To get in touch with the liberating and the transforming “wolf”!

The book Women who Run with the Wolves talks about the innate primordial feminine instinct, that many have quite forgotten over the eons!

This book is indeed a wonderful motivational, that inspires us to reinterpret the experience of women through folk tales, through art, and through nature!

To get in touch with the liberating and the transforming “wolf” that’s encouraging us to grow and be free!

Women who Run with the Wolves is for people who want to understand each other, work on their identity and self-worth, and heal emotional wounds.

Wounds we sometimes inherit from our ancestors or patriarchal institutions themselves.

In this respect, this book is a road map to find all the “traps” that keep us from finding the way back home to our true selves and our instincts.

It moves us towards that wild woman, perceptive with a playful spirit and wonderful capacity for affection.

Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing.

from the blurb to the book...

She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women.

But then, she is an endangered species.

In Women who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Estés unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairy tales, and stories, many from her own family, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature.

Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine.

In fact, Dr. Estés has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche.

Paying rich accolades to this lovely read, Maya Angelou has this to say: "I am grateful to Women who Run with the Wolves and to Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés. The work shows the reader how glorious it is to be daring, to be caring, and to be women. Everyone who can read should read this book."

Let’s now take a look at seven excerpts from the book, worth reflecting on…!

1. Be Yourself

“To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”

2. Be Strong

“To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex. It means meeting one’s own luminosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one’s own way. It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know. It means to stand and live.”

3. Getting away allows us to discover ourselves

“While exile is not a thing to desire for the fun of it, there is an unexpected gain from it; the gifts of exile are many. It takes out weakness by the pounding. It removes whininess, enables acute insight, heightens intuition, grants the power of keen observation and perspective that the ‘insider’ can never achieve.”

4. What happens when you don’t love yourself

“Our secret hunger for being loved is not beautiful. Our disuse and misuse of love is not beautiful. Our lack of loyalty and devotion is unloving, our state of separation from the soul is ugly, based on psychological warts, inadequacies, and childhood fancies.”

5. Authentic love

“Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back.”

6. Hit rock bottom

“The best land to plant and grow something new again is rock bottom. In that sense, hitting rock bottom, although extremely painful, is also the ground to sow new life on.”

7. Authentic growth

“If we live as we breathe, taking and releasing, we cannot make mistakes.”

It’s the cycle of life: take, learn, let go, accept, move forward. It’s natural and we should accept it and integrate it into our daily lives.

A Jungian on Adolescent rebellion and Dionysian wildness!

Healing Fiction

Author: James Hillman

So well, this is the third in the Jungian series.

Hillman is a leading scholar in Jungian and Post-Jungian thought, and the founder of the vibrant field of Archetypal Psychology, that emphasizes much on the importance of imagination both in the experience of psyche and in life itself. (Ain’t this liner ring a bell on the Counterfactual Imagination!)

James Hillman was indeed blessed to have studied with the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in the 1950s and the “Jungian” quite pervades his works too!

At the same time, Like Jung deviates much-o-much from Freud and propounds his own interesting propositions, Hillman also deviates great-o-great from Jung and comes out with some interesting propositions. One such concept is the ‘Acorn theory’!

In his bestseller The Soul's Code, he proposed that our calling in life is inborn and that it is our mission in life to realize its imperatives. This he calls the "acorn theory" — the idea that our lives are formed by a particular image, just as the oak's destiny is contained in the tiny acorn.

Hillman suggests that adolescent rebellion and Dionysian wildness is not something to be treated but something that the world requires. (Again, ain’t this cut much ice with the previous two reads on the ‘wild’!)

Now, coming over to one of his masterpiece of sorts, Healing Fiction!

Well, to put it simply, Hillman asks the basic question, "What does the soul want?"

And with such profound insight and wild humor he answers, "It wants fictions that heal."

How trueeey!

Examining the three great originators of depth psychology - Freud, Jung, and Adler the book explores on some of the interesting concepts in Psychology like - what is really meant by "case history", "active imagination" and "inferiority feelings".

As many passionate fans to Healing Fiction have quite suggested, it is probably good to begin with the third chapter (What Does the Soul Want?), then read chapters one and two. The emphasis is on the soul (not in a religious sense, but the soul as "psyche") and the needs of the "inner voice."

From that point, the use of the case study is developed as a "healing fiction."

In the development of that healing fiction, certain symbols, images, and signs are used.

The Many Faces of 'Power'

Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses

James Hillman

You sometimes expect to find the Machiavellian, the Chomskian, the Actonian or the Foucauldian streak to Hillman when he discusses on the concept of Power!

Indeed he does! There’s quite an amalgamation on some of those concepts, but still, he comes out bigtime with his own interesting views on Power too! That gives the book its aura and its vibes!

Celebrated Jungian therapist James Hillman shows how the artful leader uses each of two dozen kinds of power with finesse and subtlety.

Power, we often forget, has many faces, many different expressions.

"Empowerment," writes best-selling Jungian analyst James Hillman, "comes from understanding the widest spectrum of possibilities for embracing power."

If food means only meat and potatoes, your body suffers from your ignorance.

When your idea of food expands, so does your strength.

So it is with power. "James Hillman," says Robert Bly, "is the most lively and original psychologist we have had in America since William James."

In Kinds of Power, Hillman gives much needed substance to the subject by showing us a broad experience of power, rooted in the body, the mind, and the emotions, rather than the customary narrow interpretation that simply equates power with strength.

Hillman's "anatomy" of power explores two dozen expressions of power every artful leader must understand and use, including: the language of power, control, influence, resistance, leadership, prestige, authority, exhibitionism, charisma, ambition, reputation, fearsomeness, tyranny, purism, subtle power, growth, and efficiency.

Power in business, politics and the world of work, to most people, implies competition, domination, control and reward.

Rejecting this conventional notion of power as limited and stultifying, Hillman reconceptualizes power in terms of sustaining continuity, conserving, teaching, caring, bringing out the innate potential in each person or task.

Growth, to corporations, means bottom-line results, bigger equals better. But to Hillman, growth is a process of shedding worn-out identities, cleaning up messes, pondering the implications of one's actions for the wider world and for future generations.

The core of this highly reflective inquiry consists of short explorations: mythological, philosophical, etymological, psychological, etc., of concepts like influence, tyranny, ambition, office and decision.

Hillman points out that there are many different kinds of power and that the execution of power has many styles and nuances.

'Crisis of Narration' in Eco's "Baudolino"

The novel Baudolino has struck quite a lovely chord in me, even as Umberto Eco delves deep into the dual nature of language with consummate ease – or rather, into the Spivakian double bind, as a source of imaginative creativity and a vehicle for conveying truth.

Be it a compelling discussion on the complex nature of history, through the hero Baudolino, who is a consummate liar, or the construction of reality, or his compulsive habit of generating false realities, or how he constructs elaborate lies about his life and his involvement in historical events, yet! yettt! we are carried away by the sheer innovation of Baudolino’s implausible narration, or how Eco helps us critique the past, by putting forward the proposition: How do we narrate the past when language itself becomes untrustworthy?

A very insightful novel worth many many reads, to get to understand the nuances and the strands that exemplify the monumental ‘crisis of narration!’

Here goes the review for y’all – with Michael Sollars -

BAUDOLINO

By UMBERTO ECO (2000)

The fourth novel by the prolific Italian novelist UMBERTO ECO charts the adventurous life of the eponymous hero, a medieval adventurer and consummate liar with a gift for making the most of chance.

The book opens with Baudolino rescuing the hapless historian and Byzantine court official Niketas from the marauding knights of the Fourth Crusade during the sack of Constantinople in April 1204.

As he and Niketas wait for the chaos in the burning city to subside, Baudolino narrates the story of his extraordinary life and his continuing quest for the mythical kingdom of Prester John.

Baudolino has certainly had an interesting life. Born in 1137, in what later becomes the city of Alessandria, a chance childhood encounter with Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the Great rescues Baudolino from his impoverished environment.

From the Stacks of Desmond Morris!

Desmond Morris has been and continues to be one of the much-sought-after, delightful reads of all time!

Some of his lovelyyy reads are real unputdownables for ages!

How can one forget his best-seller-ready-reckoner on Body Language, titled, Peoplewatching: The Desmond Morris Guide to Body Language, which still continues to inspire, influence and impact millions of professionals from all walks of life!

Well, there’s yet another book from the pen of Desmond Morris, on ‘Happiness’ that quite attracted my attention, after Prof. Thomas Kuzhivelil George, Deva Madha College, Pala, had recommended it to me big-time!

Prof. Thomas is one avid reader, who’s been giving me such lovelyyy reads over email for quite many years now! And his enthusiasm for books is so soo awe-inspiring and catches up on us quick!

So yess! I’ve started reading the book quite earnestly for the past two days!

It’s titled, The Nature of Happiness and it give us a fascinating insight into What exactly is happiness?

Does it lie in the first sight of a newborn child?

Or the fulfilment of a longed-for ambition?

In The Nature of Happiness, Desmond Morris tackles the question head-on, in his own, inimitable wayyy!

To Desmond, the people who run classes in 'increasing your chances of lasting happiness' might well be surprised by questions such as:

'Why does cocaine make a drug-addict happy?'

'Why does blowing people to bits bring a state of blissful happiness to a suicide-bomber?'

or 'Why does inflicting pain create a surge of happiness in a sadist?'

And yet these are all valid queries if one is to understand the true nature of happiness.

Every kind of happiness must be considered — even those that most of us view as repulsive, anti-social or dangerous.

Only when we scan the whole range of possibilities can we hope to get to grips with the truth of this complex phenomenon.

He offers a thought-provoking exploration of the various myths and realities of all kinds of happiness — from the blissful state of the lover, to the sensual happiness of the hedonist and even the high reached by the drug taker.

The insights in this book will enable you to understand the importance of contentment in your life.

Deleuze and the Heideggerian Connect!

Well, for a little flashback to my chanced Deleuzean rendezvous!

When we met up with Dr. Kunhammad in Kannur months back, we all had such a delightful rendezvous over a cuppa in his (HoD’s) room.

There, we were discussing a whole lot of literary delights, from Spivak to Deleuze, giving little heed to Time’s wing’d chariot!

It was then, during this enlightening chit chat, that I chanced to know that Dr. Kunhammad is a Deleuzean! And howww!

This proved the much-needed impetus for me to revive my reading on Deleuze, and I was surprised to find some delightful, lovely streaks that links him with a host of philosophers, Heidegger in particular! This Heideggerian streak runs through Deleuze, on a host of concepts, much more so, with the concept of assemblage and that of the rhizome in particular!

But I’m still quite confused on a lot of his ideas. So me thought of reproducing some of them that I found a bit more easy on the eyes and mind! 

Thanks a million to Dr. Kunhammad for lighting the Deleuzean spark in us all!

This critique, given below, is from a book on Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus by Brent Adkins.

If I could give a tentative title for this passage that’s featured below, I would say…

Which do you prefer? Stability or Change?

Wanna have a stable schema for life, or changing vistas for life?

So here goes…

Between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari collaborated on a book that’s on Kafka.

Kafka continues many of the themes found in Anti-Oedipus, such as Oedipus and desire, and anticipates many of the themes that will be taken up in A Thousand Plateaus, such as immanence and assemblage.

I want to show that the concept of "assemblage" (agencement) provides the book with its thematic unity.

Deleuze himself is quite explicit about this.

When asked in an interview about the unity of A Thousand Plateaus, he replies, "I think it is the idea of an assemblage."

We can think of "assemblage" as an answer to the venerable philosophical question, What is a thing?

Deleuze and the Jamesian Connect!

Deleuze has gotten me knocking on Henry James’s stories by the number! And how!

Now I suddenly find a renewed interest in Henry James and his fiction in quite a new light of sorts!

Especially his novella, In the Cage, after Deleuze has done a wonderful ‘social theory’ analysis (if I may call it this way) of it.

I wish Dr. Kunhammad, could throw further light on this thread, to make us hook onto the aura of Deleuze better!

Henry James in his seminal essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’, gives a lovelyyy liner that’s quite fascinated me bigtime! He quips: “When the mind is imaginative, “it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations”.

Correlates well with the theory of the Counterfactual imagination, which our philosophical forefathers including Plato and Aristotle would have called, subjunctive suppositions, that we’d been discussing not quite long back on these vibrant walls in a series of posts & threads!

On an aside, coincidentally, it was his brother William James who’d coined the term ‘stream of consciousness’!

Well, quite many of James’s protagonists are shown to have been possessed with such singularly powerful imaginations, capable of constructing the most wonderful of subjective adventures from the scantest of material.

Two of the most creative minds belong to the heroines of James’s 1898 works, In the Cage and The Turn of the Screw.

And yessss… I was so particularly interested in the tale, In the Cage because Deleuze and Guattari in their seminal work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, have analysed this wonderful tale in such astute, erudite, and yet simple ways.

And that apart, the storyline in In the Cage also has huge semblance to what James himself tells us in his critical essay, The Art of Fiction, on the freeplay of the imagination to artistic freedom!

In In the Cage, James ain’t tell us what really happens! Looking back at the tale, in fact, very little seems to happen at all. The focus thus, is not on the events themselves, as they are, but on the principal character’s interpretation of the events.

The protagonist remains unnamed. She is an emotionally repressed young lady, from a middle class background, but, being impoverished, has to work for a living at a post-office counter.

Tastes in art vis-a-vis one's social class position!

In our vibrant discussion on habitus, Frederick Jameson’s take on ‘culture as second nature’, as has been rightly pointed out by Prof. Rasheeda, interpolates well here to a tee!

As ma’m has rightly opined, ‘prototype of culture’, yes, to Bourdieu, by a little further extension on the term, habitus is a form of ‘cultural capital’.

To Marx, capital formed the foundation of social life and dictated one’s position within the social order.

Taking a cue from Marx, Bourdieu quite extends Marx’s idea of capital beyond the economic into the realm of culture. He calls it cultural capital.

By cultural capital Bourdieu refers to the collection of symbolic elements such as skills, tastes, posture, clothing, mannerisms, material belongings, credentials, etc, that a person acquires through being part of a particular social class.

Sharing similar forms of cultural capital with others—the same taste in movies, for example, or a degree from a particular School or College—creates a sense of collective identity and group position.

Well, now, Habitus simply refers to the physical embodiment of this cultural capital, referring to the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that we possess due to our life experiences.

Hence, Habitus also extends to our “taste” for cultural objects such as art, food, and clothing.

In one of his major works, Distinction, Bourdieu links French citizens’ tastes in art to their social class positions, forcefully arguing that aesthetic sensibilities are shaped by the culturally ingrained habitus.

Upper-class individuals, for example, have a taste for fine art because they have been exposed to and trained to appreciate it since a very early age, while working-class individuals have generally not had access to “high art” and thus haven’t cultivated the habitus appropriate to the fine art “game.”

In this context, Dr. Susan’s quote too comes in so lovelyyy n’ handyyy on habitus. Thank you Dr. Susan!

She’d given us this quote, “To those accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression’.

Well, how trueee! That’s again because they’ve been trained into a culturally ingrained habitus right from a very early age, to cultivating a taste meant only for the privileged and the elite!

The thing about the habitus, Bourdieu often noted, was that it was so ingrained that people often mistook the feel for the game as natural instead of culturally developed.

This often leads to justifying social inequality, because it is (mistakenly) believed that some people are naturally disposed to the finer things in life while others are not.

In this context, Catherine Belsey’s Culture and the Real would make such an interesting reading in convergence, I guess!

Two other books that would prove wonderful interpolative reads would be –

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu, and 

a pretty little primer of 137 pages titled, Pierre Bourdieu by Richard Jenkins. (the latter from which I’ve used some lovely thoughts!)

They prove real valuable resourceful study guides to the legend’s thoughts!

Thanks to Prof. Rasheeda, in the first place, for prompting this lovely, delightful discussion!

image courtesy: eurekastreetdotcom

'The most intolerant person imposes virtue on others...'

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is so profound!

Thanks to Dr. Aparna Srinivas for this lovely link to Taleb, HERE.

The feature article gives us an estimated reading time of 27 minutes. So, in my enthu, I just ‘hop-stop’ped through Taleb, and found his premise highly endearing!

Got some lovable pearls on the pit-stops!

Taleb speaking…

The rule we discuss in this chapter is the minority rule.

Studying individual ants will never, never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants.

How do books get banned? Certainly not because they offend the average person – most persons are passive and don’t really care, or don’t care enough to request the banning. It looks like, from past episodes, that all it takes is a few (motivated) activists for the banning of some books, or the black-listing of some people.

Bertrand Russell lost his job at the City University of New York owing to a letter by an angry –and stubborn mother who did not wish to have her daughter in the same room as the fellow with dissolute lifestyle and unruly ideas.

It is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.

Once a moral rule is established, it would suffice to have a small intransigent minority of geographically distributed followers to dictate the norm in society.

The market is like a large movie theatre with a small door.

And the best way to detect a sucker (say the usual finance journalist) is to see if his focus is on the size of the door or on that of the theater. Stampedes happen in cinemas, say when someone shouts “fire”, because those who want to be out do not want to stay in!

Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion to an army of lions led by a sheep. Alexander (or no doubt he who produced this probably apocryphal saying) understood the value of the active, intolerant, and courageous minority. Hannibal terrorized Rome for a decade and a half with a tiny army of mercenaries, winning twenty-two battles against the Romans, battles in which he was outnumbered each time.

He was inspired by a version of this maxim!

23 April 2018, World Book Day

23 April is a symbolic date for world literature.

It is on this date in 1616 that Cervantes, Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died. It is also the date of birth or death of other prominent authors, such as Maurice Druon, Haldor K. Laxness, Vladimir Nabokov, Josep Pla and Manuel Mejía Vallejo.

It was a natural choice for UNESCO's General Conference, held in Paris in 1995, to pay a world-wide tribute to books and authors on this date, encouraging everyone, and in particular young people, to discover the pleasure of reading and gain a renewed respect for the irreplaceable contributions of those, who have furthered the social and cultural progress of humanity. With this in mind, UNESCO created the World Book and Copyright Day.

World Book Capital for 2018: Athens, Greece

Each year, UNESCO and the international organizations representing the three major sectors of the book industry - publishers, booksellers and libraries, select the World Book Capital for a one-year period, effective 23 April each year.

The city of Athens was chosen for the quality of its activities, supported by the entire book industry. The aim is to make books accessible to the city’s entire population, including migrants and refugees.

Source: UNESCO