introjection

Dia Mundial do Meio Ambiente / World Environment Day
Up, Down.

not entirely clear ... a dim memory of some thing some where some when ... and the OED is just being minimal help,

introjection:

1. The action of throwing in; of ‘throwing oneself into’ or entering eagerly upon, some course or pursuit.
2. Philosophy. A theory whereby external objects are images of elements within the consciousness of the individual.
3. Psychoanalysis. A term used to denote the forming of a subjective image of an object and the transfer to it of emotional energy previously given to the object itself. Psychology. The forming of an inward image of the attitudes, values, and expectations of people or groups by whom one is anxious to be accepted.

the dimness was R.D. Laing, but i can't find his book The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise on-line and my copy is not here, found only these few quotes,

Persons and Experience

As domains of experience become more alien to us, we need greater and greater openmindedness even to conceive of their existence. Many of us do not know, or even believe, that every night we enter zones of reality in which we forget our waking life as regularly as we forget our dreams when we awake. Not all psychologists know of fantasy as a modality of experience, and the, as it were, contrapuntal interweaving of different experiential modes. Many who are aware of fantasy believe that fantasy is the fartherst that experience goes under "normal" circumstances. Beyond that are simply "pathological" zones of hallucinations, phantasmagoric mirages, delusions.

This state of affairs represents an almost unbelievable devastation of our experience. Then there is empty chatter about maturity, love, joy, peace. This is itself a consequence of and further occasion for the divorce of our experience, such as is left of it, from our behavior.

What we call "normal" is a product of representation, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical "mechanisms."

There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically "normal" forms of alienation. The "normally" alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the "normal" majority as bad or mad.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

and this,

The Mystification of Experience

It is not enough to destroy one's own and other people's experience. One must overlay this devastation by a false consciousness inured, as Marcuse puts it, to its own falsity.

Exploitation must not be seen as such. It must be seen as benevolence. Persecution preferably should not need to be invalidated as the figment of a paranoid imagination; it should be experienced as kindness. Marx described mystification and showed its function in his day. Orwell's time is already with us. The colonists not only mystify the natives, in the wasy that Fanon so clearly shows, they have to mystify themselves. We in Europe and North America are the colonists, and in order to sustain our amazing images of ourselves as God's gift to the vast majority of the starving human species, we have to interiorize our violence upon ourselves and our children and to employ the rhetoric of morality to describe this process.

In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex, we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s, if possible.

From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to those forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age.

Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other's freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other's own existence or destiny.

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

but that is not quite where i was going with this today anyway ... after years of pretending not to be alone and devising dozens of entirely fictional and artificial behaviours to shore it up i have made a simple discovery: now that i am getting old i can pretend to be even older and save wear and tear on the am-i-being-judged circuits, not rocket-science but progress of a sort ...



i am
dancing
in these spiral
constellations
of gravity and light
at least as lightly as those
green
leaves
that turn daily more
substantial

eu estou rodopiando nessas constelações espirais de gravidade e luz até ligeiramente que aqelas folhas virando cada dia mais sólidas

it is one tree, you see, that has been split some time, not two, and now has marvellous whorls of branches stretching up and into the space and interlacing, some of them a bit crookedly maybe ... but delightful

there are all sorts of interesting visual metaphors for that one eh?
maybe tomorrow ...

a woman hanging up side down
her features covered by her fallen gown

Down.