In A Knot

Fishing At Dawn

Author: fproject

There was a psychologist, Scottish, by name, R.D. Laing who wrote a book called Knots. He wrote of them this way: "The patterns delineated here have not yet been classified by a Linnaeus of human bondage. They are all, perhaps, strangely, familiar. In these pages I have confined myself to laying out only some of those I actually have seen. Words that come to mind to name them are: knots, tangles, fankles, impasses, disjunctions, whirligogs, binds." He considered these in part the "webs of Maya".

Other quotes by R.D. Laing: "There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain."

“Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”

“Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”

“Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.”

“Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.”

“We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world -- mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.” (I add, to be sure you understand, he is saying we can glimpse the ideal, the spiritual, but we cannot adopt it - and that's where grace comes in)

“We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.” (he was writing back in the sixties - this has gotten if anything much worse)

“We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.” (see above)

“Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.”

“Normality highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100, 000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.” (he is being careful here since there are many abnormal and monstrous men doing the killing too - also remember he wasn't yet counting the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and the 21st century, this too has gotten worse, perhaps)

“Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.”

In A Knot

You said I could go
on my own as if it was
true for me like you
are true to yourself
but I know better than to
trust you on this one.
I know I belong
to the world in such a knot
that there is no way
I can untie it.

August 4, 2009 12:39 PM