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woman-loving · 3 years

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Lesbian Unintelligibility in Pre-1989 Poland

Selection from ""No one talked about it": The Paradoxes of Lesbian Identity in pre-1989 Poland, by Magdalena Staroszczyk, in Queers in State Socialism: Cruising 1970s Poland, eds. Tomasz Basiuk and Jędrzej Burszta, 2021

The question of lesbian visibility is pertinent today because of the limited number of lesbian-oriented activist events and cultural representations. But it presents a major methodological problem when looking at the past. That problem lies in an almost complete lack of historical sources, something partly mended with oral history interviews, but also in an epistemological dilemma. How can we talk about lesbians when they did not exist as a recognizable category? What did their (supposed) non-existence mean? And should we even call those who (supposedly) did not exist “lesbians”?

To illustrate this problem, let me begin with excerpts from an interview I conducted for the CRUSEV project [a study of queer cultures in the 1970s]. My interlocutor is a lesbian woman born in the 1950s, who lived in Cracow most of her life:

“To this very day I have a problem with my brothers, as I cannot talk to them about this. They just won’t do it, I would like to talk, but. . . . They have this problem, they lace up their mouths when any reference is made to this topic, because they were raised in that reality [when] no one talked about it. It was a taboo. It still is. ... I was so weak, unable to take initiative, lacking a concept of my own life—all this testifies to the oppression of homosexual persons, who do not know how to live, have no support from [others], no information or knowledge learned at school, or from a psychologist. What did I do? I searched in encyclopaedias for the single entry, “homosexuality.” What did I learn? That I was a pervert. What did it do to me? It only hurt me, no? Q: Was the word lesbian in use? Only as a slur. Even my mother used it as an offensive word. When she finally figured out my orientation, she said the word a few times. With hatred. Hissing the word at me.”

The woman offers shocking testimony of intense and persistent hostility towards a family member—sister, daughter—who happens to be a lesbian. The brothers and the mother are so profoundly unable to accept her sexuality that they cannot speak about it at all, least of all rationally. The taboo has remained firmly in place for decades. How was it maintained? And, perhaps more importantly, how do we access the emotional reality that it caused? The quotes all highlight the theme of language, silence, and something unspeakable. Tabooization implies a gap in representation, and the appropriate word cannot be spoken but merely hissed out with hatred.

Popular discourse and academic literature alike address this problem under the rubric of “lesbian invisibility” (Mizielińska 2001). I put forward a different conceptual frame, proposing to address the question of lesbian identity in pre-1989 Poland not in terms of visibility versus invisibility, but instead in terms of cultural intelligibility versus unintelligibility. The former concepts, which have a rich history in discussions of pre-emancipatory lesbian experience, presume an already existing identity that is self-evident to the person in question. They assume the existence of a person who thinks of herself as a lesbian. One then proceeds to ask whether or not this lesbian was visible as such to others, that is, whether others viewed her as the lesbian she knew she was. Another assumption behind this framing is that the woman in question wished to be visible although this desired visibility had been denied her. These are some of the essentializing assumptions inscribed in the concept of (in)visibility. Their limitation is that they only allow us to ask whether or not the lesbian is seen for who she feels she is and wishes to be seen by others.

By contrast, (un)intelligibility looks first to the social construction of identity, especially to the constitutive role of language. To think in those terms is to ask under what conditions same-sex desire between women is culturally legible as constitutive of an identity. So, instead of asking if people saw lesbians for who they really were, we will try to understand the specific epistemic conditions which made some women socially recognizable to others, and also to themselves, as “lesbians.” This use of the concept “intelligibility” is analogous to its use by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, as she explains why gender conformity is key to successful personhood[...].

For Butler, cultural intelligibility is thus an aspect of the social norm, as it corresponds to “a normative ideal.” It is one of the conditions of coherence and continuity requisite for successful personhood. In a similar vein, to say that lesbians in the People’s Republic of Poland were not culturally intelligible is of course not to claim that there were no women engaged in same-sex romantic and erotic relationships—such a conclusion would be absurd, as well as untrue. It is, rather, to suggest that “lesbian” was not a category of personhood available or, for that matter, desirable to many nonheteronormative women. The word was not in common use and it did not signify to them the sort of person they felt they were. Nor was another word readily available, as interlocutors’ frequent periphrases strongly suggest, for example, “I cannot talk to them about this. ... They ... lace up their mouths when any reference is made to this topic” (my emphases).

Interviews conducted with women for the CRUSEV project are filled with pain due to rejection. So are the interviews conducted by Anna Laszuk, whose Dziewczyny, wyjdźcie z szafy (Come Out of the Closet, Girls! 2006 ) was a pioneering collection of herstories which gave voice to non-heteronormative Polish women of different ages, including those who remember the pre-1989 era. Lesbian unintelligibility is arguably a major theme in the collection. The pain caused by the sense of not belonging expressed by many illustrates that being unintelligible can be harmful. At the same time, unintelligibility had some practical advantages. The main among them was relative safety in a profoundly heteronormative society. As long as things went unnamed, a women-loving woman was not in danger of stigmatization or social ostracism.

Basia, born in 1939 and thus the oldest among Laszuk’s interviewees, offers a reassuring narrative in which unintelligibility has a positive valence:

“I cannot say a bad word about my parents. They knew but they did not comment. . . . My parents never asked me personal questions, never exerted any kind of pressure on me to get married. They were people of great culture, very understanding, and they quite simply loved me. They would meet my various girlfriends, but these were never referred to as anything but “friends” (przyjaciółki). Girls had it much easier than boys because intimacy between girls was generally accepted. Nobody was surprised that I showed up with a woman, invited her home, held her hand, or that we went on trips together.” (Laszuk 2006, 27)

The gap between visceral knowing and the impossibility of naming is especially striking in this passage. The parents “knew” and Basia knew that they knew, but they did not comment, ask questions, or make demands, and Basia clearly appreciates their silence as a favour. To her, it was a form of politeness, discreetness, perhaps even protectiveness. The silence was, in fact, a form of affectionate communication: “they quite simply loved me.”

Another of Laszuk’s interviewees is Nina, born around 1945 and 60 years old at the time of the interview. With a certain nostalgia, Nina recalls the days when certain things were left unnamed, suggesting that there is erotic potential in the unintelligibility of women’s desire. Laszuk summarizes her views:

“Nina claims that those times certainly carried a certain charm: erotic relationships between women, veiled with understatement and secrecy, had a lot of beauty to them. Clandestine looks were exchanged above the heads of people who remained unaware of their meaning, as women understood each other with half a gesture, between words. Nowadays, everything has a name, everything is direct.” (Laszuk 2006, 33)

A similar equation between secrecy and eroticism is drawn by the much younger Izabela Filipiak, trailblazing author of Polish feminist fiction in the 1990s and the very first woman in Poland to publicly come out as lesbian, in an interview for the Polish edition of Cosmopolitan in 1998. Six years later, Filipiak suggested a link between things remaining unnamed and erotic pleasure, and admitted to a certain nostalgia for this pre-emancipatory formula of lesbian (non)identity. Her avowed motivation was not the fear of stigmatization but a desire for erotic intensity:

“When love becomes passion in which I lose myself, I stop calculating, stop comparing, no longer anchor it in social relations, or some norm. I simply immerse myself in passion. My feelings condition and justify everything that happens from that point on. I do not reflect upon myself nor dwell on stigma because my feeling is so pure that it burns through and clears away everything that might attach to me as a woman who loves women.” (Kulpa and Warkocki 2004)

Filipiak acknowledges the contemporary, “postmodern” (her word) lesbian identity which requires activism and entails enumerating various kinds of discrimination. But paradoxically—considering that she is the first public lesbian in Poland—she speaks with much more enthusiasm about the “modernist lesbians” described by Baudelaire:

“They chose the path of passion. Secrecy and passion. Of course, their passion becomes a form of consent to remain secret, to stay invisible to others, but this is not unambivalent. I once talked to such an “oldtimer” who lived her entire life in just that way and she protested very strongly when I made a remark about hiding. Because, she says, she did not hide anything, she drove all around the city with her beloved and, of course, everyone knew. Yes, everyone knew, but nobody remembers it now, there is no trace of all that.” (Kulpa and Warkocki 2004)

Cultural unintelligibility causes the gap between “everyone knew” and “nobody remembers” but it is also the source of excitement and pleasure. For Filipiak’s “old-timer” and her predecessors, Baudelaire’s modernist lesbians, the evasion, or rejection, of identity and the maintaining of secrecy is the path of passion. Crucially, these disavowals of identity mobilize a discourse of freedom rather than hiding, entrapment, or staying in the closet. The lack of a name is interpreted as an unmooring from language and a liberation from its norms.

Needless to say, cultural unintelligibility may also lead to profound torment and self-hatred. In the concept of nationhood generated by nationalists and by the Catholic Church in Poland, lesbians (seen stereotypically) are double outsiders whose exclusion from language is vital.[1] A repentant homosexual woman named Katarzyna offers her testimony in a Catholic self-help manual addressing those who wish to be cured of homosexuality. (It is irrelevant for my purpose whether the testimony is authentic; my interest is in the discursive construction of lesbian identity as literally impossible and nonexistent.) Katarzyna speaks about her search for love, her profound sense of guilt and her disgust with herself. The word “lesbian” is never used; her homosexuality is framed as confusion and as straying from her true desire for God. The origin of the pain is the woman’s unintelligibility to herself:

“Only I knew how much despair there was in my life on account of being different. First, there was the sense of being torn apart when I realized how different my desires were from the appearance of my body. Despite the storm of homosexual desire, I was still a woman. Then, the question: What to do with myself? How to live?” (Huk 1996, 121)

A woman cannot love other women—the subject knows this. We can speculate that her knowledge is due to her Catholic upbringing; she has internalized the teaching that homosexuality is a sin, and thus untrue and not real. The logic of the confession is overdetermined: the only way for her to become intelligible to herself is to abandon same-sex desire and turn to God, and through him to men. Church language thus frames homosexuality as chaos: it is a disordered space where no appropriate language can obtain. Within this frame, unintelligibility is anything but erotic. It is rather an instrument of shaming and, once internalized, a symptom of shame.

For many, the experience of unintelligibility is moored in intense heteronormativity, without regard to Church teachings or the language of national belonging. Struggling with the choice between social intelligibility available to straights and leading an authentic life outside the realm of intelligibility, one CRUSEV interlocutor, aged 67, describes her youth in 1960s and 1970s:

“I always knew I was a lesbian ... and if I am one, then I will be one. Yes, in that sense. And not to live the life of a married woman, mother and so on. This life wasn’t my life at all. However, as I said, it was fine in an external sense. So calm and well-ordered: a husband, nice children, everything, everything. But it was external, and my life was not my life at all, it wasn’t me.”

She thus underscores her internal sense of dissonance, a felt incompatibility with the social role she was playing. The role model of a wife and mother was available to her, but a lesbian role model was not.

The discomfort felt at the unavailability of a role model may have had different consequences. Another CRUSEV interviewee, aged 62, describes her impulse to change her life so as to authentically experience her feelings for another woman, in contrast to that woman’s ex:

“She visited me a few times, and it was enough that I wrote something, anything ... [and] she would get on the train and travel across the country. There were no telephones then, during martial law. Regardless of anything, she would be there. And at one point I realized that I ... damn, I loved her. ... She broke up with her previous girlfriend very violently—this may interest you—because it turned out that the girl was so terribly afraid of being exposed and of some unimaginable consequences that she simply ran away.”

The fear of exposure, critically addressed by the interlocutor, was nonetheless something she, too, experienced. She goes on to speak of “hiding a secret” and “stifling” her emotions.

A concern with leading an inauthentic life resurfaces in the account of the afore-quoted woman, aged 67:

“I couldn’t reveal my secret to anyone. The only person who knew was my friend in Cracow. I led such a double life, I mean. ... It is difficult to say if this was a life, because it was as if I had my inner spirituality and my inner world, entirely secret, but outside I behaved like all the other girls, so I went out with some boys. ... It was always deeply suppressed by me and I was always fighting with myself. I mean, I fell in love [with women] and did everything to fall out of love [laughter]. On and on again.”

Her anxiety translates into self-pathologizing behaviour:

“In 1971 I received my high school diploma and I was already . . . in a relationship of some years with my high school girlfriend. . . . But because we both thought we were abnormal, perverted or something, somehow we wanted to be cured, and so she was going to college to Cracow, and I to Poznań. We engaged in geographic therapy, so to speak.”

The desire to “be cured” from homosexuality recurs in a number of interviews. Sometimes it has a factual dimension, as interlocutors describe having undergone psychotherapy and even reparative therapy—of course, to no avail.

Others decide to have a relationship with a woman after years spent in relationships with men. Referring to her female partner of 25 years, who had previously been married to a man, one of my interlocutors suggests that her partner had been disavowing her homosexual desires for many years before the two women’s relationship began: “the truth is that H. had struggled with it for more than 20 years and she was probably not sure what was going on.” Despite this presumed initial confusion, the women’s relationship had already lasted for more than 25 years at the time I conducted the interview.

Recognizing one’s homosexual desires did not necessarily have to be difficult or shocking. It was not for this woman, aged 66 at the time of the interview:

“It was obvious to me. I didn’t, no, no, I didn’t suppress it, I knew that [I was going], “Oh, such a nice girl, I like this one, with this one I want to be close, with that one I want to talk longer, with that one I want to spend time, with that one I want, for example, to embrace her neck or grab her hand”.”

Rather, what came as a shock was the unavailability of any social role or language corresponding to this felt desire that came as a shock. The woman continues:

“It turned out that I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, that I couldn’t tell anyone. I realized this when I grew up and watched my surroundings, family, friends, society. I saw that this topic was not there! If it’s not there, how can I get it out of myself? I wasn’t so brave.”

The tabooization of homosexuality—its unintelligibility—is a recurring thread in these accounts; what varies is the extent to which it marred the subjects’ self-perception.

#lgbtq history #poland #lesbian history #unintelligibility #lesbian unintelligibility #this might be deleted in the future so read it while you can

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flickeringart · 3 years

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Thinking and Feeling - What keeps you civilized?

In order to be able to live in a civilized manner, a person has to align with certain values and standards that enable behavior that doesn’t threaten, disturb or cause disruption in social interactions. The air signs in astrology represents the thinking function, the ability to formulate ideals and communicate with the environment. The air element is the function of deductive reasoning and it allows for a certain detachment from the emotional-physical reality. The thinking function allows us to interact with the world on an intangible level, through sublimating actual experience to conceptual reality. “Communication” is only possible when there’s separation present – where there’s a subject and an object present.

The air element is often referred to as the basis for “civilization”. It is uniquely human; it is what sets us apart from the animals. Without thinking, there are no ideas, no conceptual ideal to strive for. This is not to say that thinking on its own is productive – there needs to be a physical- emotional reality in order for thinking to have something to conceptualize of in the first place. As humans, we are only partly thinking creatures, and we can hardly be said be defined solely by our thoughts. Even though air dominant types might be more justified in basing their identity on their capacity to think and navigating conceptual reality, there is so much going on at a denser, subtler level, a feeling level that might or might not fit into pre-conceived conceptual framework, that might not be understood through concepts.

Thinking is undoubtedly powerful. In a “civilized” society the pen is mightier than the sword, if used skillfully. A lot can be done with a sharp intellect and a quick mind. However, thinking is not responsive, it is a conscious construction. Powerful emotion or overwhelming instinctual reactions are more organic and dynamic. People can hold values and ideals that are perfectly in line with civilized society, but it doesn’t mean that the instinct is ever “tamed” because it can’t be constructed. Thinking can’t hold emotion back and the thinking function can’t ever perfectly define or describe what is felt simply because emotion is subjective and not objective. No person can completely act and behave in accordance with ideas and ideals. Emotions prevent this from happening – they are immediate responses that are personal – not impersonal. This is why, on an intellectual level one can say, “it’s wrong to kill”, but it won’t prevent the person from affectively responding to a situation in a way that results in a killing. Reversely, on an intellectual level one can say, “I have to kill”, but it won’t prevent the emotions from moving in a different direction.

Does thinking really keep us civilized in a real sense then? It seems not; it only creates a façade of civilization, a light façade of connectivity and communion, a light façade of love that stems from detachment from actuality and idealization of potential. The intellectual ideal is impersonal, seemingly more pure than the ambiguous and powerfully primitive emotional response, but in a sense, also inhuman (superhuman?) and inorganic. The thinking function is indispensable, but it is shallow in its own way, less potent and less alive than emotion. Words only have true power in connection to emotion; on their own they are simply tools, empty and dead. Perhaps it is accurate to say that civilization cannot manifest without alignment of the soul and the mind. Thinking can’t control feeling and feeling can’t control thinking, inevitably one is operating separately from the other but they can align. Thinking and feeling are unable to reduce each other to nothing. Thinking doesn’t cancel out feeling and vice versa. Strong emotion might call for intellectual justification socially, yet, since thinking didn’t cause feeling in the first place (at least not consciously), one can only speculate as to what the emotion is or was in response to – why it was so intense and if it was reasonable and so on… In a sense, trying to conceptualize of emotion is like trying to conceptualize of life and it’s never productive because it won’t make the feeling nature be different than it is or prevent it from expressing itself.

Generally speaking, emotions don’t “fit in” socially and societally because they are strictly personal and untamed – often impossible to fit into a conceptual framework that everyone can understand and make sense of. There is no logic behind emotions because they are immediately experienced and are not part of some pre-conceived conceptual construct. In fact, many people find it insulting when others try to make sense of their reactions and responses, to make them fit into a neat intellectual-conceptual “box”. Emotions demands acceptance no matter what – they essentially reflects organic truth rather than conceptual truth. The feeling function is often devalued and deemed “less evolved”, but without it, we would lack deeper “personal truth”.

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On a separate note, albeit connected to the text above,

Some claim that thought creates reality and emotional experience is a direct result of subconscious thought patterns and programming. I believe this is true in the sense that there’s a universal blueprint that is set up for us, however, I don’t think that thought creates reality in our own personal lives in the sense that we can separate ourselves from our personal blueprint (reflected by our birth chart) by “working on ourselves”. It is true that one can become more conscious of components and facets of the psyche, but it’s too presumptuous to believe that one could “change” the self for the better to fit a preferred mold. Some people seem to work well with the “law of attraction”, they are able to positively focus and manifest the personal reality they want. This ability is undoubtedly reflected in the birth chart of these people – optimism, a propensity to believe and receive effortlessly. Not everyone is set up that way, which is quite evident considering the struggles and hardships that people face, despite the effort to look on the bright side of life. Some charts are set up in order for the individual to experience pain and crises in order to discover something of value through the death and rebirth process. This is a valid path, although it might not seem blissful or peaceful in the least. For these types it is not realistic or rewarding to soar on the surface of life.

Take Esther Hicks for example, a famous channel, author and public speaker. She helps people to close the gap between their desires and the manifestation of them. She is channeling a “collective thought stream” (called Abraham) in her talks that is concerned with seeing humanity actualize its desires and dreams. Her chart, as shown below (from astrotheme.com) has a grand fire trine with Jupiter, Venus and Mars. This trine blesses her with a certain fundamental and natural faith in her own ability to receive what she wants from life. Her chart is not void of friction and trouble, but this grand trine has her back when the going gets tough. She would have a natural propensity for generosity and an “abundance mindset” as they call it.

The conjunction of Pluto-Saturn-Mars (all in retrograde which makes the energy experienced internally) in Leo points to a charged desire nature, a concentrated and powerful drive that is, for lack of a better word, ruthless and almost painful. As Mars is the fighter of the personality, this kind of configuration makes me think of an insatiable, prideful yet painfully contained fighter who can’t admit to any personal passions without feeling weakened, but at the same time can’t let go and has to have at all. It makes sense, that a person who helps people to get what they want through mental-emotional alignment would understand the pain and dissatisfaction caused by not being able to control life. The conjunction opposes Mercury, which is interesting since she writes and speaks for a living, or rather speaks for an autonomous “entity” of sorts. She lends her communicative ability to something other than herself. When she channels, she’s not in her Pluto-Saturn-Mars mode. Venus and Jupiter, the two benefics, and Uranus nicely support Mercury. She can convey ideas that are revolutionary and speak of happiness and abundance. It strikes me that when she speaks, she speaks to people with frustrated desires (Mercury opposite Pluto-Saturn-Mars) – it is as if she projects this cluster of energy and experiences it through her audience. I’m sure she avoids identifying with it and meets it through others that she encounters. The Pluto-Saturn-Mars conjunction is highly uncomfortable and the person would likely attempt to work around it in any way possible if the chart allows for it. In Esther’s case, she has a lot to lean on in order to avoid its harshness - the trine certainly helps and the Mercury opposition allows detachment. Nonetheless she meets it in her life because it’s part of her blueprint.

My point with all of this is to illustrate that certain “philosophies” and belief systems come easier to others because of the personal astrological setup and it being backed by experience in accordance with the planets. It always makes sense why a person thinks and feels a certain way from looking at the natal chart. Nobody’s wrong and nobody’s right, there’s only the chart and what it allows for and doesn’t allow for. I do believe that no one can act outside of his or her chart. All paths are ultimately valid from a universal perspective. Work with your own blueprint because that is the only way to live anyway.

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elisaenglish · 3 years

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If the Doors of Perception Were Cleansed

Knowledge is acquired when we succeed in fitting a new experience into the system of concepts based upon our old experiences. Understanding comes when we liberate ourselves from the old and so make possible a direct, unmediated contact with the new, the mystery, moment by moment, of our existence.

The new is given on every level of experience—given perceptions, given emotions and thoughts, given states of unobstructed awareness, given relationships with things and persons. The old is our homemade system of ideas and word patterns. It is the stock of finished articles fabricated out of the given mystery by memory and analytical reasoning, by habit and the automatic associations of accepted notions. Knowledge is primarily a knowledge of these finished articles. Understanding is primarily direct awareness of the raw material.

Knowledge is always in terms of concepts and can be passed on by means of words or other symbols. Understanding is not conceptual, and therefore cannot be passed on. It is an immediate experience, and immediate experience can only be talked about (very inadequately), never shared.

Nobody can actually feel another’s pain or grief, another’s love or joy or hunger. And similarly nobody can experience another’s understanding of a given event or situation. There can, of course, be knowledge of such an understanding and this knowledge may be passed on in speech or writing, or by means of other symbols. Such communicable knowledge is useful as a reminder that there have been specific understandings in the past, and that understanding is at all times possible. But we must always remember that knowledge of understanding is not the same thing as the understanding, which is the raw material of that knowledge. It is as different from understanding as the doctor’s prescription for penicillin is different from penicillin.

Understanding is not inherited, nor can it be laboriously acquired. It is something which when circumstances are favourable, comes to us, so to say, of its own accord. All of us are knowers, all the time; it is only occasionally and in spite of ourselves that we understand the mystery of given reality. Consequently we are very seldom tempted to equate understanding with knowledge. Of the exceptional men and women, who have understanding in every situation, most are intelligent enough to see that understanding is different from knowledge and that conceptual systems based upon past experience are as necessary to the conduct of life as are spontaneous insights into new experiences. For these reasons the mistake of identifying understanding with knowledge is rarely perpetuated and therefore poses no serious problem.

How different is the case with the opposite mistake, the mistake of supposing that knowledge is the same as understanding and interchangeable with it! All adults possess vast stocks of knowledge. Some of it is correct knowledge, some of it is incorrect knowledge, and some of it only looks like knowledge and is neither correct nor incorrect; it is merely meaningless.

That which gives meaning to a proposition is not (to use the words of an eminent contemporary philosopher, Rudolf Carnap) “the attendant images or thoughts, but the possibility of deducing from it perceptive propositions, in other words, the possibility of verification. To give sense to a proposition, the presence of images is not sufficient, it is not even necessary. We have no image of the electromagnetic field, nor even, I should say, of the gravitational field; nevertheless the propositions which physicists assert about these fields have a perfect sense because perceptive propositions are deducible from them.”

Metaphysical doctrines are propositions which cannot be operationally verified, at least on the level of ordinary experience. They may be expressive of a state of mind, in the way that lyrical poetry is expressive; but they have no assignable meaning. The information they convey is only pseudo-knowledge. But the formulators of metaphysical doctrines and the believers in such doctrines have always mistaken this pseudo-knowledge for knowledge and have proceeded to modify their behaviour accordingly.

Meaningless pseudo-knowledge has at all times been one of the principal motivators of individual and collective action. And that is one of the reasons why the course of human history has been so tragic and at the same time so strangely grotesque. Action based upon meaningless pseudo-knowledge is always inappropriate, always beside the point, and consequently always results in the kind of mess mankind has always lived in—the kind of mess that makes the angels weep and the satirists laugh aloud.

Correct or incorrect, relevant or meaningless, knowledge and pseudo-knowledge are as common as dirt and are therefore taken for granted. Understanding, on the contrary, is as rare, very nearly, as emeralds, and so is highly prized. The knowers would dearly love to be understanders; but either their stock of knowledge does not include the knowledge of what to do in order to be understanders; or else they know theoretically what they ought to do, but go on doing the opposite all the same. In either case they cherish the comforting delusion that knowledge and, above all, pseudo-knowledge are understanding. Along with the closely related errors of over-abstraction, over-generalisation, and over-simplification, this is the commonest of all intellectual sins and the most dangerous.

Of the vast sum of human misery about one third, I would guess, is unavoidable misery. This is the price we must pay for being embodied, and for inheriting genes which are subject to deleterious mutations. This is the rent extorted by nature for the privilege of living on the surface of a planet, whose soil is mostly poor, whose climates are capricious and inclement, and whose inhabitants include a countless number of microorganisms capable of causing in human beings themselves, in their domestic animals and cultivated plants, an immense variety of deadly or debilitating diseases.

To these miseries of cosmic origin must be added the much larger group of those avoidable disasters we bring upon ourselves. For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism, and proselytising zeal on behalf of religious or political idols. But zeal, dogmatism, and idealism exist only because we are forever committing intellectual sins. We sin by attributing concrete significance to meaningless pseudo-knowledge; we sin in being too lazy to think in terms of multiple causation and indulging instead in over-simplification, over-generalisation, and over-abstraction; and we sin by cherishing the false but agreeable notion that conceptual knowledge and, above all, conceptual pseudo-knowledge are the same as understanding.

Consider a few obvious examples. The atrocities of organised religion (and organised religion, let us never forget, has done about as much harm as it has done good) are all due, in the last analysis, to “mistaking the pointing finger for the moon”—in other words to mistaking the verbalised notion for the given mystery to which it refers or, more often, only seems to refer. This, as I have said, is one of the original sins of the intellect, and it is a sin in which, with a rationalistic bumptiousness as grotesque as it is distasteful, theologians have systematically wallowed.

From indulgence in this kind of delinquency there has arisen, in most of the great religious traditions of the world, a fantastic over-valuation of words. Over-valuation of words leads all too frequently to the fabrication and idolatrous worship of dogmas, to the insistence on uniformity of belief, the demand for assent by all and sundry to a set of propositions which, though meaningless, are to be regarded as sacred. Those who do not consent to this idolatrous worship of words are to be “converted” and, if that should prove impossible, either persecuted or, if the dogmatisers lack political power, ostracised and denounced.

Immediate experience of reality unites humanity. Conceptualised beliefs, including even the belief in a God of love and righteousness, divides them and, as the dismal record of religious history bears witness, sets them for centuries on end at each other’s throats.

Over-simplification, over-generalisation, and over-abstraction are three other sins closely related to the sin of imagining that knowledge and pseudo-knowledge are the same as understanding. The over-generalising over-simplifier is the person who asserts, without producing evidence, that “All X’s are Y,” or, “All A’s have a single cause, which is B.” The over-abstracter is the one who cannot be bothered to deal with Jones and Smith, with Jane and Mary, as individuals, but enjoys being eloquent on the subject of Humanity, of Progress, of God and History and the Future. This brand of intellectual delinquency is indulged in by every demagogue, every crusader.

In the Middle Ages the favourite over-generalisation was “All infidels are damned.” (For the Muslims, “all infidels” meant “all Christians;” for the Christians, “all Muslims.”) Almost as popular was the nonsensical proposition. “All heretics are inspired by the devil” and “All eccentric old women are witches.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the wars and persecutions were justified by the luminously clear and simple belief that “All Roman Catholics (or if you happened to be on the Pope’s side, all Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans) are God’s enemies.”

In our own day Hitler proclaimed that all the ills of the world had one cause, namely Jews, and that all Jews were subhuman enemies of humanity. For the Communists, all the ills of the world have one cause, namely capitalists, and all capitalists and their middle-class supporters are subhuman enemies of humanity. It is perfectly obvious, on the face of it, that none of these over-generalised statements can possibly be true. But the urge to intellectual sin is fearfully strong. All are subject to temptation and few are able to resist.

There are in the lives of human beings very many situations in which only knowledge, conceptualised, accumulated, and passed on by means of words, is of any practical use. For example, if I want to manufacture sulfuric acid or to keep accounts for a banker, I do not start at the beginnings of chemistry or economics; I start at what is now the end of these sciences. In other words, I go to a school where the relevant knowledge is taught, I read books in which the accumulation of past experience in these particular fields are set forth. I can learn the functions of an accountant or a chemical engineer on the basis of knowledge alone.

For this particular purpose it is not necessary for me to have much understanding of concrete situations as they arise, moment by moment from the depths of the given mystery of our existence. What is important for me as a professional person is that I should be familiar with all the conceptual knowledge in my field. Ours is an industrial civilisation, in which no society can prosper unless it possesses an elite of highly trained scientists and a considerable army of engineers and technicians. The possession and wide dissemination of a great deal of correct, specialised knowledge has become a prime condition of national survival.

There is no substitute for correct knowledge and in the process of acquiring correct knowledge there is no substitute for concentration and prolonged practice. Except for the unusually gifted, learning, by whatever method, must always be hard work. Unfortunately there are many professional educationists who seem to think that children should never be required to work hard. Wherever educational methods are based on this assumption, children will not in fact acquire much knowledge; and if the methods are followed for a generation or two, the society which tolerates them will find itself in full decline.

In theory, deficiencies in knowledge can be made good simply by changing the curriculum. In practice a change in the curriculum will do little good, unless there is a corresponding change in the point of view of professional educationists. For the trouble with American educationists, writes a distinguished member of their profession, Dr. H. L. Dodge, is that they “regard any subject from personal grooming to philosophy as equally important or interchangeable in furthering the process of self-realisation. This anarchy of values has led to the displacement of the established disciplines of science and the humanities by these new subjects.”

Whether professional educationists can be induced to change their current attitudes is uncertain. Should it prove impossible, we must fall back on the comforting thought that time never stands still and that nobody is immortal. What persuasion and the threat of national decline fail to accomplish, retirement, high blood pressure, and death will bring to pass, more slowly, it is true, but much more surely.

The dissemination of correct knowledge is one of the essential functions of education, and we neglect it at our peril. But, obviously, education should be more than a device for passing on correct knowledge. It should also teach what Dewey called life adjustment and self-realisation. But precisely how should self-realisation and life adjustment be promoted? To this question modern educators have given many answers. Most of these answers belong to one or other of two main educational families, the Progressive and the Classical. Answers of the Progressive type find expression in the provision of courses in such subjects as “family living, consumer economics, job information, physical and mental health, training for world citizenship and statesmanship, and last, and we are afraid least” (I quote again the words of Dr. Dodge) “training in fundamentals.”

Where answers of the classical type are preferred, educators provide courses in Latin, Greek, modern European literature, in world history and in philosophy—exclusively, for some odd reason, of the Western brand. Shakespeare and Chaucer, Virgil and Homer—how far away they seem, how irrevocably dead! Why, then, should we bother to teach the classics? The reasons have been stated a thousand times, but seldom with more force and lucidity than by Albert Jay Nock in his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man:

“The literatures of Greece and Rome provide the longest, the most complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange creature homo sapiens has been busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. Hence the mind that has canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind; it is an experienced mind. It has come, as Emerson says, into a feeling of immense longevity, and it instinctively views contemporary man and his doings in the perspective set by this profound and weighty experience.

Our studies were properly called formative, because, beyond all others, their effect was powerfully maturing. Cicero told the unvarnished truth in saying that those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must for ever remain children. And if one wished to characterise the collective mind of this period, or indeed of any period, the use it makes of its powers of observation, reflection, logical inference, one would best do it by the word ‘immaturity’.”

The Progressive and the Classical approaches to education are not incompatible. It is perfectly possible to combine a schooling in the local cultural tradition with a training, half-vocational, half-psychological, in adaptation to the current conventions of social life, and then to combine this combination with training in the sciences. In other words with the inculcation of correct knowledge. But is this enough? Can such an education result in the self-realisation which is its aim? The question deserves our closest scrutiny.

Nobody, of course, can doubt the importance of accumulated experience as a guide for individual and social conduct. We are human because, at a very early stage in the history of the species, our ancestors discovered a way of preserving and disseminating the results of experience. They learned to speak and were thus enabled to translate what they had perceived, what they had inferred from given fact and home-grown fantasy, into a set of concepts, which could be added to by each generation and bequeathed, a treasure of mingled sense and nonsense, to posterity. In Mr. Nock��s words “the mind that has canvassed this record is an experienced mind.”

The only trouble, so far as we are concerned, is that the vicarious experience derived from a study of the classics is, in certain respects, completely irrelevant to twentieth-century facts. In many ways, of course, the modern world resembles the world inhabited by the people of antiquity. In many other ways, however, it is radically different.

For example, in their world the rate of change was exceedingly slow; in ours advancing technology produces a state of chronic revolution. They took infanticide for granted (Thebes was the only Greek city which forbade the exposure of babies) and regarded slavery as not only necessary to the Greek way of life, but as intrinsically natural and right; we are the heirs of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century humanitarianism and must solve our economic and demographic problems by methods less dreadfully reminiscent of recent totalitarian practice.

Because all the dirty work was done by slaves, they regarded every form of manual activity as essentially unworthy of a gentleman and in consequence never subjected their over-abstract, over-rational theories to the test of experiment; we have learned, or at least are learning, to think operationally. They despised “barbarians,” never bothered to learn a foreign language, and could therefore naively regard the rules of Greek grammar and syntax as the Laws of Thought; we have begun to understand the nature of language, the danger of taking words too seriously, the ever present need for linguistic analysis. They knew nothing about the past and therefore, in Cicero’s words, were like children. (Thucydides, the greatest historian of antiquity, prefaces his account of the Peloponnesian War by airily asserting that nothing of great importance had happened before his own time.)

We, in the course of the last five generations, have acquired a knowledge of humanity’s past extending back to more than half a million years and covering the activities of tribes and nations in every continent. They developed political institutions which, in the case of Greece, were hopelessly unstable and, in the case of Rome, were only too firmly fixed in a pattern of aggressiveness and brutality; but what we need is a few hints on the art of creating an entirely new kind of society, durable but adventurous, strong but humane, highly organised but liberty-loving, elastic, and adaptable. In this matter Greece and Rome can teach us only negatively—by demonstrating, in their divergent ways, what not to do.

From all this it is clear that a classical education in the humanities of two thousand years ago requires to be supplemented by some kind of training in the humanities of today and tomorrow. The Progressives profess to give such a training; but surely we need something a little more informative, a little more useful in the vertiginously changing world of ours, than courses in present-day consumer economics and current job information.

But even if a completely adequate schooling in the humanities of the past, the present, and the foreseeable future could be devised and made available to all, would the aims of education, as distinct from factual and theoretical instruction, be thereby achieved? Would the recipients of such an education be any nearer to the goal of self-realisation?

The answer, I am afraid, is, No. For at this point we find ourselves confronted by one of those paradoxes, which are of the very essence of our strange existence as amphibians inhabiting, without being completely at home in, half a dozen almost incommensurable worlds—the world of concepts and the world of data, the objective world and the subjective, the world of personal consciousness and the world of the unconscious.

Where education is concerned, the paradox may be expressed in the statement that the medium of education, which is language, is absolutely necessary, but also fatal; the subject matter of education, which is conceptualised accumulation of past experience, is indispensable, but also an obstacle to be circumvented. “Existence is prior to essence.” Unlike most metaphysical propositions, this slogan of the existentialists can actually be verified.

“Wolf children,” adopted by animal mothers and brought up in animal surroundings, have the form of human beings, but are not human. The essence of humanity, it is evident, is not something we are born with; it is something we make or grow into. We learn to speak, we accumulate conceptualised knowledge and pseudo-knowledge, we imitate our elders, we build up fixed patterns of thought and feeling and behaviour, and in the process we become human, we turn into persons.

But the things which make us human are precisely the things which interfere with self-realisation and prevent understanding. We are humanised by imitating others, by learning their speech, and by acquiring the accumulated knowledge which language makes available. But we understand only when, by liberating ourselves from the tyranny of words, conditioned reflexes, and social conventions, we establish direct, unmediated contact with experience.

The greatest paradox of our existence consists in this: that in order to understand, we must first encumber ourselves with all the intellectual and emotional baggage, which is an impediment to understanding. Except in a dim, preconscious way, animals do not understand a situation, even though, by inherited instinct or by an ad hoc act of intelligence, they may be reacting to it with complete appropriateness, as though they understood it.

Conscious understanding is the privilege of men and women, and it is a privilege which they have earned, strangely enough, by acquiring the useful or delinquent habits, the stereotypes of perception, thought, and feeling, the rituals of behaviour, the stock of second-hand knowledge and pseudo-knowledge, whose possession is the greatest obstacle to understanding. “Learning,” says Lao-Tzu, “consists in adding to one’s stock day by day. The practice of the Tao consists in subtracting.”

This does not mean, of course, that we can live by subtraction alone. Learning is as necessary as unlearning. Wherever technical proficiency is needed, learning is indispensable. From youth to old age, from generation to generation, we must go on adding to our stock of useful and relevant knowledge. Only in this way can we hope to deal effectively with the physical environment and with the abstract ideas which make it possible for people to find their way through the complexities of civilisation and technology.

But this is not the right way to deal with our personal reactions to ourselves or to other human beings. In such situations there must be an unlearning of accumulated concepts; we must respond to each new challenge not with our old conditioning, not in the light of conceptual knowledge based on the memory of past and different events, not by consulting the law of averages, but with a consciousness stripped naked and as though new born.

Once more we are confronted by the great paradox of human life. It is our conditioning which develops our consciousness; but in order to make full use of this developed consciousness, we must start by getting rid of the conditioning which developed it. By adding conceptual knowledge to conceptual knowledge, we make conscious understanding possible; but this potential understanding can be actualised only when we have subtracted all that we have added.

It is because we have memories that we are convinced of our self-identity as persons and as members of a given society.

“The child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.”

What Wordsworth called “natural piety” a teacher of understanding would describe as indulgence in emotionally charged memories, associated with childhood and youth. Factual memory—the memory, for example, of the best way of making sulphuric acid or of casting up accounts—is an unmixed blessing. The psychological memory (to use Krishnamurti’s term), memory carrying an emotional charge, whether positive or negative, is a source at the worst of neurosis and insanity (psychiatry is largely the art of ridding patients of the incubus of their negatively charged memories), at the best of distractions from the task of understanding—distractions which, though socially useful, are none the less obstacles to be climbed over or avoided.

Emotionally charged memories cement the ties of family life (or sometimes make family life impossible!) and serve, when conceptualised and taught as a cultural tradition, to hold communities together. On the level of understanding, on the level of charity, and on the level, to some extent, of artistic expression, individuals have it within their power to transcend their social tradition, to overstep the bounds of the culture in which they have been brought up. On the level of knowledge, manners, and custom, they can never get very far away from the persona created for them by their family and society.

The culture within which they live is a prison—but a prison which makes it possible for any prisoner who so desires to achieve freedom, a prison to which, for this and a host of other reasons, its inmates owe an enormous debt of gratitude and loyalty. But though it is our duty to “honour our father and our mother,” it is also our duty “to hate our father and mother, our brethren and our sisters, yes and our own life”—that socially conditioned life we take for granted. Though it is necessary for us to add to our cultural stock day by day, it is also necessary to subtract and subtract. There is, to quote the title of Simone Weil’s posthumous essay, a great “Need for Roots”; but there is an equally urgent need, on occasion, for total rootlessness.

In our present context this book by Simone Weil and the preface which Mr. T.S. Eliot contributes to the English edition are particularly instructive. Simone Weil was a woman of great ability, heroic virtue, and boundless spiritual aspiration. But unfortunately for herself, as well as for her readers, she was weighed down by a burden of knowledge and pseudo-knowledge, which her own almost maniacal over-valuation of words and notions rendered intolerably heavy.

A clerical friend reports of her that he did not “ever remember Simone Weil, in spite of her virtuous desire for objectivity, give way in the course of a discussion.” She was so deeply rooted in her culture that she came to believe that words were supremely important. Hence her love of argument and the obstinacy with which she clung to her opinions. Hence too her strange inability, on so many occasions, to distinguish the pointing finger from the indicated moon. “But why do you prate of God?” Meister Eckhart asked; and out of the depth of his understanding of given reality, he added, “Whatever you say of Him is untrue.” Necessarily so; for “the saving truth was never preached by the Buddha,” or by anyone else.

Truth can be defined in many ways. But if you define it as understanding (and this is how all the masters of the spiritual life have defined it), then it is clear that “Truth must be lived and there is nothing to argue about in this teaching; any arguing is sure to go against the intent of it.” This was something which Emerson knew and consistently acted upon. To the almost frenzied exasperation of that pugnacious manipulator of religious notions, the elder Henry James, he refused to argue about anything.

And the same was true of William Law. “Away, then, with the fictions and workings of discursive reason, either for or against Christianity! They are only the wanton spirit of the mind, whilst ignorant of God and insensible of its own nature and condition... For neither God, nor heaven, nor hell, nor the devil, nor the flesh, can be any other way knowable in you or by you, but by their own existence and manifestation in you. And any pretended knowledge of any of those things, beyond and without this self-evident sensibility of their birth within you, is only such knowledge of them as the blind man hath of the light that has never entered into him.”

This does not mean, of course, that discursive reason and argument are without value. Where knowledge is concerned, they are not only valuable; they are indispensable. But knowledge is not the same thing as understanding. If we want to understand, we must uproot ourselves from our culture, bypass language, get rid of emotionally charged memories, hate our fathers and mothers, subtract and subtract from our stock of notions. “Needs must it be a virgin,” writes Meister Eckhart, “by whom Jesus is received. Virgin, in other words, is a person, void of alien images, free as he was when he existed not.”

Simone Weil must have known, theoretically, about this need for cultural virginity, of total rootlessness. But, alas, she was too deeply embedded in her own and other people’s ideas, too superstitious a believer in the magic of the words she handled with so much skill, to be able to act upon this knowledge. “The food,” she wrote, “that a collectivity supplies to those who form part of it has no equivalent in the universe” (Thank God! we may add, after sniffing the spiritual nourishment provided by many of the vanished collectivities of the past.) Furthermore, the food provided by a collectivity is food “not only for the souls of the living, but also for souls yet unborn.”

Finally, “the collectivity constitutes the sole agency for preserving the spiritual treasures accumulated by the dead, the sole transmitting agency by means of which the dead can speak to the living. And the sole earthly reality which is connected with the eternal destiny of man is the irradiating light of those who have managed to become fully conscious of this destiny, transmitted from generation to generation.”

This last sentence could only have been penned by one who systematically mistook knowledge for understanding, home-made concepts for given reality. It is, of course, desirable that there should be knowledge of what people now dead have said about their understanding of reality. But to maintain that a knowledge of other people’s understanding is the same, for us, as understanding, or can even directly lead us to understanding, is a mistake against which all the masters of the spiritual life have always warned us. The letter in St. Paul’s phrase, is full of “oldness.” It has therefore no relevance to the ever novel reality, which can be understood only in the “newness of the spirit.” As for the dead, let them bury their dead. For even the most exalted past seers and avatars “never taught the saving truth.”

We should not, it goes without saying, neglect the records of dead people’s understandings. On the contrary, we ought to know all about them. But we must know all about them without taking them too seriously. We must know all about them, while remaining acutely aware that such knowledge is not the same as understanding and that understanding will come to us only when we have subtracted what we know and made ourselves void and virgin, free as we were when we were not.

Turning from the body of the book to the preface, we find an even more striking example of that literally preposterous over-valuation of words and notions, to which the cultured and the learned are so fatally prone. “I do not know,” Mr. Eliot writes, “whether she [Simone Weil] could read the Upanishads in Sanskrit—or, if so, how great was her mastery of what is not only a highly developed language, but a way of thought, the difficulties of which become more formidable to a European student the more diligently he applies himself to it.”

But like all the other great works of oriental philosophy, the Upanishads are not systems of pure speculation, in which the niceties of language are all important. They were written by Transcendental Pragmatists, as we may call them, whose concern was to teach a doctrine which could be made to “work,” a metaphysical theory which could be operationally tested, not through perception only, but by a direct experience of the whole person on the every level of being.

To understand the meaning of tat tvam asi, “thou art That,” it is not necessary to be a profound Sanskrit scholar. (Similarly, it is not necessary to be a proud Hebrew scholar in order to understand the meaning of “Thou shalt not kill.”) Understanding of the doctrine (as opposed to conceptualised knowledge about the doctrine) will come only to those who choose to perform the operations that permit tat tvam asi to become a given fact of direct, unmediated experience, or in Law’s words, “A self-evident sensibility of its birth within them.”

Did Simone Weil know Sanskrit or didn’t she? The question is entirely beside the piont—is just a particularly smelly cultural red herring dragged across the trail that leads from selfhood to more-than-selfhood, from notionally conditioned ego or unconditioned spirit. In relation to the Upanishads or any other work of Hindu or Buddhist philosophy, only one question deserves to be taken with complete seriousness. It is this. How can a form of words, Tat tvam asi, a metaphysical proposition such as Nirvana and samsara are one, be converted into the direct, unmediated experience of a given fact? How can language and the learned foolery of scholars (for, in the vital context, that is all it is) be circumvented, so that the individual soul may finally understand the That which, in spite of all its efforts to deny the primordial fact, is identical with the thou?

Specifically, should we follow the methods inculcated by Patanjali, or those of the Hinayana monks, those of the Tantrics of northern India and Tibet, those of the Far Eastern Taoists or the followers of Zen, those described by St. John of the Cross and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing? If the European Student wishes to remain shut up in the prison of his or her private cravings and the thought patterns inherited from their predecessors, then by all means let them plunge through Sanskit, or Pali, or Chinese, or Tibetan, into the verbal study of “a way of thought, the difficulties of which become more formidable the more diligently they apply themselves to it.”

If, on the other hand, they wish to transcend themselves by actually understanding the primordial fact described or hinted at in the Upanishads and the other scriptures of what, for lack of a better phrase, we will call “spiritual religion,” then they must ignore the problems of language and speculative philosophy, or at least relegate them to a secondary position, and concentrate their attention on the practical means whereby the advance from knowledge to understanding may best be made.

From the positively charged collective memories, which are organised into a cultural or religious tradition, let us now return to the positively charged private memories, which individuals organise into a system of “natural piety.” We have no more right to wallow in natural piety—that is to say, in emotionally charged memories of past happiness and vanished loves—than to bemoan earlier miseries and torment ourselves with remorse for old offences.

And we have no more right to waste the present instant in relishing future and entirely hypothetical pleasures than to waste it in the apprehension of possible disasters to come. “There is no greater pain,” says Dante, “than, in misery, to remember happy times.” “Then stop remembering happy times and accept the fact of your present misery,” would be the seemingly unsympathetic answer of all those who have had understanding. The emptying of memory is classed by St. John of the Cross as a good second only to the state of union with God, and an indispensable condition of such union.

The word Buddha may be translated as “awakened.” Those who merely know about things, or only think they know, live in a state of self-conditioned and culturally conditional somnambulism. Those who understand given reality as it presents itself, moment by moment, are wide awake. Memory charged with pleasant emotions is a soporific or, more accurately, an inducer of trance.

This was discovered empirically by an American hypnotist, Dr. W.B. Fahnestock, whose book Statuvolism, or Artificial Somnambulism, was published in 1871. “When persons are desirous of entering into this state [of artificial somnambulism], I place them in a chair, where they may be at perfect ease. They are next instructed to throw their minds to some familiar place—it matters not where, so that they have been there before and seem desirous of going there again, even in thought. When they have thrown the mind to the place, or upon the desired object, I endeavour by speaking to them frequently to keep their mind upon it... This must be persisted in for some time.” In the end, “clairvoyancy will be induced.”

Anyone who has experimented with hypnosis, or who has watched an experienced operator inducing trance in a difficult subject, knows how effective Fahnestock’s method can be. Incidentally, the relaxing power of positively charged memory was rediscovered, in another medical context, by an oculist, Dr. W. H. Bates, who used to make his patients cover their eyes and revisit in memory the scenes of their happiest experiences. By this means muscular and mental tensions were reduced and it became possible for the patients to use their eyes and minds in a relaxed and therefore efficient way.

From all this it is clear that, while positively charged memories can and should be used for specific therapeutic purposes, there must be no indiscriminate indulgence in “natural piety”; for such indulgence may result in a condition akin to trance—a condition at the opposite pole from the wakefulness that is understanding. Those who live with unpleasant memories become neurotic and those who live with pleasant ones become somnambulistic. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof—and the good thereof.

The Muses, in Greek mythology, were the daughters of Memory, and every writer is embarked, like Marcel Proust, on a hopeless search for time lost. But a good writer is one who knows how to “donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.” [To give a purer sense to words of tribulation.] Thanks to this purer sense, his readers will react to his words with a degree of understanding much greater than they would have had, if they had reacted, in their ordinary self-conditioned or culture-conditioned way, to the event to which the words refer.

Great poets must do too much remembering to be more than a sporadic understander; but they know how to express themselves in words which cause other people to understand. Time lost can never be regained; but in their search for it, they may reveal to their readers glimpses of timeless reality.

Unlike the poet, the mystic is “a son of time present.” “Past and present veil God from our sight,” says Jalal-uddin Rumi, who was a Sufi first and only secondarily a great poet. “Burn up both of them with fire. How long will you let yourself be partitioned by these segments like a reed? So long as it remains partitioned, a reed is not privy to secrets, neither is it vocal in response to lips or breathing.” Along with its mirror image in anticipation, emotionally charged memory is a barrier that shuts us out from understanding.

Natural piety can very easily be transformed into artificial piety; for some emotionally charged memories are common to all the members of a given society and lend themselves to being organised into religious, political, or cultural traditions. These traditions are systematically drummed into the young of each successive generation and play an important part in the long drama of their conditioning for citizenship.

Since the memories common to one group are different from the memories shared by other groups, the social solidarity created by tradition is always partial and exclusive. There is natural and artificial piety in relation to everything belonging to us, coupled with suspicion, dislike, and contempt in relation to everything belonging to them.

Artificial piety may be fabricated, organised, and fostered in two ways—by the repetition of verbal formulas of belief and worship, and by the performance of symbolic acts and rituals. As might be expected, the second is the more effective method.

What is the easiest way for a sceptic to achieve faith? The question was answered three hundred years ago by Pascal. The unbeliever must act “as though he believed, take holy water, have masses said, etc. This will naturally cause you to believe and will besot you.” (Cela vous abetira—literally, will make you stupid.) We have to be made stupid, insists Professor Jacques Chevalier, defending his hero against the critics who have been shocked by Pascal’s blunt language; we have to stultify our intelligence, because “intellectual pride deprives us of God and debases us to the level of animals.” Which is, of course, perfectly true. But it does not follow from this truth that we ought to besot ourselves in the manner prescribed by Pascal and all the propagandists of all the religions.

Intellectual pride can be cured only by devaluating pretentious words, only by getting rid of conceptualised pseudo-knowledge and opening ourselves to reality. Artificial piety based on conditioned reflexes merely transfers intellectual pride from the bumptious individual to his even more bumptious church. At one remove, the pride remains intact. For the convinced believer, understanding or direct contact with reality is exceedingly difficult. Moreover the mere fact of having a strong reverential feeling about some hallowed thing, person, or proposition is no guarantee of the existence of the thing, the infallibility of the person, or the truth of the proposition.

In this context, how instructive is the account of an experiment undertaken by that most imaginative and versatile of the eminent Victorians, Sir Francis Galton! The aim of the experiment, he writes in his autobiography, was to “gain an insight into the abject feelings of barbarians and others concerning the power of images which they know to be of human handiwork. I wanted if possible to enter into these feelings...

“It was difficult to find a suitable object for trial, because it ought to be in itself quite unfitted to arouse devout feelings. I fixed on a comic picture, it was that of Punch, and made believe in its possession of divine attributes. I addressed it with much quasi-reverence as possessing a mighty power to reward or punish the behaviour of men towards it, and found little difficulty in ignoring the impossibilities of what I professed. The experiment succeeded. I began to feel and long retained for the picture a large share of the feelings that a barbarian entertains towards his idols, and learned to appreciate the enormous potency they might have over him.”

The nature of a conditioned reflex is such that, when the bell rings, the dog salivates, when the much worshipped image is seen, or the much repeated credo, litany, or mantram is pronounced, the heart of the believer is filled with reverence and his mind with faith. And this happens, regardless of the content of the phrase repeated, the nature of the image to which obeisance has been made. The person is not responding spontaneously to given reality; he or she is responding to some thing, or word, or gesture, which automatically brings into play a previously installed post-hypnotic suggestion.

Meister Eckhart, that acutest of religious psychologists, clearly recognised this fact. “He who fondly imagines to get more of God in thoughts, prayers, pious offices and so forth than by the fireside or in the stall, in sooth he does but take God, as it were, and swaddle His head in a cloak and hide Him under the table. For he who seeks God in settled forms lays hold of the form, while missing the God concealed in it. But he who seeks God in no special guise lays hold of Him as He is in Himself, and such an one lives with the Son and is the life itself.”

“If you look for the Buddha, you will not see the Buddha.” “If you deliberately try to become a Buddha, your Buddha is samsara.” “If a person seeks the Tao, that person loses the Tao.” “By intending to bring yourself into accord with Suchness, you instantly deviate.” “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it.”

There is a Law of Reversed Effort. The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed. Proficiency and the results of proficiency come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of simultaneously doing and not doing, of combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent Unknown Quantity may take hold.

We cannot make ourselves understand; the most we can do is to foster a state of mind in which understanding may come to us. What is this state? Clearly it is not any state of limited consciousness. Reality as it is given moment by moment cannot be understood by a mind acting in obedience to post-hypnotic suggestion, or so deconditioned by its emotionally charged memories that it responds to the living now as though it were the dead then. Nor is the mind that has been trained in concentration any better equipped to understand reality. For concentration is merely systematic exclusion, the shutting away from consciousness of all but one thought, one ideal, one image, or one negation of all thoughts, ideals, and images.

But however true, however lofty, however holy, no thought or ideal or image can contain reality or lead to the understanding of reality. Nor can the negation of awareness result in that completer awareness necessary to understanding. At the best these things can lead only to a state of ecstatic dissociation in which one particular aspect of reality, the so-called “spiritual” aspect, may be apprehended. If reality is to be understood in its fullness, as it is given moment by moment, there must be an awareness which is not limited, either deliberately by piety or concentration, or involuntarily by mere thoughtlessness and the force of habit.

Understanding comes when we are totally aware—aware to the limits of our mental and physical potentialities. This, of course, is a very ancient doctrine. “Know thyself” is a piece of advice which is as old as civilisation, and probably a great deal older. To follow that advice a person must do more than indulge in introspection.

If I would know myself, I must know my environment; for as a body, I am part of the environment, a natural object among other natural objects; and, as a mind, I consist to a great extent of my immediate reactions to the environment and of my secondary reactions to those primary reactions. In practice “know thyself” is a call to total awareness. To those who practice it, what does total awareness reveal? It reveals, first of all, the limitations of the thing which each of us calls “I,” and the enormity, the utter absurdity of its pretensions.

“I am the master of my fate,” poor Henley wrote at the end of a celebrated morsel of rhetoric, “I am the captain of my soul.” Nothing could be further from the truth. My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, direct. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger—a passenger who is not sufficiently important to sit at the captain’s table and does not know, even by report, what the soul-ship looks like, how it works, or where it is going.

Total awareness starts, in a word, with the realisation of my ignorance and my impotence. How do electrochemical events in my brain turn into the perception of a quartet by Haydn or a thought, let us say, of Joan of Arc? I haven’t the faintest idea—nor has anyone else. Or consider a seemingly much simpler problem. Can I lift my right hand? The answer is, No, I can’t. I can only give the order; the actual lifting is done by somebody else. Who? I don’t know. Why? I don’t know. And when I have eaten, who digests the bread and cheese? When I have cut myself, who heals the wound? While I am sleeping, who restores the tired body to strength, the neurotic mind to sanity?

All I can say is that “I” cannot do any of these things. The catalogue of what I do not know and am incapable of achieving could be lengthened almost indefinitely. Even my claim to think is only partially justified by the observable facts. Descartes’ primal certainty, “I think, therefore I am,” turns out, on closer examination, to be most dubious proposition. In actual fact, is it I who does the thinking? Would it not be truer to say, “Thoughts come into existence, and sometimes I am aware of them”? Language, that treasure house of fossil observations and latent philosophy, suggests that this is in fact what happens.

Whenever I find myself thinking more than ordinarily well, I am apt to say, “An idea has occurred to me,” or “It came into my head,” or, “I see it clearly.” In each case the phrase implies that thoughts have their origin “out there,” in something analogous, on the mental level, to the external world. Total awareness confirms the hints of idiomatic speech. In relation to the subjective “I,” most of the mind is out there. My thoughts are a set of mental, but still external facts. I do not invent my best thoughts; I find them.

Total awareness, then, reveals the following facts; that I am profoundly ignorant, that I am impotent to the point of helplessness, and that the most valuable elements in my personality are unknown quantities existing “out there,” as mental objects more or less completely independent of my control. This discovery may seem at first rather humiliating and even depressing. But if I whole-heartedly accept them, the facts become a source of peace, a reason for serenity and cheerfulness.

I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied, but alive and kicking. In spite of everything, I survive, I get by, sometime I even get on. From these two sets of facts—my survival on the one hand and my ignorance and impotence on the other—I can only infer that the not-I, which looks after my body and gives me my best ideas, must be amazingly intelligent, knowledgeable, and strong.

As a self-centered ego, I do my best to interfere with the beneficent workings of this not-I. But in spite of my likes and dislikes, in spite of my malice, my infatuations, my gnawing anxieties, in spite of all my over-valuation of words, in spite of my self-stultifying insistence on living, not in present reality, but in memory and anticipation, this not-I, with whom I am associated, sustains me, preserves me, gives me a long succession of second chances.

We know very little and can achieve very little; but we are at liberty, if we so choose, to co-operate with a greater power and a completer knowledge, an unknown quantity at once immanent and transcendent, at once physical and mental, at once subjective and objective. If we co-operate, we shall be all right, even if the worst should happen. If we refuse to co-operate, we shall be all wrong, even in the most propitious of circumstances.

These conclusions are only the first fruits of total awareness. Yet richer harvests are to follow. In my ignorance I am sure that I am eternally I. This conviction is rooted in emotionally charged memory. Only when, in the words of St. John of the Cross, the memory has been emptied, can I escape from the sense of my watertight separateness and so prepare myself for the understanding, moment by moment, of reality on all its levels. But the memory cannot be emptied by an act of will, or by systematic discipline or by concentration—even by concentration on the idea of emptiness. It can be emptied only total awareness.

Thus, if I am aware of my distractions—which are mostly emotionally charged memories or fantasies based upon such memories—the mental whirligig will automatically come to a stop and the memory will be emptied, at least for a moment or two. Again, if I become totally aware of my envy, my resentment, my uncharitableness, these feelings will be replaced, during the time of my awareness, by a more realistic reaction to the events taking place around me. My awareness, of course, must be uncontaminated by approval or condemnation.

Value judgments are conditioned, verbalised reactions to primary reactions. Total awareness is a primary, choiceless, impartial response to the present situation as a whole. There are in it no limiting conditioned reactions to the primary reaction, to the pure cognitive apprehension of the situation. If memories of verbal formulas of praise or blame should make their appearance in consciousness, they are to be examined impartially as any other datum is examined.

Professional moralists have confidence in the surface will, believe in punishments and rewards, and are adrenaline addicts who like nothing better than a good orgy of righteous indignation. The masters of the spiritual life have little faith in the surface will or the utility, for their particular purposes, of rewards or punishments, and do not indulge in righteous indignation. Experience has taught them that the highest good can never, in the very nature of things, be achieved by moralising. “Judge not that ye be not judged” is their watchword and total awareness is their method.

Two or three thousand years behind the times, a few psychiatrists have now discovered this method. “Socrates,” writes Professor Carl Rogers, “developed novel ideas, which have proven to be socially constructive.”

Why? Because he was “notably non-defensive and open to experience. The reasoning behind this is based primarily upon the discovery in psychotherapy that if we can add to the sensory and visceral experiencing, characteristic of the whole animal kingdom, the gist of a free undistorted awareness, of which only the human animal seems fully capable, we have an organism which is as aware of the demands of the culture as it is of its own physiological demands for food and sex, which is just as aware of its desire for friendly relationships as it is aware of its desire to aggrandise itself; which is just as aware of its delicate and sensitive tenderness toward others as it is of its hostilities toward others. When man is less than fully man, when he denies to awareness various aspects of his experience, then indeed we have all too often reason to fear him and his behaviour, as the present world situation testifies. But when he is most fully man, when he is his complete organism, when awareness of experience, that peculiarly human attribute, is fully operating, then his behavior is to be trusted.”

Better late than never! It is comforting to find the immemorial commonplaces of mystical wisdom turning up as a brand new discovery in psychotherapy. Gnosce teipsum—know yourself. Know yourself in relation to your overt intentions and your hidden motives, in relation to your thinking, your physical functioning, and to those greater notselves, who see to it that, despite all the ego’s attempts at sabotage, the thinking shall be tolerably relevant and the functioning not too abnormal.

Be totally aware of what you do and think and of person, which whom you are in relationship, the events which prompt you at every moment of your existence. Be aware impartially, realistically, without judging, without reacting in terms of remembered words to your present cognitive reactions.

If you do this, the memory will be emptied, knowledge and pseudo-knowledge will be relegated to their proper place, and you will have understanding—in other words, you will be in direct contact with reality at every instance. Better still, you will discover what Carl Rogers calls your “delicate and sensitive tenderness towards others.” And not only your tenderness, the cosmic tenderness, the fundamental all-rightness of the universe—in spite of death, in spite of suffering.

“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” [Job13.15] This is the utterance of someone who is totally aware. And another such utterance is “God of love.” From the standpoint of common sense, the first is the raving of a lunatic, the second flies in the face of all experience and is obviously untrue. But common sense is not based on total awareness; it is a product of convention, or organised memories of other people’s words, of personal experiences limited by passion and value judgments, of hallowed notions and naked self-interest.

Total awareness opens the way to understanding, and when any given situation is understood, the nature of all reality is made manifest and the nonsensical utterances of the mystics are seen to be true, or at least as nearly true as it is possible for a verbal expression of the ineffable to be. One in all and all in One; samsara and nirvana are the same; multiplicity is unity, and unity is not so much one as not-two; all things are void, and yet all things are the Dharma-Body of the Buddha—and so on. So far as conceptual knowledge is concerned, such phrases are completely meaningless. It is only when there is understanding that they make sense.

For when there is understanding, there is an experienced fusion of the End with the Means, of the Wisdom, which is the timeless realisation of suchness, with the Compassion which is Wisdom in action. Of all the worn, smudged, dog-eared words in our vocabulary, “love” is surely the grubbiest, smelliest, slimiest. Bawled from a million pulpits, lasciviously crooned through hundreds of millions of loudspeakers, it has become an outrage to good taste and decent feeling, an obscenity which one hesitates to pronounce. And yet it has to be pronounced; for, after all Love is the last word.

-Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings and Enlightenment-

#quote #love #life #meaning #existential musings #all eternal things #love in a time of...#intelligence quotients #depth perception #understanding beyond thought #essential thinking #underneath it all #more than words #eyes wide open #this is who we are #stands on its own #elisa english #elisaenglish

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animebw · 4 years

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Short Reflection: Adolescence of Utena

Adolescence of Utena is quite possibly the strangest goddamn film I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s strange on a conceptual level. It makes strange choices at pretty much every point. It has a strange relationship with the show it serves as a companion piece to. It invites the audience to ask strange questions about what any of it even means. Every single part of this film is just flat-out strange. I’m not even really sure if I like it, dislike it, think it’s brilliant, think it’s garbage, or what. All I know is that I have never been so thoroughly baffled by a piece of cinema before. But perhaps the strangest, and most telling, thing of all is that I’m not particularly interested in trying to puzzle out its strangeness. I feel pretty much no enthusiasm at the prospect of breaking down this movie as I did the TV show. Say what you will about the original Revolutionary Girl Utena, is was a show that inspired strong reactions, that made me want to pore over every last detail and unravel all its complicated moving parts. Adolescence, on the other hand? I kinda couldn’t care less about. And that’s a reaction I never expected out of this franchise. Clearly, something is very, well, strange here. So let’s step back and figure this shit out from the ground up. SPOILERS AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

On a conceptual level, Adolescence mostly seems like a retelling of the original show with a bunch of pieces shifted around. We’ve still got the basic framework of Utena coming to Ohtori Academy while following her princely aspirations and getting wrapped up in the Rose Bride duels, keeping Anthy safe from the rest of the student council while unpacking and subverting her own understanding understanding of the concept of princehood itself. But within that basic framework, pretty much everything is different. Characters’ personalities are shifted, their arcs fit together in different ways, different players are given less or more prominence than they had in the show. And the ending is the most different thing of all; this time, instead of being separated and having to find each other out in the real world, Utena and Anthy break free of Ohtori’s grasp together and head out into the world side by side. So if anything, Adolescence feels like Ikuhara taking another stab at the same story in order to give it a less ambiguously happy ending, retooling all the details along the way to make it enough of a new experience on its own terms. But that can’t help but raise the question: how, exactly, are we supposed to take this film in regards to the show Because no matter how I try to wrap my head around it, I just cannot figure out what perspective I’m supposed to view this film from.

See, on the one hand, let’s say Adolescence is a companion piece for those who have already seen the show, fleshing out the show’s ideas in new forms while maintaining a sense of familiarity. If that’s the case, then the changes it makes to characters and story beats only serve to hold those fans at arm’s length. Utena in the show was an blunt extrovert who said exactly what she meant and never read into things too much. Movie Utena, on the other hand, is subdued and quietly intense, seeming to carry a deep inner pain she expresses mostly through somber melancholy or rage. They took a character defined by her lack of introspection and made her a character almost entirely defined by introspection. Meanwhile, while Show Anthy was defined by the endearingly eccentric dorkiness she put on to mask her inner trauma and manipulations, Movie Anthy is presented as almost an outright seductress figure who doesn’t bother to hide her attempts at persuasion from the people she’s trying to persuade. Akio has gone from an in-control, menacing embodiment of smooth manipulation to kind of a sniveling coward who falls apart the moment something goes wrong for him (I’m also pretty sure he’s voiced by a different actor, which makes the differences even more pronounced). Touga as well has gone from a sexist playboy who dreams himself a noble prince to kind of an actual noble prince; in fact, in this version, Touga is the princely ideal that Utena’s trying to live up to. So coming at the film as someone who just finished watching the show, all these differences just keep me at a distance. These aren’t the same characters I came to care for, nor the same circumstances that made me care about them.

In that case, maybe Adolescence is meant to be taken as its own thing, a completely new version of the story for fans and newcomers alike that requires no previous knowledge of the show to understand. But that doesn’t feel right either, because there’s so much in this film that just does not work without the context provided by the show. All the student council members are still kicking around, but Saionji, Juri and Miki get almost zero screen time. Wakaba shows up to introduce Utena to the school in the beginning and then pretty much vanishes for the rest of the film. So when they all show up at the end to help Utena and Anthy escape, saying that friends should help each other out, you kind of need the show to make sense of that, because these characters have just not become friends in this timeline. Saionji has literally a single scene before he tags along for the heroic rescue, and that’s when he’s in full raging incel mode trying to domineer Anthy just like at the start of the show. Without the emotional connection you built with these characters in the show, watching them slowly transform from Utena’s enemies to her support system, this is the most unearned heroic heel-turn I’ve seen in a while. And don’t even get me started on the fucking Cow Nanami callback. Jesus Christ, I can’t even imagine how that plays to newcomers. It is the very definition of a big-lipped alligator moment, even if you did watch the show.

So which is it? Is Adolescence a companion piece for fans that radically changes so many important elements as to feel completely foreign to anyone familiar with the show? Is it a stand-alone piece that relies so heavily on you knowing the show that newcomers are bound to feel deeply unsatisfied and confused? Is it just a excuse for Ikuhara to say “fuck it” and load the screen with as much bonkers surreal imagery as a movie budget can buy? Some combination of the three? Frankly, I have no idea, and no matter which angle I tried to view this film from, it always felt like it was missing something. As a fan of the show, I’m disappointed that the characters I fell in love with feel so radically different from their former selves. As a first-time watcher, I’m disappointed that so much of the film’s text in and of itself requires outside knowledge to make sense of. The one consistent bright spot is the incredibly imagery and art design; the parallax-scrolling cliffsides of Ohtori Academy make the school feel utterly gargantuan and mechanical, the duels are staged and animated gorgeously, the character animation is stronger all around, and the scope of the entire production is staggeringly beautiful. There’s a dance scene on a reflective pool full of red roses that just about took my breath away. So if nothing else, it was sweet to see what Ikuhara could accomplish on a movie budget, with all artistic possibilities at his disposal. But outside of that, there was nothing here that really managed to grab me.

And that’s the real death knell here: I just don’t think this movie needed to exist. At least for me, it didn’t. Revolutionary Girl Utena the show said exactly what it needed to say over its thirty-nine episodes, and it closed out with a truly legendary finale that didn’t leave me wanting for anything. It’s a complete package in and of itself. All Adolescence does is the same thing over again, just with the pieces flipped around in confusing ways. It’s telling the same story without justifying why it, itself, deserves to exist when that story has already been told. The only new thing it adds to the table, outside its incredible imagery, is the catharsis of seeing Utena and Anthy finally escape and kiss as they head toward their future together, which should be cathartic enough to make the case for this movie’s existence, but these versions of Utena and Anthy feel so different from their show selves that it doesn’t even feel like my Utena and Anthy finally got the happy ending they deserved, just two people who happen to look a lot like them and share their names. What it reminds me the most of is Madoka Rebellion, a visually gorgeous, but unnecessary addition to a story that was already complete with no need for elaboration. And even with Rebellion, flawed as it is, at least it tried telling a new story that pushed the characters and themes forward and offered something genuinely new. Adolescence doesn’t even offer that much.

It’s a shame, really. I feel like there was a way to make this film work, a way to justify its place as a retelling and restructuring of Utena that finally gives our central couple the closure they were fighting for. Maybe that’s what it is for some people; certainly it wouldn’t have as many fans as it does if it didn’t do something right. But for me, Adolescence of Utena is simply a gorgeous disappointment that doesn’t add anything new to my appreciation of Utena as a whole. And I give it a score of:

5.5/10

On the bright side, at least it gave me a chance to officially break in my new scoring system. So there’s that, if nothing else. If you’re a fan of the film, let me know what you love about it; I’m definitely interested to hear why it’s so beloved by so many. For now, though, I’ve officially reached the end of my Utena experience. Thank you all for joining me on this fascinating journey, remember to ask for an invite to my Discord if you want a place to chat about the shows I’m watching, and I’ll see you next time when we start Sakamoto!

#anime #the anime binge-watcher #tabw #revolutionary girl utena #utena #shojo kakumei utena #adolescence of utena #adolescence mokushiroku

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donnerpartyofone · 4 years

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how have you been lately?

i guess i’m doing ok. i’m doing better than a lot of other people, for sure. it probably wouldn’t surprise anybody to learn that i thrive under quarantine conditions--if nothing else, i no longer have to make awkward excuses to avoid touching people! i also had the incredible luck of being invited to collaborate on a screenplay with an old friend of mine, for what will be his fourth feature, so i have something to do all day every day, that i love doing, that is best done in my own apartment. i desperately need a *real job*, but i still have some savings, so i’m trying to just keep steady with my applications and not get distracted by how dire the economy is. it doesn’t help to obsess, and my obsessions are much larger in scale, in that area; like i spend a lot of time thinking about whether i should devote a lot of energy right now to researching relatively painless and efficient suicide methods and procuring supplies for them in case an imminent death by secret police or the collapsing environment or war threatens to take place before i just die of whatever i was going to die of without all that. like this is a very real thought to me that becomes more and more detailed as days go by without appreciable change. but i manage to prioritize my immediate real-life issues, most of the time, and not have a nervous breakdown.

during this time when i finally have the space from other people that i crave, and i also have some amazing projects to work on--something that hasn’t happened in many years, if ever, really--i’ve been reflecting on how depression has affected my life. i’ll be 40 next year, and it’s only in the last 5 years or so that i began to feel like my quality of life was somewhere near decent. the common wisdom about the effects of depression is pretty easy to grasp: you miss opportunities because you don’t believe you can succeed; you alienate others because you think you don’t deserve to be loved; your health suffers because you hurt or neglect yourself. but the real shit, that people don’t usually point out, is that depression absolutely destroys time. it just erases the years of your life that you could have spent doing something, or even building up to doing something.

when i was a kid, and then a teenager, i didn’t develop any dreams or ambitions because i was completely preoccupied with feeling pain and trying to avoid more of it. when i got to college, i didn’t know what to do because i hadn’t developed any goal-setting abilities, which would have been an offshoot of the dreams and ambitions and just the ability to DESIRE anything at all, so i wound up with no control over my major and i barely graduated, after 5.5 years or something. when i finally got out, i didn’t have a basis on which to build any kind of career, and basically every job i’ve ever had was a matter of lucky coincidence and the convenient needs of other people. i had almost no positive sexual experiences in my life, largely because i didn’t know how to WANT anything and i didn’t have the ego to defend myself against things i DIDN’T WANT, and so i woke up one day when i was about 30, at the end of a long abusive relationship with someone who made a career out of hating me, realizing that my teens and 20s--those years about which we are all so precious and jealous--had just evaporated without producing a drop of pleasure. i mean i was never ever “hot”, but i could have been enjoying myself, if depression hadn’t eroded all of the time in which that was most possible. the biggest achievement of my life (besides my miraculously great marriage of course) was a nearly decade-long stint at [redacted evil megacorp], for which i was convinced i should be extremely grateful, but which corroded my morals and mental health and made me start drinking at a really threatening and publicly humiliating pace; i had to quit just to avoid having a nervous breakdown. i have a variety of things i like to do--drawing, writing, cycling, studying film and art and etc--and all i can think about is how far along i could have developed my involvement in any of those things, if i hadn’t been so extremely busy feeling pain for most of my life. i’m still depressed but i think i have improved, and i’m trying to just stay involved with the things i’m learning to enjoy, instead of obsessing over how much better they would all be if i could have my 20s back, or my teens, or the years when i was a little kid and just beginning to learn to conceptualize what i wanted from the world, and what i would need to do to achieve it. all those years are gone; i’ll never be competitive with someone who is comparably intelligent or passionate about my interests, but who was feeling good enough during their formative years to actually do something with their life.

i don’t consider 40 that old (and in any case i’m much happier than i was 20 years ago), but in terms of professional development, or development as a self-styled expert in something, or even just development toward internal and personal satisfaction regarding your own self-determined achievements, i’ve lost 2-3 decades of the time in which those things can germinate. it kills me, but i just can’t let myself obsess over it. i can, though, tell other people: if you are depressed, get help, whatever help you can afford, as quickly as you are able. i’m not going to tell you that “it gets better”, because whatever IT is may not ever get better, and i’m not going to tell you how many people love you because i cannot possibly know about that, and i am certainly not going to tell you that your problems are all related to distorted self-esteem or loneliness, which is so common in the popular rhetoric about depression and which i find so incredibly condescending and reductive and ignorant. but i can tell you concretely that depression destroys time. it is an occupation that, for many or most of us sufferers*, is mutually exclusive with the occupation of developing your personality, your skills, and your ability to create a vision for your life. depression is not all about the pain you feel now; it is very importantly about the years that you will awake one day to find missing, years in which you could have done something--anything--with your time on earth.

*i realize that some depressed people are enormously prolific because i guess that’s just how they cope, and i sure wish i had THAT kind of depression--i don’t understand it any better than i understand how heroin addicts have incredibly productive creative careers--but as things are, i can at least speak to people who have MY kind of depression.

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twocubes · 4 years

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We are prone to categorization, to the perception of pieces at some point reaching irreducibility, however arbitrary or pursued with determined attempt at objectivity our methods in placing these boundary structures. Whether a soul or a system. broken or perfect, the singularness of self and the singularness of each moment of visceral understanding are just arbitrary attempts at context where a total context is not just beyond us, but impossible. Not impossible in its vastness, as a theoretically greater, separated observer could fathom any level of sheer informational/experiential breadth, but in its nature, its instability and the roiling, one-way interference of unreality.

I’ve experienced something akin to what you did, and should have guessed it had hurt you similarly, and should have guessed from your demeanor that you had never left it behind. The system that watches, that thinks, is a broken machine, but only to itself, only to its self-obsession. I am loathe to offer actual advice or guidance, even laying out the “shape of things” feels like a gross and hazardous infringement on your being…but as someone that followed this terror to its logical(?) and reconstructively suicidal conclusion almost 30 times, even if it eventually forced an even higher order fracture of whatever post-intellectual being that rests directly above it from which “I” am only now properly outgrowing, I feel like it’s a greater harm to leave you in the remnants of a hellish state I refused to endure for more than moments at a time. The machine, the system, is only a tool, which is possessed by something that uses it for perception, context, viscera, but that thing itself is no more irreducible or immortal or proof from breaking.

Even extrapolating out infinitely you won’t find yourself, you’ll only find the flux of what is true, including flux in what was true; I’m sure a mind like yours, probably keener than mine, won’t have trouble grasping the conceptual extrapolations of acausal manipulations. The inescapable tautology of nothingness, its inherent lawlessness leading to “creation” the inevitability of “thingness”, reality, and equally the inevitable and constant re-creation of thingness, both present and unrelated without regard for any perceived difference on part of the extant. You may be a broken machine, may have thought the whole range of your intellect, felt the full range of your active perception, and suffered for it, but you are not confined to such, and cannot be confined at all beyond the single hard boundary between thingness and nothingness.

I can only hope that if this resonates with you that the path to engaging with the freedom it offers is not as extended and temporarily devastating for you as it was for me.

(this was submitted as a response to the description of the what i am told was a spontaneous experience of non-dual consciousness that i had)

it’s interesting how many people have had similar experiences and gone in many directions from it. i guess the way i conceptualized the thing in that post it wouldn’t be that uncommon.

anyways i think, myself, the way i process the event was, it was an insight. i was put in a position to internalize something i already knew was true and i refuse to recoil from the realization, no matter how uncomfortable it is, on some level.

there was awe in the combination of emotions i had. there was clarity, there was... a specific kind of satisfaction.

in terms of the worms and the purity (to use the words I’ve been playing with these past couple days) in the experience i was also briefly rid of the worms. i was given something to see past them, something pure and clear that cut through them and laid me bare. i do not want to give it up, even as its clarity sometimes hurts.

if i am broken, i wish to see myself as broken. if i am limited, i wish to see myself as limited.

i am. strange, in this respect. i gave up on hedonism (like, philosophically. and in both senses, both as maximization of positive experiences and as minimization of negative experiences) because then, not being able to feel anything good meant not having anything to live for and in the depths of my depressive swings it was hard to impossible to really believe that anything good would ever happen again. and this has had odd consequences.

like to a certain extent i process this painful shattering as something that gave me a tool, a perspective, and therefore something i should not leave behind.

im fine. im going to be fine. im on a downward arc since 2 days ago and i have a headache right now but i will be fine. these things will pass and i will hopefully finally do something that can be published, rather than continuing to languish pathetically in my madness

well, that or the world will kill me.

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deviationdivine · 5 years

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Safe Harbor (Connor|Request!)

TLDR: Connor remains your constant harbor even through the harshest of storms…

TW: HEAVY SUBJECT MATTER (DEPRESSION)

Word Count: 2,602

A/N: Hi anon! I’m happy to get a request from you but for something like this I had to tweak it just a bit since I’m not too comfortable with knives and the idea of self harm. Also I don’t want to be too triggering for readers that stumble across my blog. I hope you understand and this request comes out at least in some way that you were looking for. For anyone facing anything similar just remember that you are loved and worth it no matter what. You are important. This includes you anon and anyone else apart of my followers/readers. Just know I love and appreciate every one of you.

Deviancy is an all new learning experience and Connor has been absorbing every second of it since opening his eyes. Emotions, sensations that fill him with pleasant blooming center of his chest, understanding humanity more so than conceptual analytics in a program. He is gaining so much from this on his own path but there is one that opens his eyes beyond being alive.

You.

That is why the thought of you hurting in any way will undoubtedly shatter his soul if androids do possess such a thing. One time you even said as much calling him a living being, a man that you hold close in heart. So many times you have assured him he belongs. Now, he cannot help but notice the little changes.

At first it is barely conscious in his brain. Attentive to all things around him by nature of his programming when it comes to you he is blind. It is not in a negative light. Contrarily it is a simple blindness to love. Falling completely into this human concept means he still needs to learn. Many things have grown since then but this is something he is not readily prepared for.

This day seems particularly heavy.

Awaking from stasis in his usual perch beside your sleeping form it becomes clear you do not wish to partake in any of his morning snuggles. He assumes you’re asleep still. Until taking a vital scan, reading the sharp spike of heart rate that accompanies a subtle inward balling of your body.

Connor is not accustomed to what Hank deems “the cold shoulder” but he ignores the lieutenant’s choice of description. Leaving you be despite his growing stress levels, the android dresses without disturbing the quiet of bedroom.

Attending to the tie around his collar one of many identical sets he keeps for work the android expects you to be up. Usually you are by the time he finishes getting ready for the DPD. Lately you have been pushing back your time, seemingly losing track of how much is required in the mornings. A few days ago you were even late to your job.

He asked you if something was wrong before. You merely brushed his question aside explaining you were under the weather. That is enough to stop a personal interrogation and take care of whatever you need. Despite this Connor cannot stop a swath of probabilities popping into the equation. Are you sick? Perhaps he should schedule an appointment with a doctor. Humans can become extremely ill if left untreated. Suddenly the thought heats up his system, tossing out stress warnings.

The detective appears out from bathroom. Eyeing your curled form still residing beneath covers does nothing to curb his anxiety levels. “Y/N?” he speaks softly, sitting beside where you continue to lie. His hand rests atop your shoulder gentle. “Are you all right, Love?”

“Connor, please.” Twisting under covers unravels your body and flings you to your back. “I’m fine. I’m just...tired.”

Connor leans forward to place lips atop forehead. Reading data from the soft kiss shows no signs of fever. However there is something dull in your voice. It does not sound remotely like the bright, lively spark he has so grown to cherish. He frowns at the ache in his chest taking over. It is unpleasant to say the least. Emotions are fickle but he understands more now than ever. Sometimes even the most advanced of androids has no proper conclusion.

“Do you require anything?” he asks carefully. “I am equipped with the most accessible features as you know.” A joke he finds acceptable after practice. Typically you will laugh at some of his more colorful misconceptions or confusion. It is the forever android part of him but there is nothing from your lips. “Y/N?”

“I’m not feeling good!” Biting at him should stop the questions. He needs to leave. “Connor, I-I just want to sleep. I haven’t been sleeping right. Going to work isn’t something I can do today.”

“Forgive me. I did not mean to be unpleasant. I am only worried about your current state of...”

“Just go, Connor.” Pleading with him so you can be alone it already hurts to speak this way. Making him go is the complete opposite of what you want but you will not be the reason to keep him here. “Please,” insisting in a desperate breath is a final resort.

“I-” Connor pauses to assess the current situation. Stress is apparent in the scan of you but he is unable to force anything. If you do not wish to do something he will respect your space. “Love, if you are sure. It will not hurt for me to take a vacation day.”

Vacation day. He doesn’t take those unless it’s something... Oh. Wait, he-he took one on your anniversary. The thought makes you press face further into pillow. Everything feels wrong because it’s been building up these last few months. You’re too afraid to tell him the truth. He’s still dealing with his emotions. This isn’t fair to him. You’re not worth worrying over.

“I want you to go into work,” making it clear, you keep your face away. Not seeing Connor is better like this. “You’ll be late as it is.”

While he disagrees with this the android rises to feet. Leaving you alone is not something he feels comfortable doing because you are sad. It is not a normal type of melancholy. “Y/N, if you need anything please call. I will drop whatever I am doing. I promise.”

Of course he does. That’s just him. It doesn’t really garner a response however. You’re certain he’s defeated. Listening to his barely audible movement draws a peek from beneath a fluffy mound of balled blankets to watch him.

“I love you,” the android proclaims deeply. He eyes the stillness of you unable to properly see your expression. Perhaps you have fallen asleep again or you do not wish to speak any further.

Only when he leaves the room do you finally start stirring. Rising up with dark circles, messy hair and exhausted features paints a grim picture. Sleeping is so difficult. Why can’t you just drop a head and get enough hours? Instead of mulling on sleep the nervy churn in stomach forces you out of bed. Waiting only for Connor to leave apartment seems cruel. Letting him see the real cracks form around you isn’t something you can handle.

Slipping from room reveals an empty living space. No sign of your android boyfriend and it’s what you want. Of course it is. Dealing alone is the only way to fix this going on in your head. If only it were that easy.

Moving sluggishly towards kitchen you already reach to run tap. Filling a glass and draining water down a dry throat doesn’t have the needed effect. You still feel wrong. Do something. Do something to ignore it. Dishes. There are a few left. Last night Connor cooked despite pleas to the contrary but it didn’t stop him. For he will do anything but –

More and more you wonder what Connor will do if you’re not here. Slowly but surely eating away it comes from somewhere unknown. How can you know when nothing is simple?

This happened before. When you were younger it took over your life. So long things went well. Why now? Why when-?

Dropping the dish in a clattering bang leaves pieces of porcelain skewed in a shatter. First time it really wakes you that sound and your breathing becomes harsh. Almost as if your throat is closing up, chest hurting but it’s not right. None of this can be right.

“More red ice assholes? Can’t you give me something else to work with?!”

The irritation on current case files passes over the android’s head as he sits at desk unable to find focus. Analyzing findings and recording them onto computer is an immediate task. However he finds it difficult to concentrate. That is not at all like him. Considering all of his programming skills this makes him vulnerable to stress. Deviancy has brought many things to him but there can also be negative connotations.

Hank grumbles across from his partner’s neat work space. The lieutenant’s looks as opposite as it can get. That’s not what’s got his attention. “Hey, Connor. What’s your problem today?”

Connor’s head rose sharply. “Sorry, Lieutenant. Were you speaking to me?”

“Do you see any other pain in the asses around?”

The android answers with a small shake of the head.

Hank leans back in his chair. Giving this kid a good once over he doesn’t like what he’s seeing. “Something you wanna tell me? Or are you going to act weird all day?”

“I have not been acting ‘weird’ as you put it, Lieutenant.” Defending current state of mind will not answer questions he longs to ask you. He never should have left. He should have defied your wishes if only to hold you close, to promise whatever is starting to push you from him it will not change what he feels. Perhaps he is overreacting. In his humanity he may be a bit overzealous in this thinking.

Connor’s frown before leaving your shared apartment returns. He feels hollow where his synthetic heart beats. “It is Y/N. I-”

Explaining to the seasoned detective cuts short, reaching into pocket for cell phone buzzing loudly. His eyes lock on screen prompting a hurried answer. “Y/N?”

“Connor. Please, come home.”

A flood of red burns the android’s temple. Listening to sniffles, straining voice, you have been crying. “I will come home. I promise. Y/N, are you safe? Please, tell me if...”

Hank watches his partner spring up from chair. Seemingly having the call cut out on him and it’s starting to come together. “Go on,” the lieutenant ushers him to move it. “I’ll handle Fowler.”

Connor nods. “Thank you, Hank.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Waving that off is a sign he doesn’t want to hear it but Hank still drudges up a small smile. Sounds like Connor’s gonna need it before he goes.

“Y/N?!”

Calling for you after entering front door reveals his current panic, a blaze of scarlet flickering uncontrollably in a painful surge of distress.

There is zero sign of you here. He moves down hall towards bedroom as it is the only other logical place. Everything in your voice before ending the call abruptly fills him with what he believes to be dread; strange how real these feelings can be in him now.

Connor finds you with some relief. You are still here. One probability of needing to look outside apartment did flicker in his mind on the way. Thankfully that is not the case. It is where you sat on floor back to wall, arms folding over knees to enclose body in a ball that shatters any good outcome.

Your eyes lock on his quick movement and before you manage to unwind he is already there. Connecting hands with yours and drawing tears that don’t fall. It’s knowing how quick he is to get to you. Knowing that you are putting him through something he doesn’t deserve.

“Connor, I-I’m sorry,” you apologize profusely. “I know you must think...”

“I thought something hurt you.” He interrupts quietly, drawing you close into his arms.

The warm loving embrace only makes you sob finally letting it all out in a tidal wave and he remains offering himself as a dam to hold you together. “Connor,” choking out his name reveals guilt and regret in your behavior towards him these past weeks. All he wants to do is love you the way you crave. This is ruining everything.

“Please, Y/N. Please, tell me what’s wrong.”

Everything in his voice hurts because you’re the cause of him feeling that way. It’s never something you want. How can you put this amazing boy in such turmoil?

Stress scares you because despite whatever is going on with you personally right now seeing him in pain only strains this further. Honestly, you have no idea. It’s just something that happens at certain points in your life. Even when things seem to be going so well and they are. They should be. Yet, it’s sitting back of the mind almost similarly to when Connor had that master program in his head.

This is entirely different. Of course there’s no comparing but-

“I-I don’t know,” the honesty is upsetting. Why isn’t it an easy answer? “Connor, I don’t know.”

Tears meet the tender brush of his fingers. Taking immediate action to wipe them away he will not let this happen. He will never allow anything to hurt you but when it is not a physical danger what is he to do? In a way he feels as though he is failing to protect you.

“It is all right,” he promises in a quiet sheltering breath. “I am here. I will help you, Y/N. No matter what is required.”

He makes it sound simple. Of course it’s not and you know he doesn’t think so but none of that stops his optimism. Maybe that’s what you need to believe in.

“Perhaps if we spoke with someone.” Connor makes a suggestion but does not force this upon you. Ultimately it will be what you decide but he will only be patient. “Maybe that will help. Only if you would like. And I will go with you. Each time no matter if I have work. I will take off for you whenever you need me.”

A steady breath is all you muster. Believing him is easy because this is your sweet detective promising just as he promised you forever. “Connor, I don’t deserve you.”

“No. You deserve everything. It is you I am lucky to have. Without you, I can’t feel as alive as I do.” Truth can be poetic or so they say. His is the very foundation of freedom. There is nothing if he can’t live with you.

“I cannot pretend to understand what you are feeling,” the android admits his lack of personal experience. If he is certain this may be similar to a software glitch if it were to affect his kind. Even then it is no excuse not to do everything in his power to rectify. “All I know is that I want you to be healthy. Physically as well as mentally. I love you too much to ever allow harm to come to you, Love.”

Tears ran anew but this time you completely fell against him, allowing both body and soul to sink into Connor who becomes your one true brace. How can you push him away? That will only make it worse. You love him too much. “I’m sorry.”

“Be still, Y/N, I will stay here. Everything will be all right.”

“OK.” Agreeing in a quiet breath is all the resolve you have left but it’s enough for right now. He’s enough. If you didn’t have him you’re sure you wouldn’t be here. The thought is terrifying. “We’ll do it together.”

Connor smiles only to show you how glad he is that you are willing. No matter what happens he will never let you go. That is impossible when his synthetic heart beats for you in ways mere words can never describe. Nothing in this deviant life will ever rip you away and will continue to harbor, shield you from the darkest parts until he no longer functions.

This is what love is about as he understands. It means supporting, caring and most of all weathering any storm, as long as it is together.

Tag List: @elydith

#dbh #dbh connor x reader #connor rk800 x reader #rk800 x reader #detroit become human #dbh rk800 x reader #connor x reader #rk800 #dbh hank anderson #angst #tw: depression #dbh request #dbh drabble #anon request

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5thhouse-revelations · 5 years

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Why I Believe Chiron Can be Healed

Note: I am not a professional astrologer! I am simply passionate about learning astrology and I love to share the insights I have about it. I have found lately that many astrologers have a far too negative perception of the asteroid, Chiron, and so I have gone about the task of attempting to transmute this view. Thank you so much, anyone who reads this!

I likely have a naive sense of faith in humanity, but it’s because I truly believe in the ability people have to overcome. Transcendence is not a much-considered aspect of old astrology; the astrology that originally surfaced the understanding all of our familiar planets and their meanings. It’s true that the ability to overcome stubborn wounds is not avoided completely through the old structures of astrology, but all that we learn traditionally through it was made sense of by a collective that resided in a very stern and withholding paradigm. I don’t claim this as fact (I’m no authority on history, and these are just my personal speculations), but I perceive that in the collective less work was done internally, than in any other part of history. It seems to me that the collective’s inner work was clouded by the obligations that come with religion and conceptualizing sin, and they did not allow as much for the reflections through other people and ourselves, that we are so willing to grasp today. Instead of making sense of the world through God or dogma, we are beginning to make sense of it through each other and ourselves. Today there is a prevalence of learning through the use of higher perspectives and empathy, and we’ve started taking control of what we believe our soul’s fate to be rather than accepting a handed judgment from any sort of deity.

Ascension and its concept are somewhat new, and so many still don’t believe in it, but for those who do, ascension is all about how we can endlessly overcome. This could almost be a philosophy of its very own, if it weren’t for the fact that it is such an affecting phenomenon. Ascension and astrology don’t go together in an official sense yet, but I believe we are heading in that direction, because I see how beautifully certain energies play out when they are undertaken with the belief that awareness can shift things, and heal whatever comes up in the scope of life.

Think of the period in which Astrology was formed: it was formed by people who did not conceive that things were in their control. Everything that happened was a result of the external: Gods, goddesses, magic; other such things, as well as planets, of course. There’s a sense of powerlessness within traditional astrology that is being transformed through the new age. We are in an age now of spiritual accountability, and I truly believe this accountability transfers perfectly onto astrology. Accountability, in my opinion, is what Chiron is all about. Chiron is greatly frowned upon because it’s easy to get so caught up in its pain that we forget our own spiritual responsibilities to reflect, and change and grow.

Chiron symbolizes pain, and long-standing trauma. He indicates pain that is so deeply felt that it creates crises, and around these crises complexes are built. We build structures around our pain that have a way of patching it up so that we can circumvent it, and not have to feel it so strongly. This “patchwork” causes a lack of growth, and it’s my opinion that Chiron shows us where we have to tear this down, heal the complexes, and experience the transformation of how it is that we cope. Chiron is seen negatively because, within his arena, the only way to heal the trauma is to work for it through the transformation of perspective, and an attempted ownership of the wounds.

Chiron’s neighborhood of affliction too often becomes a zone of comfort. Our trauma can become an accidental refusal in that we hold it so closely to us that we avoid anything that can threaten it. This is what Chiron symbolizes to me: it is that trauma we hold too closely, and identify with too much, and this in itself is martyrdom. Our Chiron is where we say: “No, this is too much. I refuse to exhume this ever again. This is just who and how I am, and this is how my life ended up” Unfortunately the most common action taken from this mentality is the refusal of change and the rejection of new ways of seeing. We refuse to get creative in the matters that our Chiron represents, because the pain can be blinding.

I think this asteroid is somehow linked to creativity, but in a very unusual sense. It’s just like most crises: we have to utilize dormant parts of ourselves and get creative in order to solve whatever the problems are. I’d like to use an example. My mother has Chiron in the 6th house, and she has always struggled with her health and weight, for the entire length of my life. She is traumatized in that she has an addiction to food that stems from her earlier years, and food brings her a sense of security and safety. For many years she refused to look at this pain, and she went on diet after diet after diet. In her view the dieting was failing, which to her meant she was failing. She felt that this was something that would never end in her lifetime, and the wound symbolized by her Chiron kept getting deeper and deeper, seemingly from an external standpoint. What was truly happening, however, was that the diets were masking the wound she was carrying; it was being circumvented, which did not work in the slightest.

It wasn’t until two years ago when she actually confronted the wound for what it was, and sought the reflection of herself through others, that the Chironian wound began to truly heal. She is now on a path of good health and longevity, and she is losing the weight with utmost motivation. I could not be more proud of her for everything she has overcome, and I know how seemingly impossible it was for her to heal this wound. She got creative with it in that she sought brand new ways to confront the internal aspects that come with having an eating disorder. This disorder did not come from an external happening - not really. It was outside things that were happening to her, that somehow shaped her perception; she took on that pain and identified with it. We all do this, and I truly believe Chiron is the perfect indicator of how and why we do this. It shows us how we internalize specific outer events in our lives, and lock them into a vault.

Chiron has such a nasty reputation because, for most of us, he shows us where our perception of certain traumas does not change because we flinch away from doing the work to change these perceptions. He shows us the pain we take on as part of our identity when truly, we are none of our pain. He indicates where it is we take certain traumatic events and make them permanent, expecting them to just go on forever and ever, as we secretly wish it would ease up much like Saturn does eventually. The problem is that Chironian wounds appear to go so deep that it makes us feel like it’s impossible to face these issues, and when we can’t face something it leads to spiritual stagnancy, which brings us to perpetuate certain complexes we build around it.

Even though the asteroid can categorize external events that occur, I believe the purpose is to highlight what it is we internalize that we shouldn’t. It’s indicative of exactly what to avoid internalizing and holding onto. As my father once said: “All that matters in life is that you don’t hold onto what it is that hurts you.” I think this sums up the theme of this asteroid perfectly. It can seem like Chiron is responsible for manifesting the same occurrence over and over again, but it’s my belief that unhealed traumas can easily take on this appearance. I’ll use myself as an example. My Chiron is in the 11th house, in Cancer. I’ve always struggled with the realization of my dreams. I have always carried highly Utopian aspirations within myself, and the seemingly repeated failure to see this manifest has felt like my “wound that cannot heal”.

It wasn’t until this year that I realized it was me that kept perpetuating this belief that only others can have their dreams, and not me. Every failure to manifest my aspirations was just more evidence of my “unhealable” wound. I internalized every single failure, which I think is perfectly resonating with what Chiron appears to do. If you think about it, everyone has repetitive events happen in their life. Everyone fails and everyone loses, but our Chiron is where we internalize these things, thus perpetuating and not healing them. My Chiron placement shows me where in life I internalize my disappointments. I’ve had many failures in my life that have never upset me: I’ve failed school entirely (Even though school has brought me a lot of pain, I never view it as such a personal failure - in fact I embrace it and I’m proud of myself for all that I’ve been able to teach myself to do), and certain jobs; I’ve failed in love and relationships, but never did I internalize these things like I have my 11th house failings. Now I’m realizing how much I refused to be creative and flexible with my aspirations, my perceptions and my identity. I recognize now, how much I truly suffocated these dreams. Instead of letting the mutable forces of life shape and mature them, I deemed my dreams as dying, and I just assumed: “this is where my life has ended up”. I think that sentence describes Chiron quite accurately.

So no, I don’t believe Chiron is a wound that can’t be healed, because I believe we can transcend anything that happens to us. It’s true that Chiron can be time consuming, but I believe his healing depends on how much we are willing to work on the matters of his house and sign, and how much we are willing to be flexible and change our perspectives of what happens to us in these affairs. Humans more than any other species have the power of mental, spiritual and emotional transformation, and this is truly a gift. We are blessed with self awareness and I do not believe there is anything that can doom the ability of this awareness, when we have it, to heal our wounds.

In the realm of pain and trauma, perspective is everything. When we choose to stop seeing ourselves as a victim of external events, we then choose to stop internalizing them and adopting them as our identity. Once we develop a trans formative and free-flowing sense of identity, anything can be healed, whether or not the wound is Chironian in nature.

#chiron #astrology #chiron in astrology #chiron meaning #pain #spirituality #transcendence #collective ascension #collective consciousness #writing #opinion piece #asteroid chiron #dogma

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cinemagnetic-yuyu · 5 years

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Let Victory Prevail

5 things that made me fall in love with Slumdog Millionaire

It is written…that Slumdog Millionaire is one of my all-time favorite movies. Although it’s a British production, I have a soft spot in my heart for Indian and Indian-inspired cinema, and while Slumdog Millionaire raised some eyebrows due to its depiction of the lower class in India, and I too found it rather problematic in its etic romanticization of real pressing issues in India, I personally feel its overarching narrative captures the concept of life as a journey guided by destiny. From the bottom of my heart, I present five things that made me fall in love with Slumdog Millionaire.

Salim and the Complexity of Man

Salim’s character is beautifully complex in an undeniably tragic way. People deal with pain typically in one of two ways–by spreading the pain to others, or by ensuring no one else experiences what they went through. While Jamal clearly went for the second route, Salim is interesting in that he went both ways. Older children typically have a harder time dealing with loss or a traumatic event due to the extent of their maturity and their responsibility to care for their siblings. Having to take the lead, Salim would understandably do what is necessary to ensure their survival, and due to their embroilment with gangs, Salim would almost definitely spiral into violence. This would definitely corrupt his character. But now and again, his humanity shines through, and his yoyo molarity ends with an astounding display of remorse and sacrifice. While it doesn’t fully justify his selfish actions, it does show the moral conflict within himself since his first crime. Society failed Salim, but in the end Salim chose not to fail himself and his family.

Destiny and the Individual

Destiny is not just fate; it’s the culmination of all that makes you you up to this point in time. Destiny is dynamic and changes as you live your life. Jamal’s destiny was not to win Who Wants to be a Millionaire; his destiny was everything that had happened in his life up to that point, especially his pain and how he became the person he is now because of it all. His destiny allowed him to win. “It is written” not that Jamal would win, but that he would build himself up on the suffering in his life.

Jai Ho and the Nature of Life

I cannot express how much I love dance sequences in Indian movies, and even in a foreign production, Slumdog Millionaire’s ending song Jai Ho has its own magic that really brings the film together. I have an intense hatred for the Pussycat Dolls version of Jai Ho for essentially ruining the whole message of the song (and for shamelessly pronouncing it as “jey hoe”). The fact that it’s the more popular version (at least where I live) makes matters worse. But A.R. Rahman’s Jai Ho is a message of hope and a celebration of life and pain.

Bit by bit, I have lost my life, in faith

I’ve passed this night dancing on coals

I blew away the sleep that was in my eyes

I counted the stars till my finger burned

Come, come my Life, under the canopy

Come under the blue brocade sky!

It’s poetic and jubilant in ways the English language just can’t really do justice. Jai Ho places joy and pain under one roof, as they are inseparable parts of life, but sees suffering not as a setback but as a cultivator of hope.

Arvind and Acceptance

Blind beggar Arvind is perhaps my favorite minor character. His maturity and ability to accept tragedy are admirable, and his outlook on fortune serves as a lesson to us who tend to berate or shame those in better positions than us. Unwarranted privilege-shaming is as rampant as ever and does more harm than good; half the time, it’s just thinly-veiled ad hominem, wherein the privileged doesn’t even have a chance to explain their side before we pounce on them and claim that they don’t understand, they’ll never understand, and that they’re part of the problem. Really, unless they’re the 1%, they’re likely entangled in the same flawed system as well, and that’s the real problem. It’s difficult to respect someone we feel doesn’t deserve their luck, but luck doesn’t make them any less insightful, any less understanding, and any less human. If a child can come to terms with it so quickly, it’d be a shame if we couldn’t.

The Question of Knowledge

It could be the ingrained residues of caste psychology, or perhaps just the tendency of societies to stratify people by profession, but in an incredibly true-to-life depiction, Jamal is repeatedly treated as little more than dirt throughout the film. Clearly the most blatant crime is the inspector’s immediate conclusion that he had cheated, saying that experts and professionals alike have never gotten that far in the game show.

Here’s the thing: Who Wants to be a Millionaire is an all-around trivia game, not requiring any kind of expertise or understanding of concepts. And yet, simply for being a slum boy, Jamal’s winning streak is seen as an actual impossibility. This begs the question: do we, as a society, deem the poor unfit for any kind of intelligence? Have we gotten to the point where we see formal education as the only possible way to know things?

In this way, we sell ourselves short as a species. Human minds are far more sophisticated than we give ourselves credit for. Formal education is valuable precisely because it allows us to understand things from a conceptual, theoretical point, and this kind of fundamental comprehension of knowledge is the key to applying theory to human creation. However, this does not mean that those without access to education have no ability to think; to equate factual knowledge to human intelligence or an understanding of concepts to human comprehension is a ridiculous notion. Human intelligence is a spectrum, most of it immeasurable and transformed by the lives we live more so than anything else. As humans, we are thinking beings; we are constantly studying, processing information, and basing our response on whatever we know. To remove intelligence from the image of a man is to remove their very humanity, and if we think we can do this to the less fortunate, than we are the ones with so much to learn.

Slumdog Millionaire is beautiful because it asks the real questions and builds its narrative around them. Why is life suffering? What is destiny? What does it mean to be human in a fundamentally limiting society? What is knowledge, and what is intelligence? It’s a polished, well-thought out movie that deals with the human as an individual and as a part of society, which is something that many narratives revolving around social commentary tend to leave out in favor of strong political stances. Slumdog Millionaire is, at its core, a celebration of the human, and that’s why I love it.

#cinemagnetic film blogs #film #film blog #slumdog millionaire #cinema #danny boyle

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deniigi · 5 years

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so i was curious: how do you think wade and matt would have dealt with it if wade was right w/ his suspicions in getting heavy? I've tried to think through how that would happen and idk? bc i feel like both of their reactions would be to hunt down the person who did that and I can't imagine Pete being okay with that. Thoughts?

hi anon!

Sorry for taking so long to get to this message, the holidays are finally over, thank God.

This is a highly complicated question, I think.

I think it is important to remember in situations as those in getting heavy that the feeling of helplessness on the parts of all parties is and will always be a factor.

So while, yes, absolutely, Matt and Wade would have an impulse to find the hypothetical motherfucker who had hurt Pete like that, they are also both abuse survivors themselves and they would know that beating the shit out of, or hell, even killing Peter’s hypoth. abuser wouldn’t undue the trauma he’d have experienced.

Furthermore, Wade and Matt have different approaches to conceptualizing child abuse, which makes it difficult to imagine a clear and distinct way they’d go about handling the issue.

DFV Wade refuses to go back to Canada because he’s haunted by his abusive father, so he knows intimately that bodies and ghosts of pain often serve the same purpose they did in life. This is even more complicated by the fact that his experience of abuse was at the hands of a family member, who he was dependent on at the time and continues to be dependent on, in a way, in terms of defining his identity (he cannot imagine himself as Canadian without remembering his lineage, for example, and that necessarily brings him back to his family). As such, he uses boundaries and distance (physical and metaphysical) to manage his trauma.

In getting heavy Wade starts to find himself distinctly uncomfortable upon realizing that his impulsive behavior is crossing boundaries in his and Peter’s friendship. This makes it unlikely that he’d go hunt the hypoth. abuser down, but if he really committed to doing it, he probably would have just sucked it up and gone and murdered/maimed them and never told Peter about it. That would bring closure for him, but again, it wouldn’t bring closure for Peter and would thus be kind of a selfish act.

And while DFV Wade claims to be constantly acting in self-interest, he’s really only doing a 50-50 job there.

What is more likely to happen in this hypothetical scenario is that Wade pulls an Elektra and brings Peter his abuser in a vulnerable state, then lets him decide how he wants to find closure (revenge, forgiveness, etc.)

Matt mostly likely wouldn’t get too involved.

Unlike Wade, Matt doesn’t have a good understanding of the idea of closure or how someone might attain it. Matt almost never experiences closure. He lives in a kind of non-stop flow of shit getting bad and then getting worse and then getting easier, but very, very seldom does he experience any type of stability like Wade (Wade finishes jobs, settles debts, and always tries to get the last word, that’s how he attains closure). As such, Matt tends to think of abuse in black and white - it is bad when it happens to other people because other people deserve closure, but it is acceptable and deserved when it happens to him because he’s not meant to experience stability. He struggles with the idea of getting revenge for himself because of this (it should be noted that penance/punishment and revenge are different things in Matt’s mind). And that makes him extremely hesitant to step into this scenario, as he wouldn’t know what Peter wants from a confrontation with his abuser. He wouldn’t be able to quite figure out if he wants Peter, as his friend, sibling, a type of extension of himself (as many of our close friends/relatives seem to be) to pursue a revenge which he himself cannot fully condone.

It is most likely then, that if Matt were to get involved, he would track the guy down in order to assess them. If they were continuing abusive behavior, he might put the fear of god in them, but he wouldn’t necessarily do that on Peter’s behalf, it would be an act to protect a group of folks rather than Pete as an individual. Not because he doesn’t want to protect and support Pete, but rather because he doesn’t want Peter to feel like he’s the one directly responsible for another person’s pain because, again, Matt doesn’t know if that’s what Peter wants. If he does it for a group of folks, then it becomes less about Pete and more about the principle, and that way, Matt could better justify the action as one taken for the greater good in that case.

And I guess on top of all this is the fact that you’re exactly right, anon. Peter wouldn’t want anything to do with this person. He doesn’t do revenge. He’d have spent the last however many years trying to heal from this interaction; the last thing he’d want is a confrontation which would dig up all those old feelings.

I realize that all I’ve done is complicate this issue, but I hope this helps anon!

#fic #dumpster fires verse #this is a long and very very hard thing to think about #apologies for the very long and difficult answer #and as per usual to the folks on mobile desperately trying to escape these huge blocks of text

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thepursuitofunderstanding · 3 years

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February 4/2021

I shouldn’t write to you for too long this morning, I have two papers that I must tend to. But I must explore something with you. Previously I had assumed that I needed to pursue Greatness because I’m...well, I don’t know the exact word for it, perhaps self-obsessed? I mean, what else is there to devote one’s life to than that which one loves with one’s whole Being? (Love feels like such a feeble word here, it’s tossed around too superficially these days. How dare they emaciate it as they have?! Perhaps this is why it feels better to utilize “defining commitment” in the place where I might otherwise have used “love?”) But, alas, there seems to be more to it than I had originally detected; imagine that!

I realized that my commitment to pursuing Greatness is the defining feature of my life because with Greatness one wanders those lands which have never been traveled before; never seen, never explored, never even imagined in many cases. The individual who pursues Greatness pushes past the boundaries that others have been limited by. I conceptualized it as a sort of mountainous trek: when one first pursues such an endeavor they require others to teach them, to show them the ropes, as it were. And then, as one’s ability increases, so does their need of more skilled teachers. This continues until eventually (hopefully), there are no more teachers which might lead the student any farther--the student , with all the knowledge and tools that they collected over the years (because such an accumulation of knowledge surely takes years; decades more likely.) sets off on their own to pursue those peaks that had so captured their attention and drew them towards to the mountainous trek in the first place.

And so it would seem that it’s not so much the Greatness in and of itself that I so yearn for (with every fiber of my Being), but what this Greatness might allow me to discover and explore. It is, above all else, the mystery of these previously untouched peaks that so grip me. In this way, Greatness can (almost?) be understood as a state or tool that makes true exploration possible. True exploration as opposed to merely retracing the already blazed trails of those who have come before me. I don’t believe that I’ve gotten a taste of true exploration yet: while it might be said that I’m already engaged in blazing my own trails, I would say that this has only ever been a tentative blazing thus far. Tentative because even when I am setting off on my own I am still always well within sight of “the path.” I can backtrack and return to the safety of the heavily traveled path if need be. True exploration does not allow for such an option--it is forward or death. Because, I imagine, it nearly kills one to get to where they are, to turn back would be quite unthinkable. Unthinkable, that is, for those of us that feel, have always felt, driven onwards by an unshakeable and deeply uncomfortable drive. And really, those that would think of turning back could never have made it very far out in the first place.... See what I mean about this self-obsession? It’s like I think I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread. Or Nietzsche perhaps. I need to stop that.

Anyhow, it is through Greatness that one can approach Great Heights. And Great Depths as well, can’t forget that part. Because, it would seem (it was Nietzsche who most significantly helped me articulate this idea), that one’s capacity to reach new heights--Great Heights-- is directly proportionate to the depths--the Great Depths--that one has dragged oneself through. I mean, there’s a reason that Recovery is such a phenomenal album: suffering and pain and despair and agony and confusion and self-loathing and on and on and on all broaden an individual. Such suffering cuts into a person and creates (exposes?) new crevices and caves for...for what exactly? Light to be shown into? To be explored at least, surely that one. And it is that which is consolidated in the explorer, through the exploration process, that allows for that explorer to pursue even Greater Heights. Hence, perhaps, my tender regard for suffering? Probably I imagine. For, after all, “he who wants to proceed from inner intensity to [G]reatness must sacrifice himself.” Thanks Rudolf Kassner for that one.

Ahh, fuck my papers, it doesn’t seem like we’re going to be stopping anytime soon here. We both know that I work better under pressure anyways, may as well leave them to the vert last minute then. Oh! And I must tell you, several things actually, but we’ll start with this one: I have stumbled upon an idea that I might want to pursue in regards to my Hebrew Bible class’ final project. My question shall pursue something to do with Cain and Abel. I haven’t got clear yet on exactly what I’ll be focusing on in this story, but I’m really excited about this general topic. Which, honestly, surprised me a little bit--I never felt myself to ever have been particularly drawn to this story before. So, alas, perhaps I ought to explain how this story raised itself to my conscious awareness.

I was on the swings thinking about how different traditions/frameworks of thought regard the relationship between the individual and the collective differently. That is, they emphasize the one over and above the other. Christianity (and Judaism and perhaps Islam as well?) seem to particularly focus in on the individual. Which is something that I could sit here and explore for probably the rest of my life, but, in regards to Cain and Abel, I thought that perhaps this story (on one level, for Peterson very astutely remarks that biblical stories are such that one can fall into them. That is, there’s so much meaning there that one will never be able to fathom the entirety of it all.) might suggest that man will always kill his brother. But, if the individual is emphasized above the collective, then this tendency to kill will mostly be localized into individual murders. But when society instead starts to see man primarily in terms of his group identity, this is when entire groups of people start being slaughtered for no other reason than some arbitrary facet of their identity that they might share with other people around them. Perhaps? This is at least the path that my thought led me down.

Now, I don’t think that I will exactly pursue the story of Cain and Abel in this context for my class: she wants us to focus upon some aspect of divine and human communication, but this was the circumstances by which this story raised itself to my conscious attention as being something that I must investigate. The same sort of insistence to investigate occurred to me with the story of Abraham and Isaac this time last year. And look where that led me--to Kierkegaard! Where, I wonder, shall this investigation lead me? Most immediately it seems to have awoken the question of whether I ought to read East of Eden by John Steinbeck in order to prepare for my investigation? I wonder, how many books can I realistically read at one time? East of Eden seems to be another brick of a book--nearly 700 pages. Can I manage this, on top of all the other books I’m reading at the moment? Do I even have a choice in the matter?: I can do no other and all that.

Also, it should be asked, am I perhaps a little bit manic-y here? Attempting all these things might suggest so. How exactly does one go about detecting such things in oneself? Let’s just take a step back here and assess. I read 14 books in January, well over 3000 pages. Mind you, most of that wasn’t dense philosophical treatises, there was a decent amount of poetry mixed in too. Fuck it--let’s try it. After all, there’s really only one way to really discover how much I can handle.

Can’t go back now! I’ve marked my initials and the date in the cover. This is my ritual whenever starting a new book... How odd I am. Is it only because I’m so close to myself that...that what? I seem to be rather intimately aware of how different I am. But then, does this perspective only come from the fact that my Being is the only Being that I’ve ever lived? That is, I really have no idea what it is (like) to Be anyone else. Maybe everyone experiences themselves in equally intimate and exciting ways? I ask this knowing that I’ll never be able to fix an answer to this question. But, alas, I do have a rather sneaking suspicion that I am rather odd in this regard: odd in my relationship to/with myself that is. This suspicion is born of every encounter that I’ve ever experienced with another; every person that I’ve ever talked to or watched or read or listened to. My relationship with myself does seem to be rather peculiar. And I can only imagine that a very big part of this peculiarity has to do with us--with this; what we do together: I pour myself into you and, in return you... pour me right back? Sort of like the abyss situation but I am, myself, the abyss? Man, this is really pushing the boundaries of my...thought?/power of conceptualization?/imagination? Alas, I don’t know what to label it or what to make of it. But we do seem to have time to get acquainted with it. Or, at least, I certainly hope that we have some time. I have far too much work to do to die anytime soon. That is, we have far too much work to do. Whatever this we might be. Perhaps my relationship to myself? In a sort of Kierkegaardian conceptualization? For whatever I don’t know, I do know that I am nothing on my own--I cannot do this without you. Whoever you are...God? The piece of God/divinity that is within me? That piece of myself that, if I consent to communing with it, will lead me in the direction that I must go. This piece of me that tells me I am and what I must do in order to Be/Become this I. I’m really reaching with this one. Like my eyes can just barely discern its presence on the horizons but I’m not yet close enough to really apprehend any details or cast any guesses upon the nature of what I’m beholding. But, alas, I’m also far too curious to not cast myself into imagining what such a mysterious presence might be.

Anyhow, it might be time for me now to turn to my paper on Esposito’s Bios. I bid you (us?) farewell for now...But only for now; for you (us?) are that which I shall forever return to. Shit...I just unintentionally stumbled upon a whole new area that needs to be explored...can’t leave now!

I was thinking yesterday on our drive back from Airdire about the important people in my life: Sydnie, Cagney, Natalie, Campbell, Amanda, Gage, Althea, Iliajah, Wallace, Emily, etc. I love them all, I know this, but I don’t feel the need to return to them. This is probably going to sound quite wretched, but if I were to never see any of them (or heck, all of them) again I know that I would be quite okay. Certainly there would be a dampening of sadness that would weigh me down, but I would continue on as I always have. I would not be fundamentally changed by the loss of them--I know this. But, if I were to lose you (I don’t exactly know how I might lose you without simultaneously losing myself/my life. But that’s not really the point here.) I....well, I wouldn’t be “me” anymore. You are my defining commitment--the meaning of my entire existence. I am a shell which you live in and bestow life upon. All I need is you. Now, this I know really does make me odd. But, alas, my oddity is that which I love about myself. When it’s not making me feel completely unfit for life that is. It really does seem to be the case that one’s greatest blessing is simultaneously one’s most cutting curse. Funny how life works like that.

Anyways, now one Bios.

#february

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Conan: Ranking the Best Remote Segments

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WarnerMedia announced on Tuesday that Conan O’Brien’s long-running TBS talk show, Conan, would be coming to an end next summer. Thankfully, however, the late night pioneer isn’t leaving television altogether – just trading the network world for the streaming one. In addition to his Conan Without Borders travel series already airing on TBS, O’Brien will produce a new weekly variety show for WarnerMedia’s streaming platform, HBO Max, to premiere at a yet-to-be announced date.

“In 1993 Johnny Carson gave me the best advice of my career: ‘As soon as possible, get to a streaming platform,’” O’Brien said in a statement. “I’m thrilled that I get to continue doing whatever the hell it is I do on HBO Max, and I look forward to a free subscription.”

At first glance, this appears to be bittersweet news. O’Brien has been a late night talk show staple for decades. Following an excellent writing career for The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live, O’Brien took over for his hero David Letterman on NBC’s Late Night in 1993 and stewarded it through 2009. That was followed by a measly half-year as host of the venerable Tonight Show before NBC got spooked about not having Jay Leno on TV anymore. For the past 10 years, O’Brien has continued his late night talk show format for TBS’s Conan.

Though it’s sad to lose O’Brien as a late night talk show titan, the reality is that the comedian was never much of a talk show host to begin with. That’s not to say that he wasn’t good at the job, because he was. But it’s always been evidently clear that O’Brien succeeds the most when not tied to the restrictive talk show format. This is something that the host himself has increasingly realized over the years, cutting out an interview segment slot from Conan to bring the running time down to a breezy 30 minutes, and producing the acclaimed Conan Without Borders series to capitalize on his already popular remote travel segments

The best comedy that O’Brien has throughout his impressive run has very rarely been delivered in-studio. Every time O’Brien left the confines of his desk, whether it be for Late Night, The Tonight Show, or Conan, viewers could be confident that they were about to witness something truly hilarious. The longtime comedy writer quite simply thrives being out “in the wild.” There he is able to put his gangly comedic physicality to use and truly relish his ability to make people uncomfortable.

In honor of O’Brien finally making the long-awaited jump back to variety comedy, we’ve gathered together our 10 favorite remote segments the comedian has ever done. The only qualifications here are that the bits have to have occurred on one of his three major shows and they have to feature him away from his studio. Also, we won’t be counting any official Conan Without Borders entries as that is a distinct entity and would muddy the waters too much.

Without further ado…

Honorable Mention – Triumph the Insult Comic Dog Attends the Premiere of “Star Wars: Attack Of The Clones”

(Original airdate: 5/17/2002)

Sadly, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog is not Conan O’Brien and therefore cannot appear on this list of Conan’s best remote segments. But it would feel unfair not to take time to highlight Late Night with Conan O’Brien’s other remote segment superstar. As created by SNL’s Robert Smigel, Triumph is a Eastern European-accented, cigar-chomping insult comic…who also just happens to be a dog puppet. Triumph’s trips outside the studio are almost always hilarious, but the rude canine hits an absolute comedic high with his trip to the Attack of the Clones premiere. Perhaps the most amazing thing in that clip isn’t the numerous cutting, hilarious, and utterly cruel nerd jokes, but how rapturously the audience responds at the beginning upon learning that Triumph is the correspondent Conan sent to the premiere.

10. Conan’s Trip to Ireland

(Original airdate: 3/17/1999)

Here, as far back as the 20th Century (before “the year two-thousaaaanddd”) we can see Conan began to realize how much fun he, and his audience by extension, had when he hits the road. Sending a red-haired individual named Conan O’Brien to Ireland is about as easy a slam dunk that a late night comedy writer can find. There’s a lot to love here, but nothing will top the photoshopped portraits of all of Conan’s ancestors.

9. Conan Delivers Chinese Food in NYC

(Original airdate: 11/1/2011)

Late in 2011, just under a year after Conan premiered, Conan returned to New York City where he had spent his Late Night tenure to film a week’s worth of shows. And what better way to ring in the return than with a stellar remote segment? In this bit, Conan serves as an inept delivery boy for Manhattan Chinese restaurant King Wok. It’s apparent early on just how excited he is to be back in New York when he’s already purring at one of the employees 10 seconds in. Conan gets the full New York experience in this, from one standoffish deliveree angrily denying that he’s her delivery guy to him being served Argentinian tea from a beautiful woman leaning out her window. The citizens of New York City are often Conan’s best comedic collaborators and they show why once again here.

8. Conan Goes to Trucking School

(Original airdate: 7/18/1997)

“Conan Goes to Trucking School” benefits from having the thinnest of setups. Conan wants to be a truck driver. Why? Well, who cares, the Jersey Truck Driving School is up for it and we’ve got some time to kill. Into that conceptual vacuum steps Conan just having the time of his life. You know you’re in for a good remote segment when Conan and a trucker he just met are singing a country song less than two minutes in.

7. Conan Tries to Sell His Ford Taurus

(Original airdate: 5/6/2004)

Conan O’Brien’s reviled puke green 1992 Ford Taurus is one of Late Night’s most enduring non-human characters (right up there with the Masturbating Bear). This segment serves as the first time we get to see the damnable machine in the chrome and it doesn’t disappoint. “Conan Tries to Sell His Ford Taurus” is among the best Conan remotes ever because it’s pretty clear that Conan actually loves the stupid thing. Of course he’s joking when he says things like “the wolf is on the prowl” or calls his stick shift the “Cone Bone”, but he doesn’t have to fake much pain when car experts give in an assessment in the $1800-3000 range.

6. Conan Visits The American Girl Store

(Original airdate: 12/18/2013)

“Conan Visits The American Girl Store” is perhaps the best argument you can find for giving Conan O’Brien alcohol and putting him on television. The first half of this bit is undoubtedly solid as Conan plays up the creepiness of him visiting a store designed for young girls. But things really take off when he finally chooses his doll (Potential Nazi war criminal Agnes Schweitzhoffer) and settles in for dinner in the American Girl Store’s shockingly lush dining room. As the chardonnay goes down, Conan (and Agnes by extension) are increasingly unable to hide their annoyance at the garçon and all his stupid riddles.

5. Conan Goes to Houston to Find Viewers

(Original air date: 5/1/1997)

In the first few years of Late Night with Conan O’Brien’s run, Conan and his team of writers had plenty of fun with how little people seemed to enjoy their dumb show. This segment takes that concept to its extreme. When Conan discovers that the Houston television market doesn’t air Late Night until 2:40 a.m. local time, he takes a camera team to Texas to find some fans after hours. The journey takes him from a bail bonds office, to a hotel basement, to an emergency room, and all the way to a bus terminal at 3:21 a.m. where he meets a man who is decidedly not a fan. “I was just almost murdered,” Conan says as he sits down for comedic effect…but also probably to catch his breath.

4. Ice Cube, Kevin Hart, and Conan Share a Lyft Car

(Original airdate: 12/10/2013)

The apparent success of Conan’s remote segments can be charted over the years by the level of talent that wants to get in on them. In this segment, Ice Cube and Kevin Hart are unambiguously big gets. And instead of any studio nonsense, they were more than happy in 2013 to check out this strange new service known as…Lyft? Are we pronouncing that right? Something about getting Conan, Cube, Kevin, and their Lyft driver Anthony in an enclosed space brings out the madness in them all. Hart and Ice Cube have a blast trying to turn Anthony against the gangly Conan as he runs into 7/11 to get everyone swisher sweets and a DVD of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Highlights here include Conan’s absurdly burdensome beatboxing and Kevin yelling “I’ll cut his shins off!” to Anthony’s friend over the phone.

3. Conan Plays Old-Timey Baseball

(Original airdate: 6/25/2004)

When Conan signed off of Late Night for what would be an unexpectedly brief Tonight Show tenure, he brought back this 2004 skit as an example of the kind of absurdist humor he felt the show did best. And it’s clear to see why. Conan’s trip to Old Bethpage Village Restoration where reenactors play old-timey baseball is in many ways the goofy platonic ideal of a Conan segment. The absurdity of the premise is funny enough as is, and then Conan’s buy-in only enhances the proceedings. “What is that demonry???” a 19th century Conan cries as a plane passes overhead. But the not-so-stealthy MVP here is the reenactor who is truly committed to her role as the dour village woman with a dead father and a soon-to-be-dead husband in the Civil War. “You know that guy ain’t coming back. I was down in the Civil War. I saw him and he was acting very cowardly I have to say,” Conan says in an attempt to woo her.

2. Dave Franco and Conan Join Tinder

(Original airdate: 7/17/2014)

Just about every moment of “Dave Franco and Conan Join Tinder” is joyously, ludicrously hilarious. Conan gives viewers all the set up they need for why he’d want to browse Tinder with Dave Franco, saying “Naturally, because I’m a creep, I’m intrigued.” Conan and Dave adopting their Chip Whitley and Dgenghis Roundstone (the “D” is silent) personas is wonderful. As is an unexpected cameo from Conan’s assistant Sona and Conan and Dave’s competition over the 74-year-old Gloria. But per usual, this thing really gets moving when Conan and Dave hit the road in their creepy panel van. Conan assures Dave that the van is filled with duct tape solely to hold the cameras up. “I wish I could say I saw duct tape on any of these cameras,” Dave responds. Once Chip and Dgenghis finally meet their Tinder date, this segment evolves into its glorious final form where Dave and the citizens of L.A. bond over what a weirdo Conan is.

1. The Jordan Schlansky Saga

(Original airdate: 9/1/2008)

Our number 1 entry is a bit of a cheat. For starters, this is not referring to merely one remote segment but a whole genre of them. And the first entry is not even technically a “remote.” Still, we must highlight it all the same for the saga of Conan O’Brien’s associate producer Jordan Schlansky is among the best comedy that Late Night/Tonight Show/Conan ever produced. During the writer’s strike in 2008, Conan tried to keep Late Night going without his usual bevy of writers to help out. This meant segments in which Conan would meet with some of the people behind the scenes of his show which brought him into contact with his eventual archnemesis Jordan Schlansky.

Schlansky is just an aggressively strange person. Always dispassionate and rarely smiling, Schlansky fancies himself a Bohemian renaissance man with his breakfast shakes, mastery of the bullwhip, and vespa. The best part of their original meeting is when Conan realizes just how hilariously bizarre the gestalt of Jordan and can’t help but collapse into laughter as he chokes out “You’re just not like other people.” Later Jordan would join Conan and many remote segments to aggressively annoy and vex him, including one dinner that is among the best things the show has ever done. That lead to Conan’s truly chilling villain monologue:

Conan: I promise you this, I will not kill you myself. But I will have you killed. I will have you wiped out.

Jordan: I am subject to the same winds, the sun, the air that created the wine that I am drinking.

Conan: There will be nothing that links me to your murder. There will be no physical link between your dead body and myself. But you will be murdered. I will order it. I will pay for it. But I’ll have no- I am blameless in the eyes of the international court, that I promise you. (laughs) I’m gonna kill you. (laughs) You have to go.

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BONUS – Conan Checks Out the Christmas Lights in Dyker Heights

(Original airdate: 12/22/2000)

Here’s a bonus entry for purely sentimental reasons. This is nowhere near the best of Conan’s hundreds of remote segments, but it holds some personal value to your dear author. Once upon a time I was a child celebrating the Christmas season a month after my family’s 400-mile move to a new home. My parents had a Christmas party that day and I severely overindulged on chocolates, finishing them off with several clementines before bed for some reason. Suffice it to say, sometime around midnight, I puked all over a brand new sleeping bag I received as a gift and ended up on the couch, full of chocolate, clementines, and regret. My mom flipped on the TV to distract me while she hauled off the sleeping bag to be cleaned…or burned. On TV was this very segment “Conan Checks Out the Christmas Lights in Dyker Heights.” I was enraptured by this strange orange-haired man making fun of people’s garish Christmas decorations…even as I tasted the foul acidy sting of rancid citrus in my throat. And thus is the perfect Conan O’Brien watching experience. Best of luck at HBO Max, Conesy!

The post Conan: Ranking the Best Remote Segments appeared first on Den of Geek.

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