Author: White Whale

It’s a constant source of amazement to me how people will blame evil corporations for all our woes, then in the next breath call for more government of precisely the sort they just claimed the corporations had bought.  The situation is simple: large corporations buy politicians, then use the weapon of government to enrich themselves, not least by damaging competing small businesses.  Does anyone think Obamacare will hurt the Proctor and Gambles or GE’s–both of whom donated heavily to Obama–at all?  Of course not.  It will hurt small restaurants, mom and pop grocery stores, small retail franchises, car parts distributors, roofing companies, and EVERYONE WHO WORKS FOR THEM.  This is the plan, and voting Democrat does nothing but further it.  Yes, voting Republican has more or less amounted to the same thing over the past decade at least, but we are at least trying to change that.

The simplemindedness on display PARTICULARLY among allegedly educated people is breath-taking and jaw-dropping.

Aside from the constant intrusion of unwanted emotions and images, I think a core result of unprocessed trauma is a sensation of watching and not participating in life.  You can mouth the words, and do the things, but you’re not really there.

This is, I think, one of the reasons for self abusive behavior, whether through persistently bad decisions, irresponsibility, or outright self abuse, as through overeating, alcoholism, sexual addiction, drug abuse, or in extreme and literal cases, cutting and suicide attempts that are not serious: all of these, by bringing back pain, bring back a sense of presence.  You are once again a participant in at least  SOMETHING.

The hierarchy of spiritual development I have seen is relaxation, mindfulness, concentration.  But I think anyone who has experienced trauma cannot even achieve the first properly, without preliminary work.  What happens as you relax is the demons start to come out, you sense their advent, and pull back.  You have to deal with them first.

Let us call this stage purification, until I change my mind.  Preparation would also work.  Right-sizing, head straightening, delunaticism, Sanification, blending, mixing (light and dark): I’ll have to smoke on this a bit.  The best time might be the other side, which I think is approaching.

In what ways would the psychological/emotional lives of women be different if they never menstruated?  In what ways does it improve them, in what ways (beyond the obvious) does it lessen them, and what is interesting in this regard to speculate about (de Bono PMI)?

In what ways might human society have evolved differently if many if not most social orders (men) had not feared this process?

If the plane lost cabin pressure, and someone was at the controls–pilot or passenger–would not a rapid descent to lower altitudes be one of the first things they did?  One which was not “radar evading”, but oxygen preserving?  And again, if the electronics were scrambled and they either didn’t know where they were, or how to read the instruments (if the pilots lost consciousness and one or more passengers were trying to fly the thing) you would see both a rapid descent and an erratic trajectory that leads, ultimately, to a crash, either from losing fuel, or from misjudging altitude, all while trying to reach someplace safe.

And what if most but not all passengers were killed in the initial decompression?  Perhaps some remained conscious, but not those whose cell phones were called.  Or what if the survivors panicked and tried to broadcast relentlessly on a broken plane radio and forgot about their cell phones?  I read once about someone who died in a parachute jump because they gave him a left handed parachute, and all he thought to do was paw relentlessly where the pull cord would have been on a right handed parachute.  They could see the marks. 

If the plane was hijacked, it serves no purpose to fail to announce by whom and why.  No terror is achieved.  Even if it was a coordinated attack, and failed due to terrorist pilot error, there would be people who could anonymously announce their “success”.  This is their way of operating.  Nothing is achieved by mystery.

I listened to this interview on Eyes Wide Shut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inLfK535oxs

It occurred to me this morning I should likely find interviews with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but I tend congenitally to look more for background characters.  I tend to trust janitors more than CEO’s.

Be that as it may, she tried twice to share her view of what the movie was about, but I think the interviewers–as seemingly always happens with her in these interviews, which she warns them of at the outset–were more interested in her as a conduit to get to stories about the Master.

She says that in her view the essential scene is that in which Nicole Kidman admits to spending a pleasant day with Tom–Dr. Bill (and I will say that even I noticed the pervasive symbolism of the wallet, his badge of authenticity and importance, and money)–but still thinking about her Navy officer the whole time.

She was interrupted (it was a poor interview), but here is where I think she was going: we all of us are split in some ways between our social roles, our place, our mask, our persona, and our inner reality.  Kidman, there, was admitting to being simultaneously dutiful wife and what we would call a lustful slut.  She is saying, effectively, that women are just what Tom Cruise accused men of being.  They are no different.  Men have inner fantasy lives, and so too do women.  And these fantasy lives, even if they are not acted on, matter.

What both learned, what opened both of their eyes, is who they really were, how much larger and unconfined, and simultaneously vulnerable and free.  Fucking is what Kidman felt would finally close that circle, and complete some part of the process, put a stamp on it.

Alice starts the trip down the rabbit hole.  She admits to Dr. Bill her lust.  He in turn is startled to see expressed feelings he too has–he was clearly enjoying the attention of those two models, and it was unclear where it was going–but not fully brought into consciousness.  This is what women do better than men: feel consciously.  Cruise did not think about what he was doing at the party, but certainly it was inappropriate for a married man to be both flirting so aggressively, and consenting to receive such more or less open invitations to sex.

So we have the public, pious role, and the shadow licentiousness that rejects all limits–Kidman was willing to lose everything for a man she had never even spoken to (now: this is a fictional story line, and I can’t say how many women might actually feel this way, but the story comes from SOMEWHERE, and I have heard enough crazy stories to believe this may be how it actually works on strange, weird, inexplicable occasions).

Dr. Bill goes liminal.  He does eventually leave the gates of the city, to be received in another set of gates, but before that he meets someone whose ROLE is lust.  That is her point and purpose.  She is not trying to be someone else.  She is not split in any way, at least for the purposes of this analysis (prostitution is no doubt very emotionally demanding, and a profession likely largely populated by survivors of various forms of abuse).  Domino, as I have said, is the only person I like in this movie, other than Nick, who I will get to in a moment.

Domino represents a kind of way point, between role and the reality of lust.  Dr. Bill satisfies his role with her–he gives her money, as an attentive and responsible benefactor–but never fully meets his lust.  He does not integrate them, or even fully admit them.  Since he was quite prepared to spend the night out–based on his subsequent behavior, his primary concern was not with worrying his wife by staying out late–he could have slept with her, and in my opinion that may have been the honest thing to do.

But he doesn’t.  He meets his friend, whose eyes are to be shut by a blindfold, and who mediates the world of the orgy and the world of Dr. Bill’s role.  Nick goes into the party as himself.  He is the only one who does not wear a mask.  But his eyes are wide shut.  He cannot see, literally or figuratively, just what he has gotten himself into.

For his part, Dr. Bill, ironically, puts on a mask–symbolizing a role–where the role is the satisfaction of lust.  And as I have said, making sexual gratification a point and purpose also misses something.  Making it a role misunderstands its arbitrary nature.  Can this fundamental split be FULLY healed even within a carefully constructed ritual context?  I don’t know.  I don’t know.

Coming full circle–and the symbol of the magic circle plainly means something, and likely multiple somethings, in the childrens department store–Dr. Bill and Alice are left living in the liminal zone, processing it, while trying to fulfill the role of parents.  Alice, being more aware, sees that Dr. Bills experience has to be consummated, with her, within the space of both of their roles, and that for the time being everything will be OK.  I suspect they will get divorced later, though, as indeed Kidman and Cruise did.

I am thinking out loud, but there may be something here.  I will add that Davis, when asked if the filming was the first place she met Kubrick, said something like “Oh no.  I had lived in Britain at that point for several years.”  Now, I could live in Britain for decades and never meet anyone famous.  Implicit within that statement was the idea that she–as an attractive model “with great tits”–went to parties where people like Kubrick could be found.  What else that implies, I can’t say.

Here is a video of her singing what in 2007 was her latest single: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB6g66OYoKI

I put off seeing Eyes Wide Shut, because I knew I would react how I am reacting, and at that time, I was unsure how to make creative use of it.  Now I know how.  This is all good for me, even whatever nonsense I am writing.

Here is an interesting fact: the actress in Eyes Wide Shut who played the OD’d hooker, and the corpse in the morgue, was NOT the same actress as that in the mansion, whose name was Abigail something.  The two apparently got in a bit of a cat fight, this being likely the most significant film either will have been involved in in their careers.

Here is my take: what if Kubrick wanted to dangle the illusion of an overarching order–something tangible at the end of the rainbow–but take it away? Davis, in an interview, said she somehow hurt herself in the circle, which is why the other gal took over in those scenes.  But why not suppose the change was demanded by Kubrick himself?

There was no murder.  I am increasingly convinced of it.  Both times the girl warned him, men in masks were easily close enough to overhear her.  Add this to the fact that even though Davis was apparently present in the orgy somewhere, that she was not the girl warning him, and what you have to conclude is that it WAS a charade, and that even though it was NOT the same girl who warned him who died, that Ziegler saw no reason to dissuade Dr. Bill from that possibility, since they wanted all the leverage they could get for him to keep his mouth shut.  And it worked, more or less, since the fear and confusion caused him to break down when he saw the mask, and even if Nicole Kidman has been the one who secretly found it and left it out to see how he would react, she did not say.  She loved him, I think I might say, convulsively, not patiently; reluctantly and perhaps by force of will.

And Kubrick, in the end, was saying there is no order at all.  Good people like Domino get diseases, everyone else is running around chasing sex and things, and there is not even a despotic order ruling the whole thing: just a bunch of prurient and odd rich people with strange tastes they indulge from time to time, out of ennui and perhaps long-standing habit.

It is an odd joke, one he perhaps felt well content to make his last.

There has to be a better word, but I do like that it contains the word reaction, as there is something chemical–alchemical?–at work, an interplay of elements whose aftermath leaves something qualitatively new.

Abreaction is leaning into negative emotions, embracing them, emphasizing them, enlarging them, experiencing them more fully–for the first time, if this is a truly unresolved trauma.

I have been doing a lot of this over the past several weeks.  We hear about positive self talk.  Fuck that.  I’m doing negative self talk, about how I hope I fail, that everyone hates me and wants me to die, that nothing I will ever do will succeed, that I should be ground into the dirt.  .  .etc.

And this is working.  What it is doing is bringing up latent emotions, and what might be termed non-verbal dialogue, which has been in my consciousness substantially all my life, but largely unrecognized, and to the extent it was, fought.  “You say I need to die, but I say I want to live”, back and forth, endlessly.

There is no conclusion to this.  Each “side” achieves momentary victories, but always there is a loss of energy, of enthusiasm, of connection with the inner self, of vitality.

So I decided to give this voice free rein to verbalize literally anything it wants.  What has been happening is that my chronic anger is subsiding, I feel more calm, and I can think more clearly.

What I am realizing is that when I get angry over “nothing”–today, for example, the fact that cancelling a print job on my printer yields roughly 10x as many pages of gibberish as actually printing the document would have–is that the anger–the defensiveness, the sense of being under attack, the sense of needing to justify myself, the need to strike out–was already there.  It was induced by the voice.  I suspect most people with chronic anger issues–and I do want to be clear this is not a major issue for me, but it is an issue–are the same.  They are fighting battles in their heads by proxy, and I think sometimes it is the very concreteness of the proxy–the bad driver, the IRS agent, the thoughtless coworker–that makes them attractive.  At least they know WHAT they are angry at.  The alternative is an emotion without a cause or object, which is very confusing.

Stan Grof talks about traumas of commission and omission.  I believe these are his words.  It is clear enough how to abreact actual abuse, but how neglect?  How lack of love?

Ponder a parent who watches a child in pain, struggling helplessly with something, who watches the child, while the child is watching him or her, begging with their eyes for help, and who walks on without doing anything.  Is the net content of this interaction, in which nothing has apparently been done–no one hurt or helped–neutral?  Of course not.   A clear message has been sent: you don’t matter.  I don’t care whether you live or die.  It might actually be more convenient for me if you died.

This would technically be a trauma of omission–love not given–but I would argue that in important respects all traumas are traumas of commission, in that somewhere, somehow, love that could have been given, understanding and help that could have been granted, was not.  Certainly, there are limits to how much, say, the workers in an orphanage can provide love and comfort to all the children.  But has “society” still not chosen to care, also?  I think this is the way it works.

So a trauma of omission gets abreacted as self loathing, self hate, a feeling of helplessness, violence towards a self which seemingly deserved it–how else to explain these lacks, these gaps?

What I am trying to process, what I have been trying to process all my life, is the fact that not only were my parents incapable of empathetic, nurturing love, but that at many points in my life they more or less rooted for my failure, watched me flail around helplessly, and did nothing.  They just moved on, without emotional involvement or connection.

Now, as I have often said, I don’t feel sorry for myself, and I don’t want this to be a Daily Me.  At the same time, we as a society are so inured in some ways to one another’s inertia and anomie and disconnection, that I think truth telling is warranted and useful at times.  It tells us what is out there. 

And my feelings go through a sort of one way valve, in which I can express myself honestly, but need fear no blowback or emotional aggression.  You  can’t get to me.  I have far, far too much practice surviving emotional assaults, having endured them daily for most of my formative years, and in internal dialogue since.

I think clinical, therapeutic psychology, in the long run, will need to turn to teaching and eliciting deep emotions from people in emotional distress.  It will need to teach them not to hurt less, but to hurt more until they hurt less.  The solution to PTSD is Hell.  But is one large Hell that ends not vastly preferable to daily small ones until the end of a life blunted by a dependence on emotional pain killers or one sort or another?

Stan and Christina Grof’s book “Spiritual  Emergency” was very useful to me in this regard.  It broadened by horizon tremendously as to how much emotional pain someone can take, and my ideas about embracing difficult emotions come from them and Barry McDonagh’s “Panic Away” series;  primarily from them, though.  It is a focus of that book.

This movie definitely works on the mythic level.  Kubrick, who in some respects dealt in myth his whole career, considered it is best film.  I have been reading reviews, detailing the vast quantity of latent symbolism, like the luminescence of Christmas lamps, the theme of Rainbows, etc.

I’ll keep processing for a while, and as always reserve the rights both to contradict myself and to be stupid at length.

Few thoughts for now: many of the robed figures at the “mass” were likely women, likely wives.  They participated by watching.  The whole thing had little to do with sex, and everything to do with social solidarity.

The funny thing about psychology is that when you choose to transgress some line in your self, in your soul, you are driven almost inexorably to rationalize it, to justify it.

Doris Lessing talks in one of her books about the process of breaking a woman to become a prostitute.  The idea is simple: persistently, over a period of time, take her over a line she has drawn, then pull her back.  Force her to go farther than she wanted or intended, then reintegrate her.  Then do it again.

Over time, the boundaries and lines disappear, and she decides it doesn’t matter.   This is how children are “seasoned”–I believe the term is–for pedophiles.  Many are apparently very meticulous about it.

This raises the interesting question: is participation in these rituals voluntary?  Can you be given an invitation and refuse?  Certainly even if one rejects the idea that violence was an ordinary part of the process–that Mandy did in fact overdose, and that the mask was actually found and placed on the pillow by Alice, as apparently was explicitly the case in the book upon which this movie was based–would there not still be cultural and social and political and business sanctions? 

So, in important ways, it seems to me these people were also “.  . . just prisoners here, of our own device”, as the relevant song Hotel California puts it.

Power constricts, too.  It is unfree.

The other point I wanted to make is that the only place in the movie where I felt real tenderness was with the prostitute, Domino. In the midst of all this sex, where was there solace, genuine commitment, genuine peace?  Nicole Kidman wants to fuck at the end, but as I think about it, it almost feels like a way for her to express anger at Tom Cruise while simultaneously pulling in as far as she is willing to.  She feels gratitude they pulled back from the precipice, but the word “forever” doesn’t feel right.  It looks like it is giving her a headache.

The phrase “loveless fascination”, from a song by the Church I have always liked, comes to mind.

What is the purpose of life, besides rutting, besides what we might call “goatism”?  In what way does Kubrick’s vision grant new hope, new dispensation?  As critics at the time apparently objected to, his sex is not even very sexual, it is not even animalian.  It is perfunctory, ritualized, as one assumes the sex between Kidman and Cruise will be when they get home.

It is worth keeping in mind Kubrick was an atheist.  He died five days after the completed film was delivered.  Some have seen in this conspiracy, but my final conclusions are both that that scene was nothing to kill anyone over; and even if it were, the time was before the film was done, not after.

No, I think he watched his completed movie several times over, watched his completed vision, looked at life as he saw it, realized that his creative work was done, and his life energy just left him.

For a vision of a more spiritual sexuality, watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev”, where such sexuality is attacked by a Christianity obsessed with pain, suffering, and self denial, likely all in direct contradictions to Christ’s actual teaching.  There is a scene in there with a naked woman swimming strongly across a river crossing paths with a boat filled with monks that is among my favorite visuals in any movie.  She is unstoppable and innocent.

They now are saying that it is most likely to have been hijacked.  Here is my question: how many runways exist in the areas where it could have gone which could handle the landing of such a plane?  It cannot be more than a few dozen, I would not think.  Can their activity not be checked?

And if a runway was built just for this plane, we are at a whole other level of conspiracy.

I don’t like this scenario.  It is to my mind quite sinister: no ransom has been demanded, no claims of responsibility have been made.

There were no claims of responsibility made on 9/11 either. Could this be a prelude to some global, qualitative increase in the command and control apparatus unknown parties seem to be trying to create?

Alternatively, could we posit that most people were killed, and those trying to fly the plane were passengers unequipped to pilot effectively?  Still, it would seem they could perhaps have made radio or cell phone calls.  I don’t know the logistics of this.  According the radio expert, oxygen would not last as long as the flight, although exactly how long–when most people were not breathing and thus conserving oxygen for the rest–it could last for a much smaller number of people is unclear.  Could they have turned off communications accidentally?  How certain are experts that a catastrophic failure could not have caused the same effect?

Would it be possible to create a computer simulation that mimics what was seen–the sequence of communications failures, including the transponder–in which people are in fact piloting the plane, but poorly, and in the wrong direction?  We have all been lost on country roads.  Can it not be hard to know where you are and what direction you are going, when you understand nothing in front of you?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in coming weeks and months.  My gut is that this plane, wherever it went, will never be found.

Edit: I will pass along another idea I saw someone else propose: what if the electronics on the plane were so scrambled that the pilots remained at the helm, but could not tell where they were, what their altitude was, or what direction they were heading?  This would account for seemingly random direction and altitude shifts.  And what if efforts to fix one electronic system damaged another?  This would account for systems going down at different times.

I reiterate: the hijacking explanation does not make sense to me.  Every historical hijacking that I know of has been done for a reason.  I will add, that whatever the facts of the case, we can expect global elitists/feudalists, to do what they can to exploit the situation.
 

That piece also reminded me to point out that Stan Grof’s 3rd Perinatal Matrix contains both sexual and violent elements.  Blood and body fluids, sexual ecstasy and war.  Walpurgis Night, and ritual cults.

I will note that he used LSD in his therapeutic practice.  He was a psychiatrist, and under controlled circumstances he would prescribe specific amounts of LSD in the same manner any other drugs would be prescribed.  He would of course sit with his patients, through their experiences.

And the idea for the Perinatal Matrices came about simply because certain thematic and cathartic elements kept showing up over and over and over.  People remembered their births, both figuratively and literally.  It may be that the brains of infants can’t form memories right away, but in my own view clearly the field which contains them, which is the root of life, does.  Logically, if newborns can’t form memories, then it would not matter in the slightest how they were treated upon birth; that we place importance on getting them nursing quickly shows that common sense and experience indicate their early experiences do matter.

And to be clear, entering into these non-ordinary states, letting this content come up, proved to be of enormous therapeutic value.  People felt better.  They were freed from negative emotional patterns that in some cases had haunted them their entire lives.  That fact alone indicates value in this idea.