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It’s Pony Time! Get up!
Chubby Checker: ‘Pony Time’
February 2012
“Most of us, by the time we leave childhood, have repressed our vision of the primary miraculousness of creation. We have closed it off, changed it, and no longer perceive the world as it is to raw experience. The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. But nature has protected the lower animals by endowing them with instincts. It is very simple: Animals are not moved by what they cannot react to. They live in a tiny world, a sliver of reality, one neuro-chemical program that keeps them walking behind their noses and shuts everything else out. But look at man, the impossible creature. Here nature seems to have thrown caution to the winds along with the programmed instincts. She created an animal who has no defense against full perception of the external world, an animal completely open to experience. Not only in front of his nose, in his ‘umwelt,’ but in many other ‘umweltsen.’ He can relate not only to animals in his own species, but in some ways to all other species. He can contemplate not only what is edible for him, but everything that grows. He not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to an eternity from now. He lives not only on a tiny territory, nor even on an entire planet, but in a galaxy, in a universe, and in dimensions beyond visible universes. It is appalling, the burden than man bears. He doesn’t know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect. His own existence is incomprehensible to him, a miracle just like the rest of creation, closer to him but all the more strange. Each thing is a problem. Man had to invent and create out of himself the limitations of perception and the equanimity to live on this planet. And so the core of psychodynamics, the formation of human character, is a study in human self-limitation and in the terrifying costs of that limitation.”
—
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death. This idea of necessary partialization is enormously useful in thinking about mental illness, socialization and maturation, art, everything. Later, Becker puts it more plainly:
When we say neurosis represents the truth of life we again mean that life is an overwhelming problem for an animal free of instinct. The individual has to protect himself against the world, and he can do this only as any other animal would: by narrowing down the world, shutting off experience, developing an obliviousness both to the terrors of the world and to his own anxieties… We cannot repeat too often the great lesson of Freudian psychology: that repression is normal self-protection and creative self-restriction —in a real sense, man’s natural substitute for instinct. Rank has a perfect, key term for this natural human talent: he calls it “partialization” and very rightly sees that life is impossible without it.
That is, we use repression and partialization —the former a truncation of the self, the latter a truncation of the world— to achieve a stable, bearable relationship with overwhelming reality. We cut the universe down to an ergonomic size, stuff it in our carry-on with our business papers; we shrink ourselves, cram ourselves in there too; it is manageable for the duration of the flight, at least, although we might fear that a change in cabin pressure will cause us to burst, to spill our secret selves, to open up to the unmediated mysterium tremendum et fascinates.
If it were possible to modify your consciousness, would you rather (1) receive supplemental human instincts, instincts to guide you in social, professional, cultural situations through which you presently muddle self-consciously, laboriously; or (2) have your lifelong, unconscious efforts at partialization undone, largely or completely, such that you were restored to the childhood state of constant wonder, awe, and fear?
(via mills)
“I hoped that if I concentrated enough the intensity of the scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures.”
—Lucien Freud
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The Bamboos feat. Megan Washington
the bamboos feat megan washington - the wilhelm scream (via bricorama: alrightinnit: copycats)
Story Time Saturday: Weight
On the left: your car, which ought be heavy (but is now missing) - replaced by a title pawn slip and a false police report.
On the right: coincidence and optimism, which are lighter, in fact, than Fate.
On the left: two boxes of porn (the really degrading kind, much heavier than you would assume at first, heavier by the mile, heavier at every rest stop).
On the right: both of us laughing in slow-falling snow, you wearing that funny corduroy hat I made for you, patterned after a sauce-pot (this one is round and heavy in my hand, but slips gently onto the scale).
On the left: searching for you in alphabet city (when you were taken for your money and didn’t score, while I had to keep awake and on the interstate to get to work at seven, and you slept off your disappointment).
On the right: biscuits.
On the left: all of the things that everyone knew. Except me.
On the right: at least you didn’t fuck her.
On the left: because she wouldn’t have you.
On the right:
(my hands are empty)
(I feel lighter)
“Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.”
—William S Burroughs (via claytoncubitt)
“Fans of science fiction and fantasy know what I’m talking about. We walk down dark streets imagining scenarios of being attacked by a werewolf and stabbing it with the only silver thing we have on us—our limited edition Star Trek 45th Anniversary commemorative pen.”
—
Katie West on BrightWallDarkRoom
I was reminded of this yesterday when seeing my youngest Omnitrix his way through several alien life forms (which he does a lot).
“The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing — a blanket — the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two on the horizon, I feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water.”
—Douglas Coupland (via strangerains)
