The primary existential question of the origin of the self and its ultimate destiny is
implicitly and inextricably linked to place since existence occurs within a space or
place. I n analysing the influences that stimulate our timeless and universal craving
to tell stories we may also discover the nature and potential of the desire for
otherness and elsewhere-place and ultimately of the relationship between place and
the soul; the ways by which the soul or psyche is bounded and altered by the places
it occupies and perhaps too, by the ways soul changes place. That raises the
question: does the psyche or soul habitually generate narratives or stories that
connect it with place or does story emerge from place or is there some strange
admixture of the two?
This thesis examines the notion of the epistemic nature of place, as the
theatre or stage on which the human individual narrative is performed. The central
idea is that place has an integral and primal relationship to the psyche’s awareness
or knowledge of itself and that there is a place of maximal epistemic possibilities, or
scenarios. The thesis explores various ways that the individual psyche interacts
with this epistemic place, one that sometimes involves the I maginal Realm and at
other times personal epiphanic narratives. The thesis also examines the way in
which these dimensions of place intertwine, reveal themselves, unbidden, to the
psyche and the interdependent and reciprocal relationship between place and the
psyche. I approach place as proprioceptive, even extending this to suggest that the
perception of place is a form of self-perception, that to become deeply aware of
place is to become correspondingly more aware of oneself or at least an aspect of
one’s consciousness. Finally, and of immense relevance, I want to determine if the
form of consciousness reflected in the Palaeolithic cave paintings has wasted away
or merely changed its locus.
There are moments in every life when the places we inhabit become filled
with a deeply personal narrative; when place and self assume a participation
mystique. Usually, those narratives involve reminiscences of ephemeral things, for
example, my childhood bed at 26 Tudor Street, covered with toys on that first
remembered Christmas morning; but with it, somehow too, an awareness of the
inner, secret workings (the electrical wiring, the plumbing, the mouse-hole and their
accompanying olfactory stimuli, textures and dimensions) of the old terrace house
that has now been renovated and gentrified. The loose floorboard, under which I
hid my secret childhood bric-a-brac, in the upstairs back-room that was once my
bedroom, then later in my life in a different place, the stables and resting paddocks
ron
(Ron)
#1