Malina, by Ingeborg Bachmann, was published in Austria in 1971. It was not available in English until 1990, and released in a new translation (by Philip Boehm) in 2019 and published by New Directions. Bachmann is considered one of the greatest women writers of the twentieth century. She was a poet, essayist, lecturer, playwright, among other creative endeavors. Her PhD was on Heidegger which she ultimately rejected in favor of Wittgenstein. Her work contributed to feminism in major ways, particularly with the insight that Fascism/Nazism did not end with the world war, but became infused in men and became expressed in the abuse of women on a large scale in male/female relationships. She suffered from major addictions and died tragically at the age of 47. Malina was her only completed novel.

Malina, for me, was unlike any novel I have ever read. “Can a man understand this book,” asks Rachel Kushner in her Introduction. “Completely,” she answers. ‘’He doesn’t have to suffer it.” Kushner says that a woman reader will suffer it, like the burns the narrator suffers. I would add, like the burns the author suffered when her cigarette ash burned her skin which had become insensitive to pain as a result of her drug addiction. I believe Kushner is right, that a man experiences this writing from a distance, which also is one of the narrator’s complaints about both of the men she relates to in the novel.

The narrator is an unidentified female “”I” who is a writer. Malina is the man she lives with. Ivan is the man who is her lover. You can forget about all the so-called rules of the novel. None of the usual expectations are at work here. Reading Malina is like being a voyeur to the narrator’s descent ending with her disappearance into a crack in a wall as if she had never existed. The last line: “”It was murder.”

As a writer, when I read a novel, part of me reads a word, or a line, a paragraph and then muses on what I would write next. My musings are never exact, of course, but often they are in the same ball park as those of the author I am reading. Malina was difficult and jarring for me because everything was a surprise. I was constantly jolted to the point I would have to stop reading for a bit and catch my breath.

One might think of this writing as in the style of so-called “stream of consciousness” writers, all of which Bachmann noted in her various prose writings. But a stream has banks, and the water has direction, and the water flows within the banks of the stream. What Bachmann has done is to write from floodplain, as if everywhere at once. This is perhaps what is so maddening for the male mind.

But what I got from Malina was a gift. As I read, I was continually flooded with desire to write, and deluged with images of what to write. And now faced with the difficulty of writing something from what has inundated me.

Here is a very important interview with Dr. George Mecouch, author of When Psychiatry Slept: Reawakening the Imagination in Therapy (2018).

Have a listen and then read the book. If you would like a copy of my Foreword to George's book let me know.

Here is the link to the interview:

I return frequently to this poem based on an encounter with a person of the streets. Since March, due to the pandemic, I have been walking about much less and have not had encounters such as portrayed here. Someday, I'll return and I will have more encounters with people of the streets and their dreams. In the meantime, I have been seized with an impulse to write a piece in response to this encounter and its poem. I am calling it, "The Bursting Forth," and will post it when it is complete.

Here is the poem...again.

Sporting a Buffalo Bill mustache, a goatee, cascading hair
topped by a weathered leather hat of much the same breed,
one expects a handsome vest and matching chaps with fancy
boots to complete the ensemble, not a tattered blue sweatshirt
over a frayed red tee, old patched corduroys hugging ground,
broken tennies that weren’t a match; a left leg limping to boot.
But this was not a fashion ramp; it’s a newly surfaced market
parking lot and he was asking me, with hand out, and pleading
eyes, and rasping voice, if I could spare a couple of bucks.

He was new to the lot and didn’t know what I do when asked.
No, I say, I cannot spare, but I am in the market for dreams.
You have a dream you can tell me, sell me for a couple of bucks?
Taking a step back, he says, You serious? Dead serious, I answer.
OK, then. I’ll tell you the dream I remember when Jango shook
me awake this morning. Jango? Yeah, I slept with her last night
and woke her up moaning and groaning something awful, she
said. That’s her over there in the black tights. Did you tell her?
Yep. What did she say? She said I better get off all the junk.

You sure you’re gonna give me?Yes, I interrupt. OK, then.
What I saw in my dream was the sidewalk, and it was moving
like something was under the sidewalk, long like a snake or
something, something slithering along, but still under and not
coming out nowhere’s I could see. The sidewalk was moving
as far as I could see. It was creepy and I guess it got me scared
or something to make me moan and  groan and waking up Jango
and all. That’s all there was. Pretty silly dream, I’d say. You think
it’s worth two dollars? Not silly at all. I handed him two dollars.

He stood there looking at me, standing perfectly still, staring.
Jango’s man asked, almost whispering, What’s it mean?

Ah, now that, I charge for. But for free I’ll tell you that’s not
the question. The question is:

What are you going to do now, now that the snake is moving?

From Dreams From the Street

As we approach the collapse, however soon or far away, the main question is what attitude can we develop to be with what will come. I think Emily Levine's TED talk provides one hint.

My first encounter with the work of James Hillman was in 1962. I was completing my Master’s Degree in human psychophysiology and had stumbled across his book, Emotion: A Comprehensive Phenomenology of Theories and Their Meanings for Therapy. First published in 1960, it was Hillman's doctoral dissertation at the University of Zurich. I was familiar with the literature on emotion in various disciplines, but I had never encountered the voice I heard in these pages. What was it? I couldn’t quite get it, but I did know I wanted to see more work by this author. The next work I found was his essay in Harvest,on “Friends and Enemies,” in 1962, and the next was “On Betrayal,” in Spring, in 1965. By this time, I had studied a good bit of Jung, and entered analysis in 1964. Through the 60s and early 70s, I eagerly devoured Jung’s work as well as Hillman’s and taught both at university and in the analyst training program. It was in 1975, that I encountered Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology. It was clear to me that keeping Jung and Hillman close together would be a feat. By this time I had become a Jungian Analyst, and had begun a friendship with Jim. He accepted my essay, ”Cancer in Myth and Dream,” for publication in Spring in 1977, and he suggested that Spring publish a collection of my essays which was published in 1983 (Words As Eggs). In 1978, I became director of analyst training in Los Angeles, a position he had held in Zurich. Then came his book, The Dream and the Underworld, published in 1979, and it caused the most argumentative time between us. It is a profound work as is much of Hillman’s work to be sure. I delighted in the way his mind worked and his quick silvered tongue. But this book caused me to take issue with him. The main issue in my mind was that the relativity of “seeing through” everything left no solid ground for ethical action in the world--a feature of Jung’s psychology that to me was paramount and essential.” I told him that he left no bridge to the upper world. Our differing views went on for some time. Then early in 1982, Jim sent me a copy of his Eranos lecture, “The Thought of the Heart.” I include a picture of this. On it he had written, “For Russell, returning to this side of the ‘bridge,’ glad you are close to Eureka.” I had moved from Los Angeles to a redwood forest just north of Eureka, California. To get clear on Hillman’s reference to bridge take note that the first chapter in The Dream and the Underworld is entitled “Bridge.” In sending “Thought of the Heart,” Hillman is letting me know that he was“returning to this side of the bridge.” His reference to Eureka was not just to the place. I sorely miss him, but his spirit lives on.

After a long search, I have finally found my favorite performance of Maurice Ravel's BOLERO. Not only is this music in my personal top 10, but this performance is stunning in many ways. The conductor is Daniel Barenboim, long one of my favorite conductors because of his unique approach to conducting. The Orchestra is his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, composed of young Arab and Israeli musicians. Their performance is an inspiration. Watch Barenboim not conduct, in order to give his young players full reign and they respond, almost beyond belief. If this is possible in music, it must be possible in life. Maybe get the politicians out of the way and let these young performers show the way. Give this a listen.

“Caborca” is the name of a town in the Mexican Desert. And in this book, “Caborca” is so much more: this name also refers to something else governing a pattern of events that occurred “randomly” to the author over fifty years. This pattern, or meaning, came into focus only slowly for Paco Mitchell as he increasingly “agreed” to participate in the process of becoming the Paraclete of Caborca. “Paraclete” refers to a spiritual advocate or comforter. Paco thus takes us on a journey of initiation in which one life is swept away suddenly and catastrophically and a new one is born, nurtured slowly, and knitted together into a whole, piece by piece—much like one face preemptively shatters in order to give way to another face that knits slowly together over the years.

This second face is that of the Paraclete who advocates for a reality “looming up” behind the veil of the ordinary. In order for this second face to emerge into real life, i.e. to become actual, the Paraclete needs something from the human being. Drawing from Henri Corbin, Paco describes a process of “feeding the angel with our substance”. What can this enigmatic statement mean, now in the 21st century, in a technological civilisation hurtling towards its last days? This book is a careful, detailed description of what “feeding the angel” means in today’s world.

First, to feed the angel, Paco shows that we need to be able to “see” the angel, or at least his footprint appearing in our lives. This means in effect that we must begin to notice anomalies that occur in our lives in a new way, taking them seriously as “messengers” from a hidden world that interpenetrates our ordinary material world, sometimes in shocking ways, sometimes in more subtle, joy-bringing ways. We may need to undergo, as Paco did, a terrible sacrifice in order to open that eye of “seeing”—a sacrifice made worse by its unconsciousness. Paco literally had no clue of what was coming towards him out of the unknown future, as he set out on a youthful adventure to Caborca as a young man.

Second, it is not enough to only “see” these anomalies, which come to Paco in the form of dreams, visions, and empirical events, over the years. In order to feed the angel with our substance, we need also to act! Concrete action in the real, contingent world, as a gesture of love towards the angel secretly driving one into a destiny, is also required. And this book shows us the human cost in unsparing detail as Paco makes increasingly conscious choices to act in the world on behalf of the Paraclete who wishes to incarnate into the context of an ordinary human life. Through episode after episode we can see the gradual, simultaneous emergence of a spiritual being into actuality and the slow turning of a human being from living a life of “random chance” as Paco says, to one of great meaning and service to the hidden centre around which his life is turning: Most of what was revealed to me took place over many years in dreams and synchronistic events, interspersed with scattered passages read in many books. Thus I use the term haphazard—so much “chance” was involved. It would be up to me to connect the dots, to find the needles of necessity buried in the haystacks of chance.

Perhaps one last word on the manner in which individual human beings are so often drafted into service of the spiritual other. The angel finds entry through the wound, not though any heroic gesture of the will. Paco learned about this necessity in an uncompromising manner during his journey to Caborca. One particularly compelling dream also taught him this lesson, I think. He met “Heron-man” in a dream and this figure demanded to be fed. When Paco refused, “I don’t have anything to give you”, the bird-man struck at his wound. This image clearly pairs woundedness with a calling, as well as the consequences of refusing the call. Pairing wound and call generates a question for me—how can we live with trauma? Our modern world has a collective answer: define yourself as a victim and live your life accordingly! Paco gives us his alternative answer, which he found through the creative living of his life. He raises the possibility of shifting from a life of victimhood to a life of service to the mysterious other who can enter our lives through the trauma and demand “to be fed”. He quotes Jesus:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

I am pleased to announce the publication of Paco Mitchell’s

THE PARACLETE OF CABORCA: A COLLISION WITH DESTINY.

In September 1963, a few weeks before starting their senior years in college, two twenty-year-old pals, Paco and Phil, decided to take an impromptu vacation by driving from Southern California to Mexico. As their plan took shape, they figured that a beach-and-body-surfing trip to Mazatlán would fit the bill nicely. “It’ll be a blast,” they thought. They didn’t have much money to spare, but Phil’s VW sedan got good mileage, and gas was cheap then. They could save on motels by sleeping on a deserted beach. Plus, they both spoke some Spanish—Paco was even a Spanish major—so it seemed like a natural fit. And why not? Mexico! Spanish! Fun! Before their vacation was over, however, the blast they received was not the one they were expecting. And what got set in motion because of that trip, especially for Paco, is his tale to tell, since he was impacted not only visibly, but deeply, by the adventure. Now, more than half a century has passed. The Paraclete of Caborca tells the story of what Paco experienced over the decades since that fateful trip, in an uncanny series of dreams, synchronistic events and insights, and the deep meanings and purposes that revealed themselves along the way.

Quite simply, there is no other book like this. Anyone interested in the central importance of dreams and synchronicities will experience this book as a guide to finding the patterns of fate and destiny revealed in these often ignored events. The book, published by Owl & Heron Books, a division of The Lockhart Press, is available now at Amazon in both paperback and Kindle versions.

Here is a link to my Foreword:

ralockhart.com/WP/Foreword to Caborca.pdf