I have been following the interesting conversation that has evolved from Scene
7 regarding the question of inner and outer reality. John’s response to the
scene and focus on liquefaction or >luidity of reality as a result of the
breakdown of the concepts underlying it, as well as the sense of >ixity and
certainty that they serve to establish, is striking. He says that the way to
navigate this situation is “to >low with the words” and that “>low is the new
reality - the point of the breakdown of the old reality.” This leaves me
wondering if it is a necessary step in order to return to the “living energy” that
John has referred to in the past. Someone once told me that sur>ing involved
moving through a medium that was itself moving.
Along the way of the Fex & Coo narrative, this collapse of reality as we know it
has led to discussions about new words that are evolving out of the current
upheaval. “Neologisms” is the word that Paco has coined for the current
experience and future evolution of language and a new reality.
Tony asks the question, “What if the inner and outer reality are not separate?”
He goes on to describe the biological processes of cellular activity and how it
is a “seamless continuity” of phases that are “connected and balanced” in the
activity of living, dying and regeneration. We also see these processes in
Nature (or at least we used to) where the cyclical movement contains within it
these same phases.
Overall, it seems that humans experience the inner and outer reality as
separate because the rational mind has separated them conceptually and this
has led to the experience of duality. The interface between quantum physics
and some Eastern spiritual perspectives address the issue of transcending this
split in order to experience the interconnectedness of the inner and outer as a
whole living reality, which contains different dimensions within it.
Similar to Paco’s response to the ongoing conversation, a memory also
surfaced for me as I read the comments. My own experience related to the
question of inner and outer reality occurred at a >ive day Zen meditation
retreat (sesshin) I attended many years ago. Somehow, I managed to hurt my
knees after sitting for several hours the >irst day. I spent the next two days in
pain during sitting meditation (walking helped ease the pain) and mentally
struggled with it, hatching a plan to leave midway through the retreat. The
retreat was held at a house which had an aviary full of birds. Everyday at 4:00
p.m., the birds would break out in song. One bird in particular, a sparrow, sang
a beautiful song as its voice went higher and higher up to a certain point. The
day I had hatched my plan, while still struggling with the pain, the sparrow
began its song in the afternoon. As I listened to its song going higher, it got to
its usual stopping point. I didn’t think it could go much higher but it did and
when it did, as if breaking through it’s own sound barrier, something shifted in
me and I felt myself relax and let go into the pain and move through it. I then
found myself in a new space - a deeper state of mind - where the bird was no
longer outside of me but rather within me. I felt its song as though it were my
own - in other words, there was no separation between the sparrow and me.
After this experience, I was able to settle into the sitting meditation with my
mind open to what was occurring in the moment and experienced a profound
sense of aliveness and vibrating energy. I was still hobbling along physically
but not in pain. Something had shifted and left me in a deep state of openness,
clarity and vibrancy. The release or shift of energy that occurred from this
experience remained with me for some time and led to making some
important life changes.
As I thought about this experience and its relationship to Scene 7 regarding
the nature of reality, I realized that what had shifted in me was the sense of
separation between the inner and outer so that there was no boundary
between them. When Russ wrote, “. . . when things become more >luid, the
boundaries baring the full >lood of memory begin to breakdown,” it seemed to
re>lect in some way what I was sensing about the meditation experience.
Something shifts and then there is no boundary. The spaciousness of reality
opens up. The deeper mind that is spoken of in Zen teachings, I believe,
relates to this expansive reality that we are a part of and not apart from.

Response to John’s “The Madness of Scene 7”

 

John, many thanks for your post. I trust readers to get your point, that you’re hitting the nail on the head, as it were. John’s post is complemented and expanded upon in his recent Academia article entitled, The Liquefaction of the Real available at the Academia website: https://www.academia.edu/84588893/The_Liquefaction_of_the_Real_2022_?email_work_card=title

John’s sense of what is going on in Scene 7 is very clear. At the same time, it must be said that none of what appears in Scene 7 was intentional in the sense of “trying” to do what John says. It was not purposeful, intentional, or the result of an agenda. What Paco and I have done in the course of writing together in this odd way for the past few years is to continue to deepen our openness to the “Other” as the source for what comes into play in what actually gets written down. From this perspective, even to claim “authorship” is dubious. But, then, what is going on?

As I read John’s post, a memory was forming that finally became clear. I was recalling reading Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum: Perfect Reviews of Nonexistent Books. I encountered this book sometime in the early 80s and it was one of those books that “gets through” to one’s core—

at least it was for me.  The idea of nonexistent books was not new, of course, but what stands out now in my memory of all those “crazy” reviews, was the first one. It was a review of A Perfect Vacuum. In it, the critic asserts that “…A Perfect Vacuum turns out to be a tale of what is desired but is not to be had. It is a book of ungranted wishes.” The critic argues that the only counterattack against such a view would be “…the assertion that it was not I, the critic, but he himself, the author, who wrote the present review and added it to –and made it part of –A Perfect Vacuum.

This is a good example of the liquefaction of traditional literary standards, with Lem asserting the value of “something else.”

And what comes flooding into my memory now is a poem I made such a point of in Psyche Speaks, Lorca’s Cassida of the Rose

 

The rose

Was not searching for the sunrise:

Almost eternal on its branch,

It was searching for something else.

The rose

Was not searching for darkness or science:

borderline of flesh and dream,

it was searching for something else.

The rose

Was not searching for the rose.

Motionless in the sky

It was searching for something else.

 

 

 

Lorca knew—

as did Machado

 

Between living and dreaming

there is a third thing.

Guess it.

The NEXT Method

One of the first courses I taught in university was “Theories of Learning.” The most common question among students whenever I taught this course, was “how can I learn better.” This question was not confined to the course material; the discussion showed that this was a general life question. So, I made a point of teaching to this question. The key was always to increase the degree of active learning. Many such strategies were easy to generalize from the learning theory the students were learning, and the students became more adept at becoming active learners not just in class, but in other ways reported by them.

One of my favorite ways of active learning I taught was what I called the Next Method. The basic idea is simple, but the range of application is unlimited. Suppose I give you the first sentence from an introduction I wrote on science and psychology for a book entitled Contemporary Readings in Psychology, edited by John Foley, Russell Lockhart, and David Messick, and published by Harper & Row, in 1970. This was a “reader” to accompany introductory psychology texts and the articles selected were ones on the cutting edge of the field at the time and were not yet incorporated into current psychology texts. For the three editors, it was our first book publication.

The first sentence I wrote was this:

Most introductory textbooks do not give much information

about what is happening at the frontiers of the field.

Now imagine you are the student and instead of just reading on, I ask you to write the next sentence. Students invariably balk at this assignment, claiming that how could they know what to write if this is something they are supposed to be learning? Fair enough. So, then I begin to raise questions. Did you understand that first sentence? Everyone says “yes.” Does the sentence seem beyond your capacity? Everyone says “no.” Can you imagine yourself writing a “next” sentence? Here the responses become uncertain. “How is this learning?” one student might ask. “I would be writing what I already know.” “Yes,” I answer and tell them about tacit knowledge, the knowledge they already have but likely do not know they have. And then I talk about how they can now compare their own second sentence with the author’s second sentence. What is the same or similar? What is different or unexpected? Do they actually learn something? What? At this point, the whole process becomes engaging in a way that is surprising in many ways.

I have used this method with analytic candidates in relation to dreams and dream work as well as in understanding texts. Imagine, for example, hearing the first sentence of a dream and being asked to supply the next. Or consider some book or essay of Jung’s and follow this procedure. Or with a novel you are reading. Or a poem. I have used this method in many ways and continue to do so even now. It is a powerful and rewarding method and I encourage you to give it a try. And, I find it endlessly entertaining!

Let’s start with an old quote (do quotes grow old? Do they suffer and die?) from a wise old owl (do owls grow old? How about grow wise? Or are they born that way?) Already I feel some slippage… Here ’s the quote:

this interpenetration of psyche and world verges on the very definition of madness: the incapacity to distinguish and keep separate inner and outer reality… how could we have any rational discourse if we start to break the [grammatical] rules?

Or ]grammatical[ rules?

Scene 7 gives us a clear answer: we can’t have any rational discourse if we break those rules! So what kind of narrative can Scene 7 be? A clue lies in the quote. Inner and outer reality begin to lose their separateness. It may still be possible to distinguish inner from outer. After all, the narrative names the characters and they talk among themselves in such a way that we can tell who is inner and who is outer, at least to some degree, sort of, well, maybe, and maybe not. Even the distinction begins to blur when we learn of the entanglements taking place. So how is such a breakdown between inner and outer—the very definition of madness—to be navigated? First of all this breakdown is a breakdown of the real, which up till now has utterly depended of the inner/outer separation. How does this breakdown of the real manifest? Well one compelling example lies in the growing tendency to collapse speech with concrete action. Posting “hate speech” is now the same as concretely engaging in a terrorist act, for example.

How to navigate the surging flood as the barrier between inner and outer collapses? Scene 7 shows that it’s no good hanging on to this or that orange crate, as Leonard Cohen warns us, in the hope of certainty or fixity. You have to go with the flow of words. I think maybe we have to regard the flow as somehow the new reality—the point of the breakdown of the old reality. Be a kayak perhaps. Categories are bursting their banks and cannot hold reality-as-flow any more.

I used to surf a lot as a young man. We all surf the net now. Perhaps these activities are a kind of preparation for what is to come!

WARNING!  WARNING!  WARNING!  WARNING!  WARNING!  WARNING!

 

The Coming of the Left Outs

 

When Paco and I decided to make Fex & Coo available, we knew we had to “choose” from the mass of material. So, we chose a way that had some semblance of a “linear” storyline. Of course, I use “semblance” in the sense of giving the appearance of something that it really isn’t. So, essentially, we “pretended” at order. This was the basis of leaving out much that had been written. What we have come to now is that this is not fully in the spirit of the Fex & Coo project. So, we aim to do something about this. And what we are going to do is now publish what we can call the “left outs,” that is, all the material that has been written but not so far been available. Please do not expect any linearity or any other “arity.” The only thing we aim for is that these coming left outs will provide you as much enjoyment as they have provided us in writing them.