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)
John, thank you for your commentary on what I will call “doubling.” I am aware of the so-called superposition in quantum physics which refers to the adding of one quantum state to another to yeld yet a third quantum state which is ometimes referred to as doubling. This lonk to the quantum level is deliberate. I link it as wll to what Keats called negative capability, that “state” of holding two things together (like a conflict) until a third emerges as an enitrely new state.
Fex and Coo began in a similar state of two-ness: seeing and looking. And out of this, came a third thing, a novel. And, too, the novel is doubled not only by having two authors, but having a novel about two authors, who are writing a novel, aout a series of characers they are writing/acting together with. As one can sense from John’s comments, the ground gets a bit wobbly!
But the ground is inherently creative.
And this reminds me of what Jung observed: “We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a livinig thing implanted in the human psyche.” Is there a doubleness here? Is Jung really saying this as reality, or is he sayng it as reality (in John;s sense) or only as a way to think about it?