EGR/MB: I'd like to buy a vowel

[Christopher Locke]

WHEEL OF FORTUNE

“I love the babes, don't get me wrong. Hey, that's why I wrote this song!” dire straits ~ heavy fuel You know what I'm thinking? No, of course not. That's why I write this stuff. To tell you. And what I'm thinking right now, as I track down references to C. Wright Mills and Ralph Waldo Emerson (more about them later on), only to find myself, via Google, thinking about the same stuff six years ago... what I'm thinking now is that maybe it's time for certain parts of Entropy Gradient Reversals to come together with certain parts of Mystic Bourgeoisie. Since we've lately been getting so personal and all. I mean, it's all coming from the same source, my attempts at diversionary prestidigitation notwithstanding. So here. This is cryptic as hell, hell being perhaps merely a form of cryptomnesia. And more on that later, too. In the meantime... Sunday, April 13, 2003 Border Patrol coyote moon, half high, half full girl on the radio singing no one could ever compare to you. middle of the night, I'm out of cigarettes. all day reading Alice Miller. not reading really. what I do. tracking something down. two days ago I bought this first edition. not that I collect the things. not for their dates of publication anyway. I got a coffee and walked back to where I'd read those first few pages a year and change ago. and funny thing, it was a different book. Prisoners of Childhood it was called in 1981 when this all started, just now noticing. that fits. nothing else does. not really. not well. the receipt I found in the other one says 01-27-02. sitting in this same spot that day outside of starbucks on the mall I said oh my god, this is me. well of course it was. and everyone else. what marketing genius. back then I'd been thinking about C. Wright Mills. about voice. about anything but the moon. thinking that he'd said the sociological imagination flowered where biography intersected history. but in the Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller says in those first few pages, first paragraph in fact, that biography is all that counts, and not all that abstract intellectual stuff. it's all we have, she says, to protect us from mental illness. I'm quoting. for the personal history of our childhood defines, for each of us, she says, our own truth. your truth my truth his truth her truth. and this truth, though different for each, so different that it takes a boatload of empathy to get it, is that each of us was abused raped sodomized beaten. left for dead. but nobody wants to hear about your truth because of this secret conspiracy of nasty old-boy psychoanalysts to hush it all up, like Freud with his drives and instincts. Eros was bad enough, but how about Thanatos, she says. and now how do you like your blue eyed boy, Mr. Death? but here's the weird thing. in the first edition, she says I'm not going to talk a lot about narcissism. then does. at length. by that name. on and on. however, by the new improved second edition, the word doesn't appear at all except in a brief retelling of the story of Narcissus and Echo, which just sort of sits there, disconnected. split off and out of place. she doesn't like Melanie Klein or Kernberg she says, with their over harsh views about darkness and pathology. she does like Kohut, though, who deep sixed all that nonsense about drives and said no, instead it was all the self, evolving naturally, coming to its own realization. it's own truth, you could say. but tell me something Alice, honey, where does all that abusive aggression come from then? when the true self blooms in the gentle listening of someone as enlightened as yourself (no other authors are cited), is it all just perfect niceness after that? and nobody anymore wants a piece of your action? and tell me another thing before you go. what happened to all those references to narcissism, leaving us with our little personal stories but no common history, no imagination, except for an undriven darkness that, in truth, does not exist? and why no mention of solipsism, leaving me with your truth, the revised expanded second edition, and me with this coyote moon, half high, half empty. girl on the radio, interrupted. 10:22 AM | link |

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Posted By Doctor X to mystic bourgeoisie at 4/06/2009 02:48:00 PM