Paco’s enlivening post addresses his experiences of the reality of living matter. As I eagerly read it,  two vivid memories were released: In my book Anomaly I share an amazing quote by J. Elliott who visited a Sufi Temple in Afghanistan. Here is what he experienced as he gazed at the Arabic script on a wall:

What appeared from a distance to be the shading within these shapes was in fact a mosaic of angularly stylized Arabic characters, with each character itself composed of tinier tiles. ... the mosaics themselves depicted verses from the Qur’an ... Something was getting under my skin as my eyes roamed the walls. I had a feeling that this was different from any art I had ever seen. And in that cold, lowering dusk, in that shabby courtyard, where the tile work is a third destroyed, a ray of meaning seemed to leap from the walls. It was as if they had suddenly become articulate and, shedding for a moment their almost formal precision, began to dance and weave with meaning. ... This was not the art of decoration but of sacred ciphers, in which the onlooker is invited to participate, not merely stand in awe, and decode the patterns according to his means. (142)

The second memory has to do with the publication of the Red Book. Ulrich Hoerni is Jung’s grandson and acted as a guardian of the Red Book during the weeks of high quality scanning that took place prior to publication. While he was alone in the room with the book, he dreamed that the Red Book was on fire. He was alarmed and had to assure himself that the book was safe. I was surprised by his sole interpretation of his dream, as well as by the apparent lack of alternative interpretations offered by his colleagues at the time. Surely, I thought, the most obvious interpretation would be that he received a glimpse of the living Red Book, aglow with spiritual fire. But no, apparently not!

These examples of living matter seem related to Paco’s experience:

Though I had already closed my eyes, I was still “seeing” pages of text. The sheet I envisioned, however, was moving—“crinkling and glimmering,” as if some “ingredient” was being revealed to me, something buried in the laminae of the (imagined) paper itself, as it were. It was as if little flares were dancing up and down, or candles flickering in a cave.

All three examples seem to me to point to the reality of living matter, i.e. matter that is pliable enough to be inscribed with meaning from “beyond”,  like a stamp into wax. Maybe with these three examples side by side like this we can begin to wonder about our current plight. Living matter is impressionable! In this condition of impressionability, we can receive, remember, and then “speak” messages from the “other side”. But now for us moderns, matter has become hardened (materialism) so that any incursion from otherness is blocked from the outset. We can no longer receive the messages. 

Our isolation increases and the message-bearers become more desperate “to get through”. 

Fex and Coo is an example of writing that emerges from the fluid living matter of Russ’ and Paco’s psyches as they open up and receive the messages from “elsewhere” as Russ says, becoming mouthpieces for a greater voice that has impressed its life on them.

 

 

 

It’s rare for readers to get such a glimpse into an author’s inward process in creating a book (September 24, 2021 at 10:28 AM ). So thanks for that, Russ! Such a description really demonstrates the intimate relationship between soul and language, psyche and literature, which I have explored for some decades, after an initial discussion with Russ around 1994, when he said to me that etymology and psychology had been sundered at some point (19^th C.?) to the detriment of both fields. Well, this was a shocking new thought for me but I was attracted like a magnet. The first thing to do of course was write an essay to help clarify the issue.

Books and essays followed as I worked to understand how literature reflects psyche. I was convinced that certain forms of literature become possible only when new configurations of psyche are noticed and privileged by culture. For example I am told that Homeric literature shows examples in which characters are astonished by any display of personal emotion. This literary fact indicates that in Homeric Greece, emotions or interiority belonged to the gods and we received them as such at that time. We did not privilege personal interiority. In our time, with its radically different style of consciousness, literature that describes our personal interiority or that of others is simply taken for granted. 

This is a brief background to my insistence that the literary form of Fex and Coo  points to another configuration in the psychic background that we may learn to privilege as a culture i.e. when the culture feels the enormous significance of this shift in the psychic background. I have been trying to persuade others for years about this. But confusions abound, as Russ notes in his post re: some responses to his description:

Some have expressed some doubt about this, but it is the best I can do to describe the difference between this flow and what happens when I consciously intend to make something up as a story. 

Something very similar happened re: some responses to the form of the Red Book as I note in my essay The Hidden Legacy of the Red Book:  

For example, Hillman and Shamdasani’s attention is drawn to the creation of the Red Book. Did Jung write while experiencing his encounters or afterwards, upon reflection? 

JH: I wanted to ask you about that. Does he record as it happens? Or does he record after he’s had the dialogues? Because when I did active imagination myself long ago most of it was done as it happened. So it was a writing, in a way. Some of it was not. Some of it was a conversation, interior, and then I would write it – recapture it – by writing. 

SS: This is one of the imponderable questions of which I’ve hit my head against the wall for many a year now in that it’s hard to make a decision on this. Certain segments of the text give the sense that he sees a dramatic sequence and then notes it down, whereas certain other segments of the text appear to unfold in the writing. 

JH: Unfold in the writing as a flowing dialogue. (See p 22 of my essay)

I can see something similar here to Russ’ description of his process. Hillman and Shamdasani are struggling to comprehend a new form of literature in Jung’s case. I believe this is a struggle to understand a new configuration of psyche/world that literary forms like Fex and Coo are expressing/describing but which, at this time, is unrecognisable to our culture.

In a word, this is the Coming Guest! We have yet to understand it enough to privilege this form as a cultural form that can articulate and maintain a new world of appearances and perhaps steer us from our present terminal trajectory. 

It may be too late…

A NEW STRUCTURE OF REALITY: An attempt to comprehend an emerging  genre of literature.

When I read an earlier version of Fex and Coo in 2011, I wrote the following response, based on my explorations of the relationship between literary genre and psyche.

Fex and Coo is a  fictional form that portrays an emerging reality, one that perhaps has not appeared on the world stage yet through a literary genre! It is a space-time into which authors Russell and Paco enter as Owl Man and Heron Man. This reality is such that as Owl Man and Heron Man,  the authors can actually talk to the characters that they are in the process of producing, including Owl Man and Heron Man. The book is in fact being written as we readers, read the book. Owl Man, for example, is producing other characters as we go along. The plot is being formed by the characters Owl Man and Heron Man. They write the script then step into it, live it out. The reader reads a book as it is being written. Yet what the reader is reading is also a finished book. So what book is being written within the finished book? What is the status of its reality? Another way to say this is that as long as we remain on the outside, in external reflection, we encounter a finished book, but when we become fictional ourselves, by entering the book, we discover not a finished product but a process of forming a book, this book!

If this is not strange enough, what other book have you read in which the authors enter the book as both author and character such that they become subject to the plot as much as any other character? For example, Jasmine is a character in the book and starts to have a transformative effect on Owl Man. Now, since the plot is unfolding as we go along, in no way can we conclude that Russell the author “contrived” this encounter between Owl Man and Jasmine. This view would in effect destroy what is coming alive in this new genre, maybe for the first time in our culture: a new reality, one into which we too can enter, becoming “fictional” and becoming subject to its laws. 

One law that is explored in this book is what I may call the law of manifestation. 

Owl Man goes through and Russell recounts a series of events that have such a ring of authenticity that I for one can only conclude that they did indeed happen to Owl Man in reality (i.e. this new reality).  The first event is Owl Man’s growing awareness that he is falling in love with Jasmine. The intense flame of his desire (which does not exclude the body) seems to be the fuel for what happens next. He is startled by an owl launching itself at him and then he dreams of a face that slowly comes into focus as Jasmine’s face. There seems to be a sense of destiny in this occurrence. 

Owl Man receives a phone call from Jasmine, demanding that she see him at once. When they meet she demands that he tell her how he knew—how did he know that this was the gift she had always wanted? Owl Man did not have the faintest idea what she was talking about. She tells him that she had a dream from childhood in which a man places an object, an object she intensely desired into her hand. But when she woke up, it was not there, until now, until Owl Man gives it to her in the dream and then she wakes up with the object in her hand. To Owl Man’s uncomprehending astonishment, the object was his very own precious Mount Blanc pen. The pen he had owned and cherished for many years now lay in the palm of Jasmine’s hand!

As I read this passage, I was gripped by a feeling that this was really unfolding, really happening to Owl Man, that I was participating in a drama that was in the making, i.e. a poesis! This is a description of a reality and its law of manifestation. 

How can we begin to describe such a reality and the genre that can best articulate it? 

I want to pick up on a thread running though Fex and Coo. I think this thread is crucial to our time and how we navigate towards a very uncertain future. Russ condenses this thread to a concise statement:

there is "something" in the deep psyche that yearns for expression and struggles to "language" such expression. This is true of all the deep arts that go beyond the mimicry of outer reality.

The struggle takes place “at the threshold”—a poetic but apt description of the topography of the phenomenon. This is the “place” where the language/outer reality disjunction collapses, and where the “new” may appear. Long ago I had this dream:

A man is getting tortured, strapped down spread-eagled in an imprisoning cage and hoisted up. I am desperately trying to help him. Time is running out and my anxiety over his fate is at a peak.

You can see how torture, torment, agony, anxiety, all of which belong to the phenomenon of  the threshold, are paired with “time running out” in this dream. Many years had to pass before I could catch up, in consciousness, with the speech of this dream. 

Compare this dream with a passage from Fex and Coo during an encounter between Owl Man and Jasmine at Tullys (EPfour 160ff):

In this manner, one small urban donut shop served, for a few moments at least, as a time-space portal for the spirit of language. It was as if, from the teeming ether, words tumbled through the moist Seattle atmosphere into the warm, redolent donut shop, where they were funnelled into the gleaming Mont Blanc pen, to flow in an unbroken stream onto the creamy page…. At that moment the door opened and Heron Man walked slowly into the shop. Looking once around the room, he stopped in mid-stride, like a heron wading in the shallows. The entire space seemed to be floating in a kind of gravitational suspense. No one spoke. Bussers held their black tubs in the air. Customers, in freeze- frame poses, held dripping jelly donuts in their fingers, mouths agape. 

This passage is also a vivid realistic description of the threshold and note the key detail that time in fact has “run out” or stopped. Note also there is a “teeming ether”, but there is no anxiety, no torture, no torment, just a tumbling of words onto the page, a fluid languaging emerging into existence—same threshold, very different experience of the threshold. In my dream, anxiety ruled the mood. In this passage from Fex and Coo, love pervades everything. At the time I was terrified of expression per se. I did not consider myself a writer in any way; it simply was not part of my self-image. Jasmine and Owl Man on the other hand are open “mouthpieces”. There is ritual recognition that a boundary was being crossed, that a taboo was being broken, but there was no fear of letting go, surrendering, opening up to the other as this guest began to speak easily through the Mont Blanc Pen.

The degree to which the other self-presents as distorted, deranged, horrible, in apparent agony and difficulty, depends utterly on the degree to which we can meet the other at the threshold with love, or eros and without fear! Here is a painting by Klee from his angel series, showing all the distortions, yet we are dealing with an angel that wants enter the human condition:

If we accept that time itself IS suffering, then approaching the threshold will feel like time slowing down to a singularity point (is this what Einstein was groping towards?) The suffering becomes more intense the more we cling to time, i.e our self-identity as temporal beings. Remember Jung’s vision of 1946 when he “died” and was travelling to a black granite temple? His temporal being was sloughing off as he approached:

I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me an extremely painful process… (MDR: Ch. “Visions”)

Fex and Coo, then is therefore a primer of how to approach the threshold from the human side in order to welcome the other as this other seeks to enter the incarnate condition, through us.

Fex and Coo began with a literary fragment (see Prologue) and, true to the German Romantic tradition, this fragment invites further imaginations, further gathering of related fragments, even literary criticism, that continue the conversation or story. This is why, I believe, Russ and Paco invite comments and posts—the very same practices of the early German Romantics. These practices were the Romantics’ effort to establish a relationship between language and reality that went beyond what the traditional (Platonic) view of  language could offer.  The Platonic view of language, which has lasted for millennia, treats language as an inferior copy of reality—static reality, unchanging thing-like reality—the kind of reality that has now hardened into materialism, stifling any new life that may seek to break into our ossified culture and revivify it.

And so our culture is dying! 

The Romantics shook up this view of language and reality with a revolutionary view of literary language as invention—meaning discovery/creation. So, a literary fragment like Fex and Coo attracts other fragments (call them interpretations, criticisms, poetry) that accumulatively begin to unfold an underlying invented (in the above sense) meaning. This method represents an entirely new approach to language and its relationship to reality. Language is no longer mimetic of static reality. Instead, language creates/discovers or, I would say, brings reality forward into being in its character as fluid, open-ended—a process! They had to find a way to language this fluid reality. Their literary method, if successful would revolutionise Western culture, bringing it into accord with the fluid nature of reality. It was, as we can see today, an unsuccessful cultural movement in this regard and we in the 21^st century are now paying the highest price for this loss.

Much of my own task has been to trace threads of the Romantic impulse into contemporary times. If you know how to look you can see these traces most vividly appearing in modern physics—quantum physics, cosmological physics and classical physics. You don’t need specialised knowledge in mathematics or experimental physics (although some helps a lot). But you do need the “eye” to see the soul movement informing the technical language that physicists are forced to develop in response to their brilliant and mystifying experiments. Staying true to their scientific observations, scientists struggle to formulate language that can render increasingly weird and mind-bending experimental results: worm-holes, black holes, entanglement, quantum foam, anti-matter, reversibility, thresholds…. The mathematics they use is image-free (Rutherford’s atom has long been surpassed by probability wave distributions) but scientists must still struggle to find an imaginal response in order grasp the ungraspable in communicable language. In this sense the Romantic tradition is continuing into the 21^st century via modern physics.

As we go further into Fex and Coo, we hear about, for example, “time-squirrels” disappearing down into the tunnel of the throats of birds, along with the suspension of the flow of  time. Russ and Paco have found a literary method to say the soul movement underlying and informing the technical yet figurative language that physicists have to use to stay linguistically  in accord with the fluid reality revealed by quantum mechanics.

In my judgment this method is what makes Fex and Coo a novel novel! There is much more here than the employment of literary conceit. Physicists use their technical language to reference physics’ objective reality—i.e reality remains external to language. Although they do claim that the observer is somehow implicated in the outcome, I doubt that any physicist would venture to mention an actual experience she had in that regard. And on the other hand many writers of good fiction offer us their fantasies of possible human experience of quantum states (Robert Heinlein’s “And He Built a Crooked House” is a great fanciful account of the 4th dimension) but neither would these authors claim to have actually experienced what they are writing about. (There are some powerful exceptions like C. G. Jung and Philip K. Dick—neither of whom considered themselves writers of fiction) . 

Fex and Coo is an original attempt, informed by, or rooted in, actual conscious experience of the reality that both physicists and fiction writers are merely talking about, i.e., the underlying fluid reality supporting and informing our ordinary world of static appearances. How do I know this? Well, my previous post Dream Reality is a hint, as are the other hints I posted in “Comments” and there are others which I will post too. Here is an advance methodological hint for those readers who care about this angle to Fex and Coo: look into the text, via the syntax of the story, phrases casually introduced, as well as the “invisible” structure of the story. Allow your mind to get twisted a little, as I suggested in “Comments” earlier.

More to come…

In this post I want to approach a truly remarkable feature of Fex and Coo from a somewhat circuitous path. I’ll begin with a dream I had in the early nineties:

A kindly blue-collar worker finds a copy of Walter Benjamin’s third book. for me. I want it but he says it costs $350. I try to find ways to negotiate the price. I go to another book store to see if they have it. I am driving and pull over quickly at a gas station, as three people call me to show me a small book by Benjamin. It shows beautiful illustrations along with his quotations. I want to have that one, too.

After this dream I was astonished to read that Benjamin’s greatest ambition was to: 

create a book consisting entirely of quotations. i.e. no commentary necessary! The fragments themselves would express the hidden thread that unites them… Walter Benjamin understood that from amongst the fragments of our modern lives, new forms could be achieved by finding the hidden thread that connects fragments in a new way—a way that creates the future.

At the time I also was fascinated by quotations and had pasted them all around my room. As far as I know, Benjamin never did create his book yet my dream shows a completed book of quotations by Walter Benjamin (see note at the end for my use of italics). And the dream also shows my dream desire to have that book. My waking response at the time was to write such a book—my Book of Quotations (I will send a pdf copy of this small book to any reader who wants it). But the point here is that there are now two real/real books—one written by Walter Benjamin, which he never wrote in his waking life, and my Book of Quotations which I did write in waking life, in response to my dream desire to have a copy of his Book of Quotations.

Now let’s return to Fex and Coo, which began with a literary fragment, “Fex and Coo”, noticed one day in ordinary waking life. This fragment begins a process/process of writing/writing a book/book. Now there are two real/real books being written/written—the real book being written by authors/participants Owl Man and Heron Man, and the real, finished book Fex and Coo which we readers are receiving in Episodes on the website as written by Russ and Paco. 

Can you see where this is heading? What is the relationship between the real book unfolding in the story and the finished real book we readers have access to in waking life? You can get many hints of a profound mystery at work here, for example in, yes, this quotation from Episode 5:

The questions hovered in the air like hawks riding thermals. At first, no one said anything. Then Owl Man spoke up. “Well, the first thing to keep in mind is that, yes, it is dream money.” “OK. I get that, Owl. But it is also real?” Owl Man paused, took a breath, then intoned solemnly, “Yes, it is also real money"...

More to come…..

(I use italics to distinguish the real from the real—distinguishable but not separable)