Statement as a Poem #?: The Alchemical Origins of Psychiatric Diagnoses.

Statement as a Poem #?: The Alchemical Origins of Psychiatric Diagnoses.

Did you know? The whole distinction

Of Bipolar Disorder

Was once called

Manic Depression? Which was based

On the alchemical concept of conflicting

Temperaments: Sanguine (based in blood) and

Melancholic (based in black

Bile)?

Something to think

About.

Did you all so know

That the Sanguine temperament

Was believed to have been a function of

The element of Air, centered in the Heart

Chakra, whereas the Melancholic

Temperament was believed to have been centered

In the second chakra, related to

Water?

The other two elements were fire: Choleric. The third chakra.

And earth: Phlegmatic. The first chakra. Phlegm was all so identified with

The throat.

Something to think

About.

Dm.A.A.

The Convent Dream. (The House of the Dying.)

1.       Last night’s dream may not require a record of it, it may endure in memory throughout my life-time.

In place of the Hager’s residence on my street there is now a house I might have visited several times before. All though this seems unlikely given the content of other recent dreams, by the time that I arrived at this home it had all ready become familiar to me as the residence of Kresten’s extended family.

Perhaps in fact I first encountered this setting last night but can only, as it has been observed, recall the last few episodes.

Much like the land surveyor in Kafka’s The Castle, I was assigned to this destination – I think by Kresten – perhaps to pet-sit. Yet just like in the Kafka tale I had trouble gaining admittance and then acceptance. I think I was accompanied by a friend – if not Andrew then probably a reference to him, for the Dreamer of Dreams has all ready cast Andrew as a personification of the Shadow – when I first[/last?] tried gaining admittance to the House. The woman who answered, presumably Kresten’s graunt – but on second thought all most certainly his dead, demented grand-mother – asked first and in a clipped and near-silent Soviet voice if I believed in God. It might have been in this interrogative form: What is your religion? Awkwardly but without hesitation or stutter I replied that I did not have a religion because my parents never followed one in particular. She said no more to me, but passed out from sight, advancing I think towards the front of the house. I was left uncertain as to whether or not I was well come. A part of me wants to believe that I turned to Andrew at that instant and that he shrugged in mutual confusion.

The House must surely have been the House of the Dead. At any rate, it was the House of the Dying. Yet what Watts had said about how we treat our dying – with denial – seemed endemic. In truth, a number of its occupants there were of middle-age, and I wondered what they were doing there. A man occupied a cot upon my right upon entry to the bleak blue room. I recall an arbitrary riddle that I was asked to solve, or other-wise it was one that I had believed my self to have solved adequately and wanted to brag about.* I was met with feeble glares of incredulity like the one that the old man at the Zen monastery had fixed me in before the other old fuck there said of my intellectualism and philosophical curiosity that he did not know why I could not ‘relate to [with] people’** and that I needed medication (in the patronizing interrogative form: ‘Are you taking [on] any medication?’***

*This is all most certainly a reference to my attempts to talk people through Depression.

** Salinger incarnate. I am Seymour Glass.

*** This episode at the Zen Monastery was Actual.

2.       At one point later in the dream I had left the house, which never seemed to change internally. I left my home in a bath-robe. I passed by the Wookey’s open garage, where Scott’s perpetually hot sister Michelle, who might have been dressed in a salmon-magenta robe, was packing things into a car. In fact it might have been that the garage, like the Hagers’ garage had been in Actuality and as it was now. In Dream, was still cluttered as though Scott had never ‘grown up’. I asked her when he would return. She hesitated to answer and I thought first that may be she had not heard me and then secondly that she was ignoring me, though it’s possible that these two thoughts had occurred in the obverse order. It was like seeing the woman at the Che café and being disappointed to find that she was not in fact the INFP-looking buxom blonde who had worked at Barnes & Noble. [Another Actual Instant.] She finally replied, probably without looking at me. I cannot immediately recall, but it seems that Scott would be gone indefinitely, for her response left me with little to nothing to look forward to.

As I continued down in the street, I was met with an angry glare from a female stranger in her twenties-to-thirties-or-early-forties, wearing a night-robe that might have been like my mother’s. I was unnerved. I thought: She is wearing a robe. Why would mine, (which felt like it had belonged to my father, in retrospect, and might in fact have been either borrowed or inherited) offend her? I looked down and realized that I was not only wearing that robe, but dress pants and my favourite cobalt-blue business shirt over it, too.

3.       Finally, I decided to perform upon [I think one of] a series of truly grand (though not formally Grand) pianos at Kresten’s Christian convent. I was told, luke-warmly, that while my music was basically good I could use some lessons. I began to explain, again with the same Zen-off-the-bat immediacy, that those cost a lot of money and that all of my favourite artists were self-taught. It was like the time in Actuality that I had told Mitchell that all of my favourite authors were dead, except that that time the reply was delightfully a positive relief:

‘Then you are like me,’ he had said with the same Dr. Pepper immediacy.

dm.A.A.

Cat Calling: On Social Deviance.

Cat Calling.

Cat-calling is of course not the same thing as rape except to those who choose to react the same way to it. Were matters other-wise, a simple pass would make [my friend who had been a rape victim]’s Post-Traumatic Stress flare up like a Salinger novel. Feminism presupposes naively that women are the victim class and that men are victimizers by class. But not only does this perpetuate Gender Division and not only does it muddle Potentiality and Actuality. This mentality is in fact very naiive.

When I last went to Palomar College, a major stressor in my life was a fellow named [Simon Braille]. People who have counseled me and interpreted my dreams have intuited the enduring impact that he had upon me, one that while it leant colour to my prior semester there all so overcast it with gray and leant relief to my departure.

Simon insisted upon a psychiatric diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia that I grew steadily to believe.
He attested that he had been in multiple fights with gang members, some of which ended in murder, and he was 'green-lighted' by the local Diablos gang. He professed a knowledge of multiple martial arts, as well as a tremendous capacity for using Psychic Energy, the latter of which I can at least attest to, for I could Feel his aggressive, oppressive Presence in areas some times before seeing evidence that he was there. Most interestingly, though, he prided himself in an ethical code that was demonstrably more unyielding than that of anyone he or I had ever met.
Among his ethics I might imagine or remember that he would not hit a girl.

For a while, I felt unsafe upon campus. I knew that he had the sovereignty and the wherewithal to find me on campus wherever I may be and however stupid his reason. I simply did not have the sanctity to know how to respond, and in this Kafka-esque scenario it seemed possible that simply speaking my mind would warrant a potentially fatal ass-kicking. Not one of us really understood how Simon's mind worked.

I feel indebted to Simon in a way I have not felt indebted to anyone else. Not only did I really first have to affirm my masculinity and bear the sword of discretion, in the Campbellian sense, marking a transformation that my best friend could intuit and showed a look of unspoken approval for, in order to write for him a note asserting my boundaries. I befriended him.
Over time, not only did I see more and more of myself within the beast and vice versa. I saw to an incredible degree that his neuroses were but the intensification of very conventional neuroses that passed for normality amongst a relatively boring class that scoffed at us as they passed us in the night.
Simon became my only reliable guide through an Under-world that I cannot fairly say that he had created.


To this day I value social deviance indispensably and tend to regard social norms and 'personal bubbles' as abstractions borne from entitlement.
And I am reminded thus of another deviant by the name of [Frank Bonobo].
Usually, when I tried to film people without their prior consent I would be met first with reproof, at best stopping there, and at worst someone would snatch my camera from me. Frank was the first person I had met who not only allowed his self to be filmed but was offended that I would make him self-conscious by asking for permission.

Frank was a sexual deviant in the sense that he was a pick-up artist. Yet besides that there were a number of unconventional things about him. The first was his marriage, which put an end to his promiscuous days (supposedly).
Secondly was the fact that he had successfully kicked an addictive drug habit. And third and most peculiar was that, while he criticised my virginity, he never coerced me into doing things or out of doing others. The organisation that he was starting was aimed at promoting sexual freedom under respectable auspices.
My best friend had entertained the prospect of pick-up artistry under these auspices: That nine out of ten women would say 'No', but the solitary 'Yes' would be worth the candle. That solitary Yes would thus constitute a sexual minority and an instance of social deviance.

Rape restricts the freedom of the victim, but cat-calling does not.
An invitation to casual sex does not restrict a woman's freedom, for she has innumerable ways to respond, whereas in the absence of such an invitation she could not respond at all. Is one a victim? I thought myself to be a victim of Simon's bullying, until I realised that I was being irresponsible for blaming him. I tried to restrict his freedom and his actions because I felt entitled to a false sense of security and would not take responsibility for my own. I had a beloved friend who committed suicide, and amidst her complaints about the World was that she would get cat-calls every day. Yet was she a victim of the cat-calls or of an ideology that made her feel herself to be a victim? The Buddha said: There are two darts. One that the other casts and the one that you cast at yourself in response. The prevalence of these advances does not entail that they are a majority; were they, one would arguably not notice. While it may not happen 'to me', if I am to be held responsible for some degree of social awareness then my democratic insight on this matter must not be marginalised.
To me, sexual deviance is a strange thing, but I have a love for strange things that brings me into greater harmony with my self and the world.
The feminist movement, rather than promoting sexual liberation, reminds me of the sort of organisation that turns Mount Everest into a tourist attraction and then bans entry to it. Its aim at villifying sexual advances would have at its ultimate consummation the elimination of a sexual social narrative that caters to the tastes of a deviant minority bent on finding more of their kind and promoting a lifestyle that does not subordinate its self to a largely ethnocentric view of what respectful behaviour is, abstracting away from man's animal nature to a constructed conception of the 'Human Being'.

I do not know for certain that I could produce a witness to these claims. One girl I know had sex with eight different men in one week in Minnesota, yet she does not talk to me any more for nebulous reasons.
Frankly, I do not have time. The example that I will provide and close with is an instance recently that I was walking home and some one barked at me from a passing car. This habit on the part of young people, especially at night-time, would startle and un-nerve me in the past. One time, I even raged back, and I felt embarassed. This time, it had been a dog. I was taken a back. I thought: We fear and loathe oppression if a human does it because it challenges our views of what the 'Human Being' is. We do not want to see ourselves, basically and biologically, as animals.

dm.A.A.

It may be true that I only cited examples here of the male perspective. Yet it is all so untrue, because  I did not use anyone's argument on the ethics of the matter, constructing my own from a number of disparate life experiences with people of both genders. [My best friend's argument, which I used to great effect, was not an ethical observation so much as the contemplation of a life choice.]
Anyone who delivers an ad-hominem against me on these grounds will be guilty of sexism. Aside from that, I have three points that have all ready been made implicitly in my argument:

1. It is quite obvious that some women enjoy the attention. Pick-up artistry would not retain its popularity other-wise. Frank's wife, my promiscuous lady friend, and a number of college women (upon whom I saw this hypothesis proven in a youtube video demonstrating "pick-up lines") would probably testify. Some women I have met on public transit all so seemed to pretty much expect to be hit upon, and they seemed disappointed even not to be, judging by mood. Others -- a bit younger -- mistook my platonic advances for sexual or romantic advances.
2. These women constitute a minority. I have all ready proven this.
3. The very fact that I cannot produce an immediate example should stand as evidence for my sexual regularities. It would if anything bolster my Ethos as an objective, non-partisan observer. Only were it not so that being "non-partisan" is impossible in the face of a radical fanatic who is possessed of the Us-Them and We-We modes. To be clear: I have done the best I can to step out of my gender and to be objective with the knowledge that life has allotted me serendipitously and without my interference. Yet to some people I will never be more than an ignorant prick. So be it.

On the Sinking House and Numbers.

Every number is assigned arbitrarily to an item. Given enough freedom, losing count is inevitable, because there are literally infinite numerical quantities that can be assigned to a given object. For this reason, the Sinking House haunts this phenomenological inquiry, in order to prevent the mind from falling into the Problematic whilst it is captivated by the mystery of the Transcendant Function.

Dm.A.A.

Response to a feminist argument.

Well we’ve all been disrespected at one time or another, so I think that my two cents could at least count for something. I had a friend who was suicidal and got cat calls all the time, and of course it’s sad (to say the least) to hear about, but I’m not going to let it affect how I treat people because that would be neither ethical or logical. It’s like when people posted videos for crush fetishists on MySpace and the “norm” was to describe all the terrible things one would want done to the culprit, even though to preach such kind of violence as a punishment was in fact a hypocritical power attitude. And one of my friends wouldn’t talk to me for a few days because I was “defending” the woman in the video and preaching peace.

Different people respond differently to different behavior, and not all social deviance is poorly received. Some people even prefer to be treated with social deviance, such as in the case of a fellow I knew who was a social deviant as well and preferred to be filmed without being asked first. People are not crazy or “bad”. One just has to get to understand them.

I certainly never understood the whole “picking up girls” thing but I’ve heard about both sides of the perspective, and all though I found it silly myself I would not feel entitled to pass judgement upon the souls of the people involved so much as the actions. There have even been books written on pick-up artistry, one of whom I encountered in the home of a married couple whom I respect, and the argument in favour of this deviant behavior is that a minority of women will be receptive to it. But that minority is its self therefore a kind of social deviance and it would be bullying to say that such a woman is a whore or something.

I am sorry about your feelings and all I can suggest is that you do what you can to deal with it. That’s not a put-down; “dealing with” things by my definition is one of the most noble enterprises in life and can be done in a number of ways. I wouldn’t be presumptuous but I all ways tend to suspect that all though every individual goes through radically unique experiences they are all so more or less universal. As Watts said: “What you do and what happens to you are the same,” and all though this sounds like victim-blaming in a sociological context, speaking in the context that it was used in it means that rather than feeling disempowered or offended people should try to see the matter with as much objectivity as humanly possible. The shame of having wronged someone is arguably worse than the pain of being humiliated, and a basic trust in people will tell you that no one can escape his or her own conscience. That’s me preaching Buddhism, et cetera, but hopefully it creates a clearer context for what I said. Just don’t think I have not thought about this and how it affects people, both men and women, and the culture that it creates, in both its raw form and the reactionary movement that emerged out of it. Notice that I never once said that feminism was bad, but I wouldn’t embrace any ideology as universally good because that is fanaticism by definition, and it is contrary to intellectualism and freedom. That kind of thinking leads to fascism and suffering for all, and I think a more enlightened society would tend not to create so much division betwixt people. Frankly moralizing does that too, so I’m sorry for having done so in my self-defense.

Respectfully,

Dmitry.