Reading

Reading this psychological analysis of Emily Dickinson's life is tough going.
Every description of a psychologically significant event triggers comparisons with my own formative processes and I drift off into waking reveries and wonderings about my life and times and find myself lost on the page searching for the sentence that threw me off the trail.
Quite annoying.
Because, of course Life is made up of significant psychological events and we all experience them all.
We don't all hide in the attic literally as E.D.did but to some extent we all seek a place of safety, job, power, political office, society, religious fantasy, art, "the future", "life on other planets", movies, etc
It futile, of course, and it's the degree of immersion in the dream that measures relative "sanity".
Because the reality is that your best and safest place is on this planet with your feet on the ground, your eyes, ears, nose, and mind open.
Turning your senses inward can lead to a sliding scale from mild amusement to suicide

So, anyway I think that analysis of this sort seems to me often to be looking at things from the wrong direction. Saying that traumatic events in one's formation "cause" psychosis is not as convincing as saying that latent psychosis makes certain life events traumatic.

The "old maid" stereotype, the physically healthy but sexually repressed older woman locking herself in her room fantasizing about rapists is a staple character of the arts of theater, movies, and gossip.

But, we are all born with legs a certain length, hair a certain color and minds of specific strengths and weaknesses.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, knowhattImean, knowhattImean?

We could be a little nicer to each other but religion and the law for their own subversive motivations make that a risky course of action.



AIDA was apparently terrific.
I personally was enduring a slightly runny nose a bout of lethargy and spent most of the show waiting for it to be over.
In retrospect, however the set, the acting, the singing, all of it was magnificent.

It just seems that all this genius could be better employed than to display the actions of idiots who "fall in love" and screw up their and everybody else's life.

O.K. "La Boheme" is about people who care about each other, but it's not much of a moral lesson that nothing can be done about disease.

In spite of the medical establishment's loony fantasies about it's own efficacy.

But I suppose the catharsis is useful, letting the monkey out in a safe and controlled environment has got to be better than "keeping it all in".

Better to cheer Aida and Rademes removing themselves from the gene pool than to take it out on me.

Let's face it, it's the ruling class that enjoys these things and if it keeps them from taking it out on us social inferiors, so much the better.

So, once again; "Screw the Seattle Symphony Orchestra".