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.