positions on the place-elsewhere-place continuum, although I believe that there are
no clear demarcations between these points since place is as we conceive it in our
consciousness, the unconscious and imagination.
(a) Actual or Sensate Place
I f the place-elsewhere-place continuum corresponds to varying states or
levels of consciousness, each of which generates a related narrative potential, then
we have first to consider actual, physical place and its correspondences to egoic
consciousness and observe that it may possess the following characteristics:
(i) I t occupies a definite geophysical area, with specific dimensions,
characteristics and qualities and may be distinguished by facture. Actual place is
bounded and functions to unify, although it excludes as well as includes and
embodies aspects of the vertical and horizontal and perhaps some expression of a
centre or focal point.
(ii) Sometimes actual place may be distinguished by being occupied by a
particular person or group such as a family, tribe or corporation, exemplifying also
how it is fundamental in the formation of identity, status and difference.
(iii) Actual place is ultimately defined by embodied existence; an amalgam of the
fundamental structure of the human body, its finite spatio-temporality, its capacities
for sensation and movement, its uniqueness and also by a kind of provisional
existentialist value that relativises relations between the egoic-self and actual place.
This last element involves the normative uprightness, symmetry and facing of the
body, with the egoic-self conceptually located in the head behind the eyes. I t is
delicately reiterated in much of the basic and attributed meaning we take as
inherent in actual place and also the knowledge we have of particular place and the
aetiology of that knowledge. An apposite illustration of this is provided in Chapter 1
where I describe the way that I perceived, occupied and was affected by my first
home.
(iv) The elements that comprise actual place stand in relation to individual
memory and existence like a palimpsest or the rings of a tree, the tangible detritus
of time and history are its components, as I suggested in Chapter 1.
(v) Just as actual place relativises relations to the wider world it also makes
possible the articulation of psychic content, both individual and collective, and
relations by division so that by the assignment of the parts resulting from this