When i heard about the concept of pharmakon, it was as if something happened to me. Do you know about it? I tried to find a way to explain it but i am a bit too tired, so here are wikipedia’s explanationIn critical theory, Pharmakon is a concept introduced by Jacques Derrida. It is derived from the Greek source term phármakon, a word that can mean either remedy, poison, or scapegoat. In his book "Plato's Pharmacy" Derrida explores the notion that writing is a pharmakon in a composite sense of these meanings as "a means of producing something". Derrida uses pharmakon to highlight the connection between its traditional meanings and the philosophical notion of indeterminacy. "[T]ranslational or philosophical efforts to favor or purge a particular signification of pharmakon [and to identify it as either "cure" or "poison"] actually do interpretive violence to what would otherwise remain undecidable."[3]
This includes so much! The words, the translation, the poison-cure...
Now i also remember, that i often within my literary texts write:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
Like crying out.
Not always in relation to pain (but sometimes), but also when things are (too) overwhelming, when the words are lost, when there is nothing to say but AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. I also found a symbol/smiley that i like to use in chatt-conversations, its a picture of a monkey with its hands covering the mouth, for me it means “when i read what you wrote i turned into a monkey that wants to eat its hands”, that is a feeling that means “feeling feelings”, because i sometimes find it hard to distinguish between different feelings, impossible to categorize, it just feels, and feels a lot.
Thank you for mentioning the pharmakon concept - I was aware of it, but it was good to be reminded, and I plan to look deeper into it.
Last Saturday I was able to give it a new direction, this problem I told you about; it was unexpected and I am still shaken / durchgeschüttelt. What was crucial - a postcard saying "stop thinking", and - something like letting my feelings, those oriented towards life, take on the lead during the interaction. It is really better now, although I know that everything changes all the time, but for the moment it's just good, just to breath more calmly.
I very much like this picture of the monkey, expressing the feeling of just feeling a lot, and how exhausting it is.
i am very happy to read that it is better - i hope it still is (but also, i think something that i try to remind myself of all the time is: sometimes things feels better, sometimes worse, it can change, and every better-moment counts: i wrote to a friend about this a while ago, when we were writing (wwwwwwwwww!!) about relationships, and how i think it is important also when a relationship ends (or "ends", whatever that might include) "badly" to also remember how things are/have been/ also better, and also i thought a lot about this in relation to sex, how i have experienced a lot of pain in sexual encounters, but if i stop my memory before the pain/the badly/the worse/ i remember i still can feel pleasure, and i think this also is applicable to life in general, valuing moments... not sure this makes sense in the context... or you probably already know... anyway, i thought about this, and time, and change, and...)
there is snow in gothenburg too! not everyday and not much, but sometimes, and i like how the cold is then something that is touchable, visible, and audible. snow is also like birds...
also, an other thing that was on my mind when walking in the snowy air:
i thought about how my philosophy about life/language/word-world can be summarized as "taking word puns/dad jokes (is that an english (or german) expression: swedish "pappa-skämt", silly jokes with words) seriously". a friend who just went thruogh surgery felt ÖM - soreness, aching body - and therefore made a joke that they reacted more strongly to ÖM-HET (tenderness, affection, care): the swedish word ÖM, thus is a bit like pharmakon: it is the pain, the soreness, but it is also the care and the tenderness. and there is something in the words, leaking into each other, that makes something with the world, how it is percieved, i think, how one pay attention to things through words and the sound of the words... again, i don't know if this is very messy explained (i am a bit ÖM in my brain i think, from having met many humans the past days, but i think there is a feeling in here...!)
- absolutely, that makes sense, to value the moments of joy, and to remember them in times of pain. I have the tendency to get into this spiral of darkness, and then everything is just horrible - and always has been horrible, and will stay horrible forever... but it's good that in the meantime I know that I have this kind of bias, and now I can counteract, by consciously remembering the good things, the bright moments, by ensuring myself: there also was/is joy, even bliss... but it doesn't happen just like this, it always requires quite an effort.
Thank you for sharing the snow song, and your thoughts about life, about how our perception changes in accordance to the words we use to describe it.
I very much like your way of taking so called silly jokes seriously and getting somewhere else, enabling surprising new relations, enabling transformation.
Now snow.
Yes.
Very much snow at the moment. I like it but i also am very irritated, because everything is wet, when i come inside my shoes are wet and the snow melts on the floor leaving water on it, and my socks are wet and my feet don’t like wet. And i also very easily get frozen. Frozen is a word with many worlds. I have a very strong sense for the Madonna song frozen ((s)now this letterwriting seems to turn into music sharing, it was not on pupose...), mmmmmmmm mmmmmm love is a bird she needs to fly let all the hurt inside of you die you’re frozen when your heart’s not open, Madonna sings, and i realize “our words” are here : the bird, the hurt, and also the heart-hjärta-smärta (also hurt-heart much mor close than pain-heart : what do you think about Pain&Hurt?). I once wrote a play, it was called “The silence of Rabbits or Råger-Akilles and her Friends” in which Råger-Akilles is a rabbit, and four children are working on saving All Rabbits from being experimented on, by dressing out as big rabbits and occupying the science centre, one of the children never talks, and during the play one more becomes silent due to political depression and the sense of hopelessness (she feels they will never be able to save all the rabbits because they cannot really work together, too much drama and internal conflicts), but her friends decide not trying to cure her muteness but make a silent demonstration, and in that play the Madonna-Frozen-song was a big part. Also, the Frozen-movie made frozen into something new. They sing: Let it go. Which is also important. One of the sisters in the Frozen-movie is named Anna. Inside the word Frozen is also Oz, as in the wizard, the place, and I have seen the musical Wicked, based on the Oz-story, but about the wicked witch. I very much love witchcraft (the spells! also, it’s crafting!) and i think a lot about evilness (the feeling that i am evil, and the thing when someone is called evil...) and there is also a part in the Wicked-musical when they are in a school, and one of the teachers is a goat, and they are bullied by both the school system and the students, and there is a force within society that tries to silence all the non-human animals. Again: the non-human, the silence.
Ok.
My body though, don’t handle frozen very well, i get almost paralyzed, i freeze, when i am cold. Like a clash of psychological freeze-reaction and physical frozenness. And it makes me tired.
I went back to one of your earlier emails, and realized i could not open the link to the joyful pain fish.
And i thought about the frozen-word. Also, about frozen words, frozen worlds. As a joyful pain word. I think about a picture book i read, where a man and a cat find frozen fish in the lake, and the cut up the ice, and i don’t remember if the fishes are alive or dead inside the ice, but i think about the fisch-vulnerability. You wrote about E Scarry:
says that pain destroys language;
You wrote:
the utterances of pain - that bring us closer to the animal language as I suggest - the shrieks, the sounds of agony. We understand it; all animals understand it.
I could open the other link, and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaooooooooooooooo
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
i think about the hammering of letters, how it hurt the fingertips, i remember i once heard that the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, before he was super-famous, sent a lot of manuscript to the national radio, and the radio-person receiving them thought they were really bad, and wrote really angry letters of refusal, so angry the letters almost made holes in the letter, when hammering them into the paper, it is all archived. Ingmar also made a movie named the Silence.
For (s)now
(oh, this is my best serious joke at the moment, followed by (c)old: (c)old (s)now –oh!!!)