back when I used to frequent the place

more thoughts about troughs of despair

originally posted on face book with pages from my journal : I've reposted here but with images from a painting I'm working on.


journal pages : the struggle continues. I connected the dots and made an amazing macrame owl. When my grandmother became indifferent to the snuff can and spoon in her room, I knew she had left us. A contemporary French philosopher, Catherine Malabou, has addressed this removal of the person from their history in an engaging essay called Ontology of the Accident. She writes, "One does not die as one is, one dies as one suddenly becomes[p 69]. " Various traumas affect changes in us, such that a different person emerges. What has happened is a puzzle. A person may say "farewell to themselves" and become "an ontological refugee." [pp 24 -31]. Trauma can be sudden, a hit or a shock, as well as long term, unemployment or abuse - conditions that may cover decades. The phrase 'ontological refugee' is evocative on an internal nomad - one day we discover that our ego was simply the tent of our existence, and that it has now been struck and traveled on over the horizon.

movement

the figurehead of our momentum takes another victory lap. You probably saw it on the news - right after the scores : Bartok, Boulez, and Lester Young. Two hundred forty years ago, New England shipping interests launched a tax evasion scheme in order to monopolize trade along the east coast. Let's celebrate with another martini. Time to walk the dog and grab a smoke. Always the same rustling in the leaves behind the alcove lets me know when the baby needs molasses. You wore beautiful up there. Now take a breath and drive home.

grateful for my time

slow moving morning, easily distracted by cats, snacks, old essays in the new yorker - planning to write to do list - maybe later this evening; also writing a series of devotionals that take place on other planets - usually about crustaceans with day jobs and step children - my earliest memories seem to involve watching Wagon Train while my grandfather slept on the couch - there was no air conditioning then and I was left alone with fly swatters : kids these days - I can remember when coke was $1.20 a bottle

where I'm at

Zizek, discussing Lacan's distinction between Symbolic and Imaginary, uses the image of chess pieces - on the imaginary, each piece is a shape - a rook or castle, a bishop, a queen, et cetera : all appealing to our imagination; on the symbolic, each piece is actually the operation of its rules: moving diagonally, first two steps then only one and taking only en passant or obliquely. 
I have observed most contentions in life devolve on the imaginary level - we call it a bishop, how dare you call it something else; or that a proper knight must be rearing and not just a head - or any number of differences. So it is that institutions lock people into the imaginary - this is god, this is tradition, this is ultimate, this is the only way a market can function - those people call it something else and we must fear them, etc. 
This is all well and good for institutions and systems : to keep people occupied fighting bogeymen and lashing themselves with guilt. But not for people dealing with trauma : the trauma that is immediate and violent ; as well as the trauma that is prolonged and gradually crippling of soul. No amount of revivals, pledges and confessions will allay it - which is why involvement in the imaginary is so frustrating : people double down on institutionally approved solutions that don't work (pray more, consume more, vote more this way or that, submit more, confess more, go to this conference, hear this speaker) - they have to blame someone for the unrelenting trauma of their speech being taken from them (and it can't be the institution, the system that sponsors their salvation - whether spiritual or economic). 
Trauma stands a chance of being healed, integrated, salved, directed into something creative on the symbolic level. Where we begin looking at the rules, as it were, of how our affects are shaped or distorted, what distorts them and what brings about wholeness, balance. We discover what buttons we have and perceive the toxic nature of people and systems that push them. 
We become less obsessed with what some piece of our life, our spirituality should look like (what creed, what church, what business, what party) and how it functions. What do I need to think clearly, to be at peace - how do those functions work for me? 
There's a lot invested in keeping people in a state, in a permanent boil - a lot to keep people locked in their traumas, focused on labels and villains - a kind of life seen as a cartoon. 
Perhaps it can't be done all at once. I've been 35 years in this state, but each day step back, if only for a while from the pledge all institution, from the adamant belief that everyone must have; each day a little freer and then perhaps a final break. The real thing is to understand how spirituality works for you and for a community - what is involving trauma and what is healing trauma. You don't need a flag or an emblem - you simply need a practice, a curiosity about the world and yourself and others.
That's pretty much where I'm at.