The Dysfunctional Human Mind - Part 2

8/8/2019 The Dysfunctional Human Mind - Part 2

1/23

THE DYSFUNCTINAL HUMAN MIND

A Look at the Human Condition~ trough poems, images, and quotes ~

PART 2_

F o r e w o r d

(same as for Pt.1)

The title of this sociological presentation is not intended to be disparaging to orscathing of our ability to think. It is derived from the fact that I had, on manyoccassions, considered the value of our everyday thoughts and actions andcame to a humorous statistical representation: 96% of what we say and think isrobotic sloganeering.Only on rare occassions something surges in us and produces thoughts, words,

and acts of substance. Something that originates from our core, and directlyrelates back to our core. This I refer to, with a sense of serious humour, thetwenty fifth item. The other 24 are insubstancial, only this one has the truehuman punch.A logical evaluation of the human condition - what we are and what we do -

leads us to consider the major player in this situation: that system of programswe are accustomed to calling "our mind".

If we, however, place this mind under a closer scrutiny we realize it does notreally serve our innermost interest. It appears to serve our need for personalsurvival, but only in the coarsest sense of the word: it makes us endure life, ascontrasted with actually living life.And in this scenario of two mutually antagonstic forces, the body and the mind,

each striving to win our being for themselves, our heart's desire to be fulfilled isforever unsatisfied.

In the course of this mind-examining activity we may also come to notice howskillful our mind is in making us kind of pomisses based on projections into ahypothetical future, and also making us believe in these promises.

In other words, the mind's ongoing mode of operation is insinuating personalfulfilment with one hand, yet forever withholding it with the other hand. The carrotand stick method - disarmingly simple, and terribly effective.

However, what the mind does give us in abundance is placebos and soothers.So that it may cover up the real effect of its doings: the deliberate, ongoing andneverending generation of subtle unhappiness - the first part of its business.The second part of its business is to convince us that it's doing what it can to fix


2/23

everything up, and make us good again. But why does it never tell us how andwhen we stopped being good in the first place? It only wants keep fixing us up.

Yet, despite its nefarious agenda, the mind can never quite obliterate our trueheritage - the heritage to be free beings, run by no foreign programs imposed on

us by forces not originating from within ourselves. And thus, from time to time,we remember, in different degrees of intensity, our true status asincomprehensible beings of the cosmos, with the potential to keep evolving.

The following poems, images, and miscellaneous quotes somehow, and indifferent ways, pertain to this premise. Though seemingly disjointed, they arestill meaningful through the unifying intent of desire to uncover and to know.They beckon, insinuating that there is something beyond our current terrifying

and puzzling predicament - the impasse of not knowing what, rather than who,we really are.

Peter Faigl

Elm

Love is a shadow.How you lie and cry after itListen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

I let her go, I let her go

Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.

I am terrified by this dark thingThat sleeps in me;All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.

What is this, this faceSo murderous in its strangle of brances? -

Its snaky acids kiss.It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faultsThat kill, that kill, that kill.

S Plath; excerpt; Ariel


3/23

The Night Dances

A smile fell in the grass.Irretrievable!S Plath; excerpt; Ariel

Berck-Plage

The see, that crystallized these,Creeps away.


You're

Right, like a well-done sum.A clean slate, with your own face on.


The Bee Meeting

I am nude as a chicken neck,does nobody love me?



4/23

The Night Dances

The cometsHave such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.So your gestures flake off -

Warm and human, then their pink light

Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.Why am I given

These lamps, these planetsFalling like blessings, like flakes


5/23


6/23

Us3, An Ordinary Day In An Unusual Place, CD cover art

Eurydice

I did not expect her to return from hellCoarse and promiscuous, drinking too much,Her hair hanging to her waist, her laughter harshLike ice on the road crackling beneath her feet.

James Sutherland-Smith, in Poet's Market 1990

Interpretation can actually be a misinterpretation

Since it began in 1992, the Innocence Project has deployed DNA evidence toexonerate 232 people previously convicted in American courts. Faultyinterpretation of forensic evidence has contributed to around half the wrongfulconvictions.

NewScientist, 28 February 2009


7/23

A Birthday Present

What is this, behind the veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?

I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is just what I want.When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking

"Is this the one I am to appear for,Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?

Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.

Is this the one for the annunciation?

My god, what a laugh!"

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?Must you stamp each piece in purple,Must you kill what you can?

Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.If it were death

I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.I would know you were serious.

There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.And the knife not carve, but enter

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,And the universe slide from my side.


I Shall Not Go to Heaven When I Die

I shall not go to heaven when I die,But if they let me be,

I think I'll take a road I used to knowThat goes by Shere-na-garagh and the sea.

And all day breasting me the winds will blow,And I'll hear nothing but the peewits' cry

And the waves talking in the sea below.


8/23

I think it will be winter when I die,For no one from the North could die in Spring -

And so the heather will be green and grey;And the bog-cotton will have blown away,

And there will be no yellow on the whin.

But I shall smell the peat,And when it's almost dark I'll set my feetWhere a white track goes glimmering to the hills,And see far up a light -Do you think heaven could be so small a thingAs a lit window on the hills at night? -And come in stumbling from the gloom,Half-blind, into a firelit room.Turn, and see you.

And there abide.

If it were true,And if I thought that they would let me be,I almost wish it were tonight I died.

MM 1926Helen Waddell, in Helen Waddell, More Latin Lyrics

'I think it was written in January of 1925. I'd come home to Ireland fromParis, very sleepless and weary, with a mass of material without form

or cohesion ...

I went to bed, defeated and doubting, and as I lay in the dark itseemed as if I heard a voice speaking, and it was saying this fragment ofverse, and in the morning I remembered & wrote it down.'

Helen Waddell, in - http://atgbcentral.com/themournes.html


9/23

Sleeping Psychopath

"A psychopath sleeps unsoundly in a fibrolite bungalow in Eastern Queensland.The malevolent emanations from his disturbed mind agitated the air in hisimmediate vicinity, causing a strong and ill-wind to blow throughout the land."

Reg Mombassa

Tulips

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietlyAs the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses.And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.


10/23

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuffLike an eye between two white lids that will not shut.Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as waterTends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.

Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage -My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boatStubbornly hanging on to my name and address.They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolleyI watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my booksSink out of sight, and the water went over my head.I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wantedTo lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.How free it is, you have no idea how free -The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine themShutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.Even through the gift paper I could hear them breatheLightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.


11/23

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.The tulips turn to me, and the window behind meWhere once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadowBetween the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a riverSnags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.They concentrate my attention, that was happyPlaying and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closesIts bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,And comes from a country far away as health.

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

Ted Hughes has stated "Tulips" was written about some flowers shereceived while in a hospital recovering from an appendectomy. Unlikemany of her other Ariel poems, "Tulips" was written long before hereventual suicide in 1963.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulips_(poem)


12/23

Related, Unrelated ... Related, Unrelated: The sufferings of Sylvia Plath

Dust jacket art of the respective two titles.

November Morning

Someone is walking behind,walking very deliberately behind,as if he had a missionhe walks, whoever he is, behind.

Victoria McCabe, in: 1990 Poet's Market

I, virus

When, in 2001, the human genome was sequenced for the first time, we wereconfronted by several surprises. One was the sheer lack of genes: where we hadanticipated perhaps 100,000 there were actually as few as 20,000.A bigger surprise came from the analysis of the genetic sequences, which

revealed that these genes make up a mere 1.5 percent of the genome. This isdwarfed by DNA deriving from viruses, which amounts to roughly 9 per cent. Ontop of that, huge chunks of genome are made up of mysterious virus-like entities


13/23

called retrotransposons, pieces of selfish DNA that appear to serve no functionother than to make copies of themselves. These account for no less than 34 percent of our genome.

All in all, the virus-like components of the human genome amount to almost half

of our DNA. This would once have been dismissed as "junk DNA", but we nowknow that some of it plays a critical role in our biology. As to the origins andfunction of the rest, we simply do not know.The human genome therefore presents us with a paradox. How does this viral

DNA come to be there? What role has it played in our evolution, and what is itdoing to our physiology?

Frank Ryan, NewScientist, 30 January 2010

"Don't Abuse the Moon Goddess, Dad"

Chandrayaan-1 was India's first unmanned lunar probe, launched in 2008. The

mission included a lunar orbiter and an impactor. The Moon Impact Probeseparated from the Chandrayaan orbiter and struck the ground in the south poleregion, ejecting underground soil in order to be analysed for the presence oflunar water ice. The estimated cost for the project was US$ 85 million.

Wikipedia


14/23


15/23

Alien in Spring

I am a tall pale animal in bootstrampling forget-me-nots and scaring birdsfrom the lemon tree: with my long-handled clawI pull down lemons -- tear-shaped, dimpled, round,bouncing they vanish into vines and weeds.

Martha Bosworth, extract; 1990 Poets Market, p74

Francois Langur

The Rival

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.You leave the same impression

Of something beautiful, but annihilating.Both of you are great light borrowers.Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,

And your first gift is making stone out of everything.I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,


16/23

And dying to say something unanswerable.

The moon, too, abases her subjects,But in the daytime she is ridiculous.Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.

No day is safe from news of you,Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

Words

AxesAfter whose stroke the wood rings,And the echoes!Echoes travellingOff from the center like horses.The sapWells like tears, like theWater striving

To re-establish its mirrorOver the rock

That drops and turns,A white skull,Eaten by weedy greens.Years later IEncounter them on the road --

Words dry and riderless,The indefatigable hoof-taps.While

From the bottom of the pool, fixed starsGovern a life.

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

Daddy

You do not do, you do not doAny more, black shoe


17/23

In which I have lived like a footFor thirty years, poor and white,Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time --

I never could talk to you.The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.Ich, ich, ich, ich,I could hardly speak.I thought every German was you.And the language obscene

An engine, an engineChuffing me off like a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.And your neat moustacheAnd your Aryan eye, bright blue.Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You --

Every woman adores a Fascist,The boot in the face, the bruteBrute heart of a brute like you.

But no less a devil for that, no notAny less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.I was ten when they buried you.At twenty I tried to dieAnd get back, back, back to you.I thought even the bones would do.

Sylvia Plath, extract; Ariel


18/23

Contemporary Australian Aboriginal art

Human Gratitude

The conventional conception of gratitude is that one must not be critical of thosewho have shown him kindness. Thanks to this notion parents enslave theirchildren more effectively than by brutal treatment; and by it friends tyrannize overone another. In fact, all human relationships are vitiated by this noxious idea.

Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment In Russia

The Old Man of Verona

This content man has lived his life in his own fields.The house that saw him as a little ladSees him as an old man: leaning on his staff,On the same earth he crawled on, he will tell youThe centuries that one low roof has seen.


19/23

Fate has not dragged him through the brawling crowd,Nor ever, as a restless travellerHas he drunk at unknown springs; no greed of gainKept him a-quaking on the perilous sees.

No trumpet sounded for him to attack,No lawsuit brought him to the raucous courts.In politics unskilled, knowing naught of the neighbouring town,His eye takes pleasure in a wider sky.

The years he'll reckon by alternate cropsAnd not by Parliaments: spring has her flowers,Autumn her apples: so the year goes by.The same wide field that hides the setting sunSees him return again;His light the measure of this plain man's day.

That massive oak he remembers a sapling once,Yon grove of trees grew old along with him.Verona further seems than India,Lake Garda is remote as the Red Sea.

Yet, strength indomitable and sinews firm,The old man stands, a rock amid his grandsons.Let you go gadding, gape at farthest Spain:You'll have seen life; but this old man has lived.

Claudian, 4th Century CE -translated by Helen Waddell, More Latin Lyrics


20/23

A Man and His Work

I have never seen a workman as skilled as my farther. His unboastful confidencein what he could do impressed me as much as his achievements. He was so atease with his materials and always so respectful of their nature that they seemedin friendship with him, as though consenting to his touch rather than subjugatedby him.

Raimond Gaita; Romulus, My Father

Percy Trompf, poster art, 1929


21/23

The Bullroarer

[In the course of the initiation ceremony each of the initiates is told:]"See the turndun !"...

They stare at the strange sight [of the old men round, who, in the twilight, aresounding the turnduns] - a wonderful thing, such as they have never seen before.Each boy is held by an old man by the back of the neck with the left hand, whilein the right he points a spear to the boy's eye, and says,"If you tell this to any woman you will die - you will see the ground broken up and

like the sea; if you tell this to any woman, or to any child, you will be killed."

L Fison & A W Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai

Presstik A4 Notepad cover art

The Dreaming and Aboriginal Australians

Why the blackfellow thinks of 'dreaming' as the nearest equivalent in English (tothe body of lore comprising the Aboriginal Dreaming tales) is a puzzle. It may bebecause it is by the act of dreaming that the Aboriginal mind makes contact withwhatever mystery it is that connects The Dreaming (stories) and the Here-and-


22/23

Now.European minds are made uneasy by the facts that the stories are, quite plainly,

preposterous; are often a mass of contradictions; are encrusted by superstitiousfancies about magic, sorcery, hobgoblins, and supehuman heroes; and lack thekind of theme and structure - in other words, the 'story' element - for which we

look. Many of us cannot help feeling that such things can only be products ofabsurdly ignorant credulity and a lower order of mentality.Since the tales. in any case, are not really 'explanatory' in purpose or function,

they naturally lack logic, system and completeness. It is simply pointless to lookfor such things within them - the tales are fantastical. (Yet one) finds much logic,system, and rationality in the blacks' actual scheme of life.These tales are neither simply illustrative nor simply explanatory; they are

fanciful and poetic in content; they make more sense to the poet, the artist, andthe philosopher than to the clinicians of human life. Aboriginal mythology is quiteunlike the Scandinavian, Indian, or Polynesian mythologies.

Unlike us (the blackfellow) seems to see life as a one-possibility thing. This maybe why he seems to have almost no sense of tragedy. Nor have I found in himmuch self-pity.I have never been able to discover any Aboriginal word fortime as an abstract

concept. And the sense of history is wholly alien here.The Dreaming is many things in one. Among them, a kind of logos or principle of

order transcending everything significant for for Aboriginal man.It is fatally easy for Europeans encountering such thing ( - as the various tales

which comprise The Dreaming - ) for the first time, to go on to propose that'mysticism' of this kind rules all Aboriginal thought. It is not so. 'Logical' thoughtand 'rational' conduct are about as widely present in Aboriginal life as they are onthe simpler levels of European life.The (hundreds of tales about The Dreaming) are also a collection ofwhat is

validly known about such ordained permanencies. The blacks cite The Dreamingas a chapter of absolute validity in answer to all questions ofwhyand how. In thissense the tales can be regarded as being, perhaps not a definition, but a 'key' ofTruth. The tales are 'a philosophy' in the garb of oral literature.

The Aborigines have no gods, just or unjust, to adjudicate the world. Not even bystraining can one see in such culture heroes as Baiame and Darumulum the truehint of a Yahweh, jealous, omniscient, and omnipotent. The ethical insights aredim and somewhat course in texture. One can find in them little trace, say, of theinverted pride, the self-scrutiny, and the consciousness of favour and destinywhich characterized the early Jews. A glimps, but not truly poignant sense, ofmoral dualism; no notion of grace or redemption; no whisper of inner peace andreconcilement; no heaven of reward or hell of punishment.The black-fellow's after-life is but a shadowy replica of worldly life, so none flee

to inner sanctuary to escape the world. There are no prophets, saints, orilluminati. There is a concept of goodness, but it lacks true scruple - men are both


23/23

good and bad, and no one is racked by the knowledge.(There is) a kind of standstill, and a mood which is neither tragic nor optimistic.

The Aborigines are not shamed or inspired by a religious thesis of what menmight become by faith and grace. (They assent,) without brooding or challenge,of what men evidently have to be because the terms of life are cast.

W E H Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays, pp 57-68

A f t e r w o r d(same as for Pt 1)

Anyone can find, or come across, evidence for this fictitious 'law' of "One-in-Every-Twenty-five', mentioned in the Foreword, in just about all printed matter.The problem is that we seem to routinely overlook it. The glimpse of truth doesnot to jibe with our mind's agenda.

The moment the mind spots anything that threatens its uncontested dominionover the body it intervenes. It makes us skip the crucial information. How?Through pre-conceived ideas and adult cynicism, the revelations are ignored,dismissed, disbelieved, and disparaged. Anything, but examined.

The above poems, passages, and images do not, or not necessarily, express mypersonal convictions or feelings. When I originally selected them I had no pre-determined idea what I was doing nor what I was doing it for. Over a period ofsome years, whenever something I happened to read, or just plainly stumbledupon, grabbed me internally, I coppied it in a journal. Subsequently, I titled the

journal "Indications from Infinity", and subtitled it "Peeks into Open-Endedness".

I am not quite sure what I meant by that, but the name seemed appropriate. If Iam pressed to clarify and elucidate on my selection criteria, I can do that only

post facto. Thus I retrospectively try to pin down what it was that made mechoose one and discard the other.

It was plainly only the feeling of intensity in those selected items that somehowarrested my attention for a moment and made me copy them into my journal-regardless of whether my mind approved or disapproved of their actual meaningand content.If I sensed something intense and revealing emanating from an item, then that

was it. I hope that the reader will likewise derive a similar experience of intensity

from considering them - the intensity of wonder, of stupidity, of wisdom, ofhelplessness, of joy.

peterfaiglATgmailDOTcom

YouTube channel:peterfaigl

The Dysfunctional Human Mind - Part 2

Documents

Transcript of The Dysfunctional Human Mind - Part 2