KAVI VADAMOOTOO
We are of an animal species that repeats both its glories and downfalls. We are driven to repeat, otherwise the dread of courting and falling into a void. To feel at home we need to repeat. Repetition breeds familiarity. But our loyalty to such familiarity needs not bring a homely and good feeling. It is better to fill some inevitable voids in our lives with repeated bad feeling and thinking habits as ballasts than to be sucked and sunk repeatedly into the open-ended funnel of voids. Bourdieu would refer to this repeated habits, good or bad, as a form of ‘Capital’ or ‘habitus’. Some habits militate against us, and some are self- enriching. Do our lazy hands copy and paste these habits unthinkingly?
If our mind is like a ‘parliament’, peopled by potential democrats and fascists (Bollas), some thinking ‘habits’ can be democratically self-nurturing and others can be fascist-like, bordering on a state of self-anaesthetising. Not only all the ‘habits’ ingested in us are not equal to the task of being alive, but also unequal to master our basic instincts in order to adequately ‘live well’ (Spinoza). A repeated saga! Sometimes we get sucked into the bottom of the funnel, but we pull ourselves up by the straps of our boots. It is a marvel that we are still immersed in repeating such a process, thus, sponsoring a variety of language ‘game’ to the extent of being pressed and shaped into a variety of ‘forms of being’ (Wittgenstein), liberating or not.
In Classical Greece, life was perceived as the ‘ eternal return’, as symbolised by Sisyphus who was punished to carry a stone up and down the hill. His punishment can be interpreted as an effect of his unwillingness to repeat the norms of his epoch.Whereas us, mere mortals, we have always been expected to repeat certain ways of organising our lives in alignment with the collective will. Unlike the uncreative and self-defeated mythical figure, we have been compelled, for our self- survival, to invent and to repeat different scenarios: some to our downfalls and others self- enriching. We are true tragic figures, refusing to throw the towel, although we cannot undo or unscript our past failures. As to Nietzsche’s idea of history as ‘ eternal recurrence’ ,he would see us as mortals who cannot use our will, retrospectively, to change the past, but we can use our will to create new beginnings. Luckily for us!
As to how to ‘live well’, we are, relentlessly, still forging ways to do so without a blueprint. We are like the ‘ants’, micro-beings intelligently persevering in existing amidst the macro- intelligence of the universe (Voltaire), which is indifferent to us. Parts of our habitual thinking sometimes have been like credulous Candide, the optimist, believing blindly in some gurus or thinkers to our detriment ; or, on the other hand we have lived to ‘cultivate our own garden’, that is taking the responsibility of nurturing our own individuality, albeit a painful process. Can such self-cultivation border on selfishness? Nobody holds the master narrative as to how should we think well and ‘live well’. Yet throughout ages there has been a inclination for some of us to think in certain ways where they have been as if will-less, hence, subjecting us to a loss of ‘democratic’ way of thinking. Repeating such will- less way of being is what makes us ‘ voluntary slaves’ (La Boétie).
As to the idea of self-imposed form of slavery, a writer talks about the difference between the creative thinking of ‘le laboureur’, the farmer and the ‘lazy’ thinking of ‘les buveurs de vent’. Like the farmers we are inspired to think in what I will call an ‘evolutionary way’, that is we must work the land according to the weather and to keep us alive.
‘Les moutons de Panurge’
As to those who feed on wind, that is empty words or slogans, they do not think and if they think it is ‘lazy’. Instead of raising their voices against false promises, they follow, as ‘les moutons de Panurge’ , in a slavish fashion. They have become unthinking slaves who keep copying and pasting the same mantras. Or are we too overwhelmed with undigested painful experiences from the past that we repeat certain activities, almost in an addictive-like fashion, in order to kill off our thinking and reflective capacity. It is a form of self- appeasement as a solution, where not only do we remain prisoners to our past painful experiences, but also keeping ourselves as ‘ galériens volontaires’ , that is, willing ‘ galley slaves’ (Gérard Szwec).
Plasticity of our brain (Boris Cyrulnik), arguably, is an antidote to deadly forms of repetitions and ‘ lazy’ thinking which renders us ‘les mangeurs de vent’, which evacuates our mind of any responsibility and willingness to choose otherwise. We start life with a brain endowed with potentials as a ‘white paper’ and ‘fluid’ and ,yet to be impressed on (Locke). The problem is who inscribes, monopolises our perceptual organ as a piece of ‘paper’ to direct and impress ‘texts’ in our brain (Freud). Although as inscribers we cannot erase the past ‘texts’ as memories etched in our brain, we have the creative will not to be stuck eternally in the worn-out grooves of an old record. Through a community of good wills it is possible not to be slaves to a self-defeating or self-sabotaging relationship with ourselves and others. Luckily our ‘grandeur’ as a ‘thinking reed’ (Pascal) suggests there is a plasticity intrinsic to us as we have been forever struggling to think ways to ‘live well’. We have not, yet, abandoned the existential raft in search for thinking, willing and spinning, like spiders, new silky links to reach for new falling stars. Arendt would add that there are always new ‘beginnings’ inspiring us to re-kindle a democratic mind to keep in check the ‘absurdity’ of a dictatorial mind. There lies an ambiguity: throughout the world today we are using repeatedly the democratic process to elect authoritarian forces. What could happen when our mind as a ‘Parliament’ is bent on investing in a dead-end form of belief bordering on becoming a self-imposed form of slavery?
‘Second skin’
Learning from my patient: he had to be self-sufficient from a young age as nobody was emotionally available to hold and receive him. They were present but emotionally absent as a protective shield or a benign ‘second skin’. Because of his early template, he was etched with a deep unreflective belief that if he started to trust anybody, bad things would recur or repeat themselves, hence further compounding his difficulties. Cocooned in his repeated belief that he needed to be self-sufficient, he could not foresee any new beginning as exit from such repeated belief: it is as if he had self-hypnotised or hallucinated himself to anticipate malign things from what he had endured in the past. No room for new ‘texts’.
We can imagine his future was imprisoned or enslaved to such ‘negative hallucination’ or self-hypnosis (Freud). It was as if he sought to remedy his past, but along his journey he collected only what he anticipated to recur from the past, that is recurring belief that only bad things were available to him. Hence he was trapped in a self-defeating circle of a repetition of hatred of others and self-hatred. Thus life was repeatedly mothballed and spiralled into a malign circle of violence, in terms of hatred. My patient’s mind as a ‘Parliament’ lost its ‘democratic’ stature. In so doing, his mind was being dictated and dominated by his fantasy as a ‘dictator’, which inhibited the plasticity of his brain to think freely and creatively.
As to his journey in psychotherapy, he was brimming with hatred, anticipating his relationship with me to be a replica of the past. He would provoke me and reject everything that was said as being ‘rubbish’, as if wishing me to retaliate. He was expecting me to retaliate so that he could retaliate back, which what repeatedly transpired throughout his life. The sad thing was that throughout his life he was, relentlessly, in search of a good relationship with others, but his desperate and much-needed will for self- protection through being ‘obnoxious’, from an early age, militated against him. Through a review of his life he remembered how he was desperate to look for objects and toys to calm him down, but soon broke them beyond repair. There was too much hatred in him and his milieu which swamped everything around him. He was aware that it is normal for children to express some violent feelings towards their toys, but he felt, retrospectively, that his relationship with objects was ‘weird’ and ‘ twisted’. Unfortunately, he repeated this destructive pattern with other people as objects, till he discovered that there were other ways of thinking, feeling and relating. As to children projecting and repeating their past unpleasant and violent experiences through playing in order to master them (Freud), he never managed to work through his brutalising experiences through playing. But he did so through psychotherapy as a form of verbal playing (Winnicott), projecting into the non-retaliatory therapist as an object all his hatred. We both survived the attack.
Unlike the poetic world of the self-defeating mythical Sisyphus, he re-joined others, once released from the addictive-like hatred of self and others, to repeat the prosaic life of being a mortal: an admixture of pain and pleasure.
As to the idea of self-imposed form of slavery, a writer talks about the difference between the creative thinking of ‘le laboureur’, the farmer and the ‘lazy’ thinking of ‘les buveurs de vent’. Like the farmers we are inspired to think in what I will call an ‘evolutionary way’, that is we must work the land according to the weather and to keep us alive.
