One of the most outstanding aspects of this 4th dialogue for me lies in the the initial appearance of images of natural phenomena in dream, vision, or memory (tsunami, river, tornado, whirling clouds), but which then scales up to catastrophic “unnatural” proportions. This scaling up factor is expressed both in dream or in outer reality in spatial/temporal terms: normal events moving abnormally faster, or things getting unnaturally bigger or smaller—we could say unrealistically—all the while generating a mood of looming catastrophe. Paco gives some powerful examples occurring in his dreams and visions. People also dream of the sun speeding up (temporal scaling) or “spatial entities” deforming, expanding, twisting, shrinking, etc. A good movie that portrays these spatiotemporal distortions taking place is Everything Everywhere At Once.
I was intrigued to see the 18th century quote at the beginning of this dialogue. If one were searching for an historical origin of chaos theory (1970’s) this would be a good start. One of the key notions of chaos theory is the phenomenon of cascading across scale (scaling up or down). Patterns at tiny scales become visible at huge scales through a cascading process. As Paco notes, tiny tremors at great depths become catastrophically visible at the surface.
All these distortions occurring in outer reality or in dream reflect a psychic process, (the spirit of the depths) as Paco says. But here we must also invoke Russ’s dream voice: “it is not a metaphor”. A metaphor is a linguistic device for linking spiritual reality with sense-perceptible reality—it establishes a hidden identity between the two otherwise separate worlds, also known as the two-world myth—for example “nature is the book of God”. By studying nature we come closer to God’s word. But here is the rub: what happens to metaphor when this two-world myth (spiritual/material), the ancient spiritus rector of Western culture for millennia, collapses? Metaphors point to a invisible link between two separated worlds. But if the two worlds are collapsing, Russ’ dream voice seems to tell what is next: “it is not a metaphor”. This voice carries echoes for me from Jung’s Red Book in which Jung accuses Philemon and company of being just symbols but is sharply corrected (“we are not symbols, we are real”). P. K. Dick says something similar in his declaration that he was taught by a girl that his fictions were, in some sense, very real (i.e., not metaphorical).
The looming catastrophe we all face, then, is at an unheard-of scale and is decidedly unnatural (even if natural imagery is invoked). Reality as we have known it has been based on the two-world myth, requiring stable rhetorical and syntactical language to make this dual reality intelligible to us. All signs point to not so much enormous natural disasters (the earth has witnessed five mass extinctions, for example) but to a completely new situation in which the psychic background to our age-old stable cultural and linguistic world seems to be undergoing a transformation—one in which the two-world logic no longer holds. This is suggested in the upheavals taking place not so much to entities in our given space/time, but to the logic of our given spacetime itself.
We are witnessing the visible tremors of this transformation in “all the lying, denial, disinformation, ignoring, and other such” as Russ says. These linguistic distortions are no longer moral problems but hint at a breakdown in intelligibility as the language structure that sprung from and reflects the intelligibility of the two worlds is now giving way under the collapse of the two-worlds’ once stable logic of spacetime (eg eternity/time; inner/outer; mind/body; past/present/future, etc.).
Our looming catastrophe is first and foremost a catastrophe of unintelligibility. To get a profound yet hilarious sense of what people are capable of doing to one another under conditions of unintelligibility, I heartily recommend C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength: Ch 16. It begins with Merlin casting the spell of Babel on some men “without chests”. Each man’s speech was intelligible to him alone while every one else heard him babbling. It ended in violent murders with the wild animals having the last say. A must read for what is to come. It is prophetic!