Trolling with the Fisher King: Reimagining the Wound

by Paul Pines

Overview

Trolling with the Fisher King started with the author's fascination with Amfortas in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, whose mission was to protect the Holy Grail, the container that unites suffering and love, his inevitable distraction by the outer world and subsequent betrayal of the mission after sustaining a wound in battle that would not heal. Paul Pines uses the tools Jung employed in his confrontation with the unconscious in The Red Book, gathering symbolic patterns and inter-disciplinary connections to interrogate his personal experience and what he finds in the world within and around him.

As a fisherman/seaman touched by war zones and wastelands in Viet Nam and the Bowery, a poet/therapist who has worked with his own wounds, and those of others, author Paul Pines believes that the Fisher King's wounding can be understood as a function that speaks to our post-internet condition on the border of survival and extinction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781630514594
Publisher:	Chiron Publications
Publication date:	01/15/2018
Pages:	172
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.47(d)

About the Author

PAUL PINES opened The Tin Palace, his Bowery jazz club, in the '70s. It became the setting for his novel The Tin Angel (Morrow, 1983). A second novel, Redemption, (Editions du Rocher, 1997), explores the Guatemalan Mayan genocide of the '80s. My Brother's Madness, (Curbstone Press, 2007) probes the nature of delusion. He has published 13 collections of poetry, most recently Divine Madness (Marsh Hawk, 2012), Fishing On The Pole Star (Dos Madres, 2014) Message From The Memoirist (Dos Madres, 2015) and Charlotte Songs (Marsh Hawk, 2016). He is the editor of Juan Gelman's selected poems Dark Times/ Filled with Light (Open Letters Press, 2012) and has contributed translations to Small Hours of the Night, Selected Poems of Roque Dalton; and Nicanor Parra, Antipoems: New and Selected. Composer Daniel Asia's settings of Pines' poems appear on Songs from the Page of Swords, Breath in a Ram's Horn and, Purer Than Purest Pure (BBC Singers) on the Summit label. Asia's 5th Symphony, recorded by the Pilsen SO, features poems by Pines and Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. The Tin Angel Opera, was performed by the Center for Contemporary Opera in NYC. Pines has conducted workshops for the National Writers Voice and lectured for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Ossabaw Foundation, and Virginia Center, as well as a recipient of an Artists' Fellowship, N.Y.S. Foundation for the Arts. He lives in Glens Falls, New York, where he is a psychotherapist in private practice and hosts the Lake George Jazz Weekend. paulpines.com

Table of Contents

FOREWORD 11

ADDRESSING THE WOUND PRELIMINARY FORENSICS 15

GROUND ZERO 17

UNDRESSING THE WOUND 20

PREPARING THE LINES 22

DISENTANGLING THE NET STARTING IN GLOUCESTER 27

Spreading the Net 29 ON THE TROLL 31

Mare Nostrum 31

Preparing the Baits 32

Fixing the Colors 34

Tracking the Ghost 36

Consciousness = The Wound 38

Spectral Navigation 39

Guarding the Measure 40

SEABIRDS 42

Re/member Me 42

Focusing on Feathers 44

FIXING THE COLOR 46

The Rubedo, The Reddening 47

Shades of Red 48

The Alchemical Nest 50

Re-viewing 51

CHECKING THE LINES 53

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF DREAMS BREAKFAST AT NICK’S 59

Bran Muffin Blues 59

OPHIUCHUS 61

Strange Bait 61

A CASE HISTORY 63 What We Fish For 66

The Glimpse 66

ENTER THE FISHERMAN 68

Reading the Water 68

The Fisherman’s Lament 70

Dressing the Wound 72

Gone Fishing 73

DAEDALUS DELIVERS 76

Back in the Incubator 76

Serpentarius 77

CONSTELLATING THE NET: A QUANTUM FAIRYTALE SEA TIME 81

FISH TALK 83

Framing the Question 83

JE SUIS QUELQUE JE TROUVE 86

Navigating the Numen 88

Prehensile Precognition 90

DESCENDING ANGELS 91

Pauli’s Ladder 91

Bad Behavior 92

FRAMING THE QUESTION 94

From Wolfram to Wolfgang 94

Briefy Mapping the Terrain 95

TELLING TIME 97

The Invisible Number 97

Ending on a Synchronistic Note 98

WINDING THE WORLD CLOCK 99

Parting the Waves 99

CHANNEL FEVER 101

Raising the Dead 101

Getting to Know Abraxas 102

Embracing the Unimaginable: A Matter of Scale 104

RECONFIGURING THE NET: A CONVERSATION WITH THE CATCH 105

The Pre-conscious Step 105

DINNER WITH THE FISHER KING FOR WHOM THE BUOY TOLLS 111

LEAVING GLOUCESTER 112

IN FLIGHT 114

Good Directions 117

BE WELCOME HERE 118

Los Ultimos Rayos Del Sol 119

"The Fisherman Sent Me Here." 120

A Seat at the Banquet 122

Floundering in the Underworld 128

Reeling It In 130

DANCING IN THE END ZONE 131

SUMMONING THE WORLD SOUL THE WOUND AND THE WORLD SOUL 137

THE FLOATING MAN 138

UNDRESSING THE WOUND 139

SWORD AND SALVE 140

UBI SUNT 141

SUMMONING THE WORLD SOUL 142

REIMAGINING THE WOUND 143

THE SECRET AT THE CENTER OF STONES: THE “FISHER KING FUNCTION” Stone #1 145

Stone #2 146

The Goal 147

The Fisher King Function 148

NOTES

NOTE ONE: DISENTANGLING THE NETS 151

NOTE TWO: THE WORLD CLOCK 153

Wolfgang Pauli and the Fine-Structure Constant By Michael A. Sherbon 155

Pauli & Jung: The Meeting of Two Great Minds By David Lindorf 155

NOTE THREE: THE FLOATING MAN 156

Jack London & The Floating Man 156

NOTE FOUR: SWORD-SALVE 157

The Original Myth: Achilles and Telephus 157

Isseicreekphilosophy's Blog: Sympathetic Magic, the Weapon Salve and the Powder of Sympathy in the 17th Century 157

NOTE FIVE: JESUS AND THE MUSKIE 160

ILLUSTRATIONS 161

BIBLIOGRAPHY 163

COMMENTS ON OTHER BOOKS BY PAUL PINES 166

AUTHOR BIO 171

Editorial Reviews

“Paul Pines’ Trolling with the Fisher King is a work of genius—not a word I use lightly. He allies his rich personal, variegated history with immense learning, explores the archetypal rhythm of wounding and healing, and provides the reader a deeply moving reminder of the mystery which courses through history and through the lives of each of us. As both a commercial mariner of many voyages, and as a psycho-spiritual “night-sea” voyager, Pines brings us to places of discovery, places of wonder. In a time of distraction and trivia, he recalls the reader to those depths from which we have both come and are wither bound.”

-James Hollis, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and author of Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run our Lives and other books.

“Part cultural exploration, part dream analysis, part memoir, part prose poem, Trolling with the Fisher King is a brilliant exposition of symbolic structures that are both out there (culture, the world) and inside (the soul, the mind). A therapist as well as a poet and scholar, Pines has dedicated his gifts to delving the roots of creativity, his own personal journey as an artist, the psyche, and the mysterious images the human race has dreamed in its past, obscure and luminous, the shadows among which we dwell.”

-Douglas Glover, editor of Numéro Cinq and author of the award-winning novel, Elle.

From the Publisher