eradicated ... because in it lies potentially an overwhelming
empathy with, you know, universal empathy. This is why writers
bring this stuff into play all the time, because they are involved in
crossing over the categories, because they contain all the
archetypes in themselves and are conscious of that even if they’re
not conscious of how these archetypes will play when they begin a
novel.David Malouf also accepts that there is this other way of knowing and in an essay,
echoic of Corbin’s definition of the imaginal, wrote:
... we do not apprehend things only through actual experience.
We can also, given the right conditions, grasp it through the
imagination, and in such a direct and physical way that it becomes
utterly real (in Tulip, 1990:284).Malouf also seems to conceive of a web, the web of Wyrd, overlaying place,
one that influences physical existence. The last paragraph of The Kyogle Line
illustrates this when, after seeing the Japanese POWs in the railway wagon and in
meditating upon the layers of experience of both his father and his grandfather, the
protagonist becomes aware of another existence that parallels the physical one but
at the same time transcends it bringing him to an unnameable, ineffable destination
or place, a perception which is conveyed to him in an unfathomable language,
perhaps one similar to, or different manifestation of the mystical language of the
birds:
... it provoked some sort of inner argument or dialogue that was in
a language I couldn’t catch. I t had the rhythm of the train wheels
... a different sound from the one our own trains made ... I t was,
to me, as if I had all the time been on a different train from the
one I thought. Which would take more than the sixteen hours the
timetable announced and bring me to a different, unnameable
destination (Malouf, 1985:134).
This elsewhere-place phenomenon from which extra-sensory knowledge
seems to emanate is known to other writers too, for example, Aldous Huxley
conceived of Mind-at-Large as a planetary or collective mind that is both an
expression of humanity’s deepest yearnings and transcendent to them (in Ring,
1992:12). The Australian writer Rodney Hall was told by the poet Robert Graves
that he came to write The White Goddess (1948) in a trance and that he believed
that one can tap into the collective unconscious and write about things that we have
no previous knowledge of (Hall, 2002:5).