I am struggling with Versluis. I keep running into things that tick me off. Why keep reading then? For a couple of reasons. The first is that the subject matter is important to understanding the Western mind and because he is an academic writing about a subject I consider to be important (I expect a certain quality and tenor to his presentation based on this.) It is this last bit, my expectation, that keeps getting nicked by the jagged edges of his presentation.

The thing is he appears to be a practitioner. Not that this is a problem in itself. Every human being comes to a subject with a point of view, with a set of beliefs and ways. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to be able to bracket his beliefs to allow for the reader’s, nor to take into account that some of his beliefs may need support. At least that’s what I think is the problem.

For me writing about the magical mind requires this bracketing as much if not more than any other subject. For one thing, the magical mind by its very nature posits more than one reality. To understand it, to get a glimspe of its workings as part of the human mind, multiple realities must be maintained, not just the belief in multiple realities.

I think this allowance for multiple realities (i.e. other readers) is always critical for a book that purports to speak about the way the world is, which Versluis does by the way, but I think it is essential to any book that comes out of academia. I know, I know, my standards are unrealistic. Still. There they are.

I suppose that the reason I feel that this bracketing is critical for academics is because their words come with more weight. Even in a culture that supports an intolerance for the “ejukated,” even the most anti-intellectual person is going to cite some authority to support his or her point, point to some book as a reference, even if it the Koran, the Talmud or the Bible. Academia, the culture of the literate, is in our bones now. No getting it out. One would think Versluis would know this because this is what his book is really about – how the word is, for us, the philosopher’s stone, the Alpha and the Omega.

The thing is Versluis mixes up (often in the same sentence or paragraph) some important insight with a (way-left field) concept that comes straight out of his practitioner’s heart. For example:

“Active imagination” refers to the meeting of an individual and transcendent beings on an intermediate field that belongs completely neither to the transcendent nor to the mundane world. But such a term suggests that imagination is otherwise passive, and I do not believe this to be true. Rather, I believe that literature, mythology, and visionary experience all emerge on a spectrum in the field of imagination.

So here, way cool the insight that imagination is not passive. This bit reminded me forcibly of Descartes’ Error by Damasio, a really good book about the mind and its workings. Yet, this “field” — Versluis appears to mean this literally. And of course, if he does, this comes with a rather large host of intellectual and philosophical problems and drops the book right out of academic discourse and into the discourse of the practitioner.

Let me hasten to add: it is not the belief that this “field” is real, it is the lack of argument for it. This is not a standard or unproblematic belief and as such must be presented with support and argument. Just as Darwin had to do with his new notions, so Versluis is going to have to do if he wants this idea of a literally true mesocosm (his word) or field of imagination to work as a support for his presentation. He has to give his readers some help and not just obliquely accuse one of being a closed reader. At least I think so. I mean if you are going to posit something like the earth is round, today that isn’t something you have to support. It is an accepted idea and no one has successfully argued otherwise at this point. (Not that it couldn’t happen, I suppose.)  But the mesocosm, no. This idea needs support.

Still, I keep reading. The idea of magic, the magical mind, is such an endemic notion that I think it really deserves the very best of our attention and part of that is a scrupulous attention to the rigors of academic discourse. That is the heart of academic practice. I mean what if Darwin had said “Well fuck all the evidence, I just know it to be the way the world is and if you don’t agree, then that is because you don’t have the wit to understand what is, to me, patently evident.” If he did creationists would have every right to scorn the idea. But he didn’t and there was a reason: evidence is the heart of the academic’s view.