Hi all,

I am wondering if Fex & Coo and Deathling Crown Lottery have stimulated any fictive

responses in you, whether in dreams or otherwise? If so, I invite you to send anything

of this nature to me and I will post. Do not hesitate!

Russ

TULLY’S IS GOING OUT OF BUSINESS

First there was one,

but the one said, let there be two.

Then the two imagined others

and a curious thing happened.

The others started reimagining the two.

And then all hell broke loose.

There were books and banks

and rings and things.

There were birds of the night

and birds that could pluck a fish

swimming fast and alone in its murky canyon.

There were dreams and visions

and people erased with the touch of a key.

One minute they were here and then they were not,

only to reappear to ask, ‘Where did I go?’

There was confusion and mystery,

There was then and there was now,

the two sliding over each other

as easily as water in a glass.

There was the incandescent smell of flowers,

of jasmine and heather,

and a fox named Agatha.

The audience, caught in the vortex

of time and impaled on its unmoored imagination,

could bear no more and promptly fainted.

Everyone now had a time problem

and did not know when they were to be

where they were supposed to be.

Everyone now worried about tomorrow,

since no one was sure if being time-stopped
would matter to tomorrow if tomorrow never came.

But they did not worry about dreams and bones

and the future since the future could be changed,

unlike tomorrow which was just an invention of the mind.

Just an silly trick to keep us from side-stepping

the whole slavish obsession with what comes next.

But what comes next did not matter

because no one knew what could possibly come next.

All these birds and flowers

and troupes of players

armed with kisses and bullets,

razor tongues and opaque ears,

flew from the moment

towards the past or the future

and upon arriving there

did not not know where they were.

They only thing they actually knew

was that none of the innocent were injured

and everyone else won the lottery

but could not collect until on their deathbed.

Then Tully’s announced it was, sadly, going out of business.

The audience fainted once again

and for the last time.

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.

Russ, I recently had an unusual experience while immersed in reading through some Deathling Crown Lottery text and backstories. There was a lot of material—large blocks of print, hours and days of reading. One evening after I’d turned out the light, I began to notice a strange effect. Something different was happening. The various texts I’d been reading were starting to “come alive.”

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.

What was happening?

It felt like a borderline alchemical experience—in modern times. Was that the shadow of the paper itself, yielding secrets, hidden yet emergent? Or was I seeing into the writing itself, which I found to be excellent—funny, interesting, portentous. And since it also felt like I should not forget this experience I was having, I sent you a note:

“Meanwhile, and in case you didn’t already know it, Russ, there is a lot of really rich and surprising material in both the “FC-DCL Transition" file and the DCL Original Document file. The writing is excellent. It’s loaded with imagination, crawling with creative “spontaneities,” as Thomas Berry called them—like tiny little sparks or beacons, or flying hearts, or fishes’ eyes … luminosities of the darkness itself, unknown messengers. The words that once we wrote, now open up and illuminate the assembled text, as candles illuminate the space in a cave. A really subtle, luminous, serpentine spirit glides over, and attaches to, this “material.” Or does it emerge from the text, as if spawned by it? In any event, it is a creative spirit. Perhaps like the Creation-image in Genesis, where the Spirit hovers over the water, brooding. I never really saw any of this before, in our text. Now the whole thing is starting to glow.”

Many years ago I had a similar experience.

I was reading two books by the French Islamic scholar, Henri Corbin. The titles were: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, and Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. I was interested in reading them because of Corbin’s mastery of the phenomenology of angels. I had been working on the notion that what people used to call “angels”—messengers in Greek—and how they could appear as figures and phenomena in dreams—including, or especially, animals in dreams. I had intuited that angels were virtually universal, autonomous psychic factors with real effects in the world, above all in synchronistic events, which join psyche and world.

Ultimately, Corbin did not disappoint.

At first, though, I found the writing oddly complex, but I wrote it off to the French academic tradition. Piling up convoluted clauses until they resembled the Watts Towers.

Then, on several occasions I noticed this “phenomenon”: I would open Corbin and start reading, especially the second volume: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. After about ten or fifteen minutes, and with no intentional prompting from me, the page would open up further, and suddenly I would see dozens of white wings fluttering, as if white doves were boiling up out of the pages. It was like a meta-communication from the creative background of a “magical” text, and I had to admit that the ghostly effect of the fluttering white doves came from something Other that seemed to have found its way into Corbin’s words.

To me, such experiences validate the sense that dreams, fantasies and creative fictions can—in ways simple and rare—bear vital life-energies along the path to their arena of realization. It makes me wonder how much concerted imagining would be required, if we wished to situate such “new” intuitions within the orienting framework of our creaking civilization. And would such imagining be directed, or “free”?

You’ve written about such things before, Russ, as for example in your essays, Dream As Angel and The Fictive Purpose of Dreams; and we’re touching on similar, resonant issues in Volume Three of our Trilogy, Dreams, Bones &the Future: Endings. Similarly, in Fex & Coo, in the Scene where Owl and Jaz “celebrate quantum foam,” you wrote this lovely poem for a fictional book of old Scottish poetry—an antiquarian gift from Owl Man to Jasmine:

The great stones set upon one another

Hide the threads of connection, those strands of mystery

That time has wrought forever outside man’s intentions

That time itself dare not reveal but to those minds

Likewise wrought in the piecing together of soul stones

Beyond, beyond the piping sounds calling kin to task

—Paco

It is natural to think of sequence, what follows what. Or, being called, when standing in a queue, "Next!" So, we might ask, what follows Fex & Coo. What is next in line? Simple notions to be sure. But thinking this way would not be accurate. Yes, we have posted the ten original installments of Fex & Coo, and there will follow, in the traditional sense of next—what is made available to the blog members.

But things are more complicated than this.

Fex & Coo began in Tully's Coffee shop on October 10, 2010. Just over seven months later, on April 12, 2011, I had a dream. The dream was very explicit and clear: there was a title, a subtitle, and the first paragraphs of what was the beginning of an unusual narrative. The title was The Deathling Crown Lottery. The sub-title was, “A Cautionary Dream Tale.” I wrote out the text as best I could remember it from the dream. Here is what I sent to Paco a couple of days later:

The Deathling Crown Lottery

A Cautionary Dream Tale

Arthur Compton, 63, died peacefully in his sleep. This was usually the end of it, but not this time. His death was one of the jackpot prizes in the Deathling Crown Lottery.

The winning ticket in the narrative section was purchased by CedrosCM, a frequent player, and one who dreamed often of winning the chance to narrate a life back into existence. Most of his ongoing narratives remained just that: dreams that floated perpetually in his head, never finding their way to the written page, often involving females he imagined narrating to his pleasure.

That would change now, of course.

He knew the rules held no restrictions whatever on the narrative text. Whatever he wrote would come about in the new life of Mr. Arthur Compton, soon to be among the living. Whether he remained as CEO of Reticular Medicinals, Inc., was now completely up to CedrosCM. There in fact was only one rule: the winner must write a minimum 100-word narrative addition each day, weekends and holidays included. No exceptions were permitted. The penalty for failure was spelled out as well. The winner would himself become a prize in the Deathling Crown Lottery.

As with Fex & Coo, Paco sent back a continuation, and once again we became fully engaged in writing in a back-and-forth manner. We were writing both narratives at the same time. So, The Deathling Crown Lottery was not next in the sense that it followed the completion of Fex & Coo. A more accurate image would be something like parallel lines, that sense of "next to each other" from Old High German nahisto, meaning “neighbor,” or the Anglian (nesta) meaning “closest in kinship.” “Next door neighbor” is an English expression that captures this sense.

We were writing these two narratives as two different projects but being fictions and both intimately emerging from the imagination of the authors, they became in various overt, subtle as well as hidden ways, intertwined. This became more obvious and direct as the writing went on. You can see that the final episode of Fex & Coo describes Owl Man as having the above dream and that he is on his way to London, the setting for The Deathling Crown Lottery.

Perhaps a more accurate image of the relation of these two narratives would be the double-helix, stranded form of DNA, with all sorts of connections between the strands eventually giving rise to manifested life forms. One can certainly conjecture that there is something similar going on in the psyche’s DNA.

I will begin shortly to post installments of The Deathling Crown Lottery. This will be followed by various pieces and ending with Caleigh of Dreams. “Caleigh” is a Gaelic word referring to a Scottish party full of spontaneous poetry, music, dancing, and, in this case, attacks on the Queen.

Where we go from there is unknown at the present time.

Russ

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:

Klee: Angel Series

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.