x
nuances depending on each individual’s cultural and psychological endowment. I do
not dispute this but rather ponder the extent to which the individual’s culture and
psychology are themselves really only constructs that have primarily evolved out of
and articulate the subtle influences on the human soul of what we call locale or
place. Understanding that vague awareness we sometimes experience of a de-
centred self may be critical in understanding our craving to tell each other and
ourselves stories, including our deceptions, fabulations, exaggerations and fantasies,
and in understanding we may well discover therein the implicit desire for otherness
and elsewhere, to be uttered and perfected.
As a reader, I have visited exotic places, with J.M.Barrie, Captain Hook and
Peter Pan, with Robert Louis Stevenson and Long John Silver, with Herman Melville
and Ahab on the Pequod. And I was with Thomas Keneally and Oscar Schindler at
the armaments factory. One of the most agreeable experiences has been with Mary
Renault and Alexander at Macedon and Persia and Babylon by the Euphrates. I have
stood on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and watched the figure of Yeshua and his
followers and in Jerusalem I saw him stumble along the Via Dolorosa. I was at the
barricades in Paris with Victor Hugo and Jean Val Jean and, although it is said to be
non-existent, I have seen the wondrous world of Prester John. I n like fashion David
Malouf has taken me, in the company of Ovid, across a seemingly barren, timeless,
yet spiritually puissant land, one that may well be a metaphor for Australia, albeit
something far greater for me. These were, and still are, my imaginary companions
and friends – who have taught me about courage and good and evil and truth and
justice. And in some vicarious way I have seen the same far away realms and exotic
places that they have seen, and I have lived in the places in which they lived their
lives.
During these readings the boundaries between myself, the place in which I
am reading and the places to which I find myself transported, waver and melt away.
I n some sense, some state of awareness, I am no longer sure whether what I see
with my imagination springs from my interior world or, because of its substance and
detail, its topography, texture and colour, all of which are beyond my life’s
experience, emanates from somewhere else, an elsewhere-place.