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

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:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9420356/Now-metal-thieves-target-lampposts.html

I hear him in the  morning yet he died
I think I’ve got a phantom husband, oh!
I feel an instant touch when my eyes close

His funny faces made me laugh out loud
I called him India Rubber, flexed his nose.
I hear him in the  morning,  though he died

At night I hear him whisper, don’t you go!
Yet the worlds of dreams and image forward flow
I  hear him say my poetry is prose

His sense of humour  was  both deep and wide
He used to  rub my feet  and my bent toes
I hear him every  morning, he’s my guide

I overwhelmed him with my rapid voice.
Up in Hebden we  all speak to go.
I feel  his hand on my silk underclothes

We were children playing, did we know?
A phantom husband  can’t play dominoes
I sense him in the morning as I breathe.
I feel his careful touch, I do believe.

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/matthew-zapruder-on-how-to-write-and-read-poems/

Your new book is called Why Poetry? and it speaks to why so many people don’t read poetry now and why perhaps poetry isn’t valued in the same way it used to be. Can you give me the short version of why you think that is?

It’s a complicated question. One reason is that people think poetry is hard and their idea about what’s hard about it is wrong. They think it’s hard because you have to decode it, but that’s actually not what’s hard about poetry. What’s hard about poetry is just accepting what is actually being said and not doing what we’re taught to do in school all the time, which is to translate things or decode them or try to unpack what they really mean. It’s not about that.

The other thing is that people think poetry is hard because we have a mistaken idea about what it’s for and what it is. We don’t understand why people make poems at all. We think, or we’re taught to think, that there are basically these riddles or messages that are hidden inside these containers called poems, which makes the poems just these annoyances and distractions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this: Why don’t they just say what they mean? Why do they make it so complicated? I think that would be a completely reasonable question if poems were what people typically say they are, but they aren’t what people say they are. They’re not. They aren’t riddles. Those are really the two things that keep people from reading poetry: This idea that they’re hard, coded messages and this general confusion about why people would make them at all.

The irony of it is that most people I know have had an experience at some point with poetry, either with reading it or writing it, where they cut through all that stuff. They have this personal, individual encounter with a poem and they forget to treat it like it’s a secret message, and they totally understand why it’s necessary, because clearly it says something in some way that could never be said otherwise. That’s something I try to touch base with a little bit in the book–remember that experience, that is the real experience. Not all this stuff that’s in your high school English class or that you’re taught in order to get the right answer on the test.

Students are often uncomfortable with the ambiguity of poetry. They want to know exactly what it means. They want there to be one correct interpretation.

It’s not their fault. They’re taught to treat poetry that way. I spent an undue amount of time looking at the textbooks that students have to read and the standardized test they have to take. The way those things talk about poetry is just horrendous. It’s no wonder nobody likes it. If this is what they say poetry actually is, then I don’t like that

I wandered  lonely in a crowd
That wars all night  so untranquil
When in a trance, I saw  heads bowed
And march   on these green, rabid  bills

Confused by the stairs  we climbed
I saw an escalator bend
Then two mechanics  served their time
I pressed the bell and did descend

I heard my brother on the phone
I don’t know how he turned it on
His favourite phrase was : oh, don’t moan!
The kettle boiled, the  liar  has come

At the  bottom of my blog
It tells Old Pests to press right here.
Then will we hit them with  a log
Before we steal their dark brown beer?

He asked me if I’d love to hate
And envy Wilfred Bion’s gun
But I prefer to  have a date
Although they make my bowels run

Fantastically ghosts  sit here
And look upon the sky refined
They have no bodies, do not fear
They are real but undefined

So I lay down and felt my love
My man, my mate, my inspired date
Flutter o’er me like a dove
I fell asleep and now I’m late

When I go out I am no longer me
Not a woman, not a poet nor clown
My stick confers invisibility.

My singing voice is now an enemy
“Talking to herself ” is written down
When I go out I am no longer me

Madness, crime and sin are easier
Like entry into studies labelled brown
My stick confers invisibility.

And if my grooming is what some call free
It stops me  spending money in the town
When I go out I am no longer me

I drink sherry, wine and Earl Grey Tea.
Before I get the habit, a nun’s gown
My stick confers invisibility.

Yet if by chance I wear a sullen frown
The bus conductor says I put him down
When I go out now, dead men stare at me
My stick confers invisibility.

A lamppost has been cut down and stolen from a footpath in Hertfordshire, police say.

The suspects used a hacksaw to cut down the lamppost on a path off Studio Way in Borehamwood at 10:30 GMT, Hertfordshire Police believes.

Dear All

Well, I must get on with this or it will  be Xmas before I know where I am.In fact I do not know yet where I am but Leibniz’s theory that we are all monads is looking good.Don’t ask me what a monad is.Just invent it.It means we have no community, no connections, no sharing.A bit like bricks.You can build a wall with them but they never talk and but for the cement, they would all fall over and make a big mess.
You could say, the government is removing the cement as that is the wish of the people.When we all fall down then they will have us made into dust.
Which reminds me, why not try Philip Pullman’s  new book as a Xmas gift? It’s about Dust but not as we know it.I loved his Dark Materials.No, that is not his suit!
Anyway, have you noticed how brilliant geniuses also seem odd? Newton invented Calculus but never told anyone until he heard Leibniz had done it too.So he was very put out.He managed to get most of the credit
That reminds me, don’t use a credit card at Xmas.Because then someone in  MI6 will be able to see all  you have bought and where… see what I mean? You may have quite accidentally bought all the ingredients for making a bomb.For example, an alarm clock seems innocent but if you also bought some Christmas Crackers it points a suspicious finger at you.Don’t buy any gunpowder.
The best way to shop is to go to the Bank and draw out some cash!Yipes!Money… then nobody will ever know what you do with it.
For my  New Year Resolution instead of going shopping on Saturdays, I am going to get £100  in notes and throw it out of my bedroom window when a gale is blowing.I might as well do that as buy all sorts of rubbish that I don’t need

However if you can’t control your buying, do this: only buy little cheap things like soap bars, socks, biros, tissues etc.That’s cheaper and just as satisfying as buying a down jacket and ten pairs of shoes.I should know as I have 24 down jackets and an infinity of shoes.I have even got some yellow shoes and a yellow down jacket.That’s one way of ensuring no man is an island.
Well, time to feed the twins.My daughter has gone to Australia and I have them for 3 weeks.They are only 8 months old and I am very anxious.The cat will be sad if  they die but she does have a singleton as well so here’s hoping I can get them onto Carnation milk while Genny is away.I didn’t really agree with her breastfeeding them but she liked it apart from the biting and scratching.Why they are almost human which is more than I can say for her.Her father might have been a milkman but that’s no excuse
Byeeee

Kristy

Bereavement left me  lonely and distraught
The maps I  used were no guide for this time
So love  seems dead, the left  feel mute, betrayed

The place where love once lived is now a void.
Yet even here a poet  can find new  lines
Bereavement left  me low, I felt destroyed

The thought of making love fills with distaste
To our own death, we seem to be resigned
For love  seems dead and we are mute, betrayed

Though we eat, our food has no real taste
Our meals  unbalanced lose thir past design
Bereavement leaves us lonely and destroyed

Yet on what narrative are such thoughts based?
The axioms can change, create new times.
Is love dread and how were we betrayed?

There can a meaning other than divine
Love’s down low  between these very lines
Bereavement   may not   totally destroy
Love may touch my heart , no demons’ toy

Your face is map enough for me,

Your gaze, your smile, your frown, your glee.

And if I want to know the rest

The shape your posture‘s made is best

For showing what your life is now.

A look, a gesture all this show.

Till who you are is then disclosed

And I am in your arms enrobed.

Love vanishes when analysed,

And thinking too

by  Love’s despised’

Choose the means to fit the end

And then I’ll be what you intend

Václav Havel

The relativization of all moral norms, the crisis of authority, the reduction of life to the pursuit of immediate material gain without regard for its general consequences—the very things Western democracy is most criticized for–do not originate in democracy but in that which modern man has lost: his transcendental anchor, and along with it the only genuine source of his responsibility and self-respect . . . . Given its fatal incorrigibility, humanity probably will have to go through many more Rwandas and Chernobyls before it understands how unbelievably shortsighted a human being can be who has forgotten that he is not God.

“Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache; do be my enemy–for friendship’s sake.”
William Blake

Through the barbed wire fence, I saw a stream
Water washing down to  river wide
A field of daisies and wild grasses green

Inside my pulsing heart,  the blood did plead
That history and myth can take a ride
Through the barbed wire fence, I saw a stream

So lack of hope conspires to kill our dreams
And memories that lie can be no guide
To fields of daisies and wild grasses green

The silver birches light with sun’s soft beams
In their way, they are discreet disguise
Through the barbed wire fence, I saw a stream

About the cruelty  of human deeds
There is a library, shattered and demeaned
By fields of daisies and wild grasses green

Few can bear to enter and to read
What the minds of sufferers could mean
Through the barbed wire fence, they saw a stream

As Icarus was falling unperceived
Farmers tilled their meadows blithe, deceived
Through the barbed wire fence, we saw a stream
A field of daisies and wild grasses screamed

There was an old hermit in Cromer
Who wanted to befriend a loner
So he went on to Tinder
He opened a window
He picked me for he liked my aroma.

Cromer is too remote for a lady
Who likes to go out somewhere shady
I went to Soho
As I did not know
It’s for harlots,  and folk who feel flakey.

Sin is   a category error
Which fells  folk like me with its terror
So I decide  not to brood
Nor ruminate food
In case I go blind or turn yellow.

I think  my retina has conked out
And also I’ve grown far too stout
So chop off my head
When I am in bed
That will be a full cure for my doubt

Luther was an evil man, I find
Maybe sinner is a better term
He hated Jews and made up Hitler’s mind

To his own sins, he seemed  rather blind
And he sowed a seed, or call it germ
Luther was an evil man, I find

Only someone mad could thus align
A tasty Diet made  up out of worms
He hated Jews and aided Hitler’s mind

Whatever he decided was defined
To make the bellies of the Churchmen churn
Luther was an evil man, I find

The grace of God confined him in a bind
Good works were of no use, did nothing earn
He hated Jews and lived in Hitler’s mind

Let the  sinless  one take the right turn
While the rest of us  in flames shall burn
Luther was an evil man, I find
He hated Jews, bedevilled Hitler’s mind

How dangerous is technology?

“The tangible benefits of technological progress are wonderful, but are matched by irreversible damage to our global resources. To support almost eight billion people, our attempts to provide sufficient food are made with limited regard to the land or other creatures, and we have destroyed cultures and hundreds of languages. Crop yields and health care have advanced with the aid of drugs and chemicals but they are not, and cannot be, confined to their original locations. Food and water supplies are seriously contaminated with a cocktail of chemicals and drugs which no earlier civilization has ever experienced. Despite warnings and research, the potential for allergies, ill health, and mutagenic and fertility changes are ignored by the majority. Humans have always been concerned with the present, self-interest, and profit. This is why we have advanced. The difference now is that we have outgrown our potential resources.”

He told me I looked happier than him
Standing by the rack of magazines
He’d like to die, but it is still a sin

Instead, I wondered how about a gym?
And  prayer to fill the emptiness that looms
He told me I looked happier than him.

He was handsome , smart and also very slim.
A pity we were not just two baboons.
He’d like to die, but it is still a sin.

He has good eyesight, and has lost no limb
I can hum about a million tunes.
He told me I looked happier than him

His cup compared to mine is full to brim
Yet I desire to lick the plastic spoon.
He’d like to die, but it is still a sin.

We in Europe rich, feel full of doom
We are going blind, one may presume
He told me my attraction  was a sin
He’d like to harass me  like life has him