The Three Vinegar Tasters by Kano Isen'in
The Cigar
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
-Sigmund Freud (maybe)
Regardless of origin, this quote presents an ideal approach to symbolic living.
To grasp the relavance of the painting, lets hear a bit about it!
The three men are Confucius, Buddha, and Lao Tzu, respectively. Each man's expression represents the predominant attitude of his philosophy: Confucianism saw life as sour, in need of rules to correct the degeneration of people; Buddhism saw life as bitter, dominated by pain and suffering due to attaching possessions and material desires; and Taoism saw life as sweet due to being fundamentally perfect in its natural state.
The sweetness Lao Tzu tastes is precisely the same cigarness of the cigar that Freud declares.
It’s not a denial of the sour, the bitter, which is to say, the phallic or fecal character of the cigar, it is a great acceptance of it.
Vibing with the symbol.
Pleasure
Being the weirdo I am, I often discuss sex and the infinite strangeness of the internet and the unconscious with my very patient, good friends. A point that we often reach is how someone can enjoy what they know to be symptom.
I’ve never understood this. I find the understanding, the unconscious depth of the situation to be an aphrodisiac in itself, an accelerant to the flame of enjoyment.
When I smoke a cigar, I enjoy wielding a flaming phallus as much as I enjoy the simple smoke.
When I engage in a fetish, I can feel deep traumas turning in their unquiet graves.
This is what anyone who gazes into the Abyss must embrace!
Embarrassment
Chanson de la plus haute tour
Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J’ai perdu ma vie.
Ah! Que le temps vienne
Où les coeurs s’éprennent.
-Arthur Rimbaud
(In my useless youth, a slave to every concern, by thoughtfulness for others, I lost my life. Ah! Let the time come when hearts are in love. )
There was a time in my youth when I was deeply nervous about using public bathrooms. I think most sensitive young folk have felt this way. After reading Freud, and recognizing the dynamic, I lost all of that anxiety. Public restrooms no longer spook me.
The same goes for countless other bits of unconscious residue that cling to normal engagements and topics.
Understanding need not be a prison, it can be the way out.
We are irrational beings, rationality despises what is innate to our bodies, the headless one loves it.
Let your heart be enflamed!
This post really resonated with me. Throughout my youth i've suffered from a sort of sensitivity around other people (i think due to childhood trauma and shameful fetishes). Under the gaze (imagined or actual) of another person, what would be a simple task performed spontaneously, would instead be disrupted because of my awareness of being observed.
"This is what anyone who gazes into the Abyss must embrace!"
This reminds me of a dream i had a while back.
I was being pursued by a group of ragged robed beings with gas masks (similar to the weedians on Sleeps Dopesmoker album cover) in stone building ruins amidst a vast sandy landscape. I was forced into a dead end stone path alleyway. There was a tall stone tower accross an abyss perpendicular to the dead end with a staring eyeball floating above a mantle in an opening high above me. It drew me into a gaze that i failed to struggle against, and my foot steps drew closer to the edge. At the last moment i drew a revolver and shot at the eye just as it was pulled from my hands by some unseen force and a wall of flesh enclosed behind me, pushing me into the abyss. I dont remember what happened after the fall, but when i came up, the eye was gone, with nothing but the mantle and my lost revolver laying next to it.
I think the Freudian parallels are quite clear. It is one of the most symbolic dreams i remember.
"If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face"-Dona Tartt, The Secret History