Calling for Neologisms by Paco Mitchell
Russ, your penchant for whimsy, silliness, and all the other synonyms you unearthed—insofar as they lead to moments of innocent humor and joy—will always be welcome guests in this world we stand to inherit or bequeath. (See Russ's post "Whim, Wham, Whimsy" at fexandcoo. website)
In fact, I am grateful to have a comedy-mask to wear, in between my Saturnine stints of wearing a tragedy-mask while tracking vectors of doom-and-gloom. But even such a comic interest—if set against our many crises in social, political, and economic systems, our endless recourse to military “solutions,” our religious manias, guns, our terribly confused categories, our deep conflicts over self-governance, and so forth—comic interest, as I say, must work up a fine sweat to avoid brain-shutdown.
But that’s exactly what I’ve been experiencing recently, a kind of brain-shutdown in the face of crisis overload. I’m not proud of it, not bragging about it, but I’m sure I’m not alone. In fact, I would guess that a great many people, whether they realize it or not, are undergoing something similar. In my opinion, this is a new psychological syndrome for which we have no name.
This is not a scientific diagnosis, of course. I ran no studies, calculated no statistics, and invoked no theory. Nor did I eschew feelings and intuitions, the way scientists often do (cf. James Hansen’s references to scientific reticence). Quite the contrary, I revel in those unorthodox functions. I feel that, believe it or not, they ground me.
At any rate, for several days I found myself shambling around like one of Stephen King’s zombies, my mind seemingly blank, unable to write, lurching hither and yon, preoccupied with peripheral matters, wondering what’s happening now, and so forth.
Without a name, our new syndrome—a word derived from the Greek compound for “running together”—is bound to sneak up from behind and catch us flat-footed. That may sound like hyperbole, but the “shutdown,” or whatever it was I underwent, really did occur. I thought I was immune to such conditions—but apparently not.
And if my appraisal was accurate, many people would be suffering a virtual derangement, some worse than mine, thanks to this widespread phenomenon. That does not bode well for our ability to come to terms with the Approaching Unprecedented.
In this context, a neologism—a newly coined word or expression—spontaneously occurred to me when I realized what was happening to me. It was unbidden, as we say. The term was ecotastrophe. The word had a certain cachet attached to it, like a form of prestige. It even gave the appearance of having been torn apart and then stitched back together again as if it had gone through a battle. I’m not offering it as a blockbuster, exemplary coinage, just a simple sample of a complex process. It just came to me, with that creative autonomy of words which allows us to connect with the deeper agencies—the word wisdom—we all carry somewhere in our depths, whether we know it or not.
As a simple sample, ecotastrophe at least gets the ball rolling, like Jung’s spontaneous stone-carving of the bear rolling a ball, which he “saw” in the stone and executed in his garden—brought to life, we might say.
Jung has already trodden this unblazed, neologistic trail by coining the term “the Coming Guest,” which I take as his expression for the unknown “thing” that is happening to the world—a stunning choice, in my opinion.
And decades ago, Russ, you determined that, whatever else it may imply, the image of the Coming Guest resonates with the archetypal principle of Eros. That was forty years ago, and I see nothing since then to unwind that spool of yarn that you spun so skillfully. The need for more neologisms today is all the greater.
My call for neologisms is an invitation to our readers to carry out what amounts to their own active imagination in words, opening up to the psychic layers below consciousness. There we enter the train station, perhaps, where dreams come chugging in to greet us. There is where words well up, to take their place in the sun.
I don’t know if anything will come of this experiment, but I know how powerful words can be. So did the Greeks, who, long before the New Testament was written, understood that Logos and Sophia were virtually identical—both standing for the creative feminine wisdom-aspect of God.
So, dear readers: What shall we call this new, unprecedented syndrome? What neologisms come to your mind? Will you share them on our website?
This activity also brought to mind that as a kid I read a lot of mysteries and would also write my own stories and scripts.. When we got our first TV (1950), it also housed a record making turntable. The whole family participated in performing the scripts I wrote. I felt I was reconnecting with some important piece of myself left behind.