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Dear Learners,
Summary;
William Blake may have intuited the content of Winfried's most recent
posting about the camp management and facilitation of expulsion leading to
a new understanding when he wrote, "He who desires but acts not..."
Here is a distillate I came upon while studying a history of the
relationships between human expression, myth, stories we tell among
ourselves and the creative deployment of words. (-That they are often in
etymology like little explosive 'packets of vibrating energy;-)
One pattern that perhaps others can open up more with me is that cycle of
'expelling' to some edge only for it to return paradoxically restored
within itself in a newer heightened and destructive form to destroy that
which cannot, or socially will not integrate it.
A compelling side issue for me is the increasing reports of diseases that
left untreated in the third world by the developed world on the seeming
premise disease is natural for poor people and a satisfactory state of
global affairs are becoming rapidly more virulent there through our
sovereign neglect and now, via increased travel from 'fist world' to
'third world' we become 'infected' bring them home like unwanted gifts and
discover we have no cure. Epidemics may become a new part of systems
consideration soon enough.
My distillate.
"Pestilence"> "pestilent" > "pest" > injurious >>(jury/judge).. to morals
baneful or pernicious (1553) > Feelings about evil are PROJECTED onto
disease. And the disease (by way of being enriched with our subjective
narrative meanings) is projected back onto the world. (Susan Sontag)
Dis((s))Ease. Aha. Mmmm. We then assume, subsume to take away our own
meanings
QUOTE.
"It is useful to measure the health of a society and its power of social
cohesion by the strength of its resistance against fragmentation and
expulsion of its deviant and marginal members." Snip various descriptions
- " these people tend to be marginal and possible alien agents that seem
to provoke expelling and fragmentation tendencies in a given society. Rich
internal differentiation and a variety of classes and 'institutions'
(Malinowski) in a society indicate the great strength of social cohesion,
while envious egalitarianism and intolerance of social differentiation
point to weak social health. The less the power of containment in a
society, the more easily will a deviant member be treated as an alien
element that ought to be expelled. The excessive need for sameness and
equality in modern society has led to the now all to frequent phenomenon
of the displaced person, as sinister symptom of social illness. The
criminal, ( as archetype) by deliberately putting himself outside society
invites the role of the scapegoat, to be duly expelled, a willing target
for the fragmentation tendencies active within a society. The scapegoat
phenomena can be traced back into pre-history. In the mythology it was
only the 'high born' who were fit volunteers for such treatment because
through their VOLUNTARY sacrifice the whole is given new vitality."
- Summarised quote 'As societies developed they resorted to keeping 'like'
people in particular slots known as prisons for the occasion of the now
meaningless ritual of such sacrifice.' (You can all make your own
historical associations)
" At no other time does a human body come nearer to being an excrement
than after death, particularly after decomposition has set in. The social
cohesion of a society could well be measured according to the treatment
which it meats out to its dead. Fragmentation tendencies may express
themselves in a hasty and undignified elimination of the dead. The bodies
are hurriedly dug in or thrown into the -- snip. --"
End Quote from esteemed CLO
Here is another subtle connection that Rick Parkenay inadvertantly
assisted me in the co-creation of through his transmogrification;-) of an
appended "e" in the singing of his signing.
"Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well
and in the kingdom of the sick (mental and physical, subtle sickness and
less so;-( " We may all be citizens of both places from time to time."
A form of obligation to life without LEM applied?
Susan Sontag facing cancer in her own body wrote brilliantly about the way
in which we use metaphor and "-concoct punative and sentimental fantasies"
about situations, more stereotypy than scientific fact often reflecting of
"our national character."
Of course as she refers us, the subject is often not illness and its
ramifications at all but its uses as a "figure" (Metaphor). Resistance to
very illness in her 'personal and very practised' view would be purified
by lack of metaphor. Get rid of the metaphors we attach to disease and
maybe the fear of disease is decreased, acceptance breeds inner strength
to combat certain disease.
Sontag then points to the way certain societies such as France and Italy
who as a rule allow clinicians to tell everybody BUT the patient of the
disease's diagnosis. "Considering it will be intolerable (as the truth) to
all but the exceptionally mature and intelligent patients."
In clinical typology TB was considered a form of cancer the latter being
termed as 'Anything that frets, corrodes, corrupts, or consumes slowly or
secretly." way back in 1528 T Paynell "A canker is a melancolye impostume
eatynge partes of the bodye." It was not until very recently that new ways
of seeing enabled leukaemia to be understood and identified as a form of
cancer. Well, I must not test patience of a differing spelling so I say
buy the book and so you might be so tempted I end with this as Sontag does
and I ask you to reflect as she does of much human illness is not as
Maturana restates as does I think At de Lange the loss of our 'deep love'
for ourselves and our Best Natures that might be the single greatest deep,
profound, fundamental, essential cause af all human illness. Could it be
that simple, that light in posture, that unlinear that the one word LOVE
with mauybe unconditional attached like a holding hand in a dark place.
Let us collectively think on all you who remain with children in "camps".
Especially the privileged ones among us who might through talent or sheer
hard work are aspiring to be the 'campmasters' of the future like Winfried
experienced.
Sontag again."Since our views about cancer, and the metaphors we have
imposed upon it, are so much a vehicle for the larger insufficiencies of
this culture, for our shallow attitude toward death, for our anxieties
about feeling, for our reckless improvident responses to our 'real
problems of growth,' for our inability to construct an advanced industrial
society which properly regulates consumption, and for our justified fears
of the increasingly violent course of history. The cancer metaphor will be
made obsolete, I would predict, long before the problems it has reflected
so persuasively will be resolved."
I like it that the word she ends her book with heldsays to me 're-loved'.
How the boys impressioned unreasoned violence was re-loved and restored
for you Winfried is evident from your caring account, we cannot know, but
must simply imagine. I can revolve somewhat and express as imagined
possible learning and see the 'God parent' as being the boy, I see a
differing 'expulsion' and a differing 're-incorporation' of the meaning
manage and nearer facilitation.
"The infection is only a symbol, the symbol of an emotional wound...the
illness is then (so) speaking for me because I have asked it to do so."
Kafka.
Maybe see from multiviewpoint perspective of an artist's sensibilities his
little act of destructions that to my eye were like the shattering cubist
visions of Picasso, that at a certain distance and vantage point coalesce
into a newer harmoninc relation to what the art of being is; may be, into
what the art of becoming may be like. It is often the 'outsider' so called
that brings forth too merely too early the collective common sense of the
next generation and is just another -preparation -.
Illness may then be seen as a fundamental human state or phase of the
'whole' truth of our community living and only when we can in/volve
(love/in) that new geography that now lives outside the comfy, fun,
pleasure seeking, death denying, pain avoiding confines of our many of
'camps'.
Best,
Andrew Campbell
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