Big Little ThingsKnots
Right now I’m reading R.D.Laing’s The Politics of Experience, which is really fucking fascinating and rather challenging too. I just started it, and I’m still not quite sure what it’s about, but it’s got my attention, and I have a feeling it’s gonna fuck me up in a good way pretty soon.
Quick background context: Dr. Laing = a well regarded maverick psychiatrist who was doing his work in the 1960s and 70s [wiki]. What makes him so interesting to me is that he held the (unorthodox) view that craziness is connected to the structures, limits, and restrictions of communication.
Now, don’t get the idea that I know anything about psychology. I don’t. I found this guy through his poetry, specifically a collection of poems called Knots, which does an AMAZING job of showing how craziness comes from communication:
One is inside
then outside what one has been inside
One feels empty
because there is nothing inside oneself
One tries to get inside oneself
that inside of the outside
that one was once inside
once one tries to get oneself inside what
one is outside:
to eat and to be eaten
to have the outside inside and to be
inside the outsideBut this is not enough. One is trying to get
the inside of what one is outside inside, and to
get inside the outside. But one does not get
inside the outside by getting the outside inside
for;
although one is full inside of the inside of the outside
one is on the outside of one’s own inside
and by getting inside the outside
one remains empty because
while one is on the inside
even the inside of the outside is outside
and inside oneself there is still nothing
There has never been anything else
and there never will be
Wow! That is some fearsomely glitchy shit. Have you ever read anything like that?
