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?
Hi John,
Your observations about Fex & Coo are fascinating. Thanks so much for all your efforts. I’m tempted to apply the term “exegesis” to your comments. Normally, I’m sure you know, exegesis refers to explanations, interpretations and close examinations of biblical texts, and so forth.
For your comments, though, I think we need a deeper designation—exegesis, but in the old sense. The pre-Christian, Greek root suggests a more tolerant, more forgiving range of usages than Christian theologians were inclined to give it. The compound word, then, comes from the Greek ex-, “out of” + hegeisthai, “to lead, guide.”
That’s more like it. To lead or to guide out of. So THAT’S what you were doing.
So often we hear people say, “It was just a dream.” Who among us—those of us who attend to dreams, at least—hasn’t heard that? Or this chestnut: “Dreams are garbage.”
But your words have reminded me, John, that for many years now my view of dream images, characters, scenes, etc.—the content of dreams—has flown in the face of the common assumption that dreams are “nonsense.” Due to some peculiarity in me, it seems that I was destined, since birth, to number among those rare birds for whom dream reality took on, over the years, a kind of hyper-reality that our culture has for centuries denied.
Basically, that’s what you are pointing out: The dreamy, the fictive, the imaginal—all seem to have a degree of reality attaching to them that our culture does not acknowledge.
As I understand it, there are still a few of us who work the borderlands, willing to live in doubt and uncertainty.
The gestures in your writing, as usual, are delightfully subtle and profound.
Thanks, John.
Paco
Hi Paco, thanks for your comment here. I just want to add a little about what I called the Law of Manifestation in my post, for other readers—for example the appearance of the Mount Blanc pen. This and other passages of Fex and Coo are descriptive of a reality in which things can and do manifest in this way. This is not made-up fiction in the traditional sense of “not really real”. There are some famous historical examples. For example, in MDR Jung describes the manifestation of his Seven Sermons and the phenomenology is stunningly similar to that of the manifestation of the pen in Fex and Coo (appearances that defy the inner/outer disjunction, great tension, revelation of normally hidden connections…) Keep in mind there are two realities he describes just like the structure of Fex and Coo. There is the comng into being of the Sermons and there is Jung’s faithful writing out on paper what is manifesting to him. Same as the Red Book by the way.
Another example comes from the life of Wolfgang Pauli who collaborated with Jung for many years. He seemed to have been a medium for the strangest manifestations throughout his life. I explore these in more detail in my essay:
THE 3 AND THE 4: The Emergenc(y) of the Unknown Future at: https://www.academia.edu/43343770/THE_3_and_THE_4_Emergenc_y_of_the_Unknown_Future_2020_
All these examples are early signs, or if you like, small trembles in advance of an imminent appearance that is already shaking up the foundations of our global culture at an unbelievable scale.
And it has to do with this Law of Manifestation.
Hi John,
Thanks for your deep and subtle observations.
I followed the link you provided in your latest reply to my comment, and re-read your essay on “The 3 and The 4.” I first read that essay last year, and it impressed me then. Now, reading it again, I find that it continues to gain in depth and relevance. Or is it possible that I myself have just sunk to greater, more squalid depths over the past year—reading the mind-numbing reports about Trump, COVID, Q-Anon, the Proud Boys, etc. I’m amazed at what I’m seeing, as I ponder the mounting degradations reserved for what we call “the future.” Anyone who is not disturbed by conditions today “is not paying attention,” as the saying goes.
I agree with your observations about the 3 and the 4, John. I’m also wondering, whether the modern “emergence of the 4th dimension,” which you are proposing here—could also reflect a re-emergence of a deep, mythical psychology from pagan times, the times preceding the advent of the monotheistic, biblical religions. A lot of babies were thrown out with all the baths, in those days. Christians took over the power-structures of the Roman Empire, attacked the sacred places and practices of the pagan world and thus cemented their grip on power.
In other words, long ago the dynamic, patriarchal, Trinitarian-driven, Judeo-Christian Power of Three (let’s call it), supplanted the old pagan, matriarchal Power of Four (cf. for example, the four-sided, ithyphallic Hermes), in the forced collapse of the Old Gnosis and its intuitions. Jung spent much of his life recovering the psychological treasures of medieval alchemy—including the Axiom of María, devoted to the question of the 3 and the 4.
Two thousand years have brought us almost full-circle, to the doorstep of our current and greatest dilemma—the climate crisis: entering a Mass Extinction phase. The old religious and spiritual dispensations? —stale and corrupt. The Earth’s burgeoning population? —skyrocketing off-the-charts. And we? —we all scramble to bring forth ways and means of surviving our own foolishness.
Apparently, the advent of science from out of the body of Christianity, combined with the predicted rise of “the Anti-Christ,” is bringing about a resurgence of those old insights, as you rightly point out, though obviously they must be given new forms—somehow. It would be wonderful if Fex & Coo could play a role in “adumbrating” one of the new forms.
Plenty of work for all, especially those who, like you, underwent the torture of initiation, survived the ordeal(s), and emerged with a heightened endowment of vision and wisdom.
Thanks again, John. You have a unique voice.
Paco
Comment on John’s Post
John, your proposal concerning a new genre and comments on double-aspect authoring naturally raises the question of authorial intention. In the context of literary theory and criticism, concepts of authorial intention have been many and varied. From the beginnings of poetry and story and through the development of fiction and the novel, there is a range of ideas. At one end of the range, which may be considered the classical view, is that the text is fully determined by the author’s intentions. At the other end, and particularly since the “new criticism,” authorial intention is considered to have no significance. All meaning and value of the text are in the text. In between these extremes are various positions largely determined from their linguistic, historic, political, social, economic, psychological, geographic, or philosophical roots. All of this is no doubt relevant to some degree but I think it may be more important for our purposes to focus more intently on what we can consider from the text of Fex & Coo and the presence of the authors, whether they be Owl Man and Heron Man or Russ and Paco.
Prior to an appointment in downtown Seattle, I intended to go to Tully’s coffee shop, something I frequently did when in Seattle. I intended to reflect on Goethe’s distinction between looking and seeing and intended on writing out my reflections on my laptop. As a result of my experience of looking and seeing while at Tully’s, I wrote a few words of “story” from the difference in what was seen and looked at. After this little bit of story, my intention was to send this to Paco as an example. I did so. So far, in all of this, there was no intention to write “the story” beyond the small example. As you can see, there is a piling up of intentions all prior to anything relating to the text of Fex & Coo. If any of these intentions had been truncated or abandoned, there would be no Fex & Coo. Something else perhaps. This only illustrates the complexity of a stream of intentions central to the genesis of a novel or other form–all before one gets to the question of the author’s intention in the writing.
One observation I noted but did not say anything about before. In seeing the various elements while sitting there at Tully’s, I felt no “story” in them (FedEx, Costco, Sterling Bank, Key, Bank, Sale, etc.). It was only after “looking” did the story begin to flow. I felt this was what Goethe was talking about. This no doubt has something to do with triggering the imagination. I did not experience “making up” the story piece I sent to Paco. It came to me, presented itself, and I wrote it out. 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. I would like to find some words that would differentiate these two modes. I’ll work on that.
I got back from Paco a two-page continuation of what I had started in my little fictional snippet. I had not expected this–I had not expected anything really. But this continuation struck something deep in me, a chord that sung out a resounding YES. In Paco’s continuation, the setting (Tully’s) was set, Sal was there muttering to himself, his boss, the “bitch,” Miss Jolene Baker-Tomlins made me laugh out loud at her name, he left the bank for Tully’s encountered the delivery trucks, and a new figure, an old man looking like an owl. I knew at once this was me, though not yet named, “Owl Man,” and he was writing a novel. All of this pulled at me. It was not the idea of writing a novel at all, it was to “enter” into this scene and begin to write out what would come to me, as the fictional snippet came to me, and send off to Paco.
My experience of writing out my first continuation is not easy to describe. I have to say something like my identity became multiple. I, like myself, was writing, but what I was writing was a fluidity of experience, a flow of identity oscillating between myself and this new author who became Owl Man writing a novel as it became real. I do not experience much like this in novels I read, so perhaps it is, as John says, a new genre.
As I started to write this comment, I also began to read Stephen King’s new novel, Billy Summers.
It is about an assassin who only kills bad guys. He takes one last job and his “cover” is as someone who is writing a book. He has never written anything but starts to fill out the cover story. What he writes becomes part of the King’s novel and in the writing, Billy discovers an unknown voice: his childhood self.
I am fascinated with the implications that develop.
To John, Paco, and Russ: it seems to me that each of you is breaking new psychic and imaginal ground by your specific comments. Each of your comments hits me from a different angle, sort of like standing in the surf and getting knocked over from waves coming from three independent directions, or maybe coming from three separate seas, or maybe from standing simultaneously on three separate beaches. I feel that all is possible since what happens at the sub-atomic level cannot be held static. Ever since Louis de Broglie introduced the idea that particles, such as electrons, could be described not only as particles but also as waves, the idea has driven the evolution of quantum mechanics and, I think, life as well. This profound idea stimulated Richard Feynman’s famous thought experiment which predicted that even a single electron could behave as both a particle and a wave. Feynman went on to say that this phenomenon “has in it the heart of quantum physics [but] in reality, it contains the only mystery.” How could Feynman’s idea be explained? The two possibilities were that a) particles change their nature depending on what happens to them (sort of like Fex and Coo); i.e., sometimes they could be wave-like and sometimes particle-like; or more weirdly b) these particles always have a mix of both wave and particle-like traits. In 2012, several teams of teams of researchers showed that electrons/photons took the weirder route: that they are waves and particles all the time, and don’t just change from being one to the other depending on what’s done to them. So it has been suggested that we should not think of these particles in everyday terms. We should think of them as members of the quantum world and thus unlike anything familiar. This is what I glean you are all saying about Fex and Coo. They inhabit a quantum world that actually does make up the imaginations of the writers and the characters, and nothing in that world can be predicted because the rules there are different, if there are any rules at all that we can make sense of. And for this ambiguity between life and imagination, and the unpredictable interactions of the two, I am very thankful. What is happening in Fex and Coo appears to be happening on multiple intercalating planes and what is happening to to the writers, the characters, and the reader is undefinable but feels so very natural.
From Estela: I have been following the posts on A NEW STRUCTURE OF REALITY initiated by John Woodcock and find that there is much to ponder. First, John’s emphasis on what has appeared as a continuous thread through Fex & Coo described as the “threshold,” and
“. . . the ‘place’ where the language/outer reality disjunction collapses, and where the ‘new’ may appear.” This idea/image is quite evocative in terms of where the ego self finds itself in the novel’s unfolding process. It appears to leads us to a juncture where we can move from a known level of reality into one which is unknown. John describes the attitude that is needed by the ego self in order to move into this unknown territory so that one is able to meet the new. A lack of “fear, letting go, surrendering, and opening up to the other” allows us to welcome the figures that come from this other place with “love or eros,” and accept them as they “present or appear,” much like Baucis and Philemon did with the beggars.
This opening of the ego structure to the unknown and the other seems similar to how Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes her approach to storytelling and the stance of the ego in relation to the story. In particular, she talks about one of the oldest ways of telling as being “a passionate trance state wherein the teller . . . enters a state in the world between worlds, where a story is ‘attracted’ to the trance-teller and told through her.
The trance-teller calls on El Duende, the wind that blows soul into the face of listeners. A trance teller learns to be psychically double-jointed, through the meditative practice of story, that is training oneself to undo certain psychic gates and ego apertures in order to let the voice speak, the voice that is older than the stones. . . . The teller never knows how it will all come out, and that is at least half of the moist magic of story.” (Women Who Run with the Wolves, p. 19.)
John’s statement about the struggle that occurs at the threshold reminds me of Duende, the spiritual force that Federico Garcia Lorca talks about which brings something new, via the struggle between the light and dark, into existence.
Russ’ experience with Goethe’s idea regarding seeing and looking was a way to open up the psychic gate and ego aperture to the imagination, which then led to the creative flow of Fex & Coo. The “voice” in Fex & Coo came through the Agatha Christie (Snake) pen, which was activated by Russ’ relationship with Jasmine through some kind of energetic transference and configuration. There is a definite shift at this point in the novel, as though something new has come into existence via the Law of Manifestation that John talks about. The shift in perception and resulting altered state of consciousness that Russ experienced by “looking” opened the channel to the creative imagination.
Paco’s statement about the re-emergence of “ a deep mythological psychology from pagan times” feels true. It seems to parallel Este’s comment about stories and “the voice that is older than the stones.” The old gnosis connected us to the wisdom that enabled us to live and thrive within a larger field of consciousness of which we are a part, similar perhaps to Indra’s Net where every facet is reflected in all the others. This idea/image most likely leads us to the quantum leve