My third epiphany was in 1998 at a performance of Martin McDonagh’s play,
The Beauty Queen of Leenane, when I heard the protagonist, Pato Dooley, wistfully
declare:
When it’s there I am, it’s here I wish I was, of course. Who
wouldn’t? But when it’s here I am ... it isn’t there I want to be, of
course not. But I know it isn’t here I want to be either.
I n these words I heard Pato Dooley enunciate the universal dilemma of
human kind; how to resolve the unattainable quite impractical desire to dwell in that
imaginal place from which we have somehow been exiled, where we feel we are
home and where we belong and where we know that the essence and reality of our
soul will find its safe harbour. This dilemma, this longing is reflected in our religious
beliefs and dogmas, in historical narratives, in the art and literature of all cultures
and also significantly informs and structures much of our physical and psychological
survival since it is most readily and commonly perceived in our storytelling.
Professor Hugh Kenner, in his 1998 Massey lecture, The Elsewhere
Community, based on the themes of exile, identity and fantasy, provides a
compelling insight into the relationship between readers and the need to experience
places and states of mind that are elsewhere. Nowhere is this aspect of place-
elsewhere-place and its relationship to the psychological reality or soul of both the
individual and of humankind demonstrated so clearly as in mythopoeic literature.
The consequences of evil, human and natural destructiveness, love and friendship,
indeed the human condition, have been the fundamental themes of poetry, novel
and mythical text throughout history. Through such text writers and readers often
transform the perceived meaningless chaos and suffering of life into meaningful
mythic, salvific personal narratives. This literary transformation of the meaningless
into meaningful produces a separation resulting in an awareness of an inner and an
outer world where the ego acts as a threshold or gateway between these two
realities: the psychic and the physical, the imaginal and the real. That separation is
a motif in many legends, fairy tales and shamanic world-views, where specific
places in the physical world are seen as entry points of the de-centred self into the
spirit world, into another reality, into an elsewhere-place.
The mundane experience of place often seems to obscure, even renounce,
its transcendent, quintessential and dynamic potential and its influence on the life of
the individual and the group. Even the most seemingly uninteresting place is the
potential vessel for an inimitable anima locus, the condition that suffuses and