Russ, your penchant for whimsy, silliness, and all the other synonyms you unearthed—insofar as they lead to moments of innocent humor and joy—will always be welcome guests in this world we stand to inherit or bequeath. [See Russ's post Whim, Wham, Whimsy]
In fact, I am grateful to have a comedy-mask to wear, in between my Saturnine stints of wearing a tragedy-mask while tracking vectors of doom-and-gloom. But even such a comic interest—if set against our many crises in social, political, and economic systems, our endless recourse to military “solutions,” our religious manias, guns, our terribly confused categories, our deep conflicts over self-governance, and so forth—comic interest, as I say, must work up a fine sweat to avoid brain-shutdown.
But that’s exactly what I’ve been experiencing recently, a kind of brain-shutdown in the face of crisis overload. I’m not proud of it, not bragging about it, but I’m sure I’m not alone. In fact, I would guess that a great many people, whether they realize it or not, are undergoing something similar. In my opinion, this is a new psychological syndrome for which we have no name.
This is not a scientific diagnosis, of course. I ran no studies, calculated no statistics, invoked no theory. Nor did I eschew feelings and intuitions, the way scientists often do (cf. James Hansen’s references to scientific reticence). Quite the contrary, I revel in those unorthodox functions. I feel that, believe it or not, they ground me.
At any rate, for several days I found myself shambling around like one of Stephen King’s zombies, my mind seemingly blank, unable to write, lurching hither and yon, preoccupied with peripheral matters, wondering what’s happening now, and so forth.
Without a name, our new syndrome—a word derived from the Greek compound for “running together”—is bound to sneak up from behind and catch us flat-footed. That may sound like hyperbole, but the “shutdown,” or whatever it was I underwent, really did occur. I thought I was immune to such conditions—but apparently not.
And if my appraisal was accurate, many people would be suffering a virtual derangement, some worse than mine, thanks to this widespread phenomenon. That does not bode well for our ability to come to terms with the Approaching Unprecedented.
In this context, a neologism—a newly coined word or expression—spontaneously occurred to me when I realized what was happening to me. It was unbidden, as we say. The term was ecotastrophe. The word had a certain cachet attached to it, like a form of prestige. It even gave the appearance of having been torn apart and then stitched back together again as if it had gone through a battle. I’m not offering it as a blockbuster, exemplary coinage, just a simple sample of a complex process. It just came to me, with that creative autonomy of words which allows us to connect with the deeper agencies—the word wisdom—we all carry somewhere in our depths, whether we know it or not.
As a simple sample, ecotastrophe at least gets the ball rolling, like Jung’s spontaneous stone-carving of the bear rolling a ball, which he “saw” in the stone and executed in his garden—brought to life, we might say.
Jung has already trodden this unblazed, neologistic trail by coining the term “the Coming Guest,” which I take as his expression for the unknown “thing” that is happening to the world—a stunning choice, in my opinion.
And decades ago, Russ, you determined that, whatever else it may imply, the image of the Coming Guest resonates with the archetypal principle of Eros. That was forty years ago, and I see nothing since then to unwind that spool of yarn that you spun so skillfully. The need for more neologisms today is all the greater.
My call for neologisms is an invitation to our readers to carry out what amounts to their own active imagination in words, opening up to the psychic layers below consciousness. There we enter the train station, perhaps, where dreams come chugging in to greet us. There is where words well up, to take their place in the sun.
I don’t know if anything will come of this experiment, but I know how powerful words can be. So did the Greeks, who, long before the New Testament was written, understood that Logos and Sophia were virtually identical—both standing for the creative feminine wisdom-aspect of God.
So, dear readers: What shall we call this new, unprecedented syndrome? What neologisms come to your mind? Will you share them on our website?
From Estela:
Paco, you talk about your experience of “brain shutdown” as a result of the “crisis overload” we are all experiencing now. There are days when I feel like I’m experiencing secondary PTSD just from following the daily news of suffering and darkness. It can be very difficult to maintain a playful spirit and one’s sense of humor within the daily round of tragedy and corruption. So I can certainly relate to what you are saying.. You mention that your feelings and intuition (unorthodox functions) have helped to ground you during this tumultuous time of destabilization and uncertainty. It seems to me that it is the “unorthodox functions” that can help us center ourselves in a way that enables us to observe things from a deeper level in order to have a better sense of how to process and/or respond to what is occurring around us. Not an easy thing to do when so much is collapsing and things are unpredictable.
You say that we need new words – “neologisms” – to refer to what we are experiencing at this unprecedented time. The word “ecotrastrophe” rose up for you from the deeper psychic word ground. The word that spontaneously rose up for me as I read your words was “psychotrauma,” a word that speaks to the experience of being assailed by crises on a daily level. It’s a rather clinical word and I wonder if there is a more poetic way to express the experience at a root level.
In both of your posts, Russ and Paco, I sense something of the shadow play of the light and the dark – a kind of Duende experience that is reflected in your writing. This kind of psychic movement is necessary for the birthing of something new. The task, it seems, is to hold this tension in order for the “new” to be creatively birthed.
Paco, recently I’ve experienced an influx of ‘undead’ imagery in my dreams and synchronicities, mainly in the form of vampires. As I was reading your post I felt a connection between this cluster of images and the ‘zombification’ or ‘brain shutdown’ you describe. I’ll recount a few of them as context for a ‘neologism’ which you called for.
First I have to mention the book Holy Wedding by Remo F Roth, in which the author takes up the unanswered questions Jung and Pauli were focussed on, with Pauli in particular stressing the need for a ‘new type of law’ which neither physics nor depth psychology had the words for.
As its name suggests, the book centres on the ‘coniunctio’ and in it Roth offers to my mind a compelling reinterpretation of the Rosarium Philosophorum. A key step in the coniunctio – which Roth argues Jung missed – is the creation of the ‘raven’s head’ which corresponds to the blackening/abandonment of the mind/thinking or what he calls the logos ego in order to reach the state of the ‘Eros ego’ which is ‘located’ in the belly (with what he calls the eros self/matter-psyche/the world soul being spread out everywhere). Ultimately Roth proposes that the Star of David symbolises an exchange of energy which occurs back and forth between logos (located in the head) and Eros (in the belly) and which ‘breaks the law of conservation’, at least on a ‘psychophysical’ level. Symbolically or in alchemical language this can be called the death of the king into earth, and subsequent rebirth. The result is the creation of the subtle body. Apologies for the gross oversimplification, this message is becoming longer than I expected.
A great many of my dreams and synchronicities seem to relate to the theme of the coniunctio, and I think of the recent images of the ‘undead’ in this way.
In part of a recent dream I am sat opposite a man called the gambler. I notice that I have become part Carey Muligan. Then I notice he looks a bit like her too. She is moving back and forth between us so that the three of us are blended between the two bodies. (Due to Remo Roth’s work I tentatively associate Carey Mulligan with the ‘world soul’)
Shortly after I saw a movie poster for The Dig, a film starring Carey Mulligan – I decided to watch it. The film retells the story of the famous Sutton Hoo archeological digs on which an ancient ship burial was uncovered. Placed in the middle were a small number of artefacts, including the so called Sutton Hoo helmet – thought to be that of a king. I was left with the impression that the film spoke the process of the coniunctio. The ‘old king’ (thinking/rationality) had died and been buried, and now retrieved. The next morning I had the following dream:
I am in a kind of dome shaped barn with Carey Mulligan. She has just acquired the barn and will be renovating it. She starts to pull away the insulation which had been installed to reveal the original brick and is incredibly enthused as she goes. As I look up at the top of the barn I notice that it is in the shape of the Sutton Hoo helmet. I look toward the front part of the space, the is a long table which will eventually be set in an extravagant manner and be the setting for a large celebration. Now I’m looking around on the floor – I see some boxes. One of them contains a Spider-Man costume. There are many bubble letters cut from coloured pieces of card scattered around the place. I’m picking them up one by one and trying to decipher what they mean. I look up and see that Carey is eagerly creating a huge pile of these letters at great speed by using her both arms in a shovelling motion. The letters will be distributed in envelopes, a few each at random to a group of people – together the letters make a coherent message.
Another film I felt drawn to watch recently is The Crow – the story of a couple, Eric and Shelly, who are both killed and buried side by side. A magical crow then comes and resurrects Eric so that he is able to exact revenge on their killers. Ultimately the couple are both brought back from the dead.
Shortly after I am sitting in a spot I often go to in the cemetery. The bench caught my eye once as I walked by -specifically the surname of the woman it is dedicated to – Hara. Of course this is ‘belly’ in Japanese and refers to the lower chakras in certain spiritual traditions. As the sun set, a solar powered light came on by one of the graves and grabbed my attention, so I went to look. It was the grave of a Mrs Sheila Hara. Just behind her grave was her husband Eric’s. The solar light was the only one to be seen.
After reading your post Paco – and with these reflections and more in mind – I went to bed and asked for a neologism. The following morning I woke up with the words ‘the nausoleum’. In the context of what I’ve written, I’m tempted to consider the ‘zombification’ you describe as a kind of immune response from the sick world soul. She is nauseous – something wants to come up (from the belly) – and to do this our old king, thinking/materialism/rationality needs to be given up. If we don’t go willingly – and we show no signs of doing so – then it will happen by force.