CHAPTER 10
THE MYTHOPOEI C DI MENSI ONS OF PLACE-ELSEWHERE-PLACE
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
(Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, line 247)
I t is the desolateness of this place that day after day fills my mind
with its perspectives .... We are at the ends of the earth. The
country lies open on every side .... with a view to infinity .... empty
as far as the eye can see or the mind imagine .... But I am
describing a state of mind, no place (Ovid, in Malouf, 1978:15-16).10.1 I ntroduction
You are the soul and story of every place in which you find yourself (Anon).
During the course of my research I discovered this maxim, the origin of
which I was unable to establish but which began to reveal its puissance and
relevance to my research when I considered it in the context of the theme of
Richard Matheson’s novel What Dreams May Come (1978). Essentially, Matheson
proposes that the process of imagination both internalises the outer world and
externalises the inner world. Further, to borrow the words of William Mahoney, that
“ ... whether divine or human, it is precisely the imagination that fashions and
recognizes the universe as meaningful, abiding, and valuable, that is to say, as real”
(Mahony, 1998:7). Matheson’s mythopoeic narrative concerns itself with issues such
as guilt, suffering, existential transformation, the transmigration of souls, and the
essential, eternal nature of the soul. The pervasive construct throughout the book
is that of the ancient South Asian tradition of Maya; Maya that generates the world
that we recognize as reality while at the same time espousing that it is illusion and
which, according to Vedic thought, reflected an unfathomable and even miraculous
power of creativity and transformation:
The deities’ Maya was an extraordinary imaginative art through
which they drew forth and thereby gave reality to the objective
world itself (Mahony, 1998:6).
Thus, the experience of human life and, in the Buddhist sense of What
Dreams May Come, post-mortem existence, equates as a narrative of imagination
about another divine narrative of imagination. This lends itself to the proposition
that the place-elsewhere-place continuum, true to its archetypal nature and because