Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
Miss You So Much More 14
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
First Published March 19th 2013
Published Early Tuesday AM
Fourteenth Posted June 18th 2013
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
New Year’s Day
Dear Annie,
I didn’t realize how much you effected me. Not seeing you now for over two weeks and still 7 days to go, feels unbearable, Missing you was not something I expected. Not this strong. I’ve gotten too attached. The way it feels, is awful. Please I can’t wait for you to be my private analyst. When will it happen? I have to stop feeling this way. I’m diving into a really deep depression. I’m not so sure I haven’t started to transcend into that dark hole. It’s always waiting for me. It teases me when I am totally alone. Scottie is away but will be back tonight. She has been working on her latest film. I should say our film. I wrote the original screenplay. It’s almost ready for release but needed some extra touches done on the editing. They needed the director to make some decisions on the final cut. I think it’s going to make a great film. Story is being kept hush-hush. I’ll tell you when I can.
I love writing screenplays. I just love writing. I keep my writing edge by occasionally writing short stories, even work on several novels which eventually end up as screenplays. Writing novels helps me develop the visual settings and characters and the story tends to grow around that. What I really love, as often as I am able, is to write poetry. That’s where I work out my feeling and thoughts the most. It keeps the divine madness and artistic temperament under a mostly manageable control. Maybe that is what I will do. I’ll write a poem for you. Someday, after we start meeting, I will show some of my poems and other writing to you. But first, I have to be sure you won’t misunderstand how I feel. Even I don’t know or understand that myself. It still makes me insecure about whatever I feel. Someday I will explain what I mean by that.
I am going to include a poem in this letter. I’ll try to express my feelings. My love has nowhere else to grow and nowhere else to be expressed. Love rises above the sordidness of anything Earthly. It transcends to something divine. Untouched, untainted by the baser senses. When I write a poem it releases the pain inside us. Reaching the pureness. How do I tell you that I have strong feelings for you, without scaring you away. My intensity has been with me since birth. If I am drawn to anything or anyone, it is in my nature to be taken over by an intense passion. My release is to express the overwhelming feelings into my art. It releases the stress, some anyway. But it continues to regenerate. I have feelings for you, maybe you’ve noticed. But I’m afraid you will misunderstand them. I had a therapist who made what I felt into something that was ugly. One of my alters now feels love is bad, which makes her feel innately bad. Her feelings have been corrupted. This fucking therapist totally fucked her up over this. Now we don’t trust anyone with how we feel. We don’t even trust ourselves.
We are hoping for more understanding from you. Nothing wrong with feeling love. Attraction toward another human is quite part of one’s nature. We love animals. They communicate realness. Humans don’t, not ever. What I feel is good. I want to share my feelings of joy and happiness and love. Why do people corrupt goodness by making it impure and perverse. The way the abusers destroyed those feelings in me. One would expect better to come from a healer. A psychotherapist is suppose to be understanding. Not another person to damage what you feel. Especially, when your feelings are natural. I’m talking about burning away fear and mistrust and converting it into trust and openness with a new person. If badness blocks you, what do you do. I feel I have found in you a truly gifted and trusting person. You show no fears when you open up and you don’t turn away from someone else’s nightmares. You are not afraid of love. Giving it or sharing it.
I have been working on a theory for quite some time now about the true nature of love and the multiple layers that love takes. First, love is eternal. It is the power that fills the soul and ignites the universe infinitely. Love gets confused with the energy found in the expressions of sex. I believe they are two separate sources of energy. Sex can be expressed separate from love. Love is expressed separate from sex. It doesn’t need sexual energy to exist. The two can be brought together but they don’t need the other. Love is a higher energy. Sex is a lower energy. Sex is a momentary release of a physical reaction. Love is all intensive and filled with the energy of the universe. Love is divine and fills you up continually.
When someone tells you they love you, if their words are truthful, they are feeling the energy of the universe within themselves and want to share those feelings by sharing the energy of love with you.
What I am trying to say is your absence makes me feel these feelings more intensely. I miss having contact with you. It feel agitated in your absence. My feelings overwhelm me and cause so much pain, physical and emotional. I just want to be near you. When I cannot be near you, I go mad. I’m becoming rather attached. I don’t know what to do when I feel this way. It is a real problem for me. It is difficult to think about you. The effect you have on me. I know I will feel better once you return. Seeing you again will make all the difference.
I don’t understand why I feel this way. Please explain to me why only certain people cause these feeling in me. It is rare I feel this intensity or pain for anyone. Mostly, I just see someone and when I am not with them, they are either forgotten or I just think I will see them again. That’s it. With you, my feelings are monumental in proportion. It is love. An intense form of love that drives me into a madness. I feel crazy. Is your love so pure? Or is my love so pure for you that it has no censorship that filters its’ intensity. My attachment to you is more than I can handle on my own but there isn’t anyone I can talk to. Not even you. I have to keep this locked up.
If we work together, maybe someday, then I will be able to tell you this in person. I am just overwhelmed. It’s like looking at the sun without a filter, it burns out your sight. Am I too sensitive or open and the feelings for you and myself crash together like magnets that have been turned up to full power? I just don’t understand.
I will have to write more about this in future letters. Maybe, I will find some answers.
Until I see you again SOON. I cannot write another thought. It is too confusing.
Happy New Year Annie.
Fondly & In PAIN,
Madison
Madison Tayler’s Fantasy of Annie Haskell’s Office as her Psychoanalyst
Thirst of the Soul
By Madison Taylor
December 27th 2007
Sorrow.
Broken hearts.
Rawness.
Burning tears.
Dark holes for escape.
Understanding.
Listener to listen.
Take the edge off without useless drugs.
Soothing sounds of trust
Comforting support.
Taking the burden away.
Relief.
Release.
Clearness of mind to hold onto.
Offering.
Will lift up spirit.
Always in the wings.
Great lift off.
Flying.
Soaring above the clouds.
Above the storm.
Love offered freely.
Never going away.
Vent the rage.
Explode.
Cry tears of pain.
No burning.
Tears of water
To feed the thirst of the soul.
Water the trees.
The flowers.
The love awaits.
Given freely.
Arms waiting to hold.
Embrace a heart so raw.
Love with softness and warmth.
Remember time does not count.
It is all relative.
Come when ready.
Arrival time open.
Love Always.
QUOTATIONS from: LETTERS of IMPORT: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
“A Dream
The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor
“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)
“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”
“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist
“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan Poe
QUOTATIONS on MISS YOU SO MUCH MORE:
“If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.” ― Héloïse d’Argenteuil, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse
“It was going to be a long, dark night but not quite as dark as it was in the abyss of his heart where there was nothing but hollowness, yet it felt heavy, almost as if someone still resided there.” ― Faraaz Kazi
“Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? … The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.” ― Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow
“Do you think everybody misses somebody? I believe, sometimes, that the whole world has an aching heart.” ― Kate DiCamillo, Because of Winn-Dixie
Now That The First Draft Is On The Page—Then What?
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Written June 11th 2013
Illustrated by j. kiley
Post Created June 16th 2013
Posted June 16th 2013
“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” ― Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces
“Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, “We *told* you not to tell.” But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.” ― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won’t need to take notes.” ― A.L. Kennedy
“One couldn’t be selective when remembering the past. Ignore the turmoil, chaos and pain – and the truly great memories would not shine with such luster.” ― Karen Fowler, Memories For Sale
“I seemed to be upon the verge of comprehension, without the power to comprehend as men, at time, find themselves upon the brink of rememberance, without being able, in the end, to remember.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
“That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
“being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
“Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
“People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
“I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. It didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
“When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
“There’s no way I can stop writing, it’s a form of insanity.” ― Charles Bukowski, Women
Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
Last Time This Year 12
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated & abstract digital art by j. kiley
First Published March 19th 2013
Published Early Tuesday AM
Twelfth Posted June 4th 2013
Tuesday, December 18th 2007
Dear Annie,
This week I want to tell you some serious shit about myself. Letting my guard down almost to naked in these revelations. You know more about me in these letters than anyone does so far. And I haven’t even started filling you in on anything that gets close to the deeper meanings in my life.
I have been reading a great deal lately about bipolar disorder. Nobody has come out and told me straight that it is part of what I am dealing with in all my weirdness and bizarre behaviors. But I am not without analyzing the material and figuring out what seems too familiar to my life. I may not see things accurately from the inside but when I see it in Scottie’s eyes and read it in my writing I know without any real reluctance that bipolar visits me on a regular schedule with its major fluctuations.
I have the speed of someone who mainlines coke. Try having a conversation with me when I am not depressed or suicidal. How often does that occur. My wanting to die. Being obsessed in my mind all the time with thinking of ways to cut open my arms and bleeding out. It seems a gruesome way to die but even though blood usually bothers me, in this state of mind it seems the easiest way to slip away into death. Losing consciousness into a slow comatose state. Pain becomes unnoticeable. It really ends the pain. Suicide does. It’s not death I seek. It’s peace. Pain free and finished. No more memories. No more primal screams inside my mind. No emotions. No tears. Stolen. Robbed. Buried deep within my soul so it bears the suffering I should feel. What I feel is lack of feeling anything when I am deeply depressed. Maybe I am wrong about that. Maybe depression is the strongest of feelings. It may be all of them at once. All the negative emotions ripping out my heart at one time.
Who says bipolar isn’t fun. It can take you higher than a kite. Not a drug high, though that is kind of what you feel. But in this instance I am speaking about real flying high in the sky. Soaring. Catching the up draft. Being your own motor and wings. When I write on bipolar, I am hooked up to the muse and she goes fast. She is one blazing force of nature. Hot waves of energy pass through me. All that she wants is to give freely but you need to accept her terms. Simple really: just create until you can’t see the screen of your laptop. All becomes a blur and even then you must keep moving forward until the last ounce of creativity is used up. You will know when. You just stop. There is nothing left but to end it.
I read a book called “Touched With Fire” by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison. She has become my Goddess. Her words speak to my mind like she lives inside of it. Her theory about creativity and divine madness and the artistic temperament all touch my insides like fire has scorched my body with truth. When I was a teenager, I had the strangest idea that I was going crazy. But why would I even think that. What did it feel like to be crazy? I had no idea but somehow I thought I was headed in that direction. It felt like it would be so easy to just lose your mind. It would break away just like that. Well, reading “Touched With Fire” was actually reassuring. Knowing all these famous and creative people who had bipolar and a divine madness, as I have grown to like it referred to. An artistic temperament that made you delusional, but made you one hell of a creative artist. A poet, a musician, a writer, a painter, from Lord Byron to Beethoven, Lincoln to Churchill, Kurt Cobain to Emily Dickinson. People from all professions that contributed great amounts of creative work to charge up the world with gifts unimaginable.
It does make one grandiose at times. Feeling better about yourself. Going on an ego trip one minute and feeling like death is the only answer the next. It destroys your ability to think clearly or tell the difference between reality and delusions that appear so real and believable. It is so destructive and then so creative and productive. Bipolar enables you to produce feats of creation beyond the bounds of most people. You go for hours and days just creating. Your concentration is unbelievable and so crystal clear and focused. Everything keeps pouring out of you.
It’s balancing the mood swings that make it so difficult. I will not take psych meds. They are poison to me. They have fucked up my health. They’ve caused me to faint. I’ve had seizures. My mind gets so dulled out I can’t think clearly or remember anything. It’s fucked up my short term memory so I am lost at recalling anything someone has just told me. Terrible with names I heard a moment ago. I try to say something and if I don’t get it out in that moment, it is gone. Blue what, I ask myself. Why did I say blue and then forget what if anything did it mean? It is frustrating. When I get into conversations with people, I get so excited that I must speak more words in a minute than anyone speaks in an hour. And topics are like butterflies flitting from flower to flower but in a hurricane wind storm.
The divine madness does allow me to be creative. It frees my mind to release control and let ideas and words and images flow through my mind and out onto paper. Thank the goddess I have a computer so I can almost keep up with my thoughts. My hand would break if I had to write as fast as my thoughts pour out of me. The drawback is the pain I feel going from pure elation to feeling terror and depression and the loneliness I feel when all I want to do is die. There is such a hopelessness. I cannot reach out to anyone. What do I say? I am too frightened or introverted to open up about the depth of my darkness. It is an all-consuming dark that takes over. Blinding me to anyone or anything. I have figured out how to work through the suicidal feelings and the depth of the depression that pulls me into the darkest, deepest of holes. I write. I keep writing. Anything that comes into my mind. I have no shame about speaking the truth. There is no honour in silence. The world must know and understand that there are places the mind can take you that do exist but only some can enter.
This is what you would be working with if you ever became my psychoanalyst. You would hear my stories and live through my mind and delusion and irrational thoughts. I have ruined relationships, I am sure because I had no idea the bipolar was causing me to behave in ways that I did not understand. I have hurt my partner because of what I thought I needed. It fucks you up sexually. Being abused when I was a child screwed me up to have sex with anyone but it also set me up to think or believe that is the only way one can relate to another human being. Everything between myself and another person always became sexual. It wasn’t because I wanted sex. It was because that was the way it was supposed to be. So I was taught by my abusers. If you wanted attention, you spent time with them and when they tried to touch you, you tried to stop them but it never worked. If you didn’t want attention they just raped you and molested you. It taught me that was the way life was. Sick. Demented. Perverted. Cold. Damaging. Surreal. Abusive. Everyone abused me except one. She was someone special. Someday I will tell you all about her.
It seems sex is supposed to be one of the addictions that bipolars have. Would I say I was addicted to sex. Yes. Not in the way you think. It was really fucked up for me. Now I don’t want anyone touching me.
If we work together, I hope you can help me with this. I don’t trust anyone but for an unknown reason I am drawn to you and I believe you are the one who can help me. I have gone to so many shrinks. Some I became really attached to. But most of them fucked me up more than I already was. One even thought because I was obsessed with her that I was going to stalk her. She was the one that was crazy not me. I admit I do get obsessed but that is one of my personalities. That therapist knew that. She also knew that she became obsessed when she lost the only one who loved her. That person died suddenly and it crushed her. Shattered her into pieces. Left her feeling abandoned. Nobody to love her. So when anyone shows her any attention she is drawn to them like a magnet. She is so filled with needs. But the others let her have her needs and accept her. That therapist was a fool and really fucked up that alter to the point where she felt so bad about herself that she just wanted to disappear forever. Instead she just felt guilty about everything she felt and she started to feel that if she felt love that she was being bad. What kind of therapist drives a kid to feel that she is bad for feeling love?
These are issues that need to be worked on. It is an enormous job to take on the responsibility of us as a client. Mr. Xxx was a jackass. He had no idea who we were. He drove everyone underground into the darkest hole. We felt depressed all of the time. All we wanted to do was sleep. So that is exactly what we did. Sleep. All day. All night. Get up because Scottie made us feel we needed to wake up. And we felt guilty leaving her alone by herself. Not that we were great company. All we did once we were awake was to watch TV until it was time to go back to bed. The only time we got up during the day was to go to out therapy appointments or to see the doctor. The world was fucked. We were fucked up. We just wanted to block out everything. We didn’t want to feel anything. Whenever we felt anything we just would fuck things up.
Now we actually have a chance to rejoin part of the human race. We may actually get to see you in therapy. Something might actually start to make us feel better. Right now that is the only hope we have. The hope that someday soon we can tell Mr. Xxx to go fuck himself. With great pleasure I would look forward to that moment. To really, actually, in a state of reality, I would be able to utter those words. “GO FUCK YOURSELF. IT IS OVER. I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN.” Exit stage left. Here it comes, the final curtain call with Mr. Xxx. The forceful and intentional slamming of his office door so hard that the reverberations would be felt all the way to the door of my home and Scottie would hear and applaud. That is the day I am waiting ever so patiently for. Do I have the guts to do that? You had better prepare yourself to wear headphones at that very moment. Be sure it will happen. Exactly when, is still to be determined. As a child I was a famous door slammer. I slammed my bedroom door so hard, so many times, that the last time I did it, it fell off its’ hinges and crashed to the floor. The truth. May the goddess strike me with lightning if I am telling a lie. Oh, by the way, I do not lie. I tell the truth. I am too honest for anyone to believe.
So there you have some of it. Do you still have the courage to take me on as your client? The last length of time that it took to write this letter has left me with a blank in my mind as to what exactly I shared with you in the words I wrote. And whether I have the courage to read this over is, at this very moment, an uncertainty. I may just take my chances that you will be able to accept my honesty and to get past it and accept the conditions of my paying you, or rather, my insurance paying you to hire you as my soon to be next psychoanalyst. I do hope this deal goes into effect in as short a time as possible. The waiting and anticipation is, pardon the expression, killing me, literally killing me. I have so little time left to deal with where I am now. I am in desperate need to change the conditions of my life and to rid myself of someone I need to be gone from my consciousness and I need you to help me do it.
I am not an extremely confident person at the moment. Do not let the bipolar or stronger personalities fool you. We are very afraid of change. We fear leaving our home to go anywhere. And now we have finally gotten to a place where it actually might happen. That we will in the real world, fire our psychotherapist, better recognized by the name Mr. Xxx, for all his perversely sick sense of humour and his tasteless innuendos of a sexual nature and the endless telling of his self-promoting and unwanted sharing of his personal life during my therapy time when we are supposed to be working on getting me into a better state of being. And added onto that, his egotistical need to be the smartest person in the room. It is sickening and I really want to see it come to an, unknowing on his part, ending and before the next full moon rising. That gives us some time but not more than I will manage to live through.
This has been exhausting but worth letting go of some truths. I am trying to be open with you and writing these letters is great practice for when the real therapy sessions actually happen in my waking life. You sitting across from me and my either lying down on the couch or sitting up facing you. I don’t know how traditional you will want to play it. We will see. Soon. Please make it soon.
Until next time, I hope things have progressed.
Regards,
MadisonThis note is to assure the strictest of confidence.
To Annie,
At this moment I am not trying to be a coward, but I feel if I hold back now or never send this to you, then I am freeing myself up to write whatever I wish without need of censorship. Maybe someday, when I am feeling more familiar with just who you are and what you might mean to me, this parameter will be altered and a copy of this and future letters will be relayed to you. For now I want to maintain secrecy, to protect you, Annie, and to protect myself from over testing the boundaries between us and to record the development of our relationship.
I want Annie Haskell to trust me. I want you to know I am trying to protect you and also myself from any humiliation. Writing to you in this way frees up my words as I speak them onto the page. Some future date, if I feel trusting enough, I will release to you what I have written in honesty. Right now, I will keep my words confidential. On my honour, no others shall see these pages, I promise you that.
Regards,
Madison Taylor
Madison Tayler’s Fantasy of Annie Haskell’s Office as a Psychoanalyst. Not real.
Maksim — Somewhere In Time — Theme Song #1 For “Letters of Import”This is the poem I would like to include in this letter. I like to leave a poem if I find one that I would like to share with you. Since I am not even sure if I am going to give these letters to you, I felt it is okay if I include a poem in these letters. And if some day, I change my mind and I hand my building collection of letters to you, then I will likely evaluate all that I have written to determine if all of the content feels acceptable to me to share openly with you. I may feel too shy to be so vulnerable. We will proceed as we have for now and see this as a way of recording the experience of getting to know you and in turn get to know how this all effects me as I record this experience in writing.Don’t Lock Me Up
By Madison Taylor
December 16th 2007
Don’t lock me up
Don’t make me sleep
Losing consciousness
Loses part of me
Holding on awake
Needing senses sharp
Safety’s what I seek
Don’t want nightmares
Living inside of me
Roaming my sleep
Dead wanting me
If I’m awake
There’s no way out
To follow me
If I let go
Give in to them
Let sleep take hold
They’ll find me easy
Trap me, bind me
They’ll never ever
Let me go.
the labyrinth called “wandering wonderland.” it is where madison, scottie and their cats loves to escape to
madison’s “woods of imagination” where she takes long walks to reflect. it is starts just past the labyrinth
LE CHATEAU DE ROCHER
le chateau de rocher is the home of madison and scottie & their three cats sparky toker & patrick
madison’s study/library
scottie’s study library
QUOTATIONS from: LETTERS of IMPORT: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
“A Dream
The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor
“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)
“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”
“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist
“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan PoeQUOTATIONS on BIPOLAR:
“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re “not at all like yourself but will be soon,” but you know you won’t.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against– you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been mildly manic. When I am my present “normal” self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own.” ― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
“Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It’s fun and it’s frightening as hell. Some patients – bipolar type I – experience both extremes; other – bipolar type II – suffer depression almost exclusively. But the “mixed state,” the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression’s paranoid self-loathing.” ― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
“Compared to bipolar’s magic, reality seems a raw deal. It’s not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it’s the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity – the realization of illnesss, the humiliating scenes, the blown money and friendships and confidence. Depression seems almost inevitable. The pendulum swings back from transcendence in shards, a bloody, dangerous mess. Crazy high is better than crazy low. So we gamble, dump the pills, and stick it to the control freaks and doctors. They don’t understand, we say. They just don’t get it. They’ll never be artists.” ― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
“Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
“Except you cannot outrun insanity, anymore than you can outrun your own shadow.” ― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
“There was no twinkle in his eyes.
“Maybe I just love some of you. Maybe not enough.”
Tiger Lily blinked at him, and she didn’t understand how anyone could only love a part. Her greedy heart didn’t work that way.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
“To not do what you can to protect someone, that’s cowardly.” ― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
“An unspoken rivalry threaded their relationship, in which Tiger Lily thought that if she could keep up with him, she could hold tighter to him. It didn’t occur to her there was anything in which Peter would want her to fail. But sometimes, I could see that, even for him, she was too fast, too sure-footed, and didn’t seem to need him quite enough.” ― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
“It was like this sometimes, and I felt I should look away, but I couldn’t. I wanted to be there, having my face touched, defeating a heart like Peter’s, but the next best thing was seeing it for Tiger Lily.” ― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
“I began to see that Wendy had something Tiger Lily hadn’t even known she was supposed to have. Of all the things Tiger Lily had thought she might have to be for Peter-strong, brave; to be big and to keep up-she had never thought that the one thing he wanted most from her was simply to show that she believed in him, always and without fail.” ― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
Whimsical Serendipity
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Videos Created by Jennifer Kiley
Created May 31st & June 1st 2013
Posted June 1st 2013
Dedicated To Shawn: EARLY BIRTHDAY PRESENT—HAPPY BIRTHDAY on JUNE 3rd
carter the lion—HAPPY EARLY BIRTHDAY MOM SHAWN—JUNE 3rd
“As I look out at all of you gathered here, I want to say that I don’t see a room full of Parisians in top hats and diamonds and silk dresses. I don’t see bankers and housewives and store clerks. No. I address you all tonight as you truly are: wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, and magicians. You are the true dreamers.” ― Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
“Flowers lead to books, which lead to thinking and not thinking and then more flowers and music, music. Then many more flowers and many more books.” ― Maira Kalman
“These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination.” ― Rabindranath Tagore
“Do you know a better time than the present for igniting your dreams?” ― Carolyn Tody, Author and Artist, A Whimsical Holiday for Children
“Vital lives are about action. You can’t feel warmth unless you create it, can’t feel delight until you play,can’t know serendipity unless you risk.” ― Joan Erickson
“Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.” ― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures
“But in Friendship, being free of all that, we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting—any of these chances might have kept us apart… — C.S. Lewis
“In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations – that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted… Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.” ― Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
“It’s a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn’t even know you were aiming for.” ― Lois McMaster Bujold
Adorable Baby Elephant
Video on YouTube
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Created May 30th 2013
Posted June 1st 2013I watched this video with the sleepy baby elephant. People watching her and encouraging her to get up. To wake up. She looks so adorable. The people making the video, I assume, are the ones making the sounds and talking to the precious little creature. She struggled and struggled but was having a difficult time of it. I won’t spoil any more of the video for you. I would, however, ask that you pay very close attention to the language and attitude of the those who are watching this baby elephant being so adorable. You feel yourself being drawn in. How could you not be. So watch the video. Following the watching of the video I have continued my comment. Please wait to read after you have viewed the entire video. Thank You. By Jennifer Kiley
Adorable Baby Elephant Now that you have viewed the video, think further about how it made you feel. One point I will make right away. I did not know, as you did not know that there was a mother elephant just a short distance away. The people making the video were so enjoying the baby elephant struggling to get up and that she was sleepy, so she was struggling with this dilemma, probably wondering through her sleepiness: “Why isn’t my Mom coming to help me? She can see I am having trouble. Please Mom, won’t you please come and help me. All these people are saying strange things to me. They don’t understand that I am having a difficult time and just want my mother. Why aren’t you helping me.”
Well, when the camera finally scans over to the mother, these pleas are answered for you. The mother is chained by the ankle and being kept in a stationary place where she is totally unable to come to aid of her daughter. She can’t answer her frustration and panic that might be setting in. The Mother also sees these humans talking near her child. She doesn’t understand whether they are safe or not. Her child keeps struggling and all she can do is to watch helplessly. No attendant is anywhere near by to lend assistance.
I have become quite angry long before this point. The cuteness has turned into unbelievability that the Mother elephant is chained up. Not only chained up but is unable to reach her child. The cruelty just keeps growing in my mind. This is not such an adorable video afterall. The title says: “Adorable Baby Elephant ” It is closed with a smiley face. There is nothing to smile at here. Whoever stood there and took this video and did nothing about the horror they were watching is truly amazing and heartless. Why weren’t they looking for help for both the baby and the mother who were separated and in distress.
Now some may feel I am over-reacting but I think I am under-reacting. It took me a short while after watching this video to react in the way that I have. Which is placing this video on my blog post and writing up my feelings and reactions. I hope others who see this will take this video and do the same on your own blogs or on Facebook or whatever social media that you use and spread this word. It is not acceptable to treat animals in this way. You do not chain up any elephant. You do not chain up a Mother elephant far enough away from her baby so she can do nothing to protect her. Elephants are quite maternal and protective of their babies. But that is not the specific point.
The point is we as humans do not have the right to treat animals in this way for the amusement of sadistic human beings who take pleasure in the watching of a Mother Elephant being tortured by keeping her struggling baby from her. And the people did nothing but enjoy themselves fully aware, which the viewer of the video was not aware, that there was a Mother Elephant so near but chained, but not near enough to help her baby out. Why were these people not trying to find someone to correct this horrible situation. Keep in mind also that the surface these two elephants are on is concrete. Not exactly natural to any animals.
This is a disturbing video when you know all the facts and have seen the entire footage. Yes, it has an ending that helped the baby but it never should have gone that far. Those elephants need to be placed in an environment where this can never happen to them again. By Jennifer Kiley.
“We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace.” ― Albert Schweitzer
“I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.” ― Abraham Lincoln
“The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion in the only guarantee of morality.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality
“The question is not, “Can they reason?” nor, “Can they talk?” but “Can they suffer?” ― Jeremy Bentham
“We need, in a special way, to work twice as hard to help people understand that the animals are fellow creatures, that we must protect them and love them as we love ourselves.” ― César Chávez
“Kindness and compassion towards all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Conversely, cruelty, whether it is directed against human beings or against animals, is not the exclusive province of any one culture or community of people. ” ― César Chávez
“Know that the same spark of life that is within you, is within all of our animal friends, the desire to live is the same within all of us…” ― Rai Aren, Secret of the Sands
“Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.” ― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.” ― Charles Dickens
“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking…” ― Leo Tolstoy
“Friends are honest with each other. Even if the truth hurts. -Maggie” ― Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride
“I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears?” ― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.” ― Jane Austen, Emma
“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The human body is the best work of art.” ― Jess C. Scott
“Let’s tell the truth to people. When people ask, ‘How are you?’ have the nerve sometimes to answer truthfully. You must know, however, that people will start avoiding you because, they, too, have knees that pain them and heads that hurt and they don’t want to know about yours. But think of it this way: If people avoid you, you will have more time to meditate and do fine research on a cure for whatever truly afflicts you.” ― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
“This life is yours. Take the power to choose what you want to do and do it well. Take the power to love what you want in life and love it honestly. Take the power to walk in the forest and be a part of nature. Take the power to control your own life. No one else can do it for you. Take the power to make your life happy.” ― Susan Polis Schutz
“To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
“Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.” ― Thomas Jefferson
“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Truth never damages a cause that is just.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
“Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.” ― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” ― Franz Kafka
Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
Finding Identity 11
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated & abstract digital art by j. kiley
First Published March 19th 2013
Published Early Tuesday AM
Eleventh Posted May 28st 2013Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
Dear Annie,
Your news was extremely exciting to me. Graduation is just a few months away. Shortly, thereafter, you will be presented with your license to practice psychoanalysis. A brand new office will be yours. I imagine it with a black couch, one where one’s body sinks slightly into the softness of the cushions. You’ll have the most tasteful decor. An abstract piece of art hanging over the couch, where your eyes can get lost in while you listen intently to the complicated psychological issues of each of your needy and rather moderately needy clients. Of course, they will need you or they wouldn’t be seeing you. I am hoping I will be one of those patience who will be demanding of your time and needed attention. It is an assumption that you will want me to be one of your clients. Hopefully, I will be at the top of your list. Am I dreaming or will I have a chance to see you as my analyst?
It will finally enable me to end the farce between myself and Mr. Xxx. What a fucking idiot seeing him has made me. I don’t mean I am dumb and I don’t mean he is stupid. He has this insecure need to intellectualize everything or to feel a need to be in a competition with everyone so that he appears he is the smartest one the room. He does it in private sessions and you can see how be comes across in group. He’s such a connoisseur of the arts, like he is the only one that has ever had an artistic experience. Let him get started talking about writers, it’s like he is the only one who has ever read a book. The world outside his world, including myself, have been exposed to and sought out an education in the liberal arts whether through college courses and/or through what are called life experiences. Sometimes the latter is often more effective because there, you are the one seeking, wanting and choosing what you are studying on a continual basis, with subjects you are keenly interested. I do go on about his bull shit.
I have to thank you. It was incredible, your invitation to meet with you after group tonight. That was a surprise. And my excitement to hear your news. You told me I was the first person you told outside of your co-workers. That surprised me and made me feel so honoured. I know for a long while I have had these secret thoughts that I wished I could share with you. How much I wished I could have talked to you about you becoming my analyst. It never felt like the right time. It didn’t feel appropriate for me to approach you unless I knew you felt the same. A real Catch-22 situation. That would have been the only way to find out how you felt by talking to you. We always seem to forget what we ourselves need when trying to not hurt the feelings of others. That it was an alright subject for me to bring up with you in direct conversation. I didn’t know before we talked today where either of our loyalties should have been directed. I know now that we need to take care of ourselves first. Not being selfish but being protective.
You are being supervised by him, Mr. Xxx. It would only seem logical that you would defer to him. What I wanted seemed only secondary. Now I know that isn’t as I expected it to be. You actually like me. My feelings haven’t been fantasies. That you have considered asking me if I wanted to see you professionally. You knew my mind. It has been so obvious, the animosity between myself and Mr. Xxx. A thoroughly unhealthy relationship that has been deteriorating for years. My nerves have just been too paralyzed to move on any active pursuit of change. It is nearing that time now. The courage and a sense of security is all I need to find in order to radically change my life.
Starting a new therapy relationship means to radically end a pre-existing disaster of one that has been dead and in need of terminating since practically it’s inception. I need the nerve and the circumstances to bring forth my killer instinct to cleanly put that psychologically sick situation to rest. It has to be done quickly and cleanly. The least amount of blood shed the healthier. I cannot take care of him. I’ve done that for too many years. Trying not to confront him when I should have.
Talking to that friend I mentioned who crucifies him whenever we talk. I am never certain how accurate my perceptions are unless I get feedback from someone else, I feel I should be able to trust them to tell me the truth and not their distorted perceptions of a distortion of what I see. I cannot trust anything that I thought I was learning from this witness. It was their agenda I was being given, not the truth of my situation or a truth about this person. So all that I know is nothing I can depend on believing. It was all inaccurate information based on pure prejudice.
Now, I know I feel a stronger connection with you after out talk today. The next step depends on what transpires over the next several weeks. I still need to figure out what to do. How to do it. What to say. Try to talk things out to try to salvage anything that still remains. Not to sure there is anything left. I need to know somehow that you will be there to help me help when there is s transition to be made. I am trusting you to be supportive. But I know I must wait until all is set. It’s expected there will be a major blow up with Mr. Xxx. He’s never exactly got me or what I’ve needed. Now, he has an even lesser reason to try to understand. I think he is going to challenge me on everything I say, no matter what it is about or who it is about. He feels right about everything and that I am continuously wrong on any and every subject or person I want to talk about. That is the first thing I’ve got to confront him on. I am right about what I say. He needs to back off.
I will not tell him anything about you or what we have talked about. That I will leave to your discretion. When you feel the time is right, then you decide what you want to say and how much you want him to know. He is not going to hear anything from me.
I think that is all I want to write to you about at the moment. Thank you for trusting me with you confidence. It is our secret. The only thing I am going to do is wait and when the blow up comes. It will come soon, I feel. I will be ready to walk out and never look behind me. That will be the day it will all be over. So, I say that is all for now.
Until next time.
Regards,
MadisonThis note is to assure the strictest of confidence.
To Annie,
At this moment I am not trying to be a coward, but I feel if I hold back now or never send this to you, then I am freeing myself up to write whatever I wish without need of censorship. Maybe someday, when I am feeling more familiar with just who you are and what you might mean to me, this parameter will be altered and a copy of this and future letters will be relayed to you. For now I want to maintain secrecy, to protect you, Annie, and to protect myself from over testing the boundaries between us and to record the development of our relationship.
I want Annie Haskell to trust me. I want you to know I am trying to protect you and also myself from any humiliation. Writing to you in this way frees up my words as I speak them onto the page. Some future date, if I feel trusting enough, I will release to you what I have written in honesty. Right now, I will keep my words confidential. On my honour, no others shall see these pages, I promise you that.
Regards,
Madison Taylor
Madison Tayler’s Fantasy of Annie Haskell’s Office as a Psychoanalyst. Not real.
Maksim — Somewhere In Time — Theme Song #1 For “Letters of Import”This is the poem I would like to include in this letter. I like to leave a poem if I find one that I would like to share with you. Since I am not even sure if I am going to give these letters to you, I felt it is okay if I include a poem in these letters. And if some day, I change my mind and I hand my building collection of letters to you, then I will likely evaluate all that I have written to determine if all of the content feels acceptable to me to share openly with you. I may feel too shy to be so vulnerable. We will proceed as we have for now and see this as a way of recording the experience of getting to know you and in turn get to know how this all effects me as I record this experience in writing.My Identity
By Madison Taylor
Dec. 7th, 2007
I am here
This is my life
It has been a strange one
A painful one
Filled with unfallen tears
Empty people with empty feelings
Invading my world
Always wanting something from me
Things that no one would want to give
I stand back
Look at my past
I try not to repeat the mistakes
My boundaries try to keep the users out
But some invade
Others are chosen carefully
All I ask for is to love
To give love
Learn to accept love
The latter is the harder of the two
Someone to “get me”
Understanding is important
Which ever direction it travels
Sexual touch is not that important
When offered from another
Tender touch that come with hugs
Those I love and accept
But there must be love
There must be respect
Nothing less will do
Who am I?
Someone creative
A woman who wants to care
To love and be loved
Someone who needs to create
When the muse calls
That means when ever I am awake
I need my dreams
My animals
My mate
My friends who mean it
And a good Psychoanalyst
To keep my life on track
There may be more
But that is it for now
the labyrinth called “wandering wonderland.” it is where madison, scottie and their cats loves to escape to
madison’s “woods of imagination” where she takes long walks to reflect. it is starts just past the labyrinth
LE CHATEAU DE ROCHER
le chateau de rocher is the home of madison and scottie & their three cats sparky toker & patrick
madison’s study/library
QUOTATIONS from: LETTERS of IMPORT: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
“A Dream
The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor
“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)
“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”
“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist
“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan PoeQUOTATIONS on IDENTITY:
“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” ― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.” ― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
“We know what we are, but not what we may be.” ― William Shakespeare
“Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.” ― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Love Between You and Intelligent Life
Creating Love With Computers
TED Talk: April 26th 2013
Started Creating Early May 2013
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Finished Creating May 27th 2013
Posted May 27th 2013
Can a techno gadget love you back if you love your techno gadget?
SPOILER ALERT!
I watched the TV version on Twilight Zone of Ray Bradbury’s short story: “I Sing the Body Electric.” Season 3 Episode 35 (available on HULUPLUS.) It gave me a view into the question whether a human can love a computer who responds in kind with the love the human is seeking. In Bradbury’s story, a family of three young children have lost their mother. A father has lost his wife. He loves his children deeply. But he worries they will be denied the attention they need while he is working long hours to make a living. The son has what he believes is the answer. A magazine with an advertisement: “I Sing the Body Electric” is the motto of the company Facsimile Limited. “To parents who worry about inadequate nurses in schools, who are concerned about the moral and social development of their children, we have perfected an electronic data processing system, in the shape of an elderly woman. A woman built with precision with the incredible ability of giving loving supervision to your family.”
The family investigate the truth behind the ad. Two of the children and the dad are enthusiastic but one child is overwhelmingly reserved and does not want this to happen. She runs away and her father goes after her. While the two are away, the other two children discuss what they have seen and how they can build the person they want. There final decision is to proceed on their own to create their idea of the perfect “grandmother.” It is done.
On the perfect day outside, while the three children are playing, a woman comes walking down the sidewalk toward them, carrying a suitcase. She stops in front of them. The inquisition begins. The children discover she is their creation. Those who created her are thrilled, the other child rejects her and runs into the house.
It takes time but after a traumatic incident the girl finally accepts their new grandmother. It seems after losing her mother, she feared everyone would abandon her. Their promises were not reassurance enough for the young girl to feel safe opening up her feelings to someone new. Once she realized her new grandmother would never leave and she could trust it, she hugged her new grandmother who hugged her in return. A hug filled with love, real, true love. It was as real as any love that could be shared between humans.
Can you make a machine that can love?
SPOILER ALERT!
In the film “Blade Runner,” Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, falls in love with a replicant, Rachel, played by Sean Young. At first he doesn’t know she is a replicant and she doesn’t know either. He does his replicant test on her, which she is aware that he is doing. They fall for each other, even though they discover she is a machine. Basically, it makes no difference to either of them. He falls in love with her anyway. Her feelings are confused but there is a mutual attraction.
Deckard is part of law enforcement seeking four replicants who hijacked a spaceship and returned to Earth to seek their maker, to find out why they exist and why they must die. They have a termination date built in their system, set for a specific length of time. Not all replicants are aware of this determination but the ones that are want to know the answer like most humans do, why do I have to die.
Rachel is not part of the group of four. But she needs answers, too. She doesn’t know how upgraded she actually is. One being that she doesn’t have a termination date and that she is a replicant until Deckard finds that out through his tests. They meet at the Doctor’s office, who is the creator of the replicants. She lives with the Doctor in a Platonic relationship. Deckard is seeking answers as well from the Doctor. After Deckard talks to the Doctore, one of the four replicants kill the Doctor because he doesn’t give him the answers he wants. Which makes absolutely no sense.
At the end, Deckard and Rachel go off together, not before he finishes his assignment of terminating the four rebellious and violent rogue replicants.
So a good ending of love found between a human and a computer machine, who had developed the ability to love in the way of a human.
Doug Carmean, a computer architect at Intel, explores the relationships between people and computers in this TED Talk: Creating Love With Computers. He is trying to answer questions regarding computers and humans.
Does a computer have an ability to use it’s processors toward being able to love a human?
Computers are as complex as a human.
Machines have the capacity to love but they are sociopaths.
Would the machines want to run our lives?
Doug has put a team together of people. A requirement to be part of the team is you have to have emotions. Examples are psychologists, artists, etc.
Want to build set of tools that will build up communications.
Taking the sinister aspects out of it.
Communication: IM. Email. Messaging.
Look at the emotional part of it.
Combined with pronoun usage. You can tell a lot about the usage of pronouns.
Responding with long texts. If you get a note and respond too slow or too fast it will determine what is happening with you.
Theory of mind: Build a notion of the way people will respond to communications.
Treat people the way they want to be treated not the way you want to be treated.
Looking at loneliness.
Showing photo that reminds you of that person in order to develop a familiarity.
Believe that eventually that machine will love.
Some of the ideas looked at in this video. It would be a wonder to develop such a machine that would be able to have an interactive relationship with a human as a human would have with another human. Think of what it would do for loneliness and the multitude of possibilities this would create.
Something that has been pondered throughout time through imagination and the actual construction of an interaction between a data machine and a human.
I am quite interested in seeing where the possibilities will lead.
Why can’t a human feel attached to a computer, replicant, the way we would relate to another human and not feel a difference?
Is it possible to take the development of computer to human that far into a real system that worked as it would in someone’s imagination? By Jennifer Kiley
awash with water one lone tree’s reflection
The Seekers — Colours of My Life
QUOTATIONS on CHANGING/GROWING/IDENTITY:
(Can Humans Love Machines?)
(Can Machines Love Humans?)
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” ― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.” ― Tony Schwartz
“We are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that all colours and all cultures are distinct & individual. We are harmonious in the reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity. We don’t share blood, but we share the air that keeps us alive. I will not blind myself and say that my black brother is not different from me. I will not blind myself and say that my brown sister is not different from me. But my black brother is he as much as I am me. But my brown sister is she as much as I am me.”
― C. JoyBell C.
“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.” ― Alan Cohen
“I think that the best kind of change, is the change that comes from the inside and begins it’s way out until it emerges on the outside; a change that is born underneath then continues and spreads until it has reached the surface. That’s a true change. A powerful change. And I have found that while we are emerging, changing into something glorious; it is actually us becoming who we really are. A water lily is born underneath the water, inside the soil at the bottom of the river or lake. And the water lily has always been a water lily for that whole time that it was sprouting out of the wet soil, reaching up through the dark water towards the sunlight, stretching and grasping for the surface; where it then buds and blooms on the outside in the sunshine. It doesn’t bud and bloom on the surface and then try to reach down below into the soil.” ― C. JoyBell C.
“It is in this darkness that I have found all light— somehow become so bright, a shooting star on a stormy night.” ― Coco J. Ginger
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” ― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.” ― Tony Schwartz
“Love only grows by sharing. You can only have more for yourself by giving it away to others.” ― Brian Tracy
“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.” ― Alan Cohen
