Carroll,

You wrote:

> But "eternal states of mind" as an ontological or historical actuality
> simply don't exist.

Whether the human soul is "eternal" in the manner that Socrates want to
believe it is, is not for me to know. However, would you be willing to
accept this qualified sense of eternal:  "states of mind which have existed
for as as long as humankind has existed" ?

> (On the side, I personally began to have trouble in various contexts when
the
> either "mediated" or "unmediated" appears in a discourse. I'm never sure
what
> they mean.)

By mediated and unmediated, I mean something like this:  most people come to
an intellectual understanding of myth via the narratives in which they are
transmitted.  The myths are understood as stories with symbolic or
allegorical significance.  This is mediated understanding, although much
better than the sort of understanding of the psyche one would get from the
typical introductory psychology textbook. Unmediated understanding, on the
other hand, comes from finding oneself an actor in the unconcscious world
that is bodied forth in these myths; unmediated understanding is to see the
story of Daphne and the laurel bough unfold before one's eyes.


I had written:
>
> > The interplay
> > of archetypes is the dance, is the woods.  The ego is the dancer,  the
tree.
>

to which you replied:
> I simplly  don't believe in archetypes (either in Jung's sense or in
Frye's).

To which I in turn reply by quoting from The Tree:

And many a new thing understood
That was rank folly to my head before.


> Often it seems to me that critics use "archetype" to describe a successful
> reinvigoration of a cliche or dead metaphor: Make it new.
>

Not this critic. This critic is describing a peculiar human experience, not
an empty literary convention.

I wrote:
> >
> > There is no absolute border between Self and un-self; the
self-consciousness
> > we refer to by the term "ego" is merely a threshold.
>

You replied:

> My mind spins here. Let me translate into my own terms. Humanity (or the
> individual human) does not *have* a history, it *is* its history (or an
ensemble
>
> of social relations, prior to and independently of which "I" simply have
> no existence). *Paradise Lost* is all about denying this -- Adam, in his
account
>
> of his own creation, wakes up alone, looks around him, leaps to his feet
> and (one hand clapping, language in isolation from social relations)
begins
> to speak -- to reason like an 18th c. French philosopher. Austen is all
> about denying this -- which is why she first isolates her heroines so they
> can then "reenter" the world of social relations as though that were as
free
> an abstract choice as was Adam's.
>
> Pound breaks free from his world in his first line (And then went down to
> the sea) so that he  can then reenter it, over and over again, as a free
> act of the mind. I think that's what you are calling an archetype.
>

You misunderstand me.  It is my fault.  Trying to carry this discussion on
without resorting to metaphor is almost impossible.
The problem resides in my term "un-self".  By that, I mean the part of one's
psyche that is not individuated but common to all members of the type. An
archetype is a structure that informs the unconscious mind. It might be
thought of as a kind of puzzle shape that fits together with other puzzle
shapes.

> > One may assent to this
> > statement intellectually. Or one may RECOGNIZE its truth by undergoing
an
> > unmediated liminal experience. This poem is the record not of
intellectual
> > assent but of the liminal experience.
>

> This division is perhaps more commonplace than you think. A week, even a
> day, after I pull out of an attack of depression I no longer know what it
> *feels* like to be depressed -- I no longer can imagine what I felt like,
> but I can very definitely assent to various propositions to that state --
and
> I expect others (who have never experienced it  and cannot imagine it)
> to give intellectual assent and *not* claim imaginative understanding.
Pain
> tends to individualize (to create a solipsism of the moment) almost as
> successfully as capitalist relations of production. (Which is only one of
> many reasons that Clinton's "I feel your pain" is offensive.) But
everything
> we (any of us, including the poets among us) "recognize" or experience is
> not for that reason anything beyond an experience. In other words: the
> vividness or power of the recognition does not give assurance (or even
> probability) to the theoretical claim that the experience links to some
> eternal state.
>

There are commonplace experiences and liminal experiences.  Pound's "busting
through the quotidian". In the latter, the vividness and power of the
recognition does indeed give assurance that the experience links to some
state which is not purely subjective and which others have undergone for as
long as humankind has existed. Such experiences are corroborated in myth and
portrayed in the work of artists who have experienced this form of waking
dream.

Cheers.
Tim