I’m in a Care Home now.They care and I moan.Just like being married really.

Archaeologists Find Ancient Technology

After having dug to a depth of 1,000 meters last year, French scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 1,000 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors had a telephone network all those centuries ago.Not to be outdone by the French, an English scientists dug to a depth of 2,000 meters and shortly after headlines in the U.K. Newspapers read: “English archaeologists have found traces of 2,000-year-old fiber-optic cable and have concluded that their ancestors had an advanced high-tech digital communications network a thousand years earlier than the French.” One week later, Israeli Newspapers reported the following: “After digging as deep as 5,000 meters in a Jerusalem marketplace, scientists had found absolutely nothing. They, therefore, concluded that, 5,000 years ago, Jews were already using wireleless  technology

http://www.kristeva.fr/the-kristeva-circle/trump.html

 

“The phenomenon of Donald Trump’s ascendency to become the 45th President of the United States is surely overdetermined, meaning that there are likely many different causes for this. The one I entertain here is I believe significant, though I do not argue that it is the main or only cause. But it is one we should consider and address. In short, I argue that the rise of Trump is in part due to a paranoid-schizoid politics found both in the personality of Trump himself and in a large-scale regression of many in the populace to a more primitive state of denial, splitting, and demonization, coupled with a syndrome of ideality. In other words, both Trump and his supporters split the world into good and bad (or SAD!!!! as Trump likes to tweet). In his inaugural speech he repeatedly demonized foreign powers and idealized America. His America first policy is textbook paranoid- schizoid: “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.”

 

The Trump phenomenon shares much with many other nationalist politics on the rise around the world, but mostly an inability to tolerate difference and loss, including loss of a romanticized past or idealized future. Hence our politics today needs something that psychoanalytic theory has tried to offer: an understanding of how to work through trauma, loss, and persecutory phantasies. A politics of working through difficult choices and misrepresentations of others in our midst could help allay the paranoid politics that dominates politics today.”

 

After giving an account of the concept of working through in Freud, Klein, and Kristeva, I turn to the Trump phenomenon and then close with a brief account of a politics of working through.

 

 

I.

 

 

But because of the sadomasochistic nature of he drives, the adolescent’s belief in the ideal object is constantly threatened. Accordingly, Kristeva argues, “theadolescent is a believer of the object relation and/or of its impossibility.” [11] This gives rise to the ideality syndrome, the belief that there is a Great Other that exists and can provide absolute satisfaction. This is not just a syndrome that plagues teenagers: “We are all adolescents when we are enthralled by the absolute.” [12]Just as anyone can regress back to a paranoid-schizoid position, the temptation of ideality or its flip side of nihilism can tempt any adult as well as political bodies.

 

II.

 

Trump and many of his followers are perfect examples of both the syndrome of ideality and the repetition compulsion, caught up in playing out over and over an attempt to undo what they imagine they have lost, whether a good mother or a perfect country.

The cry Trump repeats at every opportunity—“Let’s Make American Great Again”—taps into a dual wager: (1) that those who imagine themselves as the dominant and quintessential “American” people need not mourn the loss of their presumed dominance at home and abroad and (2) that those who are undermining the old status quo can be undone, thrown out, excised from the body politic, making possible an ideal and perfect state. Those who will not mourn their losses nor tarry with indeterminacy, uncertainty, and democracy demand a politics of black and white and good and evil; and they presume that those who oppose them are the enemies of all things perfect and true.

 

Let me offer a psychoanalytic, though hypothetical account of the genesis of Trump’s character:

 

Just after his second birthday, his mother gave birth to a baby brother and then she almost died. After childbirth she got an infection, had to have a hysterectomy then several other surgeries. What trauma. First there was this brute fact that his mother was going to give birth to a rival, then there’s possibly some murderous rage for her doing this, then after that murderous rage she does in fact almost die, and then she’s gone—for how long?—in the hospital, almost dead, almost gone. The boy’s one true love has first defied him, then in fantasy been killed by him, then almost dies and is gone, perhaps he felt terrible guilt that he could not repair and so he could not internalize a good mother.

He grows up to be a bully. At his private school where his wealthy father is a benefactor, he becomes a troublemaker and tyrant, and eventually his teachers persuade the father to send him elsewhere. At military school, the boy learns the lessons that he is special and great and, in the course of this, he almost kills his roommate for not folding the linens correctly. He becomes fastidiously neat and develops a fear of germs, of anything that might invade his body. He goes on in life to purge any imagined invaders, including in his fantasies Muslims, Mexicans, and those who’ve deigned to ruin his imagined perfect kingdom.

And he imagines that he is the king! He takes up the great defense of undoing. This is the defense against felt harm that involves trying to do something all over again in a way that turns out better. How to undo mother’s death from his life when he was just beginning to become a little self? Maybe he could be a big self, maybe he could be so perfect and important and big and great that she would finally notice and love him. Maybe he could be so important and smart and wealthy that she would love him more than anyone else in the world.

Maybe also he could avenge his father’s loss, his father who had to grow up and take over the family business as a young adolescent when his own father died, the grandfather who made his wealth as a poor immigrant by setting up brothels where fools went looking for gold. And in the process maybe he could avenge his mother’s shame, a poor immigrant “domestic” from Scotland, leaving home at 17, arriving at 18, with only $50 in her pocket.

So the child who suffers these losses and sets out to avenge and to undo the harm. He cannot help himself; he isn’t even conscious of what he is doing. His loss turns into narcissism and grandiosity. At his rallies, he throws out protesters and crying babies. He doesn’t see his effects on other people, though most everyone around him is painfully aware of this great malformation. There’s an immense disjunct between how he acts and how he thinks of himself.

Something is terribly wrong. In public he makes great proclamations about his greatness, intelligence, and bigness, and has no sense of how bizarre all this sounds. He insults other people for their “smallness,” and seems totally oblivious that he is exhibiting his own obliviousness. In this respect, he is delusional.

He has no tolerance for criticism, no ability to appreciate other points of view, no capacity for self-reflection. He is like a person play-acting being a person, a person who is big and great and wonderful, whose enemies ought to be purged or imprisoned.

In all his attempts to purge his imagined perfect world of invaders, he purges his own internal shames and demons: the mother who entered the country as a poor domestic servant, the grandfather who made millions by prostituting land and women, all those immigrant foreigners who are trying to infect us. He purges anyone who interrupts him. He befriends those like him, other authoritarian figures. He belittles anyone who doesn’t try to be as strong as him. And because of his appeal to all those in his country who harbor similar wounds, who feel cheated, infiltrated, abandoned, and wronged, the people project their own anxieties into his anxieties and identify with his ways of acting out. He does for them what they cannot do for themselves. Where they are trapped in powerlessness, he can be their power player, their avenger, their hero. And so they nominate him to be their candidate for the presidency of their country.

 

The Trump phenomenon taps into a global political problem: a lack of public and shared means for working through ambiguity and loss, for coming to understand the strangers in our midst, that is, for moving from a paranoid-schizoid politics to and through a Kleinian depressive kind of politics.

 

 

The creation and destruction of a world
Slowly built  but rapidly laid low
Emptiness replacing what was shared

Each lover to the other lover bared
But trust reveals what can be overthrown
The creation and destruction of the world

With  one and zero all the world’s engaged
The letters Greek and Hebrew stand alone
Emptiness revealing all we shared

I do  not live in our old world absurd
In the ruins of my loss, I mourn
The broken-hearted,  insaneness of words

Life was peace and death was like a war
Where, by defeat, folk helplessly transformed,
Were seeing bones  then knew death of the shared

The madness of  our hope of love lies torn
No expectation  is one  way we may learn
The creation and destruction of a world
Bleakness  covers what was  by love shared

A cup of tea, a hot and damp reward
For housewives who bring theses untoward
Against the sign of Dirac,  be prepared.
A cup of four dimensions, what a card
In quantum theory, light is seldom stirred
Rocked by ages, particles feel jarred
A cup of tea  with sugar, neat reward,
For all  of us who write as well as care.

By Emily Warn

“Does the social function of poetry vary so wildly that we cannot generalize about it? What can be commonly said about a skeptic who turns for clarity to a Rae Armantrout poem, a plumber who searches on Yahoo for a wedding toast, a harried person who seeks in poetry refuge from a grueling job, or a Guantanamo prisoner who, denied pen and paper, uses pebbles to scratch poems on Styrofoam cups?

I’ll hazard an answer. Poetry binds solitudes. It enacts a central human paradox: we exist as singular selves, yet can only know them through our relations. A poem creates a presence that is so physically, emotionally, and intellectually charged that we encounter ourselves in our response to it. The encounter, which occurs in language, preserves and enlarges our solitude and points out our connections. Pyrotechnic poets, such as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Adrienne Rich, set a charge that reverberates among multitudes, changing the shape of our social relations and, inescapably, our individual and collective consciousness. “

The Divine can only be accessed through the human other to whom the self is infinitely responsible. (Urbano, p 51)

Emmanuel Levinas

Often silence is the better choice
When your soul’s at risk, why invent lies?
But if you speak, make sure it is your voice
Often silence is the  wiser choice
Rudeness hastens many to divorce.
We  feel that Satan’s minions roll the dice
Often silence is the only choice
When your soul’s at risk, why proffer lies?

 

t

A Triolet is a poetic form consisting of only 8 lines. Within a Triolet, the 1st, 4th, and 7th lines repeat, and the 2nd and 8th lines do as well. The rhyme scheme is simple: ABaAabAB, capital letters representing the repeated lines.

Make writing a Triolet more challenging! Make each line 8 syllables in length (4 metrical feet), written in iambic tetrameter (the more common way), or try it in pentameter (English version) where each line only has 10 syllables (5 metrical feet)

 

The tender words invented as we loved
Now have no other speaker but myself.
Lost, unique, the husband, so beloved
And special words called forth by touch and love-
In my speech , these words no longer live
I cannot use our words, our loving wealth.
The chosen words invented as we loved
Now have no other listener but myself

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/68755/does-poetry-have-a-social-function

 

Major Jackson:

The function of poetry is that it does not have any function beyond its own construction and being-in-the-world. For this reason, poetry makes everything (and, yes, nothing) happen, especially in a consumer society prone to assessing and dispensing value to everything from lap dances to teachers’ salaries. Whether as a form of witness, as a medium which dignifies individual speech and thought, as a repository of our cumulative experiences, or as a space where we “purify” language, poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry’s social value.

I hope this does not sound like an exercise in ambiguities. If so, let me add another: one of poetry’s chief aims is to illumine the walls of mystery, the inscrutable, the unsayable. I think poetry ought to be taught not as an engine of meaning but as an opportunity to learn to live in doubt and uncertainty, as a means of claiming indeterminancy. Our species is deeply defined by its great surges of reason, but I think it high time we return to elemental awe and wonder. Such a position is necessary to our communal health.

I try to teach my students the full magnitude of what can happen during the reading of a poem. The readerly self, if the music and strategies of the poem are a success, fades away to assume the speaker’s identity, or the poem’s psychic position. Once a reader has fully internalized the poem’s machinations, she collects a chorus within her and is transformed. This ritual generates empathy and widens our humanity. These might seem like grand dreams, but it is just such a belief in the power of poetry that spurs my pen to action, whether I am getting paid or not.

Emily Warn: