Reply To: Incarcerated, But Not Imprisoned,” with Mythologist Dennis Slattery, Ph.D.”
So eloquently-phrased, James. You tuned right into the enchantment of art to offer us a different cosmos by which to process the flawed one we are in.
This morning I reread Father Mapple’s sermon to the New Bedford congregation that Ishmael attends in Moby-Dick. It is a powerful story with four separate “yarns,” as Mapple calls them as he embarks on a homily through the Biblical narrative. What struck me this morning is how the stories of the past, and here I am thinking of your fine post above, entangle our own stories in the present and create a webbing with these eternal narratives that flex with us over time. By means of these narratives, as well as as the David sculpture that Sandy and I stood in front of many times in the Academia in Florence, we glimpse shards of a different world, elegant but not free of flaws; it is a moment of myth-making when we find analogies by which to gauge our own reality.
You give us above the suffering of the Virgin over her emaciated son as well–and see its universal import. That is the role of art: to open our vision to realities under our noses. And thank you as well, James, for posting my blog connection. I appreciate that as a furtherance of our discussions here. You have the poet’s sensibility of analogy in all of your posts. Many thanks.
Yes, I think we as a nation are in the throes of a profound suffering, even ptsd over the past four years.