nyuuzyou/wikis huggingface dataset:
Lipton’s Journal/January 27, 1955/316

But what is also interesting is that I welcomed the depression. It was reassuring in a way, it was almost pleasant to return to the old neurotic state which I think signifies for me the state of work, hard work, depressed work, but of course honorable work. I don’t know whether to take this journal seriously. At times I think I’m getting into wonderful things, other times I just wonder if I’m losing my grip and bathing in clichés and other people’s ideas. 
We went to a party last night at Malaquais’, and in the cab I said to Adele in a very profound voice, “You know, when people go away on vacations, it’s not a casual act—it’s of deep significance. They’re hoping that something will happen which changes their lives.” And Adele after a moment of shock at the seriousness I gave it, said, “But, of course, darling, everybody knows that.” Perhaps it is just that she has known it all her life, but I was startled and upset. It had seemed such a perception to me. I had been thinking of the peculiar frozen look almost all people have when they come into a resort hotel and their baggage surrounds them with the stamp of the novice. And how relieved they are when they find friends, and the terrible depression under the surface if they cannot cozy up to new acquaintances. Like a repetition of the childhood trauma-adventure of moving to a new neighborhood. 	 
Anyway, for the first time in many weeks I had a lot to drink at Malaquais’. Not to excess but four or five ryes on the rocks which I enjoyed. What I really enjoyed was the old neurotic tension of a party with its fatigues, its aggressions, its enthusiasms. The old depression with the feeling of “force” beneath it, of masculinity, was reassuring. We came home, had one of our enjoyable mock-spats for Adele drunk is always full of beans, and fell asleep. I woke up about four hours later, and had a deep perception which I can barely remember, but it made me realize the beauty in myself and in Adele, and I decided that the extraordinary contradiction of my personality, the saint in morality, the potential psychopath sexually was what gave me my strength as a writer. Sort of: the greater the contradiction in a person, the wider the range of his potential experience and intuitions. Only it was very beautiful as I saw it, so beautiful that I woke Adele up and we made love which was very pleasant, and then I almost fell asleep but didn’t, and finally got up with four hours of sleep, and have been moving slowly all day, feeling drained, or more exactly drawn to too fine a pitch. Part of it is getting off Seconal which I had taken three nights in a row. Anyway, the obvious occurs to me which is that forces contain a great deal of their strength because they conserve the body too, or give us the illusion that they do. When the is open and riding for several days in a row there is exaltation but there is also terror—one feels close to death all the time. S gives me feelings of depression and force, as I have written above.
Category:January 27, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 27, 1955/317

What I distrust of course is that I’m looking for short-cuts, for magic. Undisciplined, lazy, half convinced of my talent, half doubting it, I feel even in my greatest enthusiasm that this journal may be no more than a game I play with myself to have the illusion that I can do it all alone, that I don’t have to follow the rules, that my limitations can be dispelled because I postulate a good old force.
Category:January 27, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 27, 1955/318

On the positive side, however, I had lunch with my mother today and she took the idea of my father quitting work very well, and the lunch was very pleasant. Again I was moved almost to tears when I spoke of what a good guy he is, and how bad I had been to him. And I thought of my sister and how the only way she is psychopathic is that she is psychopathically compassionate. One cannot tell her a sad story—a real sad story, not an ersatz one—without tears welling into her eyes. And yet all the while I was talking to my mother I had the uneasy feeling that I was acting a little bit like a man who feels death is coming on and so he must get all his affairs in order. (How interesting is the double use of the word “affairs” in English. Hints of the basic orgiastic desire do seem to appear everywhere.) Now a few notes.
Category:January 27, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 27, 1955/319

Letter echoes: Be. (The state of passive existence as opposed to am, are, is which are active.) Add ‘d’ and we have bed (for spelling) bead (for sound). The death connotation is added in each case. One (bed) implies the little death of sleep, the other (bead) implies a concretion of being which is not bad for a bead. Beet—thingishness added to being. And a beet is very much there.
Am—masculine, assertive. Reversed it is ‘ma’.
Are—Pure R. Vividness, connotations of anger, of color—one’s sense of the other person. Reversed it is ‘era’. And ‘error’.
Is. Hard to define for me. Possibly the third person is the abstraction of the self. The ih is softened to is with the connotations ‘s’ contains of succession stream and continuance. (Piss again.)
Category:January 27, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 27, 1955/320

For some time I have wanted to write a note about the Negro prejudice of Southerners. I wonder if their rage at Negro advancements is due to the unconscious belief in the myth—which may well be right—that the Negro has a happy sex life, happier than the white, and so the Negro is recompensed for his low state in society by his high state in the fuck. The scales are balanced. 
Therefore, to the white southerner, an improvement in Negro rights is to tip the scale in the Negro’s favor. Status-anxiety so-called may consist essentially of the unconscious drawing up balance sheets in which people of lower status are considered to have equal status when the private benefits are added in. So, members of a high status group—to use that monstrous sociological jargon—feeling anxiety about a lower status group crawling up on them, are actually feeling the more intense anxiety that the lower status group is rising above them.
Category:January 27, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 27, 1955/321

The business of putting magnificent ideas in one’s notebook at night. The reason it always seems so flat in the morning is that the idea which may well have been beautiful—and dangerous—for the sense of beauty is umbilically linked with the sense of danger—was put down in cliché form in one’s haste to trap it. Normally, one might expect to be able to expand it in the morning. But the had been alerted, and so when one reads the note, the S drowns all the sensitivity, and the note seems ridiculous. S is always telling us, “Pay no attention to what happens at night.”
Category:January 27, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/161

If this record is to have any value, I have to be truthful, and today after a considerable New Year’s weekend, I am definitely down. A reaction to too much Lipton’s, too much fucking, simple and in combination, too many confessions, too many enthusiasms, too much talking, too much thinking—I feel exhausted, depressed, unpleasant, dirty....and relieved. Because although I’m depressed, the fear that my manic mood was a prelude to insanity seems to have gone. The world is around me again, problems, distastes, small worries, small revulsions, and mainly depression. But even as I’m writing this, my mood is picking up. For I had too much Lipton’s last night, and by now I should know that too much leaves me with a bad hangover, and disgust at all the psychopathy I uncover in myself.
Category:January 3, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/162

One of the curious effects of Lipton’s is that it seems to take away my neurosis and expose me to all that is saintly and psychopathic in my character. Just enough Lipton’s, and being alone with Adele, and the psychopathy is pleasantly expressed in fucking, and afterward I feel truly saintly and love everyone and am filled with compassion for mankind. But when I take Lipton’s after being pretty strenuously fucked-out, especially if people are around, then the amount of psychopathy in me is frightening—I could fuck anyone, including my sister, I could go on an orgy with anyone, I feel cold and confident and capable of pushing anyone into anything, and of course like all psychopaths I become enormously convincing and hypnotic in my effects on others.
Category:January 3, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/166

A psychopath expands one element of the emotional spectrum to full size. For example he will see the bona-fide sexual content in everything, but he sees it virtually to the exclusion of all else, and he sees it paranoically, i.e., as filling the world, filling the consciousness of the item’s creator, the item’s audience, and of course, himself. In that sense, television is almost totally psychopathic, and that is part of its fascination. It creates such an enormous Present.
Category:January 3, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/168

Precise speech appeals only to those who know what is being talked about, and are interested. The cliché, while it repels many people, actually has appeal across a vast spectrum. Precisely because it contains many meanings, and each can put into the cliché large portions of his own experience, the demagogue always speaks in clichés. I, as an intellectual demagogue, probably do no more generally than reinvigorate intellectual clichés. Man, am I down on myself today.
Category:January 3, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/171

The sensitivity spectrum: To the poet, words are not only important, but he is even driven to tear up the individual word and try to find more meaning within. The general speaks in sentences so predictable that they are the equivalent of one word. For example: “Greater productive techniques are at the heart of delivering X bombs to Y target with maximum saturation, accuracy, and density.” There are really only four words in the above sentence. Which occasions me to wonder if there has ever been a general in modern history who was also a decent poet. I believe not. Totally not. One kills individual people in order not to commit suicide, but one orders the deaths of vast quantities of people because life is always seen conceptually—in other words, the general has taken the life of the people to be murdered away from them by his mind, before he even gives the order. He is merely altering statistics. There have of course been writers like Malraux and Gary who have been good soldiers, but they were adventurer-soldiers, not bureaucrat soldiers.
Category:January 3, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/173

On television, many of the ads have their psychopathic appeal because the film is speeded up which makes the voice sound shriller. Listening to it on Lipton’s, the voice is slowed down, but the high shrill-tone remains. There may be something to the whole business of frequencies, trebles, basses, fidelities, etc. In other words by altering electronically the quality of voices, advertising agencies may have discovered that better effects are produced. I think it’s also probably true that psychopaths generally have subtly shrill taut voices—it’s undeniable that hipster speech contains a fucking rhythm in it almost as powerful as music—I truly believe that I could fuck to the sound of a psychopath advertising anything, cleaning fluid, spark plugs, whatever, but apart from the meaning the rhythm of his voice is like a compelling beat. (Very syncopated speech.)
Category:January 3, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/178

Psychopathic love. Judging by myself, I would say that in the state of pure psychopathy, love is impossible, but the pure state is rare, and the psychopath in happy moods does borrow from the saint, and I have often loved in large sweet ways, overcome by the beauty of my mate, and willing to accept anything and everything in her.
Category:January 3, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/182

Steve Allen talking while above his head girls walk by so that one sees them only from high-heeled shoes to the tips of their thighs. “If any of you folks have eaten in the last half hour I don’t want you looking at the set.” Right now he is giving a show in a pool at Miami Beach and the total effect is openly orgiastic.
Category:January 3, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/183

I heard “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by a chorus over the radio, and the music was so arranged that the total effect of the sound was like the anguish of angels in hell—which is certainly a far cry from the usual “Star-Spangled Banner.” Undoubtedly, instinctively, some slick conductor did it that way to filter into people the patriotic agony of our time. Slick artists are geniuses in their insight into society (rather than into man). Anybody great at anything, even great at knitting, is the possessor of genius in that particular thing and has experiences different from anything we can know.
Category:January 3, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/187

We may all have a social image of ourselves, close to the despised image of ourselves. Thus, I always see myself as the sweet clumsy anxious to please Middle-class Jewish boy, and socially I admire poise, coolness, manners, elegance. Many of our relations with people consist entirely of our admiration for their social face. Those are the relations where I remain fixed in certain kinds of habit and speech and never can express myself. As it used to be with Ted Amussen, Stan Rinehart, John Aldridge, and many others.
Category:January 3, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/190

Memory may be a layer of the original actuality. Thus, memories are often sweet because that is the way a part of us (our souls) really felt at the time. As a wild extra, déjà vu may have reality—the soul may actually be capable of seeing into the future, especially if we see human life as extending not only in depth but across time.
Category:January 3, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/197

In Barbary Shore I planted the seeds of a great many things I am thinking today. Thus, the meaningless beginning of Chap. 16, by McLeod “You know, m’bucko, its onanists the world is forever shaping, and if you have a taste for dialectics it demands little more to see that it is only by onanism at last one can receive the world. . . . If this doesn’t ring a bell for you now, it’ll toll a mass someday, for ye’re in the archetype.” Or Lannie with echo obscenities—Bubbles, baby, bubble that fat.
Category:January 3, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/325

Give-and-take. It is the life process which dominates, which characterizes every living movement. A static universe would be void of give-and-take. The essence of life movement is in the give-and-take. Naturally, this must be seen in all of its complexity. No human alive—not to mention other kinds of life—is ever simply a giver or a taker, but giving and taking predominate in various parts of the person. 
So it’s suggested that the fat man for instance takes but cannot give in certain emotional ways. Basic kinds of emotional energy cannot be expended. The result is that it is stored as fat. As a corollary of this, the act of going on a diet bespeaks a profound desire to alter one’s approach to life. 
For implicit in all I’ve written up to now is the idea that the psyche knows the state of the body, knows why a part functions well or badly. And a diet works or does not work in proportion as the person is profoundly ready or not ready to alter their condition. (A very frustrating thing here. As I sat down to write the note, my ideas were much bigger, much more exciting, than what I have put down here. At the last moment they deserted me. One thing I noticed over the weekend is that my is beginning to work overtime.)
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/326

The possibility of other psychotherapeutic techniques. Generally, the patient gives gives gives—the analyst takes takes takes. Occasionally, this is reversed. But I wonder if this works well for everybody. Most people, despite their resistance, probably find it easier to talk about themselves, and the projection they put on the analyst is a subtler secondary thing, picked up by intuition. 
I wonder if certain kinds of neurotics, particularly aggressive “stupid” “insensitive” patients for one example, might not best enter the analysis with the instructions from the beginning to talk not about themselves but about the analyst. This would have to be done by feel of course, but there is a kind of top-heavy righteous man who is made to violate his nature when he is asked to attempt to free-associate. Far better for “cranks” and “reactionaries”—whose ranks are conspicuously absent among analysands—such as McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and Winchell—say to lie down or stand up or sit up and deliver themselves in the early weeks of exactly what they think of the analyst. Encouraged to say more and more and more the remarks will very quickly become a giant projection, and it seems to me the time will follow more or less shortly when they realize that. Stunned and terrified, they will then be ready for free association, because simply they will now need to go into themselves. The energy to strike back, to project, which is the character defense, has become over-extended and exhausted.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/327

The voice of radio and recordings. It is a commonplace to say that the ear selects sounds, and it is almost as common to recognize that we select those sounds we wish to hear. The is the inhibitor on the ear, and the reason “takers” are invariably more sensitive listeners than “givers” is that takers accept S more than givers—therefore they can afford to “hear” more. Freud, one of the great givers, could never enjoy music. 
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/328

But, carry this a step further. I suspect that the first impact of the radio was that the ear was given “unselected” sound. So, sound effects. Paper rustled near a microphone sounded too loud. Who is to say it does not sound too loud in life and we merely suppress it? Elements of the voice which had been buried before became more evident to people—naturally at an unconscious level—it being understood as a basic premise through all of these notes that I see the unconscious as not one unconscious, but a whole series of unconsciouses, conceivably infinite, each more buried—and therefore closer to the essential —than the one above. 
So put in this light, the voice of radio penetrated more deep into the unconscious layers than the human voice, face to face, where many interferences were present. Therefore an immediate fascination (as Bob says—attraction and repulsion in one package) was the result. The radio was actually conveying more reality in its details of course than normal human intercourse. But much more can be said. (There is great interference to my thoughts today. I work along at a dragging rate, instead of racing like last week.) On radio we notice certain qualities of the voice—it never sounds the same close to the microphone and far away. On tape recorders, which are cruder, this is even more true. Every effect of the voice bouncing off objects and walls seems to be magnified. 
I wonder if the truth is that a part of us, deep within us, actually hears aural experience this way. What I wish to emphasize is that encourages us to hear the voice as one. We think of people as having a voice, not voices, but indeed a person never has the same voice exactly. At every distance we exercise our vocal chords differently from the way we exercise them close up—we are communing through all the filters of the situation in a slightly different way. 
In crude forms I’ve known this always without labeling. The voice of one’s mate in one’s ear is vastly different from the “same” voice calling across a room. And, indeed, because the discrepancy of recorded voices and “live” voices seemed too great, the sound effects man and the recording engineer were born. Their effort was to bridge the gap—the same may be said for movie lighting. The attempt in both is not only to increase “verisimilitude”—an S concept, for H always sees the individual experience as multiple—but to censor part of the actual reality. In the films, it is not merely a question of improving the deficient “seeing” qualities of photographic emulsions, but also a business of warping the final achievement. 
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/329

One’s own voice. Here the greatest discrepancy appears. Almost always a person is deeply shocked hearing their own voice. I know for me there seems almost no relation between my voice as it sounds to me and as I hear it over a recorder. One hears one’s own voice naturally from the —that is, we feel the real panic if we are scared, the exultation if we are excited. Heard as a play-back, it is invariably flattened. (Part of the art of the actor is to accommodate his inner feelings to correspond to the outer voice.) (Same for the singer.) But, listening to myself on Lipton’s last night, hearing my voice on the tape recorder, I noticed that a voice is like a face—all the elements on one’s personality exist in the various tones. On the surface my New York Jewish earnest sincere friendly patronizing voice—underneath much more complicated psychic-sexual elements were being communicated.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/330

One other observation. It was the first time in years that I spoke into a tape recorder. What happened was that I spoke very slowly. But indeed everybody except rare birds like Winchell speak slowly over the radio or television. The is fantastically on guard, because it recognized the great danger one is in. So, that accounts for the fantastic pompousness of celebrities who have little to say, and the unbearable earnestness and suppressed anguish of the creative person when he speaks over a program. Everything in the self becomes slowed up as in Lipton’s. Only, with what a difference. One speaks in a state of deep receptivity to social danger.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/331

Mimics are always psychopaths—good mimics anyway. And a person who does parlor imitations is expressing his or her psychopathy, but it is psychopathy under a neurotic protection which is why they are not professional entertainers. What characterizes saints and psychopaths is that the is comparatively non-existent in them. It is the difference in their which separates them, and this I don’t know how to define yet.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/332

Last week I wrote that the radical rebellious of reason which was true from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century has now become the rationalization of the state. And the hope for the future lies with the monsters and the mystics. To wit, the seemingly irrational, for only the irrational can fuck up the progress of the state. Monsters and mystics is of course merely a way of saying psychopaths and saints. 
But I wonder if the waves of psychopathy which every sensitive intellectual feels are not the generating life expressions of the only way to keep the alive and healthy in people. In other words, psychopathy may be healthier than we think. It is an expression of the H which can find its understanding only by the mirror image of the (here is one essential difference between saints and psychopaths), and therefore psychopathy always appears as a greater or lesser monstrosity, but what is important is that at least it is an H, and even appearing as an S (all genuine artistic expression today is degraded human expression) it is undigestable by the State (although unfortunately less undigestable than it used to be—society even seeks to rehabilitate the criminal) and therefore dangerous to the plans of the State.
Category:January 31, 1955