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.
John’s commentary has such a terrific punch in how he describes what may happen ‘at the threshold’, the place where, as he says, ‘the language/outer reality disjunction collapses, and where the “new” may appear’. The trick for all of us is to figure out how to cross that boundary without fear and meet the ‘other’ as easily as does Fex and Coo. And I agree with John that how we see the other depends on meeting the other with love and not fear. But that is a mighty task for most of us. Because it depends so much on whether we accept these images, these ‘ghosts’, as both real and in search of an answer from us. If we fail to answer, we suffer more and more. But do they suffer as well? John and Russ say yes. As John so eloquently reminds us: “The suffering becomes more intense the more we cling to time…” In my more simplistic imagery, I have always felt these figures, these images, if held at bay, act as if they were condemned prisoners begging for an audience with the ‘judge.’ And if this audience is not granted, they do not go quietly into that good night but magnify their suffering onto our souls until embraced with Eros, as both Russ and John suggest. I send this poem as an expression of what I am trying to say.
LOS DESAPARECIDOS (The Disappeared Ones)
Creeping come the condemned.
Like droplets of deep indigo spreading across the earth,
like planchets of bubbling silver,
hardly are they born into existence
then they are entombed in the tight necklaces
of man’s determined justice.
For the cost of a carp
they were betrayed.
Sold into oblivion
with the ease of a lie.
Sentenced in absentia
always to exile
and always in perpetuity.
And so down the road
come the disappeared ones-
los desaparecidos.
By ones and twos
their strident steps break
the ground clutching at their feet,
claiming for themselves what they already own.
And like grass withering under the endless drought,
no one sees the brown burned leaves
from the impenetrable earth.
No one sees the door closing upon the dead.
But there is always an end,
a termination,
a denouement.
And then there is just as always-
a beginning.
Oh the tyranny of that.
Each night those who sink from view
to immerse themselves in the past
leave behind oily shoes and stained gauze,
terrible glances and identical twins
to take their place, to fall right in line
without missing a step so that the only change
is the numberless increase in misery.
Like dead whales in the afternoon
and hungry kingfishers searching the failing light
and sad hawks flying, flying,
the disappeared ones come trailing across my eyes
asking me questions,
saturating me with doubt
as to where I belong, for or against
those moody ghosts, unrelenting
in their passion to know why.
As “an expression of what I wanted to say”, the poem is magnificent. Also when you say, “I have always felt these figures, these images, if held at bay, act as if they were condemned prisoners…” you added more depth to my dream of 1992 (in this post), thank you! All the best Talbino, John
Speaking of the other, I’d like to share the opening paragraph of a wonderful new book by Martin Savransky. It gave me to think of the pregnant experimentation that is Fex & Coo, those fertile explorations of, and within, language that might manage to keep things open and alive.
The book is entitled AROUND THE DAY IN EIGHTY WORLDS: POLITICS OF THE PLURIVERSE.
“Can one ever say when a book begins? Or when it ends? This one has, indeed, been long in the making. But, thinking back, it seems impossible now to pinpoint precisely when it began. It certainly did not begin when I started writing it. For the fact is that, if I started writing it, it’s only because it had already begun, in some other form, insisting in whatever else I was doing, making me hesitate, insinuating itself in the form of a generative problematic that, with the force of an imperative, turned me into its prey and compelled me to turn to it, to do what I could to develop it, to respond to its demand while intensifying the possibility that it could, in fact, be written…The book is ongoing and unfinished…much like the runaway philosophical and political experimentation that turned me into its means…
Excellent quote, thanks! It really shows how literature is trying to find a way of articulating the enormous flux (or uproar) at the threshold, as something entirely new strives to enter materiality through the (flawed–in my case!) human mouthpiece. This furore involves the transformation of space-time itself (reality) and your quote seems to describe the artistic effort to synchronise an art form with the new reality that is upon us. I struggled with my own writing along the same lines, finally describing it this way:
“A spontaneous weaving of realities that we normally keep well apart. My writing moves from a memory to a dream to a reflection of an external event, to an etymological study of a word, to the words of another author until the usual separation of inner and outer dissolves. The process involves memories of a kind of dual consciousness, interweaving of past, present and future, inner and outer reality, along with philosophical thoughts expressed in direct speech, which come to the author quite spontaneously.”
I try to stay faithful to the turmoil at the threshold as I write. My first attempt to write this way was in my doctoral program. At my dissertation “defence”, I was terrified that the Committee would turn me down saying something like, “go learn how to write…” Luckily I passed.
Thanks for your comment here.