We humans construct ourselves and each other through multiple layers of Defining Moments; the self or soul is a work of art and a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation and change, images in juxtaposition which unify and cohere when seen through different lenses.
In this fourth essay written for the occasion of my birthday to pursue the truth of myself and the informing, motivating, and shaping forces that created me, I interrogate the books which in reading have written me.
Literature is a Mirror of Becoming, an instrument through which we discover, reimagine, and transform ourselves as we wish to become.
Herein I offer a history of myself through my reading, with an appendix of links to celebrations of my favorite authors on their birthdays, 160 or so critical essays which discuss their works as a whole and their major books, written with the hope of inspiring others to read them.
For this story I chose one author to represent myself as I was from eighth grade through senior year of high school; Nietzsche, Joyce, Carroll, Kosinski, and Jung. These luminaries were of course not alone in living in my imagination as they did successively; Nietzsche was preceded by Plato and shaped my understanding of Burroughs, Joyce concurrent with Wittgenstein, Carroll embedded within my years-long obsessions with Surrealist film and literature and the occult which ended only with my failure to read the Zohar in its original cryptodialect of Aramaic and Andalusi Romance, Kosinski’s The Painted Bird together with Robert G.L. Waite’s foundational multidisciplinary study of Hitler The Psychopathic God helped me process the trauma of my near-execution by a police death squad in Brazil the summer before high school and inspired me to choose the origins of evil as my field of study at university, and Jung danced with Lovecraft in aberrant splendor.
And all through high school I read the entire Great Books of the Western World series, and the whole Encyclopedia Britannica, in a mad quest to eat the whole of the past and hold it pristine and entire in my mind like a Platonic Ideal of human being, meaning, and value.
Before all of this came my reading of Frasier’s Golden Bough in sixth grade, my literary first love of Hesse in seventh grade, from seventh grade through my senior year studied French language and literature, and from the age of nine for ten years I studied Zen Buddhism and Chinese and to a lesser extent Japanese literature and languages, along with martial arts and the game of go.
On the other bookend of time around my five years of growing up ending with high school, I should mention that I studied Jung from day one at university, immersed myself in Shakespearean theatre to the point where I spoke only in iambic pentameter for months, went through periods of enthusiasm for Arthurian Romance and then the British Romantics, and adopted the poetry of William Blake as a faith of poetic vision.
Why is any of this important, to anyone other than myself or those interested in how I have constructed myself in growing up, and what does it mean that we might use as general principles of action?
First as a study in how we are written by what we read, for identity is metafictional; second is the method of archeology of the soul. In the excavation of our intertexts as informing, motivating, and shaping forces and what Heather Clark called The Grief of Influence in her work on Sylvia Plath, we may question our choices and purposes in the instruments we have chosen with which to construct ourselves, the best selves we were aiming to realize in doing so, and the usefulness, survival value, and wisdom of our ideals of persona and the figures toward which we reach as we adapt to change over time in becoming human.
This is not a process limited to individuals, but one which is generalized throughout whole societies, cultures, and civilizations, for it is about the material basis of human being, meaning, and value as memory, history, and identity, mimesis and praxis; the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others. Our narratives function as scripts in the performance of ourselves, just as the canon of literature is nothing less than a set of authorized identities.
If we are to reimagine and transform ourselves and how we choose to be human together, we must surface and explore our stories and how they have created us, and learn to dream better dreams.
Eighth grade: Friedrich Nietzsche
October 15 2025 Songs of Liberation From Theocratic Terror: In Celebration of Nietzsche
Nietzsche who awakens, Nietzsche who challenges, Nietzsche who illuminates and inspires; these are the three Nietzsche’s who have been my companions throughout life, my guides and muses, and whom I offer you as a Song of Orpheus and Ariadne’s Thread whereby to find your way through the labyrinth of life.
As the world rips itself apart at the point of fracture between theocratic tyranny and democracy as a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and co-owners of the state in the bifurcated realities of Democratic and Republican America and its mirror Israel and Palestine as we struggle to emerge from the legacies of our history, and those who would enslave us weaponize fear in service to power and act with amoral brutality in committing crimes against humanity as interpreters of the will of death gods, the illumination of Nietzsche and his songs of liberation become newly relevant.
Protean in his forms, he may take whatever shape is needed in your quest; and will play his roles as befitting at different stages of the journey. There are many Nietzsche’s, who like an endless series of dancing Schrodinger’s Cats offer possibilities which echo and reflect those of his readers as an inkblot test. Who is Nietzsche to me?
Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a space in my life and imagination like no other shaping, motivating, and informing source, because my discovery of him in the year before I began high school was the final break of the Great Chain of Being which bound me to the will of authority and my fellow schoolmates ideas of virtue, truth, and beauty in a theocratic, patriarchal, and racist society aligned with the Apartheid regime of South Africa, and set me free to create myself in a universe without imposed meaning or value; then helped me to process a primary trauma which became a Defining Moment as I joined the liberation struggle of a foreign land whose glittering citadels of splendor concealed horrible truths.
Nietzsche it was who helped me to balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.
We will need such balance all of us, as we confront our complicity in systems of oppression both in America’s sponsorship of our imperial colony Israel and its seventy years of Occupation of Palestine, and throughout the world and history, for we are all caught in the gears of a machine of elite wealth, power, and privilege, and systems of oppression which are special to nothing, though conflicts often illuminate the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
When I speak of the enforcement of normality as an evil to be resisted, it is with the voice of the old woman burned alive in her home as a witch by a mob which included fellow children I grew up with. To fully understand Nietzsche, you must inhabit the historical space of liberation from systemic tyranny which his anti-authoritarian iconoclasm represents. Much of our world still lives in such darkness, and many of its evils originate in theocratic sources.
There is always someone in a gold robe who claims to speak for the Infinite, and with this false and stolen authority of lies and idolatry transfers the true cost of production of the wealth he appropriates to himself while others do the hard and dirty work. The particulars of such claims are meaningless; only the fact of unequal power and systems of oppression are real.
I grew up in such a world, a premodern world bound to the laws of a cruel and implacable Authority of alien and unknowable motives and those who would enslave us and claim to speak in his name as a tyranny of the Elect, whose hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege rely on our commodification as weaponized disparity and theft of the commons, falsification through lies and illusions, subjugation through learned helplessness and divisions of exclusionary otherness, fear as an instrument of the centralization of power by carceral states of force and control through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and faith weaponized in service to power as theft of the soul.
Such atavisms of barbarism hold dominion still over much of humankind and possess us as legacies of our history, bound by embedded tyrannies of many kinds, a world America was founded to replace as a free society of equals. Ours is a very fragile civilization, defined by its ability to question itself but threatened always by chasms of darkness which surround us and with relentless, pervasive, and systemic enemies in fascist tyranny, patriarchal sexual terror, white supremacist terror, the fetishism of death and violence in identitarian nationalism and its police states and imperial militarism, and dehumanization. This we must resist, and I read Thus Spake Zarathustra as a luminous song of resistance.
Among the great loves of my literary life, I first discovered him after reading through all the works of Herman Hesse in seventh grade, in whom I found resonance with the Taoist poetry and Zen riddles which were among my subjects of formal study, then abandoning fiction after the nightmare of Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties and its implied erotic horror, which I had chosen after reading his stunning novel of my favorite game after chess, The Master of Go, and turned thereafter to Plato whom I adored, and read voraciously all his works throughout my eighth grade year. The Trial of Socrates founded our civilization as a self-questioning system of being human together, and in the dialectics of Socratic method offered me tools of self-construal and reinvention which became central to my identity.
My father, who was a theatre director as well as my English, Drama, and Forensics teacher, Debate Team coach, and my Fencing Club coach throughout high school, and who taught me fencing and chess from the age of nine, suggested I might like the discussion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy; Nietzsche’s vision of civilization as a struggle between passion and reason, chaos and order, conserving and revolutionary forces, which interlinks with that of Kawabata and of Herman Hesse in The Glass Bead Game to form a unitary vision of a process of becoming human, and informs my reading of literature, politics, and all human activity, to this day.
So it was that during the summer of my fourteenth year before I began high school I discovered with unforgettable joy and recognition a book written by someone who spoke for me, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Wedded in my imagination to the context of my encounter with his work was the grand adventure and disruptive trauma of my first solo foreign travel, to Brazil to train for the Pan American Games with fellow fencers.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first solo foreign travel experience, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen to train with a group of fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there; I was the San Francisco Bay Area champion in saber and foil in my age division of under 16, as I had been in the under 14 and remained through high school in the under 20 division. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial arts and sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the weekly food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls, and I have been living beyond the walls ever since.
Remembering this Defining Moment now, the day I looked beyond my limits and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden to discover and question the basis of my own privilege and reach across divisions of authorized identities of class and race in solidarity with those who do the hard and dirty work for the rest of us and create our wealth, to whom we have exported the true costs of production and excluded from its benefits as our de facto slaves, what fixes my imagination is that I lived an allegory of awakening which recapitulates the story of the Buddha and has become a world myth as the Prince in the Golden Cage. I had no charioteer to answer my questions and create order and meaning from my trauma of witness; I had a whole tribe of them, the Matadors. We’ll get to that part shortly.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, like for a horse race, and a jar of tagged ears. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; that fully ten percent of Brazilians were abandoned and orphaned street children on whom bounties had been placed as a solution, that a quarter of the population lived in shantytowns, that life expectancy for 80% of the people was 35 years, that 350,000 children died before the age of five each year and only 13% finished primary school, that nearly half the people were illiterate.
And yet it was a rich nation; the Brazilian gold boom of the 1700’s created Europe’s industrial revolution, and at this same time of pervasive and systemic poverty and racism Brazil was the worlds number one coffee, sugar, orange, and gasohol producer, #2 cocoa, and #3 timber and beef producer. But over half of the wealth was owned by less than two percent of its people, like the family who were my gracious hosts.
Above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we buy the products of an unjust system, remain silent as witnesses of history to injustices, or abandon our duty of care toward others when evil unfolds before us and by a mission of action we may safeguard others from harm. This is the true mission of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege; to disrupt our interdependence and the solidarity of our universal brotherhood as a precondition of unequal power.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a second near death experience, this time similar though not as formal as those of Maurice Blanchot’s mock execution by the Nazis in 1944 and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s by the Czar’s secret police in 1849; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was my Ring of Fire and the first of more Last Stands than I can now clearly remember, and I find hope for us all in the instinctive duty of care of the young boy I once was to whom it never occurred to run, to surrender, or to abandon a stranger to harm, and like Wagner’s great hero Siegfried chose instead the fire.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did in Mariupol from March 22 to April 18 2022 and at Panjshir in Afghanistan from the last week of August til September 7 2021, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling.
When the disembodied voice of my executioner reached out from the darkness of the purgatorial labyrinth in which we were trapped to order my surrender, with the life of a stranger in the balance, I asked how much to let us walk away, and he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who had been arrested the previous year. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
As one of my rescuers phrased it; “Come with us. You are one of us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
May we all be granted the gift of vision of our interdependence and the universality of our humanity, and wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Throughout all of this, Nietzsche’s great song of liberation pulled me into its heart and ignited in me a will and vision to transgress beyond our boundaries into the unknown places marked Here Be Dragons.
I thereafter read all his works, though Thus Spake Zarathustra remained a kind of sacred text to me; I used to quote it in refutation to my fellow students who quoted the Bible to me as an instrument of subjugation to authority.
Redolent with the cadences of poetic oratory and a phraseology which echoes that of the beautiful King James Bible, pervasive in my town of Reformed Church stalwarts whose mouths were full of thee’s and thou’s, it was both familiar and utterly strange, an empowering work of liberation proclaiming the death of Authority and the limits of the Forbidden. How I cherished it, this treasure and marvel; by summer’s end I could recite it entirely by memory so many times had I read it.
May we all find such books, which illuminate our imagination and offer to us the Promethean fire.
Read therefore the immortal classics of Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Geneology of Morality, The Case of Wagner, The AntiChrist, Twilight of the Gods, and Ecce Homo.
American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen provides an insightful overview.
Maurice Blanchot’s lifelong engagement with Nietzsche can be illuminating and wonderful; The Step Not Beyond, a reply to Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle which references Deleuze, The Writing of the Disaster, and The Infinite Conversation all center on his reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return as an Existentialist principle in which the negation of presence is a path of total freedom. In the pivotal 1945 essay On Nietzsche’s Side, Blanchot reimagines Karl Jaspers’ seminal thesis on Nietzsche; thereafter his works interrogate Nietzschean themes including the Will to Power, the nature of time, ecstatic vision and the Dionysian principle, the Death of God as symbol and metaphor of the emptiness of tyranny and the illusion of authority, and the relativity of meaning and value.
A student of the philosopher Henri Bergson, Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis “Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State” interrogates the reimagined doctrine of Original Sin as the innate Depravity of Man, which is the basis of all our law and an apologetics of authoritarian power which both Nietzsche and Kazantzakis made a life mission of overthrowing, a theme which catalyzed his heroic Resistance to the Nazi Occupation of Greece and continued to inform Kazantzakis throughout his life and is central to understanding his unique brand of Existentialism. In large part his works explore the implications of the Nietzschean conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian as personal and social struggle.
Do read also C.G. Jung’s work Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, notes from the 86 seminars he chaired over 11 university terms exploring the great epic poem which seized and shook me awake. An engagement with Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-gospel and Zarathustra as a figure of Liberation like Milton’s rebel angel, as for both Jung and myself, will lead you as it did me to the works of William Blake and his rebel figure Los; Milton, Nietzsche, and Blake form a line of transmission which unfolds gloriously in Jung’s Red Book.
Last of all I must cite the influence which prefigured and later reinterpreted the meaning of Nietzsche for me, the great storyteller of my childhood William S. Burroughs, whose own ideology was shaped by his friend Georges Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche. Bataille’s On Nietzsche brilliantly interrogates the problem of the Deus Absconditus, the god who bound us to his laws and abandoned us to free ourselves from them, in a fearless reimagination of the will to power as a will to transgress. The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology, compiles the secret documents of his occult circle, disciples of Nietzsche who attempted to reimagine civilization and whose ritual transgressions echo those of de Sade and Jean Genet.
The influence of Bataille on William S. Burroughs cannot be overstated. Burroughs derived his Anarchist Trilogy, The Wild Boys, The Cat Inside, and the Revised Boy Scout Manual, from Bataille’s synthesis of Nietzsche, de Sade, and Freud, though its central premise, The Algebra of Need, references Marx.
This is the Burroughs with whom I found connection as a teenager; the anarchist philosopher for whom the Wolfman was a figure of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, whose novel on the subject, The Wild Boys, was written during the period of his visits at our home in the early 1970’s and possibly influenced by my father’s tales of our family history.
For Burroughs, writing was conjuration; an act of chaos magic and liberation struggle in which the tyranny of authorized identities and orders of human being, meaning, and value can be destabilized as fracture, disruption, and delegitimation, and created anew through poetic vision.
In this mission William S. Burroughs was the successor and reinterpreter of of Bataille and of their shared model Nietzsche, as ritual transgression, the delegitimation of authority and seizures of power as liberation struggle, poetic vision and ecstatic trance as the reimagination and transformation of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Burroughs also believed himself to be the literal successor of Nietzsche as the possessed avatar of a chthonic underworld god, a Shadow figure in Jungian terms which represents his animal nature and inchoate desires as a beast with a beast’s soul, unconquerable and free, in reference to the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow and that Burroughs’ Welsh nanny had cursed him with as a child. Burroughs spoke of this as Tsathoggua, in reference to Lovecraft. A powerful guardian spirit and Underworld guide to be embraced as a figure of one’s own darkness, as did I in reciting together the line with which Burrough’s often ended his bizarre versions of Grimm’s fairytales, a line written by Shakespeare in The Tempest for Prospero, who says of Caliban; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
So the circle of meaning returns to swallow its own tail like an Ouroboros or an infinite Mobius Loop in the embrace of our darkness as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and of the balance we must find for the terror of our nothingness in the joy of total freedom in a universe without imposed meaning, wherein the only being, meaning, and value that exists are those we create for ourselves, even if we must seize them from those who would enslave us.
Friedrich Nietzsche, a reading list
Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography, by Lesley Chamberlain
I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche, by Sue Prideaux
Nietzsche, by Lou Andreas-Salomé, Siegfried Mandel (Translator)
American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
When Nietzsche Wept, by Irvin D. Yalom
Nietzsche’s Kisses, by Lance Olsen
Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, by Rüdiger Safranski,
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, by Walter Kaufmann
Nietzsche and Philosophy, by Gilles Deleuze
Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, by Nikos Kazantzakis
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, by C.G. Jung
Nietzsche, Volumes One and Two, by Martin Heidegger
Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche, by Jacques Derrida
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167504.Spurs
Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, by Pierre Klossowski
The Step Not Beyond, by Maurice Blanchot
On Nietzsche, by Georges Bataille
The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology, by Georges Bataille
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36505075-the-sacred-conspiracy
Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon, by Stefan Zweig
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, by H.L. Mencken
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, by Alexander Nehamas
Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, by Paul De Man
Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, by Laurence Lampert
Nietzsche’s Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil, by Laurence Lampert
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/135940.Nietzsche_s_Task
Nietzsche on His Balcony, by Carlos Fuentes
Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology, by Graham Parkes
The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, by William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs’ “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution, by William S. Burroughs
Freshman year of High school; Joyce and Wittgenstein
February 2 2025 James Joyce, On His Birthday: the Quest For A Universal Language and Transpersonal Human Consciousness As Reimagination and Transformative Change
We long to reach beyond ourselves and the flags of our skin, to find connection, inhabit the lives of others as possible selves in becoming human, to find healing for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world in the redemptive power of love, hope to balance the terror of our nothingness, and the vision to bring reimagination and transformative change to our limitless futures.
Of such strategies of processing trauma and disruptive events, James Joyce and Ludwig Wittgenstein offer us allegories of rebirth and self-creation in the quest for a universal language, a hidden order and implicit structure in grammar as rules for constructing meaning, and transpersonal human consciousness which underlies all being.
Rules for constructing meaning; and possibilities of becoming human among a vast treasure house of languages, numberless as the stars, each illuminating a uniqueness in chiaroscuro with unknown chasms of darkness. And all of them equally true, for language is a Rashomon Gate of identities both authorized and transgressive relative to one’s origins and angle of view.
Truths which propagate exponentially from the palette of vocabularies, negotiated informing, motivating, and shaping forces of identity controlled by word origins and history as they move through time and memory.
Mimesis, self-construal and personae, and the doors of perception which are also funhouse mirror images of imaginal realms of being. Filters which distort, grotesque or compelling, possess us as the legacies of history or are possessed by us as seizures of power, echoes and reflections unmoored in time as conflicted pasts and futures, and signs of the ongoing struggle to become wherein falsification and authenticity play for the unknown spaces between ourselves and others; boundaries which may become interfaces.
Our original language, like our source identity, is an imposed condition of struggle; but it is also a boundary which may become on interface through which we can shape ourselves and each other.
What is important here in the subject of languages as possible selves is that learning the languages of others builds bridges instead of walls, and offers us a free space of creative play into which we may grow, a process of seizing control of our own evolution by intentionally changing how we think. Who do we want to become, we humans?
Language, then, embodies both order and chaos, authority and autonomy, histories which we cherish and despise, belonging and otherness, conserving and revolutionary forces, those we must keep to remain who we are and those we must escape to become who we wish to be.
And if we are very lucky, they are not always the same.
As I wrote in celebration of his birthday in my post of James Joyce, on his birthday February 2; “Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low!” so wrote James Joyce in Finnegans Wake.
Wonderful, hilarious, illuminating writing, still beyond the leading edge after nearly a century. A visionary and masterful wordsmith, James Joyce’s stories are compelling, intriguing verbal puzzles. New ideas unfold every time you read them.
His reinvention of language and the methods of storytelling birthed the modern world. In partnership with Gertrude Stein and drawing on a vast well of other resources, influences, and references, his unique creative genius and vision unified and transformed all that had come before in literature.
He lived with his wife in Trieste from 1905 to 1915, where he taught English at the Berlitz school and where their children were born, and again in 1919-20, his most famous pupil being the author Italo Svevo who was the model for the character of Leopold Bloom, and Triestino Italian remained the Joyce family language at home. Moreover he was a classicist with a Jesuit education who had grown up reading Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante, and Shakespeare among others; James Joyce was well suited to his great work of reinventing language and humankind when he took it up in the writing of Ulysses.
A reimagination of Homer’s Odyssey in which he forged his stream of consciousness and interior monologue methods, it is also his response to the great catastrophe of his age, the fall of western civilization in World War One.
In this he reflects his mirror image T.S. Eliot, who played the opposing side of the board as the conservative to James Joyce’s revolutionary. Both wanted to renew humanity and rebuild civilization, one by reclaiming the past which has allowed us to survive millennia of unforeseen threats and cataclysms, the other by adaptive change and imagining a new path to the future and the limitless possibilities of becoming human; both are necessary to the survival of civilization and humanity itself.
Ulysses may be reduced as a text from its 700 page length by reading only the last chapter, one of the world’s most celebrated bits of writing. Episode 14, a superb parody of the great English authors, can stand alone as a subject of study.
And then there is Finnegan’s Wake, designed as a labyrinth of transformation to forge a new humankind.
As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake, a work which he began in 1922 with the German publication of the TLP and which occupied the rest of his life, as a response like that of Yeats in The Second Coming and of T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland to the collapse of civilization in three successive waves of mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order and power from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
He envisioned a united humankind wherein war is no longer possible, a world without emperors and kings or the carceral states and colonialist empires they rule with their silly little flags and terrible divisions of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game.
Plato and his successors in western mysticism and in Romantic Idealism had already established a historical tradition which took this idea in other directions, as a religion and philosophy of the Logos to the alchemical faith of the sapientia dei which found full expression in Jung and through NeoPlatonism itself to the philosophy of Iris Murdoch, and was in the process of forming Surrealism as an art of ecstatic trance and poetic vision, but Joyce was a master of languages and chose this as his instrument for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, and for the rebirth of civilization.
And this love of languages as free creative play in which we ourselves are the artifact and product of our art is what caught my attention and created my teenage identification with Joyce. For I love languages and had grown up with three voices; English is my primary and home language, though shaped by immersion in the rhythms and phrases of the King James Bible and the Dutch language of the Reformed Church which surrounded me in the town where I was raised.
Traditional Chinese was my second language from the age of nine, in the context of a decade of formal study of martial arts which included Zen Buddhist and Taoist disciplines, inkbrush calligraphy, bamboo flute, the strategy game of Go, and conversation with my great mentor whom I called Dragon Teacher or Long Sifu, a mischievous and wily old rascal who spoke, in addition to superb English and Japanese, the Wu dialect of Shanghai and the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, as well as the official Mandarin, having served in the Chinese military from 1923 through the Second World War., of which he told wonderful stories.
As my third language I studied French in school rather than English from seventh grade through high school, as I was sent not to seventh grade English class but to French class at the high school. Brazilian Portuguese was my fourth language, though a brief study limited to conversational proficiency, legacy of a formative trip in the summer of my fourteenth year just before starting high school.
It was during that summer, my first solo foreign travel, to train as a fencer with a friend from the tournament circuit for the Pan American Games planned to be held there the following year, that I witnessed a crime against humanity, the massacre of street children who had swarmed a food truck, a trauma and disruptive event followed by weeks in which I helped them evade the police bounty hunters who ruled the streets as apex predators.
From the moment I saw what the guards were shooting at beyond the walls of the palace in which I was a guest, I chose my side, and I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
We all seek paths of healing from trauma, and of hope and the redemptive power of love in transforming the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. I found such paths in literature as poetic vision, and in our languages and our stories as universal principles of creating meaning and instruments with which we can operate directly on our psyche and take control of our adaptation and the evolution of human consciousness as an unfolding of intention. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and for this primary insight I owe the effects of reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions. I had begun my search for meaning and my Freshman year of high school by reading Anthony Burgess’ Napoleon Symphony, a novel which questioned my hero Napoleon and illuminated two of my other heroes Beethoven and Klimt, then turned to the study of language itself; S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, and Wittgenstein’s TLP, before discovering Joyce.
James Joyce’s linguistics scholarship was immense; he took Italian as his third academic language, taught himself Dano-Norwegian as a teenager to read his adored Ibsen in the original, and his modern languages degree cites Latin, Italian, French, German, and Norwegian. He loved languages and studied them as a game, as do I; his adult fluency included Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Russian, Finnish, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Modern Greek.
All of this went into his masterpiece Finnegans Wake, written in a private language filled with games and experiments of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety according to the principle of Wittgenstein that because all rules are arbitrary they can be reimagined and changed at will and ourselves with them, a language densely layered with literary allusions and references, loaned and invented words, and of signs with multiple meanings like the paths of a labyrinth.
You need a working knowledge of several languages to get the jokes; no wonder I loved him.
Curious and curiouser; it is also a recursive and nonlinear Surrealist dream journal, a Dadaist compilation of notes which disdains all narrative conventions, and displays a growing obsession with the arcane and the obscure.
I’m not sure it’s intended to communicate anything, so coded and laden with puzzles is his new language; like the notation for the principles of a system by which to create and order the universe.
He spent the rest of his life searching for the lost runes able to break and reforge the oaths and bindings of existence, to renew ourselves and our world; perhaps he found them.
Yet enter here, and abandon not hope.
Of Finnegans Wake: forget that it’s a Great Book, that scholars find it intimidating; that’s only if you try to parse meaning from every sentence like it’s an operating manual for becoming human. Yes, that’s exactly what he intended to write, but don’t let that make work out of your joy. Just read it for the sheer exhilarating fun, and let his timeless Irish magic set you free.
Though I may claim no such realization of a guiding vision of our limitless possibilities of becoming human nor Quixotic quest to create and affirm that which is human in us as he, Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake demonstrated for me a great truth which has illuminated my understanding ever since; we are made of our ideas and of our stories, and forged with our words and our languages.
We are what Gaston Bachelard called shells of speech, coquilles au parole, bearers of stories as memory, history, and identity, shaped by the passage of time and our interdependence with each other as prochronisms or the histories expressed in our forms of how we solved problems of adaptation and change.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to one another?
Can we not then change and transform ourselves with our stories through reimagination and poetic vision, as new and beautiful things freed from the legacies of our histories and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, beauty, and truth?
Let us seize the stories of which we are made, and become glorious.
James Joyce, a reading list
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed,
Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce,
by Joseph Campbell
Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce, by Anthony Burgess
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/139109.Joysprick
Joyce’s Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake, by John Bishop
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218348.Joyce_s_Book_of_the_Dark
Joyce’s Voices, by Hugh Kenner
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/778934.Joyce_s_Voices
Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress, by Samuel Beckett
A “Finnegans Wake” Lextionary: Let James Joyce Jazz Up Your Voca(l)bulary, Riverrun to Livvy: Lots of Fun Reading the First Page of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”, by Bill Cole Cliett
Annotations to Finnegans Wake, by Roland McHugh
The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, by James S. Atherton
Sophomore year of high school: Lewis Carroll
January 28 2025 I Sing of Madness, Vision, and Love: Lewis Carroll, on his birthday
I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; this is possibly a confession of faith, though if asked directly to identify my religion, particularly by authorities with badges and guns, I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation.
Without question and absolutely it is a declaration of allegiance to poetic vision and to poetic and metaphorical truth, as identity and the terms of struggle for its ownership; for after language itself the ideas by which we organize ourselves are our most fundamental ground of being.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Poetic vision and truth allow us to escape the limits of our form and the flags of our skin; to create ourselves anew as a primary human act and the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human.
To Lewis Carroll, Surrealist and philosopher of poetic vision, we are indebted for his primary insight which reconciles the transcendent truth of Keats and Romantic Idealism as developments of the western mystery tradition from Plato with the immanent truths written in our flesh.
His great book Alice in Wonderland, like Mozart’s Magic Flute, encodes this mystery tradition, for which his primary sources are Plato, the Biblical Book of John the Evangelist which forges a faith of the Logos, and Coleridge’s Primary Imagination; but he also attempted to write a Summa Theologiae which can unfold itself within the mind of its readers as transformation and transcendence.
Dense with word games of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety and mathematical-philosophical puzzles which are satirical metacommentary on the great thinkers of his time, Alice in Wonderland is intended to transmit the whole of a classical education, but is also a Socratic dialog which questions the premises of our civilization. Few such total reimaginations have ever been attempted.
I discovered Wonderland through the brilliant work of the mathematician Martin Gardner, which has been updated as The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, when as a sophomore in high school I joined a reading group at the local university, carried along in the wake of my best friend, four years older than myself and a former Forensics student of my father, Doc (given name Brad) Hannink.
This occurred during my teenage James Joyce-Ludwig Wittgenstein fandom and immersion in medieval magic, both related to a love of languages, logic, and math as hidden systems of meaning and universal principles of being. These enthusiasms of my youth foundered by my senior year of high school on my failure to learn Kabbalah, as it is written not in accessible Hebrew for whom teachers and conversational partners can be found, but in a coded scholar’s Aramaic and Andalusi Romance.
But as a fifteen year old steeped in the iconography of Surrealist film and the esotericism of Finnegan’s Wake and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and very much still processing the trauma of my summer of resistance to police terror in Brazil, I loved that Alice always questioned authority and regarded her as an anarchist hero and a figure of Socrates, and this remains the primary meaning of the work for me. Alice enacts parrhesia, what Foucault called truth telling, and I saw in her someone I wished to become.
As I wrote in my post of January 8 2022, Let Us Bring A Reckoning; Politics is the art of fear as the basis of exchange and the origin of authority and unequal power as systemic evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as balanced with the desire to belong, but it is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Washington did in crossing the Delaware to create America and as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky.
On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
Kobo Abe takes tea at the Mad Hatter’s of an afternoon; Gogol has set his words on fire and is made of a holy light which is used in place of a chandelier, Kafka elicits squeals of delight from Alice with his hideous Gregor Samsa form, Klimt’s giant apelike Typhoeus and his daughters desire, madness, and death run amok in ecstatic Bacchic dance while Lovecraft tries to put something with tentacles back in its box.
There is always an empty chair for you.
Lewis Carroll, a reading list
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland #1-2) by Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner (Introduction and notes), John Tenniel (Illustrator)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded: The Full Text of Lewis Carroll’s Novel with its Many Hidden Meanings Revealed, by David Day.
The Making of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and the Invention of Wonderland, by Peter Hunt
Junior year of high school: Jerzy Kosinski
June 14 2025 The Painted Bird, I: and a celebration of Jerzy Kosinski, on his birthday
On this the birthday of Jerzy Kosinski, I reflect on and interrogate my personal relationship and history with his great novel, which I used as an intertext and mirror in healing from trauma during my teenage years, much as did he in reimagining his childhood therapy journal as he was psychosomatically mute for five years after Liberation by the Russian Army at the age of nine.
I too created myself in revolutionary struggle during this crucial period of growing up, framed by my witness at the age of nine of Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969 People’s Park Berkeley, our nation’s most massive incident of police terror in which I was Most Sincerely Dead momentarily from the force wave of a grenade, and my near execution by a police death squad in Sao Paulo Brazil in 1974 during my direct actions with the Matadors to rescue the abandoned street children who were being bounty hunted in a state campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Identity confusion and self-creation as freedom from authorized identities and imposed orders of being, meaning and value, from the boundaries of the Forbidden and other people’s ideas of virtue, the mark of Otherness conferred by death, Last Stands in defiance of authority and carceral states of force and control beyond hope of victory or survival, and the existential crisis of becoming human in liberation struggle against the systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization which arise from the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; in all of this I found reflection in Jerzy Kosinski’s embrace of our monstrosity and fearless gaze into the Nietzschean Abyss and what Joseph Conrad called The Heart of Darkness.
The Painted Bird, I.
As I have written in celebration of Jerzy Kosinski’s birthday:
Identity, power, justice, the depravity and perversity of man and the origins of evil; these are the great themes which animate the works of Jerzy Kosinski.
His unique brand of Catholic Existentialism, a Pauline Absurdism like that of Flannery O’Connor and referential to Camus and Freud as much as Augustine and the Bible, has never been widely understood. Nor has the influence of his training as a sociologist and historian in the Soviet university system of Poland behind the Iron Curtain, prior to his escape to political asylum in America.
Jerzy Kosinski embraces the Infinite as the Absurd; though his works can create the effect of reading Samuel Beckett, Kobo Abe, or Thomas Ligotti, his intent is to tilt against Nihilism and the forces of disorder, not to endorse them. His episodes which reveal the depravity of humankind and the fallenness of political authority, like those of Jean Genet’s novels, are inversions of Catholic rituals intended as satires of the state as embodied violence.
In some respects he can be compared to de Sade, but only to a point; where de Sade was a satirist who wrote as a revolutionary act and campaign of destabilization against the authority of Church and State, Jerzy Kosinski plays the opposite side of the board, marshalling conserving forces to defend absolute and universal human values.
For his novels, often thinly veiled autobiographies and referential to historical events, are manuals of survival in circumstances of overwhelming force, dehumanizing oppression, and existential terror as systems of oppression.
Among these we may include his satires of American culture including Being There, and the magnificent nightmare of Europe under fascism, The Painted Bird. His finest nonfiction is The Future is Ours, Comrade, written within two years of his 1957 escape from Poland under Soviet dominion. All of his works bear the weight of his scholarship as a historian and sociologist.
His novels are metafictional commentaries on the roles he played in life, both chosen and those forced on him by others. Perhaps only Philip Roth has struggled more as a writer for control of his own identity, when those whom he claimed did not in turn claim him, and few have suffered more. I believe that each of us has the right as human beings to reinvent ourselves, and to be who we choose.
Being There is a precious and delicate confection of a fable, which transforms a universal myth into a new one for our time in spare language that a child might grasp. The film version starring Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine is also compelling and beautiful; I made a practice of watching it every month for years since I was at university, and rereading the novel which I taught in high school. It has become a part of who I am, this story, and I hope that you will love it as do I. But before I can take you on a walk through this novel, we must understand its context in the novel for which it is a coda, The Painted Bird.
The Painted Bird is an unforgettable paen of horrors as lived by the author as a child wandering alone in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, victimized and powerless, a figure of Europe, civilization, and all humanity.
I cannot say I advise anyone to open the lid of this particular box and look within; I cannot even say that it is good for you. Exposure to evil of this magnitude and festering malignity, raw and unanswerable, is a disruptive and corrosive, destabilizing and subversive event, at once destruction and liberation, much like the history it describes. Here the boundaries of the human are charted, in blood.
What has it done for me, this Pandora’s Box of a story? Perhaps only to help me find the will to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. For myself, this has been enough.
I have lost count of such Last Stands during my decades of revolutionary struggle and resistance to fascism since that fateful day in 1982 Beirut during the siege, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance he had appropriated from that of the Foreign Legion in Paris 1940 and set me on my life’s path. I too have looked into the Abyss, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me, since Mariupol and possibly before, and I must now and always question my actions as a man without fear, mercy, or remorse.
I am become as history has made me, a monster who hunts other monsters; with death the alternative to survival, with subjugation, falsification, and dehumanization pervasive and omnipresent existential threats on the one hand and those truths written in our flesh and to which we must bear witness, and our glorious liberty and uniqueness on the other, and with only solidarity and our faith in each other to heal the pathology of our disconnectedness and the divisions of authorized identities as elite hierarchies of otherness and belonging, love to redeem the flaws of our humanity, and hope to answer the terror of our nothingness and the brokenness of the world, we each of us must struggle to become human, even when we must trade fragments of our humanity for the hope of future possibilities of becoming human and for the lives of others, who may one day escape the shadows of history in which we dwell.
Last Stands; naming these forlorn hopes so makes them sound grand and heroic, but they are nothing of the kind. Not acts of virtue bearing the force of redemption, but choices to remain Unconquered as a free and self-created being conferred by refusal to submit against unanswerable force and impossible odds; a human thing, and a power which cannot be taken from us. As Jean Genet said to me on that fateful day, in a burning house, in a time of darkness, in a lost cause; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
Each of these Defining Moments has created unique imaginal spaces as mimesis which cannot be escaped; I will forever be crawling through tunnels of utter darkness covered in the blood of those I could not save while the earth trembles with impending collapse as I was in Mariupol 2022, and numberless other such moments. But as in Camus’ allegory of Sisyphus I bore the burden of my humanity onward and became Unconquered and free, and so can you.
This is what is important; to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows, as Genet’s Oath of the Resistance goes. What matters are not the horrors I have survived and which have shaped me to the thing that I am, a monster who hunts other monsters, and who has traded pieces of his humanity to do so and win a space of free creative play and time for others to discover and create new kinds of human being, meaning, and value which I may never find or dream; but that in refusal to submit I emerged from the darkness and despair into the light, and so can we all.
We may not be able to escape the legacies of our history or the consequences of our humanity, nor find balance for the terror of our nothingness nor bring healing to the brokenness of the world; but we can refuse to submit and become Unconquered as free and unique beings, a power which cannot be taken from us and can return us to ourselves.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
Here follows my celebration of Jerzy Kosinski, on his birthday:
A novel translated from his native Polish and reconstructed from notes written while the author was psychosomatically mute for five years after his liberation by Russia at the age of nine, as a therapy journal, it is unique among the literature of madness and psychoanalysis. The Painted Bird is the voice of this traumatized child; its authenticity is incontestable even though the government of Poland has attempted to discredit it as the Witness of History as part of its policy of denial as regards complicity in the Holocaust.
Of this I say: evil wears many masks. It can be massively destructive when given the authorized power of governments, armies, official papers and decrees, but this is not its exclusive domain, nor where it is born.
For the tortures and abuse suffered by the narrator are not inflicted upon him by officials carrying out a policy or because he is a member of a persecuted group like the Jews, though he is sometimes mistaken for a gypsy, but by ordinary villagers simply because they can. Indeed, much of the novel is a series of episodic vignettes in which brutalized villagers commit unspeakable crimes against one another. These episodes form a journey of initiation and are organized as Stations of the Cross: labyrinthine as is the symbolism of a great cathedral.
The universality of evil and the depravity of man are the subjects of his great work, and this is what elevates it beyond the conditions of time and place. The Painted Bird affirms traditional values in that it cleaves to the interpretation of the Bible on which our government is based, derived from the idea of sin. In the absence of the restraining force of law, the most ruthless tyrant or criminal wins. As George Washington said, “Government is about force, only force.”
True, the social use of force cuts many ways, especially when wielded by the juggernaut of governments; my point is that Jerzy Kosinski has written a very Catholic novel which offers an apologetics of law and order any government might welcome. That this is not generally understood may be due to no one having thought to compare him to Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, or other fellow Catholic authors with whom he belongs.
Indeed, The Painted Bird has been misunderstood as Holocaust literature and originally misrepresented by the publisher as nonfictional testimony, which backfired as it made the author and his work vulnerable to the lies of his political foes. He himself became a Painted Bird, ostracized and tormented by his fellows both as a child and as an author, and both functioning on the basis of a public denial of his identity as a Polish Catholic. The tribes he claimed did not in turn claim him, as his faith led him to identify evil as a universal human flaw and not the intrusive weapon of a despised enemy outsider.
The Painted Bird thematically recapitulates Measure For Measure, Shakespeare’s savage morality play which examines concepts of state power, justice, and the theology of the depravity of man on which our legal system is founded. Jerzy Kosinski has organized and fictionalized his therapy journal along lines paralleling the Bard’s play, while reversing its revolutionary critique of authorized force.
Running through all his novels are interlinked narratives supporting Freud’s theory that humans are polymorphosly perverse until they learn to control their animal nature, and against Rousseau’s idea that the natural man is not bound by social contracts made prior to his birth or without his consent and participation, and may without concern disregard such laws, which is the legal basis of the American Declaration of Independence and a keystone of the Supreme Court’s rulings on the Constitution. And so we have the doctrine of Natural Law, a startling bit of anarchy at the founding of our nation, which goes directly to the heart of Jerzy Kosinski’s theme of power relations and defense of a universal and imperative moral order. By moral order I mean human rights as an absolute and universal principle, independent of tribe and tradition; the classic conservative critique of ethical and cultural relativism.
The logical extension of this line of reasoning denies the legitimacy of the American state, and aligns with the British claim that our revolution, at its origin anticolonial and antiaristocratic, has no basis in law, as with the claim of all states to rule their citizens without their consent personally as a contract.
Among the finest interrogations of this idea of moral order as authoritarianism and the state enforcement of public virtue as tyranny can be found in Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.
In Jerzy Kosinski’s world, like that of William T. Vollman, moral order balances on a social contract guaranteed by force; a brutal and fallen world, but one in which true heroism is possible.
Little wonder that, once he became rich and famous on the basis of this book, his subsequent novels were mainly elaborately constructed Baroque fantasies of vengeance and the championing of the powerless. They also continue his exploration of Dante’s Inferno, displaying the consequences of sin and his role as an avenging angel. In his moral universe, such avengers and enforcers are sin eaters. His work foregrounds personal sin as the origin of social evils; vanity and greed, materialism and the loss of communion as connection with others as well as the Infinite, sexual terror as a means of ownership and dehumanization, all the facades which abstract us from ourselves and one another. He wrote them to avenge the child he had once been, but also to shield others by exposing injustices.
And this is what killed him: his quixotic knight-errantry, truthtelling, and the authorial turning over of stones. Though his death was reported as a suicide, with a final note as proof, this is inconsistent with his obsessive survivalism, vigilante justice, secret identities, use of his public role as concealment, and his appropriation of intelligence tradecraft to evade enemies which included the Soviet Union he had escaped, and his personal mission of hunting evildoers. In life as in his fiction, Jerzy Kosinski was an avenging trickster who like the heroes of the messianic films The Magic Christian and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory constructed elaborate Dante-esque traps as purgatorial rituals. This is the author who became a role model for me as I worked through my trauma with his novel as my guide to becoming human; a Dark Knight and Avenger. He would have never abdicated his chosen role as a protector of innocents, for this is what sustained him and gave his tragedies and traumas meaning and made them bearable.
Jerzy Kosinski died as his forebears did, when their lances shattered on the unstoppable tanks of the invaders in a final charge of traditional meaning and value against a nihilistic barbarian modernity, glorious and beautiful as was the defense of the Great Siege of Malta, and bearing to the last the only title that matters, that of Invictus.
As I grew older and my ideals were broken upon the shoals of real missions of liberation struggle and as an avenger of wrongs, I began to see the flaws in his reasoning regarding the social use of force, and to regard the origins of evil as unequal power and systems of oppression; but as a teenager working through trauma and its implications for the nature of humankind and the purpose or order of the universe, the imaginal world of The Painted Bird and its protagonist with whom I closely identified provided a means to do so within an illusion of security and order, where good and evil are not ambiguous, relative, and figments of authoritarian subjugation and control. In this I recapitulated the historical stages of civilization, as I created myself through casting off a theocratic cosmos for one utterly without meaning or value other than what we ourselves create, wherein the terror of our nothingness is balanced with the joy of total freedom.
So we come to Being There, a deceptively simple story based on the fables of Krylov which retells the Biblical Fall of Man and Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and the return of Christ as the Second Adam from Exile as a redeemer.
As does his work as a whole and The Painted Bird especially, Being There presents at once a path of spiritual rebirth which unifies Catholic sin and Existential freedom, a Freudian political theory of government as force, a Sartrean critique of identity as a social construction, and a theory of history which re-evaluates and diverges from both Biblical teleology and Marxism, and written by a man who was once the Soviet Union’s greatest sociologist with a deeply personal stake in the issues and themes of his work rooted in profound childhood trauma.
First, it is a masterpiece, directly addressing the themes developed in The Painted Bird in the context of America, a new home where Jerzy Kosinski found celebrity, wealth, and power, (I would like to say safety, but these things cannot buy safety, and security is an illusion) but also a dehumanizing commodification, superficial materialism, and implicit class system with which he was not wholly comfortable even though he had married into the apex of New York society.
Both novels are meditations on Otherness; in one the bird which is painted to look different is pecked to death by his fellows, and in Being There someone who is truly different moves among us unhindered because he wears the colors of whatever flock he finds. Themes of concealment and illusion, identity and membership, the protection and subjugation of assimilation or the danger, loneliness, and freedom of being different are exhibited in both great books.
Change the protagonist and we have the myth and horror story of the skinwalker, a monster or cannibal predator who walks among us in disguise, or the tragic figure of the Elephant Man, whose virtue and beauty are hidden behind a hideous mask of flesh. Or an anonymous hero, a Batman-like figure standing the night watch for us all, as was the author Jerzy Kosinski to the last.
Second, Being There is powerful because it enacts a universal mythic pattern, and then breaks the pattern to create a new myth, maybe one more useful to us now.
What follows are my lecture notes on Being There, which I would hand out to my classes of High School Juniors and Seniors in the Honors Program and AP English (AP courses being preparatory classwork for taking the AP subject exams which can earn college units if passed- like A levels in British schools) and read aloud in parts as the class progressed through the book, stopping to ask questions and start discussions. I taught Being There as an introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; it can also be read as a companion text to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, which shares its sources in Arthurian myth.
The works of Jerzy Kosinski came into my life through the influence of my mother, Coleridge scholar and expert on religious symbolism in medieval art, a Catholic university trained psychologist, biologist, and English teacher who, at my insistence after some time of Kosinski being a presence of references in our home while she wrote a study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet hospital case notes of his childhood therapy as compared to his own notes written between the ages of nine and fourteen ending when he regained the power of speech and which later became the basis of his novel, gave me The Painted Bird to read when I was seventeen. As one can imagine, we talked about it a lot.
I myself would not now do as she did then; its simply too disturbing and can cause real harm, though I was working though the trauma of battle and near execution by a police death squad in Brazil the summer before high school. If you are a survivor of private Holocausts, it can be useful; I might say the same of Kathy Acker’s novel Blood and Guts in High School, which I have taught to high school students who were survivors of sexual terror as was she.
As to other influences on the text of my lecture notes, I wrote it during my first year of teaching high school, and while I used it without changes for many years as a discussion prompt it reflects my interests and understanding at the time; I was in my third year of university and taking courses in Celtic Literature and Arthurian Romance while I wrote it, and reading Emma Jung’s Grail studies. My interpretations are also shaped by deep and lifelong interests, sparked by reading Frazier’s Golden Bough in sixth grade, in Joseph Campbell and comparative mythology, fairytales, the archetypal psychology of Jung and Hillman, and a Great Books education through my teenage years. As I could count on no particular literary background among my students, to frame a discussion I had to tell the story; hence the brief retellings of references.
On Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There: a reading guide
Being There is a fable, a retelling of the story of the Original Man, and of his exile from Paradise and his redemption of the world as the Holy Fool. It parallels the story of Christ, the Fall of Adam and the return of the world to an Edenic state through the second Adam, the Innocent who goes shod in the temple. In Being There, the hero’s quest takes him to a citadel of Fallenness, where he must heal the wound of a Fisher King, in an initiation pattern found in Celtic pagan and Arthurian sources.
Early Christian legend says that Jesus was crucified on Calvary, the Mound of the Skull, where the skull of Adam is buried. He is depicted in early art as being hung from the Tree of Life rather than nailed to a cross, just as Odin hung from the World Tree Ygddrasil, a sacrifice to himself, in order to gain knowledge of the runes, universal organizing and informing principles. In the body of Jewish folklore and mystical gnosis called Cabala, the Tree of Life is a series of emanations from the Infinite called the sephiroth, worlds which form a ladder between our world and the Divine. Through astral projection and other practices, the cabalist reunites pairs of opposing principles within himself, just as the Redeemer of the Basilidians mounted through the planetary spheres to acquire their powers. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life were understood to be aspects of the same linking system.
Many mythic systems trace humanity to an Original Man, actually an inner man in whom all participate and share in the human spirit. This is clearly true of Adam, but also of the Purusha in India and Chung Ko in China, among others.
Parallel myths are structured on the idea of the Universal Monarch, such as Arthur, the Once and Future King. In both Christianity and Buddhism, the hero is a Holy Fool who forsakes the role of Universal Monarch for that of Redeemer, just as Chance, incapable of relating to the world except as an innocent, will accidently become the President of America and restore the nation’s spirit.
Chance is evicted from the Garden of Eden and is cast into a fallen world; in the film the fallen state of the world surrounding his home is more clearly contrasted with the idyllic garden than in the book. When Chance is introduced to the world during a television interview, he unknowingly proposes to govern as a gardener tends his garden, returning it to a state of order and harmony. Chance is the Redeemer bringing about the Kingdom of God.
The lawyers who evict Chance are clearly Tempter figures; Chance defeats them when he declines to make a claim against the old man’s estate, as doing so would have kept him in Paradise and prevented him from fulfilling his role as Redeemer. While sitting under the Bo tree awaiting his vision of Enlightenment, Buddha is tempted by Mara in his terrible and seductive forms. Christ is also tempted, both to display his powers and to become World Monarch in a riddle match with Satan, prior to his vision of the Shekinah or Holy Spirit. But the Holy Fool must descend into the fallen world if he is to redeem it, and so in Islam the serpent is revered as Iblis, the Instructor, a guide of the soul and faithful servant of the Infinite. In all his forms, the Holy Fool must reject the role of Universal Monarch for that of Redeemer.
People constantly misunderstand Chance; they misinterpret his words in their own context. He is both the sum of images he has internalized from television and the images others make of him; he is all mankind. He is a mirror; Jason kills the Medusa by polishing his shield to a mirror surface so that she sees herself and turns to stone. Chance has the power to transform others because he is the Inner Man in an innocent, unfallen state. Eve tells Chance, “You make me free. I reveal myself to myself, and I am purged.”
After leaving the Garden, Chance comes by accident to live in another house, the mansion of a powerful financier, Mr. Rand, and his wife, Eve. The mansion is a Castle Perilous, a material and fallen cage for a Fisher King. Chance goes from the Garden to this second house, and from a triadic relationship with the Old Man and the maid, Louise, to another with Mr Rand and Eve.
Both Mr Rand and the Old Man are dying; to understand the interaction between the major characters in Being There, let’s compare it to the mythic pattern in the Arthurian tale of Parsifal and the Grail Quest. Parsifal is an innocent, raised in seclusion as were Buddha and Chance. Parsifal goes into the world dressed as a fool or jester, riding an ass, and defeats his opponents in combat simply because he is too ignorant to be afraid and never hesitates to charge. He undertakes to find the Grail and bring it to Arthur, who is so sick he can’t get out of bed for seven years, during which time there is famine in the land. The period of the Wasteland is a representation of the fallen state of the world, which can only be healed through spiritual renewal. Parsifal reaches the Grail Castle, whose lord, the Fisher King, is in a position identical to Arthur’s; he is sick and his land is barren. The Fisher King is wounded through the thighs; just as Arthur fell ill when he lost Guinevere, the Fisher King fell ill when the virgin in whose lap his feet must rest was slain. Both rulers are cut off from the source of spiritual renewal and empowerment. Parsifal heals the Fisher King and gains a vision of the Grail by asking the question Buddha asked of his charioteer; “What is wrong with you?” Many other knights on the Grail Quest had failed to ask it, to much wailing and sorrow.
Like Parsifal, Chance is a figure of the Holy Fool, the child who points out that the Emperor has no clothes. When Mr Rand tells Chance, “I’m not afraid of dying anymore. I’m ready to trade the Horn of Plenty for the Horn of Gabriel,” it is clear that in Chance he has found redemption.
From Garden to Wasteland and back again; Chance’s progression follows the quest of Dante for Beatrice, but without a transformative realization. Part of this initiation pattern can be seen in the tension of images between the Garden and the Wasteland.
The image of the Garden has an interesting history; in the Koran it is called Hasht Bihesht, the Eight Paradises visited by Mohammed on his Night Journey. Like the labyrinth-gardens of medieval Europe, the Islamic water garden reflected the order of a universe unfolding according to divine will, represented a plan of progress on the pilgrim’s journey toward the Infinite, and provided an immediate metaphor of rebirth in its cycles of decay and growth.
Dante’s vision of a multileveled universe is similar to the Koran’s; they also share the concepts of a divine mercy and justice in the afterlife, a vision gained in an Otherworld journey, and conceptualize the Infinite as inclusive of the feminine, the Beloved.
The English word “Paradise” has its roots in the Persian pairi, around, and deiza, wall; a walled garden. Its Greek form, paradeisoi, comes from Xeonophon’s Socratic discourse, the Oeconomics, a history of the Persian war of 400 B.C. Virgil referred to the sacred groves around Roman temples as a paradisus. The word first appeared in Middle English as paradis in 1175 in a Biblical passage” God ha hine brohte into paradis.”
The identification of Paradise with the Garden of Eden happened quite early, during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews from which they were released by Cyrus the Great in 538 B.C. During this time, Judaism assimilated the Sumerian-Babylonian Paradise, the Garden of the Gods, from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh describes his vision of the Garden: “In this immortal garden stands the Tree, with trunk of gold and beautiful to see. Beside a sacred fount the Tree is placed, with emeralds and unknown gems is graced.”
Thus, at the end of the human journey we are brought to the beginning again. From its earliest times, Indo-European myth has held the idea of the afterlife as a return to the source and origin of life.
In Being There, the Garden is contrasted with the Wasteland, the pervading economic malaise linked to the impotence and illness of both Mr Rand and the President as types of the Fisher King.
Arthur’s Wasteland is a divine punishment for his inhumanity; Arthur mab Uthr means not “son of Uther” but “the Cruel”. The Historia Brittonum records that he once hanged two dozen children; in another incident he cut off the noses of the female relatives of a man who disturbed his banquet. Geoffrey of Monmouth based the figure of Arthur on the historical Macsen Wledig, a Welshman who became Emperor of Rome in 383 with the support of the legions in Britain. His story is told in the Mabinogi, in the tale of Culwich and Olwen. The literature of early Arthurian romance was written largely by monks both as a criticism of the system of chivalry and to connect Christianity to the Celtic literary heritage.
Mythically, Arthur, a name meaning “the Bear”, is a figure of the Celtic Lord of the Animals. The usual pattern has him paired with a double-aspected Goddess who is both Mother and Bride, in Celtic terms Gog and Magog, literally son, son of Mother. Grendel and his mother are another example.
In Being There, Chance’s relationship with the black maid, Louise, is superceded by that of Eve, Mr Rand’s wife. The dynamics between Louise and Eve are understandable in terms of the Goddess figures in the original sources from which the story of Eden was drawn in Genesis.
Adams first wife was Lillith, a sensual black demoness who lived in a cave. An embodiment of the forces of nature, she is represented as a Trickster figure in medieval Jewish folklore. Adam, himself Lord of the Animals, both claimed them and completed their creation in naming them. Adam was born both male and female, a figure of wholeness split into the sexes when Eve was made from his female half.
Eve’s banishment from the Garden is an Underworld journey paralleled by the story of Demeter and Persephone. Persephone, daughter of Demeter as Eve is the Maiden aspect of Lillith, is abducted by Pluto, King of the Underworld, to reign as his queen during winter. Demeter descends to the underworld to rescue her, and wins her freedom for half of each year, during which the land is fruitful.
The transformation of Yahweh from King of the Underworld to an all-knowing, all-powerful creator was never complete in Judaism; until Roman times the Goddess was worshipped on a separate altar beside God. Even today, God’s wife, the Shekinah or Wisdom, is recognized in Jewish rituals such as the Lekha Dodi, which welcomes the Bride of God into the temple. In Christianity she became the Holy Spirit and Mary Theotikos, god-bearer or Mother of God. The Black Madonna found on many Catholic altars is a survival of Lillith, the Great Mother.
The Wasteland period in Arthurian romance begins when Arthur’s queen, Guinevere, is abducted by the mad Lancelot du Lac, a champion of the spirits, in Saxon called alven or elves, in Gaelic called sidhe. She is reclaimed in a cataclysmic war against the sidhe led by Morgan LeFay, the Faerie Queen. After his death, Arthur is sent drifting in a boat toward the Isle of Avalon, the realm of faerie, signifying his completion of the initiation process and return to the feminine source of being.
The Ramayana parallels major features of this initiation pattern. Rama is a Universal Monarch who wanders the jungle for nine years in a Wasteland period. His wife, Sita, who is a figure of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and wife of Vishnu the Incarnator, is abducted by Ravanna, King of the Demons. She is Tempted by Ravanna to become Queen of the Underworld, but remains faithful to Rama. Rama, acting as Lord of the Animals, gathers an army of six million monkeys and a number of bears and attacks Ravanna’s island. Together with Hanuman the Monkey King, he reclaims Sita in a battle which pits demons against men, beasts, and gods; rather like the war in Irish mythology of the Tuatha deDanaan against the demonic Fomorians who dwell beneath the sea.
The pivotal moment in Being There occurs when Chance fails to respond to Eve’s attempt at seduction. Incapable of sexual interest or Temptation, of initiation through assimilation of the feminine unconscious, Chance fails to unite with the Shekinah. The pattern of initiation, of internalizing projections or de-objectifying the Other, is disrupted. His mind, and the creative potential expressed by sexuality, is crippled by the wound of the Fisher King.
Kosinski leads the reader to expect a transformative event in this scene, and then diverges wildly from the expected. The jarring discontinuity alerts us to his real intent and contribution; the creation of a new myth, a modern myth in which man has no defining relationship to the world and must make his own.
The Temptation as an Underworld journey to reclaim the feminine creative force and emerge fully human, becoming an Original Man, is found in three sources which form a historical progression within a literary tradition. The direct antecedents of Being There are the story of Pwyll in the Mabinogi, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Wagner’s Parsifal.
In the first story of the Mabinogi, King Pwyll meets Arawn, King of the Underworld, while riding in the forest. They agree to trade places for a year; Arawn casts a spell which makes each look like the other. During this time, Pwyll is Tempted by Arawn’s Queen, but resists her. His initiation complete, Pwyll returns home to become a just and merciful king. The second half of the story articulates a linked myth, the Underworld journey of the goddess Rhiannon, which parallels that of Persephone.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a more sophisticated story, a synthesis of Christian and pagan Celtic elements. Gawain, linked to Parsifal in other stories as a contrasting-complementary character, is a development of the Irish hero Cuchulainn. The Green Knight is both Christ and the Green Man, Celtic god of vegetative rebirth whose leafy face can be seen as a decorative motif in English churches. A parallel trickster-initiator figure in Islam is the Green Genie Khidr.
Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are feasting at Camelot when a strange knight enters the hall bearing an axe, a man made of vines and leaves in green armor. He issues a challenge, and by the laws of chivalry the request of a guest cannot be denied once he has been admitted to the hospitality of the castle; one of them must strike off his head, after which the Green Knight will return the blow. Gawain agrees, to avoid Arthur’s loss of honor. He chops off the Green Knight’s head, and the Knight picks up his head and speaks; “In one year you will come to my castle, and I will return the blow.”
Gawain sets out on his quest a year later, and comes to the Castle Perilous, where he is tempted by its Queen. He resists, and is given her magic lace girdle to wear. Dressed in the Queen of the Underworld’s clothes, he goes to meet the Knight at a cavern called the Green Church. The Green Knight swings but stops his blow, just nicking Gawain’s neck in an act of redemption. The Green Knight tells him that the Castle Perilous is his own, and its Queen the wife of the Green Knight.
Parallel elements include the Underworld journey and Castle, the Temptation by an Underworld Queen, an exchange of identities with an Underworld King, and a wandering or Wasteland period. The Beheading Game is a retelling of Cuchulainn’s contest for the kingship of Ulster in the epic Bricriu’s Feast.
Chance is sent on an Underworld journey to Mr. Rand’s house, is Tempted by Eve, and takes the place of the Fisher King. The seduction scene is where the story of Chance breaks the initiation pattern. Like the Old Man, Chance bears the wound of the Fisher King. In the first chapter we learn, “The soil of his brain, the ground from which all his thoughts shot up, had been ruined forever.”
In Wagner’s opera Parzival, the theme of Redemption also hinges on a Temptation. Anfortas, the Fisher King, is wounded by the Spear of Longinus, which pierced Christ’s side at the Passion. Parzival’s experience with his objectified Other in the form of the sensual Kundry’s kiss triggers his despair and eventual redemption. The Holy Fool becomes Redeemer through unification with the unconscious.
Chance’s tragic flaw prevents him from undergoing a transformative initiation; he is the Holy Fool as pure symbol. Kosinski uses the interruption of a mythic pattern as social critique; the mold of man is broken. Like Theseus, we must find our way through the Labyrinth of the Minotaur, but without Ariadne’s Thread to guide us. Like Mersault in The Stranger, Chance is the ultimate image of modern man’s pathology of disconnectedness. He is, perhaps, the only Redeemer we deserve.
Or, perhaps Kosinski’s message is a more simple, hopeful one: First, we must recognize that we are on a journey toward becoming human. Second, we have no map of transformative process to guide us. Therefore, each of us must reinvent how to be human.
Kosinski beneath the illusion of a savage and nihilistic Absurdism like that of Samuel Beckett in his final form in the Malone Trilogy is a Catholic theologian of the Thomist school like Flannery O’Connor, who has lived a myth and can teach us how to witness horrors and survive without losing our humanity or our power to question authority.
Chance’s redemptive power rests on his innocence; he is the child who speaks truth to power, who knows the Emperor has no clothes, an Adamic man in his uncorrupted state, the Fool who can achieve a vision of the Infinite.
Bodidharma, the founder of Zen, once had an interview with the Emperor of China.
The Emperor said to him, ” I have donated money to the poor, I have built orphanages, hospitals, and monasteries. How much merit have I accumulated in heaven?”
To which Bodidharma said, “None whatsoever.”
Being There film trailer
Being There, Jerzy Kosiński
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677877.Being_There?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_11
The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosiński
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18452.The_Painted_Bird
Being There in the Age of Trump, Barbara Tepa Lupack
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/116268099-being-there-in-the-age-of-trump
Senior year of high school: C.G. Jung
July 26 2025 C.G. Jung, On His Birthday: Dreams As A Ground of Being and a Vision of Human Interconnectedness Within Our Universal Soul
Carl Gustave Jung has shaped myself and our civilization with his brilliant quest to forge a Grand Unified Theory of the processes of becoming human as a universal faith grounded in a science of the soul, and return medicine to its original function of healing the soul.
Through his vast library of writing across a lifetime of scholarship and the unwavering courage to embrace both our darkness and our light, this is what Jung proposes; we all of us own our uniqueness but exist in a limitless sea of Being in which we all share, and the negotiations between these boundaries and interfaces of self and other are where the art of psychology comes in as a guide of the soul.
The Collective Unconscious which unifies all humanity as a transhistorical colony organism below the surface of our personalities and awareness and referential to Platonic Idealism and the Logos, being human as a process of growth he called individuation and modeled on alchemy as a pancultural spiritual faith, synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle; personality as an organization of a quaternity of energy systems, archetypes as mythic figures who live and are real within each of us and are motivating and informing sources of ourselves and of human history; these and many more ideas are among the unique insights and radical mysticism of Carl Gustave Jung.
In any other age he would have been considered a magician; an interpreter of dreams who claimed to command the ka-mutef or spirit of a Pharaoh which he consulted with on difficult cases, a scholar of comparative alchemy, myth, and religion around whose tower in the Black Forest he wrote of fairies dancing at night. His wisdom was won through relationships with timeless and otherworldly figures and forces, that which is most ancient in us, and his books reclaim the humanity that the modern world has forgotten. In this his project is to redeem what Schiller called “the disgodding of nature”, and aligns with the holistic philosophy of Gregory Bateson; equally it can be considered a form of universal faith of the Sapientia Dei or Wisdom as Jung himself claimed.
What Jung did was to restore to religion its original function as medicine of the soul, universalize it as a syncretic faith, and forge an integrated and consistent method for becoming human with the rigor of scientific method. This method which he called Analytical Psychology echoes the dream incubation chambers of the temples of Asclepius, whose symbol of intertwined serpents is the emblem of the medical profession. Secondarily, it implies a political praxis or action of values as a United Humankind as embodied in the United Nations founded during his formative years as a guarantor of our universal human rights and an instrument of peace versus wars of imperial conquest and dominion. Third, it is also a form of Surrealism.
Surrealism is defined by twin characteristics; the quest to transcend ourselves, often in terms of religious mysticism, and the use of dreams as a door to the Infinite. Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood is a Surrealist classic; Vladimir Nabokov, especially in Ada, is the other best example which immediately comes to mind for me, but many works either advance the Surrealist project of transformation or use dream images and symbols extensively. Jungian psychology can be described as Surrealism, also as syncretic mysticism, as he modeled it on alchemical philosophy and Coleridge’s Primary Imagination. Coleridge had in fact done the heavy lifting for Jung as a philosophical framework, though he built something quite different on its foundation.
Among Jung’s other sources, Tibetan Buddhism has the Bardo, and Islam the alam al mythal, as states of being and interfaces between life and death and the individual and the Infinite, an Infinite which for Jung is not divine but human; Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue is a stellar example of modern mysticism as Surrealism. Through the influence of Philip K. Dick, Surrealism has become pervasive in our culture, and both the science fiction and fantasy genres may be considered special forms of Surrealism with their own conventions.
There is much shared ground in Surrealism with Absurdism, though Absurdism does not always posit an Infinite Being to whom we are trying to reach, especially in its Nihilist form with Samuel Beckett, Thomas Ligotti, and Kobo Abe, but it can as the Pauline Absurdism in Flannery O’Connor’s Thomism or in Nicholas of Cusa, precursor of Kurt Gödel’s from whom I derive my epistemology of the Conservation of Ignorance. The line of transmission of Absurdist elements in Jung’s writing as literature originates with Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lewis Carroll, Nikolai Gogol, and Franz Kafka, develops with Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Witold Gombrowicz, and Albert Camus, and continues today in Haruki Murakami, Kurt Vonnegut, and Elif Shafak.
How can I say these outrageous things about Jungian psychology being a system of magic, a syncretic faith, and a school of art? Let me recount for you my relevant history; I have studied and been oriented to Jungian psychology since I was a teenager interested in myths and fairytales from the age of twelve when I read Frasier’s massive work on folklore, The Golden Bough, and then read the original Grimm’s Fairytales which had been presented to me in bizarre variations as our ancestral family history by my father and his Beatnik friend, William S. Burroughs, who practiced magic together.
I was made strange by a primary trauma in which I died and was reborn and experienced a moment of supraconsciousness out of time and beheld myriads of possible human futures, on Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969, when the police opened fire on a protest in People’s Park, Berkeley, the most massive and terrible incident of domestic terror ever perpetrated by our government since the Civil War.
Of the six thousand protesters at the scene, only 111 of the victims reached the safety of hospitals. There has never been a full accounting of Bloody Thursday.
I remember my mother smiling and reaching out to a policeman offering a handful of flowers, and he pumped and aimed a shotgun at her in reply. I have no explanation for how we survived the next few moments. I’d like to think he hesitated to murder for no reason a beautiful woman, with flaming red hair and skin pale as rice powder, fearless and kind and with imperious hazel eyes and a boy less than ten years old at her side, even that she had been identified and orders issued not to shoot a notable academic, surely the greatest scholar of Coleridge and symbolism in medieval religious art of her time and a psychologist and biologist as well as an author of children’s books. But no; chance intervened in the form of a policeman who at that moment threw a concussion grenade into the crowd. There was a flash of light and thunder, and all devolved into chaos and death. Time resumed as the crowd fled and policemen fired at our backs; still we escaped harm.
The moment of my true birth was that in which I stood outside of time, beyond death, and held the universe within me.
What happened next? Governor Ronald Reagan unleashed 2,700 soldiers of the National Guard, who joined the Alameda County Sheriffs, in effect a mercenary force who had donned Halloween masks and discarded their badges, in a two week campaign of repression that included bombing the entire city from helicopters with tear gas. When informed of the elementary school children who were hospitalized as a result, he said; “Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, you must expect things will happen, and that people, being human, will make mistakes on both sides.”
Here I must share with you the other Defining Moment of my ninth year, in the context of my life mission to unravel the origins of evil as illnesses of power and violence, and of the consequences for me of growing up with three voices, English as my home language, Chinese from the age of nine, and French from seventh grade, and of spending ten years from fifth grade in near-daily study and practice of Zen Buddhist and Taoist disciplines.
How I met my teacher happened like this; during the first weeks of fifth grade I spent recess at school either playing chess with the Principal or experimenting with the chemistry set in the classroom, which doubtless seemed odd, unfriendly, and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals marked with a skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing would get a dose.
This is how division, otherness, and disconnectedness escalate into war, and why interdependence, solidarity, and communication can restore the balance of peace when things begin to fall apart.
That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. Having escaped by chance the fate of becoming a nine year old mass murderer, I told my father about it that night.
To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.
Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and you can use it as a lever to win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?
Fear, power, and the use of social force are balanced with the need to belong. Sometimes its best to do what others do to fit in, but it isn’t always best, and it can be very wrong. Best is to discover what’s best for you, no matter how different that is, and find belonging on your own terms and no one else’s. Even if you have to create that community yourself.
What you need is a way to confront people directly when you’re upset with them that doesn’t cause more harm than it solves.”
This was 1969 and he arranged for me to study with a scholar of traditional arts who had just escaped arrest during the Cultural Revolution in China.
I called him Sifu Long because of a story he told on the day we met, a version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave with nuances of the Fall of the Angels from the Book of Enoch; I had been startled by the sudden fluid movement of his enormous shadow, like a flight of silent birds, in the still room of his study through moon gate doors which like a gaping mouth opened into the chasms of darkness of a gorgeous pillared temple illuminated only by the many incense sticks which glowed like eyes of fire. And I asked, “Why is your shadow so huge? And it moves.”
“Once we were dragons,” he began, “we were vast, without end or beginning, and we filled the universe. But when humans came there was no place for them, and they could not see us all at once; so we became small, lost our greatness, and found ways to share our world. We abandoned eternity and the rapture of the heavens for the stewardship of humankind, who insist on living in boxes from which they refuse to venture out and discover what lies beyond their boundaries.
But you can see me because your cage has not yet been built, and because we are alike in our powers of vision and illusion, to see the true selves of others. This suggests possibilities. So I will teach you how to fight as you wish, but also how to grow beyond your limits and find your greatness.”
These studies included arts from The Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung’s primary reference on Taoist practices, Chan or Zen study, the game of Go, kung fu very like that of the television series with whose protagonist I identified, and possibly best of all Chinese and Japanese language, poetry, and inkbrush calligraphy. Here was a method of questioning oneself with a fabulous knowledge base, with which we may seize control of our own evolution, and which again set its mark of difference upon me as a bicultural person in my origins.
Fate handed me a Gordian Knot of problems to solve five years after this, in the summer before I entered High School, when I went to Brazil to train with a friend as a fencer in preparation for the Pan American Games, and I first escaped my gilded cage and was immersed into a bifurcated and discontiguous world of aristocratic privilege and the vast horrors of the surrounding slums of abandoned street children, beggars, garbage mound gleaners, quasi-slave laborers, and the ruthless and brutal police and gangsters who ruled them in partnership. Here I witnessed the true costs of our luxuries, and when the police came to murder children for the bounty placed on them by the rich, I fought in their defense.
These issues, unequal wealth, power, and privilege, became my subjects of study, and throughout the years since I have struggled to understand them as systems which produce evil, a Wagnerian ring of fear, power, and force, and divisions of exclusionary otherness and elite hierarchies of belonging from which are born fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and subjugation to authority. When I speak of evil and its origins and functions, this is what I mean.
During Middle School and High School I read through the University of Chicago’s Great Books of the Western World series, and became interested in the curious and the arcane and made a deep study of grimoires and the literature of ceremonial magic; Grimm’s Fairytales as a lost faith, the Kabala, the art of Hieronymus Bosch of which I made a collage on one entire wall of my bedroom as a gate of dreams, and shaped by the bizarre stories my father’s Beatnik friend William S. Burroughs would tell in the evenings after dinner; his journeys to other worlds, duels with magical beings, the art of curses and wishes, poetic vision as a path of reimagination and transformation, how to believe impossible things and transcend ourselves and the limits of our humanity.
Above all was the shadow work encoded in stories as magic rituals in which he passed to me the chthonic guardian spirit which possessed him as its avatar as the successor of Nietzsche; for all his stories ended with our repetition together of Shakespeare’s words from The Tempest; ”This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”. Thus I became heir to his powers of poetic vision as Jungian shadow work, and as the reimagination and transformation of the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
Also there were my conversations with my mother, a psychologist, biologist, and scholar of Coleridge who wrote a study of psychosomatic muteness from Jerzy Kosinski’s childhood therapy journal and Soviet mental hospital records, weaving discussions of religious symbolism and The Painted Bird together as an exploration of the problem of evil, and led me through the nuances of symbolism using as a text Émile Mâle’s The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century. From her I inherit a duality of vision, the symbolic and the psychological, which echoes Monet’s dictum, “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks inward, the other looks outward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see.”
At this point during my last year of high school, I read a just-published book which fixed me on the origins of evil and its functions as a field of study, Robert G.L. Waite’s multidisciplinary work on Hitler, The Psychopathic God, and another which suggested intriguing possibilities and solutions, Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.
My Freshman year at university I designed a Jungian Studies course and talked a professor into meeting with me as a private weekly class for credits, and haunted the library at the Jung Institute of San Francisco, where they had beautifully written studies of my beloved operas and many other things. My initial special studies tutorial included Jung’s three volumes on alchemy as a mystery faith and the structural basis for his psychology as a path of reintegration of the self; Alchemical Studies, which contains his commentary on Secret of the Golden Flower, a primary text which was the basis for my traditional supervised meditation disciplines for a decade with Dragon Teacher and my point of entry into Jung’s world, Mysterium Coniunctionis, and Psychology and Alchemy. Later I made a close study of Aion, the final volume of his four works on alchemy, though I worked through the entire corpus of his works throughout my undergraduate studies.
During this time I was a student in the Nexus program of integrated arts and sciences in four main disciplines plus linguistics, which served my personal mission to explore the origins of evil and its functions through the intersection of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, as suggested to me by reading Waite.
My literary studies focused on Classical mythology and literature, Arthurian Romance, fairytales, and Shakespearean theatre in an attempt to reconstruct the lost faith of pre-Christian Europe as guided by Jacob Grimm, Ted Hughes, William Blake, Jung, James Hillman, Joseph Campbell, and Shakespeare, and I spent a number of glorious summers pursuing amateur theatricals at the annual Shakespeare Festival in Ashland Oregon and performing at the Renaissance Faire at Blackpoint Forest a short drive from my home in Sonoma. In graduate school I studied Comparative Literature as I developed my reading lists for teaching my high school AP English students including twenty world cultures plus Modern American Literature. And of course I traveled to the places I read and wrote about, to disrupt my own expectations as I do still.
As a boy I kept a journal in Enochian, greatly interesting as a foundation of ceremonial magic though not a true language, John Dee’s idea of an angelic language used by Aleister Crowley and taught to me by William S. Burroughs who claimed Crowley as his teacher; but its really more of a cypher derived from Gematria or mathematical decoding of Hebrew in Kabala and medieval occultism hidden within a unique orthographic script for Early Modern English, much like Tolkien’s invented languages, with a modified alphabet and around 200 unique terms. So I don’t count it as one of my languages.
Beyond this, my interest in dreams as a field of study has led me to explore three spheres of ideas wherein dreamwork is primary and which were influences on Jung; I have been a Buddhist monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana order in Nepal, a member of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism in Kashmir, and since a teenager an enthusiast of Surrealist art, literature, and cinema; and I see the same interconnections and commonalities between them as Jung did.
Having properly situated my understanding of Jung in the topologies of my intellectual environment as I grew up, a crucial stage of investigation in any study of human identity as informed, motivated, and shaped by our historical adaptations, I now turn to the man himself and his work.
Jung spoke in metaphors, densely layered references, and multiple meanings; his psychology is literary and philosophical rather than scientific and medical, a Quixotic quest to map the human soul and to describe a universal process of becoming human.
Poet, historian, literary scholar and philosopher, whose project was surrealist and mystical; Carl Gustave Jung pioneered ideas which have been taken in multiple directions by others, his comparative mythology shaped into a new discipline by Joseph Campbell, his archetypal psychology forged into a new classicism by James Hillman. His massive work on psychological types formed the basis of the Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator test; the Rorschach test is an equally famous tool which puts Jungian theory to work.
His last book, Man and His Symbols, is an excellent introduction to his ideas, intended for general readers and accessible enough to use in high school English classes to teach basic symbolism in literature as I did.
Anthony Storr’s The Essential Jung is a great follow-up and broad overview; beyond this I suggest reading Campbell’s The Power of Myth, Psychotherapy by Marie-Louise von Franz, and The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire, continuing the study of all four authors together.
Of James Hillman, read next Dreaming the Dark, and thereafter The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, Kinds of Power, and Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jung’s Red Book, A Terrible Love of War, Pan and the Nightmare, and We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – And the World’s Getting Worse.
Of Joseph Campbell, read next Creative Mythology, Myths to Live By, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine edited by Safron Rossi, The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension, The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-87, Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, the three volumes of the Masks of God series, Tarot Revelations coauthored with Richard Roberts, and The Mythic Image.
The works of Marie-Louise von Franz balance them as the fourth partner of the set; Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, and Dreams: A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates, and Other Historical Figures, would begin my list.
Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung’s Psychology, by June K. Singer is still the finest state of the art text for both general readers and clinicians. Also read Singer’s Modern Woman in Search of Soul: A Jungian Guide to the Visible & Invisible Worlds.
His humanistic-existentialist works, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, The Undiscovered Self, and Answer to Job, are wonderful companion studies to the works of Sartre and Camus.
I do like the topical collections assembled from disparate essays in his collected works; Dreams, and also Jung on Active Imagination edited by Joan Chodorow.
His collaboration with Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, is a joint attempt to found a new science of mythology, and a launching point for both Campbell and Hillman.
I especially love Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, notes from the 86 seminars he chaired over 11 university terms exploring the great epic poem which seized and shook me awake in eighth grade, as a 14 year old who for the first time had found a book by someone who spoke for me.
Do read the marvelous Aion: researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, which builds on his foundational studies of alchemy and is illuminating in terms of the Sartre/Merleau-Ponty debate.
His autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections was a treasured companion of mine for years, filled with wit and wisdom, strangeness, visions and occult weirdness. When I first read it I considered it a grimoire, magic having been an enthusiasm of mine throughout my teenage years, parallel and interdependent with my immersion in Surrealist film during weekend forays to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco where I was wont to run amok.
And then there is The Red Book, in which the genesis of his ideas is written, an extended interrogation of Herman Hesse’s Abraxis as described in the novel Demian, a reimagination and transformation of Gnosticism and the founding of a syncretic faith which touches the whole mystical tradition of humankind, which can be read as a journal of madness like Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or a crisis of faith comparable to Augustine’s Confessions. Jung’s autobiography which I read in high school, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is an except from the Red Book which leaves out the crazy ass parts. The thing is, I like the crazy parts best. Our universe, and humankind, are both irrational. Jung should have learned, with all his wisdom, to do as the humorist Gini Koch advises in her signature line; “Go with the crazy”.
On the subject of Jungian psychology:
A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung, by Robert H. Hopcke.
Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, by Connie Zweig & Jeremiah Abrams.
The Eternal Drama: The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man, The Aion Lectures: Exploring the Self in C.G. Jung’s Aion, by Edward F. Edinger.
Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts, Jungian Psychology Unplugged: My Life As an Elephant, by Daryl Sharp.
Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness, by Marion Woodman & Elinor Dickson.
Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning Psychology and Literature in C.G. Jung and James Hillman, Susan Rowland
Celebrations of My Favorite Authors On Their Birthdays; those of world-historical importance who merit your time to read and study throughout a lifetime as have I
Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium, so named in recognition of our home as a refuge for her music and my writing; my initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs each year and writing an appreciation. These celebrations, some one hundred sixty of them, include summaries of their whole body of work and its meaning for us, as well as interrogations of their books individually and reading lists of the major criticism.
These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. As with my reading lists of national and diasporic literatures, I chose them on the basis of quality alone as I see it; this begs the question, what is good? In a book, a song, a life, a society? For I believe that the beauty of a political system, a work of literature, or anything else may be judged by the same criterion, as truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature.
As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year.
Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams.
The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions.
The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.
We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience.
I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. I write, speak, teach, and organize liberation of the human from systems of oppression as an agent of Chaos, revolutionary struggle, and the reimagination and transformation of our future possibilities of becoming human, whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.
But in escaping the legacies of our history and authorized identities of race, gender, class, and nationality, we must also bear witness and remember; this no less than the Primary Duties of a Citizen, Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, Disobey and Disbelieve Authority, are crucial to writing as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, or to living as a human being.
May you find joy as have I in books as companions we have chosen to shape and create ourselves as we wish to become, as we choose our friends and lovers, and in the cultivation of authors across vast gulfs of time and geography as partners in the Great and Secret Game by which we construct ourselves, our civilization, and our future.
Manuel Puig, on his birthday December 28
Philip K. Dick, on his birthday December 16
Gustave Flaubert, on his birthday December 12
Naguib Mahfouz, on his birthday December 11
Emily Dickinson, on her birthday December 10
John Milton, on his birthday December 9
Louis de Bernieres, on his birthday December 8
Rainier Maria Rilke, on his birthday December 4
Joseph Conrad, on his birthday December 3
Jonathan Swift, on his birthday November 30
William Blake, on his birthday November 28
Eugene Ionesco, on his birthday November 26
November 18 2024 Margaret Atwood, On Her Birthday: A Celebration
Chinua Achebe, on his birthday November 16
Fyodor Dostoevsky, on his birthday November 11
Peter Weiss, on his birthday November 8
November 7 2025 America in the Mirror of the Absurd: Albert Camus, on his birthday
Sam Shepard, on his birthday November 5
John Keats, on his birthday October 31
Sylvia Plath, on her birthday October 27
John Berryman, on his birthday October 25
Philip Lamantia, on his birthday October 23
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on his birthday October 21
Arthur Rimbaud, on his birthday October 20
Arthur Miller, on his birthday October 17
Oscar Wilde, on his birthday October 16
Eugene O’Neil, on his birthday October 16
Gunter Grass, on his birthday October 16
Milorad Pavic, on his birthday October 15
Italo Calvino, on his birthday October 15
Harold Pinter, on his birthday October 10
Andrei Sinyavski, on his birthday October 8
Vaclav Havel, on his birthday October 5
Flann O’Brien (Brian Ó Nualláin), on his birthday October 5
Louis Aragon, on his birthday Oct 3
Wallace Stevens, on his birthday October 2
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, on his birthday September 30
Miguel de Cervantes, on his birthday September 29
T.S. Eliot, on his birthday September 26
William Faulkner, on his birthday September 25
Maurice Blanchot, on his birthday September 22
Viktor Erofeyev, on his birthday September 19
Pierre Reverdy, on his birthday September 13
Georges Bataille, on his birthday September 10
Leo Tolstoy, on his birthday September 9
Alfred Jarry, on his birthday September 8
Antonin Artaud, on his birthday September 4
Eduardo Galeano, on his birthday September 3
William Carlos Williams, on his birthday September 1
August 30 2025 Our Monsters, Ourselves: Mary Shelly, on her birthday
Robertson Davies, on his birthday August 28
Jeanette Winterson, on her birthday August 27
August 19 2025 The Wisdom of Our Darkness, the Flaws of Our Humanity, and the Brokenness of the World: In Celebration of H. P. Lovecraft
Jorge Borges, on his birthday August 24
A.S. Byatt, on her birthday August 24
Ted Hughes, on his birthday August 17
John Hawkes, on his birthday August 17 2025
Witold Gombrowicz, on his birthday August 4
Isabel Allende, on her birthday August 2
Herman Melville, on his birthday August 1
July 30 2025 A Mirror of Our Civilization and Its Perils: Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Its Parallel and Interdependent Text and Primary Source To Which It Was Written In Direct Reply, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and the Limits of the Human
William H. Gass, on his birthday July 30
William T. Vollmann, on his birthday July 28
George Bernard Shaw, on his birthday July 26
John Gardner, on his birthday July 21
Robert Pinget, on his birthday July 19
Tony Kushner, on his birthday July 16
Iris Murdoch, on her birthday July 15
Wole Soyinka, on his birthday July 14
Pablo Neruda, on his birthday July 12
Marcel Proust, on his birthday July 10
Thomas Ligotti, on his birthday July 9
Marguerite Yourcenar, on her birthday July 8
Jeff Vander Meer, on his birthday July 7
Jean Cocteau, on his birthday July 5
Tom Stoppard, on his birthday July 3
Franz Kafka, on his birthday July 3 2025
Herman Hesse, on his birthday July 2
Czselaw Milosz, on his birthday June 30
June 21 2025 We Balance the Terror of Our Nothingness With the Joy of Total Freedom, the Flaws of Our Humanity With the Redemptive Power of Love, and the Brokenness of the World With Our Absurd Hope For the Limitless Possibilities of Becoming Human: On Sartre’s Birthday, And A Eulogy
Amos Tutuola, on his birthday June 20
Vikram Seth, on his birthday June 20
Salman Rushdie, on his birthday June 19
Djuna Barnes, on her birthday June 12
Yasunari Kawabata, on his birthday June 11
Thomas Mann, on his birthday June 6
Alexander Pushkin, on his birthday June 6
Federico Garcia Lorca, on his birthday June 5
Allen Ginsberg, on his birthday June 4
Mircea Cartarescu, on his birthday June 1
Walt Whitman, on his birthday May 31
Roberto Calasso, on his birthday May 30
Andre Brink, on his birthday May 29
Patrick White, on his birthday May 28
John Barth, on his birthday May 27
Ralph Waldo Emerson, on his birthday May 25
Robert Creeley, on his birthday May 21
Peter Hoeg, on his birthday May 17
Adrienne Rich, on her birthday May 17
Katherine Ann Porter, on her birthday May 15
Daphne du Maurier, on her birthday May 13
Arthur Kopit, on his birthday May 10
Thomas Pynchon, on his birthday May 8
Gary Snyder, on his birthday May 8
Stanislaw Witkiewicz, on his birthday May 8
Angela Carter, on her birthday May 7
Peter Carey, on his birthday May 7
Tatyana Tolstaya, on her birthday May 3
Annie Dillard, on her birthday April 30
William Shakespeare, on his birthday April 23
Vladimir Nabokov, on his birthday April 22
Kathy Acker, on her birthday April 18
Eva Figes, on her birthday April 15
Bruce Sterling, on his birthday April 14
April 13 2025 Joy In A Meaningless Universe: Samuel Beckett, on his birthday
Charles Baudelaire, on his birthday April 9
Donald Barthelme, on his birthday April 7
Homero Aridjis, on his birthday April 6
Maya Angelou, on her birthday April 4
Milan Kundera, on his birthday April 1
John Fowles, on his birthday March 31
Nikolai Gogol, on his birthday March 31
Bohumil Hrabal, on his birthday March 28
Mario Vargas Llosa, on his birthday March 28
Tennessee Williams, on his birthday March 26
Flannery O’Connor, on her birthday March 25
David Malouf, on his birthday March 20
Stephane Mallarme, on his birthday March 18
Philip Roth, on his birthday March 19
David Rabe, on his birthday March 10
Kobo Abe, on his birthday March 7
Georges Perec, on his birthday March 7
Gabriel García Márquez, on his birthday March 6
Tom Wolfe, on his birthday March 2
Jim Crace, on his birthday March 1
Ryunosuke Akutagawa, on his birthday March 1
Anthony Burgess, on his birthday February 25
Anais Nin, on her birthday February 21
Amy Tan, on her birthday February 19
Nikos Kazantzakis, on his birthday February 18
Toni Morrison, on her birthday February 18
Soseki Natsume, on his birthday February 9
Thomas Bernhard, on his birthday February 9
A Woman Reinvents Humankind: Gertrude Stein, on her birthday February 3
Kenzaburo Oe, on his birthday January 31
Anton Chekov, on his birthday January 29
D.M. Thomas, on his birthday January 27
Jonathan Carroll, on his birthday January 26
Virginia Woolf, on her birthday January 25
Gini Koch, on her birthday January 25
Edith Wharton, on her birthday January 24
Julian Barnes, on his birthday January 19
Susan Sontag, on her birthday January 16
Edmund White, on his birthday January 13
Haruki Murakami, on his birthday January 12
Leo Tolstoy, on his birthday September 9
Robert Duncan, on his birthday January 7
Umberto Eco, on his birthday January 5
Gao Xingjian, on his birthday January 4
Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said), on his birthday January 1
Torch of Liberty 
