Tuesday 26 February 2008

The hermaphrodite family is a happy family

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"We begin by desiring (and wanting to murder) the parents; registering the horror, not to mention the impossibility of this project, we more or less relinquish it. We renounce our first desires and wait; and eventually, if all goes well, we will as adults find people who are sufficiently reminiscent of the parents to be exciting, but sufficiently different so we can consummate our desire. We want something; we realise the dangerous error of our ways; and we find the substitutes that can satisfy us. We can, in a sense, have what we want because it isn't what we really want, which we could never have anyway.

But then there is the parallel text to this story [in which] our desire is ineluctably, undistractedly, transgressive; in this life we are driven to always approach and avoid the objects of desire, and what makes us feel most alive makes us feel we are risking our lives.....In this life uncanniness is way in excess of our canniness; our actions feel at once inevitable and unintelligible (and so as shorthand we say we are in love, or we are tragic heroes, or we have made a Freudian slip).

We do not know what we are doing, and yet we feel ineluctably involved in our lives. Where once there were security operations, now there is risk; where once safety was the be-all and end-all, now fear is preferred. A sense of aliveness displaces a sense of certainty as a paramount consideration. Surprise and dread are the order, of the day. In our transgressive life it is as though there is; something - or someone - we seem to value more than our lives, more than life itself."

From Equals, Adam Phillips (2002:112)

Sunday 24 February 2008

Reasons to be cheerful

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(Click on image to enlarge)

It's Richard's 40th today.

I wanted to come up with an equal number of reasons to be cheerful. But faltered after the first five.

Wednesday 20 February 2008

Compare the best of their days with the worst of your days, you won't win.

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This was inspired by a post on Jeannette's blog.
There was an interesting discussion about suicide on the Moral Maze this week.
But before you throw yourself out of your goldfish bowl, listen to this.

Sunday 17 February 2008

Monday 4 February 2008

This is your life Ma

It's been a bit quiet on the Prozacville-front recently as I've focused my energies on a side project for my mother's 60th birthday (which is today).

It's a 60+ panel piece, with each illustration depicting a memory from her childhood - drawn, hand-coloured and then mounted on 'ash grey' board.

It has given me much pleasure collaborating with her on this Remembrance of Things Past/In Search of Lost Time undertaking.

This strange eventful history will now hang on a wall in her lounge, prefiguring perhaps the 'second childishness' to come, and oh yes, the 'mere oblivion' to which we are both now heading, albeit at slightly different speeds.