armaments factory and the ghetto. I also see it clearly in the work of Jean Genet of
whom Knapp wrote describing the process of how Genet, shaman-like,
metamorphosed his prison cell into a truly imaginal domain:
... into a cathedral with all of its mysteries and miracles, both
sexual and spiritual, taking place before the reader’s eyes, its
litanies being chanted by the inmates, its confessions being
heard... the simple prison bed upon which a convict lies turns into
an altar ... [ amid] the benumbing odours, those pungent and
suffocating human smells .. the pictures of murderers framed in
coloured glass that are placed on the walls of the cold bleak cell
turn into stained glass windows stamped with glazed images of
Our Lady of the Flowers .. (Knapp, 1968:34).
C.S. Lewis also was especially responsive to the power of imaginal place and
wrote that he knew, and was more curious about, the geography of particular
places in myth and literature than some actual locales “ ... was sounder on Toad
Hall and the Wild Wood or the cave-dwelling Selenites or Hrothgar’s court or
Vortigern’s than on London, Oxford and Belfast” (in Hooper, 1982:19). So too, for
many readers, is Shangri-La, Oz, Ruritania, Atlantis, Narnia, Baskerville Hall and
Alice’s Wonderland.
10.3 The Mythopoeic Meaning and Experience of Place
The relationship between mythopoeic consciousness and the ensoulment of
place can be illustrated in the phenomena of diaspora, exile and anomie, particularly
in the case of Jews and Arabs, of Armenians and Hazaras and other displaced
peoples. As an exemplar, Jews have always seen themselves as, and have often
been forced to become, wanderers; twice exiled from I srael and living in diaspora
throughout the ages. Such peoples metaphorically carry place within themselves as
they wander to other locales. Unlike the immovable artefacts that testify to a
people’s occupation of place, narratives of one’s identity can be carried, physically
as well as spiritually, from place to place. Jews, as well as other displaced peoples,
have taken with them their laws and ethics, their myths, their stories of ghetto life
and the marks of their expulsion; tattooed numbers or torture scars and the anomie
acquired in the course of imprisonment in concentration, extermination and
temporary refugee camps. Such exiles and wanderers, like seamen, are intensely
aware of the nature and affirming essence of place in contrast to the perception of
place as a de-humanising interface; merely zones of transit where actual places
become placeless and thus, dehumanising. The new urban shopping centres and