Response to Paco

Paco’s enlivening post addresses his experiences of the reality of living matter. As I eagerly read it,  two vivid memories were released: In my book Anomaly I share an amazing quote by J. Elliott who visited a Sufi Temple in Afghanistan. Here is what he experienced as he gazed at the Arabic script on a wall:

What appeared from a distance to be the shading within these shapes was in fact a mosaic of angularly stylized Arabic characters, with each character itself composed of tinier tiles. ... the mosaics themselves depicted verses from the Qur’an ... Something was getting under my skin as my eyes roamed the walls. I had a feeling that this was different from any art I had ever seen. And in that cold, lowering dusk, in that shabby courtyard, where the tile work is a third destroyed, a ray of meaning seemed to leap from the walls. It was as if they had suddenly become articulate and, shedding for a moment their almost formal precision, began to dance and weave with meaning. ... This was not the art of decoration but of sacred ciphers, in which the onlooker is invited to participate, not merely stand in awe, and decode the patterns according to his means. (142)

The second memory has to do with the publication of the Red Book. Ulrich Hoerni is Jung’s grandson and acted as a guardian of the Red Book during the weeks of high quality scanning that took place prior to publication. While he was alone in the room with the book, he dreamed that the Red Book was on fire. He was alarmed and had to assure himself that the book was safe. I was surprised by his sole interpretation of his dream, as well as by the apparent lack of alternative interpretations offered by his colleagues at the time. Surely, I thought, the most obvious interpretation would be that he received a glimpse of the living Red Book, aglow with spiritual fire. But no, apparently not!

These examples of living matter seem related to Paco’s experience:

Though I had already closed my eyes, I was still “seeing” pages of text. The sheet I envisioned, however, was moving—“crinkling and glimmering,” as if some “ingredient” was being revealed to me, something buried in the laminae of the (imagined) paper itself, as it were. It was as if little flares were dancing up and down, or candles flickering in a cave.

All three examples seem to me to point to the reality of living matter, i.e. matter that is pliable enough to be inscribed with meaning from “beyond”,  like a stamp into wax. Maybe with these three examples side by side like this we can begin to wonder about our current plight. Living matter is impressionable! In this condition of impressionability, we can receive, remember, and then “speak” messages from the “other side”. But now for us moderns, matter has become hardened (materialism) so that any incursion from otherness is blocked from the outset. We can no longer receive the messages. 

Our isolation increases and the message-bearers become more desperate “to get through”. 

Fex and Coo is an example of writing that emerges from the fluid living matter of Russ’ and Paco’s psyches as they open up and receive the messages from “elsewhere” as Russ says, becoming mouthpieces for a greater voice that has impressed its life on them.