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Dialects of Experience,

On Drugs and Madness.

Index I II III IV V VI VII
VI.

The Internet gives invaluable access into otherwise hidden communities, but more than this, by letting them find one another, it affords these hidden communities a chance at self-description and greater coherence. Kind of like a language group squeezed in the Pyrenees or somewhere.

Mental health forums are usually moderated by mental health professionals, as you might expect. The actual threads, however, are mostly fleshed out by fellow sufferers— giving them the overall effect of the "annual convention" I mentioned earlier. Self-descriptions and coherence that mental health professionals would probably be slow to aver.


Some of the posts are lonesome missives, and often inadvertently poetic:

Others are written by people who sound like their hair is on fire:

After voicing concerns over the dietary drawbacks of demon-eating, the author goes on to offer us a metaphor...

After a series of disappointing remedies, he finally succeeds with a recipe suggested by another reader: "she said raw potatoes."

The outsider looking in is bound to find many of the stories funny. This is inevitable. Laughter, in itself, does not make you a monster. The posts represent near-cataclysmic collisions of agenda; incongruencies between diverse worldviews. Rather than trying to stifle the laughter, we might be able to search out truer understanding by paying attention to the places where we laugh, marvel, or shake our heads. Where we find that friction and those incongruencies reveals the very points that two forms of thinking are rubbing against each other... where there is a terse contradiction or visible choice-of-terms. This can also be observed in tensions that are altogether harrowing..



Dialects of Experience.
I. Interpretation.
II. Twilight Orderings.
III. Subjecthood and Hypersemia.
IV. In Secret.
V. In Letters.
VI. In the Forum.
VII. The Axiom of Mood.
VIII. Quick Visions
IX. Lines of Force


2009



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