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THE DARK SWAN OF WORDS:
Deardorff’s The Other Within holds no quarter. As a first book, it is a truly remarkable statement of intent: both a rallying call for the intelligence of dis-order, and a startling examination of dozens of half-obscured myths and texts. Writers on Myth tend to fall into two catagories: those who use old stories to back up whatever convuluted point they happen to be making, and those (a tiny minority), who actually develop a creative questioning from whatever the story-animal is trying to communicate. This requires both a kind of psychic listening to the image, and a loyalty to go down paths the writer may have never set out on, a willingnessto actually be guided. Deardorff belongs to this second camp. A natural peer of Lewis Hyde and Sean Kane, from the first paragraph Deardorff dictates a fierce linguistic rythmn—this is a book to be read in small, immense chunks. We find ourselves in densly forested language, and we have a straight choice: to head back to the city gates or slow our pace, climb down off the horse and start to concentrate. He pays us the compliment of assuming we have a compass and cooking pots already (i.e are already an enthusiatic traveller of mythic conciousness), otherwise why on earth would we be this far out into the woods? Soon the nightbirds come, little pointers that illuminate literary paths seemingly too dense to traverse. As the book progresses we notice hundreds of footprints of previous travellers that we never would have spotted, without Deardorff’s expert weaving of poetry and ideas. We begin to suspect that many of the truly moving writers and thinkers we have are somewhere ahead of us, in a knot of bushes, or dreaming in the gloom. Daniel is a natural ‘joiner of hands’- and his generous mythic associations of many different artists give us a deep sense of continum in an arena rife with uncertainty. He shows us a bespoke and arcane tribe of forest dwellers. As a scholar of Myth, this is the most useful text on what he calls ‘trickster-wisdom’ I have discovered. It walks a deliberately ungainly walk, between intense metaphor and academic scrutiny. Deardorff is a writer with something to say, but will not bend or diffuse the contrarenous of his writing. It is a journey into paradox and he remains loyal to that burning point, that depth reward. Amongst an informed audience ‘the Other Within’ is already recognised as a seminal work, the sheer brightness of Deardorff’s dark questioning ensuring it a growing readership over the oncoming decades. For any serious reader of mythological consciousness, this is a vital work. The question to us as readers is whether we have the courage for such deep-sea diving; we suspect that, like Neruda, Deardorff has crab-energy, and can scuttle this way and that, at great depths and pressure, for a long, long time. |
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