WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
Thinking about losing one's mind. Mine is OK, I worry about my mom's. Nothing seems more frustrating or sad than having to interact with someone whose connection with a cultured reality was tenuous at the outset, constrained by perhaps a childhood injury, and other teenage violations that have only recently been disclosed. I have only come to understand these kinds of disclosures as I discover more about my late spouse's parents - an off-limits topic while we were together. The madness of aging might be an appropriate yet unintended liberation from memory, even as it never frees us from history.
I'll be talking to my mom's physician on Monday, so I'll know more about her current state since I'll be having her come back in March, but like my phonecall trying to help her turn the television on, that conversation revealed like the biography of Ray Kurzweil, we need to solve the parental sadness of loss with new accessible strategies for life.
In 2010, an independent documentary film called Plug & Pray premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival, in which Kurzweil and one of his major critics, the late Joseph Weizenbaum, argue about the benefits of eternal life
In a study of 140 geriatric outpatients that prospectively investigated psychosis in the elderly and the associated clinical diagnoses, 36.7% of patients were diagnosed with dementia. In addition, dementia accounted for the highest number of psychotic diagnoses in this study. Therefore, a clinician should be highly suspicious of dementia in an elderly patient presenting with psychosis. Alzheimer's disease currently affects about 7% of the population aged 65 and over. As the population ages, the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease is expected to more than triple by the year 2050 from 4 million to approximately 14 million. Psychosis is one of the most prominent noncognitive symptoms of Alzheimer's disease with prevalence estimates ranging from 30% to 50% and is associated with greater cognitive impairment, especially frontal/temporal dysfunction, and possibly a more rapid course
So I have been thinking about psychosis as a larger phenomenon not unlike the schizophrenia of
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari where psychosis might be seen as a scalable social/economic phenomenon like the (il)logical problems of late capitalism itself.
the shrink community has weighed in on the Newtown shooter, speculating that he may have been psychotic "meaning he had schizophrenia or schizotypal personality disorder". Matricide was a step taken to combat what he perceived to be his mother's filicide by taking him from his isolated, violent basement universe to a place that might better manage his care, but it also reified the separation from his mother. The shooter had become like a machine whose desires had been projected into his instrumental relationship with an online gaming world that could be extended by access to actual non-digital firearms.
There is no such thing as desire, only desiring-machines. I mean by this that desire has to be given the same attributes that I just claimed belong to machines. First of all, desire as desiring- machine is not a thing but a process, an act of producing. That's rather straightforward and not so different from other notions of desire. Second, desire as desiring machine has no subject and no object. For example, the statement "the boy desires to have sex with his mother" is completely out of context here.
The Doors The End: "....Came to a door. He looked inside. Father? Yes, son? I wanna kill you. Mother...I want to..."
In this framework there is no subject that has the desire or the desiring-machine, nor can desire really function as a verb unless somehow it could be a verb refering to no subject. The subject does not exist before desiring-machines but only after, as an effect or residue of production. Perhaps precisely because desiring machines are asubjective, with no subject behind them, we cannot conceive of the object of desire in the same way. Desiring- machines cannot be conceived as a desire to do or have an object or even achieve a state. (Hence "the object of desire" really doesn't make sense here.) Desiring-machines have no object, or goal, or telos, but rather are completely invested in the process, the production. Desiring-machines can thus never be "satisfied" or come to a completion....The only object of desiring-machines is production itself.
In the case of Newtown the production is that of loss-driven self-annihilation - the murdering of one's mother and then proceeding to extend that act to the rest of the world where the murder of innocents is also the murder of innocence - Anikin Sykwalker's same psychotic slaughter in
Star Wars III.
Enraged, Anakin slaughters every single Tusken in the camp, including the women, children, and every Bantha mount. His mother's death ignites in Anakin a strong phobia of loss, and sets him on the path to becoming Darth Vader.
A civil society should know better than allow mediated fantasy to dominate a world with so many dangers, but the Newtown aftermath has shown that psychosis in many dimensions and at many scales is the coin of the realm these days. But now it's time to rethink things and reflect on more peaceful future action.
Our society, already flooded with information, might act with greater wisdom if we developed the habit of simmering. Plato knew better than our modern critics that without silence and time for deliberation, we are condemned to be imprisoned in a virtual reality not of our making.
So that's my FP: caregiving in a time of chaos and catastrophe. Tell us about your FPs.