deepens as he moves into a session of writing, during which he experiences a loss
of sense of place even more of time, certainly of body. Here David Malouf is
speaking of the particular power of mythopoeic consciousness to retrieve the
fictions, narratives and experiences embedded in the web of life that surrounds him.
He is aware of a power to spin out of the web story-shaped narratives that implicate
the myriad places in the world. He describes not so much an experience, nor a
writer’s intuition nor even a consciousness but rather the transpersonal aspect of
the writer’s psyche whilst literally enchanted in the state of MLC.
The writers’ responses suggested that, like the shaman, they had little
choice in their vocation and that their writing, like the trances of the shaman,
constituted an imperative to provide an imaginal experience to the reader that
would have the same effect of immediate illumination; one embedded in and
emerging out of a sense of the place from which the narrative originates, or what
formal literary criticism would term setting.
What Malouf, Keneally and also McCullough, despite her reticence, reveal in
their responses is an engagement with a process of knowing that integrates the
imagination, aesthetic sensibility, spiritual intuition, revelatory experience, symbolic
perception, somatic and sensuous modes of understanding and empathic knowing.
That process is exemplified in their writings and is examined in Chapter 5.
The shamans’ responses identified the same process operating in their lives.
The Rebbe said that reading ... somehow opens a doorway that allows him to go
back to Holocaust times in a sort of time warp of consciousness; that there were
instances that he would become aware of some obscure reference or detail in a
story that he consciously would have no way of knowing, but that later turns out to
be accurate. This is echoic of Jung’s musing that what science calls the psyche may
be “ ... a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond” (Jung, CW
15, par. 148). The Rebbe explained that he was rather poor at reading Hebrew but
that he nevertheless accesses it somehow in this state of consciousness. The
shaman Maureen also said there was a similarity of mythopoeic writing with
shamanic journeying in that writers often visualise beings and vast landscapes and
suggested that Blake, Dante, Milton, Keats, Shelley and Tolkein, amongst others,
were very like shamans.
ron
(Ron)
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