[Dennis Slattery]

Thanks so much, James. I just finished listening to the clip you included; what a heavy few minutes with Moyers on the life energy that pervades the universe and us as individuals participating in it.

I recently received from the Foundation a hard bound copy of Primitive Mythology, so I began reading it the other morning. And this is apropos of some of your insights above and it hinges on beliefs’ powers. In the Prologue JC writes: “Man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth.” (4). Perhaps when our beliefs dry up, as you use that image, then we are pushed once again out of the nest and into the cosmos to find what belief will sustain us, keep us whole or moving in that direction.

Art guides us in that quest, as you realize and as others grasp; where the confusion lies is in some of our thinking that there is no difference between worth and value; what is it worth predominates in the myth of capitalism and consuming. But value takes us in a new direction, where the artists can help guide us to what is truer than what we believed once, and may clinch on to so as not to be driven to confusion.

James, we certainly right now between mythic energies, some sapping the common person, others highlighting what virtues we must defend against the onslaught of literalism, the dragon guarding the treasury.

Many thanks for your perceptive insights, James. I always learn from them.