Status Updates From When You're Falling, Dive: ...

There's the agony of joy, startled to find someone else perched on a ladder in the next garden- and there's a quiet stillness, weeping openly in a field in mid afternoon because of the sudden overwhelming sense of peace dealt in a handful of words, a tone, nearly nothing at all, by the world's measure.

Small things can mean so much. So what goes where? Is the master morality merely the ability to choose your pain?

Hitting hardballs now. Yeah, incest is that common. Yes, there are experiences that cause you to die a walking death, and when you come back, there is something left behind. And you have to find it to move forward. Also, he's spun up the idea of joy as the absence of pain.

I'll play. Last three times you've felt joy. Really felt it. Was there pain first? If so, how much, how long, what kind?

Normally love it when authors leave breadcrumbs, but this hope with a broken harp, and Dugdale... No. Chesterton, Rodin, J RR Martin, Aristophanes, Brothers Karamazov (Sigmund's), all good leads. If you are what you love, and Nietzsche goes on about Socrates who lived for Athens, let's pour over Homer and sail with Paracles.

But this is reading a hard dead end.

Mistaking Freud wins no points. Pleasure as a relief of pain was mentioned first by Socrates. (You always hurt the one you love? Anyhow.) This too has a polar division, higher and lower, as with morality, humor, etc. Different mural pathways, different facial muscles, different energy levels. Nietzsche had it. Creativity, passion, engagement instead of blind worship- Freud read the Greek plays too.

I'm generally more at home with cohesion, but this seems to be taking an acupuncture approach. The samurai heaven and hell- very yes. The four question "work", I still call the "rational or not?" game. I've been playing it for years, in a simpler version. Thoughts don't lie, so much as they struggle to process whatever information they have. Most of it is discarded out of hand. Thus works the garden path mindset.