Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:


"Only the rational ego promotes its own single, literalistic perspective as the only perspective, while simultaneously denying—demonizing—all others.

—Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality


( Illustrated version. )

Okay, ow, of the day: Three rejections in three days. Universe, could you please space them out a bit more? Thank you.

But it's not so bad of the day: That just means I'm sending more stuff out, and once the initial blech was over, I moved on fairly quickly and sent more stuff out.

And finally of the day: I'm finally starting to get excited about closing in on the end of Charged with Folly. I finished off chapter 27 (redux) with a flourish and am actually anticipating the final chapter (or two) with eagerness. Huzzah!

It would be nice to finish this weekend, but I can't guarantee that. I'll just do the best I can.

Books I've just finished reading and will admit to in public of the day: Territory by Emma Bull. Hmm. Not sure what I think about it now.

ETA: Duh! Territory is the first of two books. Everything makes sense now! This book is definitely worth the read: rich and complex characters brought vividly to life; a marvelous melding of Old West and magic without any of the hokeyness I feared might take place; good writing. One of the most original books I've read in awhile.

Random quote of the day:

"For dreaming may be the only method of initiation left to us: each night brings a 'little death' by which we acclimatize to the Otherworld, rehearsing the journey that all souls have to take in the end."

—Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality

Random quote of the day:

"To people of imagination, the Otherworld has always been in this one. For such people, to wake is, in a deeper sense, to fall asleep; to die, to live. There may well be an end to this literal world of ours, but there can be no literal end to it because it is continuous with that other world, without end."

—Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality

So I forced myself away from the computer because I was going all green and moldy. I went out to my favorite cafe where "everybody knows my name" to have linner—late lunch, early dinner. I brought with me The Philosopher's Secret Fire by Patrick Harpur, a brilliant essayist specializing in the difference between reality, nonreality, and the boundary between, the boundary given force and substance by imagination.

I read the passage talking about the way traditional societies view death—which as you can imagine is quite different from our Western rational ideas. In traditional societies there is no separation between life and death; they are not opposites. Birth is the opposite of death, but life is a continuum. In fact, in those societies when people see what we'd call a ghost, the traditional term is usually just "dead man."

"Death," says Harpur, "merely signifies a change in the individual; it is only the last in the series of initiatory 'deaths' which have accompanied him or her through life."

This immediately brought to my mind the Jim Jarmusch film, Dead Man. This is a little wonder starring the ineffable Johnny Depp and I dearly love it. Many critics had problems with it, though, and it occurred to me today that it may be because of what Harpur is talking about. The critics viewed the film with their Western vision when the movie was really from the traditional point of view. Dead Man is an initiatory experience, a transition from one form of life to another.

It's a deeply strange movie and quite often hilarious. The story revolves around one long, tragic irony that just gets worse and worse, draws Our Johnny farther and farther from Western ways and deeper and deeper into traditional ways. The Western tradition doggedly pursues the Native tradition throughout the movie and I don't think either point of view wins out completely. I find I like its ambivalence.

Don't read this last bit if you don't want to know how it ends.

The final scene to me is perfectly explained by what Harpur was talking about. The Western tradition and the Native tradition have a full-on confrontation on the beach to a stalemate, but it's too late to stop Johnny's character from floating into his final transition. We never see him die because he never does. He just floats from life into a new life. Nobody really dies in the traditional world. We just don't see them anymore in this world—except as dead men.