Well, Christmas and New Years have come and gone and I didn’t have my usual two-fingers of Buffalo Trace. I did spend time with the beloved first-wife engaged in theological problems and recounting Christmases past with the house strewn with desecrated wrapping paper and joyous daughters who have, alas, grown up and journeyed west with our grandbabies. The conversation inevitably took a melancholy turn and the wife dropped the matter knowing, I think, that her sentimental husband would not be able to abide too much of that.
I even had a moment remembering olde Buck, that GREAT DOG, fearless defender of the homestead, who was particularly fond of rolling in cowpies and abhorred being indoors. Buck of course was named after Jack London’s dog though my Buck was a far superior animal. I mention Buck in connection with another dog, a Golden Retriever named Trixie, who belonged to Dean Koontz the novelist whose selcouth stories habitually top the NYT Best-seller list. I’ve been reviewing Koontz’s work for several years and when Trixie died last year he sent me (and many others) a ten-page account of that sad incident.
Koontz is not only a dog lover, considerate gentleman, and talented storyteller he is an erudite thinker who loads his novels with multiple and highly differentiated interpretations of the metaxical experience where the tension “between the poles of time and eternity’ reveal the beauty of the ‘flowing presence of eternal Being.”
In reading his books I’ve found that he has the ability to create this tensional (movement) experience where the flow of the readers’ mind latches onto the symbols he creates, allowing the reader, in some mystical fashion, to be constituted within the novel. This brings the reader into a unique literary experience where he is able to capture the insights that Koontz has hidden along the path and where in analyzing the story, begins to insert his own symbols to a point where they develop into a harmonious concinnity of plot, action, character development and denouement. In essence the reader becomes a part of the novel as experienced; the logos irrupts momentarily into reality where to some degree the reader’s potential is actualized in the absolute present.
Like the true philosopher, as opposed to the philodoxer, Koontz confines his work within the metaleptic reality whereby his novels emerge as a contemporary dialectics with the various protagonists engaged in rescuing the truth of reality from either the lie or the distortion. Here, if Koontz became arrogant in his knowledge or allowed the metaxical experience to become opaque or sought a “cognitive mastery” over the knowledge of the Ground he would derail into eristical error. So far, Koontz has avoided that misfortune!
My review of his latest book, Your Heart Belongs to Me, is here:
http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id-4628&cn=140
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