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Symbols for the Soul: A Mythopoetic Inquiry Into the Craft of Soul-Making

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“Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?” It is with these words that the Romantic poet John Keats proposed, in a letter to his siblings, a “grander system of salvation” than the Christian religion, “a system of Spirit-creation” through which suffering can be addressed not in the afterlife but instead within the world. Frustrated by the religious rhetoric of his age that cast the world as an inevitable ‘vale of suffering,’ Keats insisted: “call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-making,’” in which the experience of pain can be creatively transformed, allowing humans to form a “Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.” By making our soul, we are able to find a greater and more harmonious sense of self in the world.

While ignored in religious discourse, and more evocative than technical in its description, Keats’ concept of soul-making has been taken up in the work of archetypal psychologist James Hillman. Attempting to restore to the discipline of psychology a concept of soul – the original Greek definition of ‘psyche’ – Hillman stressed in The Dream and the Underworld: “I call this work soul-making rather than analysis, psychotherapy, individuation. My emphasis is upon shaping, handling, and doing something with psychic stuff. It is a psychology of craft rather than a psychology of growth.” Writing in Religion & Literature, Walter L. Reed suggested that, like Hillman, Keats may have had a process of artistic craft in mind: “The problem of pain is answered for Keats not by the acquisition of immortality… but by an act of creation or poiesis.” Comparing Keats and Hillman’s views on soul-making to the theories of literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin – in which there is a strong functional homology between an author’s relation to the hero of their aesthetic work and the spirit’s relation to the soul – Reed opens up the possibility that there is more to soul-making than its completion in a creative act. Drawing on Keats, Hillman, and Bakhtin, as well as the mythopoetic work of Carl Jung’s Red Book and a variety of other poetic and spiritual writers, this paper attempts to examine the possibility that, like an aesthetically crafted hero, the soul is itself an artistic product, a creation of the symbolic imagination.

“How then are Souls to be made?” asked Keats. “How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them-so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence… but by the medium of a world like this?” In order to examine the artistic production of the soul, we must first say what such a thing is. Soul is a slippery concept that has been defined in a broad range of often-contradictory ways throughout history. For Keats, there is a distinction between the individual soul and the intelligence or spirit: “There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions-but they are not Souls till they acquire identities.” This layered understanding of the spiritual self, which also informs the writings of Hillman and Bakhtin, extends through Greek philosophy, Christian and Gnostic theologies, medieval alchemists like Jacob Boehme, and metaphysical poets such as William Blake. For these diverse thinkers and artists, the self contains an external, perishable body as well as the spirit – the eternal, essential intelligence or spark of divinity common to all life, which Reed described in the Christian tradition as “an aspect of divine being as well as human existence” – a duality against which stands the soul: “commonly considered the possession of an individual human being, his or her particular vital identity.”

Rather than reaffirm the old and problematic Cartesian dualism separating mind and matter, spirit and body stand in interactive relation to each other through the soul. As the alchemist Boehme stated in his Confessions: “The flesh marks the outward moving… The second moving in man is the astral… The third moving is generated between the astral and the outermost, and is called… the soul.” Blake expressed this more poetically in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” In this conception, soul can be seen as an interface or medium through which the internal spirit relates to the external world. Bakhtin discussed this relation between soul and spirit in aesthetic terms in his essay, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”:

“The soul is an image of the totality of everything that has been actually experienced… the spirit is the totality of everything that has the validity of meaning… The soul experienced from within is spirit, and the spirit is extra-aesthetic… The spirit cannot be the bearer of a plot or storyline, for the spirit is not present.”

Soul then is the aesthetic medium through which experience is transformed into meaning, suffering transformed into bliss, common intelligence transformed into personal identity.

Being a medium, the soul operates through an aesthetic mode common to psychological experience. As Hillman commented upon his use of the term soul-making, “making is a term which reflects what the psyche itself does: it makes image. This image making is the first given of all psychic life.” According to Hillman, one of the Greek words for soul is eidola, meaning image: “we are speaking of images that are at the same time invisible. We are inside the imaginative mind.” Soul, then, works in and is made through the imagination. Jung summed this up when stating, “the wealth of the soul exists in images.” Avoiding the unscientific terminology of soul in his later psychological writings, Jung attempted to examine the imagistic nature of soul in his personal journals, collected in and recently published as The Red Book. Being a mythopoetic (literally, ‘myth-making,’ that is, a literary rather than philosophic-scientific) account of Jung’s own journey to find or make a soul, The Red Book continually and evocatively stresses that the soul is found in images, especially in archetypal symbolism. “Oh [my soul],” Jung declared, “that you must speak through me, that my speech and I are your symbol and expression!”

“Psychic images are not necessarily pictures and may not be like sense images at all,” Hillman clarified about the role of symbols in the imagination, “rather they are images as metaphors.” Symbols are not static, literalized images but are instead perceived as multivalent, dynamic, and autonomous forces working in the human imagination in a manner similar to belief in religious deities. As Jung stated:

“The symbol is the word… that one does not simply speak, but that rises out of the depths of the self as a word of power and great need and places itself unexpectedly on the tongue… Salvation [of the soul] is a long road that leads through many gates. These gates are symbols”

Keats’ “system of salvation” may thus be a system of artistic symbolization, in which, “the human species must have their carved Jupiter… their Christ their Oromanes and their Vishnu.” Keats stressed that such symbols serve a necessary function for soul-making. Hillman likewise spoke of the psyche as having a “natural polytheism,” while Blake wrote: “The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses… All deities reside in the human breast.”

This relation of gods to the individual psyche helps illuminate the lived experience of symbols in the imagination as autonomous and interpersonal. As the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, a key influence on the work of Hillman, said, “classical psychoanalysis has often treated its knowledge of symbols as if symbols were concepts… Such [an interpretive] method… disregards particularly the problem of imagination.” The role that symbols play should instead be viewed in light of the fact that, “the dynamic imagination is a primary reality.” For Bakhtin, the soul is “the properly empirical reality of inner life,” and it thus must be experienced, as in Hillman’s words, “like a mystery… as fully real.” Historian of religion Mircea Eliade often stressed that gods and other symbolic contents of mythology are not experienced as dead, textual concepts but as vitally real: “In such societies [where myth is the foundation of social life and culture] the myth is thought to express the absolute truth, because it narrates a sacred history.” Symbols, as expressions of the personal psyche, must also maintain this vital quality in order to be creatively effective for soul-making. Upon finding his own soul in The Red Book, Jung is surprised to learn that the soul is “a living and self-existing being… What I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system.”

Jung further spoke of the soul as something larger than and external to the individual psyche, leading to the development of his theory of archetypes: his soul was something that “did not exist through me, but through whom I existed.” Similarly, though “your soul is your own self in the spiritual world… the spiritual world is also an outer world…” in which one is surrounded by “thoughts and beings of thought that neither obey you nor belong to you.” A symbol is archetypal in that, though experienced personally, it exists autonomously from the self across individuals and cultures – a figure that “constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed.” Hillman concurred in Re-Visioning Psychology: “Man exists in the midst of psyche; it is not the other way around. Therefore, soul is not confined by man, and there is much of psyche that extends beyond the nature of man.” Though, as E.F. Edinger said in Anatomy of the Psyche, “the individual psyche is and must be a whole world within itself in order to stand over and against the outer world and fulfill its task of being a carrier or consciousness,” that psychic world of the soul also contains us. The symbolic soul is not just our own created identity, but also an entire imaginal reality, co-created by our cultures and by humanity at large.

“Individuation is a world-creating process,” said Ediger. In order to create an imaginal reality, the mythopoetic act of soul-making can be seen as akin to the aesthetic process of narrative ‘world-building.’ The symbols of the psyche can by read in terms of literary elements: characters, locations, and events. These elements are not externally determined but are drawn from the internal or subjective sense of reality. As Bakhtin said, “the principles of giving a form to the soul are the principles of giving a form to inner life from outside.”

As a personal interface between the essential self and the external world, the soul should first and foremost contain a representation of the self as a symbolic object – the ‘hero.’ As Reed explained about this form of representation in Bakhtin’s theory: “The hero exists on a different level of being from the author, but he is nevertheless involved in a dialogic relationship with the creative mind that has produced him,” an opposition that “embodies the opposition of spirit and soul.” Bakhtin stressed the point that “it is only when my life is set forth for another that I myself become its hero.” The soul, and its heroic representation, is other than the spirit or author; soul as an aesthetic object can only be created as a totality of meaning existing beyond the individual self, that is, as its symbol:

“To consolidate aesthetically… a lived experience must be purged of all undissolvable admixtures of meaning… these moments must be rendered immanent to the lived experience, must be gathered into a soul that is in principle finite and definitively completed… only this kind of concentrated soul is capable of becoming an aesthetically valid hero.”

Like the aesthetic hero, the host of archetypal characters found in the soul can be seen as both inherently other than but also reflections of the individual psyche. One of Jung’s major contributions to psychology was the concept of the archetypes: the psyche is expressed in a group of figures – self, shadow, anima, &c., which exist collectively but in personal relationship to each of us. As Jung examined only a few select figures in his scientific work, later psychologists seemed to feel that there are only a limited handful of archetypes, whereas in The Red Book, Jung suggested that the soul contains an infinite number of characters that transform into each other, taking on different roles and relations as needed by the psyche: “Haven’t you noticed that [the soul] has become multiple? …First she divided herself into a serpent and a bird, then into a father and mother, and then into Elijah and Salome.” Hillman reiterated this sense of multiplicity of the archetypes: “The endless variety of figures [in dreams] reflects the endlessness of the soul,” as well as the essential otherness of familiar figures: “The persons I engage with in dreams are neither representations (simulacra) of their living selves nor parts of myself. They are shadow images that fill archetypal roles.” The self or hero-soul actively engages or interacts with these characters, as Blake poetically demonstrated in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell when he (the poet’s heroic representation of himself) meets the same Elijah whom Jung converses with in The Red Book and then wrestles with the archetypal figure of an angel. For the poet, these symbolic archetypes are perceived as existentially real.

Just as Jung’s critical work focused on a handful of characters, so to did it underplay the importance of archetypal locations in the psyche: as Jung said, “I have avoided the place of my soul.” And yet, “you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds.” As Hillman pointed out about the symbolism found in dreams, “every dream has its psychical locality, where its images come into being. Images are somewhere.” Bakhtin stressed a similar aesthetic environment for the soul: “In art the object-world in which the hero’s soul lives and moves has the aesthetic validity of a surrounding world or environment of that soul.” In The Red Book, Jung mythopoetically arrived at “the place of the soul and found that this place was a hot desert.” In Jung’s narrative, this desert self can only be transformed into a garden through the cultivation of soul – a potent environmental symbol for the individuation or soul-making process.

The soul has landscapes, literally a ‘psychogeography.’ This is not a new idea, however, but can be seen in various cultures’ myths about the creation of the world from the body of a dead god – or in ancient Taoist alchemical manuscripts, like the Book of the Center, which claim: “The human body is the image of a country,” and, “when Lao Tzu died, his body was transformed into a landscape, the same landscape we find within ourselves.” According to Eliade in his study of the origins of alchemy, “the [Taoist alchemical] quest… was thus bound up with the search for distant mysterious islands where the ‘Immortals’ lived,” lands which are “to be found in the most secret recesses of the brain and belly.” In The Taoist Body, Karl Schipper pointed out that the Taoist alchemist saw the human body through a “symbolic vision… of the inner world”:

“The landscape of the head consists of a high mountain… around a central lake. The lake lies midway between the back of the skull and the point between the eyebrows… In the middle of the lake stands a palatial building… In front of this palace and the lake around it, lies a valley (the nose). The entrance to the valley is guarded by two towers (the ears).”

Like Jung’s journey through the desert landscape of his soul, the Taoist alchemist actively engaged with this internal landscape through meditative and physical practices, interacting with a symbolic environment peopled with mythological characters.

It is important to note that the characters and locations within the symbolic imagination are not passively encountered during the soul-making process – there is an active engagement with symbols through a series of archetypal processes or dramatic events. According to Hillman, “the logos of the soul, psychology, implies the act of traveling the soul’s labyrinth in which we can never go deep enough… It is an operation of penetrating, an insighting into depths that makes soul as it proceeds” Bachelard poetically expresses this process in terms of adventure: “A true poet… wants imagination to be a voyage… The true voyage of the imagination is the voyage to the land, to the very domain of the imaginary.” As Eliade notes, Jung discovered that the steps of this ‘journey of the soul’ map onto the stages of medieval alchemy: “The unconscious undergoes processes which express themselves in alchemical symbolism tending towards psychic results corresponding to the results of hermetic operations.” Or as Edinger explained, “many images from myth, religion, and folklore also gather around these symbolic operations, since they all come from the same source – the archetypal psyche… These central symbols of transformation make up the major content of all culture-products.”

As an artistic endeavor or ‘culture-product,’ soul-making thus follows a series of symbolic operations that can either be expressed alchemically-psychologically (as in individuation) or through the mythopoetic language of travel and adventure. Drawing on the rhetoric of heroism, Joseph Campbell examined various hero and quest mythologies in The Hero With a Thousand Faces in order to construct an overarching narrative structure that artists could also apply to the process of soul-making:

“The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation – initiation – return… A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

For Campbell, the transformation of personal and cultural symbolism is at the heart of the heroic quest: “[The hero] and/or the world in which he finds himself suffers from a symbolic deficiency.” As the quest of the mythological hero is to restore meaning to the world, so does the psychological growth process of the individual center on the attempt to restore vital symbols to the creative imagination. Soul-making is the journey to discover and transform one’s inner reality.

In order to artistically make a soul, how are we first to recognize those symbols that are most expressive of our own psychic relationship to the world? While archetypal, such symbols are also felt to be intimately personal – individual experience grants certain characters, landscapes, and events more symbolic potency than others, a potency that Jung asserted that we recognize through “a peculiar emotional intensity: it is as though chords in us were struck that had never resounded before.” Though for Jung, “the symbol can neither be thought up nor found: it becomes… through willing attention,” the becoming of symbols must begin somewhere in individual experience. For Bachelard, these archetypal images were found in childhood reverie, which “remains at the center of the human psyche… That is where the childhood being weaves together the real and the imaginary, and lives in the fullness of the imagination.” The fantastic author Bruno Schulz, who drew on the symbolism of his own childhood for material for his fiction, strikingly summed up this relationship between childhood images, the creative imagination, and the artist’s soul:

“In childhood we arrive at certain images, images of crucial significance to us. They are like filaments in a solution around which the sense of the world crystallizes for us… Such images constitute a program, establish our soul’s fixed fund of capital… the rest of our life passes in the interpretation of those insights… These early images mark the boundaries of an artist’s creativity.”

Memory, then, and the remembering of childhood images, is crucial to soul-making. Hillman suggested that the ancient Greek “art of memory” presents a “complex [method] of soul-making.” According to Frances Yates in The Art of Memory, Aristotelian philosophy correlates imagination, memory, and soul: “‘Memory, [Aristotle states in De anima], belongs to the same part of the soul as the imagination, it is a collection of mental pictures from sense impressions.’” The art of memory works by imprinting “on the memory a series of loci or places,” – the memory palace – which are then filled with images that help memory “by arousing emotional affects through… striking and unusual images,” including incidents from childhood. While beyond the direct scope of this paper, one imagines the possibility of reverse-engineering the construction of a memory palace as a technique for recalling the symbols that were pivotal in the formation of the childhood psyche.

Another classic, psychological means of getting at personal symbolism is through the imagery of dreams. As Jung proclaimed in The Red Book, “you [the soul] announced yourself to me in advance in dreams… my dreams, are the speech of my soul.” Unlike the interpretive, critical approach to dreams favored by Freud and even Jung, Hillman insisted that “interpretation arises when we have lost touch with the images” – we must instead enter into the reality of such symbolism the way it is actually experienced in dreams. For Hillman, “dream-work [is] an activity, less of a censor than of a bricoleur… The imagination at night takes events out of life… removing more and more empirical trash of the personal world out of life and into psyche, thus allowing the imagination to shape new symbols through the ‘bricolage’ or recombination of daily impressions. As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss explained about the art of bricolage in The Savage Mind: “The characteristic feature of mythical thought is that it expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire” – the limited cultural ‘givens’ that are collected and recombined for the purpose of cultural expression. The symbols in dreams can thus be collected into a cohesive soul: as Bakhtin asserted, in order to restore a unitary and meaningful sense of self from experience that “disintegrates into factually existent, senseless fragments of being,” artists must “assemble… the scattered pieces of [their] own givenness,” a givenness that Hillman suggested is realized in the rarified symbolism of dream images.

As the soul can be seen as a symbolic or mythopoetic world, one might also take an anthropological or cartographic approach to dreaming. Bachelard said, “we must take up residence in these dreams again to be convinced they were once ours. Afterward, we turn them into stories, into fables of a former time, adventures of another world.” Artists might thus draw maps of oneiric locations, catalogue the various dream entities found therein, or write stories organizing their symbolic events through the structure of alchemical symbolism or quest narratives. By tracing out the recurrent imagery of dreams, one not only learns which symbols are most potent in the psyche, but allows them to take on a richer, more meaningful imaginative life, the life of the soul.

As in alchemy where, according to Edinger, “the central image… is the idea of the opus… a sacred work,” the art of soul-making ultimately requires the construction of a work, a creative act that places the imagined soul outside of the individual, and thus able to be seen in its completed totality. In discussing the process of ‘active imagination’ in which therapeutic patients give free play to their fantasies, Jung suggested in “The Transcendent Function” that one method for dealing with imaginal psychic content is to transform it into an aesthetic product: “the material [obtained from fantasy] is continually varied and increased until a kind of condensation of motifs into more or less stereotypical symbols takes place. These stimulate the creative fantasy and serve chiefly as aesthetic motifs.” Through this process of shaping or crafting the symbolic content of the psyche, “one goes on dreaming the dream in greater detail in the waking state, and the initially incomprehensible, isolated event is integrated into the sphere of the total personality.”

And yet, as Eliade hinted about the alchemical arts, “‘to make’ something means knowing the magic formula which will allow it to be invented or to ‘make it appear’… the artisan is a connoisseur of secrets, a magician.” While memory, dreams, and active imagination can recall, recombine, and condense the psychic symbolism of archetypal characters, places, and events into aesthetic material for use in the art of soul-making, the methods and mediums through which this inner reality is transformed into a tangible cultural product reside in the abilities and needs of the individual artist. According to Reed, one can learn about the artistic process of soul-making through its display in the creative works of certain artists; Keats, for instance, “offers a symbolic enactment of the process [of soul-making] in his odes,” particularly in poems like “Ode to a Grecian Urn” that were produced by the poet “in the weeks immediately following his letter on soul-making.” This paper has suggested a similar display of the soul-making process in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and in Jung’s The Red Book. Further scholarship might examine the poetic crafting of soul through archetypal symbolism in the angels of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, the suffering Duende of Frederico Garcia Lorca’s In Search of Duende, or in the mythological bricolage of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with its soul-seeking conclusion (echoing Bakhtin’s injunction to the artist to assemble the scattered pieces of the self into a soul): “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

As Jung remarked in “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry”: “Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices… he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional… into the realm of the ever-enduring… That is the secret of great art, and its effect upon us.” The greatest and most lasting works of art, in which the fragments of culture and individuality have been shored against the ruining effects of suffering and impermanence, are those in which the artist has tapped into the deepest symbols of their psyche and set those images forth for the world to see. “If we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation of our entire civilization,” said Campbell, “we should become indeed the boon-bringer, the culture hero of the day.” Great art does not only display the process by which artists create their individual soul, but can also reveal to all who witness it the contents of their own souls, as well as the soul of the world.

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References

Bachelard, G. (1971). On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. C. Gaudin (Trans.). Dallas, TX:
Spring Publications, Inc. (Original works published 1960, 1962).

Bakhtin, M. M. (1990). Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity. In M. Holquist & V.
Liapunov (Eds.), V. Liapunov (Trans.), Art and Answerability: Early
philosophical essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
(Original work published 1923).

Blake, W. (1988). The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In D. V. Erdman (Ed.), The
complete poetry and prose of William Blake: Newly revised edition. New York,
NY: Anchor Books.

Boehme, J. (1920) Chapter IV. In W. S. Palmer (Ed.), The Confessions of Jacob Boehme.
Retrieved from http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/cjb/index.htm.

Campbell, J. (1973) The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.

Edinger, E. F. (1991). Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical symbolism in psychotherapy.
Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing Co.

Eliade, M. (1960). Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The encounter between contemporary
faiths and archaic realities. P. Mairet (Trans.). New York, NY: Harper
Torchbooks. (Original work published 1957).

Eliade, M. (1978). The Forge and the Crucible: The origins and structures of alchemy. S.
Corrin (Trans.). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. (Original work
published 1956).

Eliot, T. S. (1998). The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Hillman, J. (1975). Re-Visioning Psychology. New York, NY: Harper

Hillman, J. (1979). The Dream and the Underworld. New York, NY: HarperPerennial.

Jung, C. G. (1971) On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry. In J. Campbell
(Ed.) & Hull, R. F. C. (Trans.), The Portable Jung. New York, NY: Penguin.
(Original works published 1922).

Jung, C. G. (1971) The Transcendent Function. In J. Campbell (Ed.) & Hull, R. F. C.
(Trans.), The Portable Jung. New York, NY: Penguin. (Original works published
1957).

Jung, C. G. (2009). The Red Book: Liber novus. S. Shamdasani (Ed.). M. Kyburz, J.
Peck, S. Shamdasani (Trans.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton &Co. (Original
work unpublished)

Keats, J. (1819) Keats on “The Vale of Soul-Making”. Retrieved from http://www.mrbauld.com/keatsva.html.

Levi-Strauss, C. (1968). The Savage Mind: Nature of human society. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.

Reed, W. L. (1997). Art, Therapy, and Theology in Keats, Hillman, and Bakhtin. Religion
& Literature, 29 (1), 1-15. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40059683.

Schipper, K. (1994). The Taoist Body. K. C. Duval (Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press. (Original work published 1982).

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New York, NY: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1934).

Yates, F. A. (1992). The Art of Memory. London: Pimlico.

Burning the Blameless Moon (a metaphysical love poem)

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Burning the Blameless Moon
(for B. and Alex P.)

“If one penetrates the true nature of blame,
it is no different from blessing.”
– The Vimalakirti Sutra

Happy the blameless moon
For it’s the sun that burns:
Ruffian heart of flame
Crushing radiant smile
Every unrequited evening song.
Even gravity’s fighting
Fate far gone,
Bounding bridge tops
To grasp her halo,
To hold one moment,
Burn one smile between
The haze and laser beams,
Like foxes in suede all stars
Smoking the dance floor
In our shimmering souls:
If only an opportunity arose
To say hello.

But only to expose the heart again
Once spoken. Sunset heart,
Radiant jack-in-the-heart:
Fate’s cruel game piece
(Desire the ever-receding prize),
Beating restless up and down
The unrequited boulevards,
In fabled eternal sunshine
Like Eloïse and Abelard:
Crushed under the blameless moon,
Castrating taken moon,
A thwarting influence must
Burn me like some bad star.
The pattern grows more subtle
And disheartening:
Sing this corrosion to me,
Around and round we glow.

But we last living stars
Must never let go,
must still sing lower:
Oh majesty, oh magic! Oh
You naughty haired moon,
Dark radiant moon,
I could howl and kiss you
If you glowed any closer.
But then tides would turn
And quakes throw oceans.
Between the dream and the day
Falls the shadow’s feet:
Terminating time tramping
Eternally between us,
Unrequited every sunset.
If only we knew where we belonged,
But aren’t we all celestial here?
Sing, and hold me nearer
The atmosphere to counteract
This darkening hand.

Oh moon, spinning away
Across the dance floor cosmos,
Fate pulls another fast one,
Laying snares along lamplight
To misinform the blood and circumstance.
Sorry but I’m not alone, she says.
And exposed on cliffs of heart again
I could run the razor weeds
The other way for all I want,
Burning dissatisfaction’s roots
As if stars are mere mirror balls
And earth a cold dead tomb.
But still I pray, if only you,
If only the maybe:
Smiles maintained intact.

For still I burn, rebel
Nature holding the heart out
At her moonbeam boots.
No silent cold grown stone,
No cool Beat Buddha this one:
I burn the thousand
Dreams an instant,
Burn from the inside,
Burn wishes resigned,
Burn projections, attachments,
The whole phenomenal
World in flames.
Even Vimalakirti was burned
To tears with compassion,
Illing the world’s ills,
And how much fiercer
Scorch solar flares?
I could supernova
To save all beings
Or just be friends.

But I’m just looking
For some peace of mind,
She says. And I some charm
To forget these sick cycles,
But unerring find the inner
Compass to conflict, every sight
A sigh, a new memory singing
like needles in the heart-cushion.
And no ethics in heroic couplet
Could vindicate the moon to men:
No matter how disturbed it gets
The world turns relentless,
And I burn on the other side
From her (And if only we could
Extinguish all between us,
But isn’t there some
Categorical imperative
To be awesome?)

Gods and past tense crushed
Our best powers and passions,
And experience only grants
Partial knowledge. But I insist,
We burn for more intimate,
All under heavens howling,
Daring to remember and look up
Her omni-beauteous emanations
And see fate’s fingers dance.
In dreams love may glance
Like liberty, and nature holy law,
But so hard to forget,
This black hole dense
Of all collapsed loves compounded,
And burn anew, far gone
From forgotten innocence and harm.
No, no wonder the sun beats
The high and heart streets,
Around and round
In my smoldering shoes.

But not the moon’s doing,
Smiling her orbits by,
Happy blameless moon,
Foxy radiant moon.
For it’s the sun that burns
With ruffian heart afire:
And each time empty
Fates to fullness again
And the next song begins,
I sing the blessings
Of our shared sky.

Poems from the Plague Year

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(from an imaginary and unedited series)

We Left the Words in Our Wake

Chasing the sun, we fled hurricanes and heartbreak, & other portents of that plague year.
The cities mazed upward in the rearview, labyrinths of concrete and glass where last
year’s longings spelled forth from every storefront automaton. If only time wasn’t
running out like the concrete beneath; if only we could see (and hold onto) one beautiful,
one crashing beam before thunderbolts or roadcrews consumed the coast. To grasp

The ungraspable: our only aegis against the wrecking ball of the night, eyes revisioning
landscapes as fast as we fled across. But with each line, stranger street signs perforated,
announcing an abrupt edge center we might fall off of, as if we could fall off the road
into the howling left from where God was stolen: the pothole left when you absconded
with my heartbeat. I couldn’t let go, I had to let go; the coastlines continued to groan.

When, on a beach at the end of everything, the sun finally crashed through my overcast
and desperation. The sea broke blood and roses, more glorious than hosannas: a light
to last eternities next to these sepulchers, I mean cities. I fell at the root of that halo,
mute, exultant… but turning in tears found my notebook vanished too, through shards
of glass giving up the ghost of light, as if forced to leave even that longing shattered…

…

The Speaking Sickness

I swallowed the words no one wanted to hear, but the frozen smoke of longing lodged in my gut,
next to the horror of that plague year. We were all diseased, unable to speak what we mean
(that old magic of similarity stricken rote contagious). But the words trembled against my ribs,
shivering up my spine like St. Vitus danced across my ice-bound grave. And kept dancing,
for hours: a parade of flailing limbs could barely contain. What’s wrong, she asked
(only the customary concern)? I think I’m dying (imagine every failing of the body and I
feared worse). But the party just danced across my supine geis, everyone singing he’s just
drunk again, every one of my ex-lovers parading serpentine through the room, spider-limbed
like an autotuned hydra or Ulysses’ sirens singing Weill’s What Keeps Mankind Alive?

And I wish I knew; gods, I’ve said I love you but each only heard their own bestial acts
pounding the headboards of desire, not the dreams behind – some compassion (still not
what I mean if words can ever) swallowed like a stack of coins grown verdigrised
in the gut of forgetting. And I’ve trembled these fever visions, plagued but never spoken
that longing for radiance, as if some muse might sweep down through the spinning
machinic night to thaw each internal world in which sickness can’t take root –
where meaning is not saved or spent but burns through (to you)… No wonder
we tremble, these unspoken cosmologies beating our automated hearts out.
Well it’s not a heart attack, she clicked (far from angelic rotting her tongue),
but you’re five degrees below euthermia…

The sirens drew a bath and I trembled naked under bare industrials flickering concrete,
whispering, I don’t want to die here – as if for the first something out there might listen.
And even if mistaken I still cried out: if I wake I will… the only reply a slight thawing
of the spine, crawling resigned under covers to watch lights frail flicker extinguish.
(And then my own). When a voice spoke, like a foreign language literally inside my skull,
my own tongue replaced by some holy alien flaming Cyrillic across my eyelids (gods know
what she thundered) purging all mis-digested contagious sayings – spider-legged longings
of that plague year – from my throat. And when I woke I began to write.

Updates from the World

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A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

New Model of the Universe Says Past Crystallises out of the Future

Trees Communicate with Aspirin-like Chemical

Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys

David Foster Wallace’s Toy Cement Mixer

“Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out to itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty. Wherein, therefor, consists the difference between such a fiction and belief?”
-David Hume, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Process and the Past

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Despite the need to be working on various school and personal creative projects right now I find myself in the middle of a process of going back through past writings and making them more interconnected and available, in short a bit of personal house cleaning, which seems necessary for several reasons. Primarily I have just gotten out of a long term relationship and am realizing that, as happens when ones’ life gets intimately wrapped up in that of another, there are many perspectives and interests that I’ve neglected over the last several years, that need to be dug out and tied back in to my current projects and perspectives before I can begin fully working on those things from a fuller and more integrated place.

Some things I’ve noticed while doing this: obviously the recognition of neglected perspectives, including poetic, occult, revolutionary, metaphysical, oneiric, and process-oriented views of the world, which have shaped much of my current stance despite getting brief or invisible coverage in my thoughts of late.

Secondly I noticed that I was apt in the past to spill out great amounts of personal drama and woe on the Internet, which more recently I’ve learned not to do. We all go through emotional turmoil at times, but don’t necessarily need to present that publicly. This is not though just a choosing not to present these facets of my life, but a recognition that I and my writing have actually matured, so that these emotional contents do not press on me with the same amount of ferocious necessity that they once did; I can separate what I want to say from all the chaos that surrounds the thoughts and words. On the other hand, what is missing from more academic framings of thought is that ideas are always intimately bound up in our experience. To not discuss personal narratives and the experiential engagement with our ideas, that is, how we live out our thoughts in our real lives, is to present a too small and flattened view of what reality is. Our lives, despite our ideals and intentions, are messy, upsetting, and influence everything that goes on in our heads, and recognizing our fears and doubts and questions along side the theories and fictions is ultimately a more true representation of reality, but one that needs to find balance between discretion and disclosure.

It seems necessary to recognize these things in light of the words inscribed above the Delphic Oracle: know thyself. From time to time, life takes hold and we forget who we fully are, and must return to the process and the past in order to find out again, and again, and move forward from the present in full knowledge and being.

Literacy Narrative

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For my class on Narrative and Technology I was asked to create what’s called a literacy narrative, the story of my development as as “content producer/consumer” (to use the parlance of the age, focusing also on how our experiences with media have helped us develop standards of quality. The results were interesting and integrating, somewhat like a statement of intention or a road map, if a bit lengthy and abstract (I am trying to write a novel dealing with some of these similar themes). Thought it was worth posting here:

Long before the written word meant anything to me I loved a good story. Weekend nights growing up my father would tell my brothers and I bedtime stories; made up on the spot, featuring our stuffed animals as characters, a continuing series of tales that always intertwined with the previous nights’ adventures and with the content of our lives. Years later, when my father lost his job as a graphic designer and turned to his passion for genealogy, his stories became an ongoing collection of family legends that he hasn’t finished discovering or telling us. Encouraged more than anything to use our imaginations, my twin brother and I would go on long walks on the beach each summer and make up our own stories, often placing ourselves as characters in our favorite books and video games, but also creating between us an entire internal world through our words, which we would explore and return to year after year.

When our father was at work late, our mother would read us books, from “Alice in Wonderland” to “The Wizard of Oz,” and when I learned to read, sometime before kindergarten (roughly 1985), I became a voracious reader, consuming the entire sci-fi and fantasy sections of our local libraries before turning to more realistic literatures. I was such an avid reader that I would often stay up all night reading with a flashlight under the covers, or read books beyond the reading level of my peers, which I realized in 6th grade when I read the entire unabridged “Les Misérables” back to back with the Bible. Though I read everything I could get my hands on I became most intrigued by ancient mythologies, which I discovered in dusty large-prints in the school library, containing that epic and symbolic sense that reality contains much larger stories than those we experience on a daily basis, which we are also participating in, a sense furthered through role-playing video games and the choose your own adventure novels of the ‘80s.

Most of my love of reading was due to certain challenges I experienced as a child. The first was a sensory integration dysfunction, which eventually resulted in encouragement towards more physical and multi-modal forms of expression: music, art, acting, and gymnastics. Secondly, though, or perhaps due to being, intelligent and imaginative, I was entirely outcasted from my peers, and turned instead to a richer inner life, full of imagined stories and made up games. When I became aware of popular cultures, I explored alternate ways that teenagers express who they are in the world, researching the aesthetic and arts of various subcultures, settling eventually into the narrative of punk rock, with its Do It Yourself and world-changing ideals, the idea that anyone can say anything in any way they want, giving up my viola and books for a guitar, which was my main tool for creative expression for many years, though not the one that would become ultimately important to me.

I never wrote much when I was young, a few fantasy stories in grade school, one journal filled mostly with imaginary maps and drawings. It wasn’t until the first time I tried going to college that I learned that was what I wanted to learn to do. In a philosophy class on the meaning of death I had to keep a daily journal, assumedly so the teacher could keep track of our emotional responses, but this combined with a really droll fiction class and the encouragement of my poetess girlfriend convinced me I had to apprentice myself to recording my thoughts and experiences before I could ever tell a good story. Though my family members are mainly computer programmers/designers and I was raised with several old machines in the house, I always rejected using them for my writing, in somewhat of a luddite or romantic stance (in Pirsig’s sense) combined with being too poor to afford a decent machine. Though most importantly I write by hand, and in cursive, because this method replicates the flow of my thoughts better than my mediocre typing skills, and while typing the urge to go back and edit is too strong/easy, and the sense of flow this creates is generally apparent in the finished work.

An equally important lesson from the class of death was the idea that it is possible and necessary to more fully experience life, which I took to with a vengeance, immediately dropping out of school and moving from the DC area to Pittsburgh. Due to this idea, my imagination, literariness, and love of mythology, as well as several conversations on the subject with my new likeminded band-mates, I realized that instead of experiencing life fully in a random way, a person’s life could become a story, a narrative, a work of art or self-made mythology (an idea that many associate with Kerouac, though his wasn’t at all the story I wanted to live, because it wouldn’t be a good story if it had already been told). To this end I pursued a variety of novel and extreme experiences: protest/activism/street performance, rock and roll, romance, making fairie wings, web design, blogging (and before it was called blogging), circus performances, collective living, children’s storytelling, entheogenic drugs, various spiritual and occult rituals/experiences, psychological and philosophical studies, going crazy a couple times, writing poetry, cooking, traveling, etc. Through all of which I journaled what happened and what it could mean in terms of a larger personal narrative, making several attempts to write it into a novel that was some combination of a Proustian autobiography (as in not necessarily factual) with Grant Morrison’s idea of the hypersigil, that extended works of art are akin to magic spells created in order to realize and chart the course of one’s intentions in and for the world. This magical use of writing is important, as language as a technology may also originally have been a form of magic (spelling as a spell): words have power to cause changes in how we think/look/act in the world, as well as conjure real sensory experience in our imaginations.

In order that my particular personal narrative be interesting or applicable to other people, I have attempted to tie it into common human themes and symbols culled from psychology and mythology. At the same time I have explored the deeper symbolic content of my own life through a study of my dreams, which are
admittedly rather wild and epic, which have added to my personal story and sense of meaning as well as help develop my memory and sense making apparatuses. Dreams eventually took on a greater significance as a source or form of narrative, as they are contained, symbolic even when dealing with everyday concerns, and contain a weird or thwarting element in which the thing itself escapes (a concern with the possibility of description I find in Magical Realist literatures, that the imaginative and the non-real can sometimes express more about reality by sidestepping the inefficacy of language to actually capture what really is, best summed up in the Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant…”). At the very least, dreams are like personalized narratives or an internal TV show, offering some of the most interesting inspirations to one’s artistic process.

As for my definition of Quality, it is expressed in four parts relating back to the above narrative. First I find Quality in that which is rare, unique, or novel, that is, not what can be found in the everyday or in mass consumer culture. I recall throwing my TV out the window in 7th grade and wearing a shard of the screen around my neck for many years after, though more recently I’ve been appreciating some of the higher quality TV programming (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Deadwood), art that pushes its medium to new places or beyond the mean and expected. Quality as not yet been done.

Second, that which has Quality contains an element of intention or ability to evoke a response. Quality art always moves people in some way. Prior to an academic response it is felt viscerally, if you love it or even if you hate it the work is doing something worthwhile, allowing the viewer to experience a fullness or depth of experience. This is somewhat like Garcia Lorca’s concept of the Duende, the clear emotional depth to a performance that sets it above more rote ways of creating. Quality as authentic.

Next, Quality implies to me a harmony or reflexivity across scales, which comes from two pivotal ideas: Marshall McLuhan’s concept that the medium is the message, that form and content reflect each other, and the alchemical idea of as above so below, that the smallest scale of a work has to be reflexive of the whole, that when the parts reinforce each other they add up to something complete and larger than the sum of the parts. In terms of Quality storytelling, this means personal or local stories are reflexive of global concerns and the human condition. Quality as interconnected.

Last, I find Quality in those things that strike me as being connected to my own creative or learning processes, the eureka! or synchronistic moment where that thing is exactly what I was looking for next. Of course, this is entirely subjective and implies that Quality is conditional to the time and place of a person’s encounter with the thing, but things that don’t have that Quality don’t force themselves on our attentions in the same way (if at all). Quality as immediate and personal.

Since returning to school for creative fiction writing, in the last two years I have been trying to hone my writing process, getting a number of stories published in print and online [1] [2], making the rest of my creative output available, blogging (though I rarely have the time for this), reading more than ever, and attempting to finally finish my first novel, as there are two more pushing at the back of my brain to be written. My current literary concerns focus around the interplay of very short and very long forms, that is, flash fiction’s ability to capture the immediacy of a moment vs. the tome (800+ pages), which allows an author to create a full and changing world; second, ergodic or non-linear narratives, and last the use of storytelling and memory as a way of literally saving the world (as in backing it up so it won’t be lost), writing as a collage of personal experiences, global events and narratives, ideas, imaginations, &c. which I wish that I’d thought of two decades ago before my father’s bedtime stories were mostly forgotten.

On Aliens as Symbol and Experience

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My family has many strange stories, of the kind that Gabriel Garcia Marquez might have written if he was into sci-fi, such as that when they were children both my brother and cousin claimed they were abducted by aliens. While visiting my family this past week we spent some time with this cousin, who I’ve only met a handful of times before and haven’t seen in maybe five years, and Sophie wanted to ask her about being an abductee. I persuaded her not to, because as curious as we both are these stories in my family are all somewhat secret or taboo, often covering for situations that were traumatic or uncomfortable. Even the mere mention of Montana where my cousin grew up was enough to give her the howling fantods, mainly as that’s where her family lived in a bunker as part of the Church Universal and Triumphant doomsday cult before the world didn’t end and they became normal people again.

Asking my folks about it later gave us a little more information, though they too seemed anxious to change the subject: my cousin woke up one night in the woods far from the bunker (perhaps an alien abduction being more sane than their cult). My brother on the other hand had a much more normal upbringing, but this included a lot of educational struggles and being outcasted at school, which left him with some strange compulsive behaviors that he could only, and adamantly explained as having been abducted. While these situations could be explained as dissociation or social anxieties mixed with hyperactive imaginations, that doesn’t account for the small triangular scar that they both have from whatever experience did happen to them. The strange thing was my mother’s comments vis-à me.

Personally I can recall (and have written of here before) being a kid and being paralyzed with fear of taking out the garbage at night, because I knew that a mothership would descend from the orange sky to get me, perhaps if they hadn’t already. Or in the ’90s when that pointy-chinned bug-eyed alien face was becoming a pop cultural icon I found it horrifying even to think about (though admittedly I felt that way about spiders and the California Raisins). Before that though when I was really young my mother helped edit the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series on paranormal experiences, having to check sources for the articles. Apparently, though I have no memory of it, we were one day in a bookstore where she picked up Whitley Strieber’s book of UFO research, on the cover of which was that iconic grayfaced alien. When I saw it I flipped out, telling her that I had seen those creatures before – that they had come for me in my dreams – which could have all sorts of interpretations but was clearly so terrifying that I completely repressed it, and have only recently begun to allow myself to see and sort through the symbol of the alien in my dreamwork practices. Though thinking back I always wondered or suspected if I’d been abducted, or was myself an alien, because my whole life I have clearly felt different or separated from my fellow human beings.

While I don’t know, and refuse to make any claims without further direct experiences, if alien abductions really happen (and suspect these could be the imagination’s way of covering up or describing otherwise even more inexplicable experiences), it seems clear that people have many reasons to feel and believe that they have or might be abducted, whether in fear or even desire for such extra-terrestrial intrusion, that has led to aliens becoming a potent symbol in our post-modern age. While often addressed through stereotypes of new-age fanaticism or pop-skepticism, alien beings may still say something vital about what it means or feels like to be human. Mac Tonnies of Posthuman Blues seems to suggest that the image of the gray aliens may be either a projection of our desire to transcend being merely human in this post/trans-human age, or a metaphoric anxiety nightmare left over from the horrors of war and technology from the middle of last century.

I am not quite convinced however that aliens don’t also cover an impulse or feeling that is an ancient one for which these are only the most recent and applicable symbol: that of feeling alienated or disconnected from the other. Consider for example Greek legends of people being kidnapped by fauns or waylaid by sirens, Victorian romances in which men become monsters and vampires, or even the Biblical angels, who contain that same longing to transcend our everyday experiences through external salvation (angels being technically depicted as eye-studded revolving spheres that sound more like UFOs than anything else). Looking at my relatives’ experiences, they clearly were in extreme situations of alienation, which they only found words for in terms of alien abduction: I don’t belong, therefor I must have been removed/transformed. I suffered from the same kind of alienation as a child, feeling that either I didn’t belong or that no one else did, a feeling particularly strong as a tenager dealing with understanding one’s place in the social spheres, much less the celestial spheres. After trying and failing to fit in I tried not to fit in, and didn’t fit in there either, and only found some relief from this anxiety in music and art, listening to Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, his myth of the good alien come to save all the alienated youth certainly allowing me (and I imagine many others) to feel that they did belong, somewhere, even if that was in the distant stars, much like a modern day Ezekial, whose visions of angels the Jews turned to during the alienating reign of Nebuchadnezzar. “Look out your window I can see his light/ If we can sparkle he may land tonight/ Don’t tell your poppa or he’ll get us locked up in fright.”

While children are certainly more inclined to describe or occlude their experiences in imaginistic terms or characters, I suspect this feeling of being alienated may belong to everyone. As rational creatures whose perceptions work through distinction rather than homogenization of experiences, it is no wonder that some of the hardest struggles of history have risen from our perceived human differences. Race, sex, class, customs, gender, age, intelligence, ability, etc, whether arbitrary or not, when taken as the primary signifier and worth of individuals, reduces up to a type or group often at odds with or misunderstood by others outside that group, leading to such bromides as “men are from Mars/ women from Venus,” or more real conflicts like the recent racial profiling and arrest of the black professor Gates in his own home (not to mention centuries of national or racial warfare). Orson Scott Card, in his brilliant Ender’s Quartet novels sets up the Hierarchy of Exclusion, which seems to operate on a function between familiarity and communicability:

“The Nordic language recognizes four orders of foreignness. The first is the otherlander, or utlanning, the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country. The second is the framling… This is the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world. The third is the raman, the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species. The fourth is the true alien, the varelse, which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible. They live, but we cannot guess what purposes or causes make them act. They might be intelligent, they might be self-aware, but we cannot know it.” -from Speaker for the Dead

Of course, when the other is so
foreign to us that we can’t communicate, it often ends in direct conflict, or goes further, beyond anything remotely conceivable and thus truly alien. While this final level of total alienness could be interpreted as encounters with the numinous or ineffable – I am partial to the idea that God is the ultimate alien – it also points to our boundaries of knowledge and description, and more directly to the human experience of being bound in an individual consciousness. To some degree we are all alien to each other, and even sometimes to ourselves: this is a limit to our ability to express who we are and what our experiences of the world mean, and the alien may be the mask, the image we refer others to in order to describe what might otherwise be inexplicable, what feels out of this world, much like Freud’s idea of the uncanny or un-homelike, except with Earth as Home, we react with fear and wonder to that which is extraordinarily unfamiliar. In an age when we can finally begin to say that we know most of what is on Earth, there is still more, roughly 98% more, in the Heavens than we can fit into our scientific philosophies, dark matter and gravity if not little gray beings (though the truth may still be out there… so might God for all we can prove or disprove).

I occasionally tell people that I’m in support of space exploration, which often (and more often than I’d have hoped in the 21st Century) draws blank or incredulous stares, as if I really am from outer space. As the author of the exceptional Red Mars,Kim Stanley Robinson recently pointed out, in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, there is still a reason for going to space. Forget interstellar exploration, forget contact with other potentially intelligent life in the universe, forget finding a habitable new home for when this one inevitably wears out, the current resurgence of space programs could be local; by living on other planets in our solar system we might better figure out how to live on and take care of this planet, which is in sore need of better stewardship. Though this may first mean resolving those lingering problems of otherness that still plague and alienate mankind.

Which isn’t to say that we can’t refamiliarlize ourselves with those who are other from us, a process of dealienazation, which can only begin at home. This was one of the lessons I learned from seeing my family this week, that our secrets are symptomatic of larger miscommunications that lead to conflicts and division the way they do in the larger world, that even though we are all involved in fields of communication (as more and more people are these days), we are still shockingly out of touch from each other, as if E.T. had never extended his finger for contact. But all it sometimes takes is a phone call or a letter, or even just a smile, to make our families familiar to us again, which can equally apply to strangers, enemies, the world. Though we are all aliens lost in space, we are all human on Earth together, one vast estranged family still learning to accept each other and explain what this all might mean. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to look up at the stars together, and when we see the occasional peculiar lights zipping around like nothing but unidentifiable objects, we can finally discuss them openly, or just say hello.