/lit/ - Literature

I find reading challenging texts, in the sense that a work is either far opposed to your current expressed inclinations or comes too near to your inner lived reality in a way that is either off putting in the case where it is similar but expressed through an aesthetic that repels you by being too near but not aligned enough with your implicit inclinations, or goes straight for the vital organs, leaving the shreds of your persona on the floor; those works are the ones that break down false images, fixed ideas and ideals that mask the "reality" of the psyche. These works tend to conceptualize subjects and objects in a way that makes them mutable and full of concepts, forms. Even the other neofreudeans will tell you that pyschodynamic psychotherapy functions through giving things a name and bounds, and it's more the process of naming and organization than the model used.

Lit that invites you into that, as a mode of thought and model via the narrator, seems most effective though the majority of work isn't strictly applicable because it fails elsewhere. It's either lacking in that kind of platonic visualization or the necessary alchemical transmutation of subtil substances. It presents chemistry, or isn't a narrative, or symbolizes nothing, or has no subtext where what is presented is merely a dark mirror of the unspeakable thing itself. There is nothing for the reader to play with, it's a gallery instead of a studio.

But that's just what came to me in a few minutes, I'd have to dig back into Jung and operationalize what makes a work alchemical and tease out a lot more on that kind of mirroring or inversion of interactions and processes. All I can say right now is that the texts are occult, esoteric in presentation. They don't yield to mere reading. It's an involved process.

Anne Carson has been an interesting read so far.