TV & Me: Celebrating The PBS Oasis (and series conclusion)

 Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Last in a series.

During the 1970s and especially the 80s and beyond, the vast wasteland of television increased in vastness and waste.  Jerry Springer springs to mind, along with Dynasty and Dallas, Inside Edition, shopping channels, Faux News, and various other forms of supermarket tabloid trash TV, paving the way for our current trash Internet anarchy.

 Television’s potential was being obliterated even from memory, but these dumbed-down shows with their psychotic grins exploiting violent versions of lowest denominator banality weren’t the whole story in those decades. There was, as principal example, PBS: the Public Broadcasting Service, officially founded in 1969.  Fighting off fierce political attack for much of the past 40 years or more, and not immune to the dumbing down and chicanery infecting television in general, nevertheless PBS remained a beacon of possibility.  For me as a viewer it was often an oasis in the Great Wasteland that provided me with the rescue of inspiring and expanding programs.

 As described in the previous post in this series, some of the shows that rescued me originated in other countries (principally the UK and Canada), and were presented to me via PBS stations.  Now this series on TV and me concludes with tributes to some deeply influential programs that PBS created or had a hand in creating.

Fred Rogers with Josie Carey WQED Pittsburgh early 1950s

 More generally, PBS was a persistent highlight of television.  The Pittsburgh public television station I first watched, WQED, was one of the first educational channels (eventually organized into NET or National Educational Television, one PBS precursor) and it was the very first to be community-sponsored in the country (which I guess meant corporations based in Pittsburgh as well as local viewers contributions.)  I was nearly 8 years old when it went on the air.  

Though our signal reception was iffy for the first years and most of the programming consisted of classes, I remember Josie Carey and her The Children’s Hour at 5 pm, just before Howdy Doody on WDTV.  Josie and Miss Francis on Ding Dong School were among my earliest teachers. (Not including Crusader Rabbit and Tom Terrific cartoons which I glimpsed mornings just before going to school.)  Backstage at Josie Carey’s show was puppeteer and organ accompanist Fred Rogers.  Her set would be modified for his show in the 1960s, and many of the same characters would appear.

 By the early 1970s, PBS news coverage would become trenchant and important.  PBS doggedly covered the various Watergate hearings, anchored by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, with analysis by Elizabeth Drew and the very young Cokie Roberts.  The daily MacNeil/Lehrer Report was essential.

 But I was mostly in awe of a number of their themed documentary series. I didn’t have regular access to television when the Kenneth Clark Civilization series ran in 1969, so my first experience with this form was  The Ascent of Man, which was first shown in the US in early 1975, before I left Greensburg for Washington.  These two series apparently were designed as counterparts: Clark examined the evolution of art, and Jacob Bronowski in Ascent followed the evolution of science, though each went beyond these borders.  Both were produced by the BBC and Time-Life, under the tutelage of David Attenborough.  This was the first of several series like it that I avidly absorbed.

 Bronowski’ 13 episode series set the template for these programs: they were personal views (which was Bronowski’s subtitle) and they depicted scenes around the world as illustrations and enactments.  Each host (or in British TV parlance, presenter) was also the chief author.  Their prejudices as well as insights were inevitably part of their narratives. Some viewers now would flag race and gender (and species) biases, and some of what was said on all these programs has since been superseded by later science and discovery.  But to me at the time, these programs were astonishing in their comprehensiveness.  In areas I knew anything about, they went far beyond textbook summations and embedded information in contexts, then linked both in narrative if not causal relation.  At times watching these I could almost literally feel my brain neurons firing—I was galvanized (which literally means to be stimulated by electric current.)  

 Bronowski’s subject was no less than the human story, with subsets such as one of his scholarly fields, the history and nature of science as an heroic human activity.  The moment that remains in memory is at the end of the 11^th episode, in which this otherwise genial, brilliant but conventional older man in a suit and tie is at the edge of a pond at Auschwitz, where ashes of crematorium victims—millions of mostly Jews-- were summarily deposited. 

 He points out that it is not science that turns people into numbers: the Nazis did it here.  “It was done by arrogance.  It was done by dogma.  It was done by ignorance.  When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no tests in reality, this is how they behave.”

 Then he suddenly steps into the pond, with water up to his ankles.  After noting that many members of his family died here, he continues: “We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.  We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act.” And as he speaks his final sentence, he digs out a handful of mud and holds it up to the camera: “We have to touch people.”

 There are times when everything just stops, and the first time I saw this moment was one of those times.  It was so powerful that in my memory of it, he flings the mud at the camera (this scene is on YouTube, so I’ve seen this memory was erroneous.)  His words should echo in these times as well.

In 1979 another British series made it to PBS: Connections, created and hosted by James Burke (in his various leisure suits), explored interconnected events and technological innovations that led to major changes in societies. As host, Burke was as unconventional as his history, speaking plainly and with humor, without the scholarly gravitas of Clark and Bronowski, or any other documentary host to that point. 

 This series (and its followup, The Day the Universe Changed in 1986) asserted historical causalities that went beyond the generalizations and simplicities of the explanations we learned in school.  Crucial battles may not have been won just because of a brilliant leader, but because of a technological advantage, like the stirrup. Such was Burke’s influence that this kind of thinking has since become much more frequent.

 Burke made several more programs on the Connections theme but I believe their most important culmination came in perhaps his least known, three-part series, After the Warming in 1990.  In the guise of a citizen of the year 2050, Burke looks back at global efforts to address the climate crisis, and the changes resulting in the society of that time.  This early acceptance of the threats posed by global warming is still fascinating, especially in how it does--and mostly does not--match up with efforts so far.   Within this framework, Burke examines the determining role of climate and its changes in history and ordinary life, much as his Connections series did.  Lack of this perspective—of how important climate really is—remains a crucial and perhaps fatal ignorance.  This is essential information for our world, but unfortunately few people have ever seen these programs (though they are available free on YouTube.)   They are particularly interesting in light of what has and hasn’t happened since they were made.     

 The apex of this era came in 1980 with Cosmos.  In 1973 or so, I was managing editor of the arts at the Boston Phoenix, and interested in expanding our second section cover beyond the usual arts stories.  Celia Gilbert, our poetry editor, told me about a scientist friend of her scientist husband who was frustrated because the non-academic pieces he wrote weren’t getting published, and she asked if I would look at one of his manuscripts for the Phoenix.  I said I sure would.  But it never came. I therefore lost the chance to discover Carl Sagan.

 Carl Sagan’s first experience in the combination of science and show biz was at the age of four, when he was taken to the famous 1939 New York Worlds Fair, the World of Tomorrow.  As a scientist he believed in communicating to a general public the nuts and bolts of current science as well as the wonder scientific exploration engendered. 

 His early efforts culminated in the PBS series Cosmos, which he presented and co-authored with his wife Ann Druyan and Steven Soter.  This 13 part series was produced and directed by Adrian Malone (among others), who had produced The Ascent of Man, and again its subtitle was “A Personal Voyage.” Sagan used the irresistible vehicle of the ultimate starship to explore the cosmos, and human history in relationship to it.  It was the most popular of these programs, and one of the most watched PBS programs of all time.

 I remember it most for the vast timeline surrounding the present, not only of the universe but of humanity,  and its persistent, passionate emphasis on the fragility of human life and knowledge, eventually centered on the threat of nuclear self-destruction. In common with all these series, there was a lot of human history as context (the segment about the burning of the library at Alexandria was particularly potent.)  Again, it was enlarging: mind and soul-expanding.

 Probably just before Cosmos first aired, Jonathan Miller’s British-made series on medicine, The Body in Question, made it to America.  I may have seen some episodes then but remember it also from seeing at least some of it in later years.  Miller was always a stimulating and entertaining voice, and this series reflects his often contrarian view of events and their meaning.  I especially remember the program on the medical fad in France for “mesmerism” or hypnotism, one of many chapters in medical history the medical establishment would like to forgot.

 I did see every eye-opening episode of The Shock of the New, an 8-part series on the history of modern art by art critic Robert Hughes, seen in the US in 1981.  Hughes came from Australia, and at this time was based in New York as art critic for Time Magazine. He was not conventionally photogenic, yet his sun-lined face with its perpetual scowl demanded attention.  With his preposterous 70s hair humidified into strange shapes, and his eyes continuously moving across the camera from right to left and back again like a searchlight, he spoke plainly and yet eloquently.  His judgments were constant and definite.  He spoke from locations (beginning with the base of the Eiffel Tower), and the art of showing painting on TV had advanced so it was an experience in itself.  I learned a lot, including from his presentation on modern architecture, which proved immediately useful to me as I worked on my shopping mall book. 

 Probably the least remembered of these 1980 series was playwright Ronald Harwood’s history of western theatre called All The World’s A Stage. Its 13 episodes aired in the UK in 1984 and in the US probably a year later.  It, too, was a personal view, and was shot on appropriate locations. But its singular contribution was not only to tell what productions looked like in various times and places, but to show them—and not just in photos and diagrams, but with real sets and real actor speaking the words as they had more or less been spoken, sometimes presenting an entire scene or part of a scene.  Though I had a theatre history course in college, this series (which I taped) proved invaluable, especially when I began to write regularly about theatrical productions.  This series deserves more respect and renown than it apparently received. 

 By the mid-1980s, public television budgets had been reduced, due in large part to politically motivated cuts in funding by the federal government and some state governments, and the pinch was felt in productions. Something similar also happened in Thatcher’s UK. So the era of these ambitious multi-episode programs was largely over.

 While PBS still produced quality programs, they seldom were of this particular type: the elaborated vision of a single author.  These were television’s version of another vanished form: the long story presented by the New Yorker in full, in one issue or more often in several parts, written by John Hershey (Hiroshima) and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring), Frances Fitzgerald (Fire in The Lake) and Jonathan Schell (The Fate of the Earth), John McPhee and Janet Malcolm.  

I can remember one more such series just as the form was disappearing, eventually to be replaced by (for example) the Ken Burns histories.  It was called Millennium: Tribal Wisdom in the Modern World, funded largely by the natural cosmetics company The Body Shop, which gets lavish mention in the series, and once again produced by Adrian Malone.  

This series arrived in the US at the perfect moment: when Native American writers and activists were transforming the 500^th anniversary of Columbus into a classroom on Native history and the especially relevant traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples in a time of ecological crisis.

 It was created and narrated by David-Marbury-Lewis, an anthropologist who’d lived much of his life among Indigenous peoples in remote places. He also founded the organization Cultural Survival, which still exists. Ranging across Africa, Asia, Australia, South and North America, this series centered on vignettes of actual people in the present, which were created after producers took “care to ask them for the stories and incidents that they think are significant, and to elicit their commentaries on them.” 

 The vignettes tend to dramatize common human experiences but within contexts very different from the overdeveloped world. The themes of connectedness and ecological responsibility as crucial to physical and cultural survival have only become more critical since this series aired, and seemingly was forgotten. They are likely to become even more essential as the climate crisis begins to dominate.

 All of the aforementioned series seen on PBS also produced books based on them, and I got many of them.  Generally they expanded on ideas and information presented on TV, and became lasting references. I’ve read and consulted them many times over the years, so the influence of these programs on my life and my work have been considerable.   

Alastair Cooke, the long-time host of Masterpiece

Along the way I appreciated many of the ongoing PBS umbrella series.  Several brought over plays from the UK (playwright Tom Stoppard used to joke that these plays appeared there on such television programs as Play of the Month, but when they came to America they were Masterpiece Theatre and Great Performances.) There were American productions as well, providing me with most of the professional theatrical experiences I had, with much better than my usual rush seats in New York.  Great Performances was also one of the umbrella shows for dance and music of various kinds. 

These were also venues for dramatizations of classic (and not so classic) literature over several episodes, with the capability of more generously treating the characters, subplots and subtleties of a classic novel (a Dickens, an Austen) than a two hour movie would. The big hit in that era was the original Upstairs Downstairs.

  One of the first instances of this that I recall was the miniseries version of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.  This portrait of a woeful working class young man with aspirations to education and higher things who was diverted and ultimately destroyed by a tragic marriage, scared me to death in my early 20s. 

 Other PBS umbrella programs presented various biographies, histories, exposes, political analyses. PBS excelled in biography (often done by independent filmmakers) and explanatory journalism.  Their nature documentaries mostly suffered from the drawbacks of the genre: emphasis on conflict, action, pretty pictures, superficial narrative.  I learned less from these than other types of programs, though there were exceptions.

 Their explanatory programs on science could be breathtaking. In perhaps the early 80s or even the late 70s I vividly recall seeing a program (perhaps a Nova or a stand-alone) that went back and forth between new scientific discoveries in physics of the very large (black holes, etc.) and the very small (quarks, etc.)  The program described relativity and quantum physics, the four fundamental forces (gravity, the electromagnetic force and the strong force and the weak force within the atom) and the struggle to find the “grand unified theory” of how they all interrelate. 

 The climax of the program was the revelation of the one scientist who might yet put it all together. He was Stephen Hawking, then unknown to the general public (years before his bestselling book), or at least to me.  Most of what this program covered was new to me, and as I struggled to keep it all straight and deal with my increasing wonder, I was confronted with my first glimpse of a man twisted by disease (ALS) who might hold the answer.  This was before Hawking got his voice synthesizer, so I heard only the strange sounds he could make, comprehensible (the program said) only to a few.  It was an amazing moment.

 This program was a vivid introduction that allowed me to read further and more widely in related areas with some confidence, which eventually led to reviewing some new books covering some of these subjects for the general reader. 

Finally, there is one figure who more than any other provided various television rescue operations, and opened new doors in my life.  Simply in terms of broadcast journalism, there was no more important figure in the twentieth century after Edward R. Murrow than Bill Moyers.  But his many programs (often produced by his wife, Judith Davidson Moyers) he went far beyond those ordinary concerns of journalism. 

Born in rural Oklahoma, christened Billy Don Moyers, and raised in Marshall, Texas, he became a teenage reporter for the local newspaper before studying journalism at North Texas State College.  A summer internship in the offices of Senator Lyndon Johnson led to a long association that ended in the White House, where he was President Johnson’s press secretary and unofficial chief of staff.

 But as a young man, after earning a journalism B.A. at the University of Texas, Moyers entered divinity school, and was ordained a Baptist minister and for awhile was a pastor for a Texas church.  In 1960 he rejoined the LBJ campaign and went to Washington to work in the Kennedy-Johnson administration, where he was instrumental in establishing the Peace Corps. 

Then after an apparently compromised tenure in the Johnson White House, Moyers returned to journalism to set a stubborn standard for probity and ethics. This kept him changing jobs, which included stints as commentator on CBS and NBC evening news broadcasts. 

 But it was on PBS, which he helped create in the Johnson White House in 1967, that Moyers operated most often and most fully.  An early (and recurrent) title in his many news-oriented program of reportage, interview and commentary was Bill Moyers Journal, which is the first I recall watching in the early 70s, and even ordered transcripts of some impressive episodes. I also remember A Walk Through the 20^th Century. 

Over the years he cut through official excuses and political obfuscation to provide relevant information and succinct critiques of activities and trends that alarmed and depressed me in the 1980s and afterwards. I especially remember his powerful two hour environmental documentary Earth on Edge in 2001, and his early 2000s weekly program, Now. One episode won the Edward R. Murrow award.

 Moyers also focused on journalism and its responsibilities in relation to political life.  I remember his short series, The Public Mind in 1989 as particularly powerful.

   These programs deepened my understanding, and as upsetting as many were, they rescued me from despair because there was someone else who saw what I saw, but in more context and detail, eloquently expressed. I recall Earth on Edge, on interlocking ecological crises, as a model documentary that ought to be taught.  It was so much better than anything else produced at PBS or elsewhere. 

But much as he once dumped journalism for divinity school, Moyers kept turning to deeper and vastly different subjects-- areas of human life and thought that underlie political realms.  These were the programs that made the most difference to me. There were so many I can only mention the ones that were the most personally important.

 Probably Moyers’ most extensive series was A World of Ideas, begun in 1988: some 70 hour-long interviews, subtitled “conversations with thoughtful men and women about American life today and the ideas shaping our future.” 

 Moyers was responding in part to the impoverished national dialogue, the lack of ideas in the political discourse in that election year, but his interviewees were not in politics: they were scholars and thinkers in anthropology and sociology, linguistics and management, ethics and medicine, religion and history, education, physics and environmental sciences.  They were filmmakers, writers, novelists, poet and playwright. He described his “self-appointed” mission:  “ I was attempting to bring to television the lively minds of our time.” 

They were also—Moyers as well as his guest—excellent company.  There were some misses—I thought Moyers wasted an hour discussing Canada as a funny foreign country with (Canadian) Northrop Frye, one of the greatest minds applied to literature in the 20^th century.  But mostly they were enlightening and inspiring conversations.  I valued equally those with figures I knew and wanted to know more of (like August Wilson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Peter Sellars, Richard Rodriguez, Issac Asimov and Toni Morrison), and with those introduced into my world for the first time (like philosopher Jacob Needleman, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, classicist Martha Nussbaum, educator Vartan Gregorian and historian of religion Elaine Pagels.)  

The timing of these interviews was significant in introducing me to three Native American figures when I was beginning an exploration of American Indian literature and culture that would grow over the next decade of my life: Onondaga chief and national leader Oren Lyons (with whom Moyers also did a separate program), and contemporary American Indian novelists Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris (pictured.)  Like everything else Moyers did for PBS, these interviews were rerun several times (especially during pledge drives), and I managed to tape quite a few of them for later study.    

 In 1989 Moyers visited a biannual poetry festival to record the readings and interview the poets in the series The Power of the Word.  It would be the first of several such series (for instance The Language of Life in 1995, The Sounds of Poetry and Fooling with Words in 1999, and interviews with individual poets on his revived Bill Moyers Journal) featuring a broad range of poets. 

poets Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell

The first episode of The Power of the Word with William Stafford, Lucille Clifton Octavio Paz, Robert Bly, Sharon Olds, and Galway Kinnell, shows interactions between poets and students (many in high school) who attended the conference. The atmosphere is warm, and it definitely heats up at the end with Olds and Kinnell trading love poems.

 

poet Li-Young Lee

  The second explores poetry in prisons with James Autry and Quincy Troupe; the third, “Ancestral Voices” highlights the through-line of tradition in contemporary life with Joy Harjo, Barett Kauro Hongo and Mary Tall Mountain.  Then poets Li-Young Lee and Gerald Stern explore the poetry of memory. 

Lucille Clifton

A full hour is devoted to Stanley Kunitz, then one of the most respected American poets at age 84 (he lived to be 101.)  The final program is  “Where the Soul Lives,” featuring W.S. Merwin, Lucille Clifton and Robert Bly.  Bly ends the series on stage with the Paul Winter Consort reciting a short poem by Rumi, the concluding lines I have since often quoted: “Let the beauty we love be what we do./There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the earth.”  

Again, I taped some of these programs and over the years they continued to nourish and center me.

 Robert Bly was prominent in this episode, and he was a focus of the 1990 production of A Gathering of Men. The so-called men’s movement, and Bly’s part in it, were distorted, trivialized and lied about for years.  They were ridiculed, and the men who participated were cruelly shamed.  Moyers showed that this one event was serious, sincere, not political or a hostile escape from women but an exploration of feelings and their denial, particularly about a man’s relationship to his father.  Though others including psychologists James Hillman and Michael Meade not shown in this program were also leaders of these workshops, they all—like Bly-- employed poetry, myth and fairy tales to explore this and related issues. 

 I’ve never attended a men’s group, and I did not always agree completely with Bly at the pitch of his enthusiasms. But whatever other such gatherings were like, the ones these men led were serious attempts that met a need.  This program on its own is a tentative exploration that remains a useful introduction.  When I first saw it, these questions were new to me, but they immediately resonated.  This arrived at about the same time as related discussions about children of alcoholics and forms of abuse felt by children were being explored for a general public, or at least that’s when they were reaching me. 

Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood

These programs foregrounding poetry are among those that were centered on a particular conference or festival, where the Moyers team filmed the public events and some audience response or interaction, and Moyers interviewed principal participants.  Others include the Spirit and Nature program in 1991, which featured an interview with the Dalai Lama, and the Faith and Reason series in 2006, which provided a rare interview with the revered Buddhist monk Pema Chodron, as well as lively and absorbing conversations with Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Martin Amis.  Apart from providing a permanent digest of these proceedings for the many who were not there, the words preserved in these programs continue to stimulate thought and suggest new perspectives. 

Other programs were pieced together from research and interviews in various places, as the five-part 1993 series Healing and the Mind.  Modern western medicine had long discounted any connection between mind (including emotions) with physical processes and health: it was all about mechanics, all about the plumbing.  Anything else was considered superstition.  When reports circulated of some Buddhist monks being able to control blood pressure during meditations, it was considered at best an unverified mystery, or more typically as occult nonsense.

 This was only beginning to change in the early 1990s, and this series of programs was groundbreaking in revealing how much practical work and theory was ongoing, even in hospitals and clinics, exploring the relationship of brain, mind and body.  Experts and practitioners discussed relations of the brain and emotions with the immune system, the effects of environment and community on healing, and generally a new, broader attitude to treat patients holistically, as well as ways for individuals to provide for their own health.

 Today most of the practices discussed, from mindfulness and acupuncture to support groups and mothers holding their newborns immediately after birth, are mainstream.  Most therapies are such normal elements of treatment that insurance often covers them.  Similarly, the hospice care I first glimpsed in On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying (2000) was a rare approach then, but very much accepted now. 

The segment of Healing and the Mind that most stayed with me was Moyers exploring the work of Jon Kabatt-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center’s Stress Reduction clinic, where he was employing the radical idea of addressing intractable back pain with the practice of meditation.  Kabatt-Zinn’s variation on single-point or mindfulness meditation was still relatively new to America, especially outside Buddhist monasteries and related places like the Zen Center in San Francisco.  His techniques were demonstrated, and he talked persuasively about them.

 The program referred to Kabatt-Zinn’s book, Full Catastrophe Living, which included instructions on meditation and the “body scan” he employs, as well as a couple of yoga regimes.  I got that book and the associated tapes in which Kabatt-Zinn speaks you through the process.  When it comes to physical movements I am a slow learner, and group instruction just befuddles me.  So I used the tapes in conjunction with diagrams in the book to learn one of the yoga regimes, and I did it regularly for years.  Though I still use aspects of it, maybe it’s time to return to it in a more formal way. 

 The experience Bill Moyers had was similar to mine, and many others: the body scan was a revelation, while meditation was hard and confusing and a bit irritating.  But it opened the door to learning the practice of meditation in various ways, including a deeper understanding of Zen practice.  This has been a major theme in my learning for the past 30 years, and it effectively began with this segment.  And I still use several of Kabatt-Zinn’s guided meditations, and profit from a couple of his subsequent books on the subject.

 Again, I acquired many of the companion books to these Moyers programs (several published by Doubleday thanks to senior editor Jacqueline Kennedy.)  They remain active resources.  Many of the programs themselves are accessible via YouTube, PBS and the Bill Moyers.com website.

 

I have saved the most popular—and for me the most influential—of these many Moyers programs for last. In 1988, Moyers interviewed Joseph Campbell, previously unknown to the general public, with associated images from his work on world mythologies over six one-hour episodes.  The Power of Myth became one of the most popular TV series in PBS history. 

 I saw it when it first aired (and turned up repeatedly for awhile on PBS fund drives), but a recent re-viewing reminded me of an aspect I hadn’t thought much about: that these interviews took place during the last two summers of Campbell’s life.  This series made him famous, but posthumously. By the time it first aired, this Joseph Campbell-- so alive in personality, knowledge and understanding, who we were meeting for the first time-- was already gone.  He had been dealing with cancer those last years, so mortality was not an academic subject. As I watched it this time I was acutely aware of the additional power in his words on death and its meaning. 

Joseph Campbell was born into a prosperous New York Irish Catholic family in 1904.  Just as Carl Sagan had his defining childhood experience at the World of Tomorrow World’s Fair, Campbell never got over his first glimpses of Native American masks, totem poles and other artifacts at New York’s Museum of Natural History.

 He attended Columbia where he was a world class runner. He took from higher education what he wanted and during the Depression set his own course of study, living alone in an unheated cabin in Woodstock, dividing his day into three reading periods and one for rest. He had his own circuitous adventures-- Joyce scholar (the first book of his I owned was his Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake), friend of John Steinbeck, poet, Sanskrit expert and world traveler--and wound up pretty much inventing his own field of mythological studies.

 His many books, such as The Hero With A Thousand Faces, were influential with scholars and artists.  But it was the six-part The Power of Myth series that made him an icon, as he eloquently explained the patterns of mythology and the meanings he derived from them.

  Though the series included visual illustrations of some myths, the programs were basically little more than Campbell talking, with conversational prompts from a completely engaged Bill Moyers.  Yet the series was enormously popular.  It’s likely that many viewers got their first inklings of Buddhist and Hindu thought as well as traditional stories from Native American and other Indigenous peoples, from these programs. 

 But this wasn’t a mythological travelogue; Campbell distilled his own conclusions and related these stories to questions of the eternal within time, to the importance of the present moment, and the central functions of compassion and the individual experience.  He’d taught college students for many years, and spoke directly to their needs and yearnings. His most famous and therefore most misunderstood statement of “follow your bliss” was a profoundly religious message, shorn of any sense of sectarianism, let alone hedonism.   

Seeing the series again left me with two major impressions.  First, that so much of what has absorbed me in these recent decades in some sense began with this program. I even had forgotten that certain ideas and beliefs that I think of as essential to my life had their origin or at least articulation in these programs. (For example, that religion may have begun when humans dealt with the paradox of killing the animals they revered.)

 This series first aired when I was beginning to explore, in sometimes unrelated ways, Native American cultures and beliefs, the psychology of James Hillman and eventually his source, Carl Jung, and ecology in a deeper way.  This series touched on all of them and more.  Now my bookshelves contain dozens of books on these and related subjects, as well as several of Campbell’s books.

 The second impression is that having explored these topics and these thinkers and writers for the past quarter century and more, I found much more to learn and ponder in re-watching The Power of Myth than I could understand or accommodate back then.   That applies in different ways to other programs that Bill Moyers made.  They continue to nourish, as they once opened up new worlds, rescuing me from becoming mired in the goading limitations of the unembraceable world I was supposed to negotiate. 

These programs represent a small sample of the programs Bill Moyers created, every one of them thought-provoking and informative, and many of them revelatory.  Over the years, Moyers and his collaborators have created more worthy programs than any other individual or group, and perhaps more than some entire networks.

 Bill Moyers demonstrated the power of television to expand and deepen our experience.  There should be a thousand Moyers.  But there is only one. 

   With TV as a medium for myth and story, ideas and mysteries and their magic-- examples of television’s potential so rarely realized that they seem alien rather than what you’d expect intelligent people to do with this miraculous medium—this series ends.  From Hopalong Cassidy and Howdy Doody to The Power of Myth—not such an inconsistent journey after all. 

My family's living room 1954

By an accident of history and my birth date, I am one of a dwindling number of those who grew up as television was growing up.  It occurred to me to make a contribution of my recollections, both to evoke memories in my relatively few contemporaries, and inform and perhaps amuse the many who did not spend early Saturday mornings of their preschool years staring at test patterns.

 This series presented memories of secondary things (sometimes called “mediated experiences”) as distinguished from primary experiences with people and the world.  Though as I tried to indicate, these two  categories of experience were not entirely separate in reality.  TV experiences and other experiences had dynamic relationships in my life, as well as the life of my times.

 In combination with other important and more primary factors, I grew up as I did because I grew up with television, with its role models, cautionary tales, morality fables, personalities, implied histories, conventional lies, information and hints at how the world works—as well as its sensory overloads and simultaneous sensory deprivations, its addictive rhythms, its bright and phony hedonism, its careless deceptions, its palliative hypnotism.

  Experiences with people on TV (more clearly double—the person and the person played, but then, real people are also double, at least) at a seemingly intimate distance (though often distant in time as well as space) placed them in the realms of timeless imagination and speculation, as well as becoming presences in my life.

 I was not entirely immune to the underlying pathologies of television—to TV as addictive narcotic, to the buy this to be happier temptations, or the hypocrisy of loathing what you nevertheless watch, and loathing yourself for watching it. But almost everything about TV had at least two sides.

 The rhythms of TV and its characters influenced the rhythms of my day, as well as causing dissatisfaction with the plodding and exhaustion of real life.  And they gave me parts to play in my head, that at best might counter the false parts the world and others insisted on imposing.  They expressed and evoked emotions mirrored but hidden within me.  Books and movies  did, too, but not in such everyday ways.  (Music did as well, but with differences.)

 The real world—and the real me—seldom matched those images, including those that at various times I realized were unworthy.  TV relentlessly, unashamedly oversold the trivial, which made it maddening, even if some of it exposes the triviality and the madness. 

 There’s no sense in speculating what I would be like if I hadn’t grown up with TV, any more than I could know how I would have been different without electric lights and Italian food, and a loving mother, Catholic schools (like Joseph Campbell) and butterflies in the backyard of my little town. Or what if I been born into wealth and/or power in a vivid metropolis, not to mention at the other end of that spectrum.  Our time and its contexts shape (but don’t necessarily determine) how we think and feel, as well as how we live.  By this time in my life, it's mostly metaphor.  

In this series, despite its length, I’ve skated on the surface of my growing up with TV, for the depths are still murky.  But I felt compelled to bear witness, and especially to acknowledge and celebrate what meant something to me at a particular time. I enjoyed discovering historical contexts for the television I experienced in the early days I shared with TV. Perhaps some who read this, who may yet read this, whether they share all or some of these times, or view it as partially grasped history, will find something to enjoy in it as well. 

Today's Poet