Other relationships in my life expanded the "more" of Ceal and Spike, but my parents were the first people to usher me into the
counterworld of soul seeing, of feeling and being more than a captive of meritocracy They never talked about it; they just did it.
By responding narratively to the question: "How should things happen in the world?" the folk/fairy tale--and here I am, via Jack Zipes (2012) channeling Andre Jolles (1930)--sustains hope in a
counterworld that, unlike the real world, functions according to what he called "naive morality," and I would call justice.
This female '
counterworld' was not thought of as a sphere of commonality and action but a world of one's own, an intimate, individual withdrawal from patriarchy to find solace in inner strength.
It is from the earlier pastoral tradition of Virgil, Milton, and Marvell that Hartman first detects how intimately pastoral itself can be drawn toward prophecy, so that its own "green belt" has a
counterworld tension.
What is this
counterworld, this being within our being, this zone of desire that poetry evokes?
Antony who lived for twenty years in the Egyptian wilderness, the monks moved beyond a boundary from the world of the city and the cultivated plain into a "
counterworld" where alone the City of God could be built.
The ecstatic experience (in the original Greek sense of ek-stasis, to step outside of oneself) of leaving behind the normal world and entering an imaginary
counterworld is the basic experience which is inscribed into the pattern of the Walpurgisnacht, whose characteristic elements are journey, flight, night, dream, chaos, rapture, and collective ritual.
night not only as a cloak for actions unsanctioned by day, but as a
counterworld in which "nocturnal scenarios" and "psychic scenarios" are juxtaposed (23), one replete with "dangerous nocturnal enjoyment" (41).
The afterlife suddenly struck me as a
counterworld invented by men exhausted and parched by their ceaseless wanderings across the dunes or up and down rocky trails baked to white heat.
Jonathan Raban maintains that "[i]n the United States, as not in Britain, writing about the sea has been contiguous with 'nature writing', as if the sea offered not so much a
counterworld as a liquid extension of the green fields and forests within the land itself" (24).
Elizabeth McCutcheon has argued that Book 2 offers a "strange
counterworld or biosphere located somewhere between Dream and Nature," a positive alternative to the "negative ecosystem" of Book 1 ("More's Utopia" 78).
Kopf lets his fictional Piranesi state: "The dungeon as mirror of the world, distorted and exaggerated, but in that way all the truer--the dungeon as
counterworld in which our terrible world can be depicted" (50).