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Those we cannot help, we blame, for their suffering.

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In each other's eyes we are moulded.

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"Culture is the fossilisation of language" — Terrence McKenna

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TUMBLING, BURNING WITH WHITE HOT FIRE, I PLUNGED INTO THE DEPTHS OF THE ABYSS. UNSPEAKABLE PAIN… RELENTLESS AGONY… TIME CEASED TO EXIST… ONLY THIS TORTURE… AND A DEEPENING HATRED OF THE HYPOCRISY THAT DAMNED ME TO THIS HELL.

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my gut is a gangster

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BENEDICTION — CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

When, by an edict of the powers supreme, The Poet in this bored world comes to be, His daunted mother, eager to blaspheme, Rages to God, who looks down piteously:

—'Rather than have this mockery to nurse Why not a nest of snakes for me to bear! And may that night of fleeting lust be cursed, When I conceived my penance, unaware!

Since from all women you chose me to shame, To be disgusting to my grieving spouse, And since I can't just drop into the flames Like an old love-note, this misshapen mouse,

I'll turn your hate that overburdens me Toward the damned agent of your spiteful doom, And I will twist this miserable tree So its infected buds will never bloom!'

She swallows thus her hatred's foaming spit And, never grasping the divine design, She makes herself within Gehenna's pit The pyre suited to a mother's crimes.

Still, with an angel guarding secretly, The misfit child grows drunk on sunny air; In all he drinks or eats in ecstasy He finds sweet nectar and ambrosia there.

Free as a bird, he plays with clouds and wind, Sings of the Passion with enraptured joy; Tending his pilgrimage, his Guardian Must weep to see the gladness of the boy.

Those he would love watch him with jaundiced eye, Or, growing bold with his tranquillity, Look for a certain way to make him cry, Testing on him their own ferocity.

In bread and wine intended for his mouth They muddle filthy spit with dirt and ash; Hypocrites, all that he touches they throw out, And blame their feet for walking in his path.

His woman cries to all the countryside: 'Since he has found me worthy to adore I'll let the heathen idols be my guide And gild myself, as they have done before;

I'll sate myself with incense, myrrh, and nard, With genuflections, meats and wines galore, To prove I can in that admiring heart Laughingly claim the homage due the Lord!

I'll set on him my frail, determined hand When I am bored with this blasphemous farce; My fingernails, like harpies' talons, can Claw out a bloody pathway to his heart.

I'll dig the bright red heart out of his breast, A pitiful and trembling baby bird; To satisfy the dog I like the best I'll toss it to him, with a scornful word!'

Toward Heaven, where he sees a throne of gold, The Poet lifts his arms in piety, And brilliant flashes from his lucid soul Block from his sight the people's cruelty:

—'Be praised, my God, who gives us suffering As remedy for our impurities, And as the best and purest nurturing To fit the strong for holy ecstasies!

I know in Heaven there's a place for me Kept for the poet in celestial zones, And that I'll feast throughout eternity With Virtues, Powers, Dominations, Thrones.

Man's sorrow is a nobleness, I trust, Untouchable by either earth or hell; I know to weave my mystic crown I must Tax all the times, the universe as well.

But treasure lost from old Palmyra's wealth, The unknown metals, pearls out of the sea, Can't equal, though you mounted them yourself, This diadem of dazzling clarity,

Since it is perfect luminosity, Drawn from the holy hearth of primal rays, Of which men's eyes, for all their majesty, Are only mournful mirrors, dark and crazed!'

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"In the fierce fire of their unbridled passions they acquire the most impeccable honesty, and get into the habit of fighting the battles which await genius with the constant work by which they coerce their cheated appetites." -- De Balzac, The Athiest's Mass

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"Envious people and fools, having no knowledge of the determinations by which superior spirits are moved, seize at once on superficial inconsistencies, to formulate an accusation and so to pass sentence on them" -- De Balzac, The Athiest's Mass

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Rasoul Ashtary — Narcissus Reversed: I hate the solid image my reflection forms in mirror; it’s too heavy that I’m afraid mirror implodes (proposal for a mise-en-scène)  [oil on linen, 2022]

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"Evil can men attain and in companies: the road is smooth and her dwelling near. But the gods have decreed much sweat before a man reaches virtue" -- Hesoid, quoted in The Republic, Plato

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How much do we accord towards that human being at the end of time, at the end of history? Therein might we pronounce ourselves happy.

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Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

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The stone which was rejected, became the cornerstone.

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"This being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Dasein completely into the kind of being of "the others" in such a way that the others, as distinguishable and explicit, disappear more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the 'they' unfolds its true dictatorship. We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also withdraw from the "great mass" the way they withdraw, we find "shocking" what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite and which all are, though not as a sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness.

...

Thus, the they maintains itself factically in the averageness of what belongs to it, what it does and does not consider valid, and what it grants or denies success. This averageness, which prescribes what can and may be ventured, watches over every exception which thrusts itself to the fore. Every priority is noiselessly squashed. Overnight, everything that is original is flattened down as something long since known. Everything won through struggle becomes something manageable. Every mystery loses its power. The care of averageness reveals, in turn, an essential tendency of Dasein, which we call the leveling down of all possibilities of being."

— Heidegger, Being & Time, §27

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Ignoring and misreading of symptoms

The refusal to listen to symptoms in relation to culture and history by both psychologists and their clients occurs in many parts of the world. When we are not able to follow the symptom into its surrounding context, or when it is too dangerous to do so in authoritarian environments, we often misinterpret its protest and negate its voice. Perhaps we can see this most clearly in extreme examples.

The following of symptom always runs the risk of being foreclosed prematurely, causing one to mistakenly see in the unfamiliar and disturbing the familiar and safe idea. Phillip Cushman (1995) tells a story about how this happened with Melanie Klein’s analytic treatment of her own son, Erich. As a psychoanalyst, Klein, an analysand and student of psychoanalyst Karl Abraham, began a move in psychoanalysis away from drive and instinct theory toward object relations theory, the latter focusing on our human interactions and our internalization of them. This move, furthered by Mrs. Klein, was not completed by her, as we shall see. Klein was born into a Jewish family and lived in Germany and Hungary between the two world wars. She was one of the first to begin psychoanalytic treatment of children. For experience in doing work with children, she attempted to treat her own anxious and phobic son, Erich. She wrote about his “case” using a pseudonym, disguising his identity as her son. Klein elicited her son’s fantasies through play, and interpreted them to him in an Oedipal light, explaining to him that his anxiety was caused by his wishes to have intercourse with her. Klein’s treatment of her son was not working. Erich became more anxious, developing a phobia about going outside. Redoubling her interpretive efforts had no ameliorating effect:

“For instance, in response to his phobia about venturing outside, she asked him to describe a street that was particularly frightening to him. He answered that the street was one that was filled with young toughs who tormented him. Klein ignored this fact and realized that the street was lined with large trees. She interpreted the trees as phalluses and explained to Erich that this meant that he was desiring his mother, and his anxiety was no doubt caused by the castration anxiety that inevitably followed this desire.” (Cushman, 1995, p. 201)

Klein saw his symptom of anxiety as arising from inherent psychic structures and collective dramas. What is most striking about Mrs. Klein’s misreading of her son’s phobia about going outside is her failure to connect his internal experience of anxiety with the social and political climate of his world. Years later Erich’s older brother explained to him that the very street Erich most worried about was visited by youths who tormented him, “bullies [in] an anti-Semitic gang that routinely attacked Jewish children” (Cushman, 1995, p. 201). To complicate the matter of coming to know that which is difficult to know, Klein had never told her son that he was of Jewish descent.

[…]

In China during periods of political oppression and chronic hunger, neurasthenia or generalized malaise was explained as a biological condition and treated with drugs, silencing the protest of the body and the mind, and thus contributing to the maintenance of oppressive political power structures (Shulman-Lorenz, 1997a). In Brazil, those affected by hunger might explain their weakness as nervos, or nervous exhaustion, rather than confront social policies that produced food shortages. In a chilling example of misreading symptoms, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1995a) describes how in Northeast Brazil, there was a systematic avoidance of discussion about infant starvation and dehydration, which in some areas resulted in infant mortality rates as high as 40 per cent. Tragically, rather than following symptoms to accurately understand the situations of infant illness, Scheper-Hughes found them often misattributed to an inborn aversion to life (at least in discussions with the visiting American researcher). In the poorest areas of the Northeast, sickly infants, regarded as not having the “knack for living,” were left to die in the corners of their households due to the impossible economic situations of their families. This discourse protects against the full onslaught of awareness regarding the ravages of poverty that assault so many families, mitigates against a loss of face, and works against a confrontation with one’s sense of powerlessness to protect one’s own children. To properly read the infants’ symptoms of starvation and dehydration would require the possibly dangerous acknowledgment of how unjust land ownership and wealth distribution result in tragic inadequacies of food and clean water, even for the youngest of a society’s members. To alleviate these symptoms would require that the protest of the symptom be taken to a public arena that is itself dis-eased. Too often this may seem impossible for the poorest.

Yet, ignored symptoms can often gather force like a recurring dream that finally breaks into a nightmare to gain attention. After the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, Adolf Harash traveled there to provide trauma treatment for the survivors. He chillingly related the frequency with which workers at the former plant confided that they had been visited by dreams and nightmares about the “accident” before it happened. Most had never told anyone about these symptomatic dreams, pushing them to the side. To voice misgivings about plant safety was felt to be disloyal to the government. To heed nightmares as potential sources of knowledge was a disavowed practice in Soviet life at that time (Watkins, 1992). The position of bystander, to which we soon turn, often entails bystanding in relation to not only an objective situation that asks for our attention but also an ignoring of how this situation gives rise to unbidden thoughts, dreams, images, and feelings within. One becomes a bystander to one’s own psychic reality, disabling one’s capacity to change the situations of which one is a part.

In faithfully submitting to the tutelage of symptoms, Hillman emerged from several decades in the psychotherapeutic consulting room to admit, like others before him, that psychological distress cannot be cordoned off from the distresses of the world of which one is a part.

Mary Watkins & Helene Shulman, Toward Psychologies of Liberation [emphasis added]

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Better kept inside your head

(Mar 27 2021)

The judge no longer sits before us Upon his oaken throne, He sits between your ears and doesn't like your tone When you say things out of place and improper; You could speak your mind, or instead like a doctor With aphorisms like aspirins… Lazily… by rota -- Because, "friends are here to listen, not judge" And the judge again becomes the den Of thoughts and words unsaid. Better kept inside your head.

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I have remarked that I can get along quite well with a man only when he has reached the height of defeat, and has lost all seating, and, with it, all the certainties of his success. It is that, in these moments, he has stripped away all the lies, and that he is naked and true, restored to his essence by the blows of fate.

J’ai remarqué que je ne peux m’entendre tout à fait bien avec un homme que lorsqu’il est parvenu au comble de la défaite, et qu’il a perdu toute assise, et, avec elle, toutes les certitudes de son succès. C’est que, dans ces moments, il a dépouillé tous les mensonges, et qu’il est nu et vrai, rendu à son essence par les coups du sort.

Notebooks Emil Cioran