Secret Body by Jeffrey J. Kripal

Author:Jeffrey J. Kripal [Kripal, Jeffrey J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-49148-6
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

OPENINGS: ANSWERING LOGOS WITH MYTHOS

But how? How does one talk about an elephant that one’s interlocutors claim is not really there? How does one speak about impossible things without appearing to one’s peers as, well, impossible? I have learned over the years that it is quite futile simply to argue with individuals who are committed to resisting such historical phenomena out of their own quite reasonable commitments, many of which I share. Pure reason here gets one exactly nowhere. What finally melts the ice of rationalism is not more rationalism, but story. What finally pushes beyond logos is not more logos, but mythos.

In this mythical spirit, let me begin, then, with a deceptively simple claim. Let me claim that the paranormal is a kind of story.15 By “story,” I do not mean “just a story.” I do not mean a simple work of fiction. By story, I mean “what really happened,” which then becomes a story that is inevitably more polished or clean than the original event but which nonetheless exists only because of the original historical empirical event. By “story,” I mean to refer to what has traditionally been called “myth,” which I understand, at least here, as a narrative expression, partly empirical, partly symbolic, of a real event that overflows and exhausts any rational explanation.

Here are two concrete examples.

Consider first the American writer Samuel Clemens, otherwise known as Mark Twain. Twain’s life was riddled with bizarre events and strange coincidences. “History,” he wrote, “may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Life, in other words, is not simply linear, temporal, and causal. It is also organized around meaning, metaphor, and poetry.

And dream. Sam and his brother Henry were working on the riverboat Pennsylvania. The night before they embarked, Sam dreamed of Henry’s corpse in a metal casket dressed in his older brother’s suit with a large bundle of white roses on his chest and a single red rose in the center. The dream was so real and so disturbing that it took a walk outside to convince Sam that, yes, “it was just a dream.” Unfortunately, it was not just a dream. Sam was transferred to another ship, and Henry was killed in a boiler explosion on the Pennsylvania a few days later. Robert Moss describes the funeral:

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