Asemic writing is writing without semantic content, that is, as the Greek word says, “without the smallest unit of meaning.” Like abstract painting, asemic writing is abstract, and any “meaning” is generated within the subjective field of the viewer. Asemic authors create myriad forms of writing that are deliberately empty of meaning, attempting to produce a “vacuum” of meaning that is then filled in by the viewer. 

Why would an “author” do that? (see note below).

Asemic writing finds its home in literature, but it also finds itself considered an art form. Across various other categories of expression, it has become a global movement. It is a major question when producing an asemic work whether it is possible to create a work devoid of meaning. While the author’s intent is “no meaning,” the viewer's experience?particularly if something of the deeper psyche is triggered, will inevitably begin to fill the vacuum  and this will be experienced as “meaning.” The asemic work is “created” as an art form, while the subjective response is “created” also. Is the subjective response (particularly if outside the conscious ego’s intention) also an art form? 

It was this question I went to sleep with. In the morning, I woke out of the mist of sleep with the question:  Are dreams asemic? 

I’ll respond to this question in a later post. First, I must post a piece on how my mind recently has been taken up with the idea of favorites. I will do that shortly and try to articulate the relationship between “favorites” and asemic writing/art.

 NOTE: A useful exposure to the forms, history, and current developments in asemic writing is available in Wikipedia under the title, “asemic writing.” 

Current Active Websites

http://ralockhart.com
This is my main website and provides links to most of my online activities.

http://ralockhart.com/WP
This is my main blog with posts on all aspects of psyche and culture.

Welcome!

This site is for the fictive creations of Russ and Paco. Here you will find Fex & Coo, The Deathling Crown Lottery, The Ceilidh of Dreams, Not in My Nightmare, and other offerings.

http://owandhersonpress.website
This cite is for publications of the Owl & Heron Press division of The Lockhart Press. Here you will find links to Words As Eggs, Psyche Speaks, The Final Interlude, The Paraclete of Caborca, Dreams, Bones & the Future and coming volumes.

http://ralockhart.blog
In the dream I was working on a new website. It was intended, it seemed, to be a place for poems, art, music, readings, photography, and other manifestations of psyche that did not readily fit in the current sites.

The Paraclete of Caborca

This site is for access to The Paraclete of Caborca and for interacting with Paco in relation to this incredible book.

Coming Soon

Archive of the Writings of Russell Lockhart
A place for all of my published and unpublished writings plus additional items. Watch for more details and access beginning Jung 15, 2024.

Owl Books
Russ will be donating and selling his professional library in areas of Jungian and psychoanalytic psychology, religion, culture, language, etymology, history, criticism, the arts, and other areas of interest. Watch for details beginning June 15.

Russell Lockhart

Synchronic Coalescence

While working on an essay about dream words, an unbidden phrase comes into my experience: synchronic coalescence. Like imageless voice dreams, I take such experiences as the voice of someething other and as something “different” from my conscious intentions. I take them as tasks.
So, if I welcome this intrusion, what do I make of it? I do not think “synchronicity” is meant. That would be the going together in time of an inner psychic event (such as a dream) and an outer event that constitute an acausal “unit.” No need for another word for this. Intuitively, I think what is being referred to is the going together in time of events on the same level. For example, this past Sunday, the news was dominated by the Super Bowl, Tayloe Swift, Money (Super Bowl ad revenue) and Trump. These things “go together” in a unit of time (a kairos)—in this case, a “day.” These are all “outer” events, not the relation between an inner psychic event and an outer event. Inner events may also exhibit synchronic coalescence, e.g., a series of dreams, or visions, or image, over a period (kairos) of any defined length.
The question is: are these synchronic coalescences meaningful in any way?
The term coalescence has many exemplar meanings in different contexts, but all referring in some way to an active process of things being “pulled together.” For example, in chemistry, coalescence refers to “the process by which two or more separate masses of miscible substances seem to ‘pull’ each other together should they make the slightest contact.” (Wikipedia). Wikipedia also refers to “mind coalescence” which refers to “collective intelligence.”
As I work on this, I will post on how synchronic coalescence adds a useful dimension to the analysis of important inner and outer phenomena. In the meantime, see what you can do with this idea.

PREFICTION

A deep stentorian dream voice says but one word: “Prefiction.”

When I type the word into my computer dream book, autocorrect changes the word to “prediction.” When I Google the word, everything comes up “prediction.” Even when I first repeat the word, “prediction” comes forth. It is as if there is vail keeping me from dealing with “prefiction.”

It is my practice to take what imageless dream voices say as tasks. Almost all my writing in books, articles, essays, blog posts and other forms, has taken form from what develops from this sense of task.

So, prediction becomes a task.

As my work with this develops, I will post the results.

An extraordinary book. I highly recommend it. Highly!

A new AI model called Morpheus-1 claims to induce lucid dreaming.

Prophetic, a neurotechnology startup, has a new AI model called Morpheus-1 that it claims can help people enter a lucid dream state. The model takes the current brain state as a prompt and generates ultrasound holograms that can be sent to the brain to start the lucid dream state and keep it stable. Lucid dreaming is a type of dream state where the dreamer is aware they are asleep and can control the dream. Prophetic plans to release a headband product called The Halo in beta in the Spring. The device sends sound waves into the brain to connect with the current brain state and put the mind into a lucid state.

White Rabbit

Looking back, I feel that my favorite song from the late 60s, was Grace Slick’s White Rabbit. Slick was considered the progenitive Queen of Acid Rock and the song has always been considered an anthem to LSD and other hallucinogens. The song caught me not because of its allusions to drugs, I was not a user, but by its connection with the novels of Lewis Carroll (among my favorites) and the “beat” of the song so strongly influenced by Ravel’s Bolero (one of my favorites).* This combination of favorites has persisted now for more the 50 years.

What links these favorites?

Curiously, it was Grace Slick who made it clear. She said the song was not about drugs, but about curiosity. For her, drugs were about opening the mind, but it was curiosity that was the gold. Drugs worked to break down the miasma of conformity that kept everyone trapped in uniformity. But it was curiosity that would truly open the mind and lead to a new kind of freedom, true discovery, and the release of the imagination from its culturally induced prison.  It was not just drugs that would do this. As she made clear, “to feed your head,” meant to read books, particularly books that would lead one to follow the white rabbit, that is, to follow curiosity.

One of my earliest lectures as a Jungian analyst, was built on this essential key of curiosity as a way into the deep psyche. I invite you to be curious about this word curiosity and explore it as I have suggested in recent posts on wordwork.

*Slick also mentioned the influence of Miles Davis’s 1960 jazz album, “Sketches of Spain,” and especially the “Concerto de Aranjuez.” I was never a jazz fan, though I loved reading the history of jazz. To this day, this album and his 1959 “A Kind of Blue,” are the only jazz music I listen to. So, another kind of favorite.

Here  is an important article from the NY Times:

W O R D W O R K

Wordwork is a method of revealing the deep psyche hidden in words and images. From time to time, I’ll post an example to illustrate how to make use of this method. For more details, consult my paper, “Words as Eggs,” in my book, Words as Eggs: Psyche in Language and Clinic.

consider

The first step is to find the word in the dictionary. For wordwork, I suggest The American Heritage Dictionary. Here is what you will find:

con?sid?er (k?n-sid’?r) v. -ered, -er?ing, -ers—tr. 1. To think carefully about. 2. To think or deem to be, regard as. See Usage Note at as¹. 3. To form an opinion about; judge: considers waste to be criminal. 4. To take into account; bear in mind. 5. To show consideration for; considered the feelings of others. 6. To esteem; regard. 7. To look at thoughtfully. — intr. To think carefully; reflect. [ME consideren < OFr. < Lat. considerare : com-, com + s?dus, s?der-, star.]

The initial entry will show the word in bold and separated into syllables. Here you can see that “consider” is a three-syllable word. Next comes the phonetic spelling showing how the word is pronounced. Then the part of speech is indicated; in this case, consider is a verb. There follow different grammatical forms of consider. The entry then tells us this is a transitive verb, meaning that it requires an object to be acted on, to make sense. Then there will be a number of entries showing what the word means. Most dictionaries will list these meanings historically (with current-meaning first) or in terms of commonality (the most common-meaning first). If the verb can also be used intransitively (as a stand-alone word not requiring an object to make sense), this will be indicated.

So far, while some of this may be useful in various ways, none of it has any impact emotionally, psychologically, or imaginatively. All necessary, of course, and not to be ignored, but essentially utilitarian and rather boring.

But now something interesting begins to happen as the dictionary shows us the origin and history of the word. We rarely think about the origin of a word, but every word in every language was born at some point in time and somewhere in the world. And every word that has been born has a history, a story to tell. This birth and story of a word is referred to generally as a word’s etymology. You will recognize the “-logy” of this word, which means “speech.” The component “etym-, refers to “truth.” So, etymology literally means “truth speaking.” Notice that the dictionary “brackets” the etymology. It’s the last entry. Some dictionaries omit this altogether. But this is where the gold is.

Current meaning and definition are too often only the shell of a word. We use words but do not know their soul—or even care; we are all word abusers. Anything that will help free us from the prison of current meaning, the literalness and speed of the present, will help us to free Psyche from her prison shell. Words take on life, induce images, excite the imagination, begin to weave textures with one another, and tell whole stories, if we but scratch the surface of the word.

The sider part of this word is the root-word for star—the same etymon we see in such words as sidereal, meaning “in reference to star time,” and siderite, the iron from meteorites—that is, “what falls to earth from the stars.” In earlier times, a sidus was one who observed the stars. That required care and time—one could not hurry the heavens. And in watching the stars in this slow and attentive way, the psyche was stirred, began to move, and projected itself into the starry lights. In such careful looking, the psyche began to see itself, and man perceived the relationship between himself and the stars. In such con-sideration, being with the stars, the psyche gave birth to astrology.

In these days of instant, this sense of “consider” has been lost.

So, paying attention to the word’s birth and its developmental history is one effective waay of slowing down. And by slowing down, we become psychically prepared to experience the “shock” of what is revealed, that what is hidden in the birth and history of “consider” is the image of “star.” Now this revelation can set the imagination in motion.

Even more. Sometimes, the dictionary will follow the origin-story further back, to the primitive Indo-European roots. In this case, the I-E root for “consider” is sweide¹. This root means “to shine,” and “to consult the stars.” A further development is the word “desiderate,” which originally meant “to hope from the stars,” but in modern time has given rise to our word for “desire.” Neither of these images (star, desire) is available to us unless we do this sort of word work.

In future posts, I’ll illustrate more fully how wordwork can lead one into unexpected places in working on a dream. In the meantime, keep in mind what Emerson said: “Every word was once a poem.”

Recommendation for Lily Iona MacKenzie’s Dreaming Myself Into Old Age: One Woman’s Search for Meaning

Old age is an opportunity to experience our own deepest mystery. Life’s distractions preclude tending to this mystery before the prospect of death begins to close all the curtains to the outside world. Mystery literally means “seeing with the eyes closed.” We do this when we sleep, and then we see dreams. Dreams, like our DNA, are unique to us. Truth be known, our dreams are an invitation to explore our uniqueness and become an extraordinary resource for us as we confront the reality and inevitability of death. We do know that every dream is a story—a mystery—but most people have little or no connection to this reality. This is why it is important for something or someone to point us in the direction of our own unique path—a direction that becomes crucial as death approaches. We don’t need instruction. We don’t need lectures. We don’t need admonitions or dogma. What we need are stories that strike us to the core, stories that can open us up to the most important pathway we will ever experience. What can help is to hear stories of someone who has struggled with the same things we struggle with in old age and as death begins to call our name. An exquisite example is Lilly Iona MacKensie’s book, Dreaming Myself into Old Age: One Woman’s Search for Meaning. What I find most compelling about this work is she speaks not with an impersonal, distant voice, but with full-throated revelations of her personal struggles, an inside view that invites connection, that opens one up to her stories, her dreams, her art, in such a way that it becomes a genuine companion to one’s own struggles with old age, dying and death. Read this book now. You will be glad you did.

Russell A. Lockhart, Ph.D.

Author of The Final Interlude: Advancing Age and Life’s End (with Lee Roloff), Psyche Speaks, Words As Eggs