Feelings.

luka

Well-known member
Strange word. Good word. What are these things? Feelings? Do you have them? What are they? How important are they? Are you 'in touch with your feelings?'

I did a search for feelings and the only thread we've got is one advocating bottling up your feelings.
Have we changed? Or is this still our default position?

How can you discover what your feelings are? Are they obvious or are they furtive and secretive?
 

luka

Well-known member
A timid concern for the emotions of others can trap everyone in a stifling cave of pleasant. The middle class dining room. 'Niceness is evil.'

A lack of concern for the feelings of others is boorish, self-serving, destroys any possibility of the social.
 

luka

Well-known member
Grey Area.
It is a mistake to assume that feelings are close at hand, familiar,
easily recognisable and categorised.
Feelings can come camouflaged, or disguised as their opposites.
They may be out of earshot, even when they are screaming.
The rare can be mistaken for the commonplace,
the commonplace for the seldom seen.

Feelings are difficult. Feelings are elusive.
Often the close at hand is hardest to see, never more so
than when it is all that is seen,
large enough to fill the entire field of vision.
Similarly, a feeling may persist for such a length of time
That it is mistaken for a condition of existence.

Feelings are spectral. “Is this love,
is this love, is this love
that I’m feeling?”
Or is it something else, or nothing
at all?

Sometimes feelings make us cry.
Sometimes, a feeling is so voluptuous
we prolong it artificially,
fanning its embers,
crouched over
its
glowing
coal.

Or,
We try to strangle our feelings
before they grow too large to house,
and too difficult to control.
Or,
we disown them,
thinking them beneath
or above
us,
too
gauche
or,
too
high-
flown.

We cannot
Negotiate
with feelings.
They are stubborn
and push back
If pushed.
What we tell ourselves
of them
won't change them.
They are more real then,
than we are.
 

luka

Well-known member
I have to write things like that for people. Feelings poems. I think it's good for me to write feelings poems. A good discipline. Hygienic. Of course, they would make a lot of people puke.

Feelings are Elusive.

Feelings are not stories we tell ourselves but sometimes stories we tell ourselves are mistaken for feelings.

Feelings can’t speak for themselves, or, feelings are a language we don’t understand, or can’t hear.

Feelings tell us when our Will runs counter to our Needs. Feelings tell us when we are wounded.

There is a Tyrant within us. Feelings are not the Tyrant.
 
Interoception is a useful concept when thinking about this. The minds mapping of the bodily state. I’m gonna go and try and answer your question about trauma on the other thread now btw
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Are you purely driven by feelings, is a question I've been wondering about. In the end, are all of your choices and efforts animated by a projected emotional outcome? Or is there something else?

When I leave someone I love deeply, what is this feeling that beats love? Is it despair at the thought of love ending that brings about itself? Or is it something else? Is it about running away from feelings to somewhere empty, and is this place a feeling as well? Or is this serene pool of nothingness just the absence of anxiety of potential loss.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
very true the first part of your poem luka,

I have no idea how to explain my feelings. Sometimes I find myself trying to rationalize this complex emotional totality of myself that is by all accounts a pure fabrication.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
I love feelings. At my best I’m all feeling.

I find the lack of feeling very offensive. In large part that’s what boredom is; experiencing the world devoid of feeling.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
There are some who believe that boredom is the ultimate abyss and that all meaning is created in order to escape it. Not pain or suffering but the absence of feeling itself.

Even that stuff like social hierarchy have been created because eternal conflict is a permanent way out of existential boredom.
 
But boredom is a feeling too, there's desire in it, there's frustration in it, hope in it, pay enough attention and you can find pleasure in it.

There is no outside feeling for us, until death. Even what might come closest to 'feeling nothing', say clinical depression is a complex bundle of feelings. Feeling always precedes thought. To think is to feel and you can't think without feeling.
 

Leo

Well-known member
are we led by feelings, or are feelings a manifestation of our existing beliefs? are they on the front end or back end?
 
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