time and space, a different dimension; truly, it seems in the manner described
earlier by the shaman Rebbe Yonassan Gershom. Such literature often possesses
technical elements; elegiac and magical qualities of narrative tone and image, of
archetypal theme, for example, of lingering guilt or extraordinary survival, of
innocence and purity or the unspoiled often reflected in the image or motif of the
child. I n this regard Sebald explains that his stories:
... point up the vexatious questions of the borderline between fact
and fiction, which can never be determined. The borders are fluid.
I f one looks into one’s own mind, thoughts are transformed; there
is no distinction between the past and the present. The jumble I
create is close mimetically to the way we think. But these texts
are realistic narratives in a quite basic way: the author is always at
pains to show what he writes is real (Wyndham, 2000:9).
6.9 The I maginal Membrane
There is some correspondence between these mythopoeic writers and their
works and the cave pictographs and their creators in that these works, too, are
projections of an ancient psyche or an ancient part of the psyche onto the
membrane of place. Such projections are intended to evoke a response from an
audience or even to facilitate an almost magical simulation of a presence that links
the inner world of the self with the outer world of place. The psyche then
vicariously experiences the milieu and becomes connected to that place by virtue of
an imaginal creation; thus, does one enter the I maginal Realm.
Consider that it is the almost simultaneous initiatory dream and spirit
possession that mark out the potential shaman, who then adjusts into the ecstatic
trance that defines a divining vocation. I n a similar way, virtually all of the
mythopoeic writers and readers and shamans I questioned, have experienced an
initiation of sorts in a way that forces them to experience a new reality someway
between the empirical and the divine, one that has continued to influence them.
This often leads to a distinct awareness of the de-centred self where mythopoeic
writer, reader and the shaman, as was evident from the questionnaire responses,
become emphatically aware of being, in a sense, besides themselves. This is
perfectly exemplified in Jorge Luis Borges’ famous essay ‘Borges and I ,’ “ ... in which
Borges speaks of himself, as his ‘other’, as a split subject; the ‘I ’ who writes, acts,
speaks, and has produced a few worthwhile pages, and the ‘I ’ who watches and is