Barakamaki?..

Sushi we need..

Dreams of Eden..

Adam Phillips, from ‘On Flirtation’.

“Auden once suggested that a literary critic should declare his ‘dream of Eden’ because ‘honesty demands that he describe it to his readers, so that they may be in a position to judge his judgements’. Even though psychoanalysis ironizes dreams of Eden – in psychoanalytic theory paradise is only for the losers – it would be useful for psychoanalysts to say something about these things, about the kind of world they would prefer to live in, and why they think psychoanalysis is a good way of both spending one’s time and contributing to this Eden. It will, after all, matter a good deal to their patients what stories they tend to tell themselves and their colleagues about, say, promiscuity, or socialism, or ambition. And, of course, about psychoanalysis and the significance of its history.”

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood..

.. A beautiful day for a neighbor.
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?…

(God, I’ve been watching this for a couple of minutes now and I think I may need counselling..)

Which way..

..is she turning? Clockwise, or anti-clockwise?

You don’t know me..

René and Ray agree on that much at least..

Father Jack..

I was obliged at the weekend, against my better judgement, to attend the First Holy Communion of the daughter of close friends. It was, of course, a mistake – big old church, big old priest.. and all I could think of, as he continued to pontificate, were the words of the immortal Jack Handey, which, as it happens, were some of the first I quoted on this blog, a while ago now..

“If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is “God is crying.” And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is “Probably because of something you did.”

..and while we’re on the subject of Catholic Guilt, and sinners in general, no-one nailed it better than Mrs. Doyle..

Psych session..

Jane Fonda in ‘Klute’..

You Freud, me Jane?..

Hope you had a good Valentine’s evening. Mine was spent in the company of the inimitable Jody Linscott. She brought round ‘Marnie‘, which I hadn’t seen in years. Great movie – Bernard Herrmann really goes to town on the score – I’d quite forgotten how powerful it was – not much of which is featured in this clip.. it’s somebody’s home-made edit, which captures the prevailing mood quite nicely, I think.. and anyway, it contains my favourite little vignette where Sean is telling her about the flower..

(…this clip is posted on Youtube and in the comments section somebody has written the following..

“I think all the beauty of Hitchcock movies comes from the fact that sex is considered as an awkward act. Love, sex and desire are everywhere but in the act itself.”

Not bad, huh?..)

Some dumb thing I realised today..

I like to win. Of course I do, who doesn’t? But I’m also more than happy to lose. The one thing I absolutely will not be seen to do is to compete. If an outright win is not an option, I’ll take an outright defeat. Yeah, I know – binary opposites, polarity, good and evil, man utd – man city… anyway, just a thought…

Limits, again

Am reminded today, for some unfathomable reason, of a thing I used to feel when younger – not so much these days – a kind of pre-emptive nostalgia, of already missing the place I was in. I remember my first real trip abroad, must have been about 13-14, wandering round Malta in the blazing heat. Came across the remains of some old Roman settlement and was suddenly hit with a wave of sadness – that ‘you-can-never-go-down-to-the-same-river-twice’ kind of thing. I would never see this place again, not the same way. I could revisit it, but it wouldn’t be the same place, or I wouldn’t be the same me..

Anyway, used to get that a lot, as I said, not so much now. Not sure whether I miss it. Ha – not sure if I’m nostalgic for the feeling of nostalgia, that sounds like me.. On the odd occasion it does happen still, it’s usually triggered by searingly hot days, freshly-cut grass, melting tarmac, certain pieces of music, or the poetry of Borges, most notably this one.. (I make no apologies for the fact that I may have previously posted it here some time ago…)

Limits

Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

Thank God, it’s all in your mind..

Neuroscience and God: “The current issue of Scientific America Mind looks at how neuroscientists are using brain scans to study the biology of spiritual experiences. The fMRI images seen here are from a study by University of Montreal researcher Mario Beauregard and his colleagues. The scientists scanned the brains of nuns as they recalled religious epiphanies to see which areas of the brain lit up. From Scientific American Mind:

Such efforts to reveal the neural correlates of the divine—a new discipline with the warring titles ‘neurotheology’ and ‘spiritual neuroscience’—not only might reconcile religion and science but also might help point to ways of eliciting pleasurable otherworldly feelings in people who do not have them or who cannot summon them at will. Because of the positive effect of such experiences on those who have them, some researchers speculate that the ability to induce them artificially could transform people’s lives by making them happier, healthier and better able to concentrate. Ultimately, however, neuroscientists study this question because they want to better understand the neural basis of a phenomenon that plays a central role in the lives of so many. ‘These experiences have existed since the dawn of humanity. They have been reported across all cultures,’ Beauregard says. ‘It is as important to study the neural basis of [religious] experience as it is to investigate the neural basis of emotion, memory or language.’

Scientists and scholars have long speculated that religious feeling can be tied to a specific place in the brain. In 1892 textbooks on mental illness noted a link between ‘religious emotionalism’ and epilepsy. Nearly a century later, in 1975, neurologist Norman Geschwind of the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital first clinically described a form of epilepsy in which seizures originate as electrical misfirings within the temporal lobes, large sections of the brain that sit over the ears. Epileptics who have this form of the disorder often report intense religious experiences, leading Geschwind and others, such as neuropsychiatrist David Bear of Vanderbilt University, to speculate that localized electrical storms in the brain’s temporal lobe might sometimes underlie an obsession with religious or moral issues.

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

(Via Boing Boing.)

Just rage

… Seeing as I’ve privately declared it all-things-Freud week, I thought we’d have a piece from, I think, the best Freud-influenced writer, Adam Phillips. Here’s a short excerpt from his excellent book ‘The Beast in The Nursery’, on a subject close to my heart …

There is a world elsewhere of fluent, uninterrupted competence; a world in which everything works … A world in which we need never feel anger – or rather, the unbearable conflict that we use anger to abolish, to void ourselves of (we don’t want to kill the person we hate most, the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones once remarked, we want to kill the person who creates in us the most intolerable conflict). There is no anger, that is to say, that is not revenge; no rage without the betrayal of an ideal, however unconscious, however exorbitant that ideal might be. In my bad temper I expose not merely my loss of control – that so much wished for transgression – but far more shamefully I expose my furtive utopianism; my horrifying, passionate ideal of, and for, myself. In other words, I am humiliated at that moment when I can no longer bear – that is, rationalize – the disparity between who I seem to be and who I want to be; when, in psychoanalytic language, the gap between my ego and my ego-ideal becomes irretrievable. The one person I can never mourn the loss of is my ideal self. Anything, even the shameful excitement of humiliation is better than that.

If anger is evidence of our idealism, our self-idealization – of just how unconscious, how frantic our sense of justice is – it also reveals, by the same token, that our potential for humiliation is the root of morality. It is, indeed, curious how impressed we are by being diminished; how vulnerable we always are to slight and ridicule (as though we are, somewhere, always already ironized in our own eyes; as though, from one point of view, all our claims are boasts). Nothing confirms more clearly the impossibility of amorality – our embeddedness in a moral world – than our capacity to be humiliated. That we can feel humiliated reveals how much what matters to us matters to us. Our rage is itself a commitment to something, to something preferred. Indeed, how would a person immune from, or ignorant of, humiliation know what a good life was? Our betrayals, our travesties that issue in anger, are forms of awkward, untimely revelation.

It is as though our morality, as disclosed by our anger, is a kind of private madness, a secret personal religion of cherished values that we only discover, if at all, when they are violated. The virtues we can consciously formulate, and try to abide by, are, one might say, our official morality. Our unofficial, more idiosyncratic morality is only available, so to speak, through humiliation. Once you know who or what humiliates you, you know what it is about yourself that you ultimately value, that you worship. Tell me what makes you enraged – what makes you feel truly diminished – and I will tell you what you believe, what you want to believe about yourself. What, that is, you imagine you need to protect to sustain your love of life.

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

By MARK EDMUNDSON

Published: September 23, 2007

Batesville, Va.

SIGMUND Freud died 68 years ago today, and it remains uncertain whether he is what W. H. Auden called him, “a whole climate of opinion / Under whom we conduct our differing lives,” or whether he is completely passé. It’s still not clear whether Freud was the genius of the 20th century, a comprehensive absurdity or something in between.

Our confusion about Freud is something he predicted — and also provoked — particularly in his later work, now largely unread, which is preoccupied with the question of authority. It sheds light on our confused attitudes toward Freud, who always strove for cultural authority. But more important, books like “Totem and Taboo” and “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” illuminate our collective difficulties with power and particularly with the two scourges of today’s world, fundamentalist religion and tyrannical politics.

Probably the best way to understand Freud’s take on authority is to consider the mode of therapy that he settled on midway through his career. We might call it “transference therapy.” Over time, Freud came to see that his patients were transferring feelings and hopes from other phases of their lives onto him.

Frequently they sought from him what they’d sought from their parents when they were children. They wanted perfect love, and even more fervently, it seems, they wanted perfect truth. They became obsessed with Freud as what Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalytic theorist, liked to call “the subject who is supposed to know.” Patients saw Freud as an all-knowing figure who had the wisdom to solve all their problems and make them genuinely happy and whole.

Freud’s objective as a therapist was to help his patients dismantle their idealized image of him. He taught them to see how the love they demanded from him was love that they had once demanded (and of course never received) from fathers and mothers and other figures of authority. Over time, the patients might come to view the doctor — Freud — as another suffering, striving mortal, not unlike themselves.

The man sitting at the foot of the couch had to be revealed as neither a Merlin nor a Gandalf, but as a rather short, bespectacled fellow who smoked too many cigars and had a deep fondness for his dog Jo-Fi, the chow who sat beside him while he worked and to whom he occasionally addressed stray remarks. Once the patient could do that much, he was in a better position to treat other important figures in his life realistically. He’d be less prone to assault them with demands, to ask them for everything.

One of Freud’s key beliefs was that there is no sharp division between the psychologically healthy and the unwell. His patients longed for authoritative fathers — and so did Freud. In the early phase of his career, he embraced a sequence of mentors (among them Jean Charcot, the French neurologist; Wilhelm Fliess, a German doctor; and Josef Breuer, an Austrian doctor) who had nothing like his mental powers, but whom he vastly esteemed nonetheless. Freud said we all seek such figures, in both political and personal life.

In “Group Psychology,” Freud wrote about the qualities that a leader-figure, in his most extreme guise, possesses. “His intellectual acts,” said Freud, “were strong and independent even in isolation and his will needed no reinforcement from others.”

He also “loved no one but himself, or other people only insofar as they served his needs.” The leader’s confidence is absolute, for he possesses what everyone most wants, truth. His allure is as powerful as it is pernicious.

Well, you might say, it takes one to know one. Freud himself was drawn to authority. He liked to lord it over his disciples; he liked to make pronouncements; he liked — as schoolchildren say at recess — to act big. When Freud presented himself to the public, he almost never forgot the lessons that he had learned about authority in his consulting room and through his studies of the church, the army and tribal societies. “The autocratic pose” clung to him, said Auden.

Freud still manifests himself to us as a grand patriarch. Collectively we have thought about him as the father, as the one who is supposed to know. We have hoped he’d confer the truth — make us whole and happy. Of course, he cannot. But he has been different from all the other aspiring masters in that he has taught nothing so insistently as the need to dissolve our illusions about masters, and to be responsive to more moderate, subtle and humane sources of authority.

Such a figure — authoritarian and anti-authoritarian at the same time — cannot help but be confusing. But once we understand our confusion, Freud can also be quite illuminating. Among other things, his ideas about authority help us understand (and in some measure sympathize with) the hunger for absolute leaders and absolute truth that probably besets us all, but that has overwhelmed many of our fellow humans who find themselves living under tyrannical governments and fundamentalist faiths.

But the best of Freud will not be available to us until we can work through the transference he provoked. We need to see him as a great patriarch, yes, but as one who struggled for nothing so much as for the abolition of patriarchy.

Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author, most recently, of “The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days.”

(Via NYTimes.com)

Blogged with Flock

Magic brush

Gotta get me one of these..

Conversations with himself

Now, this is really something. Some guy channelling the heated bebop dialogue of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. One continuous shot – quite, quite spectacular..

The Paradox of Latent Belief

“Belief is a cognitive state; believing something is a matter of having a certain kind of positive mental attitude towards it, of thinking that it is true. There are, however, numerous propositions that we believe to be true even though we have never entertained them. Paradoxically, it seems that belief is independent of thought.

Take, for example, the proposition “I have more nostrils than noses.” You know this proposition, and have known it for a long time (and, as the tripartite theory of knowledge explains, belief is necessary for knowledge). However, until you read this page you had never entertained it.

This shows that belief is independent of thought, that you do not need to think a thing in order to know it. You have never engaged in any mental activity that could be described as assenting to the idea that you have more nostrils than noses, and yet you have long known that proposition to be true.

The same can be said of many other propositions: “flamingos have fewer feet than elephants”; “42 has two fewer digits in it than 1966”; etc.

If you are tempted to suggest that before reading this page you did not know these propositions, then consider the following:

You now know that you have more nostrils than noses, that flamingos have fewer feet than elephants, and that 42 has two fewer digits in it than 1966. This page did not teach you any of these things. Therefore, you must already have known them.

It seems that you can know things without ever having entertained them; belief is possible without thought.”

(via logical paradoxes)

Psychic museum closes due to unforeseen circumstances

York Psychic Museum has shut due to unforeseen circumstances, the York Press reports.
Astrologer Jonathan Cainer, who opened the museum in 2003, admitted that he’d been welcoming just 100 people a week through the doors, and had accordingly decided to temporarily hang up his crystal ball.

Cainer reckons he’ll be back in business by 2008, but cautioned: “If you are asking me for predictions when exactly it will open up again, then it is hard to say. Although I’m in the prediction business, I don’t believe you can make predictions about things you are close to.”

(Via The Register.)

Google Maps locates M.C. Escher’s apartment building..

..somewhere near Birmingham, apparently..

One for Emil..

..What Jimmy didn’t know was that Ralph was sick..

Parking: The Drewery Method..