Day: December 22, 2017

Roses fair

An unknown man has sent me roses fair
My name is wrongly spelled upon the box
Invisible,impossible, who cares?

Perhaps he wants to do what no man dares:
To learn  statistics while he irons my locks
An unknown man has sent me roses fair

I hear a footstep on my creaking stair
Can it be a human or a fox?
Invisible in silence our hearts tear

I  dream of mother  calling out,beware!
She made me lots of cotton summer frocks
Lord, a man has sent me roses fair

Now my clothes are worn as is my hair
I have got more textbooks than wool socks
Invisibly, untimely, our hearts tear.

I wish I were a  book inside a box
With  no need for love or human touch
An unknown man has sent me roses fair
Unknowable,impossible to bear

Trump- Julia Kristeva

 

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Art by Katherine

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.

Doing maths secretly at work because your partner hates it

Cats on the hill
A Tory MP has been suspended for spending 8 hours a day  on his work computer doing a mathematics degree at the Open University.He has got a B A and was starting a Ph.D before being discovered looking over excited  and shouting Eureka by a civil servant
The PM is  wondering what to do.I recommend her to go back to Oxford to read Socrates.She will have to learn Greek but it will be easier than BREXIT and better for her mind not to mention us

Stan wants a chamber pot for Xmas

New cats today

Cats by Katherine

Stan was recovering from his long feverish cold and cough.He had Emile standing on his desk under the window
cleaning it with a microfibre cloth fastened to his right front paw
Very good,Emile,he said in a husky voice.I think I’ll get up and make a hot drink.I feel better now than I did and I
enjoyed the Reith lecture on the radio.Mary came into the room wearing a long dressing gown with a zip front.
Where did you get that,Stan enquired jocosely.
It was hanging behind the door, she said.I must have bought it in a sale.I get almost all my stuff in sales.It makes it more of an achievement.
Buit are they really want you want,Stan enquired.
I am happy with them because I like bright colors but most folk don’t so they end up in the sale.I just bought
some pewter shoes for £29.99 when in black they were £79.99.
Will pewter shoes not be too heavy?Stan joked.
It’s the colour dearest.It’s a good colour for when we are going out in the evening to a do.
But we never do go out nowadays .he told her sadly.
I live in my imagination,Mary responded, and so I get clothes and shoes for any possible event funerals.weddings,evening balls.
The only b*lls you see in the evening are at home ,he murmured vulgarly.
I don’t think that’s very funny,Stan,she told him.I am a woman of gentle birth even if I was born in a coal mine.
I am sorry, dearest,my mind is not right since I fell out of bed and banged my head on that heavy tin chamber pot.
That’s a flower vase,she told him honestly and directly.We no longer use chamber pots now we have an en-suite here and a cloakroom downstairs plus an outside lav tooWell,I do.Stan said.I was brought up with one and I always use one at night
That’s strange Mary told him.Where do you find them?I have never bought any,not even in the Sales.
In the kitchen,Stan said.In the cupboard
Those are my baking bowls, she said crossly.
I forbid you to use them to wee into.
Well,will you buy me one? he asked her tenderly as he stroked her curly light blonde hair just washed in Boots
Dandruff and Acne shampoo. with Rosemary and Rose Essence
Of course,darling,if it wil; make you happy.I’ll go online.I am sure they are still made though originally they were used when people had outside loos.
That can be my Xmas present,he joked,if you pay for express delivery but don’t have it gift wrapped.
Adulterous Annie their neighbour came in.She wore a grass green trouser suit and pink calf high boots.Underneath she had spanx hip and thigh control pantees and a blue lace bra which peeped out as she forgotten to put a blouse or jumper on despite the cold weather.
What is that, in your hand,Annie ? Stan asked thoughtfully.
It’s a pewter chamber pot that we inheritied from my granny she said
Gosh,how amazing,it’s just what Stan needs,Mary informed her.He’s been using a vase..
That is very naughty,Annie told him.You should know better
NaughtyThat’s strange word to use.I am a man.I can do what I want.You’ll see.
But can you want what you do,Mary asked like an Oxford don on low dose speed.
I can if I choose to ,he said.
So do you believe in will power? Annie asked curiously.Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t, he replied ambiguously which was one of his defense mechanisms when he was with very clever women.
I see,you twist the world around your little finger.
That’s a strange parallel,Stan told her.But parallel lines on the earth’s surface do meet at the Poles which proves
that Euclidean geometry is not the only sort possible.
Why is that?Annie asked,though she had no idea what he was talking about
Because one of Euclid’s axioms is that parallel lines never meet .
It sounds a bit like men and women nowadays,Stan said thoughtfully.We will only meet if we go up the pole
I wonder what the origin of that phrase is,Mary said curiously.It’s a strange world.
Meanwhile Emile finished the window and was polishing the dressing table mirror.What luck for Mary and Stan
that Emile loves microfibre and Windolene.Next they are hoping to buy him tiny vacuum cleaner… that would
help to gather up all the dust from the floor and let Mary get on with her book
Mirrors and the development of the child’s theory of integers and meta-language as hypothesised by
Jack Lacant. Part 2z

How like a winter by Wm Shakespeare

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness everywhere!
And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.
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Xmas food– don’t buy a pie

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Pies from  a cheaper supermarket labelled chicken have got fish in.Pies from  another labelled chicken have small pieces of plastic in.Don’t end up in A and E trying to explain why you have plastic coming out of your bum or even worse, you may be dead from choking before the plastic enters your digestive system.
If you still eat pastry, make your own pies.It makes me wonder who makes the pies and where.Is it a protest by underpaid wage slaves in some Asian country?