THE PASSIONATE MIND
     Sources of Destruction and Creativity

Paperback: 331 pages: ISBN: 0-7658-0632-0

Publisher: Transaction Publishers
     www.transactionpub.com
Buy on Amazon.com

This incorporates The Violent Imagination with a new preface and a foreword by the famous anthropologist, author and public intellectual, the late Ashley Montagu, who was also a friend and neighbor in Princeton. It contains about 30% new material.

From the jacket: Consciousness, says Robin Fox, is "out of context." Useful as an adaptation in the Stone Age, it brought humanity to the top of the food chain, but has now created a world it cannot control. The Passionate Mind explores this paradox not through academic demonstration, but through satiric dialogues, blank-verse ruminations, lyric, narrative and comic verse, historical drama, and Aesopian fables. This mix of genres and styles forces us out of our usual linear modes of thinking co confront a harsh thesis. Because of consciousness we cannot operate without ideas, but once in thrall to ideas – whether of love, power, religion or ideology – we cannot operate without destructiveness.

Part One: "Diary of a Superfluous Race" includes an account of a conference of battery hens debating their own fate, a poem on "What the Hunter Saw" about the first contact of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, a Kafkaesque interrogation, and the story of evolution in verse.

Part Two: "The Trial of George Washington: Documents in the Case" is a mini-drama in which Washington is captured and put on trial for treason in London, with Sir Benedict Arnold for the prosecution and Jefferson and Adams for the defense. A mix of real and fictional characters debate the rationale for revolution; the ending will surprise you.

Part Three: "Children of the Revolution" starts with Humbert Humbert reflecting on Lolita/America, and a series of poems on a murder in Boston, the killings at Kent State, some encounters with liberated women, and a lament for an Indian girl.

Part Four: "Toward a More Perfect Dissolution" starts with an essay on what to do about Sweden, some sonnets, and the key essay of the book "Design Failure" about the basic fault in human nature. A long disquisition in blank verse ruminates on the experience of the bullfight, and a new Psalm (151) contemplates our collective fate.

Part Five: "Daughters of Earth/Sons of Heaven" includes "New Songs of Innocence and Experience", a rewriting of Plato's allegory of the cave, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" – where the Hedgehog reveals the ONE BIG THING he knows, and excurions to the Alps of the Romantic poets, and to New Jersey for earthworms, vultures, crows and trees.

Part Six: "The Jesus Tapes: We are not Alone" Sees Jesus in a monologue as an alien being inhabiting a human body as part of an experiment to raise mankind, and being thoroughly disillusioned, except perhaps by Pilate and Judas…

Part Seven: "Epilogue: Fire of Sense/Smoke of Thought" ends with a poem in the Anglo-Saxon manner "The Dream Man" recapitulating the course of evolution, up to the human dreamer carrying with him the burden of all the previous stages.

I sent the original to Dame Iris Murdoch, one of my favorite novelists, whom I had met in Oxford some years before. This was her reply:

"Thank you for sending me your free, wild book. I find it very interesting (and I like your choice of remark from my novel). [see page 169 "Design Failure"] Your book is full of dark thoughts, but it is lyrical too, wherein, in a way, you contradict yourself. If people write poems it's certainly not as bad as all that. Schopenhauer, said to be a pessimist, continually makes jokes. However, you know about such things and that's partly what your so lively book is about! Thanks for your beautiful, strange work. With all very best wishes to you, Iris Murdoch."

Reviews and Comments:

"A book bursting with wit, courage, panache, brilliance and defiant originality. The verse is as good as anything in the journals and a hundred times smarter." Frederick Turner, Founders Professor of the Humanities, University of Texas at Dallas, author of Genesis; The New World; The Culture of Hope; Natural Classicism; Tempest, Flute and Oz, etc.

" The work recalls Auden at his best, and for me that's praise of the highest order." John Mella, editor of Light: The Quarterly of Light Verse.

"If ever there was a book to show that there is more than one way to "say" anthropology, this is it. The essays are witty, sarcastic, large minded, philosophically informed, inventive. The poems bristle in the right places and ultimately bite at the heart. By eloquently mixing the forms and levels of discourse, Fox has forced a confrontation with the usual linear modes of text construction." Ivan Brady (SUNY) in American Anthropologist.

"I certainly recognized the sophisticated intelligence, imaginativeness and essential concern… rational statement but with brio: accomplished manipulation of traditional verse forms: realistic reports of contemporary life, but with a symbolic or archetypal dimension: a pervading ebullience." David Perkins, John P. Marquand Professor of English, Harvard University, author of A History of Modern Poetry.

"A quite extraordinary piece of work. I was astonished by the range of genres and styles, and by the masterly use of them. The verse is unusually accomplished and much of it quite moving. The dialogue in "The Trial of George Washington" is wonderful – crisp and formal, faintly archaic, witty and taught. Fox loves words and hovers over them like Nabokov over a butterfly (or over a word for that matter.) It is lovely to find that in a man of science. Robert Story, Professor of English, Temple University, author of Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask, etc.

Ashley Montagu, in the Foreward:

"Many writers before have attempted a similar anatomy (or is "autopsy" the better word?), but no one, to my knowledge, has done so in as diverting and original style as has Fox. His book is structurally unique in my experience, combining as it does, prose, poetry, meditative musings, raucous diatribes, snippets of observed reality, overheard conversations, dramatic scenarios, delightfully unpunctuated blank-verse ruminations, and much weathered wisdom, to offer a well rehearsed accounting of the present state of that tragic figure so prematurely, oafishly, and arrogantly self-described as Homo sapiens, who in his present sorry state deserves no better appellation than Homo sap"

(The late) Richard Moore. Poet and critic, author of The Mouse Whole, The Rule that Liberates, etc.

“Awe overcomes me. The Passionate Mind has taken me over completely: its vastness, its depth, the variety and power of its voices: learned voices, pub voices, voices from Anglo-Saxon times, from every manner and tradition in English versification. It suddenly occurred to me the other day what it was like. It was like – no, nothing else will do - The Canterbury Tales: a whole society gathered together and displaying itself.”

Riverrun Down

(Pastel)

The final stanza of the final poem, "The Dream Man" (as revised for The Tribal Imagination):

     But in secret silence noting naked nightmares
     senses of serpent drive dreary dreamworld
     fears of forest fur-thing create archaic action
     pride of pack-thing powering mutinous motivations
     symbols slaves to senses fixing freedom firmly
     I am the dream-man knowing nothing novel
     I am the dream-man natal nightmare neutered
     I am the dream-man buried beneath birthright
     I am the dream-man Do not disturb me