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.

"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."

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:

"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.

On Ultimate Realism

I haven't written much yet publicly on the new perspective or belief system I have been attempting to formulate over this past year, a perspective that I call Ultimate Realism, which is perhaps best summed up by the quote from Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornogrpaher: "Everything which man can imagine, dream, or conceivably want to exist... does exist."

This view first occurred to me one day last year during a week of spiritual-existential difficulty. I had gone to a local bar and ran into an acquaintance, who said, having not seen me in ages due to my focus on school and writing, "welcome back to the real world," to which I could only reply, but isn't everywhere also just as real? and then wandered down the street struck by the total implications of everything around me being that real. There is some sense in which we tend to believe that only those habits and experiences that we usually have are really real, or at least of the most real importance to us, forgetting that other experiences we don't have are just as real. And beyond existing situations, every content of our imaginations and the stories we tell is real, in that these have real effects in the real world. And ultimately, any perspective that will allow us to articulate our lives in the whole of such a multifaceted reality, and perhaps allow us to formulate a perspective of global significance and understanding, will have to put us in relation to that whole, not just as it is scientifically and historically understood, but in relation to all that humans have said, imagined, believed, and dreamed.

This view has come out of years of questioning spiritual beliefs and the nature of the stories we tell. How do we, as human beings in a world with other human beings, deal with the fact that people have divergent and often contradictory views on what the world is and our place in it? Historically, belief systems have clashed, and continue to clash because each side takes their perspective as most true and right, whereas if one view was somehow objectively true and right there should be no cause for conflict; and yet there is. In my own life I have struggled with such limited perspectives, not knowing in what to believe, as the beliefs always seemed too small, and yet needing to believe in something, to tell some kind of story, and finally recognizing that any belief I would want to hold would have to be large enough to contain all possibilities of believing.

Similarly I fear global destruction due to the clash of these limited perspectives, and that we as a species do not have the stories to set us in relation to where we are now that might allow us to continue into the future in a meaningful, healthy, and positive way. The stories we are prone to tell today are often too small, quotidian, dealing with failure, comeuppance, and the meaningless joy ride of post-modernity, whereas we need a perspective that can address the Universe as a whole, for future generations of humanity in this Universe. These stories must be ultimate in order to place us and our actions in the widest set of meaning or significance necessary for survival.

My old professor, Dr. Fred Clothey (a student of famed mythographer Mircea Eliade), suggested that the stories we tell can tell us about ourselves, in effect modeling our understanding of reality in order to authenticate current actions and allow future actions. Our stories/ myths/ beliefs/ perspectives, etc. can do this precisely when they are cast in an "aura of ultimate significance," that is, by referring us to the widest possible scope of experience and understanding, to our cosmic and social beginnings, to our longed for and feared endings, to our ideals taking on human form. We find our place and being in between the limits of the real as we know it.

One such ultimate signifier, that has had a direct effect on real occurrences, is the concept of God(s). While belief in supernatural beings has allowed articulation of our relation to society and mortality, is has, perhaps most clearly and distressingly, served as a justification for centuries worth of horror and cruelty: crusades, inquisitions, terrorism, or just plain ignorance. But we are prone to forget in our polarized times that this personification of ultimate ideals was also a necessary and integral perspective for the development of scientific reasoning, framing an objective and total perspective that we humans could then hope to achieve ourselves, a belief that has existed coterminous to science up through the 20th century. Contemporary atheists might be glad that God is no longer a reference for rational understanding, but "His" death has negative impacts as well: God has traditionally not only been a signifier for ultimate perspective and knowing, but also for perfection and goodness, in short, ethical understanding of behavior, without which we do things like build the atomic bomb. Technology runs rampant when not placed in the widest relation to how it might rightly be used, or the lack of an ethical signifier allows the cultural insecurities that haunt us to become manifest, and such horrors not only be imagined but made real. One imagines a similar lack of ultimate significance in the perspectives that have allowed western culture's unparalleled material consumption, environmental destruction, and continued ideological warfare on the rest of humanity.

I am not arguing here for a return to a belief in the traditional monotheistic God or earlier gods. These stories, as we have seen, are just too small and conflict-provoking compared to those perspectives that now need to be adopted. I am arguing though for a greater belief in the reality and efficacy of the contents of our stories and imaginations, and an awareness of how these otherwise subconscious narratives influence the real world.

One of the problems to this approach is the primacy we give to literal truth, vs. the obvious falsity of our "true" representations of reality. I am a huge fan of stories of the fantastic, of the magical, supernatural, weird, heroic, or sci-fi, which, looking at the predominance of these themes in the current cultural media and imagination, I believe I am not alone in. But why do we love supermen, zombies, and the end of the world? There has been a trend in storytelling, dating from the late 18th century, of attempting to represent reality as it "really is," social or quotidian realism, and not as an allegorical reference for otherwise real things. Fiction, when it first was read as not literally true, was cast as "petite histories," in order to accept stories they had to mimic reality while being divorced from talking about reality. My immediate response to all this is, there's already too much of the world we experience on a daily basis, why create more of it, when stories beyond the everyday may raise possibilities of experience and understanding more than that which we are already familiar with. That familiarity constrains us, by being real, to the obviously inadequate belief systems we now live under. We hold up what we believe is a mirror and say, this is real, and because we say it, that marks the bounds up what we will allow to be really real.

My second issue with realism is that it is not reality despite how it primps and masquerades itself as such. It may represent aspects of reality, but does so by relying on and reaffirming our assumptions about how the world is and should be, which constrains us to accepting those views and realities as more true or valid, to the exclusion of wider views. And today it seems our view of the real is that it frankly sucks and nothing matters anymore. And any attempt to actually discuss real human issues in an emotionally valid way is negated by the irony and scorn with which we articulate the real world. The fantastic however, by being non-real and symbolic of the real (mythopoetic in Tolkien's terms), precisely allows us to highlight those human themes and conditions we want to examine in truthful ways. But in order to even accept the contents of fantastic stories we must (as Coleridge first suggested) suspend our disbelief of those things that couldn't be literally true in our everyday experience. We no longer have a problem leaping into wizard fights or across star systems, we can suspend disbelief but we are never asked to truly believe, and thus are not as prone to take such fantasies as being symbolic or ultimately significant for how we really are or could be in the world. We are content to let them be mere entertainments and diversions rather than suggestions of possibility.

Yet, are ghosts and gods really real, or is this even the right way of framing the question? There is a sense that certain things are existentially real, they commit us to accepting their physical reality, being right in front of us. The invisible and imaginative do not so commit us; one can not empirically and scientifically prove a god's actual existence. To argue one way or the other for this is to miss the entire point about gods. But one can clearly see the effects that belief in such unprovables has on our world, both on our perspectives and psychologies and in actual historical occurrences. Ignoring and belittling the immaterial causes of such beliefs and effects does little to add to our understanding of ourselves in the world, allows the results of inappropriate or too-small beliefs to continue unchecked, and limits the human imagination to articulate new possibilities of being and understanding being, which are necessary for our current and continued survival, let alone enjoyment and well being. On the other hand, if we do not remember that the stories we tell are only stories, that have been made up despite their real effects, we run the risk of mistaking the stories as literally true, thus causing us to act in dangerous and inappropriate ways, when imagining better stories to live by and through is always an option (and it is this lack of awareness of the power of our symbols that I mean by the absent narrative).

I do not know where we will go from here, but I am wary and sick of the post-modern skepticism that rejects any ultimate significance in favor of what we can directly lay our hands on (and in so doing, strangle it to death). I would prefer to see interconnections of the layers of reality rather than the whole's deconstruction and rebuttal. Acting as if we know everything and nothing really matters is perhaps the smallest and most dangerous perspective one could hold. Ultimately, we exist in a Universe which we barely understand, and in which we are a bare speck, and perhaps in that widest view humanity is indeed meaningless and fated to extinction for lack of any better options. And yet it is also possible to believe, and live by the belief, that life and our consciousness of life may be more than a random fluke or evolutionary mistake; not that we serve some clear teleological purpose or extant will of God, but that for all these unknowns we are still real, and still here, and confronted with the implications of that for all reality.

Though reality may be inherently meaningless we have the choice to take on meanings and act on those meanings, to continue to be and gather greater understanding and significance, both on this planet and in the Universe as a whole, should we choose to accept this mission. Anything less than such an Ultimately Realist perspective sells ourselves short, and will only propel us down the road of meaninglessness and destruction. But if we can perhaps articulate a perspective wide enough, not just for all humans, but all life in general and beyond life, then perhaps we can continue on until that perspective, and all else we can imagine, becomes real.

Review: Kenneth Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer

I was already a big fan of Kenneth Patchen after reading his terrifyingly beautiful anti-war novel, The Journal of Albion Moonlight, but he really nailed it with his surreal Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer. The loose plot follows the comedic adventures of a shy man who accidentally writes a work of pornography and ends up in a variety of absurd social situations. Like the scathing poetic rants against war in Albion Moonlight, Patchen turns his raging eye here on society, cultural production, and genres, satirizing the failure of culture to produce meaning. What really makes this novel work though is the protagonist Alfred Budd, an innocent and honest man who has the ability of manifesting anything he imagines into reality. Unlike contemporary fictions that would ridicule such a figure, Budd is presented as the sole source of sanity and possibility in a world falling into surreal meaninglessness, especially in his attempts to heal a crippled girl by imagining hard enough that she can walk again, and convincing her to believe that this is possible. What really sealed my love of this hilarious and moving book was a scene where Budd tries to convince the girl that she can walk by saying that god doesn't need to exist, as belief is only about things that we don't understand or aren't real, except that everything we can imagine is real:

"And what would you say the God who stands before you is?"
"Everything."
"That's certainly narrowing it down."
"Everything which man can imagine, dream, or conceivably want to exist-"
"Will exist?"
"Does exist. How else could we conceive of them? It amazes me to think that there are people who suppose they believe in God, and yet won't believe that there are butterflies bigger than the earth, that there are fires raging at the bottom of the sea, that there are leopards made of golden wire circling the sun-"
"And these things prove there is a God?"
"Prove there isn't - because there's no need for one."

I think that this idea that everything we can imagine is real is very important and entirely missing today, an age where we are all too aware of the falsity of the Spectacle that confronts us in every direction, that despite their unreality, the productions of culture do effect us in very real ways, that the imagination does (and has always been the only human means to) make reality real. As such, Patchen offers a way out or beyond this, suggesting that the kinds of stories we are used to telling are not the only kinds of stories, and that the frail aesthetic irreality we give these stories might be replaced by a belief in the possibility of anything we can imagine.

Atheism 3.0 vs the Functions of Faith and God

More news from the front lines of the war between faith and rationalism [via disinfo]:

Bruce Sheiman doesn’t believe in God, but he does believe in religion.

Setting aside the question of whether God exists, it’s clear that the benefits of faith far outweigh its costs, he argues in his new book, An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off With Religion than Without It.

“I don’t know if anybody is going to be able to convince me that God exists,” Sheiman said in an interview, “but they can convince me that religion has intrinsic value.”

The old atheists said there was no God. The so-called “New Atheists” said there was no God, and they were vocally vicious about it. Now, the new “New Atheists” — call it Atheism 3.0 — say there’s still no God, but maybe religion isn’t all that bad.

Faith provides meaning and purpose for millions of believers, inspires people to tend to each other and build communities, gives them a sense of union with a transcendent force, and provides numerous health benefits, Sheiman says. Moreover, the galvanizing force behind many achievements in Western civilization has been faith, Sheiman argues, while conceding that he limits his analysis, for the most part, to modern Western religion.

“More than any other institution, religion deserves our appreciation and respect because it has persistently encouraged people to care deeply — for the self, for neighbors, for humanity, and for the natural world — and to strive for the highest ideals humans are able to envision,” Sheiman writes…

I'm glad to see that rationalists are beginning to rationally recognize that there are tangible evolutionary benefits to at least the tangible ephemera of the intangible. Certainly community, a sense of well-being, health, cultural growth, etc. are all valuable things for humanity, but (without reading his book yet) I still think Sheiman is missing the whole point about faith, which is that he may never get his coherent rational argument for the existence of God: Faith does not rely on rational proof but on acceptance of things as being true whether or not you can see or prove them, and there are distinct evolutionary advantages in that.

I will try to illustrate: I have faith that there are forces larger than myself at work in the Universe. I (personally) can not prove they are real, nor can I directly observe them, but my ability to prove or observe does not make these forces any less real, or any less active on my life. These statements could just as easily apply to black holes, electromagnetism or other not readily observable scientific phenomena just as much as they could apply to God. Yes I know I can see light from a light bulb, and someone could explain how light comes from a light bulb, but I dare anyone to show me an electromagnetic field directly, without pointing only to its effects. Science for many centuries refused to admit the existence of fields precisely for this reason, that it seemed you had to believe in them. Just because we do not see God, except for in its tangible effects (under which some might group religion, culture, even consciousness and life), does not mean that it is not just an active and real force. Faith just accepts that you may never see it, and gets right along to making use of its effects without all the rejection and consternation of reason.

But there are even clearer and more direct benefits of believing in God. Granted, I have much doubt myself, not that there are intangible forces, but whether these forces are God, rather than malevolent demons intent upon deceiving me and making life miserable. The thing is, at least demons would be an excuse; without them there is absolutely no explanation for why I often feel deceived or miserable, other than saying it is human nature, or my pscyhology or upbringing. Without reference to some larger, intelligent, or teleological force in the Universe, we are hard pressed to find any true meaning or reason for life existing at all, except to eventually die. As Buddhists say, life is suffering, and all an illusion. The thing that God grants (referring mainly to the traditional Western conception of God as all powerful, knowing, and, most particularly, good), is something that a friend of mine in AA pointed out recently: that we can give up to God our feelings of helplessness in the face of cosmic pointlessness, we can give up to God our need for responsibility for all the things in our lives which for the most part aren't in our control to begin with. Not that God or equivalent powers absolve us of responsibility or grant us ultimate meaning, but by standing as metaphors for the possible existence of an ultimate meaning, goodness, or responsibility, especially because unseen, we get to choose to believe that these things are possible, and are thus given a bit of leeway to seek out these things in our own lives where we can, without killing ourselves or each other first. Evolutionarily, belief in God gives us hope and grace, which allow just enough room to trust in and build relationships and civilizations and keep this whole mess going, until we find out if there really is some larger point to any of it.

On the total reaction to life

"Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses. This sense of the world's presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the question, "What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?" It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion, no matter what specific character they may have?"

[William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902]

The Unsayable

As a writer, or more generally an artist, something that has become increasingly more important to me is the ability, desire, or perhaps necessity to express the inexpressible, to represent in some form those situations, characters, feelings, or ideas that either defy representation, or are shades of experience that others have not found ways of representing before. Heidegger, I believe, discussed experience or perception as being similar to driving over the surface of the world, that is, one can only or most readily articulate the outermost (or perhaps innermost) layer of reality. I take it for certain that many deep and true things have been said in the past, that language has been used in innumerable ways, that any subject has been discussed, any combination has been to some degree tried out (one only has to turn to Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” for illustration of that). But I also resent how much schlock and ironic, surface content is thrown around these days, how easy it is to not have the courage to face the unfathomable in one’s self and in the world. A fellow student in my fiction class told me that he once wrote a story putting in a lot of himself and his real feelings and decided that it was so intense that he’d rather not do it again. I fear it’s indicative of our age.

And yet, as far as one can or chooses to push words, music, and visions, it seems that there will always be something more that is left unexpressed; that any art is ultimately a medium, a mediation of a reality that is still immediate and sensorially complete, and more, carrying in every moment associations to memory and imagination, references to culture and history, and gods know what else besides. Emotions, thoughts, sensations, intentions. And even then, if one where able to accurately convey all these modes of perspective, there still remains some ineffable and overwhelming quality, the spirit or life-ness of reality that has not yet come across through any artifice. Though one can come closer, through pushing ones’ perspectives and means of expression. Freud and other psychologists have called this inexpressibleness the ‘uncanny,’ or, by the religious theorist Rudolf Otto, the ‘numinous’. It reveals itself in what is weird, non-rational, fascinating, and terrifying, in the unexpected, unprecedented, and juxtaposed. It is processed in dreams, prayed to in religious rituals, and approached tentatively through an artist’s imagination and vision. Some have called it God but I think that’s just a symbol and it’s something else entirely, something wholly other than the surfaces we say it is.

For a visceral example take the body. For many the body as material is the surface, what it looks like, what’s on it, or the mass, the weight. For those trained to see it otherwise, like doctors, the body is series of elaborate processes, organs, meat, hidden beneath the outward skin. But how often do we have a total lived sense of this (excepting of course moments of illness and malfunction), on an aesthetic or even spiritual level? Or apply it outwards to the rest of the world? One of the most intense and inexpressible moments for me of this sort was not religious or drug-induced, but was the result of seeing the Bodyworlds exhibit several years back: the plasticization of human bodies and organ systems and parts of bodies, all splayed open in exact form, some refracted or expanded to bizarre, inhuman proportions. And yet all still recognizably human, still recognizably my form. One was split down the middle and folded open so that he was standing in two place at once, and I felt my own body trying to physically know what that felt like. I left acutely aware of my every organ, of every living layer within me, and when I walked out into the city and looked around I was just as aware of the insides of every other thing: the trees, machines, animals, building, the air itself even. It was awe-inspiring in such a way that I still don’t know if I’ve gotten it across.

Or on the other hand there are the psychological approaches toward memory and emotion, therapy or artistic transmutation. You could spend a lifetime tracing out the symbols and associations of your individual psyche, and still there might be some part of what makes you tick that you can’t quite lay your finger on. Or perhaps you begin to recognize feelings that you’ve never felt before and can’t yet explain. I am currently working on a story which the character goes through a transformation of a wide spectrum of emotions, and in doing so I am forced to similarly process my own emotions towards an emotional perspective that I know I’ve never felt before and certainly don’t yet know how to express. Several of my friends and classmates have asked why I am writing this piece if it is such an intense and inexplicable process, to which my response has invariably been that this is why I am writing: to experience something that hasn’t been experienced or expressed before in order to offer it up to others and the world.

Rewriting Reality

Yesterday I finished my classes for the semester, and despite the gorgeous weather drifting into the stuffy wooden room through the blue stain-glass windows, the students in my short story class were somehow excited to continue discussing the functions of literature. Debating Salman Rushdie's use of both magical realist elements and the English language in his collection "East, West" as a move towards a broader global perspective, one of my classmates asked why is any of this important to talk about, he's just a writer trying to make some money. Just a writer? Both my teacher and I had to bite our tongues, certainly one does not write in order to make money (just ask any aspiring author and many acclaimed ones). Something that we've been discussing all semester, through the writings of Poe, Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, Borges, and Rushdie, is the way in which literature can present the expectations and conventions both of literature and of life itself back to the reader, reaching for ever larger perspectives on what it means to write, to inhabit a culture, to create reality. While not explicitly addressed in class I have been debating with my classmates over what I see as being one of the most important functions of fiction: that it can create reality, if even at the very least by suggesting new and other ways of being and perceiving the world and ourselves. If there's anything I've gotten out of this semester it is the recognition that writing has the power and responsibility to shape reality.

Of course, this has also meant that I have been entirely exasperated by the current trend in American literature, which for the past fifty years has been dominated by a "quotidian realism," that is, by snarky loosers sarcastically bemoaning the inconsequentiality of their everyday lives while trying to find moments of pale truth in the arms of their ex-wives, addictions, and academic pretensions. The biggest difficulty I see in this approach to literature is that it only confirms what is base and common about real life, while utterly refusing to allow any grander emotions or events room to occur. Personally I think that while art can be a mirror held up to reality, I also agree with Bertolt Brecht that art can be a hammer with which to shape it. My biggest philosophical influences here would be Robert Anton Wilson's quote that "reality is what you can get away with," and the Hashashin mystic Hassan ibn Sabbā's apocryphal assertion that "nothing is true; everything is permitted." While realism may claim to reflect everyday life, we forget that all it does is reflect literary trends and arch/stereotypes. No story is "true" outside of being a story, and consequently, one does not have to be bound by any proscriptions against that which is not typically real or true. Take Borges' work for example, in which fictional worlds ultimately overpower conventional reality, showing that it itself is nothing but a fiction of language.

According to the structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov in his brilliant discussion of the fantastic as a literary genre, the supernatural, or even just the hyper-real and magically real, can function in narratives to express those things that might otherwise be inexpressible, whether cultural taboos or a Daoist ineffability of reality itself. Certainly psychoanalysis has taken the modern place of saying the unsayable, so that one could today write about rather taboo subjects in a realist style, but it still does not address the more imaginative aspects of what might be possible in the world. Not that one has to include magically real elements to do this, but this function of imagination is the place at which myth and folktales function. Italo Calvino suggests the way the earliest storytellers took the elements of life around them, caves, hunting, tigers, reproduction, etc. and recombined them in all possible ways, creating both a boundary on what had been seen and done before, and the possibility of other things that hadn't and either could be desired or feared. In myth, dreams are born, and the ability for culture to advance. This process is still continuing today. The human imagination in stories has more recently created both the internet (Vernor Vinge's "True Names") and the modern totalitarian state (Orwell's "1984"). If these aren't everyday enough examples for you, consider the now ubiquitous and almost bromidic myth of the American Dream. Thousands of people believe that they can raise themselves from rags to riches, and many actually do, precisely because in the late 1800s Horatio Alger Jr. happened to write a particular kind of dime novel in which that was possible. Maybe it was possible before that, but due to his stories it seems to many to be much more possible now. I know that my own life was intimately shaped by reading certain kinds of heroic fiction as a child (what always impressed me about Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series was not a desire to actually ride dragons, but the utter integrity of her characters in the face of societal pressure and change). I can only think of the current generation of children, who in reading the "Harry Potter" series may grow up with an increased sense of the possibility of true magic. Who, on the other hand, wants to grow up to be one of the bitter anti-heroes of a tepid realism, who himself is only a a second-order shadow of the much more interesting and articulate underdog, Henry Miller?

This post is of course not meant to be an exhaustive essay on the topic of rewriting reality, it is more along the lines of a tentative aesthetic statement or a whispered call to action. I'll only briefly point people to Grant Morrison's idea of art as a hypersigil, or to Paulo Coelho's idea of the Personal Legend. Why was his book "The Alchemist" on bestseller lists for the past year? Because he is telling people quite simply that they can create and live out their own stories. And if even just one reader believes him, then he has done his job as a writer. Never doubt that you too can be living in the greatest story ever told.

life is not a true or false questionaire

It wouldn't be a proper family reuninon unless at some point, preferably after everyone's got at least a couple drinks in them, someone brings up politics. Of course, in my family this is less an argument over which party is in the right, as much all around laughter at how little any of actually believes in the system and the lies it continues to spew forth on a daily basis. After reading the article this morning on the biological attack on the protesters in DC last week, and hearing that it was extensively covered in other media I began to wonder, does it really matter if it's true?

To some degree, yes, the idea of our government being so low as to poison its own population is horrendous, and needs to be addressed, but even more horrendous is that regardless of whether it's true or not, the possibility that they very well could is utterly believable. What makes something true anyway? These days, that seems to rely less on whether a particular event did or did not happen and more on how widespread the belief of its possibility is. Shortly after the Katrina debacle, on reading in multiple sources that Bush staged photo-ops of rebuilding levees and soup kitchens only to have them torn down when he left, I tried telling this to a number of people, only to find utter shock and disbelief that any human being could be so callous. What do you believe? Even if it's not true, could rumors alone impeach a man or mark him up as one of the most heinous war criminals of all time?

Truth is a sketchy issue, and one that's fascinated me for some time, because no matter where or how far you look for it, it's not there. At least by any objective standards of validification. Certainly you could toss out hassan i-sabah's old bromide that "nothing is true, everything is permitted," or, as Siga pointed out earlier, "truth comes from within" and we alone can determine what we believe, but even then it comes down to value judgments and a defined sense of morality than cold hard facts.

Let's face it, the media lies to us, and not just the corporate sponsored newscasts. About nine tenths (or more) of everything we read or hear is shadings of truth, spin and counter spin of events aimed at getting across certain ideas and agendas till our heads are dizzy and we fall down under the hubris of inaccurate information. In one might be the greatest conspiracy of them all, the "Illuminatus" trilogy (which is itself only one book full of misinformation), Robert Anton Wilson coins the term fnord, which is the almost audible sound of the full truth not being disclosed. Open up the newspaper and read any article with a critical and detached frame of mind. You can almost visibly see the gaps in logic and will to suspend disbelief that lie embedded in the slick writing. Just what is not being said? And how are we to believe any of it?

Inspired by Alfred Korzybski's general semantics and assertion that "the map is not the territory" (nor really an actual map itself but just a word), R. A. Wilson eventually formed the idea of Maybe Logic, which "consists of never regarding any model or map of Universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial." Not looking for concrete validity but for the suggestion of possibility, including the possibility to disregard one's own standards for validity.

Take your deepest held beliefs. The one's you never question and live your every moment as if reality depended on. Ask yourself, why do I believe this? (and don't answer "because it's true"). Dig into the roots of the issue, morals, upbringing, social mores or lack thereof. Here's one that used to haunt me (and is a rather minor issue when it comes down to it), vegetarianism. I used to be vegan, now I occasionally eat meat. Do I care about animals any less, did I suddenly decide that my reasons for not consuming them were fallacious? No. The more I looked at why I was doing it, the more I realized the whole issue was far more complex, far more gray than my individual actions alone would ever be able to address. I still refuse factory farmed animals, I still (and even more so than ever) am conscious of how my actions affect other living beings, but I realized that the basis for that black/white decision was based more on what I should do in toto than taking any given situation for what it was and acting accordingly. I still listen to records and ride a bike, and vulcanization requires bone marrow. There's the possibility that sometimes you can not fight every battle. There's also the possibility that we create rules and guidelines for ourselves that are just as stringent and confining as any law created by impersonal governmental policies. And the best way to not get caught in rules (or stagnant beliefs) is to occasionally break them. Out with the cop in the head, and all that. If you haven't already made up your mind it's never too late to change your opinion.

Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh yeah. Don't believe everything you read. But don't disbelieve it either. Entertain the possibility that it's possible the US government released bioweapons on its citizens or that it's all a big conspiracy. And then laugh and go to bed and make sure to watch your health. Sweet dreams and don't let the tulerimia bite.

oh, they are

“There is no reason good can’t triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.”

-Kurt Vonnegut

the protocols are stacked against us

A protocol is essentially an agreement over how to interact in a shared space, a set of rules for engagement that define and bound the interactions. But protocols don't work unless they are respected by all parties entering into the arangement. Our society is based on constantly shifting protocols that lay out how we should behave towards each other and towards/ within the larger social organizations, up to but not limited to the organizations of our whole culture, and the whole world, and the organizations of power that attempt to control the protocols for their own ends. The need to interact, and the need to set up codes for interacting may have always existed, but over time these rules have been bent to less allow us to interact in meaningful and mutually beneficial ways, and more to play out and fulfill age old political, economic, and religious dogmas that are rooted in conflict and concentration of power in the hands of a few. This is antithetical to our being connected, and though conflict is a part of connection, it is a part that attempts to lessen connection and make it not possible for people to connect on their own terms. Our present protocols are not designed to allow people to interact in the ways they want, but force them into prescribed roles which only serve to continue themselves and not allow for personal change in the system. The protocols of any free system would have to evolve from the needs and desires and interactions of all the agents in that system, not from the few who've held power of that for themselves.

But though our present system operates under such constraints we agents still maintain our essential freedom to connect as we see fit, and though it seems like we can not actually change the higher level protocols directly, these are built from the ground up, from our daily and personal rules for interaction. And these we still have our own power over. How do you interact with people when you pass them on the streets, when you have to have economic transactions with them in the stores, when you have to work with them and live with them, and share any space in this world with them? What protocols shape these small interactions? Social stigma, hatred and derision, greed and desire for power over others? Or instead the desire to break through the walls and actually interact as one human with another, to interact on that basic level of beings who are connected from the most direct fact of being here together. Why try and deny that? Why try and make that any harder than it already is? Smiling and saying hello are relatively easy, and offers the start of forming new connected relationships to the world around us. Relationships founded on respect and compassion.

Of course that assumes that people might want to form relationships of respect and compassion, or form relationships at all, and if they have been raised their whole lives on violence and hatred and conflict, what experiences do they have to encourage them to shape their interactions in any other way? I do not know if humans are essentially good, or if given the oppurtunity would more naturally tend towardss mutually beneficial relationships. But I do believe that despite how we might choose to interact with each otehr, we are all connected, even if just on the physical level of all being here on this planet together, and having to live up to that (or from that). And once that is recognized it becomes much harder to ignore your fellow humans and attempt to push them away. There's nowhere left for them to go, and our reality is most intimately shaped by us all being in it together that killing can no longer be an option. That's why it's important to treat everything and everyone, especially those who don't or refuse to see it, in a manner that reaffirms that we indeed are all connected. And even if that oppurtunity for connection is rejected by the otehr at the time, it creates a space for it to come back later, in one form or another.

***

Connection is love. Interaction is intimacy, the merging of two into one across all the levels. Every touch, every word, every glance, every thought serves to unify us with the compassionate force of that essential love, but each also carries the seeds of destruction, of conflict. For love and death, beauty and pain, always walk hand and hand, and all instances that speak of connection also whisper of the conflicting struggle that comes before unity and the rending that comes when things begin to fall apart again. The act of love itself can be the most joyous and direct form of connection, from the most physical level up, but at the same time this act serves as a painful reminder of the transcience of such connections. What wonder and what agony it precludes, and reveals in its awakening like a flower unfurling.

Every act is an act of love, perhaps not on the grossest level, but every interaction we have with the world is intimate and connects us deeper within it. And we have the choice to address that as we see fit can either accept it and give ourselves up to this connection and merging, or reject it and in so doing hold ourselves back from the world in fear that we will either lose our precious egos or die. But that choice is always ours...

we are all in this together

Humanity is facing a vast problem the closer we draw to the looming technological singularity, namely that most of us are not prepared for it to happen, and are not even aware that it is. Most of the technological breakthroughs of recent history are in communications and interconnectivity, but most of the money and resources are channeled towards weapons systems and maintaining a technological civilization that hasn't moved much further than the industrial revolution. This culture consumes more and more energy, mostly from unrenewable resources, in order to maintain a manner of living that is increasingly ineffective and downright harmful to the majority of beings on our small planet, with hardly any thought to why or what we could be doing different.



When Darwin framed the evolutionary paradigm as "survival of the fittest" he gave voice to the prime drive for humanity's destructive capabilities. Since the beginning of recorded history it hsa been warfare and manifest destiny, one tribe conquering and pushing out another as long as there was room to grow and push. This drive has found its avatar in western civilization, in twentieth century capitalism, in which it is expressed as "the one on top wins." In this view man is nothing unless he is more fit than his neighbors, unless he has complete control over his servants and the environment, and any arguments that such a lifestyle is harmful or not sustainable is laughed at as a bunch of baloney.



But now things are changing, and fast. As telecommunications quickly connects the world's information flows, boundaries dissapear and the diverse tribes are seen to be part of the human tribe. As the globe warms and the rainforests are stripped bare and countless species are driven to the brink of extinction it becomes no longer possible to deny the adverse effects this technological paradigm are having on our world. There is nowhere left to explore, there is no one left to conquer, there are no dark corners left to push those who would not be part of the "civilized world". Space may be the final frontier, but we don't have ourt shit together enough to explore it, and if we did, how long before we conquer the neighboring star systems?



Those in power, those who have the energy and resources to direct the cultural matrix, are afraid. Their world view no longer works, but they have too much invested in it to change. The sun is powerful enough to power all the earth, if it was harnessed effectively, yet we rely on fossil fuels because that is the way it has been done. That is what pays the man. The only room left for us to grow is inward, exploring the reaches of art and mind, yet they instead spend more money on war than on anything else put together. Again, because it is the way it has been done, and it pays. It doesn't pay to accept change, but to freeze it, to hold back the waves and pretend this moment can be stretched on indefinitley.



The ones on top are afraid because if they didn't maintain this illusion they wouldn't be on top anymore. Because now there is no top. The earth is round, small, fragile, and floating in the middle of space. The earth is our mother, and all we've got, but we treat her like a whore, to be used and thrown away. The old evolutionary paradigm of survival of the fittest doesn't work anymore, yet we haven't yet accepted the new paradigm of interconnectivity. We are all in this together, let's stop acting like some of us are not.