💥✍ It's 2030. 10 years ago Paddy's Day didn't happen. At the time I was self-isolating with my kids who are now teenagers & whom I never see at all in the house anymore because they are teenagers. They were good & bad times, because of the intimacy in the home vs the distance playing out on the streets. We joked at times at the exaggerated gaps that walked & talked between people as if a new race of "invisibles" was one outcome of COVID-19. The joke was another way of creating distance from the unfamiliar world that would never become familiar. I was prompted by the image & comments above to read Freud's paper "The Uncanny" the morning of Paddy's Day. The first page goes like this: ☘It is only rarely that a psychoanalyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty, but the theory of the qualities of feeling. He works in other planes of mental life and has little to do with those subdued emotional activities which, inhibited in their aims and dependent upon a multitude of concurrent factors, usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics. But it does occasionally happen that he has to interest himself in some particular province of that subject; and then it usually proves to be a rather remote region of it and one that has been neglected in standard works. The subject of the *uncanny* is a province of this kind. It undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror; it is equally certain, too, that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread. Yet we may expect that it implies some intrinsic quality which justifies the use of a special name. One is curious to know what this peculiar quality is which allows us to distinguish as *uncanny* certain things within the boundaries of what is *fearful.* As good as nothing is to be found upon this subject in elaborate treatises on aesthetics, which in general prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and sublime, that is with feelings of a positive nature, with the known to us, once very familiar.☘

MARCH 17, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night