David Malouf, in words that might well be used to articulate the experience
of the Palaeolithic cave painters, says:
There are lots of figures and subjects and pictures and sounds
that keep recurring ... I really do think of them as rather like a
whole set of annunciating angels, waiting to tell us whatever it is.
But we have to be very careful to let them speak first: our
tendency is always to think we know what they’re going to say,
not to hear what they’ve got to tell us. I think there’s some tact
you have to develop; these figures must be allowed to come right
up to the edge of a poem or a piece of writing, even if they’re
then dismissed. Certainly more and more what I try to do in
writing, and also in moving towards what I think of as the
occasion of a poem, is to put myself in contact with these
obsessive figures - or whatever they are. Maybe there are only
half a dozen of them anyway, for any writer ... just yourself and
those figures, and somewhere the language in between. And you
let that happen (Tulip, 1990:296).
D. H. Lawrence in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) also articulates the
imperative to record the feeling of that interface between the human emotions and
something approximating the numinous that the Palaeolithic cave painters must
surely have felt when he wrote
I t’s no good looking at a tree to know it. The only thing is to sit
among the roots and nestle against its strong trunk, and not
bother. That’s how I write about all these planes and plexuses –
between the toes of a tree, forgetting myself against the tree
ankle of the trunk. And then, as a rule, as a squirrel is stroked
into its wickedness by the faceless magic of a tree, so am I usually
stroked into forgetfulness, and into scribbling this book. My tree-
book really (Lawrence, 1971:43).
James Cowan describes the feeling, the way the mythopoeic elsewhere-place, ... the
world beyond, takes hold and obliterates normal consciousness when he writes:
Such a world emerges not from the sea as an island appears to do
after a long voyage but from a state of enchantment inspired by
the mind taking leave of itself. I t becomes a place of
annihilations, abysses and epiphanies that have been fashioned
during that intermediate state between waking and sleeping, when
the senses are still asleep (Cowan, 1996:135).
I ndeed, so different is this state of MLC, suggests the psychologist Robert Johnson,
that individuals who have a great sensitivity, a receptiveness to the archetypal world
are too often pathologized by society and by psychology in particular. These are
people who don’t have the option of being normal; in fact, he suggests that
normality may be a great danger to a gifted person (Johnson, et al, 1998:32). This
is an interesting point because all of the respondents to the research questionnaire,