The Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing tried several revolutionary ideas in the Sixties while working with schizophrenia patients. His embrace of existential philosophy led him to believe that the mental illness was in fact not what it is. Working with repressed experiences and through careful counseling that resisted the common urges for electro-shock therapy, Laing found several patients who could again be assimilated into the real world with care and oversight.
This ruggedly individual philosophy of going against the grain made him a strange new brand of celebrity. So he turned his thoughts to human relationships and how they could improve by a careful cataloging and recalibration of what he referred as basic conflicts. This new path led Laing to the conspicuous conclusion that these problems could further be reduced to a series of hypothetical puzzles to solve.
Dubbed “Knots,” Laing’s small poetic observations still read like some form of free-thinking “hippie” literature in part. However, once you break through the time of their writing and actually try to “undo” the “Knots” so to speak, there is something to be applied to the increasing frustrations of our daily lives.
Like that saying “the enemy of the enemy is my friend,” while its initial reading is a bit of a nested doll - there is a certain mathematical logic that reveals itself over repeated reading. So these poems break the cycle of navel gazing and actually reveal themselves to be “thought bubbles.”
The proverbial “knots” in play are the bonds of love and friendship. In both relationships, many strands are being brought together to form the knot of strength. How we undo that becomes every personal conflict we encounter. Laing maintained that jealousy, uncertainly and doubt were the “undoers” of these knots. So what better way to figure it out than in a dialogue.
Like Kierkegaard, most of these are designed to be with one’s self. However, Laing does take it a bit farther into scripted dialogues as well. As poetry, “Knots” reads a lot like e.e. cummings. The problems he is enlightening in literary terms translate into a reduction of one’s self.
“There is something I don’t know that I am supposed to know/I don’t know what it is I don’t know and yet I am supposed to know and I feel I look stupid” could be either a minimalisation of one’s self or the problem based on how you read it. However, that is the point. These are to be read. Aloud as well. So whether you are a fan of puzzles or psychology, or one of those who draws inspiration from self-invasive modern poetry, those strands of friendship and love that we unite were made into these “Knots” by Laing for all of us to untie.
Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
