Swirls

I’m being pulled into somewhere horrible, sucked into a whirlpool of awful feelings. I’m lost in the energy of the Swirl. It’s a frighte­ning space, somehow familiar, but also  alienating .

A swirl is not your friend it walks beside you, but sometimes it is inside you it makes you feel bad, useless, hopeless and lost.... it sucks you into a vortex of fear, or anger, or both. It's like a virus, airborne, seeking a host body. Sucked in, helpless in its grasp, you feel there's no escape, and you are distressed and disturbed. Is it something you've done, or not done.......do you feel ashamed? Your head feels full of pressure and empty of thoughts, feelings of dread fill you up. You have to find your thoughts again. Where did they go?

The swirl experience involves the coming together of certain emotions. These always involve self deprecation. The feelings may include fear, anxiety, shame, anguish and despair. In addition feelings associated with diminishment. It is the combination of these feelings with a background anxiety that gives rise to the felt power or force of the swirl.

What matters is to discern the coordinates of the swirl.

The power of the swirl lies in its energy. It creates a force or resistance that makes it very difficult to think or reflect.  The swirl experience is one of alienation; alienation from self and other.

1. To move with a twisting or whirling motion; eddy. 2. To be dizzy or disorie­nted. 3. To be arranged in a spiral, whorl, or twist. 4 To cause to move with a twisting or whirling motion. 5. To form into or arrange in a spiral, whorl, or twist. 1. A whirling or eddying motion or mass: a swirl of white water. 2. Something, such as a curl of hair, that coils, twists, or whirls. 3. Whirling confusion or disorder: "high-p­ressure farce built around the swirl of mistaken identit­ies" (Jay Carr). [Middle English swyrl, eddy, probably of Low German or Scandin­avian origin.] The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. swirl 1. to turn or cause to turn in a twisting spinning fashion 2. to be dizzy;  my head was swirling 1. a whirling or spinning motion, esp in water 2. a whorl; curl 3. the act of swirling or stirring 4. dizzy confusion [probably from Dutch zwirrelen; related to ...

I feel helpless and worthless isolated and overwhe­lmed by something ... in despair and afraid ... in a dark space devoid of hope...

If you look around you when you are in a swirl you will create distinctions in what is otherwise undifferentiated space; and this breaks up the swirl, thereby lessening its power.

Swirls are dynamic. They have power, and invariably that power takes the form of negative energy. So, when a swirl finds its prey, the individual feels acted upon. Unfree and helpless.

Under private property ... Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfa­ction of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is therefore accompa­nied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potenti­ality of mutual swindling and mutual plunder­ing. Marx, Human Require­ments and Division of Labour (1844)

No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda. No way in, go in, measure. Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault. Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA. Lying on the ground two white bodies, each in its semicircle. White too the vault and the round wall eighteen inches high from which it springs. Go back out, a plain rotunda, all white in the whiteness, go back in, rap, solid throughout, a ring as in the imagination the ring of bone. The light that makes all so white no visible source, all shines with the same white shine, ground, wall, vault, bodies, no shadow. Strong heat, surfaces hot but not burning to the touch, bodies sweating. Go back out, move back, the little fabric vanishes, ascend, it vanishes...

Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o'clock in the morning. Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow

It was not death, for I stood up, And all the dead lie down; It was not night, for all the bells Put out their tongues, for noon. It was not frost, for on my flesh I felt siroccos crawl, Nor fire, for just my marble feet Could keep a chancel cool. And yet it tasted like them all; The figures I have seen Set orderly, for burial, Reminded me of mine, As if my life were shaven And fitted to a frame, And could not breathe without a key; And I was like midnight, some, When everything that ticked has stopped, And space stares, all around, Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns, Repeal the beating ground. But most like chaos, stopless, cool, Without a chance or spar, Or even a report of land To justify despair. Emily Dickinson

There is a homology between outside and inside. As one moves into a swirl, as one is sucked in by it, senses contract. The distribution of the sensorium becomes skewed. What this entails is the inability to draw on one's senses to provide information that would otherwise nullify the swirl. The result of the coerced withdrawal of the sensorium is invisibility.This is an experience of extreme diminishment. There is an analagous process in the political sphere when certain groups are excluded from the political process, and become so diminished that they are invisible to the dominant group.

In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray Canto 1., Dante's Divine Comedy

Swirls is a metaphor to describe the painful experience of feeling sucked into an empty space, a vortex, where initiative and energy are drained away, replaced by helplessness and despair, panic and anxiety.  When someone is in a swirl, that particular space constitutes their environment.

"Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it." Wittgenstein-Tracatus-5.64 When one is caught in a swirl, it seems as if there is no outside. Moreover it seems as if no one else exists. In which case the swirl experience is as Wittgenstein describes, utterly solipsistic. The individual in this situation fills out the world so that, no doubt unintentionally, all others have been extruded.

Intuitively, the swirl is internal, inside the individual. But swirls can be both inside and outside, because what happens to us can cause one.

To enter the swirl is to become disconnected. One becomes temporarily disconnected from others and from oneself. Painting by Edward Hopper, who portrayed 20C alienation and loneliness.

One possibi­lity is an early childhood experience that lacked affirma­tion or expression of loving feelings. If one cannot ask for what one needs (as a child) then thinking and feeling are badly affected. So the individual is sometimes forced into a space of minimal agency where it is hard to negotiate daily life. This means not having  one's own voice, instead always hearing someone else's real or imagined usually critical words. Someone else holds the initiative and this feels shameful, and so leads to the swirl experience.

Swirl is a metaphor to describe an existential mood state. It is a deeply unpleasant experience that borders on despair and anguish. A Swirl is like a black hole; we fall into it or get sucked in. We feel overwhelmed by something stronger than ourselves. When in this state, emotional paralysis takes over. We lose voice, agency and will. We feel diminished, and sure there is no escape. It may pass, as moods do, or we may find our own way to overcome its sometimes devastating effect. What is unique about the Swirl is that it denotes a range of distressing experiences that go together and relate to an internal physical, emotional and mental space which however may have dimensions and coordinates that we can begin to recognise.  Understanding them helps us to find a way to conquer it.