This Morning

Yesterday i walked into Sittingbourne as it was such a nice sunny afternoon. Had steak and chips at the pub and then Phil turned up. We left sometime after ten in the evening. I do not remember much after that nor the short train ride home. I was a Lillie tiddly.

This morning i watched two episodes of Charmed. The end of season 1 where the cop Andy (Pru's lover) gets killed by a demon with Tempus trying to wind time back for the demon to kill the charmed ones, and then followed by the first episode of season 2 in which Abraxas steals the Book Of Shadows.

Interestingly, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote a short Gnostic treatise in 1916 called The Seven Sermons to the Dead, which called Abraxas a god higher than the Christian God and devil that combines all opposites into one being. In Carl Jung's 1916 book Seven Sermons to the Dead, Abraxas is a representation of the driving force of individuation (synthesis, maturity, oneness), referred with the figures for the driving forces of differentiation (emergence of consciousness and opposites), Helios God-the-Sun, and the Devil.

I also picked up two self-adhesive hooks from Wilco for a quid, so that one would replace the broken one in the kitchen and one for my bedroom door to hang up clothes on a hanger.

I might pop over to Rainham later, as i did not go to see the guy at Past sentence bookshop to sell some books. I rang first but got no reply, so i suspect that he did not open yesterday. I might go on Thursday,

Birthday Greetings

Happy birthday to onceupon , and juliet316.

May you both have a great day.

Book 54 - Brian Dillon "Tormented Hope"

Brian Dillon "Tormented Hope" (Penguin)





Brian Dillon's book tells the stories of nine famous people and the role their hypochondria played in their lives. The subjects range from the historical (Charles Darwin & Emily Bronte) to the modern (Michael Jackson and Andy Warhol), and Dillon respectfully delves into their medical and psychological histories.


Hypochondriasis, Brian Dillon tells us in this ingenious and intriguing book, is characterized by an intense scrutiny of the body. We should all listen to our bodies, of course, but the nine people examined here were hypersensitive, possessing a heightened awareness of having a body and of being embodied in the world.

Dillon accepts that hypochondria is to some extent a chimerical illness, but there are enough similarities and convergences to just about string these disparate lives together.

In Tormented Hope Dillon looks beyond the comic stereotype of the hypochondriac to the tragicomic reality. He also makes a strong case for there being a link between "health anxiety" and creativity, following the philosopher Gilles Deleuze's observation that many great artists have frail health, the idea of the writer or artist being simultaneously the médecin and the malade of a civilisation. Charlotte Brontë's hypochondria, he shows, was displaced on to Lucy Snowe or Jane Eyre, and Proust's was an essential aspect of his art. Dillon is a self-confessed hypochondriac and his conclusion that "the power of imagination . . . is in itself a kind of pathology" has profound implications for literature.

A morbid fear of illness often conceals a fear of death. "A Hypochondriack fancies himself at different times suffering death in all the various ways in which it has been observed," wrote James Boswell, "and thus he dies many times before his death." An exception to this is Alice James (Henry James's sister), who was perversely happy at being told she had breast cancer because her "career as an invalid" had reached its apotheosis.

Dillon quotes from a 17th-century thesis which observes that hypochondriacs can suffer spasms as a result of "sudden Outcry, or the very opening of a Door". When Andy Warhol's silver wig was snatched from his head at a book signing, he complained that "It hurt. Physically." A more extreme example is Gould's response to being patted on the shoulder by a Steinway employee in 1959. He recoiled, muttering: "Don't do that; I don't like to be touched," and later claimed that this incident had resulted in a problem with his left hand. It was the excuse he needed to withdraw from public performances, and his recording studio, like Proust's bedroom, became a refuge, "a technological cocoon that finally satisfied his urge to separate himself physically from his public".


This is a fascinating book that informs and entertains as it explores hypochondria's effects not only on these subjects' lives but also their art.

Glenn Gould Solitude Trilogy

Glenn Gould conceived the idea of contrapuntal radio ,an aural montage of overlapping voices and environmental sounds. This liminal striation of substratas does not follow a linear narrative arc, the voices of his interviewees weave a thick texture of sound from which you may unpick from the threads a particular voice, or to be dazzled by the holistic tape sliced heteroglossia.

Here is the complete set of his Solitude trilogy he recorded for CBC. Each broadcast is an hour long.



The Idea Of North (1967)

The Latecomers (1969)

The Quiet In The Land (1977)

Multiverse

Just watched Horizon on BBC2. A mind boggling look into the multiverse , from the inflationary period of the Big Bang to multiple bifurcations of quantum universes, in which every universe is parallel to our own, to the extraordinary concept of every universe including our to be the physical reality of mathematical processes. Totally fascinating.