The most wonderful life.

unenlightened

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does that sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

e.e.cummings

He says 'poet', where I would say 'sane human being', and some might say 'individual'.
And he says 'fight' and 'work', where I might say 'be vigilant' and 'have insight'.

Now my own feeling is best expressed in subservience and conformity - most of the time. That is to say, that in this game the social contrarian is just as dependent as the conformist. This is a large part of the difficulty, that one cannot give a recipe or method for authentic being. Neither can one measure it, because to measure is to compare, which is to become dependent. To use the necessarily shared language to communicate individuality - is it even possible?

This is a second attempt at a nameless topic-mountain that I previously approached thus.

But perhaps it would be clearer to approach it from the stance of the non-poet, of the thinker, believer and knower of feelings. Take the response to bereavement, for example. One is allowed and expected to feel sadness, loss, confusion, but one might well also feel relief, anger, indifference, even pleasure.

And I hope that you die
And your death will come soon
I'll follow your casket
By the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead.

Seldom played at funerals, but the stuff of Nobel prizes, because one should not speak ill of the dead, and therefore one should not have these feelings of anger and so on.

And thus the abusive 'political correctness' which has always 'gone mad', because it represses the reality of feeling. Except that this is not a reality of feeling at all, but a recitation of a 'let them go home' trope, that is no expression of the real feeling of deprivation and humiliation, but a covering up and projection of anger onto strangers because they are safe, not because they are any danger.

Valentinus

↪unenlightened

As projections go, putting stuff on the other is not a sure thing. It is always going to be tried, like sticking a fork into grilling meat, but one's results may vary.
So people may say whatever they say to themselves but there is this period of checking to see if they are actually supported.
Some of the people care less than others about the result.

Deleteduserrc

↪unenlightened

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?

Shawn

↪unenlightened

↪csalisbury

Can one deny the reality of depression?

Deleteduserrc

↪Wallows

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.

Deleteduserrc

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

Shawn

↪csalisbury

Then, is all that is left is coping?

I suppose this is unimaginable to the idealist or poet?

Deleteduserrc

↪Wallows

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.

Shawn

↪csalisbury

Comes and goes for me. How about you?

Deleteduserrc

↪Wallows

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

unenlightened

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

It's a great temptation to answer the question, but if you consider

... whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

... you will see it is impossible. There are beautiful and ugly feelings perhaps, if you want to speak so, there are real and unreal feelings certainly I would say. It's not a solution but a warning. One might misunderstand this lauding of feeling to be an exhortation to 'let it all hang out' rather than as an invitation to fifteen years of hard psychological self-questioning.

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.

Myself, I am almost never depressed. I am often frightened, sad , angry, if you want to consider ugliness, but my concern in this is to inject some seriousness into an affect poor world, of philosophy of science and of politics. They all seem to be full of cheap sensation, but ultimately flat and devoid of meaningful passion. A bunch of wankers having sex with robots for no reason.

unenlightened

Even more so in this thread, I need to speak for myself...

I recall the unenlightened of yore, a youngish single heterosexual male with __ a strong sense that the next woman I met I might have to spend the rest of my life looking after. This was before swipe left swipe right, when feelings had consequences and thus meaning. It was a condition where 'looking for the one' and 'looking out for her' were united in a sense that every step was crucial and every moment eternal. In the life of passion there is no going back, and every smile is for keeps, every harsh word a murder.

A passionate man is a quiet man.

Shawn

*pig nods knowingly*

Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Changeling

There are beautiful and ugly feelings perhaps, if you want to speak so, there are real and unreal feelings certainly I would say. — unenlightened

Is the same true for thought?

unenlightened

Is the same true for thought? — Evil

I don't know, why do you ask?

Deleteduserrc

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.)

Changeling

I don't know, why do you ask? — unenlightened

Well, thought is similar to feeling in that it is uncontrollable. The only thing that we can control is our breathing. The rest just follows a cyclical pattern

unenlightened

Well, thought is similar to feeling in that it is uncontrollable. The only thing that we can control is our breathing. The rest just follows a cyclical pattern — Evil

I'd like to talk about control with you another time, but it seems bit out of place here. But in the meantime, consider the views of this fellow:
"Look at old unenlightened riding his bike and wobbling along the road. He thinks he is in control, but he cannot ride a straight-line and a traffic light can stop him. Not to mention the bomb I'm about to detonate under him."

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 ... — csalisbury

Right, this is the difficulty that Freud tried to deal with, and that every self-help guru has to deal with. One has insight, and so one does not merely feel, one sees one's feelings and comes to have feelings about them. And then feelings about those feelings. Until one is quite lost.

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?"

RegularGuy

↪unenlightened

Thank you.

Shawn

↪unenlightened

But what about internalized anger of the sort:

"I am angry over being angry all the time."

The trees don't care.

unenlightened

The trees don't care. — Wallows

I wouldn't dare to speak for the trees, unless I was a poet. But I think they do care, as it goes.

But I was pointing to something more straightforward, that if one is depressed when one's experience is uplifting, then one is in some sense absent - not present with the trees and sunshine. Where are you then?

internalized anger — Wallows

The phrase comes easy but what does it mean? Are not all emotions internal until expressed?

"I am angry over being angry all the time." — Wallows

Are you really? It this a feeling or an idea? @csalisbury tells me a story I have heard before, of layers of feeling that are not 'about' the world as it is; the weight of depression that prevents one getting out of bed is nowhere in the bedroom, nowhere within experience therefore, but is a weight of thought. One is not in the bedroom oneself, but in a world of ideation, probably trapped there because ...

{I shouldn't say really, and deprive you of the wonderful working out that the poet glories in, but I can tell you this: }

... because the thought is never finished, it goes so far and then there is a jump, and then one comes back to the same place again, and again. Fear makes one jump.

Shawn

But I was pointing to something more straightforward, that if one is depressed when one's experience is uplifting, then one is in some sense absent - not present with the trees and sunshine. Where are you then? — unenlightened

In my head, where else?

The phrase comes easy but what does it mean? Are not all emotions internal until expressed? — unenlightened

Well, yes, there's a fundamentally awry loop in the mind of the depressive. A sort of Hegeliian dialectical self-chastising tendency to feel bad over feeling the way they do feel. How does one remedy this seems to be what I am asking?

Are you really? It this a feeling or an idea? csalisbury tells me a story I have heard before, of layers of feeling that are not 'about' the world as it is; the weight of depression that prevents one getting out of bed is nowhere in the bedroom, nowhere within experience therefore, but is a weight of thought. One is not in the bedroom oneself, but in a world of ideation, probably trapped there because ... — unenlightened

I tend to think of reality as some dream world. One where everything, including the trees are part of the world one experiences and lives within. Where the desires and emotions are part of the scenery of the world itself. Mind you, this doesn't imply that one necessarily lives in a horror world of sorts; but, that this world is one and the same as the self projecting or protecting the self from itself. Psychological solipsism of sorts.

It all seems like some "test" if you get the flow here.

frank

I'm waxing deterministic these days, so justifying anger isn't a thing. Is emotion a manifestation of something true and real about an organism? Maybe. It's depends.

Let's look at it physically, though. Is an expression of anger a powerful tool? It may seem so at first glance, but the fossil record indicates that those who live by the sword die by it.

Love is a much more powerful thing. Only through love could a global government be created. And that is the thing that could actually do something about what we've become.

So are you killing us or helping us? The answer is easy to determine: do you spew your anger like a damn heat-seeking missile? Or do you love? If its the former, then shush your whinging. You're part of the problem.

Shawn

Nobody likes to be tested. Why would anyone want to be?

And, how else can one not react with anger for being tested by a poor teacher?

Deleteduserrc

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 :

frank

↪csalisbury

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.

god must be atheist

↪frank

Much like humans go quiet and motionless when in the company of plants. In the circles I move in, everyone goes dead quiet when the plants come marching in into or through the room.

Deleteduserrc

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.

unenlightened

Is emotion a manifestation of something true and real about an organism? Maybe. It's depends.

Let's look at it physically, though. Is an expression of anger a powerful tool? — frank

I wonder if I can persuade you to un-ask these questions with a joke.

Q. What's the difference between a thermostat and a living being?
A. They both respond to temperature, but only life cares about it.

Giving a damn is not a manifestation of anything, it does not succeed or fail. It is the coin of experience.

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. — csalisbury

Conflict at every level eh? But you know this is all nonsense right? The landscape does not reproach, you are not mad at, but indulge yourself, I cannot unfortunately make you feel, and the thing you hate most is to be alone.

These two, what you say and what I say, are conflicting stories, and I am only manifesting the 'other' side of the conflict that is already implicitly part of your story.

I'm sorry, I know this is deadly serious, let me put it very simply: this is not feeling, but the negation of feeling. It is the evasion of fear of pain, of humiliation, of loss, it is at its root, the deep sadness of a life unloved and un-lived. It is a simple thing covered with many layers to hide it. Never really felt or expressed, and so never finished.

frank

Man I misread it every time. — csalisbury

:smile:

frank

Giving a damn is not a manifestation of anything, it does not succeed or fail. It is the coin of experience. — unenlightened

But doesn't a baby give a damn? Enough to cry and scream? But I don't think they understand what it is they give a damn about.

Aboutness comes later and it's a loose cannon. Yes, stop and feel the air in your lungs and the earth under your feet, but ignoring the messenger of pain is dangerous. I'm sure we agree about all of this?

The most wonderful life.

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Categories

More Discussions