Sunday, August 24, 2014

Totem.

Totem stands silent in chaos.

Let us study it awhile.

Prismatic effect of light on its forms.


Solidity at a distance is feint.

Come closer, it appears alive, organisms, neurones, nodes, connecting to give semblance of unity.

How should we name this... swarm?

Contours dissassemble, becoming particle, parsing pole.

Complex, fluid, composite-Ied totem.

Pole of attraction.

Go on, capture its grains.
Seize its shape.
Celebrate acquired understanding.

Lose your frame, it contains your empty reflection.

Snapshot annihilates sense of life.

Be in awe.

We are DESIRE...


5 comments:

  1. I don't want to lose my frame, it helps me to acquire deeper understanding. Freud (1914) Totem und Tabu.
    Totem is a tamed God or Father and we admire Him in a swarm. We people need our illusions. The following book written by Freud was Die Zukunft einer Illusion + Das Unbehagen im Kultur.
    We repeat and repeat and stay blind...

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  2. Hello Heli!
    Thanks for commenting here and extending my frame of reference. You have connected me to an element of what is behind this strange post - the work of D&G and their rejection of Freud's framing of desire (or at least that's what I have understood so far).
    I hadn't made the connection with Totem being God or Father - that makes this post even more intriguing.

    I like your comment 'We people need our illusions' - I suspect I agree with you. Indeed I have written a poem somewhere about that question in French. I shall try and dig it out. I had forgotten about it.

    I also like your 'repeat and repeat and stay blind...' that is evocative.

    I am intrigued at the connection between rhizomatic learning, stream of consciousness and psychoanalysis as I spent many years on a couch facing a wall. (See post Beyond me.) The moments which were the most rewarding were those when I had nothing to say. Silence is astonishingly informative. I suspect that one of the reasons I have enjoyed and thrived in the rhizo14 course is a result of psychoanalysis.

    Thank you for what I perceive to be your calm, reflective presence, I have remarked that and apppreciate it.

    I am very interested in the whole question of 'attractors' in a complex system and this post was a first step in furthering that particular investigation.

    I look forward to digging into your blog mine again.

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  3. Thanks for this, Simon. Of course, I itself is a totem, standing as it does alone and tall, often at the head of the sentence (coincidence?), a nod to God before the other characters arrive on the scene and the action begins. But it seems there is always some strange attractor in the sentence or paragraph, something that pulls the I inward, engages it, smudges it into a swarm i, seemingly reduced from the perspective of a totem, not so erect anymore—but not so alone, either. It is now 2 and not I. A dot and a line. Not so insistent.

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