Abstraction is violence. I have recently realized this. It is a way I personally process anger. It is confining. I read a Sherlock Holmes story once where Holmes commented that the mind becomes channelized and “freed” with confinement. Logically, he said, he ought to lock himself in a box.
Feelings expand, like wind and light. Abstractions, though, are hard. They have firm places and times and shapes, at least to me.
One wonders–I wonder–about how people like George Bernard Shaw could discuss with such apparent equinimity the mass murder of social misfits. The reason is that, as I believe Oscar Wilde commented of him, that he was incapable of poetry. He was hard, despite his mechanical virtuosity with wit.
Secondly, I was watching in my mind the progress, as on a graph, of the mathematical interaction of different “channels” within a personality. As I have said earlier, I think the most useful way to think of the “unconscious” is that we have multiple personalities. Most of them just sit there, mute, dumb, until a specific circumstance–normally an affective circumstance–calls them into action. They sit there like statues, then come to life.
Channel A is our conscious life. For people who are largely integrated, who do not have long term unprocessed negative emotions like anger, lust, resentment, sadness, and the like, if we posit say four channels, they all more or less progress in tandem, pari passu.
But when you have a negative unprocessed–unaccepted, I think is the word–emotion, then the lines get curved and distorted. They start to circle around the actual center of gravity, the emotion that won’t go away, the personality that won’t untie its own knot and go away.
Finally, I think the foundational problem of “modernity”–that problem simultaneously created by and diagnosed by our imbecilic thought leaders–is that of retaining form. We all need tribes. We need groups. We need certainties. But we are told we can’t have any. And the people who tell us this fail to see that they themselves have formed a tribe consisting of those who oppose tribes.
The problem is not how to create: the problem is how to prevent what might be termed uncreation, dissolution, and even destruction.