(i) Place as a Dimension of the I maginal Realm
I t is conceivable that we may become literally enchanted by a place; indeed,
such a state of enchantment may be the most authentic way of experiencing place.
I t occurs when the perception of place seems to parallel the principal condition for
the imaginal set down by Henry Corbin; as an act of creative imagination that
transcends the subjectivity of ordinary imagination (Corbin, 1998:117-134); a
domain that is hidden behind the act of sense perception but is ontologically as real
as the world of the senses and that of the intellect (Corbin, 1972:17). Here place is
the product of a more purposeful attribution than simply remembered or imagined
place. I n a way that very much parallels the imaginal criteria established by Henry
Corbin and discussed in Chapter 7, Robert Dessaix writes in his autobiography about
his imaginary place, a city, that:
... does exist, but not quite in the same way as, say Vancouver or
Wellington. I don’t wish to sound mystical, but it’s existed for me
since I was a small boy of about six, pottering around in the
backyard where the bush came up through the chook yard .... I t
was there in that backyard that I started to imagine my own Pure
Land. I t wasn’t just a fantasy or a game I played there with
myself; it was and still is a parallel world .... Part of me lives there
and has done for over forty years. (Dessaix, 1994:2 6 - 9).As a parallel world it may possess concomitant simulated sensory and
neurological stimuli; David Malouf seems to understand this and in his An I maginary
Life, Ovid, tells us:
... we humans are fortunate in having two ways of attaining that
experience [ of the world, of place] : either through actual events
or, when it is working at its most powerful, through the
imagination. And I would want to insist, myself, that what we
experience in this second way, if it is deep and immediate enough,
is every bit as real, every bit as useful to us, as what we
experience directly in the everyday. The whole point of
storytelling or drama may be just this: that by experiencing things
in imagination, in apprehending and exploring them that way, we
can save ourselves from having to live them out as fact (quoted in
Tulip, 1990:281).
This, or a similar experience, seems to happen to the cohort shaman-Rebbe
as he travels back to the Hasidic world, the place of his ancestors that he described
in his questionnaire responses. I t also happens to the protagonists throughout the
Keneally corpus too; certainly his Schindler does this, layering the imaginal over the