Welcome to my blog
which needs to think about wordlessness, or rather, a world without words. Is
there such a thing? Is language innate? Even as I ask the question, I know I
can’t begin to answer it properly because my mind is elsewhere and to casually
contemplate such a subject, one the finest minds have dwelt upon and argued
about, is pointless. This is why I have addressed someone who may be able to
help.
Dear Peter
My question is this: my
brother has the beginning of dementia and he is 'losing his language'. This is
something to do with the functioning of his brain (I assume.) I have worked
with people with dementia. In terms of matrika, or the four levels of speech,
or whatever, how do I understand what is happening in his inner experience?
Does the language go from that? Does the knowledge of knowing who you are
transcend your ability to remember?
We’ll see if he
answers.
---
Today I should be
postering again but fuck it is difficult. I took myself off to Somerton, a
small town some seven miles from glaston. Somerton turned out to be every bit
as dull as Axbridge, maybe even quieter. I ended up managing just two posters
and couldn’t find a place at all to advertise the hip-hop event. I woke up
feeling bad tempered and during the day have felt physically achy. Is that good
enough reason to come home? Maybe if my promised companion had turned up I
would have pressed on to the next village. Maybe not.
Do I have reasons to be
cheerful about my project. I suspect not. When I went into the record shop to
see how the ticket sales were going I discovered that the woman there had
forgotten she was selling them. I presume no customers had insisted that she
did. Somewhat bizarrely, I’m suffering, my gig is suffering, severe competition
from zombies who are not, as I thought, just doing a walk for charity, a child
death charity, but also having a Halloween party. The local paper, which did
print some of my press release, has been giving the zombies the big build up.
So it goes.
It is possible that the
Art Exhibition is taking shape. Fingers crossed. And maybe the kids program
too. Meanwhile the costs escalate daily. Will anyone come?
…
I’ve been cheering
myself up by reading more Peter Wilberg; maybe too much because I can’t take in
all the ideas. Most importantly, he reminded me of the ‘felt sense’ (Gendlin),
the ‘extended feeling’ (Palmer), which makes all the difference to getting out
of the mental trap. I’ve never been much good at keeping up my meditation
disciplines and only really turn to them for fire-fighting. This last month
I’ve been ploughing through lists and neglecting all my resource building, such
as Chi Kong, a walk, some Avatar; the result is a distinct lack of zap. Mind
you, the weather has turned cold, 3 degrees tonight, and that always takes some
adjusting to.
Both my friend Alison
and her daughter, Beth, are presently on anti-depressants. I have always been
prejudice against these drugs although I’ve witnessed, once, some help
appearing to have been done. I’m quite amazed that Alison has allowed herself
to be so ill-advised. She has also developed a yearning for valium which, it
seems, she has passed on to her daughter. Now I’m reading up on the science,
I’m appalled.
"The biggest drug-addiction
problem in the world doesn't involve heroin, cocaine or marijuana. In fact, it
doesn't involve an illegal drug at all. The world's biggest drug-addiction problem
is posed by a group of drugs, the benzodiazepines, which are widely prescribed
by doctors and taken by countless millions of perfectly ordinary people around
the world... Drug-addiction experts claim that getting people off the
benzodiazepines is more difficult than getting addicts off heroin. ‘
Of course, for many of us the
pharmaceutical industry’s lying and maleficent control of the medical world is
no surprise. What I need to do is fully understand, and then develop the tools
to explain, exactly how fallacious is the ‘science’ behind this horrendous
abuse of the brains of the people.
My own attitude has been – to quote
Wilberg- ‘That an encircling mood or
disposition, of whatever ‘depressive’ or ‘anxious’ quality, can either be felt
to “confine man in his corporeality as in a prison” or can “carry him though
corporeality as one of the paths leading out of it.” This depends entirely on
how fully we are able to feel that mood or disposition in a bodily way, and do
so with our body as a whole – our whole self or soul’. These anti-depressants
make that inward journey more, rather than less, difficult.
---
Today I went to visit two of my grandchildren and it did me good. The
little boy isn’t at all impressed by having a new sister. He’s cross and
put-out. She’s just cross. When he noticed my holding her today, he walked over
and tried to smack her. Clearly he’s upsetting his parents. Singling him out
for attention doesn’t really work because if you take him away to be on his own
he worries even more about how much attention the girl is getting from his
parents at home, although we did in fact manage to take him to a café where we
cheered him up only to be recalled by mum and dad because it was his lunchtime.
When I got home I was glad to have gone out and even gladder to spend a
day not thinking about the Day of the Dead.
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