Chaos breeds Conflict

I’m being pulled into somewhere horrible, sucked into a whirlpool of awful feelings. I’m lost in the energy of the Swirl. It’s a frighte­ning space, somehow familiar,  but also  alienating .

A swirl is not your friend it walks beside you, but sometimes it is inside you it makes you feel bad, useless, hopeless and lost.... it sucks you into a vortex of fear, or anger, or both. It's like a virus, airborne, seeking a host body. Sucked in, helpless in its grasp, you feel there's no escape, and you are distressed and disturbed. Is it something you've done, or not done.......do you feel ashamed? Your head feels full of pressure and empty of thoughts, feelings of dread fill you up. You have to find your thoughts again. Where did they go?

What matters is to discern the coordinates of the swirl.

The swirl experience involves the coming together of certain emotions. These always involve self deprecation. The feelings may include fear, anxiety, shame, anguish and despair. In addition feelings associated with diminishment. It is the combination of these feelings with a background anxiety that gives rise to the felt power or force of the swirl.

The power of the swirl lies in its energy. It creates a force or resistance that makes it very difficult to think or reflect.  The swirl experience is one of alienation; alienation from self and other.

1. To move with a twisting or whirling motion; eddy. 2. To be dizzy or disorie­nted. 3. To be arranged in a spiral, whorl, or twist. 4 To cause to move with a twisting or whirling motion. 5. To form into or arrange in a spiral, whorl, or twist. 1. A whirling or eddying motion or mass: a swirl of white water. 2. Something, such as a curl of hair, that coils, twists, or whirls. 3. Whirling confusion or disorder: "high-p­ressure farce built around the swirl of mistaken identit­ies" (Jay Carr). [Middle English swyrl, eddy, probably of Low German or Scandin­avian origin.] The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. swirl 1. to turn or cause to turn in a twisting spinning fashion 2. to be dizzy;  my head was swirling 1. a whirling or spinning motion, esp in water 2. a whorl; curl 3. the act of swirling or stirring 4. dizzy confusion [probably from Dutch zwirrelen; related to Norwegian svirla...

I feel helpless and worthless isolated and overwhe­lmed by something ... in despair and afraid ... in a dark space devoid of hope...

If you look around you when you are in a swirl you will create distinctions in what is otherwise undifferentiated space; and this breaks up the swirl, thereby lessening its power.

Swirls are dynamic. They have power, and invariably that power takes the form of negative energy. So, when a swirl finds its prey, the individual feels acted upon. Unfree and helpless.

Under private property ... Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfa­ction of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is therefore accompa­nied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potenti­ality of mutual swindling and mutual plunder­ing. Marx, Human Require­ments and Division of Labour (1844)

No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda. No way in, go in, measure. Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault. Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA. Lying on the ground two white bodies, each in its semicircle. White too the vault and the round wall eighteen inches high from which it springs. Go back out, a plain rotunda, all white in the whiteness, go back in, rap, solid throughout, a ring as in the imagination the ring of bone. The light that makes all so white no visible source, all shines with the same white shine, ground, wall, vault, bodies, no shadow. Strong heat, surfaces hot but not burning to the touch, bodies sweating. Go back out, move back, the little fabric vanishes, ascend, it vanishes, a...

Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o'clock in the morning. Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow

It was not death, for I stood up, And all the dead lie down; It was not night, for all the bells Put out their tongues, for noon. It was not frost, for on my flesh I felt siroccos crawl, Nor fire, for just my marble feet Could keep a chancel cool. And yet it tasted like them all; The figures I have seen Set orderly, for burial, Reminded me of mine, As if my life were shaven And fitted to a frame, And could not breathe without a key; And I was like midnight, some, When everything that ticked has stopped, And space stares, all around, Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns, Repeal the beating ground. But most like chaos, stopless, cool, Without a chance or spar, Or even a report of land To justify despair. Emily Dickinson

There is a homology between outside and inside. As one moves into a swirl, as one is sucked in by it, senses contract. The distribution of the sensorium becomes skewed. What this entails is the inability to draw on one's senses to provide information that would otherwise nullify the swirl. The result of the coerced withdrawal of the sensorium is invisibility.This is an experience of extreme diminishment. There is an analagous process in the political sphere when certain groups are excluded from the political process, and become so diminished that they are invisible to the dominant group.

In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray Canto 1., Dante's Divine Comedy

Swirls is a metaphor to describe the painful experience of feeling sucked into an empty space, a vortex, where initiative and energy are drained away, replaced by helplessness and despair, panic and anxiety.  When someone is in a swirl, that particular space constitutes their environment.

"Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it." Wittgenstein-Tracatus-5.64 When one is caught in a swirl, it seems as if there is no outside. Moreover it seems as if no one else exists. In which case the swirl experience is as Wittgenstein describes, utterly solipsistic. The individual in this situation fills out the world so that, no doubt unintentionally, all others have been extruded.

Intuitively, the swirl is internal, inside the individual. But swirls can be both inside and outside, because what happens to us can cause one.

To enter the swirl is to become disconnected. One becomes temporarily disconnected from others and from oneself. Painting by Edward Hopper, who portrayed 20C alienation and loneliness.

One possibi­lity is an early childhood experience that lacked affirma­tion or expression of loving feelings. If one cannot ask for what one needs (as a child) then thinking and feeling are badly affected. So the individual is sometimes forced into a space of minimal agency where it is hard to negotiate daily life. This means not having  one's own voice, instead always hearing someone else's real or imagined usually critical words. Someone else holds the initiative and this feels shameful, and so leads to the swirl experience.

Swirl is a metaphor to describe an existential mood state. It is a deeply unpleasant experience that borders on despair and anguish. A Swirl is like a black hole; we fall into it or get sucked in. We feel overwhelmed by something stronger than ourselves. When in this state, emotional paralysis takes over. We lose voice, agency and will. We feel diminished, and sure there is no escape. It may pass, as moods do, or we may find our own way to overcome its sometimes devastating effect. What is unique about the Swirl is that it denotes a range of distressing experiences that go together and relate to an internal physical, emotional and mental space which however may have dimensions and coordinates that we can begin to recognise.  Understanding them helps us to find a way to conquer it.

A recent report in the New York times says : ' My sister Beth just a few weeks ago fell in her apartment and lay on the floor for 30 hours before her son came and found her. She had a heart attack during her time on the floor so she could not get up to use the phone to call for help. She was not wearing an alarm button nor did she have a mobile phone in her cardigan pocket.' Just her bad luck?  How many stories like this one?  Old elephants walk into the forest to die alone, perhaps to spare their relatives the witnessing. Is Beth's story the human version, alone in her apartment, cut off from relatives and the life outside her door?  We know of examples of old people who die in their houses and lie undiscovered for months or even years. The elephant in the room: The extended family model where the generations live together is foreign to Western Societies, so we have alienation, aloneness, atomised families and the austerity politics that reduce social services. Our soc...

Getting on the escalator going up is ok, but going down is not.  Old eyes search for something easily visible that appears to be level and substantial, and disappearing steps don't cut it. Wide painted lines on pavements and floors can be deceptive.  Do they signal a step, a hollow, a decline, a change of level?  There's always  the fear of a misstep.  It's about failing depth perception, or balance, or both. The step that wasn't there, the grab for a support that missed, the crunch on the way down, the sudden impact of a hard surface. The fractured this or that, the ambulance, the hospital, the rehab, the lost confidence. Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death in the over 65 age group - and the numbers have doubled in the last decade. Well of course, the population is ageing isn't it? The other fear is losing independence, causing many of the old refusing to wear an alarm pendant. ' They just don't want to accept that they are in mortal danger ...

The usual definition of narcissism is self-love. We tend to think of this as intrinsic to the personality or temperament of an individual; in which case context is irrelevant. But in old age temperament cedes to context.  What is common in old age, as friends and family members die, is self-absorption. It is as if survival is the greatest achievement and this is always the topic for the self. What is it to be absorbed in oneself in this way? The consequence of this absorption for some is the creation of a paranoiac system. That is one based on hostility, hostility towards others as a way of still feeling special.    For example, “ The nurses here are stealing things from me.” This ensures the centrality of the self. Erecting a system like this is seen as the only way to maintain the survival of the self-image in a contracting personal world. There is an alternative process, which can be thought of as narcissistic depletion. Here over time the narcissism diminishes as...

"Life can only be understood  backwards; but it must be lived forwards." - Kierkegaard Is one of the abject aspects of old age, of retirement, a re-evaluating of one's past? Ruminating on a life lived professionally in an environment that subsequently appears a fundamental mistake leads to what? Freedom, despair? If the response is freedom, is it a real freedom? Might that be an illusion?

"Life can only be understood  backwards; but it must be lived forwards." - Kierkegaard Is one of the abject aspects of old age, of retirement, a re-evaluating of one's past? Ruminating on a life lived professionally in an environment that subsequently appears a fundamental mistake leads to what? Freedom, despair? If the response is freedom, is it a real freedom? Might that be an illusion?

One of us, K, thinks that a lot of what we do is done to distract us from the fundamental tragic aspects of life. The other, R, is not sure about this. R. What do you mean by distraction? K. I think we have a need to distract ourselves from the lonely waiting for death, which can begin early in life, and which depresses some young people so much that they elect to suicide. We have a need to pretend that we are not just helplessly subject to the life cycle. Distraction starts early with fairy stories and adventure stories and cartoons, which are all about super human powers. R. Hmm. Distraction sounds very judgemental to me. What would it mean to not pretend that we are helpless? What would it be like to bear death in mind all of the time? K. I think of Buddhism, and being in the present without the grandiose intrusions of fame and fortune. Being less distracted would mean being less grandiose and wanting to be special in the eyes of other people – parents, peers, social media. R. I thi...

One of us, K, thinks that a lot of what we do is done to distract us from the fundamental tragic aspects of life. The other, R, is not sure about this. R. What do you mean by distraction? K. I think we have a need to distract ourselves from the lonely waiting for death, which can begin early in life, and which depresses some  young people so much that they elect   to suicide.   We have a need to pretend that we are not just helplessly subject to the life cycle. Distraction starts early with fairy stories and adventure stories and cartoons, which are all about super human powers. R. Hmm. Distraction sounds very judgemental to me. What would it mean to not pretend that we are helpless? What would it be like to bear death in mind all of the time? K.  I think of Buddhism, and being in the present without the grandiose intrusions of fame and fortune. Being less distracted would mean being less grandiose and wanting to be special in the eyes of other people - par...

Ernest Becker grasped the insight that a primary motive of mental life is the denial of death. The mechanism for this denial is the construction of a fictional, tragic-heroic self which is the center of our lies, delusions and immortality projects. - Ernest Becker Foundation Newsletter: April 2000. According to Becker, "everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness." Now what stands out for me is the idea that the symbolic world, which I imagine is another term for culture, is a form of denial. What is denied is the ineluctable fact of death. To many existential philosophers this fact points to the fundamental absurdity of the world. And by absurdity is meant inherent meaninglessness. In which case meaning, the symbol, is a ...

When we thought about the blog, we ignored gender issues. One of us came upon the following and realised the significance of our mistake. "Looking at John it seemed to her that men are forever alone. Men,she said to herself, are not like women. Their aloneness is in their souls. In their deepest place, men remain solitary all their lives. No matter how well loved they know themselves to be by a woman, men are always on their own. We never touch them in the place of their solitariness. John is alone now, lying here beside me sleeping. And when he reads his books, then he is also alone. He looks in those old dead books for the answer to his own aloneness, seeking a confirmation of his solitariness in the thoughts of other men, hoping to hear in their thoughts an echo of his deepest aloneness. And when he meets it, he says to himself with satisfaction, There! I knew it already. And when he drinks too much wine he embraces his aloneness as if it were a punishment that he has deserved....

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjHnWz3EyHs] Is this an example of what Mark Fisher calls 'magic voluntarism'? He defines it as "the belief that it is within every individual's power to make themselves whatever they want to be."

Is this an example of what Mark Fisher calls 'magic voluntarism'? He defines it as "the belief that it is within every individual's power to make themselves whatever they want to be." 

This letter was published in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on 31 July:   Indignity of suffering   One small but crucial aspect was ignored in your editorial on euthanasia (''Legalise the right to choose assisted death'', 28/7). It is not only terminal illness which may justify a decision to end one's life. Unrelievable existential suffering is just as real as unbearable pain, and may be present when death is not imminent. This is the suffering associated with some severe conditions and may include an unbearable loss of dignity, complete absence of autonomy, and persistent crippling fear, among others. Because it may seem less tangible than terminal illness, including it in the debate could be just too hard for some people. But the relief of all kinds of suffering needs to be talked about for the subject to be considered in full. Paul Laycock, Malvern