Poetry & Churchill's Black Dog
Last Lessons
Last lessons.
Feel the sky drip with
hyperbolic melancholy. Friends,
enemies, their faces stretched with
farcical grins, teeth all bare.
"I'll miss you!" So will I.
I'll miss the confusion, the torment,
the pervading cynicism that has served
as friend and crutch through all these years.
I'll miss that bitter boy,
haunted by pain, the one who
shed his skin till iron showed
underneath.
And more, I'll miss
the forced intimacy, the flapping smiles,
the masks. I'll miss
the fake affection, the challenge
I found in 'social faux pas'. I'll miss you,
and I'll hate you.
Every last one of you.
---
I finally finished reading "Churchill's Black Dog (and other phenomena of the human mind)" by Anthony Storr, which was a very good, easy read and had a lot of tidbits on psychiatry & psychoanalysis that I enjoyed learning about, though I have to say I wasn't as interested in his focus on specific famous persons (I skipped the Kafka and C.P. Snow chapters as I don't know anything about them). He also seemed to diss Freud a lot, for justifiable reasons but ones I tended to disagree with, and seemed to be very empathetic about Psychoanalysis not being a science - which he explained, and I could see where he was coming from, but some of his arguments based on the 'subjectivity' of psychoanalysis could well have applied to 'true' sciences as well, I'd say. Anyway, very good read.
"Nevertheless, works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting. This has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such things, to spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.
This has brought me to recognize the apparently paradoxical fact that precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unresolved riddles to our understanding. We admire them, we feel overawed by them, but we are unable to say what they represent to us. I am not sufficiently well informed to know whether this fact has already been remarked upon; possibly, indeed, some writer on aesthetics has discovered that this state of intellectual bewilderment is a necessary condition when a work of art is to achieve its greatest effects. It would only be with the greatest reluctance that I could bring myself to believe in any such necessity."
- Freud, pg153 (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey, 13:211-12)
"However, at an early age, Jung developed serious doubts about the conventional faith in which he was brought up. He began to think of religion as a personal matter which had little to do with accepted creeds. He tried to discuss some of these doubts with his father, but found the latter unwilling to enter into argument. Jung found himself in the position of being unable to subscribe to the faith in which he had been reared, while at the same time continuing to believe that individuals could neither be happy nor healthy unless they acknowledged their dependence upon some higher power than that of the ego.
In the letters between himself and Freud, the question of whether or not they should join a new International Fraternity for Ethics and Culture is discussed:
'Is there perchance a new saviour in the I.F? What sort of new myth does it hand out for us to live by? Only the wise are ethical from sheer intellectual presumption, the rest of us need the eternal truth of myth. You will see from this string of associations that the problem does not leave me simply apathetic and cold. The ethical problem of sexual freedom really is enormous and worth the sweat of all noble souls. But 2000 years of Christianity can only be replaced by something equivalent.' (McGuire, Freud/Jung Letters, Letter 178J, p.294)"
- pg199
"Everything great comes from neurotics. They alone have founded religions and composed our masterpieces."
- Proust, pg254 (The Maxims of Marcel Proust, ed. Justin O'Brien)
"It should be remembered that psychiatrists, and perhaps especially psychoanalysts, have very little idea of what the average, "normal" man or woman is like, and may therefore tend to call "neurotic" all kinds of people who are actually within the normal range. As one of my psychoanalytic teachers used to remark, "The normal man is a very dark horse.""
- pg256
"Men who commit violent crimes are not infrequently told by magistrates or judges that they have behaved like animals. This is grossly unfair to other species."
- pg269
"Aggression, therefore, is a potential response which we share with other animals and which, at least at the dawn of history, if not today, was biologically adaptive. The same cannot be said of destructive violence and cruelty, which are not only blots upon the human escutcheon, but which serve no obvious biological purpose. (...) Kindness to other human beings is likely to pay in terms of reproductive potential and survival; or, as a friend of mine used to put it, "Civility is cheap, but it pays rich dividends!" Violence and cruelty, therefore, are phenomena which are not only repulsive, but which demand explanation."
- pg271
"Football games appeal to adolescent males because they provide opportunities for so-called macho displays which bolster feelings of developing masculinity. But such displays are apt to be converted into something far more dangerous if alcohol is available. Modern society provides too few opportunities for young adult males to express the aggressive feelings to which I referred when quoting Washburn's remarks. If I were home secretary, I would try to triple the price of alcohol. I am quite sure that there would be some decrease in violent crime as a result."
- pg273
"So many human beings in Western culture show an interest in sadomasochistic literature or films that it is not possible to argue that such interests are abnormal. There are many people who are uncertain of themselves and ineffective in sexual relationships, and such people may need sadomasochistic fantasies or rituals in order to become fully arouse.d Their fascination with sadomasochism springs from their need to establish dominance (or to have the other person establish dominance) before they can venture upon a sexual relationship.
There are a few instances of murderers combining sexual excitement with the act of killing, of whom the so-called Monster of Dusseldorf, Peter Kurten, is one. John Christie was a necrophilic who had intercourse with the corpses of his victims; but such cases are exceedingly rare. I do not believe that torturers usually become sexually aroused when inflicting pain upon their victims, nor do I think it likely that riot police have erections when wielding their whips and clubs."
- pg277
As it's been the last week of highschool evar (ohmygawdz) we've had themed dress up all day.
Mon: pyjamas
Wore some PJs I haven't worn since I was 13 or something xD With little bears or dogs or something on them. And then dad's dressing gown. Boiled to death in the heat for most of the day.
Tues: school uniform
Wore my sister's uniform, and since she's so huge compared to me I ended up looking like a gangsta with my shirt hanging off me and baggy trousers.
Wed: highschool stereotype
Went as an EMO/goth. Laziest costume ever. Black clothes, thick eyeliner (which also substituted as black 'lipstick'), then one of those 'belts' you use for coats that I wrapped around my neck as a 'choker collar', haha. Then I looked moody for the whole day. People kept being scared out of their wits by my appearance, apparently. Rachel also went as a goth, including a part of her costume which was actually her mother's lingerie and looked much damn sexier as a goth than I did.
Thurs: future job day
That's today. I'm dressed as a French (hipster) poet: red trousers, red scarf, collared shirt, curly moustache and goatee drawn on with eyeliner (haha, yet again), a notebook with the amazing poem "Amor! Blah blah blah blah & the flowers are dying." and a quill clobbered together from a snipped-off (modern) pen nib and a peacock feather I found being sold in a little arts-and-crafts shop. I'm supposed to have a beret, but the girl I was borrowing it off has, since Sunday, the day I originally asked to borrow it, not given it to me. Completely unreliable, I swear. I waited an hour and a half in the McD's near the train station yesterday to meet her (sleeping through most of it) but she never showed up, so that was a humongous waste of time. I was quite bitterly pissed off about that.
Friday: "fuck shit up"/FSU day, with the theme of Saw
I don't know why we're doing Saw, I've never seen it. But we're all wearing Jigsaw masks on this day, so...we'll see how it goes. And pranks and such - we're going to be doing something with dry ice in the bathrooms.
(EDIT: We had breakfast first of all, pre-paid by Mr Nixon as a gift. Chartwells actually outdid itself and gave us eggs and bacon and all sorts of nice stuff. That was a very enjoyable part of the day.
We played with dry ice by putting it in sinks but it didn't work very well. We found the best thing to do was put them in little plastic cups of water and set them around the staircases so there was a sort of low mist. Best part was walking around with the foaming cups and masks on and having everyone run out of the way. XD Must say I enjoy being an anonymous terror.
Then there was a final assembly for the yr 13s where Mr Taylor sang a song about the interesting people in the year i.e. none of us, so Katie and I just kind of slumped out of boredom while half the year wailed from SUDDEN NOSTALGIA and a desire not to leave. Because of this stupid assembly we never got to steal people out of classes, which was a bummer because it was a yearly tradition. Hmph. But soon after that was time to go home, and we gave the people crying and hugging one another a wiiiiide berth.)
Everyone's being all "oh no it's our LAST LESSON EVER!!!! I'll miss everything/everyone!" whereas I can't get over the bliss of finally getting out of this tormentous place that has been little but a source of misery over the past few years. And I don't know where half of these people are getting their sudden nostalgic love of the school from - it was not that long ago they too were bitterly complaining about it. At any rate, I'm finding it pretty annoying, hence my rather hateful poem above. Call me a spoil-sport!
Last lessons.
Feel the sky drip with
hyperbolic melancholy. Friends,
enemies, their faces stretched with
farcical grins, teeth all bare.
"I'll miss you!" So will I.
I'll miss the confusion, the torment,
the pervading cynicism that has served
as friend and crutch through all these years.
I'll miss that bitter boy,
haunted by pain, the one who
shed his skin till iron showed
underneath.
And more, I'll miss
the forced intimacy, the flapping smiles,
the masks. I'll miss
the fake affection, the challenge
I found in 'social faux pas'. I'll miss you,
and I'll hate you.
Every last one of you.
---
I finally finished reading "Churchill's Black Dog (and other phenomena of the human mind)" by Anthony Storr, which was a very good, easy read and had a lot of tidbits on psychiatry & psychoanalysis that I enjoyed learning about, though I have to say I wasn't as interested in his focus on specific famous persons (I skipped the Kafka and C.P. Snow chapters as I don't know anything about them). He also seemed to diss Freud a lot, for justifiable reasons but ones I tended to disagree with, and seemed to be very empathetic about Psychoanalysis not being a science - which he explained, and I could see where he was coming from, but some of his arguments based on the 'subjectivity' of psychoanalysis could well have applied to 'true' sciences as well, I'd say. Anyway, very good read.
"Nevertheless, works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting. This has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such things, to spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.
This has brought me to recognize the apparently paradoxical fact that precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unresolved riddles to our understanding. We admire them, we feel overawed by them, but we are unable to say what they represent to us. I am not sufficiently well informed to know whether this fact has already been remarked upon; possibly, indeed, some writer on aesthetics has discovered that this state of intellectual bewilderment is a necessary condition when a work of art is to achieve its greatest effects. It would only be with the greatest reluctance that I could bring myself to believe in any such necessity."
- Freud, pg153 (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey, 13:211-12)
"However, at an early age, Jung developed serious doubts about the conventional faith in which he was brought up. He began to think of religion as a personal matter which had little to do with accepted creeds. He tried to discuss some of these doubts with his father, but found the latter unwilling to enter into argument. Jung found himself in the position of being unable to subscribe to the faith in which he had been reared, while at the same time continuing to believe that individuals could neither be happy nor healthy unless they acknowledged their dependence upon some higher power than that of the ego.
In the letters between himself and Freud, the question of whether or not they should join a new International Fraternity for Ethics and Culture is discussed:
'Is there perchance a new saviour in the I.F? What sort of new myth does it hand out for us to live by? Only the wise are ethical from sheer intellectual presumption, the rest of us need the eternal truth of myth. You will see from this string of associations that the problem does not leave me simply apathetic and cold. The ethical problem of sexual freedom really is enormous and worth the sweat of all noble souls. But 2000 years of Christianity can only be replaced by something equivalent.' (McGuire, Freud/Jung Letters, Letter 178J, p.294)"
- pg199
"Everything great comes from neurotics. They alone have founded religions and composed our masterpieces."
- Proust, pg254 (The Maxims of Marcel Proust, ed. Justin O'Brien)
"It should be remembered that psychiatrists, and perhaps especially psychoanalysts, have very little idea of what the average, "normal" man or woman is like, and may therefore tend to call "neurotic" all kinds of people who are actually within the normal range. As one of my psychoanalytic teachers used to remark, "The normal man is a very dark horse.""
- pg256
"Men who commit violent crimes are not infrequently told by magistrates or judges that they have behaved like animals. This is grossly unfair to other species."
- pg269
"Aggression, therefore, is a potential response which we share with other animals and which, at least at the dawn of history, if not today, was biologically adaptive. The same cannot be said of destructive violence and cruelty, which are not only blots upon the human escutcheon, but which serve no obvious biological purpose. (...) Kindness to other human beings is likely to pay in terms of reproductive potential and survival; or, as a friend of mine used to put it, "Civility is cheap, but it pays rich dividends!" Violence and cruelty, therefore, are phenomena which are not only repulsive, but which demand explanation."
- pg271
"Football games appeal to adolescent males because they provide opportunities for so-called macho displays which bolster feelings of developing masculinity. But such displays are apt to be converted into something far more dangerous if alcohol is available. Modern society provides too few opportunities for young adult males to express the aggressive feelings to which I referred when quoting Washburn's remarks. If I were home secretary, I would try to triple the price of alcohol. I am quite sure that there would be some decrease in violent crime as a result."
- pg273
"So many human beings in Western culture show an interest in sadomasochistic literature or films that it is not possible to argue that such interests are abnormal. There are many people who are uncertain of themselves and ineffective in sexual relationships, and such people may need sadomasochistic fantasies or rituals in order to become fully arouse.d Their fascination with sadomasochism springs from their need to establish dominance (or to have the other person establish dominance) before they can venture upon a sexual relationship.
There are a few instances of murderers combining sexual excitement with the act of killing, of whom the so-called Monster of Dusseldorf, Peter Kurten, is one. John Christie was a necrophilic who had intercourse with the corpses of his victims; but such cases are exceedingly rare. I do not believe that torturers usually become sexually aroused when inflicting pain upon their victims, nor do I think it likely that riot police have erections when wielding their whips and clubs."
- pg277
As it's been the last week of highschool evar (ohmygawdz) we've had themed dress up all day.
Mon: pyjamas
Wore some PJs I haven't worn since I was 13 or something xD With little bears or dogs or something on them. And then dad's dressing gown. Boiled to death in the heat for most of the day.
Tues: school uniform
Wore my sister's uniform, and since she's so huge compared to me I ended up looking like a gangsta with my shirt hanging off me and baggy trousers.
Wed: highschool stereotype
Went as an EMO/goth. Laziest costume ever. Black clothes, thick eyeliner (which also substituted as black 'lipstick'), then one of those 'belts' you use for coats that I wrapped around my neck as a 'choker collar', haha. Then I looked moody for the whole day. People kept being scared out of their wits by my appearance, apparently. Rachel also went as a goth, including a part of her costume which was actually her mother's lingerie and looked much damn sexier as a goth than I did.
Thurs: future job day
That's today. I'm dressed as a French (hipster) poet: red trousers, red scarf, collared shirt, curly moustache and goatee drawn on with eyeliner (haha, yet again), a notebook with the amazing poem "Amor! Blah blah blah blah & the flowers are dying." and a quill clobbered together from a snipped-off (modern) pen nib and a peacock feather I found being sold in a little arts-and-crafts shop. I'm supposed to have a beret, but the girl I was borrowing it off has, since Sunday, the day I originally asked to borrow it, not given it to me. Completely unreliable, I swear. I waited an hour and a half in the McD's near the train station yesterday to meet her (sleeping through most of it) but she never showed up, so that was a humongous waste of time. I was quite bitterly pissed off about that.
Friday: "fuck shit up"/FSU day, with the theme of Saw
I don't know why we're doing Saw, I've never seen it. But we're all wearing Jigsaw masks on this day, so...we'll see how it goes. And pranks and such - we're going to be doing something with dry ice in the bathrooms.
(EDIT: We had breakfast first of all, pre-paid by Mr Nixon as a gift. Chartwells actually outdid itself and gave us eggs and bacon and all sorts of nice stuff. That was a very enjoyable part of the day.
We played with dry ice by putting it in sinks but it didn't work very well. We found the best thing to do was put them in little plastic cups of water and set them around the staircases so there was a sort of low mist. Best part was walking around with the foaming cups and masks on and having everyone run out of the way. XD Must say I enjoy being an anonymous terror.
Then there was a final assembly for the yr 13s where Mr Taylor sang a song about the interesting people in the year i.e. none of us, so Katie and I just kind of slumped out of boredom while half the year wailed from SUDDEN NOSTALGIA and a desire not to leave. Because of this stupid assembly we never got to steal people out of classes, which was a bummer because it was a yearly tradition. Hmph. But soon after that was time to go home, and we gave the people crying and hugging one another a wiiiiide berth.)
Everyone's being all "oh no it's our LAST LESSON EVER!!!! I'll miss everything/everyone!" whereas I can't get over the bliss of finally getting out of this tormentous place that has been little but a source of misery over the past few years. And I don't know where half of these people are getting their sudden nostalgic love of the school from - it was not that long ago they too were bitterly complaining about it. At any rate, I'm finding it pretty annoying, hence my rather hateful poem above. Call me a spoil-sport!