Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, has just posted a positive (and humorous) review of my Unlimited Story Deck!
I am deeply flattered, as the cards are still only in a beta version (though available under a Creative Commons license for download) and not yet actually published. Hopefully someone who can resolve that problem will see it and contact me, but this is a pretty good way to end the year.
Happy Holy Days and stay warm inside!
12.23.2009
A Year in Reading 2009
The end of the year is often a time to look back and reflect on where we've come from, particularly through the easily-digestible form of the best of list, often reminiscing over music and movies and other popular media. Book reviewer The Millions is currently doing a series called A Year in Reading, in which various notable authors discuss what books they read and enjoyed during 2009. As an author and voracious reader, it's nice to see literature represented as a still living form, and thought I'd contribute my own words on some of the books I read this year and didn't get around to rambling about the first time!
The noted reads featured Bolano's 2666 and The Savage Detectives, Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Galeano's The Book of Embraces, Wallace's Infinite Jest, Tsutsui's Paprika, and Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (these links to my reviews). And these were pretty good too:
Death takes a holiday in Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago. Imagines all the socio-political implications of death stopping in only one country, with all the emotional intensity, compassion, and whimsy available to the Portuguese master-storyteller as he passes through his eighties. I read it on the plane. Also of note is Blindness, which imagines the horror of if everyone except one old lady goes blind.
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie tells the nighttime story of India, following the life of one of the fifty magically-gifted children born on the eve of Indian independence. Hailed as eastern magical realism, Rushdie's almost apocryphal tone of storytelling soon descends into the horror of real politics while never once stopping that cloying wink at the reader. While it wasn't a favorite due to Rushdie's over-pretentious use of language, this book holds a significant place in post-colonial literatures, as Rushdie's life took on the quality of his writings when a fatwa was issued for his depiction of Islam in The Satanic Verses, which I'll hopefully get a chance to read over the holidays.
I read One Man's Meat for an autobiography class and was highly impressed. This book is the accounts of the daily life of E.B. White, of both Charlotte's Web and Strunk and White Style Manual fame. White shows a masterful grasp of relating the minutiae of every day life to both complex themes and global/historical changes. Poignant and thought-provoking, this collection of non-fiction essays is highly recommended as a masterpiece of the form.
The Empire of Dreams by Giannina Braschi is a wild surreal prose-poetic ode to living in New York City as if it was caught between the urban and a land of mythic dreams. An incredible sense of language and the immediacy of the process of writing as a saving grace. Honestly I need to reread it, many many times, and you should too.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov... is just brilliant. The Devil, his shapeshifting cat, and an improbable character in a hideous checked suit and pince-nez wreck havoc in 1930's literary Moscow. At once politically intelligent, fast-paced, and absurdly comic, Bulgakov flat out nails the way literature should be written: with enough of an edge to get banned in his home country for over 40 years.
Hidden Faces is not the novel one imagines Salvador Dali could have written. Penned in a madcap week, it is mainly a story of the dissolution of the bourgeoisie way of life through WWII and the unquenchability of people's obsessive desires. Actually pretty tragic, Dali's language is often dense and abstract, while at the same time being absorbingly visual. Perhaps the most interesting is his technique of telescoping between objects and metaphors, so that the words in a description in one sentence become an emotional state in the next, a real fluidity of meaning that harks more from the interplay of dreams than the figurativeness of poetry.
I've tried reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow about four or five times in the last ten years, and finally finished the whole thing this summer. While I read his latest, Inherent Vice, this summer too, it doesn't even hold a match-flame to the sprawling global epic that assured Pynchon as the master American novelist of the 20th century. All I can say is don't give up, it really is worth it. Next time around I'll read it along side Zak Smith's Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow... but before then I should probably tackle Ulysses.
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and Warlock by Oakley Hall paint the double edged face of the mythic western. The first is a surreal tale of a haunted Indian ghost town, hailed as one of the most important pieces of Latin American literature by both Marquez and Borges, and features one of the most beautiful descriptions of a meteor shower. The second narrates the hard-edged failure of the cowboy to live up to his heroic image, and was Pynchon's favorite novel as a youth (and was most likely the main source inspiration for the show Deadwood). Reading these back to back was highly illuminating of why the "wild west" maintains an integral place in the American cultural imagination.
It took me a long time to get to reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, namely as I'm skeptical of reading books that consistently top best of lists. But there is a very good reason why this one does, because it is awesome! The frame story is essentially a set of nesting doll tales taking place through various genres and historical periods from the 1600s to the far future, intertwining a sense of urgency about why and how we are able to narrate our lives, and the effect these narrations can have generations hence. Though a little heavy-handed at the end, this book points to a new direction for the importance of storytelling in the future.
[Edit: For the sake of symmetry here's one absolute reading failure for the year: The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below by Jose Maria Arguedas was recommended by my Literature of the Americas teacher as an example of the function of magical realism in the Boom and took half a year to track down an affordable copy of. This book is both a portrait of a small fishing town crumbling under the approach of modernity and the journals of the author crumbling under the weight of the untenability of writing this portrait. While at first glance it looks like an interesting juxtaposition between the process of writing as intertwined with the object of writing, this book has no plot, turgid and horrifying descriptions of life, and an undercurrent of despair that at once is directly critical of the other Boom authors while driving them to reject Arguedas from literary circles. I picked up and put down this book multiple times but was unable at any point to make headway, and finally had to admit that as fraught as this book is it is no wonder the author killed himself before he finished writing it. At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if twenty years down the road I return to and decide it is a masterpiece.]
The noted reads featured Bolano's 2666 and The Savage Detectives, Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Galeano's The Book of Embraces, Wallace's Infinite Jest, Tsutsui's Paprika, and Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (these links to my reviews). And these were pretty good too:
Death takes a holiday in Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago. Imagines all the socio-political implications of death stopping in only one country, with all the emotional intensity, compassion, and whimsy available to the Portuguese master-storyteller as he passes through his eighties. I read it on the plane. Also of note is Blindness, which imagines the horror of if everyone except one old lady goes blind.
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie tells the nighttime story of India, following the life of one of the fifty magically-gifted children born on the eve of Indian independence. Hailed as eastern magical realism, Rushdie's almost apocryphal tone of storytelling soon descends into the horror of real politics while never once stopping that cloying wink at the reader. While it wasn't a favorite due to Rushdie's over-pretentious use of language, this book holds a significant place in post-colonial literatures, as Rushdie's life took on the quality of his writings when a fatwa was issued for his depiction of Islam in The Satanic Verses, which I'll hopefully get a chance to read over the holidays.
I read One Man's Meat for an autobiography class and was highly impressed. This book is the accounts of the daily life of E.B. White, of both Charlotte's Web and Strunk and White Style Manual fame. White shows a masterful grasp of relating the minutiae of every day life to both complex themes and global/historical changes. Poignant and thought-provoking, this collection of non-fiction essays is highly recommended as a masterpiece of the form.
The Empire of Dreams by Giannina Braschi is a wild surreal prose-poetic ode to living in New York City as if it was caught between the urban and a land of mythic dreams. An incredible sense of language and the immediacy of the process of writing as a saving grace. Honestly I need to reread it, many many times, and you should too.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov... is just brilliant. The Devil, his shapeshifting cat, and an improbable character in a hideous checked suit and pince-nez wreck havoc in 1930's literary Moscow. At once politically intelligent, fast-paced, and absurdly comic, Bulgakov flat out nails the way literature should be written: with enough of an edge to get banned in his home country for over 40 years.
Hidden Faces is not the novel one imagines Salvador Dali could have written. Penned in a madcap week, it is mainly a story of the dissolution of the bourgeoisie way of life through WWII and the unquenchability of people's obsessive desires. Actually pretty tragic, Dali's language is often dense and abstract, while at the same time being absorbingly visual. Perhaps the most interesting is his technique of telescoping between objects and metaphors, so that the words in a description in one sentence become an emotional state in the next, a real fluidity of meaning that harks more from the interplay of dreams than the figurativeness of poetry.
I've tried reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow about four or five times in the last ten years, and finally finished the whole thing this summer. While I read his latest, Inherent Vice, this summer too, it doesn't even hold a match-flame to the sprawling global epic that assured Pynchon as the master American novelist of the 20th century. All I can say is don't give up, it really is worth it. Next time around I'll read it along side Zak Smith's Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow... but before then I should probably tackle Ulysses.
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and Warlock by Oakley Hall paint the double edged face of the mythic western. The first is a surreal tale of a haunted Indian ghost town, hailed as one of the most important pieces of Latin American literature by both Marquez and Borges, and features one of the most beautiful descriptions of a meteor shower. The second narrates the hard-edged failure of the cowboy to live up to his heroic image, and was Pynchon's favorite novel as a youth (and was most likely the main source inspiration for the show Deadwood). Reading these back to back was highly illuminating of why the "wild west" maintains an integral place in the American cultural imagination.
It took me a long time to get to reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, namely as I'm skeptical of reading books that consistently top best of lists. But there is a very good reason why this one does, because it is awesome! The frame story is essentially a set of nesting doll tales taking place through various genres and historical periods from the 1600s to the far future, intertwining a sense of urgency about why and how we are able to narrate our lives, and the effect these narrations can have generations hence. Though a little heavy-handed at the end, this book points to a new direction for the importance of storytelling in the future.
[Edit: For the sake of symmetry here's one absolute reading failure for the year: The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below by Jose Maria Arguedas was recommended by my Literature of the Americas teacher as an example of the function of magical realism in the Boom and took half a year to track down an affordable copy of. This book is both a portrait of a small fishing town crumbling under the approach of modernity and the journals of the author crumbling under the weight of the untenability of writing this portrait. While at first glance it looks like an interesting juxtaposition between the process of writing as intertwined with the object of writing, this book has no plot, turgid and horrifying descriptions of life, and an undercurrent of despair that at once is directly critical of the other Boom authors while driving them to reject Arguedas from literary circles. I picked up and put down this book multiple times but was unable at any point to make headway, and finally had to admit that as fraught as this book is it is no wonder the author killed himself before he finished writing it. At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if twenty years down the road I return to and decide it is a masterpiece.]
12.20.2009
Learning to See
Learning to See, new collage by Tait McKenzie"Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It's still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time." - Rilke, from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
12.19.2009
Bananarchy in the Bowl of Winds (fiction)
[This one's inspired by a bunch of puns from work today, and the ridiculousness of the anxiety that manifests itself in Pittsburgh this time of year. Enjoy!]
Bananarchy in the Bowl of Winds
It was third down in the final minutes of the third quarter, and Jerry was on the edge of his seat. C’mon, he screamed, just catch the ball! I can’t believe that call, he was clearly across the line… I couldn’t tell how Jerry knew; it was almost impossible to see the field from as high up as we were in the stands. But the seats were cheap, even if in this terrible weather the wind just whipped down into the bowl of the arena and froze our faces off, even though the group of fans in bright yellow suits right below us seemed jovially unconcerned.
Touchdown! No it’s not, Jerry howled, wringing his towel and jumping up and down. One of the fans cast an odd glance up our way, but his friends were occupied, huddled around something I couldn’t see, probably watching a replay on the Net as the JumboTron screen was having a hard time staying focused. The fan’s face was inexplicably painted like a clown’s, in a yellow as garish as his suit. Jerry had warned me the fans often dressed quite strange to show their team spirit. I’ve never understood football myself, being more of a story man. What’s the entertainment value of watching large men you can’t even see tumbling all over each other? But Jerry’s enthusiasm was contagious, so when he begged me to come along with him to the game I agreed, not realizing how miserably wretched the weather would be, even in the chintzy team windbreaker Jerry leant me that did nothing to keep out the wind. Those thick yellow suits were starting to look appealing right now.
The game wore on, Pittsburgh falling behind as Dallas caught a second wind, and then a third. Unable to make out the ant-like players below, my attention kept wandering, returning to the yellow-suited fans who seemed to be having a lot more fun. It looked like they were busy constructing some apparatus, what after a moment my brain told me was a catapult. A catapult? I wanted to ask Jerry if this was for some post-game ritual, but he was too busy chewing his mittens to shreds over the last foul to listen, so I sat back again to watch, finally a little curious.
Third down in the final minutes of the last quarter, and the Steelers had just used their last timeout, hopefully planning how to turn their game around before poor Jerry threw himself from the bleachers in despair. The whole crowd was on the edge of their seats, except for me, unable to see why this was so important, and the yellow suits, who’d finished building their contraption and all leaned back, opening their jackets despite the chill. Suddenly, just as one of the Cowboys was about to claim another first down (I think that’s what it’s called), a small flapping object went whirling out of the stands, landing right in front of the runner, whose feet flew out from under him in an inglorious pratfall.
The crowd went wild as the cameras zoomed in to reveal a banana peel on the jittery JumboTron screen. The announcers all mumbled, uncertain where it had come from. The crowd was actually aghast, but they couldn’t keep from laughing at the absurdity of it, the yellow-suited fans most of all. Finally the field calmed down again so the Cowboy could redo his play without interruptions. But no! This time with an audible thwang another yellow whirl went sailing, and another. Suddenly the arena’s cold air was filled with banana peels, all landing whichever way the winds blew them! Looking around I realized that the top rows of the stands were dotted with yellow-suited individuals, each group of them busy at their own little catapult. They must have planned this whole caper in case the Steelers began to loose, unless it was a political statement, hiding the bananas in their jackets to keep them from freezing.
No one else seemed to notice the characters depart, all eyes intent on the field, where the game carried on now despite the rain of peels, the players slipping and tumbling all over the place, the ball slick with juice and a fruity reek wafting up to the stands. It was chaos, sheer bananarchy! Jerry could only shake his head as his cherished pastime was reduced to the buffoonery I’d always told him it looked like, while I laughed and laughed, entirely forgetting about the cold. Eventually the game was called on account of the mushy sabotage, and as we were walking to the lot I turned to Jerry and said, you know what, that was a lot more fun then I expected, you wanna go get a smoothie? For some reason he only grumbled and kept walking.
Bananarchy in the Bowl of Winds
It was third down in the final minutes of the third quarter, and Jerry was on the edge of his seat. C’mon, he screamed, just catch the ball! I can’t believe that call, he was clearly across the line… I couldn’t tell how Jerry knew; it was almost impossible to see the field from as high up as we were in the stands. But the seats were cheap, even if in this terrible weather the wind just whipped down into the bowl of the arena and froze our faces off, even though the group of fans in bright yellow suits right below us seemed jovially unconcerned.
Touchdown! No it’s not, Jerry howled, wringing his towel and jumping up and down. One of the fans cast an odd glance up our way, but his friends were occupied, huddled around something I couldn’t see, probably watching a replay on the Net as the JumboTron screen was having a hard time staying focused. The fan’s face was inexplicably painted like a clown’s, in a yellow as garish as his suit. Jerry had warned me the fans often dressed quite strange to show their team spirit. I’ve never understood football myself, being more of a story man. What’s the entertainment value of watching large men you can’t even see tumbling all over each other? But Jerry’s enthusiasm was contagious, so when he begged me to come along with him to the game I agreed, not realizing how miserably wretched the weather would be, even in the chintzy team windbreaker Jerry leant me that did nothing to keep out the wind. Those thick yellow suits were starting to look appealing right now.
The game wore on, Pittsburgh falling behind as Dallas caught a second wind, and then a third. Unable to make out the ant-like players below, my attention kept wandering, returning to the yellow-suited fans who seemed to be having a lot more fun. It looked like they were busy constructing some apparatus, what after a moment my brain told me was a catapult. A catapult? I wanted to ask Jerry if this was for some post-game ritual, but he was too busy chewing his mittens to shreds over the last foul to listen, so I sat back again to watch, finally a little curious.
Third down in the final minutes of the last quarter, and the Steelers had just used their last timeout, hopefully planning how to turn their game around before poor Jerry threw himself from the bleachers in despair. The whole crowd was on the edge of their seats, except for me, unable to see why this was so important, and the yellow suits, who’d finished building their contraption and all leaned back, opening their jackets despite the chill. Suddenly, just as one of the Cowboys was about to claim another first down (I think that’s what it’s called), a small flapping object went whirling out of the stands, landing right in front of the runner, whose feet flew out from under him in an inglorious pratfall.
The crowd went wild as the cameras zoomed in to reveal a banana peel on the jittery JumboTron screen. The announcers all mumbled, uncertain where it had come from. The crowd was actually aghast, but they couldn’t keep from laughing at the absurdity of it, the yellow-suited fans most of all. Finally the field calmed down again so the Cowboy could redo his play without interruptions. But no! This time with an audible thwang another yellow whirl went sailing, and another. Suddenly the arena’s cold air was filled with banana peels, all landing whichever way the winds blew them! Looking around I realized that the top rows of the stands were dotted with yellow-suited individuals, each group of them busy at their own little catapult. They must have planned this whole caper in case the Steelers began to loose, unless it was a political statement, hiding the bananas in their jackets to keep them from freezing.
No one else seemed to notice the characters depart, all eyes intent on the field, where the game carried on now despite the rain of peels, the players slipping and tumbling all over the place, the ball slick with juice and a fruity reek wafting up to the stands. It was chaos, sheer bananarchy! Jerry could only shake his head as his cherished pastime was reduced to the buffoonery I’d always told him it looked like, while I laughed and laughed, entirely forgetting about the cold. Eventually the game was called on account of the mushy sabotage, and as we were walking to the lot I turned to Jerry and said, you know what, that was a lot more fun then I expected, you wanna go get a smoothie? For some reason he only grumbled and kept walking.
12.17.2009
The Unlimited Story Deck is now online!
I finally finished designing the website for my final project for my Narrative and Technology class, and the Unlimited Story Deck is now available online!On the site you'll find an introduction, rules, playtested stories and analyzes, and downloadable versions of all the cards (licensed under Creative Commons). I will be continuing to test out the limitations of the deck and revise it for a gamma version and eventual publication, so if anyone's still interested in trying it out, either download the Deck or get a hold of me to play it.
It's been one hell of a process banging my eyes off html code the last couple days and I am in much need of a break!
12.16.2009
Christmas, a poem by Fernando Pessoa
Christmas
One God is born. Others die. Truth
Did not come or go. Error changed.
Eternity is different now.
What happened was better always.
Blind Science plows the useless sod.
Fool Faith lives the dream of its observance.
A new God is but a word.
Search not, nor believe. All is hidden.
One God is born. Others die. Truth
Did not come or go. Error changed.
Eternity is different now.
What happened was better always.
Blind Science plows the useless sod.
Fool Faith lives the dream of its observance.
A new God is but a word.
Search not, nor believe. All is hidden.
12.14.2009
The Somnolent Territories
Inspired by recent poetry readings, I've started working on some new verses for the first time in years, and in the process went back through some older unpublished works to find and edit this piece, which is essentially a catalog of places I visit in my sleep. Enjoy!
The Somnolent Territories
roving insomniac landscapes
cities hung off the cliffs of mind’s eye
no windows and a blurry clock
peeling the hours between dim alleys
crooked wooden dovecote homes
and the diagonal drift of vague
symbol-choked bars and opera halls
rocknroll dripping from the walls of
haunted hallucinating forests
footsteps cobwebbed off a too-close moon
searching for that one winged book
and a lock to lost love’s keystone
crumpled across the dunes and obelisks
of memory’s striated bedrock
vast with sand in the hourglass eye
and only one light on in the ruins
where they mine for replicating relics
to prove the world was ever here
but only in the lone of night when
the desert of soul ripples with worms
worm holes and the witch’s grotto
she’ll sell you charms and insurance
against early morning amnesia
and the mountains of shivering ice
carved to statues of flayed godsflesh
down the porcelain-leaved road of trials
all highways pass the convex lake
to the city of crystal and conveyors
floating on the edge of that abyss
where they fight off tooth decay
and visions of apocalypse by fire
and you don’t want to know
what lurks in the subbasement
but down to the beach
which we still can never reach
straddling tall mossy barrier reefs
beyond pirated jungle villas
to watch the spume of whalebacks
and the underwater sun slope
out of this rose colored sea of dreams
while the lighthouse keeps blinking
on the shelf of my father’s study
calling out to some greater tower
lying leagues offshore maybe north or
in an Oakland you can’t reach either
and or the walls are all façades and or
labyrinthine with jeebering horrors
you shouldn’t have asked about
and just like every childhood nightmare
it’s hiding around the corners
and or those walls are actually
a hostile alien life form maybe
a dark chaotic maelstrom that will
transport you to another dimension
like endless stairwells or the gates of hell
you can’t seem to stay away from
those worm holes rippling
and somewhere in the middle where
spiders spin the worlds together
is maybe a good night’s sleep.
The Somnolent Territories
roving insomniac landscapes
cities hung off the cliffs of mind’s eye
no windows and a blurry clock
peeling the hours between dim alleys
crooked wooden dovecote homes
and the diagonal drift of vague
symbol-choked bars and opera halls
rocknroll dripping from the walls of
haunted hallucinating forests
footsteps cobwebbed off a too-close moon
searching for that one winged book
and a lock to lost love’s keystone
crumpled across the dunes and obelisks
of memory’s striated bedrock
vast with sand in the hourglass eye
and only one light on in the ruins
where they mine for replicating relics
to prove the world was ever here
but only in the lone of night when
the desert of soul ripples with worms
worm holes and the witch’s grotto
she’ll sell you charms and insurance
against early morning amnesia
and the mountains of shivering ice
carved to statues of flayed godsflesh
down the porcelain-leaved road of trials
all highways pass the convex lake
to the city of crystal and conveyors
floating on the edge of that abyss
where they fight off tooth decay
and visions of apocalypse by fire
and you don’t want to know
what lurks in the subbasement
but down to the beach
which we still can never reach
straddling tall mossy barrier reefs
beyond pirated jungle villas
to watch the spume of whalebacks
and the underwater sun slope
out of this rose colored sea of dreams
while the lighthouse keeps blinking
on the shelf of my father’s study
calling out to some greater tower
lying leagues offshore maybe north or
in an Oakland you can’t reach either
and or the walls are all façades and or
labyrinthine with jeebering horrors
you shouldn’t have asked about
and just like every childhood nightmare
it’s hiding around the corners
and or those walls are actually
a hostile alien life form maybe
a dark chaotic maelstrom that will
transport you to another dimension
like endless stairwells or the gates of hell
you can’t seem to stay away from
those worm holes rippling
and somewhere in the middle where
spiders spin the worlds together
is maybe a good night’s sleep.
12.11.2009
In the Desert of the Soul: Early Symbols in Jung's Red Book
I finally started reading the text of Jung's Red Book last night, and it is as revelatory, revolutionary, and vitally important as I suspected it would be, not just in terms of Jung's psychological theories but in taking a stance for a broader spiritual approach to reality that is even more lacking now than when Jung was writing. Reading this is like reading Blake, I want to quote every passage (as they are almost all brilliant), but if my cat will get off the tome I'll constrain myself to just one before looking at some of the important symbols and themes that Jung was attempting to articulate.
Potent symbols and themes in the first seven sections:
The spirit of the times vs. the spirit of the depths - Jung makes a distinction between the spirit or stance of the time in which he lives vs. the spirit of a greater, ancient, and universal reality that is entirely overlooked by the present, and is striving to come forth through Jung. This is historical consciousness vs. the mythic subconsciousness, and Jung frames the Red Book as a way of getting past all the small-minded, violent, materialistic impulses of his age (including a harsh criticism of Christianity), while recognizing that this present world may entirely ignore his warning and call for an understanding of the subconscious.
The supreme meaning - Jung claims that God and gods are only images of an eternal supreme meaning oscillating between meaning and absurdity, and it is this supreme meaning that men must come to recognize as a solution to the spirit of the times. This is entirely consistent with my concept of ultimate significance, in that the supreme meaning is more truly real than the images we conceive of it through.
Dreams and epiphanic visions - Jung recounts a number of visions prophesying the world wars as well as his own future work. He claims an uncontrollable compulsion to record these dreams, though he never did before. Similarly, a number of the passages Jung claims are actually the spirit of the depths or his soul speaking through him as a medium.
The soul - Much of the early part of this book is Jung's attempt to reconnect with his soul. This is the formation of his archetype of the anima/animus, but it is not made explicit in his academic writings that the archetype is not just an image but one's actual, living soul, which encourages us to live and do everything we dream of living and doing. The soul is one's God and opposite, which perfects us in the supreme meaning. The soul is not part of us, we are only the expression and symbol of our soul in the world.
The desert - Though Jung's academic writings discuss the archetypes they do not discuss (as far as I've read) the importance of subconscious locations. In particular Jung discusses here the image of the desert, which is the conception of oneself and soul that one must journey into and rejuvenate in order to overcome the spirit of the times. Jung believes he saw a desert because his soul had been withered (and perhaps those in touch with their souls experience a garden). From my own explorations of the subconscious I also found this "desert of the soul" as the location for the deeper, mythic realities I had to contend with outside of the city (the symbol for the everyday world and times). As my own process continued, this desert was first flooded and became a garden before the entire inner world was set to flames so that a new internal reality could form. I am curious how these locations change through Jung's process in the remainder of the Red Book, as I find such psychogeographies an essential compliment to the character archetypes.
The descent into hell - Jung has a vision in which he realizes that he must descend to hell in order to individuate himself and find the supreme meaning. Such descensus avernum are common in mythic and revelatory literature and serve as another example of the importance of place as symbol for Jung's theories. Jung equates this descent with the possibility of going mad, and sees himself as a sacrificed hero who must overcome that potential madness for a more divine madness lacking in the spirit of the times. This section (and the titles of the other sections) suggest that Jung is on a hero's journey comparable to that described by Joseph Campbell. This hell is all the absurd meaninglessness of our times that we must go through in order to construct our own meaning of events, which is the supreme meaning.
Alright, I'll close with another short passage: "You thought you knew the abyss? Oh you clever people! It is another thing to experience it. Everything will happen to you."
"The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical. He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces the supreme meaning.
But the supreme meaning is the path, the way and the bridge to what is to come. That is the God yet to come. It is not the coming God himself, but his image which appears in the supreme meaning. God is an image, and those who worship him must worship him in the images of the supreme meaning.
The supreme meaning is not a meaning and not an absurdity, it is image and force in one, magnificence and force together.
The supreme meaning is the beginning and the end. It is the bridge of going across and fulfillment [a reference to the way of becoming the superman from Nietzsche's Zarathustra].
The other gods died of their temporality, yet the supreme meaning never dies, it turns into meaning and then into absurdity, and out of the fire and the blood of their collision the supreme meaning rises up rejuvenated anew.
The image of God has a shadow. The supreme meaning is real and casts a shadow. For what can be actual and corporeal and have no shadow?
The shadow is nonsense. It lacks force and has no continued existence through itself. But nonsense is the inseparable and undying brother of the supreme meaning...
The image of God throws a shadow that is as great as itself.
The supreme meaning is great and small, it is as wide as the starry Heaven and as narrow as the cell of the living body.
The spirit of this time in me wanted to recognize the greatness and extent of the supreme meaning, but not its littleness. The spirit of the depths, however, conquered this arrogance, and I had to swallow the small as a means of healing the immortal in me. It completely burnt up my innards since it was inglorious and unheroic. It was even ridiculous and revolting."
Potent symbols and themes in the first seven sections:
The spirit of the times vs. the spirit of the depths - Jung makes a distinction between the spirit or stance of the time in which he lives vs. the spirit of a greater, ancient, and universal reality that is entirely overlooked by the present, and is striving to come forth through Jung. This is historical consciousness vs. the mythic subconsciousness, and Jung frames the Red Book as a way of getting past all the small-minded, violent, materialistic impulses of his age (including a harsh criticism of Christianity), while recognizing that this present world may entirely ignore his warning and call for an understanding of the subconscious.
The supreme meaning - Jung claims that God and gods are only images of an eternal supreme meaning oscillating between meaning and absurdity, and it is this supreme meaning that men must come to recognize as a solution to the spirit of the times. This is entirely consistent with my concept of ultimate significance, in that the supreme meaning is more truly real than the images we conceive of it through.
Dreams and epiphanic visions - Jung recounts a number of visions prophesying the world wars as well as his own future work. He claims an uncontrollable compulsion to record these dreams, though he never did before. Similarly, a number of the passages Jung claims are actually the spirit of the depths or his soul speaking through him as a medium.
The soul - Much of the early part of this book is Jung's attempt to reconnect with his soul. This is the formation of his archetype of the anima/animus, but it is not made explicit in his academic writings that the archetype is not just an image but one's actual, living soul, which encourages us to live and do everything we dream of living and doing. The soul is one's God and opposite, which perfects us in the supreme meaning. The soul is not part of us, we are only the expression and symbol of our soul in the world.
The desert - Though Jung's academic writings discuss the archetypes they do not discuss (as far as I've read) the importance of subconscious locations. In particular Jung discusses here the image of the desert, which is the conception of oneself and soul that one must journey into and rejuvenate in order to overcome the spirit of the times. Jung believes he saw a desert because his soul had been withered (and perhaps those in touch with their souls experience a garden). From my own explorations of the subconscious I also found this "desert of the soul" as the location for the deeper, mythic realities I had to contend with outside of the city (the symbol for the everyday world and times). As my own process continued, this desert was first flooded and became a garden before the entire inner world was set to flames so that a new internal reality could form. I am curious how these locations change through Jung's process in the remainder of the Red Book, as I find such psychogeographies an essential compliment to the character archetypes.
The descent into hell - Jung has a vision in which he realizes that he must descend to hell in order to individuate himself and find the supreme meaning. Such descensus avernum are common in mythic and revelatory literature and serve as another example of the importance of place as symbol for Jung's theories. Jung equates this descent with the possibility of going mad, and sees himself as a sacrificed hero who must overcome that potential madness for a more divine madness lacking in the spirit of the times. This section (and the titles of the other sections) suggest that Jung is on a hero's journey comparable to that described by Joseph Campbell. This hell is all the absurd meaninglessness of our times that we must go through in order to construct our own meaning of events, which is the supreme meaning.
Alright, I'll close with another short passage: "You thought you knew the abyss? Oh you clever people! It is another thing to experience it. Everything will happen to you."
12.09.2009
A Magnet for Possibilities (news)
APA Philosophy Referee Hand Sginals (above)
Rumors that first Dark Matter Particle has been discovered
US finally to settle Native American Trust Lawsuit
What Philosophers Believe
How the iPhone could Reboot Education (which I've already seen with my own eyes at Pitt)
Tom Waits may be up for a role in the Hobbit
David Bowie and the Occult
The Fortsas Bibliohoax
The Milky Way at different Wavelengths
Don't Believe in God? Can't Hold Office in NC
MIT's Mind Machine Project takes AI research to 2.0
Dave Eggers publishes a newspaper
Casual Sex found to not be psychologically dangerous for young people
Henry Miller's Watercolors
Should Earth Scientists take a Hippocratic Oath? (I say yes)
The Mystery of the Magically Braided Horse Manes
Music for Water Bears
100 Best last lines of novels, the first of which and my favorite is from Beckett's The Unnameable:
".... ...you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on."
12.08.2009
Updates from the World
A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity
New Model of the Universe Says Past Crystallises out of the Future
Trees Communicate with Aspirin-like Chemical
Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys
David Foster Wallace's Toy Cement Mixer
"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out to itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty. Wherein, therefor, consists the difference between such a fiction and belief?"
-David Hume, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
12.06.2009
A Yarn: The Burden of Proof (Unlimited Story #1)
[This is the first story generated by the now finished Unlimited Story Deck (beta version). The underlined words refer to the cards played.]
I was at the bar writing when I was approached by a girl who didn’t look old enough to get in, but she was dressed like a hipster, so maybe that’s the style of the week. We got into a debate about oppression, from parental to existential lacks of personal control, and I told her that a girl once told me that sometimes you have to wait, or ask, for help from outside the situation, like from a god in the machine of our world.
Who are you, the hip chick quarried, some outcast from the middle ages? No one believes in God anymore. Or maybe you’re just one of those androids who believes whatever they’ve been told enough times. I just smiled, and she for some reason followed, and later as we were walking toward the carnival through the milling crowds, a turn of fate showed her why.
The turn was that some eco-hackers had forced a viral attack on the nearby zoo’s computer system, hoping to liberate the animals; but they had accidentally released the creatures in a disastrous stampede! In order to escape the war-zone of terrified pedestrians we ducked into the closest café, but even there could not escape the TV’s blaring noise, advertising the doom and dying of the latest war. But just when all seemed hopeless, and she didn’t believe any help could come, out from a hidden lair beneath the kitchen hearth flew a whole mythic pantheon, turning all the rules of logic on their head as they saved the day!
Celebrating this miracle afterward with drinks and dancing back at the bar, the girl apologized for calling me names, and said that I must actually be some angelic messenger to have been so certain the gods would come. But what would really be convincing, she said, would be to next time catch it all on camera.
After just this one play, I am really pleased with how the deck works. The story, though randomly constrained, manages to convey the same kind of aesthetic, tone, pacing, etc. that I would usually put into a story of this length, but managed to be written in about a quarter of the time. Even more intriguing is that where I usually plot out the turn and ending hook of my flash stories, I was not able to here (since who knew what cards would later come up), and yet they happened to work with a fair amount of continuity. Part of this I suspect is foreshadowing: the otherwise arbitrary debate about oppression resolved through a deus ex machina became, as I constructed the tale, something of a goal or end state, the conflict to be resolved, which I continually kept in mind as I drew and played cards. Of course, with just one narrator, I knew what kinds of cards could possibly be played from my hand, and could group certain ones for later scenes or resolutions. At the same time though there were definitely several points when the story could have spiraled out of control; with so many ways of using any of the cards there is an over-determination of imaginative possibility. But I think that is only part of this deck's beauty: anything truly can happen!
Now to play it with more than one person...
I was at the bar writing when I was approached by a girl who didn’t look old enough to get in, but she was dressed like a hipster, so maybe that’s the style of the week. We got into a debate about oppression, from parental to existential lacks of personal control, and I told her that a girl once told me that sometimes you have to wait, or ask, for help from outside the situation, like from a god in the machine of our world.
Who are you, the hip chick quarried, some outcast from the middle ages? No one believes in God anymore. Or maybe you’re just one of those androids who believes whatever they’ve been told enough times. I just smiled, and she for some reason followed, and later as we were walking toward the carnival through the milling crowds, a turn of fate showed her why.
The turn was that some eco-hackers had forced a viral attack on the nearby zoo’s computer system, hoping to liberate the animals; but they had accidentally released the creatures in a disastrous stampede! In order to escape the war-zone of terrified pedestrians we ducked into the closest café, but even there could not escape the TV’s blaring noise, advertising the doom and dying of the latest war. But just when all seemed hopeless, and she didn’t believe any help could come, out from a hidden lair beneath the kitchen hearth flew a whole mythic pantheon, turning all the rules of logic on their head as they saved the day!
Celebrating this miracle afterward with drinks and dancing back at the bar, the girl apologized for calling me names, and said that I must actually be some angelic messenger to have been so certain the gods would come. But what would really be convincing, she said, would be to next time catch it all on camera.
After just this one play, I am really pleased with how the deck works. The story, though randomly constrained, manages to convey the same kind of aesthetic, tone, pacing, etc. that I would usually put into a story of this length, but managed to be written in about a quarter of the time. Even more intriguing is that where I usually plot out the turn and ending hook of my flash stories, I was not able to here (since who knew what cards would later come up), and yet they happened to work with a fair amount of continuity. Part of this I suspect is foreshadowing: the otherwise arbitrary debate about oppression resolved through a deus ex machina became, as I constructed the tale, something of a goal or end state, the conflict to be resolved, which I continually kept in mind as I drew and played cards. Of course, with just one narrator, I knew what kinds of cards could possibly be played from my hand, and could group certain ones for later scenes or resolutions. At the same time though there were definitely several points when the story could have spiraled out of control; with so many ways of using any of the cards there is an over-determination of imaginative possibility. But I think that is only part of this deck's beauty: anything truly can happen!
Now to play it with more than one person...
12.05.2009
Truth and the Transcendent Function
Still preparing to dive into "The Red Book," I reread Jung's essay, "The Transcendent Function," in which he describes the technique that he used for his process of self-experimentation, a method for consciously delving into the subconscious and uniting them, which was also the practice he recommended to patients in order to continue working on their subconscious materials after or outside of therapy.
The method is one of active imagining, and involves taking whatever emotional state one is in and allowing that mood to become more conscious, at the same time writing down associations of that state (in a controlled manner, in order to not go off into other areas of the subconscious), until the unconscious emotion is enriched and clarified. Or, if there is no particular emotion to focus on, one should remove critical attention and let inner images, voices, or movements emerge, taking similar associative or symbolic notes. Once this material has been collected, Jung suggests (here from his own experience, viz. the Red Book), to either subject it to creative formulation or analytical understanding, that is, to give the unconscious an aesthetic form or concrete meaning, depending on one's tendencies towards either art or logic. The important thing though, is not to get caught up in either the form or meaning alone, but to be able to go back and forth between the two, essentially creating an internal dialogue by which the antipathy between the unconscious and conscious minds is transcended.
I have personally had much success with such methods of active imagination, particularly through dreaming (which Jung claims was too difficult to generally recommend as a method) and elaboration as internal fiction, which over the years has put me into direct contact with many of the subconscious forces and symbols that hold play over my psychology. My intention in reading "The Red Book" slowly and through Jung's techniques is in order to return to another stage in my own psychic self-experimentations.
One of the more interesting things I've discovered through becoming more in tune with my subconscious is a decreasing need for such conscious graspings as truth, non-contradiction, and blunt logic (while at the same time being able, ideally, to apply these to a wider scope). As Jung so deftly puts it in this essay:
I encountered this kind of grasping in my Wisdom class the other day, discussing Berger's concept of the social construction of reality, which my teacher wanted to refute logically, at all costs. Granted, this teacher has applied logical arguments and the principle of truth = non-contradiction to everything we've read this semester, from Aristotle to Lao-tzu, and seems to find all of them lacking as logically consistent systems of wisdom, while I sit there baffled, wondering how logic will ever get you to wisdom, which for me seems at least equal parts belief. Now if this wasn't frustrating enough, the teacher's specific beef with Berger's theory (which I haven't read, so won't comment on myself), was that: to construct reality implies that reality has been made up or fabricated, and as a fiction it is thus false and a pack of lies of no value, etc. And that's the rub, the assumption that fiction necessarily equals falsehood, that things imagined can not convey truth or really effect the world, regardless of if the contents represent any historical, existent reality. Even the too-smart-for-his-britches philosophy major I usually disagree with was aghast, and despite our best arguments the teacher refused to listen to that his "truth" might be wrong.
It seems to me that this perspective is like someone only using the conscious part of their mind, ignoring or fending off the "demons of the irrational" subconscious instead of accepting them as equally a part of who we are, which they are, and if that boundary is transcended then we can begin to enjoy ourselves more fully in the world and more fully accept this world in all its irrational and boundless glory.
The method is one of active imagining, and involves taking whatever emotional state one is in and allowing that mood to become more conscious, at the same time writing down associations of that state (in a controlled manner, in order to not go off into other areas of the subconscious), until the unconscious emotion is enriched and clarified. Or, if there is no particular emotion to focus on, one should remove critical attention and let inner images, voices, or movements emerge, taking similar associative or symbolic notes. Once this material has been collected, Jung suggests (here from his own experience, viz. the Red Book), to either subject it to creative formulation or analytical understanding, that is, to give the unconscious an aesthetic form or concrete meaning, depending on one's tendencies towards either art or logic. The important thing though, is not to get caught up in either the form or meaning alone, but to be able to go back and forth between the two, essentially creating an internal dialogue by which the antipathy between the unconscious and conscious minds is transcended.
I have personally had much success with such methods of active imagination, particularly through dreaming (which Jung claims was too difficult to generally recommend as a method) and elaboration as internal fiction, which over the years has put me into direct contact with many of the subconscious forces and symbols that hold play over my psychology. My intention in reading "The Red Book" slowly and through Jung's techniques is in order to return to another stage in my own psychic self-experimentations.
One of the more interesting things I've discovered through becoming more in tune with my subconscious is a decreasing need for such conscious graspings as truth, non-contradiction, and blunt logic (while at the same time being able, ideally, to apply these to a wider scope). As Jung so deftly puts it in this essay:
"One of the greatest obstacles to psychological understanding is the inquisitive desire to know whether the psychological factor is "true" or "correct." If the description of it is not erroneous or false, then the factor is valid in itself and proves its validity by its very existence. One might just as well ask if the duck-billed platypus is a "true" or "correct" invention of the Creator's will. Equally childish is the prejudice against the role which mythological assumptions play in the life of the psyche. Since they are not "true," it is argued, they have no place in a scientific explanation. But mythologems exist, even though their statements do not coincide with our incommensurable idea of "truth."Of course, one runs into such grasping for truth and consistency almost everywhere you turn, spying every day yet another atheistic rebuttal of belief, such as this article from Alternet on demanding evidence from religious believers (which asks: “Why do you think God or the supernatural exists? What makes you think this is true? What evidence do you have for this belief?”), when the important thing about belief is that one believes without proof, to demand evidence or a truth behind beliefs is to entirely miss the point of believing (at least for me; I will never apologize or condone dogmatism of any flavor). And furthermore, as Jung seems to agree, the important thing is not whether the contents of our belief are true or false, but what those beliefs allow us to feel or do in the real world. The belief exists, and extends beyond truthiness.
I encountered this kind of grasping in my Wisdom class the other day, discussing Berger's concept of the social construction of reality, which my teacher wanted to refute logically, at all costs. Granted, this teacher has applied logical arguments and the principle of truth = non-contradiction to everything we've read this semester, from Aristotle to Lao-tzu, and seems to find all of them lacking as logically consistent systems of wisdom, while I sit there baffled, wondering how logic will ever get you to wisdom, which for me seems at least equal parts belief. Now if this wasn't frustrating enough, the teacher's specific beef with Berger's theory (which I haven't read, so won't comment on myself), was that: to construct reality implies that reality has been made up or fabricated, and as a fiction it is thus false and a pack of lies of no value, etc. And that's the rub, the assumption that fiction necessarily equals falsehood, that things imagined can not convey truth or really effect the world, regardless of if the contents represent any historical, existent reality. Even the too-smart-for-his-britches philosophy major I usually disagree with was aghast, and despite our best arguments the teacher refused to listen to that his "truth" might be wrong.
It seems to me that this perspective is like someone only using the conscious part of their mind, ignoring or fending off the "demons of the irrational" subconscious instead of accepting them as equally a part of who we are, which they are, and if that boundary is transcended then we can begin to enjoy ourselves more fully in the world and more fully accept this world in all its irrational and boundless glory.
12.02.2009
Belief confirms Belief
Taking a break from working on a philosophy paper about free will to comment on this research presented in New Scientist showing that people ascribe their own beliefs to God:
I think this is very useful research, as the way our beliefs, and the stories we tell to authenticate those beliefs, influences our actions is, for me, one of the prime functions of mythology, and highly overlooked in our polarized age. I think it is very important right now to look at the way the stories we tell influence us, as culturally we are aflood with stories telling us all kinds of wondrous and troubling things. Violence in video games is just the tip of the iceberg. It's not surprising though to find that God is less a moral compass than a sounding board; people have been using the concept of an ultimate reference for this purpose since we've been able to conceive of such an "objective" stance. The difference I think though is that originally (as conceived in both ancient Greece and theology), God was a sounding board for our conception of the largest possible scope of reference and goodness, that is, one which was bigger than our individual perspectives and could thus serve as a map or guide to them. Nowadays though the popular conception of God has become much smaller, inimical to a total perspective of belief, and very specific beliefs have been attached to the attendant texts and rituals that support belief in God (ie: all the dogma and hatred and ignorance of religious fundamentalists that are in us and not in It). Unfortunately it seems that we have grown to believe more in the one-sided interpretations that have codified over history than in the total set of possibilities inherent in an ultimate god belief, and as such project those back on that image in order to reinforce these negative views.
As always, it is important to remember that whether or not you believe that we are created by God, we create gods ourselves through our belief in them, which allows us to believe in ourselves. As I like to put it, gods are solely everything that has been said or believed about them or has been done in their names.
God may have created man in his image, but it seems we return the favour. Believers subconsciously endow God with their own beliefs on controversial issues.
"Intuiting God's beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one's own beliefs," writes a team led by Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers started by asking volunteers who said they believe in God to give their own views on controversial topics, such as abortion and the death penalty. They also asked what the volunteers thought were the views of God, average Americans and public figures such as Bill Gates. Volunteers' own beliefs corresponded most strongly with those they attributed to God.
Next, the team asked another group of volunteers to undertake tasks designed to soften their existing views, such as preparing speeches on the death penalty in which they had to take the opposite view to their own. They found that this led to shifts in the beliefs attributed to God, but not in those attributed to other people.
"People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want," the team write. "The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing."
I think this is very useful research, as the way our beliefs, and the stories we tell to authenticate those beliefs, influences our actions is, for me, one of the prime functions of mythology, and highly overlooked in our polarized age. I think it is very important right now to look at the way the stories we tell influence us, as culturally we are aflood with stories telling us all kinds of wondrous and troubling things. Violence in video games is just the tip of the iceberg. It's not surprising though to find that God is less a moral compass than a sounding board; people have been using the concept of an ultimate reference for this purpose since we've been able to conceive of such an "objective" stance. The difference I think though is that originally (as conceived in both ancient Greece and theology), God was a sounding board for our conception of the largest possible scope of reference and goodness, that is, one which was bigger than our individual perspectives and could thus serve as a map or guide to them. Nowadays though the popular conception of God has become much smaller, inimical to a total perspective of belief, and very specific beliefs have been attached to the attendant texts and rituals that support belief in God (ie: all the dogma and hatred and ignorance of religious fundamentalists that are in us and not in It). Unfortunately it seems that we have grown to believe more in the one-sided interpretations that have codified over history than in the total set of possibilities inherent in an ultimate god belief, and as such project those back on that image in order to reinforce these negative views.
As always, it is important to remember that whether or not you believe that we are created by God, we create gods ourselves through our belief in them, which allows us to believe in ourselves. As I like to put it, gods are solely everything that has been said or believed about them or has been done in their names.
12.01.2009
Liber Novus: first impression of Jung's Red Book
I couldn't sleep last night, as inspired as I was having begun to read Carl Jung's Liber Novus, his "Red Book." My first impression is that this is a massive tome; at 16x12x2'' it is easily the largest book I've ever laid hand on, and just turning the pages takes a substantial effort. But it's well worth it.
The Liber Novus is Jung's account of his decades long process of psychological and subconscious self experimentation, through a technique called "active imagination;" a process that he claimed was the seeds to all his work. Written first in a series of Black Books, this masterpiece was later painstakingly copied into a red leather-bound book, though never finished. And by copy I mean create an entire illuminated manuscript, complete with exquisite calligraphy and full color mandala and dream illustrations, that Jung worked on till his fascination with alchemy took hold, and then sat in a box until long after he died.
This first edition presents not just a translation of the text (by Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani), but a full facsimile of the original folio plates, which have been kept in a safe deposit box unlooked at for the last 80 years and so are in excellent condition. The edition also includes critical apparatuses; a historical essay to contextualize the significance of the Liber Novus in Jung's life and work (and was the main thrust to convince the Society for the Heirs of Jung to finally let the book be published), as well as paratextual citations to highlight the variety of references in the manuscript itself, which should make the read that much more insightful.
Flipping through the folio I was struck by the richness of the illustrations, some of which I would consider masterpieces in themselves, filled with fractals, swirling colors, archetypal situations, and a surreal dream-sense that was apparently under-appreciated by the Surrealists. The calligraphy is in German, which I unfortunately don't speak, and can only comment on the precise appearance of.
As for the text itself, that will be my next attempt. I will say that it begins with the title: "The way of what is to come," along with some prophetic quotations from Isaiah, and much of it is in dialogue form between Jung and his spirit guide (in the tradition of Mephistopheles), placing the work as a modern take of the tradition of revelatory literature, which isn't so far off considering the inclusion of Jung's dreams prophesying the World Wars.
On the whole, the book seems to be Jung's attempt to reconcile the scientific with the mythic and spiritual, the personal with collective, and as such could not be more timely than to finally see the light of people's eyes. As a writer interested in the use of dreams and personal narratives, as well as having taken this process to my own experimental, revelatory, self-mythology and understand the danger of attempting vs. the incredibly potent imagery that can come out of such a process, I suspect the Liber Novus may have far reaching cultural effects that we could only begin to imagine.
The Liber Novus is Jung's account of his decades long process of psychological and subconscious self experimentation, through a technique called "active imagination;" a process that he claimed was the seeds to all his work. Written first in a series of Black Books, this masterpiece was later painstakingly copied into a red leather-bound book, though never finished. And by copy I mean create an entire illuminated manuscript, complete with exquisite calligraphy and full color mandala and dream illustrations, that Jung worked on till his fascination with alchemy took hold, and then sat in a box until long after he died.
This first edition presents not just a translation of the text (by Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani), but a full facsimile of the original folio plates, which have been kept in a safe deposit box unlooked at for the last 80 years and so are in excellent condition. The edition also includes critical apparatuses; a historical essay to contextualize the significance of the Liber Novus in Jung's life and work (and was the main thrust to convince the Society for the Heirs of Jung to finally let the book be published), as well as paratextual citations to highlight the variety of references in the manuscript itself, which should make the read that much more insightful.
Flipping through the folio I was struck by the richness of the illustrations, some of which I would consider masterpieces in themselves, filled with fractals, swirling colors, archetypal situations, and a surreal dream-sense that was apparently under-appreciated by the Surrealists. The calligraphy is in German, which I unfortunately don't speak, and can only comment on the precise appearance of.
As for the text itself, that will be my next attempt. I will say that it begins with the title: "The way of what is to come," along with some prophetic quotations from Isaiah, and much of it is in dialogue form between Jung and his spirit guide (in the tradition of Mephistopheles), placing the work as a modern take of the tradition of revelatory literature, which isn't so far off considering the inclusion of Jung's dreams prophesying the World Wars.
On the whole, the book seems to be Jung's attempt to reconcile the scientific with the mythic and spiritual, the personal with collective, and as such could not be more timely than to finally see the light of people's eyes. As a writer interested in the use of dreams and personal narratives, as well as having taken this process to my own experimental, revelatory, self-mythology and understand the danger of attempting vs. the incredibly potent imagery that can come out of such a process, I suspect the Liber Novus may have far reaching cultural effects that we could only begin to imagine.
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