insider / outsider ambivalence

Czechoslovakia's velvet revolution evolved under the leadership

of Vaclav Havel, who refused to live in the palace.  After

becoming president he continued to reside in his working

class digs in downtown Prague.  Although to his constituents

he was a hero, Havel did not define himself as superior to the

common man; he preferred to be the common man.  Havel

lives out a relationship to authority that seems to include respect

for the hermetic as well as the heroic.

Resisting the seductive delusion of the Big-Man in the Big-House in keeping

with the "under-the worldly point of view," which is at the root of 'wisdom.' 

Like the shaman, the hunter mediates wilderness to civilization.  As in

history and throughout the world: in the hunt, the vision quest, the initiatory

vigil, the hunter goes alone - beyond civilization, into the primeval forest,

into the dark, into the under-world.  And yet the family, the whole village, is 

carried along in the heart.  Perhaps it is only in such solitude that on comes

to understand what human beings really are,...

The insider / outsider ambivalence of the hunter plays across the categorical

and normative boundaries. With the hunter, as with the Trickster, the 

impenetrable boundary becomes a permeable membrane: "membranes act

in a selective permeable way, allowing nourishment in, keeping poisons out."

The hunter, to be successful in the hunt, must abandon the ordinary,

structural categories of perception and descend from the rider into the

mind of the "horse" and "dragon." This descent, delineates "a 

fundamental distinction between two types of perception: 

discernment and designation."  

Distinction, 'designation' may be placed

 on the side of dogmatic structure's endless classifications; 

whereas 'discernment' is nameless, pre- and para- lingual,

 before-and-beyond designation - beyond our linguisticlly 

constructed world - 

discernment is "the music of the pattern."   

Discerning outside of the limitation

of designation - as Rilke implores:

If only we would let ourselves be dominated

as things do by some immense storm,

we would become strong too, and not need names.

Dropping the reins, our tight-fisted rationality must come to trust the shaggy

 little horse of limbic discernment.

~ Daniel Deardorff

from the other within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, & Psyche