changed everything. Every mythology, across every culture that has ever existed, produces the same story: departure, initiation, return. The hero leaves the known world, undergoes a transformation in the depths, and returns with something for the community. Campbell’s argument was not that the stories resemble each other by coincidence or by diffusion. It was that they resemble each other because they describe the same thing: a psychological process, available to any human being willing to undergo it. …

There was an eleventh-century Tibetan lama known to his students as Gloomy Face. His given name was Langthangpa Dorje Senge; the nickname came from a vow he had taken never to smile. He was also one of the teachers responsible for transmitting the Lojong mind-training slogans — a collection of pithy instructions whose recurring theme is the danger of taking oneself too seriously. The irony, apparently, was intentional. He lived the joke so completely that he became it. …