Dreaming the Future Closer

When I started to think about starting up a review category, I already had this slim volume in mind.  It’s an older title, from the way back lands of the 1940’s.  It’s temporal origin can be seen clearly in the writing, but it remains a valuable work that compiles and addresses a wide range of mythological phenomena.

However, as I turned to reread the book in preparation for dasing off this review, I was struck by how difficult a prospect it was to say more than that.  Meguey Baker once described a relationship that never  quite was as existing “a sideways step” from the life she was living.  In so many ways, I just wish this book had taken that sideways step toward me and it could be *the* book on mythic experience for me.

Cassirer’s scope, especially given that the book barely crests 100 pages, is remarkable.  He is still close enough to the late 19th-century and early 20th-century anthropologists (armchair and otherwise) to take them with a level of seriousness that is rare nowadays, engaging with them without the postmodern blasé so common among contemporary intellectuals.  Unfortunately, he’s still close enough to their mindset that he also participates in some of their Eurocentric biases, most notably the progressive notion of culture that was Hegel’s legacy.

He takes mythic experience seriously, though, as a form of discourse as real and valid for the African Ewe as for the contemporary Christian, as having a fundamental role in shaping the hearts and minds of a people and their concepts. 

I’ve been thinking, though, that there’s a lot more than a review to be had from my experience with this book.  I think I’m going to explore finding that sideways version of the book that speaks more deeply to me, find it by producing it out of a close reading of this book.  If I actually do it, it will be a lengthy project, composed of many different entries.