DUMB BUNNY.....THE PARENTAL UNDERMINING OF CONFIDENCE.....

Digging though some old boxes of "papers" i found my 'report card' from 7th grade and noticed that my mother had refused to sign off on the reverse side because my grades were not up to whatever standards she had established for me.......I felt really stupid and rejected at the time.......{I expected the abysmal grade in "PE" as i always spent the PE period hanging out and chatting with friends in the volleyball court........} and there were other distractions....like.....hormones at work!

I remembered, at 19, reading "Metaphysics of Morals" by Immanuel Kant.......then....just this week, Simon Kaijser's Film drove a shovel into my Memory Banks....

as I watched "Spinning Man", the Pierce Brosnan/Guy Pearce/Minnie Driver Film about Pathological Moral Dilemma, Intellectualization, Rationalization and Emotional Displacement in service to Ego.......my viewing of the Film was intersperced with flashes of college lectures on both Philosophy and Behavioral Psyhchology....

 

"KILLING THE EYE"

At 6, i became aware of the variations in individual's interpretations of sensory information and how these variations from the mean create eccentrics like myself. A few years later i discovered that my eyes did not focus very acutely upon objects more than a yard away, although my close range focus was extraordinary. I was amazed, when my vision had been "corrected" by the intricacies of Nature at greater than arm's length. Then, when the world was "in focus", I continued to avoid interactions with other children whom i considered boisterous and undisciplined...and therefore.....unthinkingly dangerous and volatile creatures. It seemed that the surfaces of things were extreme and the depths unfathomable. Of course, I did not..at that time....either have the vocabulary to shape my thoughts in such a way that I could play back my interpretations or the confidence to believe that my take on what seemed to be happening around me could be any more "true" than the preconceptions of others that formed the context of my education in Life. I did not know about the sub-species called Artists or those labeled Intellectuals or those who lived lives as instinctual as those of birds. I was wary of the impulses that were genetically driven and that seemed to bypass ethical or moral considerations and wanted only to cast aside the predestinations of learned patterns of both perception and thought......But then....I was only 7 by then, and had only a few clues to go by.....