kFoyauextlH

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  • in reply to: Foundations of objective ethics #19169
    kFoyauextlH
    Participant

      Evil to me means simply having the potential to harm or leading to potentially harmful experiences, thus not benign, but rather potentially unpleasant. Just about everything or anything can be considered evil with such a broad definition, such as determinism, as well as Freedom from which it likely or necessarily stems, the most Evil or capable of freely harming of all.

      in reply to: How can we know anything? #19176
      kFoyauextlH
      Participant

        I can be sure that experience is occurring, that things are appearing to change and move, at the very least appearing so.

        I can make up references known as words that have definitions. One of the definitions can be Whatever appears to be the most powerful force, what appears to have the most impact. I can give it a word, God.

        I​​​ can say that whatever is actually the cause of all this experience ultimately is what I call God or what is indeed the most powerful. People tend to misunderstand this, thinking something specific is being claimed in the manner of folk who say this IS God, the Sky IS God, Jesus IS God, a figure IS God, rather than just a definition of something which logically exists, whether one claims it is this or that, something is by definition the Force or Power.
        [hr]
        So those are a few of the things I am certain about. That there is Experience and whatever is causing it whether one says its this or that, whatever is causing it ultimately is what I call God.

        in reply to: Foundations of objective ethics #19168
        kFoyauextlH
        Participant

          Plus Evil.

          in reply to: What is there? (Beginners thread) #19161
          kFoyauextlH
          Participant

            I can not confirm the existence of any reality or experience except the one claimed or understood to belong to me.

            All I see are others who might insist they too are seeing things, though I have no way to verify that they really are seeing anything.

            ​​​What I see or experience in all careful honesty is them claiming to see things, but I have no access to any of it, nor can I even really know what that means if it were the case.

            So at most, or at best, I pretend they are seeing things as I see them somewhat, in a like manner, in order to have conversations with these creatures.

            I call them creatures because what I am is completely different seeming than what they appear to be. I appear to be a faceless thing which encompasses all faces that I see, but they appear to insist that their face belongs to them and that they are an individual.

            I see them as Whole, bodies with defined form known by the limitations of what they appear to be able to move. As for me though, I seem to be some sort of headless thing on a tower of flesh that I can move around. Totally different sort of thing, until I look into a mirror and see something I appear to be able to move.

            When I inform people they might not really exist as I do, they appear to become sad and even belligerent. If they told me that I don’t exist, all I could say is at the very least stuff seems to be present as I am a witness to that, I can’t know if they know what I mean though, and my suspicions remain perpetual and indestructible.

            Unless you or someone else can help me to Know.

            in reply to: The Essential Ken Wilber #19145
            kFoyauextlH
            Participant

              Argh I just wrote a long thing and it got rid of it, shoot. It was a cool thing about messages of love being hypnotic and popular and jeez I’ve been thrown off a few times now I am just going to press send.

              kFoyauextlH
              Participant

                Can you write a little more on that please?

                I thought it was really interesting that a mixture was perceived as bad but a whole was returned to good standing, even if it was wholly diseased in reality, that ambiguity was apparently the issue. Then one reconsiders ideas like the Bastard, the Woman going with different men, and how many different forms ambiguity occurs in a disdained way, like the transgendered person or homosexual as well, the religious convert or spy.
                [hr]
                ” The nineteenth–
                century Highlands provides a microcosm of the processes forming the backbone of 
                Abnormal: the psychiatrisation of abnormality coupled with the rise of the psychiatric 
                expert and legislation like “dangerous lunatic” acts, leading to the creation of a specific 
                “juridico-medical” madness. The main questions that Foucault explores through 
                Abnormal inquire into how power is constituted through the framework derived from 
                legal and medical discourse about deviance and madness; in a word, “abnormality.” 
                Foucault undermines the concepts of “truth,” “expertise,” or transcendental categories: 
                rather, there are historically and geographically contingent categories. In other words, 
                normality and deviance are both socially constructed within given contexts, times, and 
                places. Two of the main conceptual frameworks underpinning the lectures are 
                “monsters” and “the norm.” His own summary of what he means by monsters is:
                “I would say that until the middle of the eighteenth century monstrosity had a criminal status 
                inasmuch as it was a transgression of an entire system of laws, whether natural laws or juridical 
                laws. Thus it was monstrosity in itself that was criminal. The jurisprudence of the seventeenth 
                and eighteenth centuries tried as far as possible to remove the penal consequence of this inherently criminal monstrosity. 21
                He emphasises a conceptual shift in juridico-medical focus from unnatural monstrosity,
                the epitome being the figure of the hermaphrodite which he argued was the ultimate 
                transgression of nature, to moral monstrosity. When discussing moral monsters, he 
                describes “a monstrosity of conduct” rather than “a monstrosity of nature.”22 The 
                reason that the hermaphrodite epitomises the monstrous is that it transgresses the laws 
                of nature by the mixture of two states, which according to “natural law,” as it was 
                understood, should be separate – in this case the male and the female. But it is also the 
                mixture of human and animal, and even life and death (the example he gives is the fetus 
                that only lives for a few minutes after it is born). He then states that the “mixing of two 
                realms” in such a way that violates natural law is not enough to be considered 
                monstrous. It must also challenge “the interdiction of civil and religious or divine 
                law.”23 These two prongs of Foucault’s monstrosities are useful tools for analysing the 
                mad and madness in Gaelic folklore; frequently the insane appear at the intersection of 
                supernatural and natural, and at the boundaries of moral transgressions, always mixing 
                realms.

                Sexuality and sexual deviance feature prominently in the lecture series as 
                particular forms of monstrosity, most frequently in the form of the hermaphrodite, 
                mentioned above, and the masturbator. These sorts of figures do not explicitly feature 
                in Gaelic folklore,24 but if we accept Foucault’s conceptual monster as “a blending and 
                mixture of two realms” and also “the transgression of the natural limit,” then it becomes 
                clear that monsters (in this context) and madness in Gaelic folklore are inextricably 
                linked.

                Later on in the lectures Foucault constructs the argument that it was through the 
                juridical system that psychiatry asserted its power, as it could offer explanations for the 
                “motiveless” crime, which had eluded the judicial system since the nineteenth century, 
                for the “modern” judicial system was designed to punish rationality. Both the 
                criminal’s motives and his or her reason must be punished – the exercise of punitive 
                power requires both these things – but when no such things existed, the judicial system turned to proto-psychiatric expertise, bound up in the so-called insanity defense.25 
                Psychiatry itself turned its gaze and its main focus to what Foucault calls “public 
                hygiene,” the assertion that it has the power to control the “dangerous individual.” He 
                writes: 
                To justify itself as a scientific and authoritative intervention in society, the power and science of 
                public hygiene and social protection, mental medicine must demonstrate that it can detect a 
                certain danger, even when it is not yet visible to anyone else; and it must demonstrate that it can 
                perceive this danger through its capacity as medical knowledge.26
                Psychiatry, in effect, was a source of early detection and, more generally, of “proving” 
                the presence of mental “illness.” Once such illness was present, it cancelled out 
                motives/reasons. Psychiatry as public hygiene emerges as a dominating feature of the 
                empirical data in this study that came from state apparatuses. Hospital admissions 
                papers – legal documents signed by legal authorities such as the sheriff substitute for the 
                county – emphasise the idea of the “dangerous individual,” and the role of psychiatry as 
                having the expertise and power to control the dangerous individual, as the primary 
                reasons for committing him or her to a hospital or mental asylum, in effect deciding in 
                advance on someone’s “abnormality” and taking preventative measures in the form of a 
                spatial separation from “society” 
                 Foucault finds that the sort of questions asked about the mad person before the 
                nineteenth century were whether or not the subject suffered from dementia, an 
                alienation of consciousness, which made him or her unfit to be a subject of legal 
                rights.27 However, the nineteenth century saw the erection of “the great taxonomic 
                architecture of psychiatry.”28 There were different types of madness, different 
                diagnostic categories: there was partial madness, continuous madness, monomania, 
                mania, idiocy, and so on. Critically for legal psychiatry by the 1840s, one’s murderous 
                actions could be considered mad, while the individual might appear quite sane in other 
                regards. The role of the expert, though, was not only in trials where the alleged lunatic 
                had already committed a crime and his or her motives, or lack thereof, needed to be 
                evaluated by someone with medical expertise.”
                [hr]
                “J.F. Campbell wrote of amhas, wild, ungovernable men, also called 
                amhanan: “They were public pests but great warriors, half crazy, enormously strong; 
                subject to fits of ungovernable fury. Saner men sometimes employed them and put 
                them to death when they were done with them.”214 The grotesque physical changes 
                undergone by Cuchulainn have been diluted – Campbell did not indicate that amhanan 
                underwent any physical distortions, but the tales retained the relationship of madness to 
                “primitive” violence and disorder. Campbell’s sources implied that mad people are 
                dangerous and ungovernable, but useful if one is having trouble with the neighbours, 
                while his text also implies that the animality of the amhas meant that they were more 
                disposable than the lowliest peasant, who was still human, still part of the community. 
                The amhas existed outside both natural law and human law. 
                 The immensity of their transgression of law is evident in a tale in Campbell’s 
                collection called “The Story of Conall Gulban.” Conall goes to the palace of the King 
                of Lochlann and finds himself engaging in a battle with the king’s amhas, who were 
                guarding the palace. The amhas say to him, “fresh royal blood will be ours to quench 
                our thirst and thy fresh royal flesh to polish our teeth.”215 They have cannibalism in 
                mind and cannibalism, along with incest, was one of society’s two great prohibitions. 
                Foucault asserts that cannibalism is “at the very heart of the juridico-medical theme of 
                the monster.”216 It was, in a sense, a very early classification of the “dangerousness” 
                that would dictate lunacy law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, effectively 
                placing these individuals outside Foucault’s dichotomy of natural and of manmade law.217
                In other tales recorded during the nineteenth century, the supernatural shifts to a 
                causative force rather than a physical or mental characteristic of the mad person 
                themselves. Supernatural beings cause people to go insane, but the sufferers do not for 
                the most part acquire any supernatural attributes. Lord Napier (of Crofting Commission 
                fame) published his own collection of Highland folklore and superstition in 1879. In it 
                he related one instance of a woman with whom he was acquainted who “took a sudden 
                fit of mental derangement, and screamed and talked violently to herself.” The friends 
                and neighbours believed that “her affliction was the work of the devil, brought about 
                through the agency of some evil-disposed person.”218 Another story from South Uist 
                told of a bard who fell in love with a girl from Stornoway, who married someone else. 
                The bard dabbled in the supernatural, conjuring up images of her, but he pined away 
                and “became so small that his father used to carry him in a creel on his back.” It was 
                whispered that the one he had conjured up was in fact the devil, recalling a much older 
                trope of madness as “demonic possession” and perhaps a warning that the supernatural 
                should be left well alone.219 J.G. Campbell warned of a “wandering madness” which 
                fairy women inflict on humans, especially men, wherein they “roam about restlessly, 
                without knowing what they were doing, or leave home at night to hold appointments 
                with the Elfin women themselves.”220 This particular belief may well be employed to 
                explain away adulterous or otherwise undesirable behaviour, or perhaps indeed 
                explained a type of insanity where young men wandered away for no other apparent 
                reason. 
                Even though supernaturality had become more of an outward force, rather than a 
                physical disfigurement of the mad person themselves, “folk” belief still positioned it as 
                a legitimate cause of derangement instead of a symptom, as nineteenth century alienists 
                later suggested.221 Psychiatrists such as John Cowles Prichard, for instance, insisted 
                that an individual’s belief that they were being pursued by the devil or fairies was clear 
                evidence of a disordered and delusive mental fixation,222 but in the pre-modern Gaelic construct of not only the mind, but reality itself, the existence of these supernatural 
                beings was not questioned. The ontological transition of madness from something 
                completely outward to something completely inward was grounded in the validity, and 
                later on the lack thereof, of belief in supernatural forces. 
                Sir Thomas Dick Lauder recorded a story where the main character, the hapless 
                laird Invereshie of the area around Glen Feshie in the Northeast Highlands (Fig 2.1), 
                lingers in the hazy boundary 
                between the pre-modern belief that 
                witchcraft could cause insanity, 
                and the modern sense that this 
                belief in and of itself constituted 
                evidence of madness.223 ”
                [hr]
                “The man suffers 
                because of philandering or fathering an illegitimate child, but the woman cannot avenge 
                herself, or commit any violence on him, unless she is reclassified as a supernatural 
                being. The moment where she steps outside the boundaries of socially acceptable 
                behaviour – non-violence or perhaps chastity – she becomes a non-person, even if the 
                object of her violence or “promiscuity” has committed a wrong. In this way, the 
                abnormal and the problematic are reframed, reconstituted as thoroughly un-human and 
                unnatural. At the same time, witchcraft, although feared, is somewhat empowering. 
                Later chapters on medicine, for instance, will show people seeking out persons of 
                supernatural abilities in order to heal various maladies. Ronald Black, in his 
                commentary on Campbell’s work, suggests that: “It seems from this the community as a 
                whole is more willing to believe that human beings can turn themselves into animals 
                than confront the uncomfortable truth that one of its own young women is capable of 
                attacking a man out of jealousy.”243 Even our own culture has narratives that it uses to 
                explain and construct violence and disordered behaviour, mental illness being one such 
                explanation. ”
                [hr]
                “Water-horses occasionally attempt to 
                capture young women by transforming into the shape of young men, but are 
                recognisable from the sand and seaweed in their hair. This sort of tale, J.G. Campbell 
                explains, “is known through the whole of the Highlands.” In one such tale, he describes 
                the following incident:
                A Water-horse in man’s shape came to a house in which 
                there was a woman alone; at the time she was boiling water 
                in a clay vessel (croggan) such as was in use before iron 
                became common. The Water-horse, after looking on for 
                some time, drew himself nearer to her, and said in a 
                snuffling voice, “It is time to begin courting, Sarah, 
                daughter of John, son of Finlay.” “It is time, it is time,” she 
                replied, “when the little pitcher boils.” In a while it repeated 
                the same words and drew itself nearer. She gave the same 
                answer drawing out the time as best she could, till the water 
                was boiling hot. As the snuffling youth was coming too 
                near she threw the scalding water between his legs, and he 
                ran out of the house roaring and yelling with pain.265
                Sarah comes across as quick-witted girl and the 
                snuffling voice and appearance of the water-horse 
                alert her to the fact that he is a supernatural being. Like the tales of witches and fairies, 
                these stories mediate problematic human behaviour and violence through the 
                supernatural. In this instance, instead of assuming a snivelling young man might stalk 
                or threaten a young woman, the tale makes him a monstrosity of the human (only in his 
                physical appearance) and the animal, an outsider to natural and social order. ”
                [hr]
                “Highland society has often acknowledged that the seer’s experience was both 
                real and valid. In his text, Martin acknowledges that his readers, the intellectual elite of 
                London and Edinburgh, were less accepting of this reality and confronts several 
                objections to Second Sight. Thus Martin writes, “These seers are visionary and 
                melancholy people, and fancy they see things that do not appear to them or anybody 
                else.” He answers the objection with: 
                The people of these isles, and particularly the seers, are very temperate, and their diet is simple 
                and moderate in quantity and quality, so that their brains are not in all probability disordered by 
                undigested fumes of meat or drink. Both sexes are free from hysteric fits, convulsions, and 
                several other distempers of that sort; there’s no madmen among them, nor any instance of self-
                murder. It is observed among them that a man drunk never sees the second-sight; and that he is a 
                visionary, would discover himself in other things as well as in that; and such as see it are not 
                judged to be visionaries by any of their friends or acquaintance.272
                Not all of Martin’s claims here are unassailable, such as his insistence on the 
                temperance of Highlanders or his assertion that there is not a “madman” amongstthem.273 Nonetheless, he cuts a wide discursive gap with madness on the one side and 
                Second Sight on the other. The suggestion that Second Sighted Highlanders must be 
                sane because no one in the Highlands goes mad did not withstand increasing interest in
                lunacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but Second Sight retained ardent 
                supporters; and over two hundred years later they were still rebelling against the 
                suggestion that the visions were nothing more than hallucinations. In 1901, the 
                Reverend William Morrison from the Free Church of Duthill, wrote: 
                The Second-Sight may excite the surprise and the incredulity of the learned, but of its existence, 
                even in some Highlanders to the present day, there is not the shadow of a doubt in the minds of 
                many who have certain knowledge of instances that can admit of no dubiety whatsoever.274
                Morrison indicates that Second Sight has deleterious effects on the mental soundness of 
                the seer, at least temporarily. It is “regarded as troublesome to the possessor. The vision 
                of coming events is attended by a ‘nerve-storm,’ which ends in the complete prostration 
                of the subject of it.”275 One can even be completely paralysed by a vision but still be 
                considered sane. In Morrison’s view, the visions are real and any mental distress that 
                emerges comes from the trauma of seeing one. J.G. Campbell’s account of Second 
                Sight, on the other hand, casts slightly more aspersions on its existence, suggesting 
                there might not be such a wide gulf between the visions of Second Sighted people and 
                the hallucinations of the mad: 
                In the one case the vision is looked on as unreal and imaginary, arising from some bodily or 
                mental derangement, and having no foundation in fact, while the other proceeds on a belief that 
                the object seen is really there and has an existence independent of the seer, is a revelation, in 
                fact, to certain gifted individuals of a world different from, and beyond, the world of sense.276
                While Martin and Morrison both insist that Second Sight is absolutely true in all cases, 
                Campbell claims that before science found the causes of hallucination and delusion in 
                “an abnormal state of the nervous system, exhaustion of mind or body, strong emotions, 
                temperament, and others of the countless, and at times obscure, causes,” all “thespectres were believed to be external realities having an existence of their own.”277 
                Now that knowledge has proceeded in a generally forward direction, he suggests it is 
                likely that many incidents of Second Sight were in fact hallucinations. 
                Even within the Victorian scientific community, the existence of Second Sight 
                was contested along these lines; some believing that it was just a primitive, unscientific 
                construction of hallucinations and others arguing that some individuals indeed 
                possessed an ability to access a world of ghosts and spirits. Highly regarded members 
                of the British scientific and literary communities such as William Crookes, Yeats, and 
                Tennyson invested heavily in investigations of “spiritualist” phenomena, which 
                included Second Sight but more commonly séances and the powers of psychic 
                mediums. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was involved in a direct inquiry 
                into Second Sight in the Highlands, funded by the Marquis of Bute, primarily conducted 
                by a researcher, Ada Goodrich Freer.278 Her research methods came under fire, 
                however, as she received most of her data from the folklorist Fr. Allan MacDonald 
                rather than conducting any kind of thorough scientific inquiry herself. In any case, 
                although the SPR claimed to be investigating spiritual phenomena using scientific 
                methods (thus slating Freer for not using them), they were generally marginalised by 
                mainstream science. 
                The rifts amongst folklorists over the validity of Second Sight continued as well. 
                Alexander Mackenzie, allying himself with Morrison, went to even greater lengths to 
                defend Second Sight from the scepticism of science, contending: 
                The gift of prophecy, second-sight, or “Taibh-searachd,” claimed for and believed by many to 
                have been possessed, in an eminent degree, by Coinneach Odhar, the Brahan Seer, is one, the 
                belief in which scientific men and others of the present day accept as un-mistakable signs of 
                looming, if not of actual insanity. All are, or would be considered, scientific in these days. It 
                will, therefore, scarcely be deemed prudent for any one who wishes to lay claim to the slightest 
                modicum of common sense, to say nothing of an acquaintance with the elementary principles of 
                science, to commit to paper his ideas on such a subject, unless he is prepared, in doing so, to 
                follow the common horde in their all but universal scepticism. 
                Without committing ourselves to any specific faith on the subject, however difficult it 
                may be to explain away what follows on strictly scientific grounds, we shall place before the 
                reader the extraordinary predictions of the Brahan Seer. We have had slight experiences of our 
                own, which we would hesitate to dignify by the name of second-sight. It is not, however, with 
                our own experiences that we have at present to do, but with the “Prophecies” of Coinneach 
                Odhar Fiosaiche. He is beyond comparison the most distinguished of all our Highland Seers, and 
                his prophecies have been known throughout the whole country for more than two centuries.279”
                [hr]
                “However, are the “outside forces” truly outside Invereshie’s mind? Witchcraft is further 
                problematised by the same distinctions which Shakespeare drew in Macbeth between 
                “supernatural madness” and “natural alienation.”327 As I have illustrated previously, 
                supernatural madness within the Highland context, even as late as the mid-nineteenth 
                century, was a perfectly ‘legitimate’ means of being mad, and at the same time, witches, 
                demons, and the Second Sight existed as “real” cultural constructs, not delusions or 
                fantasies. But this tale finally reflects the colonisation of the supernatural by “natural 
                alienation,” concluding with an indictment on the supernatural. Invereshie was not 
                bewitched after all, but his superstitious ideations drove him to commit murder. Unlike 
                other tales of witches and changelings which utilise supernaturality in order to shy away 
                from murder,328 this one looks squarely at this ugly reality and makes it the centre of the 
                tragedy. 
                A final reading of this tale, which I do not want to neglect, is as an allegory for 
                the political, social, and economic troubles of the nineteenth century Highlands. 
                Invereshie’s monomania represents the obsession that Highland lairds had for fine 
                material possessions. The love-object, the lady, becomes the lifestyle of the Lowland 
                and English aristocracy, which led many Highland elites to squander their wealth and, 
                in some cases, to sell their estates. She is characterised by both her foreignness to the 
                Highlands and a delicacy largely at odds with the Highland way of life: 
                As his lady’s previous nurture and education had accustomed her to much nicety of domestic-
                arrangement, and to many luxuries then altogether unknown in the Highlands … 329
                Invereshie lacks the power to control the excesses of his wife, or his own complicity 
                therein, much as Highland lairds in reality failed to control their excesses and wracked 
                up massive debts.  ”
                [hr]
                “Madness 
                was something sane people could see and hear. It manifested itself in the outward 
                behaviours, the language and physical appearance of the mad. “Indeed,” Houston 
                writes, “a look of madness or stupidity had for centuries been the criterion used by the 
                sane to identify men and women whose intellects were deranged or lacking.”350 The 
                traits that identify the mad in Gaelic tales are not substantially different from the 
                archetypes of the “frenzied and ranting madness” and “sombre melancholics” that 
                Foucault identified.351
                Physical appearance was one measure used to discriminate the insane from the 
                sane. Mad bodies looked different from sane ones. Indicators highlighted by Houston 
                in his treatment of eighteenth century Lowland madness include the eyes, hair length 
                (especially in men), beard length, apparent lack of concern for clothing and appearance, 
                and an overall look of “wildness.”352 These types of features also typically 
                characterised insane Highlanders in the Gaelic tales. When a weary traveller escapes 
                from a storm by seeking shelter in an ostensibly empty castle in Ross-Shire, he finds a 
                madwoman named Chirsty Ross living there. When he first sees her in the dark, he 
                catches a glimpse of “a wild expression.” Once they are inside the castle she appears to 
                him thus: 
                Now he could perceive that her hair was exceedingly 
                long and untamed, and whilst the greater part of it was 
                white or grizzled, as if from premature failure, it still con-
                tained what, if properly dressed, might have been called 
                tresses of the most beautiful glossy black, and the strange 
                effect of this unnatural intermixture of the livery of youth 
                and of age, was heightened by the wild combination of such 
                fantastical wreaths of heather and sea-weed, mingled with 
                sea-birds’ feathers, as insanity is usually so fond of adopting 
                by way of finery.353
                The nameless stranger immediately recognises this as the countenance of insanity, and 
                so do Lauder’s Victorian readers.354 Keeping one’s hair and clothing in order was an 
                outward manifestation of the rationality and morality that separated human from 
                animals. It was, as Roy Porter observes, “a moral warning (against pride, sloth, rage, or 
                vanity) blazoned forth for all to heed.”355 Foregoing self-grooming was a sure sign of 
                losing one’s mind. So long as reason remained in charge, life would be sane and orderly and, quite crucially, look sane and orderly. The physical appearance of Chirsty 
                Ross, her wild expression, long tangled hair, and wreaths of heather, sea-weed, and 
                feathers, effectively caricatures the disorder in her mind. 
                To turn our focus on insane characters from Medieval literature is to go from the 
                mad Highlander embodying attributes commonly associated with the nineteenth century 
                lunatic but remaining recognisably human, to one that seems mystifyingly bizarre. As I 
                have illustrated earlier, both Cuchulainn and Suibhne morph into human-animal 
                monstrosities when they go insane. Their physical transformations emerge from the 
                texts as a fundamental attribute of their madness. In O’Donovan’s translation, Suibhne 
                undergoes physical distortions when he loses his mind at the battle. “The inlets of 
                hearing were expanded and quickened by the horrors of lunacy; the vigour of his brain 
                in the cavities of his head was destroyed by the clamour of the conflict; his heart shrunk 
                within him at the panic of dismay.”356 The concept of the mad person’s head becoming 
                disfigured similarly arises in the Tain during Cuchulainn’s warp spasms. “One eye 
                receded into his head, the other stood out huge and red on his cheek; a man’s head could 
                fit into his jaw; his hair bristled like hawthorn, with a drop of blood at the end of each 
                single hair; and from the top of his head arose a thick column of dark blood like the 
                mast of a ship.357 Obviously both Suibhne and Cuchulainn are fictional characters with 
                exaggerated traits, but nonetheless present a model of madness that manifests itself in 
                physical, grotesque contortions. 
                 When he goes mad Suibhne also casts aside his clothing, one of the principal 
                faculties separating men from animals. The mad person as the naked figure in the 
                woods appears in the Merlin and Lailoken stories as well due to the Medieval 
                associations of nudity with wildness and an absence of humanity and civilisation Philo 
                suggests that the “wild man” compounds both human and animal traits, “a ‘darker’ side 
                of civilization: an emblem of untamed brute nature lurking beneath the veneer of an 
                ordered and cultured society.”358 Clothing represents order and culture; the state of 
                one’s clothing, whether it is the lack thereof, its destruction or merely its disarray, is 
                suggestive of one’s mental state. The archetype of the wild, naked madman who flings 
                aside his clothing had lost none of its potency by the nineteenth century. Both 
                laypeople and medical professionals considered the state of a potential mental patient’s 
                clothing when assessing whether or not the person was insane, offering a “symptom” of 
                psychiatric disorder with a long history. Academics across the disciplinary matrix, fromhistorians to psychologists to anthropologists, have suggested that the manner in which 
                mental disorder manifests itself is culturally specific.359 In Western society, clothing is 
                a symbolic referent of civilization, even of humanity, and an outward sign of 
                ontological awareness of the self and, critically, how the self is represented to others. 
                Patients in asylums, for instance, were prone to shredding their clothing or casting it off. 
                When Janet Shaw from Islay was admitted to Gartnavel Asylum, for instance, her 
                admission papers describe her as desiring “to burn clothes.”360 Another Gartnavel 
                admittee, John McPherson of South Uist, is reported in the case notes as “tearing his 
                clothes.”361 To both Medieval Gaels and nineteenth century alienists, the insane person 
                who destroys or throws away his or her clothing is, in effect, throwing away symbols of 
                their humanity.
                The mad are not only identified by the way they look, but the way they sound 
                and the seemingly irrational that way they interact with their surrounding environment. 
                Thoughout the Gaelic texts, the concept of wildness governs the voices and the actions 
                of the insane. Madness and wildness are complementary and conceivably 
                interchangeable.362 As the mad are deemed incapable of self-control – this is in fact 
                what characterises them as mad – the control emerges from the community. After all, 
                madness is unconcerned with social conventions and the mad seem to have super-
                human strength that is not easily contained. The amhas described by J.F. Campbell, 
                are “wild, ungovernable men … subject to fits of ungovernable fury.”363 When 
                whoever is employing the amhas is finished with them, he simply kills them. Similarly, 
                when the warp spasms overrun Cuchulainn’s mind, he could only be brought back to 
                sanity by repeated dunkings in cold water. When the king’s daughter in “The Barra 
                Widow’s Son” goes mad, her attendants bind her but she repeatedly breaks free.364 
                 I have already drawn attention to Cuchulainn’s and Garbh’s respective assaults 
                on the sea as representative of the irrationality and wildness associated with madness. 
                Other tales briefly suggest behaviour that leads to a social label of derangement: one 
                story in Freer’s collection tells of a man who went mad and ate his own horse. His 
                wife’s brother shot him “to prevent further mischief.”365 ”
                [hr]
                “The Battle of Magh Rath and Buile Shuibhne, suggest that 
                restlessness and an unquenchable desire to roam emerge out of derangement. 
                Suibhne’s insanity was primarily characterised by his wild flights through Ireland and 
                Scotland. While in Scotland he encounters another roving madman named Elladhan, 
                who had equally been roaming through Britain. Not even the hospitality offered by the 
                cleric Moling surpresses Suibhne’s irrepressible desire to wander, and thus the deal 
                Suibhne strikes with Moling is that he return to Moling’s house each night. 
                Lunatics in early modern and modern tales appear a bit more human and walk, 
                rather than fly or shape-shift, from one place to another, but nevertheless several stories 
                suggest instances of the mad roaming through the countryside. Alexander Carmichael 
                relates the tale of an Argyllshire man named Lachlan Og (young Lachlan) who became 
                insane while incarcerated for accidentally murdering his lover.369 He was released from 
                prison after he went mad, and Carmichael’s informant reports him as:
                [Wandering] about the country, making Killchrenan the centre of his circuiting. He never 
                entered a house, never asked for food, and never spoke. When the people knew that he was 
                about, they left food for him in well-known retreats — which were simply depressions among 
                the rocks and hillocks — summer and winter.370
                This tells us that the insane were not always confined (indeed, this case raises some 
                interesting questions about why this individual was released from prison when he losthis mind), although there are other examples in Gaelic tales, like that of the king’s 
                daughter in “The Barra Widow’s Son,” where the lunatic is tied up. It also reads as 
                though Lachlan’s behaviour falls within the norm for how people expect lunatics to act; 
                accordingly, they leave food for him in places where he is likely to be in his travels. 
                Although he is a wandering outsider, he remains part of the community – in essence a 
                resident madman. 
                I have already mentioned J.G. Campbell’s description of madmen who “roam 
                about restlessly, without knowing what they were doing.” The suggestion of shape-
                changing manifests itself in Campbell’s account as well, although, unlike the Buile 
                Suibhne, he illustrates that shape-changing is a delusion in the disordered minds of the 
                insane, not something which actually happens to them. These men were “driven from 
                their kindred, and made to imagine themselves undergoing marvellous adventures and 
                changing shape.”371 This is a reconstitution of Suibhne’s insanity and perhaps the very
                nature of madness itself. In the early Celtic epics, the Buile and the Tain, madness is 
                equated to shape-shifting, the physical transformation into something else and the 
                acquisition of supernatural abilities. In J.G. Campbell’s description, the mad believe 
                they change shape but the sane know they cannot. Madness then becomes characterised 
                by the erroneous beliefs of the mad.372 At the same time, as we have seen, Gaels 
                acknowledged that perfectly sane individuals could possess supernatural abilities, such
                as the Second Sight, so mere belief in such phenomena did not automatically constitute 
                derangement even as late as the mid-nineteenth century. Even educated Highlanders 
                like J.G. Campbell, who as we have seen above expressed some doubts about the 
                Second Sight, could not bring himself to dismiss it completely.”

                “The narrative again invokes the relationship between the clergy, God, 
                and supernatural beings when Suibhne regains his reason and attempts to return to Dal 
                Araidhe. Ronan, hearing of Suibne’s return, summons God again and God answers 
                Ronan’s prayer by sending supernatural apparitions to waylay Suibhne’s return to sanity 
                and his kingdom: 
                A strange apparition appeared to him at midnight; even trunks, headless and red, and heads 
                without bodies, and five bristling, rough-grey heads without body or trunk among them, 
                screaming and leaping this way and that about the road. When he came among them he heard 
                them talking to each other, and this is what they were saying: ‘He is a madman,’ said the first 
                head; ‘a madman of Ulster,’ said the second head; ‘follow him well,’ said the third head; ‘may 
                the pursuit be long,’ said the fourth head; ‘until he reaches the sea,’ said the fifth head. They rose 
                forth together towards him.203
                The heads eventually leave him, but his madness returns, and he resumes his course of 
                wandering through the hills and glens, bereft of reason. 
                The very form of Suibhne’s madness integrates the natural and the supernatural. 
                It assumes the form of the monstrosity, a man-animal chimera, arguably reflecting 
                Foucault claims that monsters were “the mixture of two realms, the animal and the 
                human: the man with the head of the ox, the man with a bird’s feet – monsters.”204 In 
                the Buile, this transformation is quite literal. Suibhne is described as becoming “bird-
                like” or possibly even turning into a bird. O’Keefe’s translation ascribes to him birdlike characteristics: “when he arrived out of the battle, it was seldom that his feet would 
                touch the ground because of the swiftness of his course, and when he did touch it he 
                would not shake the dew from the top of the grass for the lightness and the nimbleness 
                of his step.”205 Suibhne spends most of his time sitting in trees, while in Heaney’s 
                translation, he becomes a deranged bird-like creature; he “levitated in a frantic 
                cumbersome motion/like a bird of the air.”206 Madness, in both Heaney and O’Keefe, 
                gives Suibhne non-human abilities, living in trees and travelling through the air from 
                one tree to another or one hill to another. 
                The theme of the madman living like the wild creatures and having supernatural 
                abilities also appears in the Merlin stories. In Merlin’s case, he acquires the gifts of 
                prophecy and foresight, and while he does not fly through the trees, he lives naked in 
                the woods, stripped of the faculties of reason which humanise him. Philo suggests that 
                he represents “the hairy man, curiously compounded of human and animal traits.”207 He 
                finds the “negativity of madness and the negativity of wildness roped together” in the 
                fictional character of Merlin.208 Suibhne takes this one step further. He is not only 
                wild and animal-like in his habits, but transforms into a creature not even fully human. 
                O’Keefe’s translation equates madness to flight and to losing some of his humanity, 
                although not entirely; he is still able to recite poetry lamenting his situation. “He went, 
                like any bird of the air, in madness and imbecility.” If the ability to reason and to 
                engage in certain behaviour was regarded as a defining characteristic of humanity, then 
                their loss and the wildness duly incurred, seemed frightening. The combination is 
                something not human, but not animal either; rather it was a monstrosity of both. This 
                characterisation would have resonated with the medieval audience, drawing on their 
                own referents for what it meant to be mad. These stories not only show madness, but 
                again illustrate the fine line between madness and reason, such as the need to be 
                stripped of our worldliness understand what is real, like King Lear, who becomes mad 
                before he can truly perceive what is real in his relationships with his children and his 
                own value system. 
                Other Celtic texts from a similar time period, such as the Tain Bo Cuilainge,
                also draw upon the symbiosis between madness and the supernatural. The Tain is 
                preserved in a series of manuscripts, written in Old and Middle Irish, from the twelfth 
                through the fifteenth century, but like the Buile, the characters and events are from the 
                seventh and eighth centuries.”

                “Physical appearance was one measure used to discriminate the insane from the 
                sane. Mad bodies looked different from sane ones. Indicators highlighted by Houston 
                in his treatment of eighteenth century Lowland madness include the eyes, hair length 
                (especially in men), beard length, apparent lack of concern for clothing and appearance, 
                and an overall look of “wildness.”352 These types of features also typically 
                characterised insane Highlanders in the Gaelic tales. When a weary traveller escapes 
                from a storm by seeking shelter in an ostensibly empty castle in Ross-Shire, he finds a 
                madwoman named Chirsty Ross living there. When he first sees her in the dark, he 
                catches a glimpse of “a wild expression.” Once they are inside the castle she appears to 
                him thus: 
                Now he could perceive that her hair was exceedingly 
                long and untamed, and whilst the greater part of it was 
                white or grizzled, as if from premature failure, it still con-
                tained what, if properly dressed, might have been called 
                tresses of the most beautiful glossy black, and the strange 
                effect of this unnatural intermixture of the livery of youth 
                and of age, was heightened by the wild combination of such 
                fantastical wreaths of heather and sea-weed, mingled with 
                sea-birds’ feathers, as insanity is usually so fond of adopting 
                by way of finery.353
                The nameless stranger immediately recognises this as the countenance of insanity, and 
                so do Lauder’s Victorian readers.354 Keeping one’s hair and clothing in order was an 
                outward manifestation of the rationality and morality that separated human from 
                animals. It was, as Roy Porter observes, “a moral warning (against pride, sloth, rage, or 
                vanity) blazoned forth for all to heed.”355 Foregoing self-grooming was a sure sign of 
                losing one’s mind. ”
                [hr]
                “From the earliest Biblical writings, the man outside the pale of
                orthodoxy is “the Wild Man” (e .g ., Cain, Ham, Ishmael) . These Wild Men
                are depicted as “inhabiting a wild land, above all as hunters, sowers
                of confusion, damned, and generative of races that live in irredeemable
                ignorance or outright violation of the laws that God has laid down for
                the governance of the cosmos .” 1 For the ancient Hebrew, the Wild Man
                1 Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness,” in The Wild Man Within,
                ed . Edward Dudley and Maximillian E . Novak (Pittsburgh : Univ . of
                Pittsburgh Press, 1972), p . 14 . 

                was under the curse of God, in a state of unredeemed and unredeemable
                degeneracy . Thus it was that traditional Old Testament theology jus-
                tified centuries of black slavery and the general persecution of dark-
                skinned people .
                The habitat of the Wild Man was a wild land, a nature which as-
                sumed “the aspect of a chaotic and violent enemy against which man must
                struggle to win back his proper humanity .”- When such a wild, uncul-
                tivated land was found, as in the Americas, it was logical to view the
                aboriginal inhabitants as Wild Men, as forces of disorder–even as
                agents of the Devil . Certainly, in their great primitive appeal they
                represented a threat to the fragile, rational structures of white
                civilization . As the English-Puritan girl in Short of the Glory re-
                flects :
                They were a wretched remnant of a race seduced to the western
                hemisphere by the Devil himself . As God had called Abram out
                of Chaldee, so the Devil, aping God’s ways, had led his sub-
                jects to America . And like their father the Devil, they
                raged up and down the land seeking whom they could devour . 3
                And even in more modern times, a young missionary in The Burning Wood
                says that “Satan walks among them .”4 Such irrational fears motivate
                the prejudiced and often violent responses of some people, especially
                2 White, p . 12 .
                3 E . M . Granger Bennett, Short of the Glory (Toronto : Ryerson,
                1960), p . 51 . For an amplification of this attitude see Roy Harvey
                Pearce, The Savages of America, rev . ed . (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins Press
                1965), pp . 19-35 .
                4 David Williams, The Burning Wood (Toronto : Anansi, 1975), p . 32 .

                the illiterate, the ignorant, the self-interested, and the over-zealous .
                The first part of this chapter, then, will examine works in which na-
                tive religious practices are depicted as black and damnable or as mere-
                ly superstitious and contemptible–“unmeaning mummery,” as Ballantyne
                referred to the rituals of the medicine tent . 5 Obviously, there is
                plenty of room here for the depiction of symbolic conflicts and for a
                high degree of romance and melodrama .
                But Christianity normally permits man to regain his paradise
                through the intercession of Christ, so that even the most monstrous,
                according to St . Augustine, are “to be seen as possible converts rather
                than as enemies or sources of corruption, to be exiled, isolated, and
                destroyed .”6 When the New World opened up to trade and settlement,
                amongst the earliest arrivals were Christian missionaries, out to emu-
                late the achievements of their predecessors in pagan England, Ireland,
                and Germany a millenium earlier . To the missionary the Wild Man (the
                Indian in this case) was not spiritually corrupt, but sinful through
                ignorance ; nevertheless, as Fairchild summarizes, ignorance could not
                “possibly absolve them from the curse of Adam .” 7 The aboriginal state
                of sin is sometimes viewed as evil, sometimes as possessing a kind of
                good, practical relevance to the lives of its practitioners ; but there
                is never any doubt that the Indian can and must be redeemed through Chriatian teaching. ”
                [hr]
                “It is not surprising, then, that often in Canadian romance about
                Indians, the archetypal struggle between light and dark becomes a
                literal struggle between an .evil medicine man and a good white man or
                an Indian of recognizably Christian values, The medicine man (shaman
                or conjurer) of an Indian tribe was rather like all professional men in
                white society rolled into one : a religious practitioner foremost ; some-
                what of a doctor, pharmacist, psychologist, and scientist together ; a
                magician ; and often the repository of tribal lore and traditions . Few
                Indians had as much to lose as the medicine man did when white religion
                began to take over ; and many writers saw in the conflict possibilities
                for high romance . As long as men firmly believed that the salvation
                of the Indian lay in the adoption of white religion and habits, the
                medicine man’s role in romance would most probably be destructive or
                demonic ; he would be the representative of a beguiling world of super-
                stition, fraud, and error . ”

                “As in Huldowget the action is precipitated when a basically good
                person of weak faith arrives in the community . Abe Ross, who has re-
                jected the heartless rigidity of his own Presbyterian upbringing, has
                come to Frozen Lake as a trading agent with the Frobisher Company . The
                enemy of Christianity and the Frobisher Company is one Sig Bjornesen, a
                huge, blond, exploitive Manitoba Icelander . He is clearly depicted as
                a destructive influence, but being good and kind is not enough to fight
                him . As McKelvie showed, a genuine commitment to a code outside one-
                self is needed to cultivate the inner strength necessary to combat evil .
                The missionary tells Abe :
                . . . even you, Abe, a kind moral decent man but you haven’t
                dared believe in anything except maybe yourself . That seems
                possible for some ; I think maybe Bjornesen was like that once,
                long ago, but he got to care less and less about anyone or
                anything–if you think at all you get discouraged with your-
                self and slowly it all turns sour . Now he tortures these
                people with their fears, for his own gain . Or more likely,
                amusement . (pp . 172-73)
                The main Indian characters in this conflict are members of the
                Crane family and Kekekose, the conjurer and spiritual leader of his
                people . The traditional ways he represents are presented sympatheti-
                cally, as in this conversation between Abe and the missionary :
                “I don’t know whether the spirits Kekekose says he uses are
                bad or good . I know that the Indians tell me in the past
                they did mostly useful things–like making people well orprotecting them from the windigo–and if this is mere sug-
                gestion, so what? They’re still well, aren’t they? If it
                helps them to live in the bush–”
                “Then why wreck it by coming here and telling them they
                don’t really need all they’ve had, that they need Jesus,
                about who [sic] they’ve never heard, or care? . . .”
                “When white men come they tear old ideas apart and in the
                end leave the Indians nothing–because they simply don’t
                believe what the Indians do and when every day they live out
                their care-nothing, faith in the old beliefs is lost .” (pp .
                171-72)
                Kekekose himself is depicted as a good and responsible man–rather like
                MacLean’s Running Wolf–and the missionaries are wise and sympathetic
                enough to recognize his real value to his people .
                Unfortunately, Kekekose, and by implication his religion,
                39
                lacks
                the strength to combat the powers of Bjornesen, who fights with a per-
                verted version of the conjurer’s own spiritual powers . But after the
                dramatic resolution of the novel, Kekekose himself realizes the inade-
                quacies of his religion and leads his people to the missionary for in-
                struction and, later, baptism . The victory of good has been achieved
                and a state of social order restored when Violet decides not to marry
                Alex and instead to become a teacher amongst her own people .”
                [hr]
                “The act dealt with the insane only tangentially. It allowed commitment of
                persons “of little or no Estates, who, by Lunacy, or otherwise, are furiously Mad, and
                dangerous to be permitted to go Abroad” by two justices, for such lime as the madness
                continued. The reference here was explicitly to the poor. Hunter and Macalpine
                argue that the effect of the act was to treat the mad differently from other categories
                of sturdy beggar: the mad would no longer be liable to be whipped as a punishment
                for their vagrancy.’ 3 A relatively high standard of lunacy was required by the
                statute. This can be seen as an extension of the common law standard. There had
                long been a common law defence to an action for trespass against people committing
                or restraining mad people, but the defence applied only when an the lunatic was
                detained “in his fury”. 14 The statute can thus be seen as carrying the common law
                standard over into the statutory realm. This standard also reflects the bestial imagery
                associated with the mad in the eighteenth century, imagery Anne Digby characterizes
                as follows:
                In an age of reason the forces of irrationality —
                represented by the mad — needed to be excluded. Their
                conditions while confmed were to be appropriate to their
                ambiguous state. Having lost their reason, which
                constituted their badge of humanity, the mad were seen as animals.”
                [hr]
                “A patient in a Parisian asylum early in the nineteenth century used to cry
                out:
                I am man, God, Napoleon, Robespierre, altogether. I am Robespierre,
                a Monster. I must be slain.
                The history of madness is the history of power. Because it imagines power,
                madness is both impotence and omnipotence. It requires power to control
                it. Threatening the normal structures of authority, insanity is engaged in
                an endless dialogue – a monomaniacal monologue sometimes – about power.
                This is partly due to the irresistible analogy drawn ever since the Greeks
                between microcosm and macrocosm, the body natural and the body politic.
                Plato explicitly developed the analogy. between the hierarchical ordering of
                the healthy soul (in which reason lords it over the base and unruly passions)
                and the organic social order, in which rational guardians possess true author-
                ity, disciplining the anarchic multitude, who have no potential for self-control,
                but are slaves to their own appetites.
                For two thousand years afterwards, healthy minds, healthy bodies and
                healthy societies were associated with the rule of reason, and disturbance
                with the tumult of base and vulgar desire. Echoes ofthis pattern, transformed
                to his own uses, survive in Freud’s tripartite division of the psyche and in
                the role he mapped out for the controlling superego and the anarchic id.
                The analogy was not just descriptive but prescriptive as well. Good order
                required that reason should reign. When it was overthrown, the political
                madness of civil war followed, as happened when King Lear gave away his
                kingdom and lost his mind in the storm on the heath. In other words something
                particularly evil had occurred when reason, that rightful instrument ofgovern-
                ment, both personal and political, ceased to fulfil its proper office. When
                princes abused their office and turned tyrant, substituting base urges for
                higher duties, they disturbed the order of things. The fates or nature, or
                God, would wreak revenge, fittingly by driving them mad. ”
                [hr]
                “AbstractSt Augustine suggested that monsters (monstra) serve to show or to signify (monstrare) something, whilst Foucault argued that one ancestor of today’s abnormal individual was the human monster, a class of being characterised by a composite nature. This essay examines what two very different mixed human monsters can show us. The donestre, a mediaeval race of lion‐headed polyglots with a taste for human flesh, demonstrate an ancient form of monstrous transgression by their corporeal violation of both social and natural law. The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, meanwhile, illustrates a modern form of monstrosity in which a person’s instinctual character, their potential conduct or behaviour, marks them out as deviant. The study of monsters helps to debauch our minds with learning and thus, in the words of William James, to make the natural, explanatory power of ‘instinct’ seem strange. “

                kFoyauextlH
                Participant

                  Two examples of artists who seem to have a kind of visual vocabulary of concepts they are building are Die Antwoord and Grimes. I see repeated imagery and themes, moreso in Grimes who has now used the Black Winged thing, reminscent of some images of the Greek Khaos though I am not so sure how aware of any of this she is, more than once as well as some other stylistic elements. One problem might be that her explanations are not broadcast much or known and even if they were might not end up sounding very sophisticated.

                  In my case though, the visuals would be jam packed with information which could be thoroughly explained and discussed.

                  For more on the motivations behind such things, my recent post in Simplicity Vs Complexity goes into that in a way that would likely sound unpleasant to people.

                  in reply to: Simplicity Vs Complexity #19124
                  kFoyauextlH
                  Participant

                    I think people who think things are snobbish are annoying anyway. They are threatened by anything non-communal since it represents some sort of thing falling out of their range of access or influence in their social domain.

                    I likeithe idea of the recluse as a kind of new noble, but then again I don’t personally identify with someone who doesn’t share with people. It is hard for me to imagine satisfaction without expression, even though I am generally happiest alone and in my own thoughts and I’m greatly stressed by people.

                    ​​​​​There are certain communities and cultures which realty promote social contribution and cooperation and participation with the world system or society. In often hear things like “functioning member of society” “giving back to society” as high and noble goals.

                    I buy into it as well somewhat. Though I don’t view the escape artist too harshly, I want to escape too, but then again feel chained back by hellish Bodhisattva vows and wishing to do good and feeling responsible or guilty for not trying or leading people behind.

                    Plus, there isn’t really anywhere to go. Even though I make what I like, I surely wouldn’t make these things if there were no people around, there would be no reason to do it really at all, because then who cares?

                    Who cares even if I remember all this trash? So I still do all this because of people and for people, people I don’t even like or want.

                    I don’t think I could stomach not forcing myself into people. I think my whole life is about imposing myself into everything, irrelevant of political content, simply as a form of living so long as the content is self identifying for me as a spiritual vessel.

                    My life is about being like an infectious disease, a virus that only wants to live, not even knowing enjoyment of life or having a reason, see Rebel Without. A Cause ( my threads and posts are all winding and connected ).

                    I even lie about the truth mattering to me, in a sense, because I know people don’t understand what I even mean about the truth even though I tell them.

                    To me, Truth is only Violence, its Force. The Reality is what has Impact, what makes itself known through its undeniable substance of pressure and force.

                    So if I say the truth matters to me, what I really mean is shoving myself down peoples throats, making them suffer my existence one way or another, or finding ways to make them take the medicine.
                    ​​​
                    I create unique forms or combinations which are secret representations of myself in order to inject them in people, I make them unpalatable and unique so that I know it is me they are taking in and not something else.

                    I reject things which are too common, or seem to be the vessels of something else or used by others, which is what I mean when I say “I do not want to work for someone else”. That includes what people call God or Causes or Organizations or anything which isn’t Me shoving Me into people.

                    I don’t even need to accomplish it much but constantly do it as a form of life and living.

                    If there were no people around, I wonder what I’d do then, with the simple life. It is likely I would structure it to reflect me yet again.

                    People often don’t even perceive the narcissism behind their every desire and goal and action.

                    in reply to: Simplicity Vs Complexity #19117
                    kFoyauextlH
                    Participant

                      I had wanted to post this earlier but here is a good chance:

                       https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
                      [hr]
                      Withdrawing from the world can be considered a kind of snobbishness.
                      [hr]
                      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

                      Weird errors and refreshing, not sure if this posted. The perception of the withdrawn as elitist or snobs can also resemble the anger of the living towards loved ones who leave or commit suicide.

                      kFoyauextlH
                      Participant

                        That is very cool. In my case I’d largely be using internet based transmission and if I manage to put together films of sufficient quality they may get released in theatres but it is probably most important that they through various strategies become well known and referred to and influential on people so I might distribute memes from things as well to try to circulate interest and frequent searches for the origins.

                        The three main forms would be writing, artworks such as digital images, and films as music videos with my music and feature length films.

                        The message overall is really not so much a message as to make available materials and themes and ideas and images to build a kind of new visual vocabulary of cool stuff that pleases me since I mostly don’t see much I really like except snippets and see lots of tropes which are a bit boring.

                        in reply to: The Essential Ken Wilber #19144
                        kFoyauextlH
                        Participant

                          How did you like it? What did it seem to say? What do you think of him and whatever message you think he is trying to give?

                          in reply to: Simplicity Vs Complexity #19116
                          kFoyauextlH
                          Participant

                            That is awesome, I’d love to see some stuff you make put up on this website along with any explanations of it.

                            kFoyauextlH
                            Participant

                              Very cool. I just want to make my stuff and get people to see it. I am against selling rights to my stuff or giving anyone else creative input much, any input from anyone I would let their input be dominant because I’d view anything else as sullying my work which to me is a form of religious divination and devotional like these posts even.

                              in reply to: Simplicity Vs Complexity #19123
                              kFoyauextlH
                              Participant

                                Both of these words and concepts mean almost nothing to me when I look at them for too long. I only care about which is sharper to attack life with or more hurtful to slap a face with.

                                ​​​​​​like Elitists for example just makes me thing of biting hard into a neck with no relenting. It isn’t even that I hate elitists, I am just hungry and possibly insane, and there is something about biting the neck of elitists until they are dead that pleases the lionhearted.

                                I think it means something really profound though. I think as a lion I sense that the gazelle will not help me, so that all I can get from them in way of help is by devouring their person for their resources.

                                We are alienated from what we eat, our food source, and so to get money and power, which the elitists have become symbols of, we have to seize it if we can, holding tight until they are no longer able to resist our taking of their resources.

                                This is why the people are threats, and elitists used to go lion hunting.

                                So that was an example of a strange thought with a simple meaning.

                                The complex is often obscure and organic, like the symbol of a man-lion biting the neck of an elitist, but when explained the symbol can appear as a simple way to describe something which would take many more words, even though it couldn’t be understood just as a symbol.

                                in reply to: The rise of the right #19152
                                kFoyauextlH
                                Participant

                                  The rise of the right, as always, stems from rage and frustration. The words involved are no more than barks of agitated animals. It barely mstters what they say, see the Rebel without a cause thread which is actually about the same.

                                  The rage in mankind can not be contained, it is a sublimated anxiety and hatred for life itself which even I know firsthand, but among less aware or honest people, it becomes a hatred of anything else, a hatred of the political correctness of the 90s, a hatred of the environmental concerns of the 80s, a hatred of being nice and tolerant and a rejection of everything. This is the age of smashing baby cherubs and taking out frustration on anything possible.

                                  The sounds of the age are raging, explosions, whining music or highly discordant sounds. All this representing human frustration.

                                  Why? It is because we have and were given so much false hope, so much technology to entice us, that the medieval hopelessness was washed away, we stopped for a moment thinking that we really are doomed, and felt a cocaine-like strength that we really could be doing something. Then we found out it wasn’t so, that we are still shackled and obstructed, and like any animal, this made us more angry than ever before, and so we lash out and what we lash out at also lashes out and the whole world is raging at its own lie it told itself one day when it was in a better mood.

                                  Part of this was by giving us so much apparent speed and ability through the internet all of a sudden but findung we really can’t do much with it anyway.

                                  We are still slaves, and whatever is around is what pays the price in the range of blind rage.

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