It’s rare for readers to get such a glimpse into an author’s inward process in creating a book (September 24, 2021 at 10:28 AM ). So thanks for that, Russ! Such a description really demonstrates the intimate relationship between soul and language, psyche and literature, which I have explored for some decades, after an initial discussion with Russ around 1994, when he said to me that etymology and psychology had been sundered at some point (19th C.?) to the detriment of both fields. Well, this was a shocking new thought for me but I was attracted like a magnet. The first thing to do of course was write an essay to help clarify the issue.
Books and essays followed as I worked to understand how literature reflects psyche. I was convinced that certain forms of literature become possible only when new configurations of psyche are noticed and privileged by culture. For example I am told that Homeric literature shows examples in which characters are astonished by any display of personal emotion. This literary fact indicates that in Homeric Greece, emotions or interiority belonged to the gods and we received them as such at that time. We did not privilege personal interiority. In our time, with its radically different style of consciousness, literature that describes our personal interiority or that of others is simply taken for granted.
This is a brief background to my insistence that the literary form of Fex and Coo points to another configuration in the psychic background that we may learn to privilege as a culture i.e. when the culture feels the enormous significance of this shift in the psychic background. I have been trying to persuade others for years about this. But confusions abound, as Russ notes in his post re: some responses to his description:
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.
Something very similar happened re: some responses to the form of the Red Book as I note in my essay The Hidden Legacy of the Red Book:
For example, Hillman and Shamdasani’s attention is drawn to the creation of the Red Book. Did Jung write while experiencing his encounters or afterwards, upon reflection?
JH: I wanted to ask you about that. Does he record as it happens? Or does he record after he’s had the dialogues? Because when I did active imagination myself long ago most of it was done as it happened. So it was a writing, in a way. Some of it was not. Some of it was a conversation, interior, and then I would write it – recapture it – by writing.
SS: This is one of the imponderable questions of which I’ve hit my head against the wall for many a year now in that it’s hard to make a decision on this. Certain segments of the text give the sense that he sees a dramatic sequence and then notes it down, whereas certain other segments of the text appear to unfold in the writing.
JH: Unfold in the writing as a flowing dialogue. (See p 22 of my essay)
I can see something similar here to Russ’ description of his process. Hillman and Shamdasani are struggling to comprehend a new form of literature in Jung’s case. I believe this is a struggle to understand a new configuration of psyche/world that literary forms like Fex and Coo are expressing/describing but which, at this time, is unrecognisable to our culture.
In a word, this is the Coming Guest! We have yet to understand it enough to privilege this form as a cultural form that can articulate and maintain a new world of appearances and perhaps steer us from our present terminal trajectory.
It may be too late…