28 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. The mortgage document which secures the promissory note by giving the lender an interest in the property and the right to take and sell the property—that is, foreclose—if the mortgage payments aren't made.
  2. Jun 2023
    1. L’alto mare aperto: Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare e sa cosa vuol dire, è quando l’orizzonte si chiude su se stesso, libero diritto e semplice, e non c’è ormai che odore di mare: dolci cose ferocemente lontane.

      The high sea opens up new possibilities of connecting. This passage of the chapter follows a moment of solid and fixed textual memory. After managing the recitation of two terzine from Inferno 26 that initiate the encounter with Ulysses, Levi indicates his frustration at his inability to translate, but also points to Jean’s ability to connect from afar, from a cultural and linguistic remove. Then a gap in memory, a struggle to recall. Half phrases finally crystallise in a well-remembered line, ‘Ma misi me per l’alto mare aperto’ (Inf. 26, 110). This line first prompts Levi to play the role of teacher, explaining to Jean how ‘misi me’ is not the same as the French ‘je me mis,’ but rather something bolder (see also this annotation). In doing so, in envisioning the liberatory potential of breaking a boundary, a chain, putting oneself beyond a barrier, Levi sees a precious and telling connection between himself and Pikolo: ‘noi conosciamo bene questo impulso’. There is a flattening of difference here, a forging of a bond between two men that stretches across the Mediterranean, across a linguistic and poetic divide. Levi is no longer explaining, translating, teaching; instead, they have found a connection in seeking to go beyond, to break out and be free.

      Importantly, this oceanic connection privileges Jean’s experience over Primo’s technical knowledge. It is by no means the same as the disdain for intellectuals shown by Alex at the beginning of the chapter. Rather, this emphasis on Pikolo’s experience - ‘Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare e sa cosa vuol dire…’ - is a way to privilege what might be gained through the perspective of the cultural outsider. Jean has been on the sea; he apparently knows what Primo describes as that feeling of freedom when there is nothing left but the aroma of the ocean. Has Primo not had that? (Perhaps only in the pages of books, by Salgari, Conrad?) Is he thus able to have a wholly different, more potent experience of Inferno 26 as a result of this ‘non-native’ reading? Earlier in the chapter, the ‘leggero odore’ of paint and tar have - strangely, almost paradoxically - brought to Levi’s mind ‘qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia’, but this is of another order. Primo’s experience seems to have been shore-bound; Jean has truly sailed.

      Because Pikolo knows (and the use of ‘sapere’ is telling here, in contrast to the ‘canoscenza’ of Ulysses’ dictum to follow), Primo can convey with both precision and lyricism that mode of apprehension and feeling of emancipation: ‘è quando l’orizzonte si chiude su se stesso, libero diritto e semplice, e non c’è ormai che odore di mare’. He is envisioning and embodying the possibilities of freedom, of being unbound and certainly not being inundated by odours of a very different kind, such as the paint and tar evoked earlier. The image of the horizon closing in on itself stands in stark contrast to the end of both Dante’s Inferno 26 and the end of this chapter, when it is the sea that closes over Ulysses and his companions, and - by implication and association - over Primo and Jean once more as well. The use of the verb ‘rinchiudere’ in that final moment is also striking, almost as if to imply that there are moments such as this one that open out to the world at large but there is the inevitable return to the horror of the camp that once more closes over them. Here, though, the sea is freedom: it is a simple, straight line of the horizon that connects these individuals together in their desire to escape.

      In that exquisite, bittersweet phrase ‘dolci cose ferocemente lontane,’ there is something not just Ulyssean (‘né dolcezza di figlio…’), not just hybrid (‘dulcis’ and ‘ferox’ together, which also resonates with the ‘viver come bruti’ to come), but also a channeling of Purgatorio. One might think in particular of the opening of Purgatorio 8: ‘Era già l’ora che volge il disio | ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core | lo dì c’han detto ai dolci amici addio…’. Here, too, the sweet memory of things left behind is made bitter by their absence and separation across the sea. Such a way of thinking Ulysses and the ocean voyage across the Commedia is almost a banality; it nonetheless serves to give us some impetus to thinking about Levi as a reader of not just Inferno, but of other parts of the poem as well.

      And it serves to have us perhaps think about this powerful moment of Mediterranean connectivity a little differently, to take that insight of valorising Jean’s non-native perspective out to the world at large. In his 1990 work Poetics of Relation, Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant espouses Relation as a means to connect globally and valorise the multilingual, multicultural nature of the Caribbean as a model for global culture that is rhizomatic and not tied to a single, Western line of becoming. Glissant sees the Mediterranean as an enclosed sea, ‘a sea that concentrates’, while the Caribbean is ‘a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc. A sea that diffracts’. In this moment of SQ, I wonder if we might find the Caribbean model as one that resonates more with the Primo-Jean dynamic, as Jean’s experience of the open sea asks us to see Dante’s text as one that is not enclosed but rather must be opened up to the global reader. Indeed, Glissant himself characterises Dante’s Commedia as a work that is committed to cultural mixing, dwelling on how ‘one of the greatest monuments of Christian universalisation stresses the filiation shared by ancient myths and the new religion linking both to the creation of the world’. Perhaps this moment of connection, of seeing the liberatory possibilities in the open sea that beckons, is not just a way to palpably feel the strength of Primo and Jean’s new bond, but also to urge us as global readers to embrace the diffractive, rhizomatic potential of a decolonised Dante.

      AK

    2. Trattengo Pikolo

      This paragraph fascinatingly exemplifies how a text can build on bodily patterns and sensorimotor experience to produce an effect that enriches its semantic meaning. Positioned towards the end of the chapter, it coincides with the emotional peak of Levi’s attempt to explain Dante’s Commedia to Pikolo. The conversation leads Levi’s mind outside of the camp and far from his present condition (‘Per un momento, ho dimenticato chi sono e dove sono’), back to Turin (‘non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino!’) and to a place where it is possible to devote time and mental effort to existential issues other than bare survival. Yet, at the same time, it is Levi’s present condition that makes it all the more important to convey to Pikolo the relevance of Ulysses’ story and Dante’s recounting of it.

      The feeling of this sudden expansion – towards other geographical places, past times, and higher meanings – is rendered through various stylistic devices. While the average length of sentences in the chapter is 16.5 words (Voyant Tools), this sentence counts 74 words; the anomalous length of the sentence dovetails with the unusual breadth of Levi’s thoughts, with how far he concedes himself to go with his mind away from the concerns of his life in the camp. Within this continuous flow of words, the urgency of Levi’s present task is formally conveyed through the accumulation of paratactic sentences linked via asyndeton, which reinforce the idea of a linear proceeding, simply propelled forward without strong control (which would be expressed by a period with a more complex and rigid structure), stretching out towards meanings that seem to escape Levi’s reach (and whose scope progressively increases: specific textual passages; the Middle Ages; human destiny). However, this long, loosely ordered period is delimited by words with a high deictic power: ‘Trattengo’ and ‘oggi qui’. Both the opening verb and the closing pair of adverbs (temporal and spatial) identify a deictic centre that coincides with the narrator (and the reader): in between, the paragraph unfolds in a flow that leads both narrator and reader far from the camp, in an encompassing movement that reaches out in time and space to the point of touching and almost enfolding something ‘gigantesco’, which is the sense of destiny of the entire human race, and then swiftly reverts to the starting point of the here and now (‘oggi qui’). (For more on this 'qui', see here.)

      The meaning of Levi’s words is reinforced thanks to a conceptual metaphor operating unconsciously which is that of THINKING IS MOVING (writing conceptual metaphors in capital letters is a linguistics convention). THINKING IS MOVING is an elaboration of the very general conceptual metaphor MIND IS BODY, which means that we automatically tend to conceptualise mental activities in terms of bodily activities, because the latter are those of which we have immediate experience. In this paragraph, the encompassing wandering of Levi’s thoughts, its breadth and immense distance from the reality of the camp, is conveyed through strategies that all variably rely on the reader’s bodily experience. Sensorimotor experience operates unconsciously and yet plays a crucial role: it is our non-representational knowledge of what is feels like to move through open spaces, to be held vs. be released, to roam freely with our bodies, that scaffolds and enriches our understanding of what it means to metaphorically roam with one’s mind. Thanks to this metaphor, because the deictic centre at the beginning and at the end of the period is the same and is close to the narrator (reader), this period is endowed with a feeling of circularity, of reaching out and returning to the starting point, which is not explicitly expressed in the text and is rather projected by the reader’s embodied experience.

      MB

    3. La polvere di ruggine ci bruciava sotto le palpebre e ci impastava la gola e la bocca con un sapore quasi di sangue.

      The intense sensoriality of this sentence opens up questions of visceral geographies and material ecocriticism by way of stimuli pertaining to touch and taste in particular: the rusty environment gives rise to forbidding language associated not only with the exterminatory context (burning/blood) but also with the human being pervaded by the non-human, as the particles of iron oxide unsettle the functioning of the eyes and gullet.

      DAFR

    4. una qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia

      Memories of childhood always send a pang through the heart. Not because they are sad. Perhaps they are, but the pang can be deeper when they are good, for they tell us of what is utterly lost and are thus redolent of our relentless passage through time, projected as we are towards death with, so it seems, an increasing rapidity as we get older. Levi passes quickly over this moment of thought of his infancy. But it sets the tone for ‘Il canto di Ulisse’: the tone of something utterly lost and yet completely present. The childhood beach with its peculiar smell of paint and tar is wholly past and yet it is Levi, here, now. In this moment it is everything he is. Just so, the canto is utterly gone, belonging to a different life, the life Levi had before Auschwitz, and yet is here, now, making him this particular individual man with this burden of identity. He is freighted with the memory of the beach as he is with the memory of those lines from Dante.

      When I was a child, I was sometimes taken in the summer in my parents’ car to one of the few sandy beaches near to where I grew up. The car park was behind the dunes and was itself a vast expanse of coarse grass worn flat and of impacted sand. The smell of that beach was the smell of the grass and sand mingled with that of the hot interior of the car, leather and metal warmed through, the bench seat offering to my child’s body a kind of place of perfect rest, long enough for me to stretch out on it to warm myself after the coldness of the sea. For me, leather and metal are what paint and tar were to Levi: the odours of these at the beach, suffused with the smell of hot sand.

      I cannot think of those odours and all they bring back to me of my childhood without pain, intense but somehow delicious in its melancholy. This is all lost but it is mine and no-one else’s, giving me an acute sense of my individuality. I grasp that Levi had the same sense in remembering that smell of paint and tar from his childhood, even in this dark place. This is why he needs to mention it; this is why he passes over it so rapidly. It is everything and nothing; it is painful and sweetly delicious. This experience of the memory of the beach, surging up out of the nowhere of the camp, is at one with the eruption in Levi’s mind of the canto from Dante. Not everyone can read Dante. But everyone knows of these odours of childhood. Levi is saying: somewhere in this nightmare, in this hell created by some human beings to torture other human beings, there is someone else who, perhaps deprived of culture and learning, ill-educated and uninterested in books, nonetheless has a feeling for his or her childhood as I do for mine. I move from that to Dante; this other person will not. No matter. What binds me to that other, even this side of good and evil where theft is honoured and cheating praised, in this world of remorseless self-concern for the sake of survival, is that he or she too will smell the tar and paint, or some other material, and then be joined again to a moment of childhood. There is a common fellowship after all, a fellowship forged by the fact that that other unknown person and I are both returned to our childhood in some fleeting moment that is saturated in an odour.

      Levi then tries to express this in turning to Pikolo and grasping after those fragments from Dante in order to get him to understand these words of a – for Pikolo – foreign language and feel the depth of Levi’s response to Dante. But it is the beach that is at the back of that: the Dante stands proxy for a more universal feeling – that feeling that we can have, says Levi, even here, perhaps especially here, for our lost childhood.

      CH

    5. bruciava

      Sensorial descriptions help readers to get better involved in the story. The body is a universal signifier shared and recognised by all. Bodily signs, perceptions, and markers of suffering prove themselves to be universally intelligible. They can bridge the distance between readers and characters. On the body as signifier see, for example, Madelaine Hron’s ‘The Trauma of Displacement’ (in Kurtz 2018, 284-98).

      MJ

    1. bruciava

      Sensorial descriptions help readers to get better involved in the story. The body is a universal signifier shared and recognised by all. Bodily signs, perceptions, and markers of suffering prove themselves to be universally intelligible. They can bridge the distance between readers and characters. On the body as signifier see, for example, Madelaine Hron’s ‘The Trauma of Displacement’ (in Kurtz 2018, 284-98).

      MJ

    2. bruciava

      Sensorial descriptions help readers to get better involved in the story. The body is a universal signifier shared and recognised by all. Bodily signs, perceptions, and markers of suffering prove themselves to be universally intelligible. They can bridge the distance between readers and characters. On the body as signifier see, for example, Madelaine Hron’s ‘The Trauma of Displacement’ (in Kurtz 2018, 284-98).

      MJ

    3. L’alto mare aperto: Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare e sa cosa vuol dire, è quando l’orizzonte si chiude su se stesso, libero diritto e semplice, e non c’è ormai che odore di mare: dolci cose ferocemente lontane.

      The high sea opens up new possibilities of connecting. This passage of the chapter follows a moment of solid and fixed textual memory. After managing the recitation of two terzine from Inferno 26 that initiate the encounter with Ulysses, Levi indicates his frustration at his inability to translate, but also points to Jean’s ability to connect from afar, from a cultural and linguistic remove. Then a gap in memory, a struggle to recall. Half phrases finally crystallise in a well-remembered line, ‘Ma misi me per l’alto mare aperto’ (Inf. 26, 110). This line first prompts Levi to play the role of teacher, explaining to Jean how ‘misi me’ is not the same as the French ‘je me mis,’ but rather something bolder. In doing so, in envisioning the liberatory potential of breaking a boundary, a chain, putting oneself beyond a barrier, Levi sees a precious and telling connection between himself and Pikolo: ‘noi conosciamo bene questo impulso’. There is a flattening of difference here, a forging of a bond between two men that stretches across the Mediterranean, across a linguistic and poetic divide. Levi is no longer explaining, translating, teaching; instead, they have found a connection in seeking to go beyond, to break out and be free.

      Importantly, this oceanic connection privileges Jean’s experience over Primo’s technical knowledge. It is by no means the same as the disdain for intellectuals shown by Alex at the beginning of the chapter. Rather, this emphasis on Pikolo’s experience - ‘Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare e sa cosa vuol dire…’ - is a way to privilege what might be gained through the perspective of the cultural outsider. Jean has been on the sea; he apparently knows what Primo describes as that feeling of freedom when there is nothing left but the aroma of the ocean. Has Primo not had that? (Perhaps only in the pages of books, by Salgari, Conrad?) Is he thus able to have a wholly different, more potent experience of Inferno 26 as a result of this ‘non-native’ reading? Earlier in the chapter, the ‘leggero odore’ of paint and tar have - strangely, almost paradoxically - brought to Levi’s mind ‘qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia’, but this is of another order. Primo’s experience seems to have been shore-bound; Jean has truly sailed.

      Because Pikolo knows (and the use of ‘sapere’ is telling here, in contrast to the ‘canoscenza’ of Ulysses’ dictum to follow), Primo can convey with both precision and lyricism that mode of apprehension and feeling of emancipation: ‘è quando l’orizzonte si chiude su se stesso, libero diritto e semplice, e non c’è ormai che odore di mare’. He is envisioning and embodying the possibilities of freedom, of being unbound and certainly not being inundated by odours of a very different kind, such as the paint and tar evoked earlier. The image of the horizon closing in on itself stands in stark contrast to the end of both Dante’s Inferno 26 and the end of this chapter, when it is the sea that closes over Ulysses and his companions, and - by implication and association - over Primo and Jean once more as well. The use of the verb ‘rinchiudere’ in that final moment is also striking, almost as if to imply that there are moments such as this one that open out to the world at large but there is the inevitable return to the horror of the camp that once more closes over them. Here, though, the sea is freedom: it is a simple, straight line of the horizon that connects these individuals together in their desire to escape.

      In that exquisite, bittersweet phrase ‘dolci cose ferocemente lontane,’ there is something not just Ulyssean (‘né dolcezza di figlio…’), not just hybrid (‘dulcis’ and ‘ferox’ together, which also resonates with the ‘viver come bruti’ to come), but also a channeling of Purgatorio. One might think in particular of the opening of Purgatorio 8: ‘Era già l’ora che volge il disio | ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core | lo dì c’han detto ai dolci amici addio…’. Here, too, the sweet memory of things left behind is made bitter by their absence and separation across the sea. Such a way of thinking Ulysses and the ocean voyage across the Commedia is almost a banality; it nonetheless serves to give us some impetus to thinking about Levi as a reader of not just Inferno, but of other parts of the poem as well.

      And it serves to have us perhaps think about this powerful moment of Mediterranean connectivity a little differently, to take that insight of valorising Jean’s non-native perspective out to the world at large. In his 1990 work Poetics of Relation, Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant espouses Relation as a means to connect globally and valorise the multilingual, multicultural nature of the Caribbean as a model for global culture that is rhizomatic and not tied to a single, Western line of becoming. Glissant sees the Mediterranean as an enclosed sea, ‘a sea that concentrates’, while the Caribbean is ‘a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc. A sea that diffracts’. In this moment of SQ, I wonder if we might find the Caribbean model as one that resonates more with the Primo-Jean dynamic, as Jean’s experience of the open sea asks us to see Dante’s text as one that is not enclosed but rather must be opened up to the global reader. Indeed, Glissant himself characterises Dante’s Commedia as a work that is committed to cultural mixing, dwelling on how ‘one of the greatest monuments of Christian universalisation stresses the filiation shared by ancient myths and the new religion linking both to the creation of the world’. Perhaps this moment of connection, of seeing the liberatory possibilities in the open sea that beckons, is not just a way to palpably feel the strength of Primo and Jean’s new bond, but also to urge us as global readers to embrace the diffractive, rhizomatic potential of a decolonised Dante.

      AK

    4. Trattengo Pikolo

      This paragraph fascinatingly exemplifies how a text can build on bodily patterns and sensorimotor experience to produce an effect that enriches its semantic meaning. Positioned towards the end of the chapter, it coincides with the emotional peak of Levi’s attempt to explain Dante’s Commedia to Pikolo. The conversation leads Levi’s mind outside of the camp and far from his present condition (‘Per un momento, ho dimenticato chi sono e dove sono’), back to Turin (‘non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino!’) and to a place where it is possible to devote time and mental effort to existential issues other than bare survival. Yet, at the same time, it is Levi’s present condition that makes it all the more important to convey to Pikolo the relevance of Ulysses’ story and Dante’s recounting of it.

      The feeling of this sudden expansion – towards other geographical places, past times, and higher meanings – is rendered through various stylistic devices. While the average length of sentences in the chapter is 16.5 words (Voyant Tools), this sentence counts 74 words; the anomalous length of the sentence dovetails with the unusual breadth of Levi’s thoughts, with how far he concedes himself to go with his mind away from the concerns of his life in the camp. Within this continuous flow of words, the urgency of Levi’s present task is formally conveyed through the accumulation of paratactic sentences linked via asyndeton, which reinforce the idea of a linear proceeding, simply propelled forward without strong control (which would be expressed by a period with a more complex and rigid structure), stretching out towards meanings that seem to escape Levi’s reach (and whose scope progressively increases: specific textual passages; the Middle Ages; human destiny). However, this long, loosely ordered period is delimited by words with a high deictic power: ‘Trattengo’ and ‘oggi qui’. Both the opening verb and the closing pair of adverbs (temporal and spatial) identify a deictic centre that coincides with the narrator (and the reader): in between, the paragraph unfolds in a flow that leads both narrator and reader far from the camp, in an encompassing movement that reaches out in time and space to the point of touching and almost enfolding something ‘gigantesco’, which is the sense of destiny of the entire human race, and then swiftly reverts to the starting point of the here and now (‘oggi qui’).

      The meaning of Levi’s words is reinforced thanks to a conceptual metaphor operating unconsciously which is that of THINKING IS MOVING (writing conceptual metaphors in capital letters is a linguistics convention). THINKING IS MOVING is an elaboration of the very general conceptual metaphor MIND IS BODY, which means that we automatically tend to conceptualise mental activities in terms of bodily activities, because the latter are those of which we have immediate experience. In this paragraph, the encompassing wandering of Levi’s thoughts, its breadth and immense distance from the reality of the camp, is conveyed through strategies that all variably rely on the reader’s bodily experience. Sensorimotor experience operates unconsciously and yet plays a crucial role: it is our non-representational knowledge of what is feels like to move through open spaces, to be held vs. be released, to roam freely with our bodies, that scaffolds and enriches our understanding of what it means to metaphorically roam with one’s mind. Thanks to this metaphor, because the deictic centre at the beginning and at the end of the period is the same and is close to the narrator (reader), this period is endowed with a feeling of circularity, of reaching out and returning to the starting point, which is not explicitly expressed in the text and is rather projected by the reader’s embodied experience.

      MB

    5. una qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia

      Memories of childhood always send a pang through the heart. Not because they are sad. Perhaps they are, but the pang can be deeper when they are good, for they tell us of what is utterly lost and are thus redolent of our relentless passage through time, projected as we are towards death with, so it seems, an increasing rapidity as we get older. Levi passes quickly over this moment of thought of his infancy. But it sets the tone for ‘Il canto di Ulisse’: the tone of something utterly lost and yet completely present. The childhood beach with its peculiar smell of paint and tar is wholly past and yet it is Levi, here, now. In this moment it is everything he is. Just so, the canto is utterly gone, belonging to a different life, the life Levi had before Auschwitz, and yet is here, now, making him this particular individual man with this burden of identity. He is freighted with the memory of the beach as he is with the memory of those lines from Dante.

      When I was a child, I was sometimes taken in the summer in my parents’ car to one of the few sandy beaches near to where I grew up. The car park was behind the dunes and was itself a vast expanse of coarse grass worn flat and of impacted sand. The smell of that beach was the smell of the grass and sand mingled with that of the hot interior of the car, leather and metal warmed through, the bench seat offering to my child’s body a kind of place of perfect rest, long enough for me to stretch out on it to warm myself after the coldness of the sea. For me, leather and metal are what paint and tar were to Levi: the odours of these at the beach, suffused with the smell of hot sand.

      I cannot think of those odours and all they bring back to me of my childhood without pain, intense but somehow delicious in its melancholy. This is all lost but it is mine and no-one else’s, giving me an acute sense of my individuality. I grasp that Levi had the same sense in remembering that smell of paint and tar from his childhood, even in this dark place. This is why he needs to mention it; this is why he passes over it so rapidly. It is everything and nothing; it is painful and sweetly delicious. This experience of the memory of the beach, surging up out of the nowhere of the camp, is at one with the eruption in Levi’s mind of the canto from Dante. Not everyone can read Dante. But everyone knows of these odours of childhood. Levi is saying: somewhere in this nightmare, in this hell created by some human beings to torture other human beings, there is someone else who, perhaps deprived of culture and learning, ill-educated and uninterested in books, nonetheless has a feeling for his or her childhood as I do for mine. I move from that to Dante; this other person will not. No matter. What binds me to that other, even this side of good and evil where theft is honoured and cheating praised, in this world of remorseless self-concern for the sake of survival, is that he or she too will smell the tar and paint, or some other material, and then be joined again to a moment of childhood. There is a common fellowship after all, a fellowship forged by the fact that that other unknown person and I are both returned to our childhood in some fleeting moment that is saturated in an odour.

      Levi then tries to express this in turning to Pikolo and grasping after those fragments from Dante in order to get him to understand these words of a – for Pikolo – foreign language and feel the depth of Levi’s response to Dante. But it is the beach that is at the back of that: the Dante stands proxy for a more universal feeling – that feeling that we can have, says Levi, even here, perhaps especially here, for our lost childhood.

      CH

  3. Feb 2023
  4. Jan 2023
    1. the lack of external input—of content to consume—is terrifying to people, to the extent that singular artifacts of media aren't sufficient. you need multiple inputs at once, to hedge against the possibility that one of them will fail to hold your attention and force you to sit in the quiet of your own mind.

      Overwhelming the senses, numbing thought -- antithetical to meditation, blocking thought rather than releasing it, detachment from reality and immersion in the created world, embracing overwhelm instead of deep experience

  5. Jun 2021
  6. Mar 2021
  7. Feb 2021
  8. Apr 2019
    1. Thalamus: Our Thalamus is like a cook.  It takes in info from all the senses and then blends it with our autobiographical memory. Breakdown of the thalamus explains why trauma is primarily remembered not as a story with a beginning, middle, or end, but as isolated sensory imprints: images, sounds, physical sensations that are accompanied by intense emotions usually terror and helplessness. In normal circumstances, the thalamus also acts as a filter or gatekeeper. This makes it a central component of attention, concentration, and new learning—all of which are compromised by trauma. People with PTSD have their floodgates wide open. Lacking a filter, they are on constant sensory overload. In order to cope, they try to shut themselves down and develop tunnel vision and hyperfocus. If they can’t shut down naturally, they may enlist drugs or alcohol to block out the world. The tragedy is that the price of closing down includes filtering out sources of pleasure and joy as well.
    1. Agency starts with what scientists call interoception, our awareness of our subtle sensory, body-based feelings: the greater that awareness, the greater our potential to control our lives. Knowing what we feel is the first step to knowing why we feel that way. If we are aware of the constant changes in our inner and outer environment, we can mobilize to manage them.
  9. Feb 2019
    1. they need only peruse what they've Writ, and consider whether they wou'd express 'cmsclvcs thus in Conversation

      And what of those who cannot see/sense writing in the same way they sense speech? What cut is she making here in ability?

  10. Feb 2017