INSIDEOWL: On Madness

On Madness · 7 December 2008

I wanted to keep myself sane in my practice. Like in Solaris, the Tarkovsky film, wherein a cosmonaut journeys far to a planet where something has gone very wrong among a crew of explorer-scientists. A mysterious presence, some animus in the planet’s living ocean, has driven them mad; and our new explorer must find the reason while himself withstanding the hallucinatory pulsing of that ocean.

I had seen the advanced windmill-tilter ashtangis, longtime in league with durvasa and the nataraj, lose their shit in a variety of ways. (How many not-crazy advanced practitioners do you know?) So I think that is what I was doing here all summer: charting a course through third series that would allow me to stay grounded and rational, capable of taking others’ perspectives, emotionally even keeled. I wanted a firm-enough reign on my unconscious that its contents would not populate my everyday experience unbidden, would not run rough-shod over my conversations in the ways that freak out the rationalists. (I love free-associators and intuitives, but post-rationalism doesn’t play in social science cocktail parties at all.) I also wanted to push back the veil into my shadow on my own time, rather than forcibly unifying the known and unknown only to have the latter take over the show like it has among the many egomaniac-libertine "gurus" of this world.

I did find a few techniques in my effort to keep it together. Little practices for counterbalancing the aggressive nature of this programme, for grounding myself in the midst of a growing dis-position toward wild-eyed, hypervata butterfly-sage. Envelope breathing, various embraces of earthen feminity, a focus on the roots in the feet and pelvis, self-cuddling. These are very good. I will write about them if others would find them useful. But they’re nothing more than sandbags against the tide of the Solaris sea.

What I’m seeing more clearly now is that practice creates personal insanities—there’s no intensive practice disorder we can write up for the DSM. There is just a systematic removal of your defenses, a revealing of sharper parts of the personality and darker parts of the shadow. People who claim practice makes a person angry are mistaken: practice simply tends to remove barriers to the expression of buried anger. Same for terror, narcissism, vanity, whatever. Don’t tell people practice will make them feel a certain way: experience is specific.

On Solaris, what ultimately drives you mad is the way the universe reflects back to you your own desires. The planet knows your neuroses and projects them right into three dimensions.

I see now how it is Quixote upon Quixote to try to save myself via technique from the 3S Crazy. Serious crazy is in more or less in you, though perhaps the greater proportion of those who self-select into this practice do have copious serious crazy latent. Removing defenses isn’t necessarily a good idea: often, it is functional to leave them in place. In removing them, I feel it’s more urgent than ever that I care for my psyche as more of it comes in to view. I want to say that this is enough, but it seems like there is another small thing.

Solaris comes from Stanislaw Lem’s story about humankind’s two-sided inadequacy: both to understand the human heart and to understand the universe.

It seems something happens as you become very aware with the body. The physical does not always require full attention as you go on, so you learn to follow other trails of experience in the breath and the subtle body (&c.). As you do this, the subtle body techniques that never made sense physically start to yield new experiences. They’re still just techniques, but as the body itself becomes refined the techniques start to engage something… else. You almost don't have a choice about this happening, if you're advanced contorting every day with a refined, fluid exterior and the mind focused if not clear. My guess is that this is how people become not little-kuckoo crazy but instead go knocking on the door of the Universal-Kuckoo. I have no idea what it’s about. Do we need a modern wizard school where we can learn to integrate the mystical stuff back in to the constant stream of experience? Cervantes meets Tarkovsky and Philip K. Dick. It’s such camp, this third-eye-gazing, spinal-breathing, psychic mula-jalandhara connecting nonsense. And I guess that’s why it’s safe to have it out here, because it’s just pre-modern nintendo for people in caves with nothing to entertain themselves but the stringy little muscles in their underfed bellies. It’s not dangerous or esoteric so much as it’s useless. And then suddenly it might not be useless. Without Hogwarts or spaceships I don’t know how to keep it from turning me weird other than to normalize it, laugh with the experience. And ultimately, again and again, come back to relationship as the true ground of practice.

Here is the Doctor, now resident on Solaris and cautioning the arriviste savior-scientist:

Science? It's a fraud! No one will ever resolve this problem, neither genius, nor idiot! We [space explorers] have no ambition to conquer any cosmos. We just want to extend Earth up to the Cosmos's borders. We don't want any more worlds. Only a mirror to see our own in. We try so hard to make contact, but we're doomed to failure. We look ridiculous pursuing a goal we fear, and that we really don't need. Man needs man! [sic]

Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , science

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Comment

Ohh such richness, you have been saving that all up! I prefer Soderbergs to Tarkovsky because I am a romantic sap.
Having said that, maybe its more like the plateau experience: in martial art, analysis and ‘mastery’. We can only take so much in at one time until we feel mad (uncomfortable at least), and then we somehow gestate that, like you are now doing. And somehow we build-up this pressure in us, that alchemises us. This in turn strengthens our ‘containment’ (responsiveness versus reactiveness), and grounds us to the point that we can withstand coming right up against the solaris of our ‘Self’... and harmonising…
You like that? :)

Posted by: Gregor · Dec 7, 06:30 PM · #
hi (0v0)
I’m not sure what envelope breathing is. Does it make a noise like snoring, as if the envelope’s flap is swayed by the air movement? Intensive practice disorder? That is so funny. Maybe all of those inversions in the middle of 3rd have a way to make a person not feel grounded. Pre-modern nintendo for stringy underfed bodies? That’s a really good insight into the history of how the practice might have developed.

Can I digress for a minute? That last observation is really interesting because it’s trying to analyze how something, in this case a physical practice evolved. On a different matter, I stumbled upon how some words developed among ancient Chinese people. The Chinese character for “beautiful” stems from two components that mean “sheep” and “ big”. It made me reflect that at the early stages of the development of language, big sheep might have been considered beautiful – synonymous with wealth, strength and beauty. So people started saying “big sheep” to anything that was “beautiful”

Your analogies are “big sheep”.
hugs,
Arturo

Posted by: arturo · Dec 7, 07:26 PM · #
“...though they go mad they shall be sane”. Chris kelvin

Posted by: grimmly · Dec 7, 11:39 PM · #
Maybe it is time to have a child, after all.

Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Dec 8, 02:20 AM · #
Or, somewhat uncomfortably, there is always:

http://www.hermitary.com/lore/chekhov.html

Perhaps more suitable for the fellas. Not sure.

Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Dec 8, 02:48 AM · #
Chekov’s story of a modern anchorite is very interesting. i think i heard versions of the short story told as urban legends while i was in college. it started like, “i knew this guy who decided to read every book ever written…” i was naive then and thought that was possible. but what you’re saying is that people practicing advanced series are detached from the world, looking at it from a different perspective…

Posted by: arturo · Dec 8, 05:26 AM · #
Wow, brilliant, in ways I will write more about later.

Posted by: patrick · Dec 8, 07:14 PM · #
It does seem that many of us are becoming oddly sane... :)

Containment. I like that a lot, Gregor. Especially that it’s called what it’s called.

I never saw the later Solaris... seemed kind of wrong on its face. (Or on Clooney’s face? Ha.)

But tangentially: do you know about Soderbergh’s Che’? Four hours 17 minutes (!), it opens this weekend at my local theater. I can get tickets, and Del Toro and SS are doing Q&A afterwards. So tempting! Guillermo was born to be Ernesto, yes? Not that I have a thing for Che'. (Secret but true nostalgia script: it was so perfect years ago, the day I first learned of him on the Plaza de la Revolucion. Looking on the stunning Che’ mural there, I asked a passerby, “Quien es eso?” And it began. This was before Rage Against The Machine changed everything, made him an icon for the D&D set. Poor misunderstood Che'....) Anyway, I don't think it's going to work out this weekend. Soderbergh will have to wait. But from the looks of the trailers, I bet we’ll all (more or less secretly) love this version of Guevara. Not to romanticize revolutionary asceticism or the world's last Quixote.... (P.S. There's a line in the film where a reporter asks him, "How do you feel about being a symbol?" Del Toro, droll and laconic in the line-delivery, replies, "A symbol of what?")

Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 8, 07:42 PM · #
Big sheep…. :)

Another context: today I went to a Bel-Air home that is a private “museum,” filled with Kandinskys and Giacomettis and a couple Picassos and de Konings, and a bizarre Rothko in irridescent lime to match the owner’s chintzy sofas. On the front lawn were sheep sculptures… I felt the collector (a ketchup magnate) laughing at me, at all of us creators and all of us dumbstruck visitors to his private Xanadu on the hill. And sheep sculptures on the lawn.

We decorate our austerity though.

Not that it doesn’t seduce me sometimes, a lot, the cave-dwelling thing….

I had never read this story, The Bet. It’s devastating. I love it. I never understand how writing can be so strong even in a second language. And the story is so strong in a second century. God.

But what do you make of it?

Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 8, 07:47 PM · #
Arturo,

I linked ‘The Bet’ to complement the ovoriginal post. I don’t really have a ‘point’ as such, nor (I suspect) did Chekhov or the ovoriginatrix.

But. Please ignore the net-based ‘anchoritic’ context and consider the ‘eveloping breath’ of the banker too, and the significance of him locking the lawyer/hermit’s ‘confessional’ away.

In the same vein, the short novel ‘Ward No.6’ is well worth looking at, too:

http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/jr/166.htm

Really, there’s so much to condsider in the ovoriginal post. Allusive, discursive; pointed pertinent. Disquieting. Manifest rumpling: an owl was hooting outside my window all last night!

A wizard school? Yes. For the born-wierds that might be very helpful. Not sure that Ashtanga Vinyasa is the ideal for all of them – arcane/mundane in the wrong ways, i suspect.
Bear in mind that Ovo has had a couple of post- jesus camp mini-mokshas, wriggling directly out of the medieval into a varigated, renaissance radiance. This makes her recorded skirls so valuable but her muse milieu is just that little bit different as a result.
Not sure that Guillermo was ‘born to be Ernesto’. A bit on the chubby side. Benicio might do a passable job, though.

Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Dec 9, 02:36 AM · #
I can’t believe you called Guillermo chubby.

Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 9, 08:28 AM · #
This reminds me of one of RF’s talks where he defended the oft-maligned ahamkara by comparing it the immune system. It’s an interesting perspective since we’re always breaking down the ahamkara – his point is that we need it to survive in the world…and perhaps to keep the inner craziness somewhat under control.

Posted by: cody · Dec 9, 08:37 AM · #
Solaris is a favourite of mine. Interesting you chose it for your post, been wondering why,(had you just seen it again?). A particular kind of madness/sanity, what is REAL I suppose. Is that your idea of madness losing touch with what is real or the madness you fear, losing your rationality. Do you consider the real and the rational the same or different? Interesting too your madness vocabulary in this post.

“wanted to keep myself sane in my practise, something has gone very wrong,driven them mad, find the reason,hallucinatory windmill-tilter,lose their shit,stay grounded and rational,even keeled,firm-enough reign on my unconscious, unbidden, wild-eyed insanities,a systematic removal of your defences,darker parts of the shadow,remove barriers,drives you mad your neuroses, Crazy, Serious crazy is in more or less in you,knocking on the door of the Universal-Kuckoo,integrate the mystical stuff, nonsense, how to keep it from turning me weird,normalise it.”

Marty and I have a problem I think with madness. Not the neurological, damaged brain sense of madness but rather the social kind. No subject/object correspondence for us, we either experience a phenomena or we don’t. For us to experience anything there must be a world of interrelations. (the old equa-primordial deal).

A mat is for stepping on, but woe betide anyone who steps on your yoga mat. My yoga mat exists within my understanding of mats but also within my understanding of yoga, it’s practise and shala etiquette. If my friend doesn’t know yoga and wipes his feet on my manduka I’m going to go nuts or at least he’ll think I’ve gone nuts. He might consider my reaction out of all proportion (a problem for Aristotle),there’s a lack of correspondence between my yoga world horizon and his world horizon that doesn’t include yoga. We exist within a shared world horizon and this allows us to function within the world but what happens when my, in this case, yoga world begins to supplant the shared world. Now my yoga world couldn’t exist without the shared world but if i become so absorbed in my yoga world and it’s make up, it’s rules and perceptions that i can no longer function or perhaps relate in the shared world… IS this madness?

Or inconvenience.

This line of yours is telling no? “how to keep it from turning me weird, normalise it?

That choice to become an artist, a musician, a philosopher, a scholar, an ascetic, a yogi. To absorb oneself so completely in that world that your tenure to the shared world horizon becomes loosened. Your experience of the shared world is other, or rather your perception for M-P. Is it a choice I wonder or do you just wake up one day other? Can you normalise it? Could you normalise being a scholar? Well scholars are tolorated in the shared world I guess, but perhaps not Yogis….but I forget , you live in calfornia.

Posted by: grimmly · Dec 9, 05:00 PM · #
Guillermo del Toro? He is a bit chubby, eh? Much too chubby to be the revolucionario, anyway. The proper revolutionary should be gaunt and squinty-eyed. Otherwise, the would-be followers would say: “Why do you want to revolt? You look like you’re doing just fine.”

Posted by: Carl · Dec 9, 06:05 PM · #
Che was Secretary of Economic Planning in the INSTITUTIONALIZED revolution! He oversaw a brilliant agro-economy and the quick fattening of the Cuban state. Got a little jowly—which is not to say pudgy!!!—in those years. The years of plenty came only by dint of his insurgently might.

Watch what you say about Guillermo man. I’ll even grant that Garcia Bernal, the sexiest actor that is, made a lousy Che’. But I hold out faith for GDT.

Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 9, 06:30 PM · #
CP, I have been thinking about that RF discussion, and also about that article I posted in the comments a while ago (on how “the ego” is actually seen in Buddhism practice as nice, and useful).

Two responses:

1. The other CP, of EZB yore, said something to me last summer by way of explaining how he teaches. About how we experience practice: “It’s all so personal.”

I’d tended to be in the mindset of “it’s all so universal,” focused not on the flesh and bones of the experience but everywhere else.

Uh oh. I feel like I’m careening toward a koan here. Stop me now! There’s a line of orange (er, saffron) koans in the median!

But honestly: what’s personal and what’s universal?

As I think about this dropping of our defenses, and watch and work with so many people in different ways, I feel like the way people respond to the removal of defenses—physical tension patterns, relational life-organizing patterns, and emotional how-I-feel-about-X patterns—is so specific. Personal. ...I think that’s what brought me to this post. Seeing that, yeah, body-experience is specific in this fine-grained way... but there is also such specifity in how (and how successfully!) each person plays the edge of ahamkara.

2. All the literature I’ve seen on “working” the subtle body—from Gopi Krishna’s writings on “evolutionary energy,” to anything good on pranayama, to tantrics-gone-public—emphasizes that zeroing in on the subtle body too fast without preparing the physical body can cause freak-outs. Bad trips. I don’t know that Krishnamachya ever said that his aim was to create a system that lead the practitioner from gross to subtle to causal but the names of the ashtanga series do imply such a model. Seems so wise. Prepare the ground for a while before you start to push psychic boundaries, play with energy, or whatever.

Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 9, 06:31 PM · #
P.S. Holy cow. A real-live Heideggerian. I will try to engage this without going too (Haber)mæssy (because I’m not really in to Jurgen’s postmodern “diversity” epistemology—relativism is a tool, not a moral ultimatum).

Have to deal with some email first though. I have no email tapas. But MUST try to be halfway effing disciplined about it…

Oh and P.P.S. Where am I supposed to find the time to read everything Anton Chekov ever wrote? Why didn’t I do that years ago?

Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 9, 06:32 PM · #
Guillermo

Benicio

Benicio is verrrrry sexy. But Gael is the most.

Posted by: V · Dec 9, 08:44 PM · #
Oh. My. God. I must obtain that diphthong digraph character capability for myself! I must find out how I too can make this very special kind of typing.

And, yeah, Benicio has the furrowed brow of the revolutionary. One can easily imagine him ruminating over the necessity of revolution by and for the people.

Posted by: Carl · Dec 9, 09:06 PM · #
CARL, if you practice in your thong tomorrow morning I shall bestow upon you the gift of dipthong. Yours. Simple as that.

Anyway, I cannot distinguish Janus B and C, nor Toros B and G? Terrible.

Thanks dear V. for spelling it out for me. Phhhhhht.

I think I could keep it straight if Gael had a double.

Ok now back to inbox-driste. Dhiyo yo nah prachodayat.

xoxovolver…
xoxovolent!
xoxoxoxyzzzzzzz…..

Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 9, 09:39 PM · #
Ok, more prepared to speak now that we’re thoroughly off-topic (of course if we’re what Deleuze and Guattari call DIVIDUAL enough, we’re never off-topic, eh? Blog without organs?).

“Removal of defenses” and “The practice makes you angry: not true.” Those are the big resonators. In 2002 I turned thirty years of my life on its ear. In journals, on climbing walls and on mats, I’ve been seeing that stuff work out, now that the container is finally tipped. Spills, pours, trickles.

Life has had uncommon and unwanted discipline since then; a real forced march. Financial balance, dissertation, job market (twice!). Ashtanga as of 2004. One-pointed foci that have had to be maintained despite positively ferocious desires not to (dissertate, for example).

Insanity, of course, results. Or no, it doesn’t. Insanity, finally, blooms, in a way. “Latent crazy.” Yes.

What I find odd about my experience is that my embrace of the Great-Cuckoo (and that alone sounds so DADA that it must be loved) comes from embracing what America would see as greater socio-economic security (??) and it is this SANITY, precisely, which drives my native INSANITY completely MAD.

The sort of shadow-light dialectic (which only works if its dialectical) established early on here, still holds. If years ago I hopped full-on into the shadow, now I have to step into the light from the shadow, holding the shadow, embodying the shadow, performing the light. To not shatter, to not combine matter and anti-matter (“More Power, Mr. Scott!”), that is where the alchemy comes in.

Yes, one starts writing koans; it’s the only way to maintain accuracy.

Posted by: patrick · Dec 10, 07:11 AM · #
A story a day will do. If you’re cheerful and have five minutes, there’s this:

http://www.classicreader.com/book/393/1/

Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Dec 10, 07:55 AM · #
Yes, we were almost extinct, but bred in captivity and finally released back into the wild.
All this talk of Che…..you bought the yogamatic Che mat huh.

Posted by: grimmly · Dec 10, 10:36 AM · #
Shhhhh. Covert operation.

Yes Patrick I guess we all go in cycles. :) BTW by Universal Cuckoo I don’t mean the rationalization of bizarre social conventions. I mean a shared unknown—the What. I don’t know What. Dasein on nitrous.

I don’t think we should be talking about this.

L8R.

Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 10, 12:36 PM · #
Someone said ‘Evolution is chaos with feedback’.
I like that very much.
And I suppose it also means that there will be more chaos, and so, to which we contain ourselves just enough to evolve from waiting for the feedback…
Its that simple
haha!

Posted by: Gregor · Dec 10, 02:32 PM · #
(((Full-on lyricism here, SORRY!!! Gregor asked for it.)))

[The spirit…]

Plays as a minnow plays,
Tethered to a limp weed, swinging,
Tail around, nosing in and out of the current,
Its shadows loose, a watery finger;
Moves, like the snail,
Still inward,
Taking and embracing its surroundings,
Never wishing itself away,
Unafraid of what it is,
A music in a hood,
A small thing,
Singing.

-Theodore Roethke

Also, because this is a post about madness, when I came home tonight the Goodyear Blimp was suspended up there directly over my house, right next to the near-full moon. It (the blimp, not the moon) sounds like an old lawnmower. The electronic display is advertising winter grade tri-grid tires for your SUV. It was 74 today. However, gas is down to $1.73.

Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 10, 06:05 PM · #
I’m supposed to be cheerful about Ch? Please, these are rapier denouments. RE and I saw The Seagull last spring. The RSC came to town and King Lear sold out (to my annoyance), so we took their staging of the Chekov play as consolation prize. Oh, God. The last time the Russians came around was 15 yrs ago, some Doestoyevsky guy. Maybe that’s why Chekov resonates, as these older feelings return. But about that…

This story is like the arriviste “teacher,” unable to see the phantoms of past abuse arising in others’ bodies, and so satisfied with his new “learning” and the neat “connectedness of the universe.” My teaching mentor said this to me: ashtangis are intense people, they’re wounded shamen, but you have never been harmed, you were raised by healthy and compassionate people, have been safe all your life… how can you learn to see old fear in the body? You have to learn it from them. Sort of like an Rx for AC, that…

Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 10, 06:24 PM · #
oh gawd I love that movie. Thank you for mentioning it. I like it even better than Andrei Rublev.

xoxo
K

Posted by: katie · Dec 10, 07:15 PM · #
Katie, my girl. Hello! I fell asleep in Andrei Rublev. Will try again.

So Grim, I have been mulling over that comment with some enjoyment.

I hope it is not too frustrating that my writing has become internally contradictory. I’m glad for readers who share my impatience with post-structuralism, but for the moment maybe I am writing a kind of “fractured narrative.” I’m suspicious of regnant categories and my experience doesn’t fully confirm them, so it’s coming out mixed up.

Why Solaris. For Katie. But… aren’t ashtangis space explorers going to lands of crazies? On old maps they used to write Here There Be Tygers to denote unexplored territory, but that also seems a good line for this “seeking” businss. And it’s also a Ray Bradbury story about an insane planet, if I remember.

If I can specify, remembering that the categories at hand don’t quite work for any of this, I’d say the crazy I’m talking about is postrational. Rationality’s still there, it’s just not so useful. I’m not worried about becoming irrational—-I’m terribly analytical, even if I am learning to, uh, bracket that in order to access other streams of experience. What I do see, and find annoying, in Tyger country is that practitioners get so in touch with previously unconscious stuff that they let it take over. Freaky.

The story about the mat is lovely. I would say this is not craziness so much as a shallow form of depth. The devotee goes so deep in to one perspective that he loses the ability to encompass his friend within that perspective. But we’re living in globalization; we (ashtangis, D&D freaks, and Christian alike) follow a practice whose rituals mean nothing to our neighbors; this is modern sacredness-—knowing the boundaries of our own deep meanings. Not being cultural dopes. By contrast, expecting others to hold sacred that which we have made sacred isn’t crazy. It’s just unintelligent. :) The “tenure to the shared world horizon [does] become loosened,” yes; and it’s beautiful. As long and one gets it that she is being a kind of hermit.

I am interested about your and Marty’s issues with social madness, together with this implication that brain-damage madness is not so problematic. Phenomenologically, how is skitzophrenia not real? Hey, having several “crazy” loved ones makes you work out your phenomenology with fear and trembling. :) And on some level that’s gotten me in a pickle. Sometimes the mystical nonsense is real. I’m being honest about that, as much as I know it’s not real for others—“normalization” is granting both realities are real, or something. I don’t care if it’s just a lie my brain tells me. It’s real. Phenomenologically.

Same as William James sniffing nitrous. :)

Subjectivity and objectivity might just be moments of being, different places to step in to the lake—-that probably makes no sense but I don’t know how to say it otherwise.

If sometimes it gets trippy I am ok with that-—and see it as real-—as long as I don’t use that to justify yoga mat rage (Stay off my Che, and my Benicio, you hear?), don’t become slave to half-repressed desires (don’t ask how my belief in the unconscious mind squares with all this; I dunno), and don’t lose the ability to contain the non-tripped-out perspective of others generously within my own perspective. Those are things I want to avoid just because they’re annoying in others. :)

Whew! Managed to get through that without any discussion of subject-object relations and almost no metaphysics. Can I have a cookie? Oh yeah, getting on a mat in 8 hours. I think I’m going to go look for the blimp again now.

Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 10, 09:05 PM · #
“how can you learn to see old fear in the body?”

Mm. That’s some serious compassion.

Re: crazy.

Dogen: To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others.

I guess it’s easy to get stuck at “to study the self” (SELF SELF SELF!) or “to forget the self” (while still hyperfocused on the SELF — hence the reactionary ahamkara-hating)?

If “aham” refers to the Self, and “kara” to any created thing, that sure sounds equivalent to being enlightened by all things of the universe.

All. No matter where it falls on the political or psychological or spiritual continuum. Everything. Nothing left out. Cookies, blimps, ideas… And sometimes it’s finely differentiated, and sometimes it’s a big undifferentiated mess. But it’s always everything!

Posted by: karen · Dec 11, 04:15 AM · #
gives owl a cookie

Old fear in the body comes radically to life, if/when a person cracks the “line” that connects the old fear to its present incarnation. There are days that DECADES of me do Primary.

Posted by: patrick · Dec 11, 07:44 AM · #
eats cookie

Emptiness is form.

Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 11, 12:42 PM · #
I mean…

Form is emptiness?

Shoot, I can never remember which side goes first.

Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 11, 12:44 PM · #
Isn’t insanity relative to the social and individual states of mind? That is to say, we can be socially insane, or we can insane with respect to our individual selves, but if we’re insane on one end of our axis we are probably sane on the other. When we say people are “well adjusted” don’t we mean simply that they fall somewhere in the middle of the two extremes and can function reasonably well, and don’t behave in ways that appear extreme to other people?

People that push aside all the binding social conventions look crazy to those of us who like to keep some links to the social world. But people who slip too deeply in the relational, social mindcast are equally nuts — they don’t even know who they are as individuals. It’s my guess that that is the pool where severe depression happens but I can’t offer much to support that notion.

Everybody is nuts in some way. The over-the-top individuals at least seem to enjoy their craziness.

Posted by: Carl · Dec 11, 04:21 PM · #
I only just now noticed the ‘forget’ checkbox for our personal information in the comment entry window. Is this deliberately contrary to convention?

Posted by: Carl · Dec 11, 04:23 PM · #
Since we’re obviously subject, I once told a whey-faced Freiburgher that Heidegger played for Bayern Munich. This was 1991, in Tel Aviv and I was in earnest.

Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Dec 12, 09:21 AM · #
So Martin walks in to a bar….

I don’t get it. But watch what you say about bayrichers…

Carl, it is deliberately contrary to convention. Crazy, I know.

Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 12, 09:50 AM · #
It’s a true story. A time of innocence and, dare I suggest, an age of sanity.

Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Dec 15, 01:53 AM · #