Dysfunctional relationships

3 Body No Problem

Well-known member
I would never hear the end of it, how easy my life compared to what his generation went through.

Same with my family. It did my head in, until I lived in really dirt poor developing countries and encountered children that cant go to school because they have to work from age 5 with their parents. And these were the lucky ones, because they had a somewhat stable family who was looking after them. In such countries you'll find hordes of orphaned children scavenging garbage heaps at night.

I now agree with my family. Our generation (in developed countries) has got it extreeeemly easy, and we are just whining.
 

swears

preppy-kei
I never understood the whole "getting feelings off your chest" thing. Every time I've done this it's just led to me being punched/sacked/dumped/rejected/embarrassed/judged/laughed at. By the age of about 18 I realised that keeping my feelings to myself was going to make my life a thousand times easier. Some people are allowed the privilege of "feelings" and some aren't, like anything else.
 

mos dan

fact music
This made me chuckle, very emo:

Stages of courtly love
(Adapted from Barbara Tuchman[21])

Attraction to the lady, usually via eyes/glance
Worship of the lady from afar
Declaration of passionate devotion
Virtuous rejection by the lady
Renewed wooing with oaths of virtue and eternal fealty
Moans of approaching death from unsatisfied desire (and other physical manifestations of lovesickness)
Heroic deeds of valor which win the lady's heart
Consummation of the secret love
Endless adventures and subterfuges avoiding detection

that's awesome. have been listening to this on a loop this morning
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Thanks for the links, Lichen.

I now agree with my family. Our generation (in developed countries) has got it extreeeemly easy, and we are just whining.

Oh, I agree with them too. I don't think this means therapy or trying to work through your problems is bad or frivolous--esp if they're pretty serious--but I do get tired of the idea that the way we live in the Western world is just the sickest of all, as some hippies suggest, because (e.g.) we don't get to have fun all day instead of working, or we don't have enough self-esteem because of commercials or whatever--pleeeeze. No, I think starving to death and eating garbage, or being gang rapedand forced to be a child soldier in Africa, would be much worse than what I've been through, or what I go through on a daily basis.

Swears said:
I never understood the whole "getting feelings off your chest" thing. Every time I've done this it's just led to me being punched/sacked/dumped/rejected/embarrassed/judged/laughed at. By the age of about 18 I realised that keeping my feelings to myself was going to make my life a thousand times easier. Some people are allowed the privilege of "feelings" and some aren't, like anything else.

In my family, it was more or less a "get your feelings off" free-for-all. I can see the encounter group technique maybe being valuable for a family of supremely uptight people, who have a hard time communicating, but there's a danger in letting that become the norm. Then all you have are reactive patterns.
 
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luka

Well-known member
The first thing that springs to mind is C. S. Lewis's famous argument (in The Allegory of Love) that the medieval French troubadours effectively invented romantic love. Fin amour is initially purely a literary fiction. Then people start turning art into life, much to the religious establishment's chagrin, since the fiction is founded on adultery, (marriage being a political-financial deal, essentially). Then, I suppose, marriage has to take on these trendy ideas of romantic idealisation in order to be appealing again. Something of the shift has happened between Chaucer and Shakespeare, but it's interesting that although Shakespeare's happy endings are marriages, I couldn't think of a single play in which we have a happily married couple represented.* That comes later, I think.Found Lewis saying elsewhere that 'the conversion of courtly love into romantic monogamous love was...largely the work of English, and even of Puritan, poets'

One would probably now want to ask where the troubadours got their new ideas about love from. I think the most interesting theory is that the crusading princes picked it up from the Arab poets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtly_love#Andalusian_and_Islamic_influence

*In fact, I can't think of much later literature or art on this...

Pound had a theory on this. The cult of amor which he traced all the way back to Eleusis, but via the Arabs, the Templars and the Crusades as mentioned above. RAW adopts this theory. So you have a bunch of western tantric gurus disseminating the secret knowledge via poetry basically. That's the idea.
 

luka

Well-known member
whether these things can start as 'purely literary fictions' is debatable. It's the hyperstition bit again. There's various different ways to think about it.
 

luka

Well-known member
There's times when I'm inclined to think of everything, even down to the atomic level, as a literary fiction, and it's this which makes me think the G-O-D function is up for grabs. Whoever writes the script makes the reality.
 

luka

Well-known member
So here you wouldn't say, love doesn't exist it's just a literary fiction but rather love exists because it is a literary fiction.
 

luka

Well-known member
But embedded in the Pound theory of the cult of amor is the belief in a set of concrete practices and techniques to achieve vision, a functional body of knowledge concerning ways to gain specific concrete results.

RAW is more specific here about the tantric nature of the exercises, orgasm without ejaculation etc.
 

luka

Well-known member
This is Pound's conception of the good conspiracy, the conspiracy of intelligence and the preservation of wisdom throughout the centuries.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I didn't know Burroughs loved cats. Makes me like him more.
Not sure of this was mentioned upthread, but I believe the last note written in a notebook of his was that love was the only thing that matters. I think he only had his cats after his son passed. Talk about dysfunctional relationships.
 
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