Exactly. The other thought experiment I was thinking of is about a spaceship full of men. After millions of years (where I guess they clone themselves), they've lost any memory at all of female-ness. They don't even have female plug adapters. The question being: would they know that they're male?

As you hinted, their concept for what they are would stop at human. They don't know that they're male because they don't have anything to compare that to. — frank

ah. Maybe, but - what that dick for then? whys it get hard? whats the weird white fluid all about?

So we can see that being able to conceive of maleness isn't just a matter of being exposed to the positive qualities we think of as maleness. Conceiving of maleness is a matter of holding it up against a background of its negation. Conceiving of anything is a matter of doing something with an opposition[

yeah definitely. That's why in almost every action movie there's either a cowardly sidekick, or the villain himself has some cowardly flaw, which fuels - and explains - his villainy. But I suppose thats an intra-male dramatization of masculinity.

I agree, in general with what you're saying.

Yes...you've reached the foothills ...keep going ! — fresco

Explorer's hubris has led me the mistake the lower ascent for the summit. I guess I need a sherpa who can see the full spectrum. What's the next foothold?

Another question: if everything was green would they even perceive it the way we perceive green? isn't perception as contrast-centric as language? At some point, the very idea of everything being green falls apart, even as an an imaginative hypothetical, and we have to resort to saying they can only perceive this subsection of light, and find a material basis for what green means. One could, as un hinted at, consider more color-perceptive species than us for whom everything we consider as 'the spectrum of color' is just (the analogical equivalent of) 'green.'

theyd have a word for green but it would mean what we mean by 'color'

I agree - 9/11 wouldn't happen if the perpetrators weren't 'in it' enough to grasp why the twin towers were a symbolic target. Or, another lens, all the prophetic ranting against Israel that the OT has transmitted us comes from Israelites. 'the meaning is that there is no meaning' seems to me to really be saying : the meaning is that the current system of meaning is inadequate (specifically here: the system of meaning can't help me make sense of what is happening to me.) Yeah, I think we agree, it is an act of revenge. (I think philosophy channels similar energies less destructively. We only question a hammer when it breaks, we only question an economy of meaning for similar reasons. I sometimes think about what would have come of me if, when my bubble burst, I didn't have the capacity to slowly put stuff back together novelly in a meaning-arid space.)

@unenlightened Making sense of the OP, in terms of hero worship - America as the place where people jostle for their 15 minutes of fame. Germane or not?

I would like to also say that the berserker phenomenon is most consonant with a culture that is not just military-centric (as the US is) but also warrior-in-action-centric ( as the US hasn't been, at least since My Lai, and maybe never was. We support the troops, but we support them for, e.g., sacrificing their lives in order to raise a flag - Iwo Jima, sacrifice for an ideal. The vikings came up with Valhalla - violence here is not only a means but an end in itself.)

Which is to say the berserker phenomenon must necessarily play a different role, in the land of Self-realization. The aurora shooter, i think, or one of them said : the message is there is no message. This alone makes in terrorism in a precise sense : its a challenge to the official, avowed, economy of meaning. That this challenge dovetails with the actual american practice of shining a temporary spotlight is interesting, and is a turn of the screw that frustrates my compulsion to convert horror into insight.

It's worth drawing a firm distinction between appropriacy and utility here. One does not necessitate the other. Feeling a mixture of anger and indignation at your child being slapped in the face by a stranger is an appropriate reaction regardless of utility. Conversely, not feeling much and being concerned only with utility could be considered inappropriate. Same with mass shootings. It's not about being reasonable, it's about being human. (But it's not very on-topic so I'll leave it at that). — Baden

As the kids say, this.

I think it reveals that our society is unable to understand what is important. 120 people. It makes me sick when TV and other media broadcast hysterical reports full of outrage and fake tears. It's such bologna. The worst thing is that the kind of action that really can address violence does not come from attitudes of horror and outrage.

For what it's worth, the murder rate in the US is half of what it was in 1980. 650,000 die of heart disease annually. Cancer 600,000. Let's put our energy there. — T Clark

There is a lot of energy being put there though. The reality of the collective pain of those who have lost loved one to cancer isnt lessened by the attention given to mass shootings. I could ask : did something in your own life upset you this month? Even when hundreds of thousands are dying of cancer? Shouldn't you ignore that thing that upset you, then, and focus on helping the cancer cause? But this isn't a healthy way to approach things.

Un's post - and mine for that matter - don't strike me as outrage, much less the outrage of a rube grifted by yellow journalists.

One should think the reason, regardless of demographics, behind the murder is frustration. I'd think that when the decision to murder is reached, no other options seem viable. Powerlessness. Asserting control. — Hanover

Yeah, definitely, terrorism in general, bracket race, it's clear it's frustration. I suppose the question is how to determine what means we leave at the disposal of the frustrated. We do know that frustration will continue. And so mass shootings will continue. What's wanted is a robust explanation of how leaving the means at their disposable is worth it because [x]. this will happen with some regularity, yes, but its a tragic necessity, bc [x].

I may not have much to add here, but I'll try anyway. I'd echo @Bitter Crankthat surveys of philosophy are a legit place to start. I started, at 17, with From Socrates to Sartre which is probably as 'popular' a philosophy book as exists, but it gave me a minimal framework to forge ahead. I also had the intensity, the need to know, and palpitations in the face of all the stuff you have to read, for it to be real, authentic truth.

But the best place to start is with what has left you dissatisfied. If you're looking for the truth you've already realized that certain ways of looking at the world don't satisfy. It helps sometimes, imo, to look at the failures of explanation and try to figure out why they failed. What were you asking that was answered poorly, and why was that a bad answer? It's a good starting point because you already have it.

You mentioned epistemology. What draws you to that in in particular?

But there's still a lot of mass shootings in the US and there's a qualitative difference between a mass shooting and other murders. Maybe there's a relation between the fact of 17000(!) hardly visible murders (invisible to the nation as a whole) and irruptions of very visible ones. Imagine the hardening of self it takes to do a premeditated murder; then the surrender of self to 'passion' it takes to kill in hot blood; then, finally, the dissociation inherent in perpetrating a mass killing.

I mean even 9/11 pales in the face of 17000, but its still

What is the perspective thats lacking? What does that perspective reveal?

I've barely read him, but I know Rene Girard said something to the effect that the physiological state of being angry is something that takes hold of a person, demanding discharge, and the body doesn't consider whether the victim of that discharge is the original offender or not - it simply believes it. In any society, Girard says, there is a gradual build up of anger-inducing wrongs (or perceived wrongs) which becomes more and more liable to erupt in carnage (e.g. neverending cycles of retaliation or genocide) So, sacrifice and scapegoats: communal discharge leading to a subsequent regluing.

(Girards a christian because what is Jesus but an eternal scapegoat who not only suffers your misplaced rage but also, miracle & mystery, forgives you for raging at all.)


I wonder if the beserker phenomenon (which seems very apt, considering the absence and exhaustion of, say, the aurora shooter at his hearing) is an extreme end of a spectrum of this kind of stored anger which has to distort reality to find release.

I have an idea (which may not be borne out by the facts) that young white male shooters might tend to members of sections of society that represent themselves to themselves as beyond violence, obviating the need for any communal discharge, while actually internally discharging that anger in various forms (toxic family dynamics, bullying, the winner/loser dynamic of american society etc.) In past societies, the scapegoat was killed, the violence is flushed down the tube that goes from this life to the next. But if you pretend there's no scapegoating at all, you don't even recognize that its happening, and the scapegoat is left dazed to make sense of an anger and violence that doesn't officially exist.


I once heard an npr interview with a psychologist considering the Newtown shooter. He offered a theory, based on a hodgepodge of details of the shooters life, that the shooter purposely chose the worst possible thing he could do, in order to make sense of the crushing feeling he had of being evil. Its as though the process happened backwards. The disavowed scapegoat makes himself avowed, by committing the crime he distortedly already feels the retribution of. (Adorno (or one of the frankfurt guys) made a similar observation, that some criminals seem to commit crimes to give some tangible, finite explanation to an intangible, infinite guilt. The guilt precedes the crime. As a kid might act out to give concrete object to Dads angry sulk, that kid not being able to comprehend the idea of nursing a wound brought home from work.)

None of which is meant as an absolution for horrible crimes, the violence of which exceeds , by orders of magnitude, any harm the perpetrator suffered previously. One is responsible for one's actions no matter what one may have suffered in the past.

Yet we know there will always be people who fail to live up to that responsibility and so, if any of that is right, the hard question is: what to do, given that it's no longer an option to throw virgins in volcanos?

What would such a forgetting entail? The jungle will still grow verdant on the volcanic soils, it will not care where they came from, only how they are there right now. But the prospect of an eruption is too far in the future and in the past to imagine or remember it. Less poetically, the soil formation process and the jungle following it over space will not care about the eruption itself, it will care about how its effects impregnate the present with its potential; where the nutrients and plants are, we shall cast our our net and grow. — fdrake

I like the story a lot. Two other things I've read recently come to mind (I guess you could say in the sense of a deleuzian series of resonance)

A poem by Rilke

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

As to the second, I don't know if this will be in any way intelligible outside the broader context of the book, but I'm reading Nietzsche & the Vicious Circle by Pierre Klossowki, a study of Nietzsche which tries to take the eternal return seriously (very very similar to Deleuze; the book is dedicated to him. Also, interestingly, Klossowski was an acquaintance of Rilke. his Mother was Rilke's final lover.)

At the moment the Eternal Return is revealed to me, I cease to be myself hic et nunc and am susceptible to becoming innumerable others, knowing that I shall forget this revelation once I am outside the memory of myself; this forgetting forms the object of my present willing; for such a forgetting would
amount to a memory outside my own limits: and my present consciousness will be established only in the forgetting of my other possible identities.


What is this memory? It is the necessary circular movement to which I abandon myself, fleeing myself from myself. If I now admit to this willing - and, by willing it necessarily, I will have re-willed it - I will simply have made my consciousness conform to this circular movement: Were I to identify myself with the Circle, I would never emerge from this representation as myself; in fact, already I am no longer in the moment when the abrupt revelation of the Eternal Return reached me; for this revelation to have a meaning, I would have to lose consciousness of myself, and the circular movement of the return would have to be merged with my unconscious, until the movement brings me back to the moment when the necessity of passing through the entire series of my possibilities was revealed to me. All that remains, then, is for me to re-will myself, no longer as the outcome of these prior possibilities, no longer as one realization among thousands, but as a fortuitous moment whose very fortuity implies the necessity of the integral return of the whole series. But to re-will oneself as a fortuitous moment.

His big thing is that, for Nietzsche, the eternal return was actually a sudden revelation he had, something he talked about with friends, but tried to cover over in his work by translating into concepts.

The above is I think trying to understand what 'amor fati' actually means. It's often taken as something 'live your best life, and as a heuristic for doing that, imagine youll have to live that life over and over forever.'

I think klossowki is saying something similar to what you're saying toward the end of the story - that it's really willing a dispersion of self into a bigger process, where your identity will be lost (until it is worked into another identity). The eternal return is something more like affirming this eventual dispersion. There's a lot more too it tho, and I'm still wrapping my brain around it. But the dynamic between forgetting and anamanesis is a huge part if it. ) I think - and this is where it gets quasi-mystical - part of what he's saying is something I've found echoed in a lot of diverse works ( there's a work of AP called 'surviving death' and also in various religious traditions: You survive the destruction if you lose the one thing you're overly concerned to save. The self is traded for an attunement which is beyond the self. Which is why a poem like 'sailing to byzantium' is a grand inversion by someone (Yeats) who should know better - but then consider the difference betweens yeats falcon/gyre in 'the second coming' and Rilke's in the poem above , and it makes sense. Yeats is scared while Rilke has a kind of resolute abandon to the circle *he* may not complete.

(this post brought to you by a carefully watched hypomania)

I have a long-standing grudge against CBT because I think it plum doesn't work. I've had a few hospitalizations and have come to the conclusion that CBT has spread thru the mental health landscape like wildfire because its (simple, not too helpful) ideas are easy to transmit and so require little training, while also being easily chunkable into sessions which makes insurance codes easier and streamlines the billing process. I think there are pockets of insight but its mostly ineffective. Ineffective, but easy.

That said, I've also had little luck with mood stabilizers but I know many people who have deeply benefitted. It seems like mental health treatment ought to be an art (with herbs and prayers and guidance and etc. tailored to the individual case) but is being progressively turned into a flowchart.

Reminds me of a Tibetan thing:

May I be free of fear
May I be free of anger
May I be free of craving and aversion.
May I be free of suffering and the root of suffering.

May you be free of fear
May you be free of anger
May you be free of craving and aversion.
May you be free of suffering and the root of suffering.

In the real, there is no distinction between me and you, so the two paragraphs sort of say the same thing. Fear is the emotion of the victim and anger is the emotion of the sinner. Together they make up a type or "general problem" that generates identities small to huge.

I think of it as briefly peeking out of my own identity and I'm nameless in a cocoon in the real.

Kind of like turning down the volume on Hal. — frank

I went to the park today (a particular park high up on a hill in Portland, where you can pick a spot to post up and look out over South Portland.) I like this park because my usual feeling of disconnection feels ok there, I think similar to the peeking out you described. I still have a weak grasp on my 'self', but I feel the pressure of needing a self less. It helps that the park is very pretty and often empty. I was there for like five hours, just sitting, sometimes reading, sometimes listening to podcasts. It was really nice, and I even got a tan.

I did want to ask : why do you say that anger is the emotion of the sinner? I struggle badly with irritability, which I guess is the expression of anger restrained (like in cartoons where someone plugs a dam with their finger and water breaks out somewhere else.) Anger is something I'm trying continually these days to understand. I was curious about what you meant by that since you said it with what struck me as an earned declarative assurance.

Let's just say that there is that possibility, and that it is not something willed or performed or achieved, but a visitation of grace, as you say, or if that is difficult, a natural phenomenon like the coalescing of drops of water, or the seeing of one scene with two eyes. Let's say there is no 'how' any more than there is an action to relaxation. One can prepare a little by doing whatever is necessary, and dropping whatever is not... make some space, get some rest, sow a little kindness...

Or if the poet insists on science, http://ift-malta.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-cybernetics-of-self-A-theory-of-alcoholism.pdf — unenlightened

The frame of preparation is good. It seems to complement (no pun intended) the Bateson piece. I found myself relating very well to the cycles he describes - not just with alcohol, any number of things.


The decision to stop the cycle ends up being a key part of the cycle. It seems like each part of the cycle is experienced by a different 'I' - all these 'I's are superficially similar (they'd scan as the same person if subjected to a demographic/whats your favorite food/movie/etc quiz) but with radically different implicit values and beliefs about what is the best thing to do. The implicit bubbles under the sheen of regular talk - a good diagnostician might be able to spot early signs - until a phase change happens and the implicit become explicit in some action which climaxes and denouements into the beginning of the next stage.

But it's hard to be cognizant of that fact and keep track of this continual recurrence if you're always one of those 'I's because each I will try to rewrite the (fragmented) whole in its own terms. So even if you catch on to what's happening, you've still got a room of subselves tracking the same events yet deriving from them wildly different policy proposals. (I wonder if the power of AA springs in part from having a group of people whose cycles are out of sync and so, as a whole, naturally balances those who participate in it.)

Much of my ambivalence toward the OP springs from a mistrust that its thrust could be taken as the Noble Image the implicit relapse-ready I cloaks itself with. Even if its right, I know myself well enough to know I can't be sure what shadowparts of me are counseling me to heed to an eloquent paean to a certain way of being in order to satisfy their own ulterior motives (themselves ulterior motives of the cycle.)

I think any expression of values carries with it the potential for two contradictory ways of illustrating it, each equally powerful. The libertine is both Voltaire or a weak yellow-toothed lecher. And either frame can be as imaginatively powerful and persuasively forceful as you like. So too with the most wonderful life.

But still there's something about the post of yours I've quoted above which seems different than that.
As Bateson says the cycle will continue until a deeper nonwilled change happens. The idea of preparation seems to both admit the powerlesness of oneself to stop a cycle by force, but leaves room for a different kind of thing, an attentiveness maybe while it goes on and on, to maybe change things in little ways just enough to leave a little space for something outside to come through?

Maybe HAL and Dave are aspects of consciousness. The fuel of consciousness is problems: unanswered questions for the mind, unredeemed sins for emotion, wounds for flesh.

Dave relies on HAL to bring these problems to his attention. It seems like Dave is in charge. He thinks is. But HAL can move Dave like a puppet.

But if HAL is taken off line, doesn't Dave become blind and deaf? — frank

I think of Hal as being programmatic. He has a certain cybernetic quality that, yes, seeks certain problems, certain sins, but only insofar as they are particular cases of general problems, using those problems in such a way that he replicates himself. I think Hal is in charge only as long as Dave identifies with his problems. Ive been thinkinh lately something that, transposed into this metaphor, would be: Dave does have free will, but not to choose something different. It's the free will to choose not to listen to Hal. Which leaves him deaf and blind for a moment, but only until the roar of hal quiets and he actually realizes what he called seeing and hearing were, as you said, puppet strings. There's another hearing and seeing I think

That stuff is an unconscious attempt to resolve a problem. But it also generates persona, so it's like the work of a doctor: if she was successful in ending all disease, she would simultaneously destroy her own identity as a doctor. — frank

Yea exactly

I've probably mentioned this before on here, but I've thought of this for a long time as both Hal in 2001 + the hero trying to shut him down. The greatest threat to hal is his not being in control of threat-handling. Once the threat is gone, he's the threat and the threat to him becomes the people he was supposed to protect but can no longer , and so threaten him.

[so a really smart hal would make the hero identify with him....something something about how Lacan's real seems a lot like outer space around a spaceship w/ life support.]

But that of course is too tidy so another quote, this time lyrics.

'What’s redacted will repeat,
and you cannot learn that you burn when you touch the heat,
so we touch the heat,
and we cut facsimiles of love and death
(just separate holes in sheets
where you cannot breathe, and you cannot see).

And I cannot now, for the life of me, believe our talk—'

All of which is a shaggy dog to: a wonderful life a as a gift of faith versus a fruit of decision. I can't imagine how you can see the fragments as they are (as one is) - as fragmented, as the wave, not as one fragment observing - without some visitation of grace. Only a fragment can decide! And in deciding, will always redact. And so repeat.

So in the meantime (yea rilke but no one has yet said it better):


Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Orders?

And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence.

For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us.

Every Angel is terror.


And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry
of a darkened sobbing.

Ah, who then can
we make use of?

Not Angels: not men,
and the resourceful creatures see clearly
that we are not really at home
in the interpreted world.

Perhaps there remains
some tree on a slope, that we can see
again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street,
and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit
that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed.

Do you know if he ever wrote or spoke about being gay? — unenlightened

From another poem in the same collection (self-portrait in a convex mirror)


"Once I let a guy blow me.
I kind of backed away from the experience.
Now years later, I think of it
Without emotion. There has been no desire to repeat,
No hang-ups either. Probably if the circumstances were right
It could happen again, but I don’t know,
I just have other things to think about"

There is the moment, and the trauma one brings to it; at each moment there is the possibility of seeing the fragmentation, and seeing it, not from another fragment as observer, but fragmentation seeing itself - a whole seeing.

Well i am sitting here on my porch trying to think of what to say to that. I just saw Quentin Tarantino's new movie with a friend and his friend. Its a movie brimming with Identity (cool music, violence, confident, seamless dialogue) and I walked back feeling more sure of myself and my presence, and out here with my cigarette and beer and coming home to everyone else asleep, it feels like a movie, which feels like being watched over and approved.

I also know this is a temporary feeling, since I've had the experience a few times. We all agreed the movie wasn't really good -- except my friend's friend, who had been the one to suggest we see it, seemed to be unsure about that. He and my friend were the first to say it wasn't good, or at least as good as it was supposed to be. But he - my friend's friend - had told us, over margaritas at the mexican restaurant we went to beforehand, that this was his first night out in months (married, two kids.) He convinced me to buy a ticket, even tho he knows me and my friend have a track-record (thats become a running joke) of getting bored and walking out of movies halfway through.

Earlier today I bought a book while at work about how to do self-therapy using the " internal family system"model.

During the movie I kept finding myself trying to theorize the movie and it took effort to let the thoughts fizzle out instead of pursuing them to some synoptic sum-up of What Is Really Happening In This Movie, What this Movie is Really Doing.

I have weird hives on my arms lately I've been scratching and halfway through the movie I went to the bathroom and took a piss and looked at my forearms, and got fascinated with the shape of the hives and was looking at them as I walked out, and a pretty teenager was on a bench outside and looked at me and I felt vile and strange. I had also just been looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and trying to see myself as my friend's friend saw me.

At the mexican restaurant, with my friend, before my friend's friend showed up, I was trying to speak directly, and I was trying to do that by resisting impulses to make jokes in the emotional beats I always makes jokes during. It seemed to actually be working, which felt miraculous, and I resented the friend's impending arrival and the movie.

Last night a girl who I've been hanging out with casually for a year, and who, in the past few weeks, I've begun to spend more and more time with and open up more and more to asked me via text if we could hang out that night and I said yes but in a way that signalled no and the conversation went just that way and I went home and laid in bed with a feeling of satisfaction that repulsed me but that I also allowed to lull me to sleep. The memory of this cut repeatedly into tonight.

I dreamt the night before of a woman on 'neighborhood arrest' in a beach community who called me and asked if I could borrow my roomates car to bring her somewhere.

The dream followed two different paths after that.

In one path we walked through a series of interconnected beach houses in her neighborhood, where it got progressively more crowded, until the final beach house gave out onto a beach choked with hooded figures in weird iridescent water and I said we had to turn back. I had thought we were going to an empty beach.

In the other path, I picked her up in the car and we left the neighborhood and we drove and drove and I got frustrated because there was nowhere to go to at all and I finally desperately suggested we see a movie but she didn't want to.

poem about the cover-up, as a cover-up.

I mean what else can you do?

They always get quiet when humans come around because they don't want everybody to know there's such a thing as a plant party. — frank

Man I misread it every time.

Come for a walk with me. We go up the road for ten minutes, and we're in a wooded public garden with paths meandering across the side of a steep hill, with flowers and shrubs and bits of rocky cliff, and steps every now and then to take us up a level. It's warm and sunny with a bit of wind, and as we labour up the hill, I ask you how you feel.

And you say, "I'm depressed, but I think my depression is really anger, but the anger might be about humiliation, or something worse."

And I say, "Is it the trees? Or maybe the steps, that upset you?" — unenlightened

One notch more expressive:

The trees, the wind, the cliffs - they all feel reproachful, as though they had just been joyfully communing with one another and, with my approach, have become icily silent. That you ask me to walk with you makes me deeply sad because I already know that this is how it will go. You have mistaken me for someone else, who does not have this effect, and my wish to be who you have mistaken me for cannot be separated from the surety that I will be revealed as what I am. You may not see the reproach but you will see its effects on me. I will either become morose and withdrawn or I will talk a mile a minute pretending I'm not being reproached. And it will be frustrating and offputting.

I am mad at the landscape for reproaching me & I am mad at myself for having merited that reproach, but then I am also mad at you for making me feel that reproach anew. You can grow used to it after a while, alone, but what makes it sting is to have someone witness it.

At some point something perverse happens and theres a ritual satisfaction in frustrating anyone who invites me to walk. A invitation to walk is a nice gesture, but given the landscape it is also an impossible demand :" I'm asking you to be someone who is not reproached." But that is not a demand I can satisfy.

which leaves one expression, which is mean :

I do have a theory about depression, but I want to talk about feeling not theory here. Express your depression dudes, don't whinge about it in the usual abstract hopeless comfortable way. At the moment you are talking about each other, or Churchill's black dog; Eeyore does it better. — unenlightened

Well to whinge in the abstract just a little longer. What little feeling I've allowed myself has lead me to believe that my depression is really anger (turned inward, as the thinker said.) So that's what must be expressed, only that's a tricky one, because there are so many bad ways to express anger. And then the harrowingest thing is if if the anger in turn is really humiliation, or something worse, then there's maybe a zero-level of the unexpressible which can only be covered (which is where Lacan scoops me up & i get stockholm syndrome)

In the life of passion there may be no going back, but that means one thing if your passion is to take care of someone, another if your passion seems to be something selfish and vengeful. It hasn't been 15 years of hard self-questioning for me but it has been near half that. And at this stage, it seems to me like its about learning how to set up a life around myself (outbursting on this forum,rather than real life, is one part of that, not great, but a kludge.) Center's way too volatile to remain there(Pound went fascist, Eliot was an antisemite, and balkan poets fueled plenty of genocidal passions. A lot of poets 'danced their did' and it wasnt pretty.)

pretty similar. If there were a line graph, like with stocks, I think it'd be real jagged up and down but slightly tending upward

I don't know. For me I just hold on tight to the glimmers of nondepression I can remember and have faith they'll be restored somehow. So coping in the meantime, but without that being all that's left.

of course denying it doesn't make it go away.

Yeah, especially if you're a parent. People explain away depression all the time. Again, especially when they have responsibilities that demand they not be depressed.

@StreetlightX I was thinking about this at work today. For some reason, I got into literature in high school as like an important thing I felt like I needed to get good at (whatever that means.)A big part of that for me was mastering words. And I did really well with SAT conceptual words, like ambivalent and sedulous and desultory. But I would get really hung up on architectural terms, nautical terms (sooo many nautical terms), flowers/trees and so forth.

They kept coming up but I couldn't get them to stick. I'd get legit frustrated encountering them, they were like little opaque blocks in the reading. But I guess the point of them is they're not meant to convey concepts (like the sat words I could master) but build worlds, and that only works if you have some sense of the world theyre a part of. Its hard to just learn one at a time, while theyre easy as pie if you have a sense of the world of a ship, and can place 'binnacle' in terms of a bigger lived-in space of which its a part.


Definitions work for the SAT words because definitions are conceptual and if you've already got the basic concepts, you're in a position to see how other conceptual words are situated. definitions of the other sort of term tho are almost inherently unsatisfying - almost like replacing a single word with a longer phrase which is just as ungraspable.

the only satisfying definition of 'binnacle' is 'that thing over there' when youve been on a ship long enough to already kind of get it. Just like you only get 'I can't function without...' if you've done a few tours and get mom, her coffee, her emotions etc.

no point really, just something that hit me at work.

Interesting turn at the end. I'm curious if you had the structure of the post in mind from the beginning or if it came out in the writing? I like the progression.

The end (which I'm reading as a solution to 'what if the real feelings are ugly?') seems to me to offer two possible interpretations
1. The ugly feeling is not the real feeling, because anger is a secondary emotion.
2. The ugly feeling is the real feeling but had been made ugly by being directed at the wrong target. (you kick someone else because if you kick your boss he has the power to ruin your life)

1, 2, both, neither, or all of the above?

edited out, post was too extra.

You and me both — Noah Te Stroete

:grimace:

What is cluster b? — Noah Te Stroete

personality disorders. intense emotions, unstable sense of self. I have at least one toe dipped in myself.

OP makes sense to me. It feels right, looking back on my own memories growing up and also watching kids grow up into the world.

It seems like a certain emotional attunement comes first, and language is a means of entering as a 'player' (but there must be a better word) into a space crisscrossed by confusing emotional/social dynamics. Does this work? Am I doing it right? You test things out. It's not super unlike posting here, or elsewhere about philosophy. You bring something to 'canon' philosophy, you have all these feelings and ideas, and then you observe for a while, and then you test out certain things, to see if you get it. There's that old trope about the 'western canon' and how it's all one big conversation, which is exactly what it's like to be a child growing into a household, but the difference between learning a first language and trying consciously to learn a second.

I have some theories as an amateur DSM reader. Something cluster B. I hope he finds a soft place to land.

I got the sense he was a deeply-damaged guy who was picking up the pieces.I didn't like his posts, but I was morbidly fascinated by his presence. It sounds like he met a lady who validated his poetry unconditionally (which probably wasn't good), and then that fell apart, and he was holding things together by recycling decades old posts for approval.

I definitely think banning was the right move, because he was just spinning his wheels, but there's something somewhere in his story. There but for the grace of god

Sounds too uplifting. And your book was due for return yesterday. :razz: — Baden

get out of here zombie librarian number one trauma guy

addendum: the real-as-trauma model renamed 'wires' by phillip larkin


The widest prairies have electric fences,
For though old cattle know they must not stray
Young steers are always scenting purer water
Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires

Leads them to blunder up against the wires
Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter.
Young steers become old cattle from that day,
Electric limits to their widest senses.


Also could be titled : the world as seen by a sad librarian.

My thought, against Lacan (who I'm annoyed with, because he set up shop in my head for a long time, starting in my late teens) is that trauma is two-part: (1) It's something you can't conceptualize or understand plus (2) a powerlessness in the face of it. I don't think that two necessarily follows from one. Take some primal scene : a kid on a bike being urged by his parents to ride it down a small hill. This is something he is not prepared for - as is the case with all true rites of passage - and the challenge is whether he gives in to fear and frustration or trusts himself to respond to the bike, to the hill, to his emotions with just enough serenity to not panic and crash. If he succeeds there will be a joy and some sense of mastery, which will spill over into who knows what other aspects of life. This too is constitutive of the social order, though partially outside of it. As much as trauma, at least.

But Lacan, the head priest, would like to emphasize failure and castration over everything else. Once you identify a rite of passage (an encounterwith the real) not with joyful success, but with the necessity of diminishing failure, you can draw in a lot of people (like me) eager to transform ressentiment into resigned wisdom. Powerlesness becomes a deeper power, just like that.

Maybe there's an art of encountering the real, which is risking trauma for something else, using various techniques and social and emotional stores of self-belief to guide you through.

If you think about the idea of 'giving up' it is a sacrifice. And that's how it always was - denying myself with gritted teeth, the thing that made me comfortably myself. And this was the course dictated by thought, with homilies 'it's bad for you to smoke', 'you ought to stop', etc. So when I stopped like that, I suffered from symptoms, nervous agitation, irritability. I was the same person, a smoker, not smoking and having symptoms, and wanting to smoke.

But then something happened, such that something new was built. The might or must have been some provocation, but to me it is a mystery, that I will call a realisation of ... Well it occurred to me that I did not need to smoke or want to smoke; that I never had, but had been imagining I wanted to all this time. — unenlightened

I've had a very similar experience, recently, in my case involving drinking after work to 'wind down.' Just as you say - I had a shift from commuting home thinking to myself 'I shouldn't drink, I shouldn't drink, I shouldn't drink' to realizing that I actually didn't want to drink, that I didn't enjoy it and hadn't for a while. Again, as you say : I had been imagining I wanted to. And that was the real addiction, the addiction to the imagining because:

And I was anxious and agitated and irritable, not because I was not smoking, but because I had always been anxious and agitated and irritable. — unenlightened

Once you can't blame this on (the lack of) something else, but rather as how you are (or at least how you've been for a while) you have to confront something else, tip of my tongue. Imagining you want something very much - and are either pursuing or refusing it - keeps everything in motion in just the right way, so things never settle.

It's a weird thing because it's not a particularly liberating realization (you're left with yourself), but it's not something you can undo.