Month: January 2019

I just checked something, and validated my recollection.  There are two scenes which are repeated: when the group initially comes in, and the women fail to escape; then when the group comes in and they do escape.  Secondly, when the host proposes a toast.  In the first case, etiquette is observed and he is applauded.  In the second he is ignored.

What is being established, in a very subtle manner, are two parallel timelines, two parallel universes, in one of which decorum is observed, and in the second of which it is not.  We know we are in the realm of the latter when the waiter intentionally crashes the food.

What I think we are to understand is the tightly bound nature of these social systems, which run on a complex system of social habits, and which becomes undirected and helpless outside the bounds of these habits.  When the complex dance misses a step, no one knows what to do, and everyone looks at everyone else, but there is no center in such a system without a leader, who in this example would by definition be someone who understands the system, but who exists beyond it.

What saves them in the end?  Reconnecting at the appropriate junction with that system, with what should have happened the first time.  They reconnect, in effect, with the first timeline.

And what traps the congregants in the church?  The priest not following protocol. 

I really think this movie is an extended commentary on the nature of conformity, of the simultaneously arbitrary and necessary nature of some social conventions among certain sorts of people, and of the quasi-hypnotic quality of many forms of learned helplessness.

This is the root of the anger many people when they witness non-conformity, someone doing something different.  And I will repeat myself repeat myself by saying that the Left is the opposite of welcoming of genuine diversity of thought, even if the Right is often rightly called judgmental.

Here is the thing: Conservatives categorically reserve the right to call specific behaviors morally wrong.  We all need that ability, and the Left, self evidently, feels no hesitation at all in judging individuals and groups in the harshest ways.  But for me, at least, the more important question is that of freedom, and the two mindsets, two tendencies, differ radically here.  The Left wants to be able to dictate, and the Right wants freedom even for people it hates.  People who are not hurting anyone else are to be left unmolested by the society and particularly by the State, on a traditional Republican rendering of the issue, at least as I see it.  The whole War on Drugs was driven by emotion and propaganda, not principle.  We need to end it.

Good fences make good neighbors.  That, to me, obvious bit of wisdom was widespread at one time.

For me personally, this film contains a lot of useful content. I am going to add it to my DVD collection

There is a time when your children are the meat of your life.  Then, hearing from them or seeing them becomes a seasoning.  Perhaps grandchildren are the desert, something sweet at the end.

This is perhaps an infelicitous metaphor, but I think carries my point.  Disentanglement, and letting go, and space allowing, can be very hard for involved–perhaps overly involved–parents.

Life is so short, and death is seemingly so long, that I think many parents almost unconsciously intentionally prolong their childrens childhood. 

Raising children, watching them grow, is one of life’s greatest pleasures.  But it has, and must have, an end.

Not all parents are attuned to their children, but ALL children are very, very attuned to their parents, absent gross pathology.

Narcissism in a parent is a way of sucking a child away from self regulation, since there is no self to regulate.

And I will comment that I have been pondering in recent days the status of dissociation as a psychological symptom.  It is rarely discussed.  There is Dissociative Identity Disorder, aka Split or Multiple Personality Disorder, but simply being poorly connected with ones feelings, with ones own desires, is really not something they have a good term for.

It might be termed Impinged Living Disorder.  Or Grey Foggy World Disorder.

Obviously, it can manifest as depression, but that is not the core problem.  People with what I suppose I must call mild dissociation (when compared with having multiple “alters”) are simply not thriving, not flourishing.  They are not enjoying their lives, and given that life almost always also presents lot of negatives, it can be tiring getting the bad without the good.

This, in my view, is really what kills people like Chris Cornell and Anthony Bourdain.  They’ve got what everyone thinks they should want, but it isn’t what they want.  And they can’t fucking figure out what they want, because their illness is not a presence but an absence, a lack, a something that is nearly impossible to see, which psychologists don’t name often because it isn’t in their little book.

They feel–odd, different–but can’t quite put their finger on it.  So it seems to me, projecting my own introspective insights (or guesses) on them.

And this problem is closely tied to the question: what and who should I trust?  This is a very hard question to answer nowadays.  I don’t know if it was much easier in the past, but I do think extended families and clans were physically and emotionally closer for most, and certainly they did not have the flood of information we do, and with it keen awareness of the many possible disasters awaiting all of us.

Affective Dysregulation, which I might insert as a more sciencey sounding term for this, worsens over time.  This is known. Brainwave patterns established in early childhood do not generally correct themselves.  For much of this, Neurofeedback is the only good solution, with the likely exception of psychedelics like Ayuahasca, LSD, Peyote and the like, when dosed properly, in the right place, at the right time, with the right people.

Talk therapy arguably makes things worse.  The thing is that trauma seems to reside in the right hemisphere (for right handed people at least), and by definition that is not the talking part.  I would argue that much art is really the effort of the right hemisphere to “talk”.  I found myself spontaneously reciting poetry a few nights ago, which I was making up on the spot.  It was poetry of the quality (poor) which I post on here, but it had metaphors, and meant something to me.  I normally vocalize nonsense, so this was something qualitatively different and I think better.

But the thing with talk therapy is you create over time “a story”.  And that story, if it has to do with Developmental Trauma–describes something that is STILL HAPPENING in your right hemisphere.  It is not in the past, but if anything talking about it without feeling it distances you from true healing.

And it can be good being a victim.  People feel sorry for you or tell you how brave you are. That story can become a sort of business card, to tell people who “you are”.

It is so hard looking into the unknown.  It is very, very hard.  I feel confused and afraid every day.  

The most painful moment in a personal growth process is seeing what is possible, but not yet being able to get there, or at least to sustain it.

When you are in complete darkness, you cannot see it.  But when you see a ray of light, everything else becomes dark by comparison.

And necessarily, those who live in the dark have to accustom themselves to the darkness.  This is absolutely needed to avoid madness. 

But emotional maladjustment, emotional pain: it becomes like a Stockholm Syndrome.  It is easy to become attached to your symptoms and to your story.  Your story is a ticket to self pity.  It is a ticket to the pity of others.

Leaving this story behind, saying “I used to be this sort of person” is for many more scary than crossing the ocean of a life with a fractured self paradoxically intact.

You carry a broken plate and a shattered glass, not because you can eat or drink from them, but because you know them well.  They are your companions in this strange, uncertain, and confusing world.

Anyone who wants to try and pretend they can offer equal loyalty to everyone, is simply playing a political game, and in the end, they are offering it to no one.  It cannot be otherwise.

Our politicians, whatever their other differences, need to offer their loyalty and devotion to American citizens.  This should be a sine qua non of holding political office.  That Pelosi and Schumer, and many around them want to pretend that Mexicans are as important to them as Americans should tell you everything you need to know: they are whores, who think that the Mexicans will pay better in votes than people born here.

They may of course be right, if we allow them to get their way.  Neither is stupid.  They are just utterly anti-moral, disgusting, utterly degraded human beings.

Despite having everything, he was happy.

Are you rooting FOR the American people, or AGAINSTthe Party which sometimes dilutes your power?

With respect to the last post I recall an acronym from Dan Siegel intended to summarize the aspects of a mature, well integrated personality: FACES—flexible, adaptable, coherent, energized, and Stable.

Children of the Reeee lack all these things, with the exception of being energized. But even there, the energy is external. They have to be given a Daily Cause, just like hamsters need pellets of food. Without the food, they don’t have a clue what to be mad about, and would dissolve as a group in short order.

Our universities are breeding these loons, because in the main the people doing the indoctrinating are mentally ill, in a formal sense, if we apply the above definition.

An easy sacrifice of  self on the altar of political conformity, one which offers a stable sense of self in exchange for belonging in a mutable group, but one which will always include those who jump when they are told to

I intend here, of course, those are situationally confused, and willing to sacrifice a stable sense of self in order to gain victim points in the Leftist hierarchy. I do not include those whose confusion in truly innate, and who would have been non-conforming even when it was hard, and dangerous.

Shame is more or less directly the feeling that you don’t belong anywhere, with anyone.

If my thesis is correct, it is the need to surrender in response to social pressure, but when it arises from a childhood which has nothing to do with present circumstances, there is no one to surrender to.

To be sure, this may well be the key psychological force behind mass conformitarian movements, but even there the people cannot belong as themselves.  They can merely belong as what they become in the group, never as who they are as individuals.  As people with names, they still don’t belong.

Shame is a neurological spasm, and the cure is ending that spasm.