"O sentimento de reverência é inspirado por duas coisas: a beleza e a vastidão. É difícil imaginar algo mais transformadoramente belo e vasto do que o planeta visto do espaço, sobretudo sendo enquadrado por uma vacuidade negra aparentemente infinita."
"O Efeito Visão Geral muda as pessoas. Um astronauta da Apolo tornou-se sacerdote depois de regressar à Terra. Outro iniciou-se em meditação transcendental e dedicou-se ao voluntariado. Um, Edgar Mitchell, fundou o Instituto de Ciências Noéticas, que investiga a consciência humana."
Jonathan Safran Foer, in Salvar o Planeta Começa ao Pequeno-Almoço [pag 144]
"There, old vicary, congratulate my refuge, the saneside outside sheltering the insane inside: to present the static sane side outside to another outside saneside, to be esteemed for that outsane side while all the while the insaneside attacks your outsane side as though we weren't both playing the same game, and gone dowm Summer Street (singing unchristian songs) the inane sinside, pocketing a cool million wearing the shoutside outside and the doubtside inside, the vileside inside and the violinside outside skipping dancing and foretelling things too come all ye faithful, of thine own give we back to thee."
“O nascimento dá início ao processo de aprendizagem da separação. A separação é difícil de acreditar ou aceitar. Contudo, à medida que a aceitamos, a nossa imaginação desenvolve-se – a imaginação que é a capacidade de religar, de reunir o que está separado.
A metáfora encontra vestígios que indicam que tudo é uno. Actos de solidariedade, de compaixão, de auto-sacrifício e generosidade são tentativas de restabelecer – ou ao menos uma recusa em esquecer – uma unidade que já foi conhecida. A morte é a provação mais difícil em que a vida incorre na aceitação da separação.”
— Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest. William Gaddis, The Recognitions [252]
— Never interrupt people when they're telling you more than they know they are, no matter how mad they make you. William Gaddis, The Recognitions [253]
"The aim of psychoanalysis is to enable the analyst and the patient to enjoy eachother's company. And so what's analysed are the obstacles to the pleasure of being with eachother. Just that."
"When we are most excited and most endangered, we’re likely to feel we’re about to have the realistic experience available to us. In other words, there’s something about something that feels dangerous that’s linked to something that’s forbidden.
So that’s one bit of it.
And I think that’s likely to make us think, not that unforbidden pleasures are so boring, but that they’re just fine. We just don’t think about or talk about them. That’s just what we do.
And then there’s the whole world risk taking and courage and bravery and all that stuff, saying that if you privilege forbidden pleasures, it’s a way of not talking about most of the pleasures we have. Because most of the pleasures most of us have are unforbidden. And again it seems me that (not that everything has to do with childhood), if you look at the origin of this, most of the pleasures of childhood are, actually, unforbidden. And most of our everyday pleasures… How much time can you spend doing unforbidden things? Not that much!
So, even though if you were a professional criminal, there’s still going to be a limit.
Most of your day is going to be spent sustaining yourself, hopefully, on unforbidden pleasures.
Because it’s arranged like this, for whatever reason, our conversations or our language about pleasure is severely diminished. There’s lots of exciting language about exciting dangerous pleasures, but there is very little language about most of the ordinary pleasures.
So, for me, it’s partly to do with imagination. Which is, we’ve been induced to imagine forbidden pleasures much more, because they’re forbidden. What else would we be imagining? Whereas the unforbidden pleasures, like having a cup of coffee… Why would you want to think about that... much? But there could be something very immediately and intensively pleasurable about that, that is kind of set aside or taken for granted.
So that’s really THE point. We're being instructed about what to desire, by the forbidders. And I think that's a shame, because it's so limiting."
“There may always be things we care about more, than the things we care about most.”
This seems to suggest that we never really know what we want. And if we think we do know what we want, we’re, in some way, in error.
So let’s problematize:
I think the point in the sentence is to say: ‘We are, largely out of anxiety and need to survive, we have to be conscious of our pleasures, to some extent’. But we’re likely, I think, to be more unconscious of the pleasures and desires that are more troubling or more conflictual for us. So… we might have a quite rigid sense of what or who we like most. And this is a way of, both, expressing a preference and it’s also a way of narrowing our minds, that it creates a kind of internal security along the lines of ?I know what I want’ (even though I can’t have it) or I know what I like.
So what the sentence holds out for is that there’s an unknown repertoire of things and people we might enjoy that we might be unwilling or we might feel unable to engage in.
It’s like a phobic model of the mind. In which you think, ‘I know exactly what I want and if I stick to that I’ll be fine’. And, in fact, what one’s doing is fundamentally narrowing the repertoire. So it’s like not allowing oneself to be as receptive as one might be, not to the whole world, but (because of our education) to be extremely selective in terms of our attention."
The unforbidden pleasure of living obedientely...
"The most obscene form of desire is doing one's duty" Slavoj Žižek
"The good is that which is and can be argued about". Rowen Williams
The thing about obedience is that it's a conversation stopper. That it's as though, at a certain point, the conversation stops and people abide by whatever the rules are taken to be.
"The book in a very ordinary and sort of liberal way, is promoting the idea that it's possible to, in conversation with other people, work out which rules you might want to agree to and consent to and be able to give reasons why that is to somebody who asks you, including yourself, and that this could evolve, so that it's ongoing".
[...]
on SUPER EGO:
Freud’s idea of ‘super ego’ is an attempt to secularize a more religious idea of conscience.
In other words, if the question is: where do the internal authorities come from? Well, Freud’s saying they don’t come from God. Freud says the super ego does two things: It punishes you and restricts you and it can also sustain your ideals for you. It gives you a picture of how you ought to be, or of your preferred or better self. In a way, Freud wants the super ego to do too much, because it’s very difficult to, actually, talk lucidly about internal authority, because, of course, you can only imagine it on the basis of external authority. From here
I think conscience, or our super ego, feeds us our worse lines. I think talking about the super ego can feed us our best lines.
"The extent to which self criticism is a refuge... It's a refusal to think about something. It's a refusal to engage, that looks like a profound engagement."
"We can only recognise in ourselves what we are capable of judging [...] The extreme version of this would be, we've judged ourselves before we found out who we are. So that judgement is privileged over experience, in some way. So that, internally, we're very very quick to judge, criticise, assess, evaluate what's going on inside us or between us and other people, at the cost of or instead of experiencing it. What psychoanalysis does is to invite you to suspend your judgement insofar as you're able to. And it does it for a very interesting reason which is: you don't actually know the value of what you said until you say it. But, of course, the internal censorship says, you know exactly the value of what you said before you say it.
Habit is almost always linked to failure and we should try out other habits.
Desire is inconceivable without imagining it's satisfactions. here.
— The happily dependent self thinks, 'How wonderful it is to live in a world where other people have different thoughts and feelings than I do'
— The unhappily dependent self thinks, 'Shit. Why couldn't I have thought of that?'
In the first picture you have an open world full of unknowable thoughts and feelings that other people might have that you don't know about.
In the second version you've got a closed system where 'it's all about me' And it's fundamentally all about my envy and all about my depravation.
So the book is on the side of an openness that is not an over anxious, and therefor, violent narrowing of the mind and other peoples minds.
[...]
The Story of the Traffic Lights
In Holland, on a rather complicated roundabout crossing, the oficial view was that it would be necessary to put traffic lights on this crossing. Because traffic lights actually enable the flow of traffic.
And a very interesting traffic engineer decided that it would be much better to take away the traffic lights. Because if we do so, people will have to cooperate with each other to make the traffic flow.
And that’s exactly what happened.
So there was much less road rage, much less congestion and the traffic flowed better.
One of the things this example illustrates is that, if you take away the oficial rule (the red light), people will be much more attentive to each other. It’s more like coreography and less like prison.
Certain kinds of discipline preclude collaboration between people. In fact, they are an attack on people’s capacity to collaborate.
The ‘one forbidden thing’
There’s the one forbidden thing, and then the ‘hero’ goes and does exactly that thing that was forbidden… And the story of Adam & Eve is an excellent example of the one forbidden thing. And if the hero or the heroin does that one forbidden thing, things actually begin to happen and the world is no longer the way it was before. So it’s a very good thing to do the one forbidden thing… And also, the ‘one’ who forbids, if he has any wisdom at all — and we assume that God is full of wisdom — he knew precisely that his one forbidden thing would be broken
The book is all about morality, because pleasure is about morality. About what we want to believe we should be able to do with each other. Why are people so frightened of each other? It's easy to say why we are frightened of each other, but less easy to say why we might not need to be frightened of each other. And I think one of the ways we intimidate each other is through morality. It doesn't mean to say that we have to get rid of morality but it might mean that we need to get less intimidating forms of morality. That seems to be a good project— here
Paul Holdengräber: Jokes are problematic on so many levels because they demand a response. They’re not unlike gifts, which demand a response as well. But a joke also excludes… A joke is also there to humiliate.
Adam Phillips: Jokes are really a test of sociability, because if I tell a joke… If I say to you, ‘I’m going to tell you a great joke’, obviously I can’t tell you a great joke. I can tell you a great joke and you will tell me whether it’s a great joke with your response.
If I were to tell a joke now, it could be excruciatingly embarrassing or a roar in success. But it would be like some love test to the audiance: ‘am I, are we all together in this? Or am I an isolate?’ So it’s a real test of sociability and a real test of one’s relation to the group. The other bit which I think is very interesting (which I think Freud says)is that , ‘we never really know what about a joke amuses us’. And in that sense, jokes are like some tacit communications in the sense of, if we get it we laugh. But what we don’t get is what getting it involves. We don’t actually know what we’ve got. All we know is that we’ve been amused. And Freud makes a lot of this because there is a lot in it. It’s a very strange form of… You never know, with a joke, whether it’s creating a collusion or a collaboration. Whether you’ve got a sort of gang of accomplices who all share a sense of humour, whether it’s a cult, so to speak, or whether it’s a group of differently minded people. Whether you’re coercing a sort of group by shared sense of humour. And Freud’s obviously very on to this, because he’s wondering what kind of intimacy jokes create… And do they, in a sense, gloss over differences between people or are they a sort of magical act between people?
People will say, ‘we share a sense of humour’, then…
All those things, Freud is suspicious of. Not in a cynical way, but in a genuinely questioning way. Wondering what we’re doing with this stuff.
[…]
Adam Phillips: Any culture that puts so much value on knowing, must be very frightened of not knowing… And it’s very clear that there are limits to knowing.
I
The day cools towards the evening...
Drink the warmth from my hand
my hand has the same blood as the spring
Take my hand, take my white arm
take my thin shoulders' yearning...
It would be curious to feel,
a single night, a night like this
your heavy head against my breast.
II
You threw your love’s red rose
in my white womb
I hold in my hot hands
your love’s red rose soon to wither
Oh you lord with cold eyes
I take the crown you offer me
which bends my head down to my heart…
III
I saw my master for the first time today,
trembling I recognised him at once.
Now I feel his heavy hand on my light arm…
Where is my singing virginal laugh,
my emancipation with head held high?
Now I feel his firm hold over my quivering body,
now I hear reality’s hard sound
against my frail frail dreams
IV
You sought a flower
and found a fruit.
You sought a well
and found an ocean.
You sought a woman
and found a soul -
You are disappointed.
"Porque é que ele me humilhava desta maneira? Creio que não foi, como acontece muitas vezes, porque as qualidades que o inicialmente encantaram – a minha vivacidade, a minha liberdade, o meu sentido de igualdade com os homens – acabassem por o irritar.
[...]
Ele tinha medo de mim: é a razão por que era cruel comigo. Tinha medo de mim de uma maneira vulgar e de outra invulgar. No primeiro caso tinha medo de mim da maneira que os homens costumam recear as mulheres: porque as amantes (ou esposas) os compreendem. Alguns homens são muito pouco adultos: querem que as mulheres os compreendam, e para atingir esse fim contam-lhes todos os seus segredos; e depois quando elas os compreendem totalmente, eles odeiam-nas porque elas os compreendem.
No segundo caso – o mais importante –, ele tinha medo de mim porque tinha medo de si próprio. Tinha medo de me amar completamente. Não era o simples terror de eu lhe invadir o escritório e a solidão; era o terror de eu lhe invadir o coração. Era cruel porque me queria afastar, porque receava amar-me completamente. Vou contar-lhe o que, no meu íntimo, acredito: que para Gustave, de um modo que ele não apreendia totalmente, eu representava a vida, e que me rejeitava ainda mais violentamente porque isso lhe criava a mais profunda vergonha. E eu tenho alguma culpa? Eu amava-o; há alguma coisa mais natural do que eu querer dar-lhe a oportunidade de ele me amar a mim?
[...]
É verdade que era um homem difícil de amar. O seu coração estava distante, afastado; tinha vergonha dele e muito cuidado com ele. O verdadeiro amor sobrevive à ausência, à morte e à infidelidade, disse-me ele uma vez; os verdadeiros amantes podem passar dez anos sem se verem. (Não fiquei impressionada por estas observações; limitei-me a concluir que ele se sentiria mais à vontade se eu estivesse ausente, se fosse infiel ou se morresse.)
Gabava-se de estar apaixonado por mim; mas nunca vi um amor tão impaciente. "A minha vida é como andar a cavalo", escreveu-me ele uma vez. "Dantes gostava de ir a galope; agora gosto de ir a passo". Quando escreveu isto ainda não tinha trinta anos; já tinha decidido ser velho antes do tempo. Enquanto eu... o galope! O cabelo ao vento, a gargalhada que vem de dentro, do fundo dos pulmões!
A sua vaidade lisonjeava-se com a ideia de estar apaixonado por mim; creio que também lhe dava um prazer não assumido o desejar constantemente o meu corpo e, no entanto, proibir-se de o ter: negar-se o prazer era tão excitante como ceder. Costumava dizer-me que eu era menos mulher do que a maioria das mulheres; que era uma mulher na carne, mas um homem no espírito; que eu era um hermaphrodite nouveau, um terceiro sexo. Afirmou-me muitas vezes esta teoria louca, mas na realidade estava só a afirmá-la a si próprio: quanto menos mulher ele me fazia, menos amante ele precisava de ser."
Julian Barnes, O Papagaio de Flaubert [pg 172, 173, 174]
Emasculated — The problem of men writing about sex
"... and what a relief we might assume the reader to feel when this kind man imagines things from her perspective – that she has the right to find him physically repellent – and when he proposes a platonic friendship instead. The darkness is dispelled and the protagonist’s decency is rewarded in the next page by the young woman’s eventual erotic desire for him, his kindness overriding all."
"We’ve had to listen to men’s accounts of desire for a long time; now it’s women’s turn. Men are always reducing women to minor characters. Why should we listen to them exalting their lust? Isn’t this the cultural noise that allows a man like Weinstein to make his moves? Aren’t you embarrassed to be making the case you’re making?"
"Ele tinha medo de mim: é essa a razão por que era cruel comigo. Tinha medo de mim de uma maneira vulgar e de outra invulgar. No primeiro caso tinha medo da maneira que os homens costumam recear as mulheres: porque as amantes (ou esposas) os compreendem.. Alguns homens são muito pouco adultos: querem que as mulheres os compreendam, e para atingir esse fim contam-lhe todos os seus segredos; e depois quando elas os compreendem totalmente, eles odeiam-nas porque elas os compreendem.
No segundo caso – o mais importante –, ele tinha medo de mim porque tinha medo de si próprio. Tinha medo de me amar completamente. Não era o simples terror de eu lhe invadir o escritório e a solidão; era o terror de eu lhe invadir o coração. Ele era cruel porque me queria afastar, porque receava amar-me completamente."
Q: Is criticism always shaming or does it have a useful function?
A: We're encouraged to believe that we should be good at taking criticism. That's a really impressive thing to be able to do. It certainly isn't my experience. I'd much rather be praised. Occasionally people say critical things that engage me and I'm struck by them, but I often feel got at. Now... that's me... I'm not saying that that's true to all of us (laughter). But I do think that there's something, that the risk is that criticism becomes the wish to shame. On one end there's a wish to modify, or a genuine question, and on the other end there's a wish to humiliate and it would seem to me much better if we stopped humiliating people and start asking them questions.
"The object is defined by the distractions to which it leads". Devorah Baum
No entanto, a hipocrisia masculina é igualmente evidente. Pinta uma mulher nua porque dá-lhe prazer olhar para ela. Coloca-lhe um espelho na mão e intitula a pintura de 'Vaidade'. Deste modo, condenando moralmente a mulher cuja nudez retratou, para o seu próprio prazer.
Não fazendo mais senão repetir o exemplo bíblico de culpar a mulher.
