The First Rule of the Camino (part 1)
The movie Fight Club has been interpreted many ways, my favourite being that it's a battle for the psyche between the ego and the id. Which actually kind of reminded me of the Camino...
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If you’re an older subscriber then welcome back. I appreciate anyone who stuck with the meta-journey of my diary of Camino entries, in some small way hoping that it felt like just much of a slog for you, dear reader, as it did for me, though I hope it was also just as enlightening an experience.
I’m going to wrap up the Camino chat in the next couple of weeks, but just wanted to try and summarise everything in a few essays - as much for myself as anyone else.
From then I’ll be broadening my horizons a bit more, though my (current) New Year’s Resolution is to resume a weekly format of essays and short stories about travel, the outdoors and all sorts of environmental stimulation.
This week I’m revisting all the more abstract philosophical stuff that came to mind while doing the Camino, inspired by an analysis of the movie Fight Club, of all things. The Camino and the fictional Fight Club might seem like polar opposites, but maybe spiritual retreats are not what you think they are.
Read on for part 1, and don’t forget to Subscribe, Share or Comment:
The first rule of the Camino is, you don’t talk about the Camino.
The second rule of the Camino is, you don’t talk about the Camino.
Well, they’re not really the rules, and good job, because I haven’t shut up about it since I got home. And in sharing my adventures and reflections here and on various social media, I undertook a second Camino in the weeks following my return home – one that involved a creative journey rather than a physical trip – though more about that next week.
I read this thread on Twitter shortly after I got back to Ireland, and it really struck a chord. The thread is a breakdown of the movie Fight Club, an analysis of its underlying core philosophy, as well as that of various secondary elements and moments from the movie.
See the thread here:
[The first rule of talking about movies is NO SPOILERS; the second rule is if you’re going to share spoilers then at least put some kind of disclaimer before you do, so here you go: SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t seen the movie Fight Club, or read Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name which it is based on]
The core premise of the analysis is that Edward Norton’s nameless Narrator character represents the protagonist’s ego, and Tyler Durden is his id. As we find out at the movie’s climax, the two characters are one and the same person.
The ego is the ‘voice in our head’, our own life’s narrator, the person who we think we are, but in reality is attached, anxious, insecure, and running a program of how we live our lives that is more a traumatic response to the world than our true self. The ego is our yang, our masculine side, and represents rationality, order, rules and conscious awareness. This is Edward Norton’s Narrator, and he is anxious, depressed and an insomniac. According to Eastern philosophies, the ego is an illusion – it is not our true self.
The id, then, is Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt. He is an amoral trickster, he sees reality for what it is and he just wants to live in the moment. The id represents our instinct, our intuition, our inner child, our true self.
The id represents our subconscious, and many would say its workings are more indicative of our true self, our desires and our motivations, as well as most likely (almost certainly) being a bigger guider of our actions than our egoic, conscious self, despite what we’d like to believe.
Eastern philosophies might call this our yin, or more feminine side. It is the realm of compassion, generosity, nurturing and creativity, but if left unchecked, of chaos and destruction.
Anyway, why did it strike a chord? The whole thing – from the various groups that the Narrator attends or forms throughout the movie, to the gripping philosophical battle between Norton and Pitt which unfolds as the movie reached its climax – reminded me of the Camino, to be honest.
I’ll try to explain.
As you’ll know if you’ve been reading about my Camino – or anything on this blog, really – I had a fairly philosophical interpretation of the whole thing. I was curious as to what it is that draws people to the Camino, and what they find so transformative about the experience, and wanted to experience it for myself.
As you’ll also know I have quite an interest in Joseph Campbell’s analytic philosophy (sharing a phrase with psychoanalysis as per Freud and Jung) and his description of the Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey describes a universal storytelling narrative that appears to be embedded deep in our psyche as humans, which follows a metaphorical journey of a hero leaving their comfortable home, overcoming a challenge and returning home with some kind of wisdom which enhances his or her life, to be shared with others.
The narrative can be analysed at all levels of depth and literalism but that’s the overview of it, and it describes any process of growth, whether the learning of practical skills or undergoing a life-changing spiritual and mental ‘levelling up’, as with traditional initiation ceremonies at the onset of adolescence; as a result of a life-changing life event (either voluntary or inadvertent); or following the overcoming of some sort of challenge in the course of life.
And of course, going on some sort of literal adventure, like going backpacking, or doing the Camino (which is also backpacking), is a physical acting out of this journey: you go to overcome some sort of challenge, and in the course of it, you learn something about yourself.
Often the myths and stories that fit the Hero’s Journey narrative are tales of the central character undergoing a death and rebirth. In order to assume the new identity which their newfound wisdom confers on them, their old identity must first die – there cannot be two competing identities.
This process of symbolic death and rebirth goes for minor changes we make to our lives as well as grand transformations. In fact, when you break it down sufficiently, every single choice we make is a choice between one outcome and another, and thus, of one identity and another: who we become if we act or don’t act; or who we might become whether we choose Option A or Option B (or maybe an infinity of other outcomes).
This is the power that storytelling has over our consciousness – we do not think or perceive the world in terms of units and information, but in full-fledged stories. And every choice we make follows this pattern of leaving comfort, overcoming adversity, returning ‘Home’ integrating the newfound knowledge we have to our existing lives (‘Home’ in this case could be your literal home, or back to your ‘normal’ self).
But, the crucial part of the Hero’s Journey, as anyone who’s gone away somewhere only to come back ‘a different person’ and see the same old home but like a different place will appreciate, is that this new perspective comes from being a different person with a different identity (or accumulation of self-told stories about themselves).
This personal storyteller is your ego talking. It is your Narrator. It is Ed Norton’s character in Fight Club, and often it is an anxious, rule-obsessed, status-chasing, consumerist, overly-attached, insomniac mess (maybe not literally, but the Narrator we meet at the start of the movie represents the negative side of the ego, and where someone might end up if they let their ego go unchecked).
And so your Narrator must die.
This is where Tyler Durden comes in.
“Why are you doing the Camino?”
Here we go again.
Everyone is asking ‘Why’ you’re doing the Camino, but it dawned on me early on that such a question was unanswerable by myself, and I instinctively presumed that it might be better not to: such questions of ‘Why’ seemed to me to be attempts to over-rationalise what was probably an intuitive calling to go on an adventure.
This is the ego at work: we do things, and then it attempts to give a rational explanation as to why we do them, this rationalising actually a meta-egotistical act to make ourselves appear clever... to ourselves… before we then try to inflict our cleverness on others by explaining to them why we did the thing, whether it’s choose a career or pack our bags to go on the Camino.
The reality is possibly much different – it depends on how in touch you are with your id, your subconscious, your shadow, your inner child, your intuitive self – your Tyler Durden. To me it became quite apparent that while we could recite our ‘Why’s in conversations with ourselves and others all day, every day on the Camino, it could all well be a load of rubbish, a dishonest or at least misguided story we’re telling ourselves ‘til it becomes true. Which isn’t all a bad thing, really, but if it’s authenticity you’re looking for on the Camino, looking at your actions – and ‘How’ you Camino – might be more reflective of what your natural instincts are, and thus your true self.
In doing the Camino you’re taken out of your familiar environment and thrust into the daily unknown. You have no attachments only what fits in your backpack. You have no home, no routine, no belongings, no existing relationships, and like many of us: not even the crutch of understanding language to fall back on. Nothing, really, except yourself.
Two weeks in and all you know now is walking. Like Project Mayhem, you don’t even have a last name. And like Fight Club, the only people you can talk to really are your fellow members – even if you tell people at home what you’re experiencing before or after, they won’t get it, and might even get angry at your trying.
Your ego is stripped away and all your left with is yourself.
And you have to keep going every day into the unknown – a place where you don’t know the rules, and it’s impossible to place any order on. The only order you can exert on the world is in the most basic actions of day to day existence on the road: when you get up, when you eat and drink, how far you walk each day, how quickly you walk, where you stay, how long you take to walk the Camino, when and how you clean your clothes, what you carry in your backpack, and so on. It may seem simple but these series of choices add up to form a more complete picture of who you are and how – and why – you do what you do than any attempts to over-rationalise even dramatic and overt life events.
Who are you when you’re faced with chaos, or when you’re lying in bed at night and no-one’s looking?
(End of Part 1)
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