Dear Russ, Paco, and John,

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?

In the spirit of detectives approaching a mystery, let’s gather some clues that drop from this latest episode of CD 38-Scene 4: 

Owl Man: Have no fear, my friends. The crows are seeding our future, and I believe it will have something to do with our modus operandi, our writing, our authoring, and our telling what needs telling. And that includes you, Chip. I can't be sure but that is my best sense. And now, I suggest we close our eyes and welcome whatever the crows have in mind for us as their gift from Dead Mountain, as they complete their fateful marching and return to their cloud.

Crows are of course oracles, birds of seers. Remember the crippled boy seer in Game of Thrones? He became a three-eyed crow and could overcome the arrow of linear time. The detective method I privilege here is based on noticing or being drawn to the anomaly and allowing connections to take place between anomalies. So, as soon as I read Owl Man’s enigmatic prophesying above, a memory guided me to another passage way back in Fex and Coo. But then a puff of wind drew me to another passage, several actually, occurring much earlier. So I had some busy moments gathering all these clues together:

Helen… resembled a prophetic bird/you’re looking down from above because you are birds/dive through the tunnel of the bird’s throat/we were surrounded by hundreds, even thousands, of birds/the birds were issuing a warning/they were saying that everything is melting, that we should be preparing for a phase of total liquifaction.

These few memory clues are echoes of a unrevealed mystery, much like—whoops, another one just flew in so I get out my detective’s magnifying glass (now called the “spotlight search function”). I remembered my work with Walter Benjamin who

gathered fragments to himself in such a way as to reveal the hidden thread linking them and placing them uniquely in this historical moment. In this way the shattered meaning underlying the fragmentation in our modern life could be revealed to the flâneur… (from my book Making New Worlds)

Benjamin seems to be a detective too! 

Drawing back for a moment, I survey the “crime” scene. These clues, being oracles, hint at a crime as yet in the future or AS A FUTURE, producing all these clues in our present, often appearing as anomalies in regularity. Something yet to happen has already left us clues, sensed by the birds, and other animals of course. And it constitutes a crime. The clues keep gathering, like birds—the conference of the birds, of course! But what crime is yet to be committed? Could it be in the nature of mystery itself to be a crime? I quickly consult my dictionary for another clue. “Against the law” leaps out. This clue must now join the others. So mystery breaks the Law! Laws describe the regularities of space-time. Vladimir Solovyov describes the fundamental law of our current space-time (materialism):

Anomalies are the statistical outliers, easy to ignore for the sake of regularity—that is, until they accumulate, or avalanche. They become our clues to the as-yet uncommitted crime.  Through them, mystery begins to reveal itself to the careful detective and to force itself on the unprepared. Mystery is against the Law and there is no going back…

The fundamental Law of our time, as described by Solovyov is the "cause" of the syntactical structure of our language and the root of all all our cultural practices, as well as the originator of our very self-definition. If it is successfully challenged by an accumulation of anomalies, then the entire Western culture goes under.

The Law of materialism is assailed on all sides by anomalies which are at the same time clues to the emerging Mystery.

See: The Coming Guest: Fountain Mouth

The birds prophesy “a phase of total liquefaction”. The ultimate Law breaker is upon us and...

WE ARE NOT READY!. 

Whim, Wham, Whimsy

Something done on a whim is considered capricious, without serious intent, or purpose. Much of Fex & Coo, Deathling Crown Lottery, the Cèilidh of Dreams, and Not in My Nightmare may be considered whimsical. There is much that is playful, fanciful, and humorous.

But let’s consider whimsy a bit deeper. Look at these synonyms:

unconventionality
 unorthodoxy 
singularity
 oddness
 queerness
 strangeness
 weirdness
 bizarreness
 quirkiness
 freakishness
extraordinariness
 peculiarity
irregularity
abnormality
 anomaly
 foible
idiosyncrasy
caprice
quirk

Without going into each of these words I want to claim them all as applicable in all their senses to what Paco and I have been doing in Fex & Coo. Notice the absence of rational, logical, reasonable, practical, useful, and other such terms. I feel like hugging the above synonyms for whimsy—much as I felt like hugging the unfinished statues of Michelangelo in the Academia in Florence. I was more taken with those figures struggling out of a stone than with the finished perfection of “the world’s greatest sculpture,” David.

So be it. The embrace of whimsy. 

Hi Russ,

You and Paco are a constant source of stimulation for me.  I met someone who said he was having some trouble with his memory.  And since you, me, and Paco are all getting up there, this poem irrupted.

The Door

He sat on the edge of the bed

waiting patiently for his memory to return.

He knew he’d find it again,

like the left shoe to

his dress-up brown wing-tips

that he liked to keep polished

more than any other pair.

They turned up again,

didn’t they.

Why not his memory?

How about the day he caught

his finger in the toaster

trying to fish out some burnt bread.

He remembered that alright!

Or last Thursday when someone introduced him

to someone who said he was supposed to know

but didn’t.

I am sure I never met that person before,

he remembered thinking.

I wouldn’t associate with someone who looked like that anyway.

Maybe he left his memory in his penny jar -

‘a penny for your thoughts’, he said out loud.

I’ve a penny but no thoughts.

What are they worth anyway if I can’t remember them?

Now let’s see, I’ve my

nice, polished brown wing-tip shoes on,

but where was I going?

He sat back down on the bed

to think it over.

He looked down at this shoes and asked them -

‘Do you know where we were going?’

Staring at them, he thought - I like my brown wing-tips

and don’t want to get them scuffed.

I think I’ll take them off.

Maybe they can find their way without me

if I put them by the door.

He looked at all the doors he had

and fell silent.

He looked down at his shoes and wondered

If they remembered which door to use.

His eyes drifted from the door to his shoes to his bed

and back.

And in that drifting,

he remembered what someone told him once:

that all you will ever need in this world

was a bed, a pair of shoes, and a door.

Dear Russ,

Full Disclosure: I have an abiding and increasing passion towards the mystery of love/desire and its relation to space-time. This passion orients me to COD in a particular manner.

In Episode 26, we learned that Xhactu is about to reveal the mystery of love to us humans. In previous episodes we had ventured into the mysteries of quantum reality, space-time, and so on. He begins by imparting some wisdom concerning desire:

Desire is bound to locality. And for this reason, desire itself, and its object are more and more bound to locality of time and space, Desire does not move out into the universe, but it is as if the universe concentrates itself in locality. This is why desire can drive one mad, no matter what kind of creature one may be.

("We can witness this truth in real time in the Depp/Heard trial that is currently running"—unbidden insertion!)

At the point that Xhactu is about to release his wisdom about love to us, the Universal Translator breaks down and we lose the pearls. I was bereft. But my imagination had been fired up by this absence and continued down the path of inquiry to connect love and space-time. Then the “Ask Xhactu” column appeared unexpectedly and … what? A question from "me" appeared there, much to my surprise. This surprise has the same quality in dreams at times when I am surprised by questions I asked in a dream or that another dreamer tells me about (i.e. “my” asking a question in their dream).

Here, “my” question is “what is the nature of love” and Xhactu answers:

—Dear John: Love is what you inferior Earthlings call “mush puppies.” We superior inter-galactics call “love” the Super-Glue of Everything (i.e., the gravitational field of dark matter)

Once again the connection between love and space-time is pressed upon me. Amazing! Now I felt I was on the scent of something important and therefore promptly forgot the whole matter—i.e. until this issue of COD 36-Scene2:

HERON MAN
Something's not right, Owl.

OWL MAN
Of course not, Heron. If everything was all right, time would just stop. You know as well as I do that it is something not right that keeps the next happening, thus the so-called flow of time in the direction of time's arrow. It's not really a flow but a jumping from next to next like steppingstones.

Another pearl was freely cast before this swine! I went right on reading ahead, desiring to get to the horror, as if nothing had happened but then I got pulled up. What WAS said back there on the stairs! I slowed down. My psyche was speaking to me… Psyche (Xhactu?) had once again connected desire, love, and space-time.

How can this be?

“Something not right” must have something to do with desire being bound to locality and forever seeking to extinguish itself in an object imagined as out of reach, in the future, over there on the next stepping stone. And so we jump from stepping stone to stepping stone, seeking the next happening, finding ourselves unexpectedly on another stepping stone but needing to making up stories about how we arrived there, based on our current understanding of there being an arrow of time.

("Once again, witness Depp and Heard on their current stepping stone in court"—another unbidden insertion!)

But now the $60 000 question: what happens if “everything was all right”, i.e. desire’s quest is stilled? The $60 000 answer given us is: “time would just stop”. What would one experience then? So, three questions now: how does desire get stilled? And what would the experience of space-time be then? And lastly how does love figure in this mystery?

If this, my story, appeals to you, fellow readers, you might story a response or maybe ask Xhactu!

Cheers, John

THE MYSTERY OF MYSTERY

I stopped watching television in 1998, when Seinfeld ended its nine-year run. 

In the fall of 2021, I had a dream in which I was watching a BBC crime show. When I worked on the dream, and looked at the offerings on BBC, I found myself attracted to a program called Vera. Vera began broadcasting in 2011 and continues to the present time. The series is based on the Vera novels by British author Ann Cleeves. As I began watching, I also began reading. Something about the crime genre hooked me and since then I have watched numerous other crime shows and read the novels or screenplays they were based on. 

This activity also brought to mind that as a kid I read a lot of mysteries and would also write my own stories and scripts.. When we got our first TV (1950), it also housed a record making turntable. The whole family participated in performing the scripts I wrote. I felt I was reconnecting with some important piece of myself left behind.

A subsequent dream pictured the title page of either a novel or screenplay entitled, Rule of 3. It also showed that this was an "Arlan Condon Mystery." Arlan Condon is one of the main figures in my novel, DREAMS: The Final Heresy (not yet finished). 

The majority of dreams this year have involved the mystery genre in various ways. some seemingly influenced by the books I've read or programs I have watched. But never in any sense just repetitions—always adding a twist or turn or phrase or simply a word. And others with content that is wholly new and different from anything I have read or watched but still enveloped within this realm of crime and mystery. I do not experience the insistence and persistence of this theme as evidence that I am not “getting” the message. Instead, it feels like an essential collaboration with “the other” prodding me with ideas and elements to take seriously in this task.

I am used to experiencing dreams as tasks and most of the things I have written or published have had their origin in dreams. Still, I am an old man now with much “on my plate” as they say. Lots of things to finish. At this rate I will run out of days before running out of things to finish. For some time I fought this “pressure.” No longer. I now consider it a bounty and I am learning to enjoy it. 

Dear Russ,