Samuel Beckett's absurdist play, Waiting for Godot, was voted the most significant play of the twentieth century. Over the years, I have read the play several times, but I have never seen a production. With my mind full of reflections, considerations and dreams relating to the sixth extinction, as well as the contemporary geopolitical climate, I decided to watch the play. I do not wish to add to the endless commentary and critique of this work, but I want to recommend that you watch this play. A good version of it is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wifcyo64n-w Forget analysis, interpretation, or even understanding the play. None of that is the point of absurdest art. Instead, tend to what rises up spontaneously in you: thoughts, feelings, images, emotions, impulses, dreams. The play is psychoactive and that is the point. I must admit that my favorite genre of art and literature is absurdest in nature as well as its various related and ancillary forms. From what I have said already, you can see that I do not favor traditional analysis (of any sort), but favor focusing on what is engendered spontaneously on an individual basis. Like a dream, such responses may appear "absurd." This, of course, is why they take a back seat to more "rational" approaches. What faces us in the coming "collapse of everything" is not absurd. But the conscious collective response to the collapse is absurd at almost all levels and in all directions. I find, for myself, that almost all present collective conscious efforts in dealing with what confronts humanity to be absurd. Rather than falling into nihilism, I experience this as a necessary condition to develop a more radical individual effort. So what does one do from this perspective? Small, slow, simple, local, human-to-human, dwell in negative capability, create and listen to the dream and...

It is time to read Edgar Allan Poe's THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH.

Here is a link:

https://poestories.com/read/masque

Conducting, as we know it today, did not come into its own until the middle of the 19th century and then with much opposition from composers. Since I began listening to music in any serious way, which was about the time I began to play the piano in earnest, I was fascinated by conductors. In the 170 years since conducting became conducting, there have been many great conductors, masters of their art. Perhaps the greatest of them all is the legendary Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache. During his decades of conducting he did not authorize any recordings to be made of his performances. His reason was that only in the live performance with orchestra, conductor and audience in the enclosed chamber of the concert hall could the potential for the transcendental experience inherent in the music be achieved by everyone. As the conductor John Mauceri makes clear in his book, Maestros and Their Music: The Art and Alchemy of Conducting, the digital recordings released after Celibidache's death are "oddly exaggerated and technically unimpressive," but adding, "His concerts, however. were considered life-changing, for those who attended them." The disparity between the digital recording and the live experience is important—perhaps especially as more and more of our lives are experienced digitally. I'm thinking that the difference lies in the mystery of the live experience which becomes lost in the digital world. I'll explore this sense of mystery in a later blog post. For now, I'd like everyone to experience something digitally that only hints at the art, alchemy and mystery of conducting. This is a 1971 recording of Sergiu Celibidache conducting the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in Maurice Ravel's Bolero. What is special about this video is that it focuses entirely on the conductor, so we see him as the audience never sees him. This recording is a master class by one of the great masters of conducting. Pay attention to what you experience. Watch if possible, on a full screen.

Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5Ve3338-E

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.