The Language of Vision: Meditations on Myth and Metaphor

An exploration of the relationship among art, myth, and contemporary culture discusses such subjects as myth as discovery, imagination as political power, homosexuality as metaphor, cultural piracy, the death of the sacred, and the reinvention of the past.

Using the 22 pictorial cards of the Tarot deck as springboards for his forays into myth, art and metaphor, Highwater ( The Primal Mind ) offers an adventurous, often profound meditation on the relationship of art and culture. He considers the transformation of art from a sacred into a secular, often commercialized activity and efforts by visionary, avant-garde writers, painters and dancers to tap spirituality. Highwater contrasts a mechanistic Western worldview rooted in soul/body dualism with the "primal" outlook of indigenous people for whom art often expresses a communal mentality. He draws on a diverse range of referents, from Mesoamerican codices and the Nazca lines incised in the Peruvian desert to Balinese trance-dances, Dante and the outsider status of literary homosexuals Wilde, Rimbaud and Gide. Advocating a humane, tolerant multiculturalism, Highwater excoriates advertising and mass media as brainwashing efforts inducing people to betray both their individual and group identities.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The prolific and controversial Highwater (Dark Legend, 1994) leaves behind his interest in American Indians and turns to his other obsession, aesthetics, in this ethereal and silly collection of essays. Examining the complex relationship among art, myth, and metaphor, the author contends that much of what we term ``reality'' is nothing more than our dreams turned into banalities. Real truth and meaning are to be found in the dreams themselves, but we lack the language to do them justice. Art, therefore, becomes the means by which we touch this ultimate reality. The job of the artist is thus to lead others to the realm of dreams and back again in such a way as to show that dreams are possible. The present volume explores the ways various artists seek to accomplish this task. Each of the essays takes its title from one of the 22 cards in the Tarot's Major Arcana. For instance, Highwater uses the Falling Tower, which symbolizes disorder and loss of old beliefs, as a springboard to discuss the modern period's divorce of art from the sacred. The Magician, who represents free will, creativity, and guile, serves as a metaphor for the modern artist who struggles against convention to speak in new forms. With the Empress, who stands for feminine power and terrestrial creation, Highwater returns to one of his familiar themes: ritual and our relation to the earth itself. In his final chapter he turns to the World, a nude figure of a woman symbolizing completion. By his own admission, he ends the volume as he began: Much of the final essay is a virtual verbatim repeat of the first. Filled with Jungian psychology, this unoriginal book relies heavily on the words and work of others, especially the late Joseph Campbell--who's a lot more fun to read. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Prolific writer and mythographer Highwater has a number of novels, books of poetry, and provocative and original works of nonfiction such as Myth and Sexuality (1989) to his credit. His newest work falls into the last category. Here Highwater has assigned himself the task of elucidating how artists translate dreams and other out-of-the-ordinary experiences into art forms that liberate us from preconceived notions while providing us with fresh perspectives on our lives and society. An immense and amorphous topic to be sure, but Highwater has come up with an ingenious structure based on using the 22 images, or Major Arcana, of the Tarot card deck as catalysts for discussion. He doesn't consider these symbols to be tools of divination, but rather evocations of the human psyche that can illuminate the interconnections among myth, art, and metaphor. Highwater roams freely through the literature of a number of disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, quantum physics, psychology, and philosophy, pondering the significance and function of art in diverse cultures and in different time periods. Donna Seaman

Using a mosaic of quotes and insights, Highwater (Kill Hole, LJ 9/15/92) takes a multicultural approach to the concepts of originality, sign, and iconography. Proposing Tarot cards as a key to the relationship of art and myth to society and the individual, he describes the emotional and intellectual problems of the contemporary scene and gives some solutions to these problems. In the Tarot section on the body, Highwater has interesting things to say about mystical ideas that can be traced back to the Great Adam of kabalistic writings. He also presents compelling chapters on homosexuality, censorship, anthropology, and cultural politics. In the tradition of Jung and Joseph Campbell, this work is a provocative look at myth and metaphor and offers a good starting point for the reader new to the subject.
Gene Shaw, NYPL
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.