walking the “road of trials” and encountering the Goddess, the hero achieves the apotheosis of the “ultimate boon”—what Percy will glimpse at the heights of heaven’s stairway. Campbell emphasizes that this peak comes halfway through the diagram of the hero’s journey; after this he must return to ordinary reality and reintegrate, as “master of the two worlds.” This is the developmental process that Percy does not follow: He wants further highs and juicier goddesses. And he will rue the day.
Mythology is more than an abstract story or a universal code, however. Mythology is also deeply embedded in human practice. Traditionally, myths are acted out; even their verbal transmission is a highly charged performance. Even more important is the relationship between myth and ritual. Rituals, like taking communion or dancing around a maypole, perform and sustain the transforming fictions of mythology just as much asmythology explains or demands ritual. So if “Stairway to Heaven” is a successful myth, then what rituals support it? What practice sustains the song that Lester Bangs memorably described as being “lush as a kleenex forest”? The song itself hints at the answer when Percy suggests that great things will happen if we “listen very hard” and all “call the tune.” The central rite of “Stairway to Heaven” was and continues to be this:
hearing the damn thing over and over again.
Whether you call up a file on your iPod, or call your radio station to vote, or call your spouse a goofball for playing the song just one more time, “Stairway” makes its peculiar magic known through the brute force of all ritual: repetition. Even those of us who have no desire to sustain the mystery, who can’t wait for this number to be swept into the dustbin of history, continue to feel its presence in sonic memory. On the surface this presence goes against Walter Benjamin’s famous argument that mechanical reproduction—which churns out all those copies ofin the first place—saps the “aura” from works of art. Though Benjamin was talking principally about visual art, his argument works for music as well: The special magic of live performance is leached away when you record and reproduce the event with modern technology. But in the case of “Stairway,” the very banality that results from the staggering numberof times this track has been played over the last thirty-odd years only underscores the awful majesty of the song, its weird air of
necessity
.
The “magic” of “Stairway to Heaven” lies with a power at once more mechanical and more spellbinding than the commodity fetishism discussed earlier: the power to literally become a part of our minds. Here’s what I mean: close your eyes, shuffle through your mental jukebox for “Stairway to Heaven,” and then drop the virtual stylus or laser beam or whatever you want to call it onto the song in your brain. If you are like millions of other people now living, you can probably reproduce a decent mock-up of this track from memory. If you sit with it for a while, you might even score some personal associations out of the deal—tasty madeleines like the pungent reek of Thai-stick, or the Christmas morning promise of a teenage grope.
All this is all very ordinary of course. All of us have used commercial recordings to sound our souls; all of us know songs that resonate, songs that stick. But we rarely turn the situation around and consider the possibility that, as the nineteenth century Belgian physiologist Joseph Delboeuf wrote, “The soul is a notebook of phonographic recordings.” Delboeuf’s quotation popped out at me from an essay by Friedrich Kittler, the contemporary German media theorist I cited earlier. In his text, Kittler suggests that the analogy betweenthe brain and the record player is, as the geeks like to say, nontrivial. Like the sounds on a record album, physiological memory is a product of something like
inscription
, as associative
Mythology is more than an abstract story or a universal code, however. Mythology is also deeply embedded in human practice. Traditionally, myths are acted out; even their verbal transmission is a highly charged performance. Even more important is the relationship between myth and ritual. Rituals, like taking communion or dancing around a maypole, perform and sustain the transforming fictions of mythology just as much asmythology explains or demands ritual. So if “Stairway to Heaven” is a successful myth, then what rituals support it? What practice sustains the song that Lester Bangs memorably described as being “lush as a kleenex forest”? The song itself hints at the answer when Percy suggests that great things will happen if we “listen very hard” and all “call the tune.” The central rite of “Stairway to Heaven” was and continues to be this:
hearing the damn thing over and over again.
Whether you call up a file on your iPod, or call your radio station to vote, or call your spouse a goofball for playing the song just one more time, “Stairway” makes its peculiar magic known through the brute force of all ritual: repetition. Even those of us who have no desire to sustain the mystery, who can’t wait for this number to be swept into the dustbin of history, continue to feel its presence in sonic memory. On the surface this presence goes against Walter Benjamin’s famous argument that mechanical reproduction—which churns out all those copies ofin the first place—saps the “aura” from works of art. Though Benjamin was talking principally about visual art, his argument works for music as well: The special magic of live performance is leached away when you record and reproduce the event with modern technology. But in the case of “Stairway,” the very banality that results from the staggering numberof times this track has been played over the last thirty-odd years only underscores the awful majesty of the song, its weird air of
necessity
.
The “magic” of “Stairway to Heaven” lies with a power at once more mechanical and more spellbinding than the commodity fetishism discussed earlier: the power to literally become a part of our minds. Here’s what I mean: close your eyes, shuffle through your mental jukebox for “Stairway to Heaven,” and then drop the virtual stylus or laser beam or whatever you want to call it onto the song in your brain. If you are like millions of other people now living, you can probably reproduce a decent mock-up of this track from memory. If you sit with it for a while, you might even score some personal associations out of the deal—tasty madeleines like the pungent reek of Thai-stick, or the Christmas morning promise of a teenage grope.
All this is all very ordinary of course. All of us have used commercial recordings to sound our souls; all of us know songs that resonate, songs that stick. But we rarely turn the situation around and consider the possibility that, as the nineteenth century Belgian physiologist Joseph Delboeuf wrote, “The soul is a notebook of phonographic recordings.” Delboeuf’s quotation popped out at me from an essay by Friedrich Kittler, the contemporary German media theorist I cited earlier. In his text, Kittler suggests that the analogy betweenthe brain and the record player is, as the geeks like to say, nontrivial. Like the sounds on a record album, physiological memory is a product of something like
inscription
, as associative
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