TS's session, X and a Spengler ?

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

 TDY Abreaction Ward.

ABREACTION: The discharge of energy [emotion] involved in
recalling an event that has been
repressed because it was consciously intolerable. The
experience may be one of reliving the
trauma as if it were happening in the present, complete with
physical as well as emotional
manifestations (also called revivification). A therapeutic
effect sometimes occurs through partial
discharge of or desensitization to the painful emotions and
increased insight. Abreaction can
happen spontaneously or can be therapeutically induced
through verbal suggestion or hypnosis.
Adapted from American Psychiatric Glossary, p.1. See also
flashbacks.

Flashback: A type of spontaneous abreaction common to
victims of acute trauma. Also known as
"intrusive recall," flashbacks have been categorized into
four types:

    dreams or nightmares
    dreams from which the dreamer awakens but remains under
the influence of the dream
    content and has difficulty making contact with reality
    conscious flashbacks, in which the person may or may not
lose contact with reality and
    which may be accompanied by multimodal hallucinations
    unconscious flashbacks, in which a person "relives" a
traumatic event with no awareness at
    the time or later of the connection between the
flashback and the past trauma.

Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality
Disorder, pp. 236-237.

http://www.sidran.org/glossary.html#glossary

In Dr. Roland Roecker's letter to the editor in the June 7
issue supporting "abreaction therapy,"
he refers to the work of Grinker and Spiegel during World
War II and their amytal interview
technique wherein they led the traumatized soldiers through
their traumas (and past associated
traumas), the soldiers energetically "abreacting" their
traumas. Although Dr. Roecker states that
the technique "achieved considerable success," actually it
was progressively abandoned as the
war went on.

 http://www.appi.org/pnews/sep6/peyser.html



Now we all know, or we think we know, why ("Pointsman") is
administering Amytal and Tapping Slothrop’s brain.  So, it's
Winter 1944 and there is a war going on and men are getting
pretty fucked up and it’s pretty tough to get “rupture
ducked,” so "stick a needle in my vein" and lets "talk some
more" about BOSTON? Boston, "well no, not see
exactly...elevated subway, only in Boston, steel and a
carbon shroud over the ancient bricks--"

Tired of doing or not doing the Kenosha Kid? Try a little
time/space surrealistic pillow dance?

“Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience,” Stephen
Polcari, (1991)

A mood of profound introspection followed the war, and the
AE, like many Americans, turned toward an art and thought
that presented history not a progression toward a
technological ideal but as a more complex drama of human
achievements and failures. This art was modernist and
especially surrealist. So widespread was the search for
internal explanations of events that Benton, the Regionalist
par excellence of the 1930s, momentarily ended his
frustrated search for “applicable pictorial ideas” by
turning to the work of surrealist Salvadore Dali, which he,
like the AE, combined with Christian ritual.
See
http://www2.iinet.com/art/20th/american/benton/benton32.jpg
Surrealism was appropriate, for it was an art that grappled
with the primary and elementary qualities of human nature,
life process, instinct, and change. Surrealism attempted to
reveal the fundamental sources and substances ot the
universe. It represented in original form violence and
strife (particularly in the works of Masson, Dali, Ernst,
and Miro). It understood life as streaming through space and
time—Dali, Masson, Tanguy.  It proposed that human life had
a dialectical nature. With its explication of the
profundities of human nature, it depicted the built-in
limits of human existence in a time of war, fascism,
totalitarianism, locating sources for human behavior in the
elemental unconscious.


Tired of never doing the Kenosha Kid?
Try a little Fowler’s better than Weisenburger on this
“problem” in his NSHO.

ARGTGR Fowler, Appendix III: “The Problem Of Imipolex G”

“With every problem like this in GR I would argue that the
poetic, illogical evocation should be ‘preferred’ to the
commonsensical”

Tired of you never did the Kenosha Kid? Try a little Jazz
and Literature?
http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/ams/Jazz/Jazz3/Noferi.html

Tired of JAZZ ? Oh no, you can’t be tired of jazz . Try a
little Nabokov?

 Strehle, Susan. “Actualization: Pynchon’s debt to Nabokov.”
(1983)

On the other hand, we might first consider Pynchon’s debt to
TAoMX as told by Alex Haley.

Pynchon’s debt to this Autobiography, is noted by Fowler and
Weisenburger in their Guide and Companion. However, it seems
to me, that Pynchon “steals” far more than either of these
two suggests.

Anyone have any ideas about Red’s stripping the drunk
soldier on the train in chapter five or any other comments?

Leon Howard’s “The Composition of Moby Dick” is worth
reading on this subject.

cfa wrote:

The path of the sun is east to west ( the corrrect
translation of
Spengler's title should be closer to "The Sunset (or Dusk)
of the
West) The west is new, fresh - the south (Africa) dark,
dank, in a
sense decrepit, the original home. The westernman seeks the
new
horizon whereas the "easternman" goes backwards to the
origin.

Right, mentioned in the intro or a preface or trans. note or
something, Adorno?
Don’t have the books now. Also have a paper-crap abridged
someplace, maybe Spengler’s  decline/dusk comments are
there? I don’t recall much on America? What I do remember
fits right in Tom’s hand as you say.

Terrance
“They are fools, with no ability to reach out with their
thoughts, who suppose that what formerly Was Not could come
into being, or that What Is could perish and be utterly
annihilated.”
     -Empedocles

“As our souls, being air, hold us together, so breath and
air embrace the entire universe.”
        -Democritus

“Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is
transformation.”
        -Wernher von Braun