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Going full-tilt with the moon references, this instance is the name Constance associated with the letter M since childhood and now as she is slipping into an early second one, only at 42 and a half years old! Her husband Alfred is a piece of work: distracted by the tidbits of news, including the death of Marilyn Monroe, yet frustrated the his wife obsesses over the monthly world sent courtesy of her brother's behest.

One, and perhaps the only, play to contain some autobiographical reference, Stoppard muses on the rosy-coloured glasses a bunch of old boys wear as the reminisce on the snow-filled days of yesteryear at boarding school. A few of them have got the right story, or unlike Jenkins, the right school in mind. Yet with few sound cues, the scenes shuttles between past and present, very much the precursor to Arcadia.

While the conversation between the all-encompassing minds never fails to be fascinating, the grab-bag of textual evidence included in the appendices is less convincing. Pauli becomes kind of a crank, scolding the C. G. Jung Institute (not Jung) for not being scientifically rigorous enough, as if the whole world needed dream analysis. What might a handwriting analysis on the excerpts from each of their letters reveal?

The first half of Pauli's appendices contain letters, lectures and an amazing unpublished essay that connects "aion" and "chronos" to the Pythagorean transmigration of the soul - Sir Topas would be impressed, along with the character's real-life counterpart Johannes Kepler. Even parts of correspondence where doubt is cast over Jung's claims, as in Max Knoll regarding UFOs, there is still much respect for his process.

The latter letters in the collection go all out, mostly with Pauli diving deep into his dream analysis, writing rhapsodically long letters that border on essays, while an ailing Jung keeps fanning the alchemical flame by writing to ask Pauli his opinion on esoteric matters. One wonders how each of their peers would have reacted to the unconventional correspondence which Aniela maintains up to Pauli's bittersweet end.

A tribute to the playwright politician Václav Havel, who appears briefly as Pavel Hollar I believe, among the philosophy professors and football players more familiar to Stoppard's yob-less England (has he ever written a play about the common man? Maybe Enter a Free Man). Some intriguing discussion about the price paid to exercise one's human rights as well as a satire of lecturers not meaning what they say.

The letters increase in size and complexity as Pauli and Jung exchange philosophical and theological riddles for their respective fields, each of their responses are cordially critical of what the other has written. Much of it collaboration on Synchronicity, Aion and Answer to Job. Pauli has commentary directed at Emma and Aniela's letters, despite his seeming adversion to "feminine" ideas.

The sheer simplicity and affective absurdism of this early televised play is Stoppard at his best: the curious John Brown checks into a private hospital with a bag full of money and nothing medically wrong. Asides from the restful reasons for not wanting to be disturbed, he doesn't give much for the hospital staff to go on, only getting close enough to a pretty nurse Maggie to reveal a less peaceful time in his past.

Back on point with his favourite topic: clever, clueless men and uncertainty over wives' infidelities, Mrs and Mr Bone take up familiar positions in separate bedrooms. He is examining his life starting at Ancient Babylon up to 3rd century Greece (BCE) while she experiences the greatest kind of paradigm shift in morals.

With the number of "P" letters in this next section, it seems like the conversation was one-sided with hardly any response from Jung, yet of course the two had resumed their face-to-face sessions after the Second World War. During this long meantime (roughly 23 years), much of their collaboration had been published, with the timely Synchronicity causing a stir both in Pauli's dream world and their causality.

With the improbable title alluded to in the opening sequence, this television play had the potential to be a science-y tour de force like Arcadia or Hapgood. Other than some squabbling over facts and represented fiction courtesy of the Narrator and Witness, the script was a rather procedural approach to Poland's struggle to westernize while upholding Soviet ideal of a communism with snappy TV edits.

Amazed by how quickly the letters go from formal "will be unable to meet..." to delving into dream and the collective unconscious. Also self in spacetime, projected everywhere at once! And much like the elusive centre of the atom, unknown and unconscious, Jung's letter outlining his Traumsymbole des Individuationprozesses project is missing, perhaps its fate was ending up in some wastepaper bin at Princeton!

As alchemical as it may sound, a conjunction of minds does not aptly describe the relationship Pauli and Jung formed during the latter years of their lives. Far from a sun/moon dualism, the physicist and psychologist had more in common than their disciplines would dictate. The editors and translators point to the synchronicity of their ideas, illuminated throughout their correspondence, shaping our image of the mind.

Dispensing theories of the Big Bang and the eventual extinguishing of light and life in the universe (caused by dark energy, probably created as a residue of consciousness that humans trail through spacetime like slugs), Falk goes beyond physics to the hard problem of reality. Interesting that he chooses Caesar's assassination as a test of time's flow, as if his later book on Shakespeare's science shows the meta-now.

A gracious Guppy extends his circle of friends more feckless than he is, and for some reason we get introduced to a family of Smallweeds, Mr George Allegory? and someone else named Bucket. Never thought I would say this about a Dickens novel, or any book, but will someone please hurry up and spontaneously combust or something?! The randomness of the bleak plot is even making Mr. Snagsby start to question his reality.

A fitting epilogue for his 500 plus inquiry into alchemy discusses (briefly) the teleological end-point for hermetic study was Goethe's Faust, a play about a man who read too much at the cost of his soul. Experience, Jung asserts, is worth its weight in gold as opposed to the mass of papers and books he consulted in the process of writing his own, one of a few that explicate upon the unconscious and unknown.

Albert's time (or Einsteinian spacetime) is a good way to start the latter half of this book, noting how relativity and quantum mechanics changed everything we seemed to know about how the universe works. Atoms and uncertainty. Yet by the ninth hour (aka chapter), Falk finds fault with biblical scholars, geologists and evolutionists who cannot figure out the universe's age yet readily trusts physicists' 13.7 billion.

Fascinating way to sum up Jung's understanding of alchemy as a key to the psyche, examining the many symbols depicted by ancient and medieval scholars. The inquiry in the prima materia brings forth the thousand-faced hero that Joseph Campbell will make much of later, while the connections between Christ and the lapis, or unicorns as untamed spirits of nature (often paired with the lion) show many mysteries left open.

So strange to re-read the same play I had studied over a year ago and to find so many surprises in it: the central role of Antonio that I overlooked the first time around, the banishing of the Duchess and her family as a dumbshow while Churchmen sing, Bosola's shifting attitude to murder and its rewards. All of these threads must have been in the play when I first read it yet became intricately woven into a tapestry.

Opening up the door to the many ways of perceiving time that contradict the Western C&CT (clock & calendar time) is a good way to start going beyond what is known from historical academic knowledge. I will have to find out more about Australian Indigenous dreamtime! Once through that door the mechanics of memory come under scrutiny, perhaps the only evidence that philosophers and relationists would accept about time.

The very human activity of measuring time spans the hundred or so millennia we've been around, years in caves and megaliths, months and weeks in celestial bodies and scripture, hours and minutes in longitude and quartz crystals. Even with the advent of atomic time, down to the picosecond, there is still the mystery of whether our position in the universe or machines based on this position is our true measure of time.

Not off to a bad start, a satirical city comedy that takes aim at contemporary playwrights like Fletcher, Shakespeare and perhaps even Webster (a "witty young master... o' the Inns o' Court" from the Induction). The dizzying array of folks represented on stage at the Fair is amusing, up until Jonson's caricature of an Irish pimp named Whit and the dialogue devolves from "turd i' your teeth" to "kiss her o' the arse."

"And we played the first thing that came to our heads,/Just so happened to be..." (Tenacious D's "Tribute") seems to have accurately portrayed Artaud's method despite Singleton insistence that the alchemy was more illusionary, theoretical at best. Some notable theatre-makers to pick up the torch are SITI/Toga founders Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki as well as RSC innovator and Empty Space author Peter Brook.

Another take on the post-Surrealist Artaud and his new wave for theatre, more of a condensed summary of his groundbreaking Le théâtre et son double. It wasn't until the late 1960's that others like Peter Brook popularized the radical move away from literature. Singleton gives Artaud his due in full French quotations and reveals the patchwork nature of each chapter, ie. le Théâtre alchimique in 1932.

As the new-ish research method comes together, it becomes evident how Aristophanes, Shakespeare and a host of other playwrights would have been researching their contemporaries to create characters, dialogue and drama. Weighty issues like injustice or intolerance have always been a part of human existence, yet it takes a sensitive artist to delve into self and world for someone in the audience to think "hey, me too!"

One of the lines from Johnny Saldaña's textbook on ethnotheatre stands out as I work my way through the newer method that owes much of its existence to him: one of the last chapters in Ethnotheatre praises the ordinary and mundane. It is enough of a challenge to make research findings palatable to audiences outside the field of study, yet the authors here dive into the finer details while staying on message.

Scott gathers his fourth-dimensional thoughts in an epilogue that is, like much of the preceding book, neither here nor there but a blend of now and then, Polar icecaps continue to break apart but we are more concerned with status updates it seems (written with the bitter irony of me posting this message about my reading progress). In all the 4D fairy fire, he traces out the humdrum life pre-digital as way past then.

The last-mentioned great Gnostic is the scientist-philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, known previously as Newton's public enemy no. 1 as well as inspiring Voltaire's caricature Dr. Pangloss. What neither of these detractors could see was how far ahead Leibniz's monadology was to quantum mechanical problems still being worked out. Not sure if I'll get around to understanding the Kabbalah but I am relieved that Leibniz did.

Richard is fretfully becoming a fritterer, leading Ada on with one career choice after another, all the while imagining a windfall from his uncle's court case, not yet resolved and perhaps never in their lifetime. Esther, on the other hand, inches ever so closer to a better understanding of who she is, based upon cryptic clues in Lady Dedlock's presence. Unfortunately, jilted Mr. Guppy may get the goods on her first.

Coming from an entirely different time and place from Audre Lorde (about 45 years before her) Artaud seems to be living through "master's tools will never dismantle" the masterpieces of theatre and literature. He struggles to share how awe-inspiring theatre could be, a totally immersive, virtual, experience based on the Oriental examples. The letters after his Cruelty manifesto show how comrades still need old tools.