One of the ways to learn to give up an unbearable personal fantasy... is to make it the subject of a story...
The principle dream of most children- the dream with the dream, as it were- is the dream of not dreaming any longer, the dream of growing up. For the adult the outlook is reversed. The adult's quest is an inverted one: to find those desires again, in more reasonable forms- and this involves forgetting the original childhood desires (to become an adult) in order to remember them as an adult. Subsequently, Freud is not really saying that we are really children, but that the sensual intensities of childhood cannot be abolished, that our ideals are transformed versions of childhood pleasures. Looking forward... is a paradoxical form of looking back. The future is where one retrieves the pleasures, the bodily pleasures, of the past.
For a child, boredom may be the biggest non-event or riddle to solve because its solution must come from without- while seeming to come from within. It may be a pedagogical and therapeutic mistake to try to cure boredom. One of the dangers in ending a child's boredom is that the adult's gestures wil be, like a bad psychoanalytic session, too coercive; a kind of monstrous bestiary of loud-mouthed creatures and half-human authority figures... Is saying what one means the same as meaning what one says?
Yet annoying and worrisome enticements are also incitations to desire, curiosity, and empathy- that is open invitations not to be bored, not to remain the same as one was but to transform oneself, to relate to things and people outside oneself- and thus bring about an end to one's boredom. The opposite of boredom turns out to be unsettling and frustrating. Ending boredom may be more dangerous than it at first appears. One must be careful that their desires don't turn into worries. The boredom of the world is indeterminate, whereas worrying, because we tend to worry about something, is not- and this suggests that the subject of our boredom is somehow intrinsically insoluble, at least by worry.
Morality, like laws and manners, are ways of living with one's own and others' desires. Perhaps all desires are riddles, especially to others. For if our desires are inexpressible, then the language with which we try to communicate our desires will appear, at least to others, as a kind of linguistic nonsense. The words for our anxieties may be an incomprehensible poetry of which on the speaker is master. But if possibility is about desire, then probability is about its limitations. And that is where nonsense, which is where the probable becomes indistinguishable from the the possible, comes into play, along with anxiety, misunderstanding, puns, and death.
For children, answers merely interrupt questions. One can no more choose to be or not be angry than worried or curious. Our appetites are arbitrary. If our desires are not surprising to ourselves, they probably don't work very well as desires. Worries are a form of policing one's desires, often before they become desires. And yet worries are not easy to see for what they are. Worries are almost feelings. Like minor disturbances, they disappear and begin again and disappear and begin again. They are feelings we don't want to be having- but are....
The vagaries of dreaming and nonsense occur within the boundaries of a book and the head of a sleeping child. Such is the nature of desire: One desires things that have yet to be and that are, in some sense, already lost to the moment of desire. In a paradoxical way... one has desires in order to forget them and thus grow into a future rather than merely repeat one's past. I am no longer trapped in someone else's dream of me. But, like a good many children who are on the verge of not being children, I am learning forgetfulness , as a prelude to something (the future of one's desires) that cannot be known with certitude. Childhood desires thus comprise a nonsense of a different order...
Boredom still manages a moral impetus: it teaches the adult that nonsense is both possible and necessary; it also teaches the adult that nonsense is a regressive fiction that one wakens from and in waking from, then mourns. For an adult, the nonsense of childhood is the nonsense of its loss... or perhaps boredom is the preemptive strike at desires we may never have. Lessons in change are paradoxical.
"I wonder if I've changed in the night? Let me think: WAS I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is, 'who in the world AM I? Ah, that's the great puzzle!"
The principle dream of most children- the dream with the dream, as it were- is the dream of not dreaming any longer, the dream of growing up. For the adult the outlook is reversed. The adult's quest is an inverted one: to find those desires again, in more reasonable forms- and this involves forgetting the original childhood desires (to become an adult) in order to remember them as an adult. Subsequently, Freud is not really saying that we are really children, but that the sensual intensities of childhood cannot be abolished, that our ideals are transformed versions of childhood pleasures. Looking forward... is a paradoxical form of looking back. The future is where one retrieves the pleasures, the bodily pleasures, of the past.
For a child, boredom may be the biggest non-event or riddle to solve because its solution must come from without- while seeming to come from within. It may be a pedagogical and therapeutic mistake to try to cure boredom. One of the dangers in ending a child's boredom is that the adult's gestures wil be, like a bad psychoanalytic session, too coercive; a kind of monstrous bestiary of loud-mouthed creatures and half-human authority figures... Is saying what one means the same as meaning what one says?
Yet annoying and worrisome enticements are also incitations to desire, curiosity, and empathy- that is open invitations not to be bored, not to remain the same as one was but to transform oneself, to relate to things and people outside oneself- and thus bring about an end to one's boredom. The opposite of boredom turns out to be unsettling and frustrating. Ending boredom may be more dangerous than it at first appears. One must be careful that their desires don't turn into worries. The boredom of the world is indeterminate, whereas worrying, because we tend to worry about something, is not- and this suggests that the subject of our boredom is somehow intrinsically insoluble, at least by worry.
Morality, like laws and manners, are ways of living with one's own and others' desires. Perhaps all desires are riddles, especially to others. For if our desires are inexpressible, then the language with which we try to communicate our desires will appear, at least to others, as a kind of linguistic nonsense. The words for our anxieties may be an incomprehensible poetry of which on the speaker is master. But if possibility is about desire, then probability is about its limitations. And that is where nonsense, which is where the probable becomes indistinguishable from the the possible, comes into play, along with anxiety, misunderstanding, puns, and death.
For children, answers merely interrupt questions. One can no more choose to be or not be angry than worried or curious. Our appetites are arbitrary. If our desires are not surprising to ourselves, they probably don't work very well as desires. Worries are a form of policing one's desires, often before they become desires. And yet worries are not easy to see for what they are. Worries are almost feelings. Like minor disturbances, they disappear and begin again and disappear and begin again. They are feelings we don't want to be having- but are....
The vagaries of dreaming and nonsense occur within the boundaries of a book and the head of a sleeping child. Such is the nature of desire: One desires things that have yet to be and that are, in some sense, already lost to the moment of desire. In a paradoxical way... one has desires in order to forget them and thus grow into a future rather than merely repeat one's past. I am no longer trapped in someone else's dream of me. But, like a good many children who are on the verge of not being children, I am learning forgetfulness , as a prelude to something (the future of one's desires) that cannot be known with certitude. Childhood desires thus comprise a nonsense of a different order...
Boredom still manages a moral impetus: it teaches the adult that nonsense is both possible and necessary; it also teaches the adult that nonsense is a regressive fiction that one wakens from and in waking from, then mourns. For an adult, the nonsense of childhood is the nonsense of its loss... or perhaps boredom is the preemptive strike at desires we may never have. Lessons in change are paradoxical.
"I wonder if I've changed in the night? Let me think: WAS I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is, 'who in the world AM I? Ah, that's the great puzzle!"
Very thought provoking and mind-melting at the same time