FEX & COO

I want to pick up on a thread running though Fex and Coo. I think this thread is crucial to our time and how we navigate towards a very uncertain future. Russ condenses this thread to a concise statement:

there is "something" in the deep psyche that yearns for expression and struggles to "language" such expression. This is true of all the deep arts that go beyond the mimicry of outer reality.

The struggle takes place “at the threshold”—a poetic but apt description of the topography of the phenomenon. This is the “place” where the language/outer reality disjunction collapses, and where the “new” may appear. Long ago I had this dream:

A man is getting tortured, strapped down spread-eagled in an imprisoning cage and hoisted up. I am desperately trying to help him. Time is running out and my anxiety over his fate is at a peak.

You can see how torture, torment, agony, anxiety, all of which belong to the phenomenon of  the threshold, are paired with “time running out” in this dream. Many years had to pass before I could catch up, in consciousness, with the speech of this dream. 

Compare this dream with a passage from Fex and Coo during an encounter between Owl Man and Jasmine at Tullys (EPfour 160ff):

In this manner, one small urban donut shop served, for a few moments at least, as a time-space portal for the spirit of language. It was as if, from the teeming ether, words tumbled through the moist Seattle atmosphere into the warm, redolent donut shop, where they were funnelled into the gleaming Mont Blanc pen, to flow in an unbroken stream onto the creamy page…. At that moment the door opened and Heron Man walked slowly into the shop. Looking once around the room, he stopped in mid-stride, like a heron wading in the shallows. The entire space seemed to be floating in a kind of gravitational suspense. No one spoke. Bussers held their black tubs in the air. Customers, in freeze- frame poses, held dripping jelly donuts in their fingers, mouths agape. 

This passage is also a vivid realistic description of the threshold and note the key detail that time in fact has “run out” or stopped. Note also there is a “teeming ether”, but there is no anxiety, no torture, no torment, just a tumbling of words onto the page, a fluid languaging emerging into existence—same threshold, very different experience of the threshold. In my dream, anxiety ruled the mood. In this passage from Fex and Coo, love pervades everything. At the time I was terrified of expression per se. I did not consider myself a writer in any way; it simply was not part of my self-image. Jasmine and Owl Man on the other hand are open “mouthpieces”. There is ritual recognition that a boundary was being crossed, that a taboo was being broken, but there was no fear of letting go, surrendering, opening up to the other as this guest began to speak easily through the Mont Blanc Pen.

The degree to which the other self-presents as distorted, deranged, horrible, in apparent agony and difficulty, depends utterly on the degree to which we can meet the other at the threshold with love, or eros and without fear! Here is a painting by Klee from his angel series, showing all the distortions, yet we are dealing with an angel that wants enter the human condition:

Klee: Angel Series

If we accept that time itself IS suffering, then approaching the threshold will feel like time slowing down to a singularity point (is this what Einstein was groping towards?) The suffering becomes more intense the more we cling to time, i.e our self-identity as temporal beings. Remember Jung’s vision of 1946 when he “died” and was travelling to a black granite temple? His temporal being was sloughing off as he approached:

I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me an extremely painful process… (MDR: Ch. “Visions”)

Fex and Coo, then is therefore a primer of how to approach the threshold from the human side in order to welcome the other as this other seeks to enter the incarnate condition, through us.

Fex and Coo began with a literary fragment (see Prologue) and, true to the German Romantic tradition, this fragment invites further imaginations, further gathering of related fragments, even literary criticism, that continue the conversation or story. This is why, I believe, Russ and Paco invite comments and posts—the very same practices of the early German Romantics. These practices were the Romantics’ effort to establish a relationship between language and reality that went beyond what the traditional (Platonic) view of  language could offer.  The Platonic view of language, which has lasted for millennia, treats language as an inferior copy of reality—static reality, unchanging thing-like reality—the kind of reality that has now hardened into materialism, stifling any new life that may seek to break into our ossified culture and revivify it.

And so our culture is dying! 

The Romantics shook up this view of language and reality with a revolutionary view of literary language as invention—meaning discovery/creation. So, a literary fragment like Fex and Coo attracts other fragments (call them interpretations, criticisms, poetry) that accumulatively begin to unfold an underlying invented (in the above sense) meaning. This method represents an entirely new approach to language and its relationship to reality. Language is no longer mimetic of static reality. Instead, language creates/discovers or, I would say, brings reality forward into being in its character as fluid, open-ended—a process! They had to find a way to language this fluid reality. Their literary method, if successful would revolutionise Western culture, bringing it into accord with the fluid nature of reality. It was, as we can see today, an unsuccessful cultural movement in this regard and we in the 21^st century are now paying the highest price for this loss.

Much of my own task has been to trace threads of the Romantic impulse into contemporary times. If you know how to look you can see these traces most vividly appearing in modern physics—quantum physics, cosmological physics and classical physics. You don’t need specialised knowledge in mathematics or experimental physics (although some helps a lot). But you do need the “eye” to see the soul movement informing the technical language that physicists are forced to develop in response to their brilliant and mystifying experiments. Staying true to their scientific observations, scientists struggle to formulate language that can render increasingly weird and mind-bending experimental results: worm-holes, black holes, entanglement, quantum foam, anti-matter, reversibility, thresholds…. The mathematics they use is image-free (Rutherford’s atom has long been surpassed by probability wave distributions) but scientists must still struggle to find an imaginal response in order grasp the ungraspable in communicable language. In this sense the Romantic tradition is continuing into the 21^st century via modern physics.

As we go further into Fex and Coo, we hear about, for example, “time-squirrels” disappearing down into the tunnel of the throats of birds, along with the suspension of the flow of  time. Russ and Paco have found a literary method to say the soul movement underlying and informing the technical yet figurative language that physicists have to use to stay linguistically  in accord with the fluid reality revealed by quantum mechanics.

In my judgment this method is what makes Fex and Coo a novel novel! There is much more here than the employment of literary conceit. Physicists use their technical language to reference physics’ objective reality—i.e reality remains external to language. Although they do claim that the observer is somehow implicated in the outcome, I doubt that any physicist would venture to mention an actual experience she had in that regard. And on the other hand many writers of good fiction offer us their fantasies of possible human experience of quantum states (Robert Heinlein’s “And He Built a Crooked House” is a great fanciful account of the 4th dimension) but neither would these authors claim to have actually experienced what they are writing about. (There are some powerful exceptions like C. G. Jung and Philip K. Dick—neither of whom considered themselves writers of fiction) . 

Fex and Coo is an original attempt, informed by, or rooted in, actual conscious experience of the reality that both physicists and fiction writers are merely talking about, i.e., the underlying fluid reality supporting and informing our ordinary world of static appearances. How do I know this? Well, my previous post Dream Reality is a hint, as are the other hints I posted in “Comments” and there are others which I will post too. Here is an advance methodological hint for those readers who care about this angle to Fex and Coo: look into the text, via the syntax of the story, phrases casually introduced, as well as the “invisible” structure of the story. Allow your mind to get twisted a little, as I suggested in “Comments” earlier.

More to come…

In this post I want to approach a truly remarkable feature of Fex and Coo from a somewhat circuitous path. I’ll begin with a dream I had in the early nineties:

A kindly blue-collar worker finds a copy of Walter Benjamin’s third book. for me. I want it but he says it costs $350. I try to find ways to negotiate the price. I go to another book store to see if they have it. I am driving and pull over quickly at a gas station, as three people call me to show me a small book by Benjamin. It shows beautiful illustrations along with his quotations. I want to have that one, too.

After this dream I was astonished to read that Benjamin’s greatest ambition was to: 

create a book consisting entirely of quotations. i.e. no commentary necessary! The fragments themselves would express the hidden thread that unites them… Walter Benjamin understood that from amongst the fragments of our modern lives, new forms could be achieved by finding the hidden thread that connects fragments in a new way—a way that creates the future.

At the time I also was fascinated by quotations and had pasted them all around my room. As far as I know, Benjamin never did create his book yet my dream shows a completed book of quotations by Walter Benjamin (see note at the end for my use of italics). And the dream also shows my dream desire to have that book. My waking response at the time was to write such a book—my Book of Quotations (I will send a pdf copy of this small book to any reader who wants it). But the point here is that there are now two real/real books—one written by Walter Benjamin, which he never wrote in his waking life, and my Book of Quotations which I did write in waking life, in response to my dream desire to have a copy of his Book of Quotations.

Now let’s return to Fex and Coo, which began with a literary fragment, “Fex and Coo”, noticed one day in ordinary waking life. This fragment begins a process/process of writing/writing a book/book. Now there are two real/real books being written/written—the real book being written by authors/participants Owl Man and Heron Man, and the real, finished book Fex and Coo which we readers are receiving in Episodes on the website as written by Russ and Paco. 

Can you see where this is heading? What is the relationship between the real book unfolding in the story and the finished real book we readers have access to in waking life? You can get many hints of a profound mystery at work here, for example in, yes, this quotation from Episode 5:

The questions hovered in the air like hawks riding thermals. At first, no one said anything. Then Owl Man spoke up. “Well, the first thing to keep in mind is that, yes, it is dream money.” “OK. I get that, Owl. But it is also real?” Owl Man paused, took a breath, then intoned solemnly, “Yes, it is also real money"...

More to come…..

(I use italics to distinguish the real from the real—distinguishable but not separable)

I found this poem riveting from the start, beginning with the image of "occipital light" -- i.e. the visual cortex active in the dream when our eyes 'out here' are closed.

Then to rise up in bed and at once know you're in a dream because of the physical STING OF THE AIR.  Dreams have vivid colors, sounds & even smells, but they don't often offer stings of sharp air.  Is this, too, like the presences in Fex & Coo, an example of the dream moving out into our world?

And when the dreamer asks "dutifully" what his dream seeks, I was caught by the word "dutifully".  It's as if by invoking the god of "Duty" his mind is instantly stung awake to the demands of a daytime conscience.

And I also felt the power of the image of bleeding (red) bits of himself all over the rumpled bed BECAUSE he had been dreaming of poisoned prams & crying Marjorcan bombers!

And finally the strong reminder where the poem declares: "Dreams know the end of everyone but themselves."  Indeed, dreams never do seem to end.  They last into the future with a life of their own, as Tony says, dreaming their own dreams & sleeping their own sleep -- and never get tired!

Merrilee Beckman

A NIGHTLY BAND

Grazed by an occipital light

I rise up in my bed,

stung by the sharp air,

and ask dutifully-

from where do you come

and what do you seek?

I do not know what you mean

when you say

‘poisoned prams bear a grudge

or the bombers of Mayorca

cry like babies’.

You are only a dream

and I only a man.

Howling will do you no good.

I was trying hard to rest

when this band started playing,

in the streets I thought,

fool that I am.

I turned on my stomach

and saw the trumpeter recede

into the pillow,

the drummer into the sheets.

And then I knew

from whence comes evil

and joy

and light

and sound.

I am blue with rage

and bleed bits of myself

all over this rumpled bed.

Flattened against each other

we slip through this dreamy world

and waste time to death.

Dreams know the end of everyone

but themselves.

And they find you a place in the world.

And they find you friends.

And they fail at nothing

not even the future.

But I must stoop and fetch water

every day just to keep myself alive.

And my dreams dream their dreams

and sleep their sleep.

And only I always feel tired.

Member Lillian Palermo has submitted a provocative poem, entitled, Now

Some astute reflections on "Imaginary Characters in Your Head?" from blog member Mike Flowers.

Comments welcomed.

Maybe the feeling to which Anne Tyler is alluding is familiar?

I’d/we'd like to riff on this a bit and try to find a mode of expression that feels more accurate to my/our experience.

Imaginary Characters in Your Head?

It was Anne Tyler who said, “You would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer, once you get to know them.”

I was struck by the word companionship. Com- means “with.” Pan- means “bread” or “meal.” So companionship carries the image of eating bread or a meal with someone. This is a rather delicious image: to break bread with imaginary figures.

Paco and I certainly know the feeling Anne Tyler is describing.

Do you?

Comments welcomed!

The Fex & Coo effect seems to be spreading!

Thanks for this photo goes to blog member Suzan Wilson