Tag: field of view
The tunnel vision of people, and the cosmic vision of the wise.
Links about the concept of Wahnstimmung. Here, too, beyond the context of schizophrenia, in the sense of a state of dissociation and free-floating anxiety. Continue reading
Jetta – An autistic kid talks about the universe and the end of time
Chris: If you could share one message with the whole entire world, what would you say?
Jetta: The universe is about the end.
Chris: Why do you want people to know that?
Jetta: Because someday it will end in our face. Read the full page
And what do those philosophers who oppose our resenting life propose? The forging of new myths such as the übermensch or the deification of human history. However, changing gods won’t make a difference, just as returning to medieval or ancient times won’t make a difference. Eventually, these new myths will die, too, because some of us are intelligent enough to see through them. Read the full page
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2024/09/excess-lucidity.html[🡕] Continue reading
If one thinks about the (obviously made up) religious scenarios, or any other kind of hellish stories invented by humans, it’s obvious that most real lives don’t even come close to that. Continue reading
Some of that discouragement for me (ed. in advocating) comes from seeing this world lacking in a plethora of metacognitive skills. Even the institutions themselves that discuss mental health – papers, researchers, those that present themselves as being scientifically minded, unbiased, and focus entirely on a description of the nature of certain things regarding mental health and neurodivergency – are constantly lacking so much metacognition that the very papers, the very pieces of research I read make that very apparent. And the people doing such work in the therapeutic world and otherwise don’t have any idea it’s happening. They don’t even know. So much so that I’ve seen forms of therapy that are attempting to instill metacognition in many of those that suffer with psychosis and many of those that are considered schizo-spectrum… When metacognition is the reason those people are sometimes crippled, mentally crippled by the world that they inhabit. But still, they try to produce more of it, only in a direction that would make them more functional, more available, more compliant to a society that they already oftentimes perceive as being run by mad men, and supported by cowardice, fear, death, fear of worthlessness, fear of invalidation. And in name of those things, the banality of evil grows and grows and grows.
Schizoid Angst – Schizoid Ramble: Emptiness and Advocacy
William Shatner: my trip to space filled me with “overwhelming sadness”
William Shatner (Captain Kirk in Star Trek), after his trip in Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space shuttle on Oct. 13, 2021. Continue reading
Aella on fetishes and the myth of trauma
My guess is also that fetishes are less malleable and controllable than most people seem to assume they are. Read the full page
JAI @jaivcalla – I have to fucking say this
Completely different ontological plane of existence compared to People™.
Related: University of Utah Neuroscience Initiative – The Unfixed Brain[🡕]
[young people] went out there to stop discrimination – not all discrimination, just some of it… Which is a weird form of discrimination, but…
Louis C.K. – “Sorry” special
It’s like when you have a toothache and you curse yourself for all the times you felt fine and didn’t fully appreciate how great it was not to have a toothache, and you promise yourself that if there’s ever another day in your life when you don’t have a toothache, you’ll spend at least half of every day you have left reflecting on how great it is not to have a toothache, and you certainly won’t complain about stupid things anymore, like, I don’t know, noisy neighbors or not being able to find a parking space – my God, how wonderful it is to not find a parking space without a toothache!
Astutillo Smeriglia in his blog “In coma è meglio” (“Being in a Coma is Better”) – Il famoso asteroide (“The Famous Asteroid”)
When you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real. Read the full page
About the movie “Melancholia” – Florin Flueras
All other sorrow in comparison with this is a travesty of the real thing. For he experiences true sorrow, who knows and feels not only what he is, but that he is. Read the full page
To this question, as kids, my friends always gave the same answer: “Pussy.” Whereas I answered “The smell of old people’s houses.” The question was “What do you really like the most in life?” I was destined for sensibility. I was destined to become a writer. I was destined to become Jep Gambardella.
The Great Beauty
I told him, at that time already, that my “not living” was dissolving the fear of dying… Read the full page
You’d be surprised by how many people aspire to be completely normal. We’re a race apart. You have to fight to the teeth for not end up being one of them. Read the full page
A spider walking on a vulva, is walking like if it were in a desert.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race – A Contrivance of Horror – Thomas Ligotti
The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others like a scandalous heirloom. Being alive: decades of waking up on time, then trudging through another round of moods, sensations, thoughts, cravings—the complete gamut of agitations—and finally flopping into bed to sweat in the pitch of dead sleep or simmer in the phantasmagorias that molest our dreaming minds. Read the full page
You know, Kyon… have you ever realized just how insignificant your existence on this planet really is? […] It happened to me. And I’ll never forget it. Back when I was in the sixth grade, my whole family went out to go watch a baseball game at the stadium. I didn’t really care about baseball, but I was surprised by what I saw when we got there. Everywhere I looked, I saw people. On the other side of the stadium, the people looked so small, like little moving grains of rice. It was so crowded. I thought that everyone in Japan had to be packed in there.
So I turned to my dad and asked him, “Do you know how many people are here right now”? He said since the stadium was full, probably fifty thousand. After the game, the street was filled with people and I was really shocked to see that, too. To me, it seemed like there was a ton of people there. But then, I realized it could only be a tiny fraction of all the people in Japan. When I got home, I pulled out my calculator. In social studies, I’d learned that the population of Japan was a hundred some odd million. So I divided that by fifty thousand. The answer was one two-thousandth. That shocked me even more. I was only one little person in that big crowded stadium filled with people, and believe me, there were so many people there, but it was just a handful of the entire population.
Up till then, I always thought that I was, I don’t know, kind of a special person. It was fun to be with my family. I had fun with my classmates. And the school that I was going to, it had just about the most interesting people anywhere. But that night, I realized it wasn’t true. All the stuff we did during class that I thought was so fun and cool, was probably happening just like that in classes in other schools all over Japan. There was nothing special about my school at all. When I realized that, it suddenly felt like the whole world around me started to fade into a dull gray void. Brushing my teeth and going to sleep at night, waking up and eating breakfast in the morning, that stuff happened all over the place. They were everyday things that everybody was doing. When I thought about it like that, everything became boring. If there’s really that many people in the world, then there had to be someone who wasn’t ordinary. There had to be someone who was living an interesting life. There just had to be. But why wasn’t I that person? So, that’s how I felt till I finished elementary school.
And then I had another realization. I realized fun things wouldn’t come my way just by waiting for them. I thought when I got into junior high, it was time for me to make a change. I’d let the world know I wasn’t a girl who was happy sitting around waiting. And I’ve done my best to become that person. But in the end, nothing happened. More time went by and before I knew it, I was in high school. I thought that something would change.
Haruhi in “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”
Chance doesn’t exist But the path of life is not totally so predestined Time and chronology show us how all should be In the ways of existence To find out why we are here
Being conscious is a torment[🡕] The more we learn is the less we get Every answer contains a new quest A quest to non existence, a journey with no end
No one surveys the whole, focus on things so small But life’s objective is to make it meaningful Only searching for this That which doesn’t exist Although our ability to relativize remains unclear
I’m not afraid to die I’m afraid to be alive without being aware of it
I’m so afraid to, I couldn’t stand to Waste all my energy on things that do not matter anymore
Our future has already been written by us alone But we don’t grasp the meaning of our programmed course of life Our future has already been wasted by us alone And we just let it happen and do not worry at all
We only fear what comes And smell death every day Search for the answers that lie beyond
Epica – Sensorium; lyrics by Mark Jansen
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
The sinking of the Titanic represented the end of an era, the broken dream of the belle Ă©poque. As with the fall of the Babylonian empire, the sinking of the Titanic represented the symbol of the crumbling of proud empires, with a similar mix of rich, bourgeois and poor all destined together for the abyss. It was the end of a legend that married technology to wealth, materialism to romance, illusion to fantasy.
Massimo Polidoro, The Curse of Titanic
As If The World Were Ending: The Meaning of the Schizophrenic Experience – Eugenio Borgna
“Confess! Confess! they shouted at me, just as they once did with sorcerers and heretics, and in the end, I decided to let myself be classified within an illness defined by doctors and indiscriminately labeled in medical dictionaries as either theomania or demonomania. By relying on the inherent meanings of these two definitions, science grants itself the right to make disappear or silence all the prophets and seers foretold in the Apocalypse; and I took solace in being one of them.” Read the full page
Well, well I’m young I’m a young girl Well, I mean… I’m a young woman And then, I guess, I’ll just be a woman Not too young Not too old Just right Right in the middle Just about right in the middle
And then, well… Well, I guess I’ll get a little older, God willing Guess I’ll just get A wee bit older And then I’ll be, yes That’s right: An older woman And as the years roll on and on and on I’ll keep on getting older, God willing
And then, well… Well, I guess Nothin’ for it I’m gonna be If God wills it Yes, that’s right: An old woman An old, old woman
And as the years roll on and on and on I’ll keep on getting older, God willing
But you’ll still say I’m beautiful I’ll still be beautiful inside And lovely to you, huh, baby? Lovely to you, huh, baby?
And I’ll say to them young’uns: «Hey, kids! Kids! Gather round, Gather round me, now.»
«When your grandfather and I were young…»
And as the years roll on and on and on I’ll keep on getting older, God willing
«Oh, mother, mother,» «Hear me, father,» «Catch me when I fall!» And as the years roll on and on and on I’ll keep on getting older, God willing…
Rebecca Pidgeon – Grandmother
The Lüneburg Variation – Paolo Maurensig
I’d always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it. Read the full page
I’m not interested in solving the ills of society. I don’t want to save the world. I don’t even want to save me… I think most talk is so boring; I mean: save this, do that, do this… I think we’re all so boring saying everything we don’t even wanna save ourselves, we’re so boring talking about it. There’s nothing left to save, we’re so fucking boring. Let it die, I say. Let there be a new beginning. It’s awful. Goodnight.
Charles Bukowski – Let There Be A New Beginning
There was a time when I was irritated by certain things that today make me smile. And one of those things, which I’m reminded of nearly every day, is the way men who are active in day-to-day life smile at poets and artists. They don’t always do it, as the intellectuals who write in newspapers suppose, with an air of superiority. Often they do it with affection. But it’s as if they were showing affection to a child, someone with no notion of life’s certainty and exactness.
This used to irritate me, because I naïvely assumed that this outward smile directed at dreaming and self-expression sprang from an inner conviction of superiority. In fact it’s only a reaction to something that’s different. While I once took this smile as an insult, because it seemed to imply a superior attitude, today I see it as the sign of an unconscious doubt. Just as adults often recognize in us, who are devoted to dreaming and expressing, something different that makes them suspicious, just because it’s unfamiliar. I like to think that the smartest among them sometimes detect our superiority, and then smile in a superior way to hide the fact.
But our superiority is not the kind that many dreamers have imagined we have. The dreamer isn’t superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.
Life being fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
I took my bottle and went to my bedroom. I undressed down to my shorts and went to bed. Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Bach, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.
I took my choice. I raised the fifth of vodka and drank it straight. The Russians knew something.
Charles Bukowski – Women
The unforgettable days in a man’s life number only five or six. The rest just fill up space.
Ennio Flaiano, Autobiografia del Blu di Prussia (“Autobiography of Prussian Blue”)
In five hundred thousand years, it appears that England will be entirely submerged. If I were an Englishman I should lay down my arms at once.
Each of us has his unit of time. For one it is the day, the week, the month, or the year; for another, it is a decade, or a century… These units, still on the human scale, are compatible with any plan, any task.
There are some, however, who take time itself for their unit, and sometimes raise themselves above it: for them, what task, what plan deserves to be taken seriously? A man who sees too far, who is contemporary with the whole future, can no longer act or even move…
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they know they must not be impatient, that it will come sooner or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to await it, it is present. By freeing himself from succession, he has devoured the possible and rendered the future superfluous. “I cannot meet you in your future,” he says to the others. “We do not have a single moment in common.” Because for him the whole of the future is already here.
When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords a certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
…to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying. It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible. It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
The Trouble With Being Born – Emil Cioran
No sooner are they [the eyes] open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much… Read the full page
– I haven’t recovered. I never will. Never…
[…]
– Don’t say that. Calm down. What are you afraid of?
– The streets, the factories, the colors, the people… everything!
[…]
– There’s something terrible about reality and i don’t know what it is. No one will tell me. Even you don’t help me, Corrado.
Giuliana in “Red Desert” (“Il deserto rosso”)
[…] After the horses came Muriel, the white goat, and Benjamin, the donkey. Benjamin was the oldest animal on the farm, and the worst tempered. He seldom talked, and when he did, it was usually to make some cynical remark—for instance, he would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies. Alone among the animals on the farm he never laughed. If asked why, he would say that he saw nothing to laugh at. Continue reading
(In the dedication to Leone Werth)
All grown-ups were once children (but only few of them remember it).
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
You really have to see men from above. I put out the light and went to the window: they never suspected for a moment you could watch them from up there. They’re careful of their fronts, sometimes their backs, but their whole effect is calculated for spectators about five feet eight. Who ever thought about the shape of a derby hat seen from the seventh floor? They neglect protecting their heads and shoulders with bright colors and garish clothes, they don’t know how to fight this great enemy of Humanity, the downward perspective.
Erostratus – Jean-Paul Sartre
The rushing river they call violent But the riverbed pressing it in Nobody calls violent.
Bertolt Brecht – On Violence (poem, excerpt)
The Last Messiah – Peter Wessel Zapffe
«Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.» Read the full page
Health doesn’t analyze itself, nor does it look at itself in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves.
Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.[🡕]
Friedrich Nietzsche – The Joyous Science
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
I will answer you in good conscience and I will swear to you, that since I set foot in this city, not a single drop of pleasure has fallen upon my soul; except in those moments when I have read your letters, which I tell you without any exaggeration have been the most beautiful moments of my stay in Rome: and those very few lines that you placed beneath my Mother’s letter, were for me like a flash of light breaking through the dense, mute, and desolate darkness that surrounded me. You will say that I do not know how to live; that for you, and for others like you, the fate would not be the same. But listen to my reasoning and to the facts. Man absolutely cannot live in a large sphere, because his strength or capacity for relations is limited. In a small town we may grow weary, but in the end man’s relations to man and to things do exist, because the sphere of those relations is narrow and proportioned to human nature. In a large city, man lives without any relation whatsoever to what surrounds him, because the sphere is so vast that the individual cannot fill it, cannot sense it around himself, and thus there is no point of contact between it and him. From this you may infer how much greater and more terrible is the boredom one feels in a large city than that which one feels in small towns: since indifference – that horrible passion, or rather non-passion, of man – truly and necessarily has its main seat in large cities, that is, in very extensive societies. Man’s sensitive faculty, in these places, is reduced to sight alone. This is the sole sensation of individuals, which in no way reflects inwardly. The only way to be able to live in a large city, and the one which all, sooner or later, are obliged to adopt, is to form for oneself a small sphere of relations, remaining in complete indifference toward all the rest of society. That is to say, to build around oneself a kind of small town within the large one; the rest of the big city remaining useless and indifferent to the individual. […]
Giacomo Leopardi to Carlo Leopardi – Rome, December 6, 1822
O Julie, what a fatal present from heaven is a sensible soul! He who has received it must expect to know nothing but pain and suffering in this world. Lowly plaything of the air and seasons, his destiny will be regulated by sun or fog, fair or overcast weather, and he will be satisfied or sad at the whim of the winds. Victim of prejudice, he will find in absurd maxims an invincible obstacle to the just wishes of his heart. Men will punish him for having upright sentiments on every subject, and for judging by what is genuine rather than by what is conventional. Alone he would suffice to his own misery, by giving himself over indiscreetly to the divine attractions of honesty and beauty, whereas the weighty chains of necessity attach him to ignominy. He will seek supreme felicity without remembering that he is a man: his heart and his reason will be endlessly at war, and unbounded desires will set in store for him eternal deprivation.
Julie or the New Heloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau