BOUNDARIES OF THE SOUL

Mythopoeic fiction rather puts to work collective forms in which the author
may indeed have a psychological investment but which, perforce, must be seen as a
synchronic unity of structurally contradictory elements manifested in the
consciousness of both the writer and the reader. The narrative text and its author
is only one half of the equation of perception and understanding on the part of the
individual reader, the mythopoeic reader’s receptiveness or state of mind is the
other; the three; text, writer and reader, converge in a synchronous elsewhere-
place. True to psychological convention, as was shown in Chapter 8, such a
synchronicity gives rise to an archetype. What must be recognised is the
emergence of the coincidentia oppositorium as a crucial archetype of the human
psyche, and an acceptance of a potential human response to place that is far richer
and far subtler than anything modern psychology has yet identified. That view
posits place and the personal narrative in contingent and inter-relational social
locations, that is, the personal as place. I t is the dialectical process of making sense
of not only locale but of the cosmos through mythic dialogue, experience and re-
conceptualisation that creates a place imagination. Place imagination, in the
mythopoeic literary sense, is a two-part concept; first it acts as a meta-narrative
that includes presuppositions about self meanings and rational dimensions and,
second, in a spatial and symbolic sense, it reveals how metaphors and symbols
shape the possibilities for envisaging self-space and existential concepts of
belonging of the soul within the place-elsewhere-place continuum.
The archetypal basis for mythopoeic narratives makes them perpetually
relevant to our lives. They derive from collective efforts that span history, lending
them immunity from the vagaries of individual consciousness and its prejudices.
What follows for the reader is a single existential moment of awareness, a
heightened awareness of a place, a sense of deep intimacy with it, a soul soliloquy
of symbiosis with place. Like the Kabbalah, mythopoeic literature uses the power of
language as an instrument of deep perceiving and knowing. As in the case of the
cave paintings, it focuses the mind in such a way that the reader feels included and
held by a sort of play across and throughout the ‘membrane’ of text, where from
moment to moment their awareness belongs unconsciously to that of the narrator,
to the consciousness of mythopoeic reverie.
Everyone’s life is based on story telling and most of the cohort subjects live
their lives in the places of stories, sometimes almost as if they were a character in a
story. I ndeed, the research suggests that each of the cohort respondents very