A Day in the Life

Forgive me, but I may be well over my own head in what I am about to talk about. So expect errors, erroneous and fulsome , of which I am entirely to blame. I don't know why, but I've been thinking about the nature of schizophrenia, in particular delusions of reference. These occur when we somehow misinterpret the world. The paranoiac , for example, reads conspiracy into every action. But if, as I have been taught, we see the universe, in particular , language, as one giant, signifying system, isn't it just our inherent nature which sees us falter when trying to interpret events. The detective would seem like a good place to start in analysing this postulation. In the Sherlock Holmes model he is a master of deductive reasoning, clues pointing the way to a somewhat inevitable conclusion. In other novels, however, such as Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49", the detective is used as an instrument to portray the unreliability of following any clues or apparen...

Firstly, thanks for all your comments once again. After the Christmas break they were most welcome. I hope that I have commented sufficiently on your own blogs to let you know that your interaction is truly appreciated. Anyway, this time I was going to talk about "magical thinking", of which I seem to have been doing quite a lot lately. I first learnt about the phrase from a Joan Didion book, called "The Year of Magical Thinking", in which she describes her feelings about the death of her husband and long-time companion. She states that her thinking was "magical" after her husband's death in that she would always expect , somewhere, somehow, for him to return to her, even though he was finally, absolutely and irrevocably, dead. Something in her could not accept the finality of his death, hence she would somehow keep expecting him to walk through the door, say hello, and settle down for dinner, perhaps, as he always had done. I think, perhaps, that ...

Dear readers, I've been thinking about writing another blog for a long time now, but with Christmas and the New Year and the inevitable whoop and wharf I've been finding it rather difficult . You could say I lack the drive to positively engage with my blog. You could say I feel a little lacklustre. You could say, as klahanie , a friend of mine in cyberworld , once did, "I was going to write a blog about apathy, but then felt that I just couldn't be bothered." So, what is it with these feelings of withdrawal, lack of any seeming enthusiasm and what I feel is an inability to feel. Indeed, I often used to get frustrated at counselling sessions where the counsellor asked me, "how do you feel, David?" I just couldn't answer the question, other than to say, "well, I really don't feel like I feel anything at all." I felt I had just gone through a complete emotional shut-down. Even emotions for my friends and family didn't quite feel the sa...