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Reading Jung.

3/31/2019

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Jordan's thoughts in Jung's "Psychological Types".

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"the reflective character, the introvert, though certainly trying to deal with his unruly affects, is in reality more influenced by his passions than the man whose life is consciously guided by desires oriented to objects. The latter, the extravert, tries to get away with this all the time, but is forced to experience how his subjective thoughts and feelings constantly stand in his way. He is far more influenced by his psychic inner world than he suspects. He cannot see it himself, but the people around him, if observant, will always detect the personal purpose in his striving ". <...>.

"The other, the introvert, with his conscious thought-out intentions, always overlooks what the people around him see only too clearly, that his intentions are really subservient to powerful impulses, lacking both aim and object, and are in a high degree influenced by them."

"​The observer and critic of the extravert is liable to take the parade of thinking and feeling as a thin covering that only imperfectly conceals a cold and calculated personal aim. Whereas the man who tries to understand the introvert will readily conclude that vehement passions are only with difficulty held in check by apparent sophistries. "
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Adrienne Rich on relationships

9/27/2018

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​An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
​
from the essay Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying 
copied from Love's Learning Place:  Truth as Aphrodisiac in women's long-term relationships ​by Renate Stendhal.


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Paul Tillich Thoughts

5/22/2018

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Doubt is based on man's separation from the whole of reality, on his lack of universal participation, on the isolation of his individual self. <...>He flees from his freedom of asking and answering for himself to a situation in which no further questions can be asked and the answers to previous questions are imposed on him authoritatively. In order to avoid the risk of asking and doubting he surrenders the right to ask and to doubt. <...>. He "escapes from his freedom" (Fromm) in order to escape the anxiety of meaninglessness <...> Meaning is saved, but the self is sacrificed. And since the conquest of doubt was a matter of sacrifice, the sacrifice of the freedom of the self, it leaves a mark on the regained certitude: a fanatical self-assertiveness. Fanaticism is the correlate to spiritual self-surrender: it shows the anxiety which it was supposed to conquer, by attacking with disproportionate violence those who disagree and who demonstrate by their disagreement elements in the spiritual life of the fanatic which he must suppress In himself. Because he must suppress them in himself he must suppress them in others. The weakness of the fanatic is that those whom he fights have a secret hold upon him; and to this weakness he and his group finally succumb.
​
From The Courage to Be
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Clearing the Space: A why of Writing

4/10/2018

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Quotes from Anne Le Marquand Hartigan's paper

She can get a chair; she can sit down and write. Facing the blank page. The blank page also faces her with freedom.
<...>
Stand with the woman by the table. Sit with the woman facing the blank page, or blank canvas. A space waiting for filling. These spaces are perfect. What is perfect terrifies.
<...>
The steam of tension evaporated. The moment passed. The fear, buried. It is easier like this. It is ordinary and safe. We hurry to fill in spaces with everydayness because spaces frighten us, but, the dividing line between fear and excitemnet is thin.
<...>
In bardic times, it was considered a great misfortune to have a poet in your family. But if the poet happened to be a woman, this was double misfortune, for she, as a woman, would have double the power. ... Magic surrounded the poet's power and this power was feared.
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Nuala O'Faolain

12/15/2017

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A  few of my favourite quotes from "Almost There" - My #1 Summer 2016 book

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- I used him, but, you know, I paid for it, in not being known by him.
-And as for that - passion - I was so estranged from it that I could hardly remember what appetite was like or what confidence was like that would let it show.

- ... you do gain a small distance from anything by keeping it in suspension in your mind while you work on finding the words to fit it. I think this is interesting because you also lose sight if you ruminate on something in your head all the time. The difference is in one case your producing something and in the other your are sort of stuck in thought cycle. 

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Adrift: seventy-six days lost at sea

7/30/2017

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"Was it only half a day ago that I felt so confident, that I convinced myself that reality was just a small part of my life and that my imagination could give me security?"

[about the school of fish following the raft] They have destroyed my ship, disarmed me, and now they mock me. If only I were a sea creature. Fish don't get themselves into problems that they must use intellect and tools to solve"
"Even here, there's richness all around me. (... However,) I need to find more than a moment of tranquility, faith, and love. A ship. Yes, I still need a ship"
​​

"I miss the inspirational advice and hope, the ingenuity, creativity, and charity, of a helping hand."
"search for rest and find only sleep"

"I do not like the fact that whales are hunted, but then again, I often think that the beautiful "balance of nature" is really just everything running around eating each other"
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Ferguson Quotes

7/7/2017

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nFrom Between the Bridge and the River

 Like many of her sex, Sophie was fiercely competitive with other women, working on the crackpot theory that if she could be better in some way, men would like her better, respect her. Make her happy. She never cottoned on the fact the men she was attracted to, the men who found her attractive, didn't like women.
          They liked variety. And fucking.

He realized [his wife] didn't really like him. (...) When he was nice to her it was to calm her down or to stop her from being upset. Not very good reasons, he thought. He realized now he had been patronizing  her for years. "I'm sorry", he said.

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A quote from RIlke

5/28/2017

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Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and  try to love the questions themselves... Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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Ted Hughes

9/25/2016

 

Crow's Theology

Crow realized God loved him --
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.
Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.

And he realized that God spoke Crow --
Just existing was His revelation.

But what
Loved the stones and spoke stone?
They seemed to exist too.
And what spoke that strange silence
After his clamour of caws faded?

And what loved the shot-pellets
That dribbled from those strung up mummifying crows?

What spoke the silence of lead?

Crow realized there were two Gods --

One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.

Crow's First Lesson

God tried to teach Crow how to talk.
"Love," said God. "Say, Love."
Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea
And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth.

"No, no," said God. "Say Love. Now try it. Love."
Crow gaped, and a bluefly, a tsetse, a mosquito
Zoomed out and down
To their sundry flesh-pots.

"A final try," said God. "Now, Love."
Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and
Man's bodiless prodigious head
Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling eyes,
Jabbering protest --

And Crow retched again, before God could stop him.
And woman's vulva dropped over man's neck and tightened.
The two struggled together on the grass.
God struggled to part them, cursed, wept --

Crow flew guiltily off.


Emily Dickinson

7/23/2016

 

XLVI


A THOUGHT went up my mind to-day
That I have had before,
But did not finish,—some way back,
I could not fix the year,
  
Nor where it went, nor why it came        
The second time to me,
Nor definitely what it was,
Have I the art to say.
  
But somewhere in my soul, I know
I ’ve met the thing before; 
It just reminded me—’t was all--
And came my way no more.

From Emily Dickinson (1830–86).  Complete Poems.  1924

Dickinson's poem about power of words - click "read more":​
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Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, MA

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Words and talking in person vs. having an audience

7/20/2016

 
​Another quote about importance of words comes from Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
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"The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of "We are all writers!"
​
The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding."

Words, secondary worlds and Milan Kundera

7/16/2016

 
There is a world out there and around us and then there is what we make of it. Words help navigate through the world by means of letting us name objects/events and in doing so face them. Experiencing something and being able to say  "this is [insert word]" is like dropping an anchor, like tying yourself to the world, like building a bridge. People often don't agree on what a word means : what's funny for one person might not be funny for somebody else. The mismatch, albeit confusing at times, also helps us make sense of the world -- helps notice differences , similarities, all sorts of interesting effects.

I like the idea of this secondary personal world that has the features of the actual world, yet different from it and unique. It's singularity arising not only from the unique combination of events/places one has encountered but also from the words that this person chooses to refer to them (= from the way he/she relates to those events).

This quote from The Joke by Milan Kundera led me to thinking that the personal world of words is not the only secondary world possible:
"Once more I was amazed by the incredible human capacity for transforming reality into a likeness of desires or ideas".

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The Wisdom of the Native Americans. Value of a Word.

5/15/2016

 
Continuing the series of posts on the importance of words. 

A treaty, in the minds of our people, is an eternal work. Events often make it seem expedient to depart from the pledged word, but we are conscious that the first departure creates logic for the second departure. until there is nothing left of the word. 
- Declaration of Indian Purpose 1961
American Indian Chicago Conference

​

More Isaiah Berlin.  On two types of liberty.

4/21/2016

 
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Positive liberty vs. Negative liberty
​
Positive liberty is a proactive process, springing from the need of individuals to feel as if they are in control of their decisions. One of the effects of posivite liberty is that people may feel they are more in control than they really are.

Negative liberty is the absence of meddling in one's individual decisions : "by being free in this sense I mean not being interfered with by others". Interesting side note: ideal Romantic artist is the embodiment of heroic individual negative liberty. 

(from  Isaiah Berlin,  Four Essays on Liberty , 1969)

Unforeseeability

4/16/2016

 
"In 1920 Stefan Wolpe,  a 18 year old student at the Berlin Hochschule fuer Musik, ogranized a performance of Beethhoven's Fifth Symphony using eight phonographs on a stage each playing the Symphony simultaneously but at a different speed.
 Many years later he repeated the performance using two phonographs and spoke of "one of the early Dada obsessions, or interests, namely, the concept of unforeseeability":
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​That means that every moment events are so freshly
invented,
so newly born,
that it has almost no history in the piece itself
but its own actual presence.
 
Wolpe's distortion can be heard as a attempt to re-create the experience of  Beethoven's contemporaries when they first heard the Fifth, to conjure up a time when the work's course was still unforeseeable . "

(from The FIrst Four Notes by Matthew Guerrieri, 2012)

St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo on  words.

10/4/2015

 

​A quote from The Confessions of St. Augustine.

Not one whit more easily are the words learnt for all this vileness; but by their means the vileness is committed with less shame. Not that I blame the words, being, as it were, choice and precious vessels; but that wine of error which is drunk to us in them by intoxicated teachers; and if we, too, drink not, we are beaten, and have no sober judge to whom we may appeal.


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War and Peace Quote.

3/29/2015

 
In external ways Pierre had hardly changed at all. In appearance he was just what he used to be. As before he was absent-minded and seemed occupied not with what was before his eyes but with something special of his own. The difference between his former and present self was that formerly when he did not grasp what lay before him or was said to him, he had puckered his forehead painfully as if vainly seeking to distinguish something at a distance. At present he still forgot what was said to him and still did not see what was before his eyes, but he now looked with a scarcely perceptible and seemingly ironic smile at what was before him and listened to what was said, though evidently seeing and hearing something quite different. Formerly he had appeared to be a kindhearted but unhappy man, and so people had been inclined to avoid him. Now a smile at the joy of life always played round his lips, and sympathy for others, shone in his eyes with a questioning look as to whether they were as contented as he was, and people felt pleased by his presence.

idiots, water and space (Thoughts on "Leviathan")

1/20/2015

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It is scary how routinely and how subtly evil can enter the world around someone and fill the cracks. Like water. Dead water.

Interestingly, the "dead water" motif found in Slavic folklore is more than just a substance deadly for living creatures. It transforms the living into the dead, true, but it also affects the dead, for example it heals wounds found on a dead body. In a way it provides sustenance - for the dead. Like the "living water" - for the living.

No heroes, no leviathan - only dead water.
Discord among people and within them.
"What!? I'm just bla-bla-ing"


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The Phantom Tollbooth

10/26/2014

 

"My goodness, <...> everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best."

Food for thought from a great book by Norton Juster, who lives here in Amherst, MA.

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