trivial daily mind. There are indeed, personifying spirits that we
had best but call Graces and Gatekeepers, because through their
dramatic power they bring our souls to crisis (in Harper,
1957:102).The great poet Wordsworth saw himself too, as one who looks ... before and
after ... and shaman-like used his ecstatic vision to transcend the limiting
constrictions of the human condition, the limits of time, place, and corporeal reality
but he also knew the dangers (Tolstoy, 1985:235). Just as the materialist
anthropologist (erroneously) explains the shaman as a person suffering from a
psychosis that becomes steadily worse, so too, Wordsworth reported that he was
condemned by prosaic contemporaries and in The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s
Mind he writes:
Some call’s it madness: such, indeed, it was,
I f childlike the fruitfulness in passing joy,
I f steady moods of thoughtfulness, matur’d
To inspiration, sort with such a name;
I f prophecy be madness; if things view’d
By poets in old time, and higher up
By the first men, earth’s first inhabitants,
May in these untutor’d days no more be seen
With undisorder’d sight.
9.3 Receptiveness to Mythopoeic Literary Consciousness
The reader respondents felt enlarged through a vicarious process of
otherwise unattainable experiences, that reading generally expanded their
awareness or consciousness, that the self becomes enlarged. Two described
reading as a transcendent experience that made them feel more complete: Reader
1 said that she felt larger when she transcended the everyday by becoming the
unstated recipient of the writer’s musings, that she became, the other character in
the book [ narrative] , the unspoken observer, in the place that we are taken to, but
very much a part of the writer’s intention. Reader 2 described her sense of
transcendence and happiness because ... fictional characters wander into my
dreams to rub shoulders with family and friends, living and departed. Reading into
the early hours of the morning, I find fiction dissolving into dream, dream into
drowsy reality, drifting together into a sensual, sleepy dance - until the mind's music
stops and it's time to wake up for work.