What if our books, and our movements as they are currently constructed (often in ways that resemble corporate brands), are only changing words? What if words – written on the page or shouted in protest – change only what people and institutions say, and not what they do?
”I AM THE YOU THAT IS NOT WORDS,” Fake Roth announces to Real Roth, touching on the central question of many doppelganger stories: Who is real and what is real?…
This speaks to the quicksand underpinning of our age: the confusion between saying/clicking/posting and doing. The tension between the virtual nature of lives led in the blue glow of screens and the reality of the embodied labor… and material inputs…
That is the real source of my speechlessness in this unreal period: a feeling of near violent rupture between the world of words and the world beyond them. In recent years, left social movements have won huge victories in transforming the way we talk about all kinds of issues… and I have to believe that those changes represent real victories, that they matter. And yet, on almost every front, tangible ground is being lost.
a feeling of near violent rupture between the world of words and the world beyond them
A journal as an experiment in consciousness. An attempt to record not just the external world, and not just the vagrant, fugitive, ephemeral “thoughts” that brush against us like gnats, but the refractory and inviolable authenticity of daily life: daily-ness, day-ness, day-lightness, the day’s eye of experience.
Oats, Joyce Carol, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oats
heard from fagan, chelsea
_‘Everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things which are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness; all this is the content of the unconscious’ (CW8, para 382).
‘Besides these we must include all more or less intentional repressions of painful thought and feelings. I call the sum of these contents the “personal unconscious”’ (CW8, para 270)._
https://www.thesap.org.uk/articles-on-jungian-psychology-2/carl-gustav-jung/jungs-model-psyche/
carl hiaasen, quoted in Clear, James 2025-05-29 newsletter
always aspire to act in a way that cancels out someone else's cruel or stupid behavior
America has fundamentally changed and we still refuse to acknowledge it. American optimism has not survived the information age and American pessimism has proved to be far more entertaining.
Anger is like an oven; heat without light. Forgiveness is like the moon; light without heat.
Clear, James 2024-10-31 newsletter.
“The perpetual hesitation of the neurotic to launch out into life is readily explained by his desire to stand aside so as not to get involved in the dangerous struggle for existence. But anyone who refuses to experience life must stifle his desire to live—in other words, he must commit partial suicide” (C. G. Jung - V5 – §165).
kruger, rafael - pistis - demystifying jungian psychology pg. 41
anyone who refuses to experience life must stifle his desire to live
woolf, virginia, seen in Clear, James 2025-12-18 newsletter
It involved ripping up the neural networks that had been laid down in my brain in childhood and remained there for over thirty years and replacing them, one by one, with something new. As with any ripping, it was excruciating.
Attitude is a readiness of the psyche to act or react in a certain way [...] The state of readiness, which I conceive attitude to be, consists in the presence of a certain subjective constellation, a definite combination of psychic factors or contents, which will either determine action in this or that definite direction, or react to an external stimulus in a definite (predetermined) way.
(C. G. Jung - V6 – §687). kruger, rafael - pistis - demystifying jungian psychology
attitude is the readiness of the psyche to act or react in a certain way
“Be guided by beauty. I really mean that. I think pretty much everything I’ve done has had an aesthetic component—at least to me. Now, you might think, “Building a company that’s trading bonds? What’s so aesthetic about that?” What’s aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, and approaching the problem, and doing it right. And if you feel that you’re the first one to do it right, that’s a terrific feeling. It’s a beautiful thing to do something right.”
Simons, Jim, Mathematics, Common Sense, and Good Luck, as read in Clear, James’s 2024-07-18 newsletter.
the Puer lives in the illusion that everything is harder for him. They secretly enjoy being perceived as incapable and fragile so others take responsibility in their place…
To compensate for this mediocre life they're abducted by the intoxicating realm of possibilities, potentials, and romantic obsessions. There’s a perpetual longing for the perfect thing and waiting for the perfect conditions. When everything falls apart they look for someone to blame, when in reality, they never commit to anything long enough and never go all in.
Sticking to the process involves realizing that they aren't a special snowflake and will have to endure the learning process just like everybody else. Many fall on the perfectionism side, but this is only a protection against an imaginary failure. The mindset “If I never try I can’t ever fail” perfectly encapsulates this. This tends to mingle with procrastination, and as a result, they're constantly stuck. But procrastination is only a symptom of something deeper, their desire to never grow up and fully take responsibility for their lives.
They refuse to pay the price to achieve any greatness, but this shouldn’t matter, after all, they’re constantly substituting reality with their fantasies. In fantasy land, they can continue dreaming about everything they want to achieve and remain completely inert. To compensate for this lack of action, their fantasies usually involve megalomaniac deeds, and as long as they tell everyone about their hypothetical plans they can delude themselves into thinking they're doing something productive…
to their own fantasies and little do they know that real life can set them free because it’s in the real world that their fantasies must be given shape and be concretized.
kruger, rafael - pistis - demystifying jungian psychology, pg. 40-41
to compensate for this mediocre life they're abducted by the intoxicating realm of possibilities
To prove to others – and to myself – that I do indeed exist, I needed to give the machine fresh content: new takes, new rage, new intimacy. Yet I found myself utterly unable to deliver, unable to do the basic identity maintenance I had done for my entire adult life and that the attention economy demands.
to prove... that i do indeed exist, i needed to give the machine fresh content
“Life and spirit are two powers or necessities between which man is placed. Spirit gives meaning to his life, and the possibility of its greatest development. But life is essential to spirit, since its truth is nothing if it cannot live” (C.G. Jung – V8 – §648). ”
pg. 131 kruger, rafael - pistis - demystifying jungian psychology
I find it difficult to wrangle facts. I find it difficult to know what to do with them, how to organize them so they make sense and tell some sort of narrative. Truth is the thing that emerges from the careful arrangement of details. Fact is the word we use to describe a detail that has some particular relationship to the truth. But any group of details can be arranged so they seem to cohere into a truth – and when we have discerned that truth, we call those details facts, even if they previously were untrue.
truth is the thing that emerges from the careful arrangement of details
Vertigo invades when the world we thought we knew no longer holds.
The world is not holding. (pg. 320)
see also nothing can radicalize someone more than feeling like you’re being lied to
vertigo invades when the world we thought we knew no longer holds
...I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
Didion, Joan, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, as seen in On Keeping My Notebook // Trina O'Gorman – Baum-kuchen.
2024-09-06 {202302220425} identity development is facilitating a conversation between the past, present, and future
we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be
the 2000s “torture porn” trend is still often maligned as the horror genre’s flop era. people compare it negatively, both to classic slashers… and to the current trend of ‘elevated’ horror. starting with the babadook, the vvitch, hereditary, and get out – movies that endeared the horror genre to gatekeepers of middle-brow taste, with artful cinematography and ostentatious use of allegory to explore ““serious themes””.
oh, the monster is a metaphor for trauma. wow, that’s really elevated.
it’s so elevated the camera’s turning upside down – whooooaaaa –
this timestamp lol
https://youtu.be/uiGIbdrQjbI?t=592
…writing, especially about one’s life, is a process of telling half-truths, exaggerated truths, and fabrications. Writing - at least the writing I enjoy reading - is rarely precise reality transcription. It’s a simulation of reality, refracted through our personal preferences, stylistic choices, and unconscious biases…
Look closer, the writer asks, gaze at the viscera that I’m willing to show you. I’ll try to keep my guts tidy. And you, dear reader, can understand that your gaze is only partial. That your perception is limited, by your own positionality and by the amount I’m willing to share. That’s the beauty of writing and reading - embarking on a song and dance to seek understanding.
writing, especially about one's life, is a process of telling half-truths
Yes, let us learn Literature and Grammar and Physics and How to Conduct ourselves in Social Settings. And then let us Continue Converting and Imprisoning and Subjecting and Killing in the Name of All the Things that We have been Taught. And let us Assume that our Society, Working on such a Complicated and Established system, cannot possibly be Barbaric.
This is a note I put on Facebook in 2011 or 2012. I have absolutely no idea where it's from, and I can't find the source.
In Joseph Campbell's words: “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path”.
kruger, rafael - pistis - demystifying jungian psychology pg. 63
the wave does not have to die to become water; she is already water
Writing down your thoughts is both necessary and harmful. It leads to eccentricity, narcissism, preserves what should be let go. On the other hand, these notes intensify the inner life, which, left unexpressed, slips through your fingers. If only I could find a better kind of journal, humbler, one that would preserve the same thoughts, the same flesh of life, which is worth saving. Moreover the writer invents [herself] as a character in this form. [She] shapes [her]self from the shards of the everyday, from the truth of that daily life. Which is also a truth not to be scorned.
Kamienska, Anna, from In that Great River: A Notebook
what matters to her ... is to seize this time that comprises her life on earth at a given period, the time that has coursed through her, the world she has recorded merely by living
Anne Ernaux