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 21st 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 21st 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…
To form a “picture” of the genesis and manifstation of Fex & Coo requires tending the phenomenology of intention. In Tulley’s, my conscious intention was to follow Goethe’s admonition to “look” at what one “sees” and find the “story” there. What I saw was rather banal and everyday seeing: trucks, banks, windows, pillars, etc. Wht made this experience unusual was my intention to “look” as Goethe had admonished, and in the looking to “find” the story there. Note, this was not an admonition to “make up a story,” as one do if prompted in some way. From whence comes this “finding.” I recall the experience vivedly, now, 10 years later. As I waited in a statte of openness to whatever would come, I “heard” the words, “Sal is a teller at Lling Bank.” It was not my conscious effort to find the story. My conscious effort was directed at achieving that state of opennes so that–hopefully–some sense of story would come. And there it was, in that first line. What I saw as SALE, upon looking became SAL, and as I waited, SAL became a CHARACTER. None of this had any intention on my part. Once I was in this space of openness, the rest of those initial words “flowed.” There was no effort to make up anything, no effort to figure something out. None of that. It was as if a faucet had opened an words poured out. My intention, to the extent I had any, was to write out what was coming in this flow of words.
What has haunted me since this experience and all that has come from it, is teh question: whose intention created those first words and all that followed? To say it was “my unconscious,” is quite unsatisfying partly because the idea is so general it does not illuminate the “author” of those words in any way–even it was some aspect of “my” unconscious. The usual personae of the unconscious, the personages of the complexrs, do not seem to be ready sources of illumination either.
I worked on this issue in two blog posts which I think would be useful to read if you have not done so and to read again to be reminded of what I wrote. Go the the blog site (ralockhart.coom/WP) and put dreamsmithing in the search box. Two posts will open. Please read both.
Shortly I’ll continue with further reflections in response to John’s comments.