Soul murder

Notes for a an approach to a storyline about the swirl:

1 Progression - life is jogging along, then one day or more likely one night an uneasy feeling creeps into awareness, like a mild anxiety with perhaps some irritability or restlessness.  Undirected movement may follow," I can't sit or lie still because something inside me is agitating my body and my mind, like a washing machine is churning in my gut."

2  Actions. Reaching for analgesics or valium or zoloft or a sleeping pill. Or some distraction - TV, DVD, video game, ipod, email. Maybe a spouse or a friend for some comfort, or anything which might allay the agitation and rising panic and offer  possible escape or relief.

3 Alternative. Staying with the anxiety and agitation, being able to be curious about what is happening, being aware it's happened before, and is not life threatening, observing the shape and form of it, the 'coordinates', doing deep and measured breathing, trying to slow the pulse, meditation (if it's possible), maybe slow walking, slow sipping water.

4 Onset of swirl.  Aware of feeling isolated, because it's an unshared experience, something abnormal, that marks one off as not normal, and when it gets worse, " I had to call the doctor ", " I thought I'd have to get to a hospital.", " I had wild thoughts that I was dying. " ,  " My body can't cope with this mind chaos, these brain fireworks." , " It's like being in a closed space, claustrophobic, how do I get out when I feel swept up in a swirling  vortex, a maelstrom, a grand opera of the soul, with catastrophe imminent? " 

" Someone inside is intent on soul murder; who is it? Can I talk to him? Will he answer? Is there anyone there?  No, it's just me and my fear, we're bad company. But what is the fear? It's not rational, I can't explain it  but it's all mine, it gets going inside me.  Is my chemistry out of balance? Are they 'bad thoughts because I feel guilty, ashamed, remorse, regret?  It's funneling, whirling, gaining momentum and force, like a tornado, a circular swirl with an empty centre.  Is that centre lifeless,

something annihilated? Is that the fear, the panic, the high anxiety? "

5 Ways out.  Perhaps writing a description will calm the anxiety.  Stern says feelings are emotions with words attached. Putting words on paper may reveal the emotions behind the feelings.   In a panic we forget what it's like to be free of anxiety, like we forget wellness when in illness. But by not drugging or distracting this swirl experience one can encounter strong and real emotion while in an existential mood state, a sense of the fragility along with the energy in the swirl.

The forces of eros and thanatos have joined in battle and the war zone is the inside of one's head. Fit to burst perhaps, but still alive.

My sense is that immersion in the swirl takes place suddenly, it just happens. This hides the strange comfort to be gained in the swirl.

Ken Hey

The Swirl at large

 The demise of democracy and identity politics

Peter Hartcher in The Age on Saturday (29.9.18) wrote under the heading 'Identity politics looming large'  He dwells on Fukuyama's book Identity: the 
Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, and claims that Trump is the high priest of the low order of angry right wing identity politics.  He agrees that Trump's right is a reaction against the excesses of the left.

John Gray in the current New Statesman on the same topic slices through Fukuyama, who has no explanation for the rise of populism and Appiah, whose 'nominalism' which Gray accepts, does not account for the intensity of the search for both identity and dignity. (Thymos - surely what slaves have always sought, with little success)

"The remedy for populism, then, is the anti-essentialist philosophy of nominalism, according to which ideas that split up the world into definite kinds of thing are simply tools we use to simplify our dealings with an environment actually composed of an infinity of particulars."

Paul Kelly in the OZ describes the demise of democracy - partly because of the digital revolution and social media, partly because of the rise of identity politics, which tends to atomise the polity.(which comes first?)  He points out that representative democracy depends on social cohesion and a politically aware public.   But what happens when these don't exist?    Thatcher said there was no such thing as society;  her statement is even more relevant now.

Atomisation, anomie, the loss of solid ground, bearings and certainties, show up in the personal Swirl and as factors in current world turbulence and violence. So there may be a legitimate analogy between the personal Swirl and another version seen in social and political movements.

Change is so rapid, digital communication so immediate. Events tumble over each other on the screen, such that there is no space or time for reflection, or even careful consideration.  As the personal Swirl is sudden and unbidden, so the 'social' Swirl is experienced without being understood.

Flat ontology

Flat ontology :
It is is a model for reality that says that all object, even those that are imagined, have the same degree of being-ness as any other object. No object is more a subject than any other. All subjects are simply objects. The key factor in determining ontology is the ability of an object to affect another. (http://scalar.usc.edu/works/material_philosophy/flat-ontology)

So, a way of thinking about a swirl or swirls is that they are objects, whether they are internal or external. One reason for thinking of them as objects is that the swirl as a complex of negative affects can not be reduced to to a single component. One philosopher, Graham Harman thinks of an object as "anything that is resistant to reduction." So on the understanding that thinking of a swirl as just anxiety or panic is misleading then it might be useful to think of the swirl as an object and moreover as a powerful object. 
I think this is advantageous when we are trying to explore the swirl as a social phenomenon. I wonder whether what gives rise to the swirl, what creates the swirl as an external object are social contexts that bear on agency in particular ways. Someone is unable to get a job because in their region unemployment is high and they lack requisite skills for what is available. They thus get unemployment benefits and at the same time might be characterised as lazy and sponging on the state. So a whole range of negative affects are almost unavoidably in relation to this situation; they can't but they must. If they can't then they are not trying hard enough.

Grammar

I take it that what we are doing here is attempting a phenomenological account of a rather complex mental, psychical state. But it is not just a state experienced by an individual. It can be a much broader social process, experienced by a group. It can be then internal and external. But it is not just an it. So far for the most part I think we have treated the swirl as a noun. I imagine it and have experienced it as something spatial. Thus I write about going into it, or of it pulling me in. And when in, I am inside it. The it being some sort of spatial entity. And when not in it I am outside it. The experience of some might be of an oscillation, in it and then out of it.
Swirl can also be a verb, a gerund. So being in a swirl might involve swirling; the experience of nothing stable. Psychical vertigo.
To many this might be a characteristic of modernity, namely the experience of the loss of a stable centre, everything is up for grabs. In which case the swirl is closely allied to scepticism. If I can not be sure of anything then there is a collapse of boundaries and in which case the swirl as a malevolent power has an easy time of either creating swirling or pulling the individual in to the swirl space.

This then is an amendment to the previous post. The alternative to the subjective position, the world is my creation is the breakdown of the objective outlook. The world is not my creation but whatever it is is uncertain, and changeable.

Meaning

I have just read a review of a book of articles by a philosopher that I found rather stimulating. The review was stimulating, and most probably the book too. And what provoked me was the mention of two rather different models or theories of meaning and how each might bear on swirls.
Whilst what stands out in our deliberations on swirls over the years is the affective dimension, we have always tried to make sense of meaning. So we have always wondered about and considered the cognitions that have accompanied the negative feeling. What the review discussed were two quite different models of meaning. How they might impact the swirls I'm not sure.
The first model presents language as a directly ? about the world. So one might think of this as an objective view. The world or reality is objective and can be known directly through language. Might this mean then that swirls could be received cognitively as objective data about the individual who experiences them? That this is how things are.
An alternate view that is really quite different takes meaning to be constructed by an individual. So in order to understand another we need to understand how they conceive of the world. I shall call this a subjective view of meaning. How might this influence the swirl? I am not sure. If the swirl is intimately linked to my conception of the world does that make it more or less intense than the supposition that the meanings associated with it are objective in some way?

Shame?

I have stated in a post that shame is a necessary component of the swirl. My thought was that the swirl is a complex of affective states and shame is a necessary but not sufficient condition of a state to be characterised as a swirl. So if it is absent, then the state is not a swirl.

My co-writer on this blog, Ken, disagrees. He thinks that whilst shame might often be present it is by no means necessary.
Well if he says so. The point being this. We have compared notes on our respective experiences of the swirl. For me, shame was ever present. For Ken, it was never present. So I need to rethink this. It is as if something needs to replace shame, and maybe it is intensity. Panic or anxiety can be felt as so intense that the experience might be reasonably categorised as a swirl. The other variable that might be relevant here is that of diminishment. I have often thought that diminishment is an existential category that ought to have had a chapter devoted to it in Yalom's work. Is diminishment a necessary afffective aspect of the swirl complex of experiences? Possibly. Can there be diminishment without shame? Possibly

Command

There seems to be something or some part in the person, in the self, that demands or commands the self into the swirl. It is not as if there is a warning. It happens suddenly. I'm not sure it makes any sense to presume one can refuse the demand, because it seems that at the moment one is overcome by the swirl then agency stops. So it makes no sense to intend not to be swept up in the swirl, because as agency dissolves so does intention. It is even difficult to imagine not succumbing to the power of the swirl because at the point of pull the desire to resist just has no traction.

I have been thinking about the swirl in terms of a command, and wondering about the relevance here of Althusser's concept of interpellation. Wikipedia has a useful gloss on this:

Althusser’s notion of interpellation or hailing is a non-specific and unconscious process. For example, when a police officer shouts (or hails) “Hey, you there!” and an individual turns around and so-to-speak ‘answers’ the call, he becomes a subject. Althusser argues that this is because the individual has realized that the hailing was addressed at him which makes him subjective to the ideology of democracy and law." It happens instantaneously.
So, in relation to the swirl it is as if one part of the self 'hails' another part. And the part hailed accedes power and then moves to a space of shame and despair. It is pulled down, demoted and has become a subject constituted by the ideology of the swirl.

Anomie and other phenomena

Anomie  -  Social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values. Personal unrest, alienation, and uncertainty that come from a lack of purpose or ideals. Mirriam Webster

"Anomie, translated from French means normlessness, when things happen in society, change occurs so fast we do not know what the norms are. Do we go back to the old norms? Create new ones? What happened to the current norms, why do they no longer apply?" Sally Rascoff, sociologist

There may be connections between anomie, depression, cognitive dissonance and the Swirl

"in the midst of a depressive episode - when the anguish is as meaningless as it is painful - suicide has a terrible logic."
" I was surprised by my own paralysis. It was embarrassing and unprecedented.  Worse, it was frightening. I couldn't concentrate. My lucidity diminished. I wondered if I was going mad.
(I had) a sense of futility about articulating the anguish. I was profoundly exhausted.....the alien form of the pain struck me as indescribable........the most perverse aspect of depression is its theft of motivation."    Martin McKenzie Murray

"Sometimes a wave of climate grief breaks over me. It happens unexpectedly, perhaps during a book talk, or while on the phone with a congressional representative. In a millisecond, without warning, I’ll feel my throat clench, my eyes sting, and my stomach drop as though the Earth below me is falling away."
Peter Kalmus Climate Scientist

" we westerners are living in a society that is still deeply entrenched in the very practices we now know are damaging and destructive. This creates a very specific kind of situation—what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Unless we know how to work with this dissonance, we will continue to come up against resistance, inaction, and reactivity.”   Renee Lertzman Psychologist

Double bind

So circumspection involves a tacit knowledge of one's way around the space the individual inhabits. As one moves into the swirl this breaks down, and in terms of my own experience the sense is of being directed, of being the object not the subject.
Today I was thinking of what might be a catalyst, a provocation that leads to movement into the swirl and I was at the same time thinking of Trump et al. I wonder if something like Bateson's concept of double-bind is useful here. It might be generated by the individual at some deep level, as in a self directed command that is illogical. And in terms of the social sphere swirls might emerge as a result of policy announcements or news that are contradicted by evidence. Or a country governed by a coalition government that is split in relation to views on the environment and climate change. So if one thinks of circumspection at a group level then we have groups moving around in opposition to each other. What then is hegemonic is a consequence of wheeling and dealing and not intellectual discourse. Thinking is demoted and affect constantly what is appealed to. But in a double bind, which is a demand or command there is a contradiction between the elements constitutive of it so the individual of course can not do what is demanded. But the individual, or group is left trying to cognise the contradiction which is impossible. The message sent is also sent with its negation. And thus to the swirl, which may be one way the mind/body copes with a dialectical utterance.

Response

I want to respond to a point in the comment below. I want to do this before I post a few lined on Bateson's concept of the double-bind.
I previously wrote that the swirl caused a cognitive breakdown, and Ken disagrees. His point is that irrespective of the pain and psychic devastation wrought by a swirl, the observing ego carries on as usual. That's to say there is no breakdown of that. Accepted.
But, and yes I think there is a but. I goes like this. The swirl is disruptive and a disrupter. It is doing something and initiates a change. So in the move from normalcy to the swirl, something happens that is sudden and I am not sure what in that movement the ego discerns except for what seems like a change in state. So there may be some clarity in the before and after but maybe not at the point of change except for the felt fact of change.

on Circumspection

" Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy."   Martin Heidegger

I was pleased to find this quote, as it may assist me to understand the use of the word circumspection in a philosophical context. In everyday English, it means cautious, or prudent, but Jules Henry, following Heidegger, gives a relational emphasis to it, so that it means concern for others, their needs and plans. This may be to do with managing space and time, or failure to do so, or it may represent the presence or absence of the flexibility that allows constructive engagement. Probably everyone puts their own needs first at times, but some see this as the only possible mode of being in the world.

Self referential self centredness, also known as narcissism, can harbour anxiety, and people characterised in this way, when thwarted, lack the flexibility to respond to reality, and may panic and act out destructively. Looked at this way, the Swirl has a relational origin, but is induced by internal processes.

I'm not sure about 'cognitive breakdown', even if temporary, as I think the ego retains its capacity to observe the catastrophe that assails the self that we call the Swirl, even with the loss of agency and equilibrium.

Circumspection

Here is Jules Henry again. In the Introduction to Pathways to Madness he offers a gloss on Heidegger's term Umsicht that is translated as circumspection.
Henry writes:

"Circumspection. Heidegger coined this term for the process of perceiving things in their relationship to other things, and I shall use the term in the same way. A person who is able to perceive what he does in relation to how it affects others, who sees his time schedule in relation to the time schedules of others, is capable of circumspection; and a person lacks it who does things as if other people didn't exist or who always gets mixed up in time. Later I extend the term "circumspection" to cover the capacity to see any relationships at all. " 

So this term covers space and time, in relation to the almost unreflective, unselfconscious, matter of fact mode of finding one's way in the world. It is about tacit knowledge, everyday knowledge that is of course taken for granted. 

The swirl experience takes place when circumspection breaks down. Thus in that state the normal, everyday signposts that are indicative of temporal and spatial boundaries are quite simply absent. Now all of this as Henry suggests can be thought of as a disruption of a perceptual system. But I think one can extend the concept of circumspection to a cognitive breakdown as well.

So inside the swirl judgement breaks down. There is no internal argument. Thus the cognition that 'I am bad' or 'I am no good' are taken in as the truth. Whatever is cognized within the swirl is heard and felt as fact. The assumption here is that when circumspection fails or breaks down then the negative voice, in this case, is all powerful. It has the aspect of a monological dictator.

Reply to a comment of September 9

This statement is at the end of the comment,
'create the space that might allow the negative power to be constructed as an object.'
It shows how the concept of the Swirl is slippery and defies simple explanation.

I take it that 'negative power' is in some way destructive, and some countervailing power is needed to avoid the person succumbing to it.  But can an 'object' also be a power?  Or is it that an object can be conceived of as having some definition, and therefore able to be worked with. That may be the import of the above quote.

Like the Moebius strip, the Swirl as we have thought of it is like an optical illusion, with no clear inside or outside dimensions. Illusory only in spatial terms, however, because its effect is uncomfortably palpable.

Blaise Pascal puts it thus: "When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there ... now instead of then."

We speak about entering the Swirl, or being pulled into it, as if it has spatial dimensions, and also speak of it as an invader, like an alternate self who comes from Yung's dark side and intends to  take over.  However,  it is primarily an affect, a disturbing and distressing feeling, and in this way it is similar to other feelings to which we give some sense of space : 'falling in love', 'a towering rage',  or associate a colour: 'black depression', 'green with envy', 'blue mood'.

These are attempts to convey what a feeling is by using imagery. So why give the Swirl an objective existence, or indeed a colour, when the experience of it threatens to remove all experience, along with thought and agency. As feelings come and go, often without apparent cause, so the Swirl has a beginning and an end, with an intense median.

I say threatens because if the Swirl, however we may describe it, actually caused a complete implosion, there would be no surviving living organism.

Perception

Something goes wrong, something has gone wrong. And I find myself in a swirl. What brings that about? In the previous post I suggested that within the swirl there is a problem with boundaries. They seem not to be there except on the outside. If boundaries involve something spatial then their absence leads to an experience of no-space. Except on the outside, and from within the swirl that is somewhere else.
But why?
Or how?
Jules Henry in the Introduction to 'Pathways to Madness' writes "If we assume that the underlying structure of consciousness, the culturally determined framework of judgment and perception, is acquired through learning, it follows that some may learn it well, others poorly and some may not learn it at all............. under  the influence of a theory of unconscious destructive motivations, we have come to think that people who do the 'wrong thing' are motivated by unconscious hostility or death wishes." There are two issues here. When might some behaviour be categorised as the 'wrong thing' ?Secondly when is it appropriate to make reference to unconscious motivation as a causative factor in explaining the process? Actually there is another issue connected to the last point. When is the death instinct and allied notions called on to give specificity to unconscious motivation when considered as a or the causal factor in motivation.
The alternative that Jules Henry mentions is to think about the painful process as constituted by perceptual deficit. So for example the experience of a negative feeling state such as anxiety might be amplified by a cognition that itself is a function of a misperception. And this might give rise to a swirl. And the misperception might be illustrative of what I was exploring in the last post, namely the collapsing of certain boundaries that gives rise to a strange experience of no-space. No space to get bearings, no space to reflect, and this giving the swirl power.

Boundaries

This is a very tricky area, as boundaries always seem extremely difficult to define. And I feel the need here to proceed very slowly. Falteringly.
A swirl has an inside and an outside. So, what distinguishes one from the other has to be a boundary. The individual knows when they have succumbed to the swirl, which is another way of saying that they know when they have moved from the outside to the inside.  I have experienced the swirl so I shall not write about this impersonally. I know when I am inside. But the move from outside to inside as I have written before seems instantaneous. As such I have no awareness of crossing a border or boundary. All of a sudden I am there, inside, where I manifestly do not want to be. I know that even though that is not how I might think of it at the time. And that for the simple reason that thinking is highly compromised in this space. Once inside, I think the move out is much the same. It happens and then I find myself on the outside. The boundary has been crossed again. But this boundary is not of course a physical one. It is not an external one. So what is it? My first thought is that something inside weakens. Inside where? Well one thing that weakens. so to speak, is a cognitive process; the process that might challenge and correct faulty or misleading thoughts. And the thoughts are not any thoughts but, I think, thoughts that fall under the general heading of self-attributions. And therefore one way of thinking about the swirl experience is that for the time within,  the negative self attributions have no witness for the prosecution. When I have been in a swirl I am unable to oppose the swirl charges.

Comments

Here are some comments on the blog post below.
I think that the experience of being in a swirl is worse. It is worse because there is no space between the self and the negativity that is what gives a swirl its extraordinary identity. Thus it is the abyss. It is not so much an issue of being forced to look into the void or abyss, as if one might be able to counter this. Rather it just happens. Entering the swirl almost instantaneously involves the collapse or disintegration of a previously taken for granted space; not just between oneself and the world but but between thoughts. For the space between thoughts allows one to step back, or rather allows one to reflect on them. One could call this affective and cognitive entropy. The system breaks down and thus the swirl has power to take the individual into its clutches.

"Something hidden threatens to reveal itself, and there will be shame and disgust when it does."

I am not sure about this. I think that there is no threat because in the swirl the 'hidden' is automatically revealed, and thus the shame and disgust are unavoidable. The more we explore this complex negative state the more I think it resists being undone from the inside. Or rather the self alone is probably a prisoner until such time as the negativity just diminishes in its power. Until that happens, my hunch is that another person is needed to help create the space that might allow for the negative power to be constructed as an object.

A Swirls story   

Being in a dark place

Something hits you, from a dark place inside, and you feel helpless.

It is what we call a Swirl - your world is suddenly lurching and spinning, and you lose your bearings.

The Swirl disrupts the familiar internal movie, where you write the screenplay, and forces other scenes 
upon you -  a mixture of nausea and anxiety, a sense of oncoming doom, loss of confidence, and 
blind panic. Being forced to look into the abyss of non being.

It is a slide into a sucking quicksand, a whirlpool of chaos, a tilting floor with no walls or ceiling, where 
your self is no longer yours.   It is an encounter, hopefully brief, with madness.

Something hidden threatens to reveal itself, and there will be shame and disgust when it does.

You might try to keep calm and wait for the awfulness to pass, like a dizzy spell, and sometimes it does, 
but usually there is no room for the intentional act of trying - the Swirl disrupts intention, thought and 
action - all three.

It mostly comes on with no warning, and afterwards you feel exhausted and depressed.
If it comes often,the cumulative effect is a kind of paralysis, and you can’t do much - just sorrowfully wait
for the next attack. It is like a repeated trauma, with sometimes savage after effects.

Some may describe it as the work of the ‘internal saboteur’, a part of the self that seeks to undermine 
pleasure and achievement. 

You may ask how could such an attack on the self exist?  But it does. Ask Google. Ask the 
sportsperson about the ‘demons’ that upset their performance, ask the writer who can’t write, the painter 
who can’t paint, the leader who can't lead.

Sports people sometimes ‘choke’ when near to a triumph.  And can’t explain what happened. If they 
could, it would be to understand that it was an attack on their achievement, driven by envy, which can’t 
tolerate feeling excluded from that achievement, and attempts to spoil it.  Even though both the 
achievement and the attack on it are parts of the same person. 
Sebastian Vettel, Formula One champion race driver says: " I think my biggest enemy is me" He gets it.

The saboteur is a self destructive impulse, which lurks in a dark place inside us, and can assert itself 
even when things are going well, when disaster seems unlikely.  

Mindfulness?

This is from Matthieu Ricard:
' How do we go about making peace with our own emotions? First, we have to focus our mind on the raw power of inner suffering. Instead of avoiding it or burying it away in some dark corner of our mind, we should make it the object of our meditation, without ruminating over the events that caused the pain or reviewing every freeze-frame from the movie of our life...........When a painful emotion strikes us, the most urgent thing is to look at it head-on and to identify the immediate thoughts that triggered and are fanning it. Then by fixing our inner gaze on the emotion itself, we can gradually dissolve it like snow in sunshine..... once the strength of the emotion has been sapped, the causes that triggered it will seem less tragic and we will have won ourselves the chance to break free from the vicious circle of negative thoughts. '
Now it may well be that one way to combat the Swirl is, amongst other ways, to use mindfulness. And it might be the case that mindfulness practiced regularly might prevent being sucked into a Swirl. But my hunch is that once the individual is 'in' a Swirl then mindfulness just won't work. It won't work because there is no way, I think, in which mindfulness can get any traction.
What Ricard is presuming in the quote is that in the wake of suffering there is a possibility of focus on that state. But in a Swirl that is highly unlikely to eventuate because there is no energy for the mental state of focusing. Focus surely depends on there being a split, a boundary between the mental state, in this context, and its object. But in the Swirl there is no boundary. The mind is, so to speak, subsumed into the complex of emotional suffering, and thus there is no reflective space.

Does the Swirl have a phobic quality?

Talking, thinking, reading, writing about the Swirl experience brings the threat of slipping into that un-mind space. What does that mean? That the swirl is never very far away, that it lurks in the subconscious dark but has the ability, like a parasite, to re-infest its host? That I, or others, have a propensity to be infested? or infected? That the Swirl has the qualities of a fantasy, and thus can invade the conscious mind without effort or warning?

Claustrophobia:   'extreme or irrational fear of confined places.'
A similar irrational fear to that driving the Swirl experience, which also feels like a confined space, a prison, where some unseen force holds sway. There is no prison, it's a fantasy, an unseen and very powerful force.

Claustrophobic images can suddenly manifest during a dream - unrealistic but vividly present fantasies - frightening and disorienting, like the Swirl. Where do these fantasies come from? One possibility is the murky breeding ground we call the unconscious.  Another is that a memory, perhaps distorted, of being frightened by an actual childhood trauma comes back in another form, with distressing affect.

Victimage

To enter the swirl or to be overcome by a swirl experience is to become a victim.; even if it would seem that an individual has become a victim of themselves or a destructive part of themselves. The difficulty in dealing with this is, in part, the difficulty in dealing with or accepting a self description of victim. And that is difficult because that label is frowned upon, deprecated in our society. Now I am not sure how widespread this is, to what extent this is a western phenomenon. But i can not count the number of times a client or friend has said something like, "I'm not a victim, you know..." And it has always seemed to me that something important is being denied here.
And if we take the refusal to regard self as a victim into the swirl experience then maybe that might account for the intensity of the space. So maybe the demand to face it might be a demand not to appear as victim. But if one is victim then that is a denial, a foolish one that might indeed increase the power of the swirl. But to not face it does not entail turning one's back on it, which is impossible anyway.
So maybe one way of dealing with it involves acknowledging what it seems the swirl experience is expressing. I am not sure if this is the same as accepting it. Maybe it is.
Another thought, that possibly the swirl experience needs a relational other to help alleviate its intensity.

Facing

Early on in our deliberations on the swirl we wondered about how to deal with the experience. Often, it seemed, without realising it we treated the swirl in a spatial way. So, we talked about going into it and then wondered how to get out of it. I think that at that time, about nine years ago, we were reading about and thinking about Buddhism. So it was not surprising that what we often came up with was something like, face the swirl. That's what someone has to do, face the enemy, face the fear.
Easy to say, but does it make much sense in terms of the swirl experience?

The short answer is no. One of the key characteristics of this experience is its disabling, psychic disabling quality. It's not so much that it takes one by surprise, but that within its grasp there is no apparent foothold for a counter move. That's to say part of its power is the sense that its propaganda is true. So in the midst of an experience of worthlessness and shame and fear it is difficult to know quite what is meant by the command to 'face it'. For in a way that is precisely what is going on, and the negative voice has the power. It is, so to speak, hegemonic. In which case facing it might seem impossible, as the power of what is to be faced is so great, or too great. Or worse, that facing it is to be open to defeat, and at the same time, to be shamed. And that is because everything that goes on in this space is infused with shame.
I wonder if the command to 'face it' is part of a trend that deprecates the victim. In the swirl the individual is a victim.

Quantum

I read an interesting article by Benjamin Ogden where he introduced the term quantum criticism. And this described a set up where an article was setup with pages  divided into three horizontal chunks each containing a different continuous text, all in dialectical relation to the others. So on each page there are what seems like three voices putting forward their individual points of view. And presumably the task of the reader is to contain these disparate voices and somehow think through them or think with them.
How does this relate to the swirl experience?
What the article illustrates and instantiates is complex cognition, and a process that sets up an almost constant interrogation of both the article itself-why on earth is the author doing this? Why is this so hard to read? What is the point? And so on. And in addition each segment sets up questions about the ostensible subject which is a novel by Coetzee.
But in a swirl there are no contending disparate voices. Indeed the swirl experience is marked by a unitary negative voice. Even if there are different elements they all cohere in their unrelenting negativity. Now this must bear on thinking.
The Ogden article provokes thinking, stimulates it even if it is perceived as problematic in its structure. The swirl experience does the reverse. It seems to shut down thinking almost completely. In its place there is the visceral experience of negative affects. And this is where it is difficult to analyse the experience. Because of course thinking takes place but in an almost subservient way. Thought at the service of feelings.
'I am no good' is a thought not a feeling. But in a swirl it might portend a feeling. Or it might seem like the thought has the texture of a feeling.

Stories

Here is Coetzee:

One of the basic story-plots has the following shape. During his youth a man (it is usually a man) commits a shameful act, perhaps even a crime. He runs away, covers his tracks, takes a new name, makes a new life for himself in some faraway place. Years pass. He marries and has children; he becomes a pillar of the new community. He begins to allow himself to think his secret is safe, he has escaped his past. Then one day a stranger arrives in town and begins asking nosy questions. Implacably, step by step, the man’s secret is uncovered. He is shamed; he is ruined.

But what if that happens in an instant? What if this narrative is reversed so that the shameful act follows the man's integration into a new community. And what if the shameful act is in a way a fantasy, a construction that is intrinsic to the swirl experience.

Either way the story plot is quite probably paradigmatically modernist. What is indicative of that is the fractured movement from stability to instability or the other way round and all in a way that might be represented by ellipses.
This post could have been entitled parataxis. The point being that the move from outside of the swirl to inside seems to happen without any apparent cause so there is a gap. The gap, or ellipsis in a story might indicate just that this happened and then that happened without in any way suggesting that what happened last is a consequence of something prior. Another way of putting this is to introduce terms like trauma or shock into our thinking. The swirl is a dislocation, and as such difficult to make sense of both when caught up in it and after.
Important to consider the cognitive and affective dimension of the swirl.

Identity

So, this post has a title. I guess over the years when we have discussed swirls we rarely linked it overtly to identity. And yet now it seems to have come to the foreground.
What seems obvious is that a swirl experience bears on identity in a particularly negative way.
So, here are some random thoughts. Kafka's Metamorphosis is one example. If we think that it does exemplify something to do with swirls then for sure one of the dominant issues is how a swirl experience impacts identity. In the Kafka story the ascription, the taken for granted ascription is, of course, undone and transformed. And that also is a feature of a swirl experience. It is as if the outer layer of who I am is transformed almost instantaneously into something totally negative. In Metamorphosis the new identity is disgusting. It does not though have to be disgusting, but in the movement into the swirl there is a move into a sort of black hole which is constituted by any number of negative features. I do not imagine that once one has entered this space, and entering is no choice, one could take on any number of negative ascriptions. What determines the swirl identity must have something to do with the intensity of the complex of feelings that accompany what might seem like a descent into a sort of underworld space.
The movement in seems unstoppable but the movement out is more complex and laboured. The point being that negative ascriptions, negative layers that constitute identity, stick. And maybe this is one of the essential aspects of identity politics. Without that there is just a singularity that provides no hook of recognition that might easily alleviate the negative associations. Indeed the point of recognition or acknowledgment is that they logically the object invariably, always(?) involved something generic.