TITHONUS' DIARY!!
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word up, homies So. Hi. Remember me? - Anyway, it occurred to me yesterday that I have another fantasy which I haven't talked about here before. Both of the other fantasies were basically sexual in nature (the harem fantasy and the rescue fantasy) whereas this one isn't. And it's not really a fantasy, exactly, more like a... a recurring thought? An exposed point in my psyche? I don't know exactly. But for whatever reason, I think a lot about torture. About being tortured. Also, things that deal with torture almost invariably have a powerful effect on me. The episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" where captain Picard is tortured by the Cardassians makes me cry every time I see it, for example. When I read "The Gulag Archipelago" I gave $100 to Amnesty International, when it was the last money I had in the world. Reading the account of interrogation in Joe Sacco's comic book "Palestine" had me in tears. And so on. - I can't figure it out, though. Why torture? I mean, there are all sorts of human tragedies which don't affect me at all. When the two towers fell, no real emotional response. (Although I do find several of the songs on "The Rising" very moving.) When I heard about the earthquake in Turkey, nothing. It's not that I don't think those events are tragic, or that on some level I don't recognise how horrific they are, but they don't move me. It's just that I don't have any kind of spontaneous emotional reaction to them. But torture is something that I... it tugs at my heartstrings every time, whether it's an account of a real event or a fictionalised description of it. - And when I think about being tortured, there's always this kind of... hatred and contempt but also something else in there. As though being tortured somehow strips me down to my fundamentals, the reality of who I am... I can't describew it. Destitution in the sense that Serres describes in "Angels". - I think maybe... maybe my mother's cruelty to me as a child was somehow akin to the psychological... condition of torturers. They are people who feel nothing themselves, so they try to feel by proxy, by causing feelings in others. They cannot feel their own sadness so they try to make other people sad, as a way of connecting with their own lost souls... - And maybe I am like that too; I cannot feel my own sense of rejection, my own outrage at being disregarded and unappreciated, and so I... try to manipulate others into feeling these things. Ugly. It's hard to think about seriously without getting defensive and trying to justify myself. I'm so good at all that defensive stuff... - Well, I think that's all I can manage today. - "Life is useless Like Ecclesiastes say" - Pete Townshend |
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