A psychologist's question

A lover places her love so far above the earthly that the mere appearance of her love in the world, his limited manifestation, is a turn-off and an objection to her love. But who can see that this need to idealize and interpret the temporal as imperfect hides behind it a profound self-pity and self-loathing, which more than anything else does not want to be loved?

The body of writing

Some people do not write because they feel writing will cheapen their beloved insights and strip them of their vitality. They are their own worst and most critical readers who come back to what they have written, after gaining some distance from it, and are appalled at the banality and pretentiousness of their words. Gaining this distance gives enough time for that madness and adrenaline to subside , which induced them to writing in the first place. They rather prefer to read somebody else's writing, and take envious pleasure in the fact that the author has expressed something which is close to what they would have expressed, if they were not so disgusted with their own ink. Isn't this quite strange? They forgive others of their shamelessness to express themselves easily, but are inexplicably hard on themselves and are ashamed at their own immodesty.

What a writer requires is that distance from himself, such that he does not feel ashamed and disgusted at his own insights and words. He should earn the right to be immodest. This distance should be gained before he begins to write, not after he has written something. Gaining this distance means to lend body and power to one's writing, to let one's pen control one's thoughts, and give content and form to the latter such that they are transformed in turn. Put crudely, a writer should not really be clear about what he is writing. But to gain this distance, one should also have thoughts which are strong and lively enough so that they can traverse this distance uninhibited, without losing their brilliance, their suddenness and their surprise factor. But this is another matter.

The curious memory

We willingly open up some past wound just to check if it is still there. And after we are assured of its existence, we are comforted. We shut it and move along with renewed strength, apparently forgetting that the wound would not have been there if we had not opened it up.

Recipe for the born-again - type I

Ultimately, the greatest solace for the one betrayed lies in grasping the insight that other people, how these others have appeared to one, the roles that others play in one's life, the disgust and the happiness that one sees in others, the degree of expectancy, love, comradeship one has with others, the mutual trust and understanding that one thinks one shares with others, and the whole order of power relations between one and the others, exist because one has put them there. It lies in the insight that one has built one's own world and colored it with one's own brushes. And that one can, as easily, take these colors away if one wanted to and thereby see this world and the others in it as totally devoid of any meaning or significance. This requires selective memory, suppression, transitional stupefication of the senses, wearing a thick skin, abstraction from the influences of the immediate sorroundings, distantiality and other psychological ingenuities. The end result is the ultimate victory over the others, reducing all the sufferings, the resentments, the frustrations of misunderstandings and misplaced levels of faith and trust to a nought. One then laughs in magnanimity at the world. There is a unique comfort in this solitary insight denoting a great triumph over the world. It calls for a Herculean strength and clarity of one's soul. And after one has grasped this insight, one must multiple this strength a hundred times by enacting the power of this insight and embodying it as the new light which guides the path of a new life; in short, one has to die first in order to be reborn.