http://www.abstractmath.org/MM/MMImagesMetaphors.htm

Metaphors

We know by direct physical experience what it means to be warm or cold. We use these words as metaphors in many ways:

• We refer to a person as having a warm or cold personality. This has nothing to do with their body temperature.
• When someone is on a treasure hunt we may tell them they are “getting warm”, even if they are hunting outside in the snow.
• Children don’t always sort meta­phors out correctly. Father: “We are all going to fly to Saint Paul to see your cousin Petunia.” Child: “But Dad, I don’t know how to fly!”

How 7 Historic Figures Overcame Depression without Doctors

William James (1842-1910)

One of America’s greatest psychologists and philosophers, James suffered periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for months on end. John McDermott, editor of The Writings of William James, reports that “James spent a good part of life rationalizing his decision not to commit suicide.” In The Thought and Character of William James, Ralph Barton Perry’s classic biography on his teacher, in the chapter “Depression and Recovery,” we learn that at age 27, James went through a period that Perry describes as an “ebbing of the will to live . . . a personal crisis that could only be relieved by philosophical insight.”

James’s Antidotes: James’s transformative insight about his personal depression also contributed to his philosophical writings about pragmatism, as James came quite pragmatically to “believe in belief.” He continued to maintain that one cannot choose to believe in whatever one wants (one cannot choose to believe that 2 + 2 = 5 for example); however, he concluded that there is a range of human experience in which one can choose beliefs. He came to understand that, “Faith in a fact can help create the fact.” So, for example, a belief that one has a significant contribution to make to the world can keep one from committing suicide during a period of deep despair, and remaining alive makes it possible to in fact make a significant contribution. James ultimately let go of his dallying with suicide, remained a tough-minded thinker with scientific loyalty to the facts, but also came to “believe in my individual reality and creative power” and developed faith that “Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.”

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/it+figures

1. Demokratia, the ultimate origin of our word ‘democracy’, is a portmanteau abstract noun (feminine) in ancient Greek, combining the two words Demos and Kratos. Kratos meant Power, Might, Strength, Grip. (In modern Greek it is the word for ‘state’, as in ‘the nation-state of Hellas’.) Demos is a very ancient Greek word, attested as far back as the second millennium BCE among the ‘Linear B’ archival clay tablets produced by the bureaucracy of the – very much not democratic – Late Bronze Age/Mycenaean kingdoms of mainland Greece and Crete. There it meant village, a local designation that persisted into classical Greek, but already in the epic poems of Homer (c. 700 BCE) it had come to mean also ‘people’.

2. However, demos in that sense of ‘people’ is ambiguous and therefore ambivalent, since it could be taken to mean either i. (All) the People or ii. the Masses (the majority, specifically the poor majority) of the People. So, to use deliberately anachronistic modern analogies,demokratia might be translated/interpreted as either i. ‘government of the people by the people for the people’ (Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1863) or ii. ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Karl Marx followed by V.I. Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin). In that ambivalence lies the explanation for the class-conscious struggles in antiquity to define and implement (or oppose) demokratia: who is/are the demos that holds and wields the kratos, and over what or whom is the kratos being held and wielded?

My cat got run over and he was not even in the road, [some loon drove across the lawn]; my husband died and I fell downstairs and broke my  twinkles
But look at it this way-I am getting a rest.I   saved money by having Xmas dinner in hospital and I had a good excuse not to send any cards.
Next year, what will I do to evade buying Xmas presents?
Commit a crime? It will have to be serious; otherwise, I’ll get bail.I  can’t think of a crime that won’t hurt somebody else nor spoil Xmas for them.Unless I commit suicide.But that’s murder, which is evil.And somebody may be sad.
I’ll just have to grit my teeth and save some money.Sell myself to the highest bidder.Not the devil, I hope.Will I recognize him?

Writing about your emotional pain could make you feel worse, unless you do it with “self-compassion”

“How does self-compassionate introspection fare against simple distraction? In a second study, 152 undergraduates (107 female) took the compassion and rumination tests and endured the “negative mood induction” of Prokofiev and terrible slides.  After a five-minute breather “to let your mind wander,” half did the self-compassionate writing exercise and half watched letters appear on a computer screen and responded when they saw “X”— this was the “distraction”.

In the mood-measurements, the participants in both groups experienced a similar reduction in “negative affect” post-exercise, so this was a tie. If you tend to think distraction is worthless, take note. However, distraction didn’t increase “positive affect” whereas self-compassion did, so it can be said to have won the contest. There’s also hope for brooders/ruminators. They had more “negative affect” hanging over from the Prokofiev, but they also experienced more change.

Clinicians might learn from these results that introspective approaches are dangerous for ruminators without a lot of stress on compassion. The risk is significant since rumination is linked to depression and significant procrastination. Pouring out painful feelings could turn into a binge-and-purge experience, which leaves you in a bad way and becomes a habit.

Ruminators, many say, need better forms of distraction. But the research literature on distraction is murky, the authors note, with many studies lumping all kinds of distraction together. They’d like to see research comparing a variety of distraction tasks with emotion regulation tasks like the self-compassion exercise. I’ll confess I’ve tried writing out my painful feelings and have innocently passed on that advice to others, without any instructions about compassion since I didn’t get any. I’m grateful to have read this research and next time will pass it on instead.”

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http://www.salon.com/2016/10/31/walt-whitman-saw-donald-trump-coming-genuine-belief-seems-to-have-left-us-the-underlying-principles-of-the-states-are-not-honestly-believed-in/

Quote:“I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil,” Whitman wrote in “Democratic Vistas, “until it found and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past.” Democratic politics demand democratic culture, and without the committed cultivation of that culture, a question will forever haunt the new nation: “The people of our land may all read and write, and may all possess the right to vote — and yet the main things may be entirely lacking?”

Homogeneity is impossible in a country as diverse as America. It now seems that there are elements of American culture lacking the main things — curiosity, avidity, hospitality — while there are other elements failing and failing better as people dedicate their time, thought and labor to building a country of Whitman’s imagination; the “beloved community” of Martin Luther King’s dreams. If that project fails, as Whitman warned, “if America is eligible to downfall and ruin,” it is “eligible within herself, not without.”

Belle Lettre on the Postmodern

“Universals of the mind and the senses make poetic movements and schools possible. Universal sensibilities provide generations with solidarity around the voice of particular poets. It is the privileging of a poet’s voice that gives rise to his or her subjectivity. This subjectivity has enabled the evolution of Twentieth century free verse of the postmodern period. The magnitude of the free verse movement is a result of the order surrounding the poet’s voice. Postmodern poetry evolved into the dominant literary mode of the last half of the Twentieth century;and subsequently reflected the poet’s concern for cultural ontology. The poet’s voice in the second half of twentieth-century  American poetry depicted the abundant populace of American identities (i.e., African-American, Asian-American, Chicano, Latin@, LGBTIQ); its distinctive subjective trait now saturates the poetic experience. The subjective is now the dominant discourse, and it has become a postmodern paradox.”

I have walked the silent paths of grief
Sunless,dreary,cold and all alone.
I have slept on beds of winter leaves.

I feel that death’s an avaricious  thief.
Although my heart weeps and my joy has gone,
I have never felt I was deceived.

I have learned that human life is brief.
I have learned by sorrow we’re undone.
I  have sifted earth and what’s beneath.

I felt my dark emotions  seethe
While I have been mocked by glaring sun.
I have learned the geography of grief.

I wait in patience for my life to cease.

When will my last message deign to come

Will my life be written on a leaf?

Unconsoled  grief  can make   us dumb
Into  our  hearts, we drag the ice  that numbs
I have walked the silent paths of grief
I have made my bed on winter leaves.

They say that writing bad
Poetry can be good for you
It seems it’s practicing that matters
Up to a point
Which makes me recall
Using cliches is an error
When do  you move
From practicing to reality?
It’s like life itself
We think we are practicing
And before we realize
It’s almost over.
This is it.
Life
Reflections
It’s being present that counts

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/the-worst-poems-by-7-great-writers/

William Wordsworth

And to the left, three yards beyond,

You see a little muddy pond

Of water–never dry

I measured it from side to side:

‘Twas four feet long, and three feet wide.

Broken lamps at night

Soon after I began writing my husband was very ill.I had to fit it in between caring for him, washing many pairs of pyjamas and cooking.That means I didn’t read as much of other people’s writing here as I would have liked to do.And unfortunately, I still can’t believe /feel he is dead.I need to write but I’d like to read as there are some fine people here.Best of all, there are many good, kind and courteous people  here on WP.It helps me to know that.

I am a kettle made of stainless steel
I am a saint,  for tea  is brewed to heal
And ,unlike kettles on an old  coal fire,
I am not dirty nor do I perspire.

My mirrored sides reflect you as you cook.
Look at me and read me like a book
I’m  full of love and hotter than a man
Oh, dear lady, love me while you can.

Superior mother,  yet inhuman  I;
Even electric kettles sometimes lie.
I shall never punish you, my dear
For perfect love like mine shall wield no fear.

All I ask is that you polish me.
For, in between your hands, I  yearn to be.

Since you died ,I’ve burned eight non-stick pans
But I have not  passed out or fallen down
I have not hung more than a photograph
Though on my solemn face I wear a frown.

Since you  died I do   not  want to eat
I put on silken camisoles that droop
As my  flesh,my body ,seem to shrink
I  tie the straps up in a knotted loop.

Since you died I wish to be with you
And yet my soul and body are alive
I  do not wish to murder my own self
Be  suicidal  widow or ex-wife.

Yet in my dreams I feel your absence bleak
And of my days I do not wish to speak.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-is-he-thinking/201612/the-decline-empathy-and-the-appeal-right-wing-politics

“The worst scenarios are ones occurring in conditions over which children have no control, such as the dangers faced by the babies in the still-face experiments.  When we are powerless to prevent our nervous systems and psyches from being overwhelmed, our physical, emotional, and intellectual development is disrupted.  We call this trauma.

As a metaphor for adult life in contemporary society, the “still face” paradigm—the helplessness intrinsic to it and the breakdown of empathy that lies at its foundation—aptly describes the experience of many people as they interact with the most important institutions in their lives, including government. And, as with Tronick’s babies and their mothers, when our social milieu is indifferent to our needs and inattentive to our suffering, widespread damage is done to our psyches, causing distress, anger, and hopelessness.  Such inattention and neglect lead to anxiety about our status and value, and a breakdown of trust in others.

The pain of the “still face” in American society is present all around us.

People feel it while waiting for hours on the phone for technical support, or dealing with endless menus while on hold with the phone or cable company, or waiting to get through to their own personal physician. They feel it in schools with large class sizes and rote teaching aimed only at helping students pass tests.  They feel it when crumbling infrastructure makes commuting to work an endless claustrophobic nightmare.  And, too often, they feel it when interacting with government agencies that hold sway over important areas of their lives, such as social services, the IRS, building permit and city planning departments, or a Department of Motor Vehicles.  Like Tronick’s babies, citizens who look to corporations and government for help, for a feeling of being recognized and important, are too often on a fool’s errand, seeking recognition and a reciprocity that is largely absent. “

A wonderful word is pentameter
Does it  like to be rhymed with thermometer?
If the answer is, No
I will ask you to show
How you kept all the real poets quite outa here.

Pentameter iambic how sweet
That the line has got exactly five feet
So mathematics intersects
And sometimes it wrecks
The  music of words as they leap

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/my-novel-finally/

“With my fiction I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance. Each finished poem felt realized, arrived at directly by way of an inner struggle between whatever emotion had inspired it and the nuanced thought needed to both express and propel its forward movement.

Was I on some unrealized level granting permission to the poet that the novelist was being denied? In any case, The New Yorker magazine, the place I most wanted my fiction published, started taking my poems when I was 28. When one, “Like Wings,” generated a great flurry of letters (including marriage proposals and requests for advice, equaling a record at the magazine, ….”