BILL MOYERS: Do you think you, Joseph Campbell, have to…it has to be physical?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: No, but it can be a peak experience there are other kinds of peak experiences, which I know were superior to those, but those are the ones that when I read Maslow and read of peak experience, I just know that those were peak experiences.
BILL MOYERS: What about James Joyce’s epiphanies?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Now, that’s another thing. This has to do with the esthetic experience. Joyce’s formula for the esthetic experience is that it does not move you to want to possess the object, that he calls pornography; nor does it move you to criticize and reject the object, that he calls didactics, social criticism in art and all that kind of thing. It is the holding the object, and he says you put a frame around it and see it as one thing, and then seeing it as one thing, you become aware of the relationship of part to part, the part to the whole and the whole to each of the parts. This is the essential esthetic factor rhythm, the rhythm, the rhythmic relationships. And when a fortunate rhythm has been struck by the artist, there is a radiance. That’s the epiphany. And that is what would be the Christ coming through, do you understand what I’m saying?
BILL MOYERS: The face of the saint beholding God.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And it doesn’t matter who it is. I mean, you could take someone who you would think of as being a monster, that is an ethical judgment on the life, and this is transcendent of ethics, no didactics.
BILL MOYERS: But see, that’s where I would disagree with you, because it seems to me in order to experience the epiphany, that which you behold but do not want to possess must be beautiful in some way. A moment ago, when you talked about your peak experience, running, you said it was beautiful. Beautiful is an esthetic word.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah, that’s right.
In an Alternate Reality, the fanatics of Star Wars, the audience, would have listened to Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell from 1986 and 1987 that George Lucas made such an effort to hand down… instead of squandering a great understanding and comprehension of James Joyce.
James Joyce ARG / Alternate Reality Game
An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players’ ideas or actions. The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real time and evolves according to players’ responses. It is shaped by characters that are actively controlled by the game’s designers…
“Sean Stacey, the founder of the website Unfiction, has suggested that the best way to define the genre was not to define it, and instead locate each game on three axes (ruleset, authorship and coherence) in a sphere of “chaotic fiction””