Knots

Product Information

You begin with a thought, which reflexively leads to another, and so on- ultimately producing a tangled mess of paradoxical neurotic beliefs, a knot (added to this are your thoughts about what another person is thinking, and what they think you are thinking, so on). But whole cities have fallen to the weakness of a good soul, as they fell like dominoes to little King David. Hardcover in original black glossy jacket (jacket has some tears to edges; cloth has some tape residue).

of human bondage,” descriptions of the bonds (or binds) that people—par ents and children, lovers, friends, therapists and patients—put each other and themselves in. Like Freud 40 years ago, Laing is read as psychi atric theoretician, political philos opher and personal guru. After having been through some 'knots' in relationships myself, it now seems a bit like John Cleese's Families and how to survive them. To grasp this dense and difficult book one must be willing to follow Laing in his spirals of descent. D. Laing portrays the innumerable webs we weave in our mind that tangle and fray and continue on and on and on and on until what was at the root likely a simple misunderstanding or words unspoken becomes something so deep seeded that we are unable to untie them and begin again free and clear of whatever or however we got where we are.

I read this poetry collection years ago and marveled at the brilliance and wit Laing tooled into each poem. I hope they are not so schematized that one may not refer back to the very specific experiences from which they derive; yet that they are sufficiently independent of 'content', for one to divine the final formal elegance in these webs of maya. I say, read it, and know that either you will hate it and find it a complete waste of time OR you will be very glad to have it in your life. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

Back in 1971, on an emergency run that New Year’s Eve, I chatted with a couple of psychiatric medical interns about RD Laing’s books. Such patterns can be insightful in verse and beautiful in a brief video but I can't see anyone really wanting to be trapped in such loops. In a series of poems varying in length, Laing lays out the excruciatingly illogical thought patterns that we all go through in as simple a manner as possible, almost like paradoxical equations. Take it with a grain of salt, but not so much that you miss the brilliance of some of these riddles.If you know someone who is having interpersonal problems you may want to consider giving them this book. Original black cloth, spine lettered in silver, front cover lettered in blind, pink endpapers, dust jacket. Each poem describes a different kind of relationship, indicating the knots people will tie themselves into through preconception or misunderstanding. Sometimes just being able to look from the outside and see what the pattern is can allow us to pick it apart or even to opt out.

The book is filled with some brilliant insights into circular reasoning, along with some self-conscious, purposefully baffling poetics. Though the tone is playful and childlike, the logic is painful and inexorable, and the meaning many leveled. as I said it only demonstrates the knots, doesn't offer a solution or a way of untying the knots, It just shows them as they are. So I'm proposing a reading of Knots as possibly carrying a very beneficial side effect--a reading might alert us to patterns that can really knot up our own life.So often the knots just get tighter; we pull them over the years - never considering how we are effectively ending any kind of positive communication.

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. Each reader, after their initial dizzying resistance is overcome, will probably untie them differently. The dialogues could be those between lovers, between parents and children, between analysts and patients or all of these merged together. One can discern an approximate focus in each—love, possessiveness, under standing, fear, the nature of being— but all these themes are echoed in each knot.

Its a sort of illustration to the confusions and interweaving patterns that people get lost in during their lives. One feels the connection between the fant's struggle to define what inside his body and what is outside and the mystic's strenuous denial this separation, but both these pur suits are seen as “webs of maya” against a more remote background. It was securely packed and in very good condition - pretty much as described by the seller, if anything, somewhat better than they made it sound. With its short lines and repetitious spare vocabulary the book reads rather like a reading primer - or a very basic book in logic. Each chapter describes a different kind of relationship—the "knots" of the title—bonds of love, dependency, uncertainty, jealousy.