Tarrying with the Negative: A Second Hegelian Perspective on OCD Outline of the Problem Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is marked by obsessions, intrusive images, waves of anxiety, and rituals — sometimes visible, sometimes entirely internal — that feel compulsory even when they are not truly willed. Driven by absolutist and non-negotiable core beliefs or fixed ideas — ‘I must be certain’, ‘I can never be wrong’, for instance — the condition becomes a relentless overseer,

She Stands Alone She stands alone, a single bulb lighting an entire room, the walls curved into her private sphere. No doors. No windows. No-one can break in. Her world is the only world and all things lie within her scope, sealed within her soul. Solitary appetites she pursues in consecrated isolation, in this her sacristy, her prison, her cell — an inside with no conceivable outside.

Private Language In / creasing thought, the self doubles / folds inwards, suppose a private language against the world’s shared grammar — self-authored, a book written for no . one. A page torn away, stains in the margins, a footnote wrongly numbered, the letter ‘i’ faintly printed. Such is the pain of the man who yearns for his whole self between the covers of biography and meets only estrangement.

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The Soul Moves The soul moves & by small degrees Of slow calculation Actuates the two substances That are body & mind. First operation is the entry of light Into dark, of dead limbs Galvanized by the sun’s power; The second is of vast dreams cut short By a harsh & loud noise, Like a fire alarm at the cinema – Enfolded in stillful bliss no longer, Soul, body and mind sit up blinking, Grudgingly resurrected – Otherwise known as waking up.

A Vagabond Jew from Lithuania: A Poem on Salomon Maimon It took a vagabond Jew from Lithuania to strike the wick that Königsberg’s sage had hid and let go out in dark’s old age. Said the synagogue’s rude son: Let there be German with a Yiddish tongue, and from his restless mind concepts flowed like fire onto the page. With quid facti? and quid juris? as his lamps, he lit the lecture halls and shadowed nooks of Europe with flame incandescent, a

On the Point of Vanishing Cogito ergo ends with a sum beyond my reckoning: Thoughts add up and multiply exponentially like numbers. I must have miscalculated. It’s what happens when you cannot count on your own mind to make sense of the world. This time I’ll square the root - 100,000 to 316 to 18 to 4 to 2 to 1.4 to 1.2 to 1.1 to 1 - and keep on subtracting 1 to 0.5 to 0.1 … I arrive at a bare fraction of a thought, a mere variable

In the Dark, Dreaming (Inspired, in part, by John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 5: 108-113) Tonight I am not in my right mind. It was the same last night And the night before. When at night the conscious mind Retires to its Monastic cell, and my senses are Asleep, the dreaming mind yokes together Heterogeneous shapes that Derive from the remembrance of Things seen in daytime. And not only that. It dredges up past deeds, produces Strange ideas that Run together in the Form of a

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What fact makes a principle true? Quid Facti. That is the question.

Thought Putting aside the extensive facthood of properties and things distributed in space, one has to wonder whether existence’s sense of itself -- the subjective correlative of the world at large -- is a prolonged sensation of horror, a horror that exceeds all the little horrors that we (as feeling individuals) experience over and again.

Fichte / Picture There is nothing real anywhere, neither outside of us nor in us. I know of no being at all. Not even myself. Images there are. They are all that exist, connected to each other, interpenetrating, merging, overlapping, an irreducible multiplicity of unframed pictures in movement. It is a strange dream making pictures of other pictures, the image of your mind picturing pictures, and the picture of my mind picturing you doing so.

Bergson Memory is a cloud wherever my body is; A fog of the virtual enveloping the actual. The past contracts to the present at the point Of sensation, then widens again: a mutual Interpenetration of time. I see into things, See them whole, unique and ineffable: God’s gift of intuition.

My Name Is Lubbert Das I There is (if you care to know), a flower of folly growing On my brain, on the surface of the matter’s deep. Fit for the Fire, its fate is allotted. To be plucked - no - uprooted, And then chucked on the heap. But won’t it hurt? Well, yes, it will, but (And since you must inquire), there is more than one kind of pain. So with steady hand, and clutching his trephine, the doctor will Incise, excise, cut, and splice, and rid me of this fleur du mal. And i

Irrational Numbers In my mind a series of irrational numbers, of non-repeatable fractions without end. Something doesn’t add up. I am divided, incommensurable. I count on my intellect to calculate a solution but thoughts multiply endlessly and without purpose - an innumerable and undetermined infinity indifferent to sense. All this thinking-without-limits is a problem I cannot get my head around.

Descartes' Dream I was a lonely cripple Seeking shelter; I heard thunder, saw fire. Sleeping too much, Snow on the rise. My bones warm in an oven. I am outside again, Near the church entrance. A whirlwind spins me round. I fall on my knees, drag Myself along the damp ground Towards my own grave. Is this the path I should take? What of thinking? I awake but I am still Sleeping. What did The thunder say? What? Can geometry put Flesh on the bone? Can it save the soul? I cannot

Thinking Therefore I Am Seeing this house, that tree, the sky – my experience is already in accord with certain classes of thought*. World anterior to thought occluded, excluded. Vision unfree, bound by laws and logic, and I am unfree with it. So where is freedom? Nowhere, for to point to it in terms of there is to think of space. And to think of it in terms of when is to think of time. And so? The solution? Drop the agenda! The self that asks these questions is the self t

The Sleepers and the Dreams Dreams like girls in private rooms beckon from windows the souls of sleepers who move shadelike through night’s dark parade, eyeless and unspeaking. Will-less and confused, some continue adrift, but most consent – if only dimly – to partake of something strange, a drugging of the body and the brain. And if the sleeper is changed, so too is the dream, so that it may be very much altered by morning’s light unable to regain its initial face. But thos

A Poem Is a Picture Environed by varying degrees of space, (depending on where you draw the line), a poem is a picture of the artist's mind on a pagewhite canvas.

Judaism, Panentheism and Spinoza’s Intellectual Love of God It is a popular misconception that Spinoza was a pantheist or even an atheist. He was not. Like the medieval Kabbalists, Spinoza was a panentheist. Judaism, Panentheism and Spinoza’s Intellectual Love of God Panentheism, meaning “all-in-God,” is situated somewhere between pantheism and classical theism. For pantheists, the world is identical to God, while for classical theists, the world is completely external to G