I'm taking my time between posts. Not that I don't have things to write. I have a backlog. Jeremy Begbie recommends that I write something. He thinks I could publish somewhere. So I'll give it a try. Meanwhile I'm carving out some time to paint. Even as my CPE residency comes to an end. I've learned a lot. I wish that Alice Miller's Drama of the Gifted Child were more universally read.
I could paint a picture, or describe in words, the projections and counter projections endemic to our society; how most arguments are set against a straw man, filled with vehemence and judgment. Watching the media, reading papers and blogs: one might draw the conclusion that the mass of humanity is disconnected from the reality of life.
I think Deleuze describes this well - albeit in jargon that presents difficulties to people casually opening his books. People desire freedom. People also desire approval. When people move about the world they are threatened by difference. It is hard to see difference as a good thing. So some people, out of paranoia, attach themselves to large social entities - a church, a corporation, the military, the judicial system, government. Other people, see difference but instead of attaching themselves to the large social entities, want to fight these entities. They are afraid not of difference so much, but of being enveloped, becoming mere ciphers, lost in a large enterprise. These people easily attach themselves to people of similar fears,having also needs for relationship - but also nervousness about being engulfed, and they join sects. Not Church but sect; Not corporation but shop; Not military but militia; various libertarian dreamlands. The tenor of these places is fundamentalist - that they're true believers, true upholders of the constitution, true practitioners of capitalism. Deleuze describes this as the subjective black hole; the large entities as the wall of the signifier. It's scylla and charydis - two outcomes of fascism: one outside and the other inside. The person in the hole shakes his fist at the signifier; he is angry and directs his anger at the large entity - but he is angry because he's imprisoned; he's imprisoned himself. He is in the hole of his subjectivity, and he knows he's not free, which angers him - but he directs his anger, not at the hole, but at the signifier. The signifier doesn't care. His companions in the hole want to keep him in the hole - the fantasy of being "the real christians", "the real patriots", "the real capitalists" will yet play out!
Deleuze recommends avoiding the black hole and the signifier. His counsel for freedom is making connections, experimenting, with this in mind: connections don't close off but open up; experiments yield further experiments. Don't judge. Create!
I described this to my therapist and he said that it is my drawing that has saved me. I've drawn my way away from paranoia and out of black holes. Without drawing and painting, sometimes outlandish nudes, but often descriptions of pain - pain that I was feeling, even as I cooperated in my imprisonment, I would have remained in some hole (for me various tiny churches).
Now I'm out. I've been out - but I understand what I'm out from.
I know who I am and what I need.
And I'm only 50.
The other day was a melancholy day for me. Whatever is inside us is complex, not just what we're conscious of. Jung, Freud, Klein, Lacan - all point to this complexity, this unknowable process at work in us, and they conceptualize it as event, timeless symbols or significations. Lacan goes the deepest of any I've read on this matter of the unconscious. He contends that our ego, that sense that I'm thinking my thoughts - and Klein's object relations construction of introjects is contained in what he calls the Imaginary: that is my own conception of an Ego is a product of my imagination. So the ego, that sense that we know what we know, is illusory - that is, it is more a sense that we imagine a sense in ourselves that knows. There is a gap in the cogito, a gap that where we would grasp our identity, we find that it slips further away. At least as long as we think that our goal is to strengthen our Ego - our sense of knowing what we know about who we are - as if our problem were simply one of being informed, and then we would live a life of stasis. Free from the demand of unmet desire.
