MORE THAN NOBLE 230311

Where do I go from here?
There are places I can and can’t go depending on what I have and haven’t done up to this point. Experience provides structure through opportunity and limitation.
Such delicious time spent indulging my self-loathing and self-disgust. It makes me feel alive, ploughing this fertile furrow, mining this rich seam, this narcissistic feast, the quality of which has changed recently: it doesn’t last as long but it’s deeper, more profound.
Life isn’t infinite, nothing lasts forever. My appreciation of what I have received leads me to focus my previously self-centred efforts on working to contribute to the life of others and the benefit of the greater whole.
Noble sentiments?
According to Melanie Klein creativity is an act of reparation resulting from anxiety about imagined damage done to the life-giving good object. It emerges from the depressive position in which the individual recognises the object as incorporating what it previously perceived as unconnected good and bad parts. The subject’s mind, having internalised this whole object, can now contain conflict rather than defend against difference through splitting and projection, which leads in turn to discriminating thought and freedom of choice rather than kneejerk reactions and right-wing ideologies. Concern for the welfare of the now whole other is because the subject comes to know that the bad object it hated and wanted to destroy is also the good and loved object. It isn’t hard to see how guilt would arise at this realisation.
Throughout our lives we can return to the paranoid/schizoid position at times of stress and personal threat resorting to primitive defences, in degrees dependent on earlier emotional successes, to ensure our survival.
Achieving the depressive position is the beginning of separation from the object, of becoming independent beings coming to know our own minds. If we fail to make this developmental move in a substantial way we are stuck in dependency which in later life can manifest as (and I’ve taken some leaps here) seeking refuge in drugs and alcohol to escape our difficulties and to sustain our infantile wish to be merged with another.
Dependency is acted out by resorting to and remaining on the bottle. We can witness creativity and self-destruction (an envious attack on the object that gave and nurtured life) on Stokes Croft, which taken in its entirety is a whole object: all life is here, depressingly and otherwise.
So these sentiments aren’t noble, an act of redemption and an acknowledgment of the divine in Stokes Croft.