transitions transmission
Gnah. Trying to think how to put across what's in my head at the moment, things feel unfixed and my mood's all over the place so it's hard to find a way in. My poetry, as you may be able to guess from what I've posted lately has been kind of dark and obssessed with relationships. It's not all been autobiographical by any means - there's a fair element of fiction and mythologising in there too. There will be some more of the six pieces created so far this month posted here if you keep watching.
Been thinking for a few weeks about transitional objects. Now as I understand it, in fairly crude terms, a transitional object is an item that a child latches onto round about their first birthday as a 'substitute and repository' for the security and comfort their parent(s) or care-giver(s) provide. It's important because up to that point the infant understands comfort as being external - when they cry the parent provides comfort - but as they get older they need to be able to internalise that process. The transitional object helps them to do this. Anyway such is the adaptability of language and ideas that it seems the term now has wider applicability, especially in connection with adult mental health, presumably where the individual has a deficit in their ability to comfort themself. All of which expatiation is to introduce the thought I've been having that maybe I've used transitional objects...
Sorry, this is getting old, I'm suddenly aware I'm going into speculative discussions about relationships, which I've done rather a lot lately. It's possibly going to get a little boring if I keep banging on about it, besides being unfair on anyone who was involved. But it'll come out in a poem or a script soon, so keep watching the skies.
Not sure if this has any relevance to what I was saying right at the start, though I feel it might. The problem is I abandoned a couple of thoughts in the middle in the space of the first sentence. First I was talking about how I can't quite pin down or express what's happening emotionally or personally. Then I was starting to define one of the moods that's been present a lot lately. I was then going to go on and expand on other moods and thoughts, before drawing them back to the beginning to explain that my head's been flicking through them like a slideshow. All of which is both characteristic of the way I think, write and speak anyway, but particularly of how things have been recently. I guess the link with transitional objects is that it's one of those concepts that lodge in your head from time to time, in this case associated with my current state of mind.
Which seems to bring us back to the beginning. So, my mood. Mostly over the last fortnight or so I've felt bored or down, punctuated by moments of panic and intense unhappiness, with occasional elation. So pretty much like anyone else, huh? The difference I guess is that I've felt less in control, that mood swings have hit me out of nowhere, and that everything feels really fluid - out of control - sometimes in a good way sometimes in a bad way.
In the last couple of days things have shifted a little, inasmuch as I'm more dominantly positive, and in my creative writing I've been attempting to give a more disruptive (even inappropriate) sense of physical reality to the imagery used. It feels a little like something's changing, which is another reason I began thinking about transitional objects. In fact because I decided I wanted to talk about them I substituted the word transitional with unfixed in the second sentence so as to avoid confusion when I did bring them up. In fact I have a poem called spit it out in which I refer to a (wholly fictional) gun in terms of being a transitional object. Which is ironic because what set me thinking about transitional objects recently was an article in Sight and Sound on Gus Van Sant's Last Days, in which Blake, the Kurt Cobain-ish character is described as cradling a shotgun like a transitional object, and which I didn't really want to refer to in my writing.
I'm sorry, does any of this posting make any sense? I know what I mean, but how about you?
Been thinking for a few weeks about transitional objects. Now as I understand it, in fairly crude terms, a transitional object is an item that a child latches onto round about their first birthday as a 'substitute and repository' for the security and comfort their parent(s) or care-giver(s) provide. It's important because up to that point the infant understands comfort as being external - when they cry the parent provides comfort - but as they get older they need to be able to internalise that process. The transitional object helps them to do this. Anyway such is the adaptability of language and ideas that it seems the term now has wider applicability, especially in connection with adult mental health, presumably where the individual has a deficit in their ability to comfort themself. All of which expatiation is to introduce the thought I've been having that maybe I've used transitional objects...
Sorry, this is getting old, I'm suddenly aware I'm going into speculative discussions about relationships, which I've done rather a lot lately. It's possibly going to get a little boring if I keep banging on about it, besides being unfair on anyone who was involved. But it'll come out in a poem or a script soon, so keep watching the skies.
Not sure if this has any relevance to what I was saying right at the start, though I feel it might. The problem is I abandoned a couple of thoughts in the middle in the space of the first sentence. First I was talking about how I can't quite pin down or express what's happening emotionally or personally. Then I was starting to define one of the moods that's been present a lot lately. I was then going to go on and expand on other moods and thoughts, before drawing them back to the beginning to explain that my head's been flicking through them like a slideshow. All of which is both characteristic of the way I think, write and speak anyway, but particularly of how things have been recently. I guess the link with transitional objects is that it's one of those concepts that lodge in your head from time to time, in this case associated with my current state of mind.
Which seems to bring us back to the beginning. So, my mood. Mostly over the last fortnight or so I've felt bored or down, punctuated by moments of panic and intense unhappiness, with occasional elation. So pretty much like anyone else, huh? The difference I guess is that I've felt less in control, that mood swings have hit me out of nowhere, and that everything feels really fluid - out of control - sometimes in a good way sometimes in a bad way.
In the last couple of days things have shifted a little, inasmuch as I'm more dominantly positive, and in my creative writing I've been attempting to give a more disruptive (even inappropriate) sense of physical reality to the imagery used. It feels a little like something's changing, which is another reason I began thinking about transitional objects. In fact because I decided I wanted to talk about them I substituted the word transitional with unfixed in the second sentence so as to avoid confusion when I did bring them up. In fact I have a poem called spit it out in which I refer to a (wholly fictional) gun in terms of being a transitional object. Which is ironic because what set me thinking about transitional objects recently was an article in Sight and Sound on Gus Van Sant's Last Days, in which Blake, the Kurt Cobain-ish character is described as cradling a shotgun like a transitional object, and which I didn't really want to refer to in my writing.
I'm sorry, does any of this posting make any sense? I know what I mean, but how about you?
Comments