The tickling narrative, unlike the sexual narrative, has no climax.
Is the tickling scene, at its most reassuring, not a unique representation of desire and, at its most unsettling, a paradigm of the perverse contract?
Does it not highlight, this delightful game, the impossibility of satisfaction and of reunion, with its continual reenactment of the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration?
Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience. To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable. Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition. When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe- we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see. We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
Adam PhillipsThe wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as asults, to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
Adam PhillipsThere is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage
Adam PhillipsTag: happiness
Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.
Adam PhillipsTag: monogamy
Finding hate-objects may be every bit as essential as finding love-objects, but if one can tolerate some of one's badness -- meaning recognize it as yours -- then one can take some fear out of the world.
Adam PhillipsThe big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.
Adam PhillipsTag: truth art philosophy secrets aesthetics
Greed is a way of avoiding making choices: if I have everything I don't have to choose what I want. And choosing what I want means giving up some pleasures for other pleasures.
Adam PhillipsThe only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating.
Adam PhillipsSo there is something perhaps more difficult to conceive of, sometimes born of resignation and sometimes not- a life in which not getting it is the point and not the problem; in which the project is to learn how not to ride the bicycle, how not to understand the poem. Or to put it the other way round, this would be a life in which getting it – the will to get it, the ambition to get it – was the problem; in which wanting to be an accomplice didn’t take precedence over making up one’s mind.
Adam PhillipsTag: bicycle getting-it
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