Further musings on Fear & Anxiety The Concept of Anxiety according to Kierkegaard: anxiety/dread/angst is unfocused fear Kierkegaard uses the example of a man standing on the edge of a tall building or cliff. When the man looks over the edge, he experiences a focused fear of falling, but at the same time, the man feels a terrifying…
Tag: fear
More or less profound feelings
or: who am I to talk about Anxiety …? further notes on anxiety and fear Notes based on Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings From chapter 5. Anxiety Anxiety has gradually replaced melancholia as the intellectual’s signature sensibility, indeed becoming the distinctive “feeling-tone” of intellectual inquiry itself. Moreover, anxiety has a history of being gendered, not least through the influence of psychoanalysis, where the centrality of…
Maelstrom
I ended my last post by claiming that the nothingness of anxiety echoes the nothingness at the center of Beckett’s writing – but (how) can nothing function as a source, as the origin of creative production? Beckett offers two different ‘nothings’ as interpretative keys to his writing: If I were in the unenviable position of having to study…
Better to be afraid of something than of nothing …
Further musings on Edmund de Waal’s exhibition During the Night at Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna Edmund de Waal, Albrecht Dürer, Samuel Beckett & the concept of Angst A man (Albrecht Dürer) awakes from a nightmare in the depths of the night. He writes down his fears and illustrates them with a painting. 500 years later, another man (Edmund de Waal) is inspired…
Silence & Suffering
Ars Poetica V (personal lyric, cont.) Speech is among the most fundamental ways we have to connecting our selves to other selves. This is what Gregory Orr can tell us about silence & suffering There are silences that are positive and powerful and willed by the self, but many silences have a destructive origin and destructive…
I want to listen to the enormous waterfalls of the sun
Today I read “Dogfish” by Mary Oliver in the light of my own ongoing preoccupation with meaninglessness, fear & creative excess. Here is a short excerpt from the original poem: (…) I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a…
Consecrating ones life to an imbecility
I suppose, as a poet, amongst my fears can be counted the deep-seated uneasiness that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility (to something intrinsically unnecessary and superfluous – and thereby unintentionally cruel). In an intriguing essay called “On Fear”, Mary Ruefle touch upon a problem I have been…
We stumble – We fall – We fail –
– And so desire to progress, to become better poets, to eradicate a disease, to become better people, to perfect that which is perpetually imperfect. On Fear by Mary Ruefle
sub rosa 