Silent_Water
Tribune
Hi,
first I introduce myself: I am new here and I'm the rather scientific type of a madman what seems to be a speciality of Germans, Austrians and some Eastern Europeans. Terribly enough, my family is and was partly Austrian, Hungarian and Romanian and I really still have distant relatives in the former German / Austrian colonized parts of Transsilvania (= almost the same territory as the former German territory of “Siebenbürgen”). If you want to know something about the German / Hungarian / Romanian history there, ask me.
But I would like to ask YOU some questions and to learn more about the reason and history of my obsessions (and yours as well, if possible ;-) ) by writing and showing you some pictures of my own archive. I guess, there have already been similar discussions here but I would also like to ask different questions.
For example:
1. Do you know any literature - possibly really scientific (!?) – about the coherence / context between civilisation and perversions, maybe as a kind of “civilisatory sublimation”? What I mean will be explained further down.
2. When did you first remark that there is a dark side of your mind and was there a single reason like in my case?
In my case, I can tell and show you it exactly: In 1976, August 16, "Time" magazine published a leading article about "Torture as State Policy", which shocked a lot of readers in those times because of the graphic drawings included. There were even complaints about the five drawings but not about the text!
I was a very young subscriber of Time in order to improve my school lessons and I was really shocked, too. I was growing up in a really perfect childhood without any remarkable violence and I was more than shocked. But there was not only shock, there was also the feeling of being fascinated by the graphic material and at first, I was shocked by my own feelings. I thought, I must be crazy because I wanted to see more and not only male victims as in this article but also female ones.
Soon afterwards, I read in a scientific newspaper that in human brains - as in those of many other beings on this planet - the most receptive brain segments for recognition and acceptance of violence are in the same area as the receptive segments for sexual attraction. The scientists explained it as typical remains of the times when our more animal-like ancestors possibly needed aggressions and brutality when they may have fought for the females in rutting-seasons.
Hey, I was really somehow glad to read that! (So, it was also not an "unfortunate accident" that the monks of the middle ages as a whole were often the best artists (sublimation!) and at the same time the best inventors of torture techniques in witch-hunt proceedings.)
So I could explain my own desires for looking at torture pictures as an easily explicable human atavism and a typical perversion of human beings in times of high civilization.
Maybe, I thought, I am even more civilized than others because I am the always friendly and helpful guy who will always help old people to cross the streets.
Later, I was surprised how much this article engraved on my thoughts and later, when I tried to calm down some aggressions, I drew almost automatically and more and more perfect pictures from my nightmares. In that way, I am really similar to H.R. Giger, illustrator of the alien monster in the Alien movie series with Sigourney Weaver. He once said in an interview on TV, he always had these pictures in his nightmares and they did no longer haunt him at night, when he painted in reality these alien and not only extraterrestrial monsters at day-time.
So, maybe I will show more but on the other hand, I am really busy in my profession and I must apologize because I cannot post or answer every day or even every week.
Thank you for your interest and your answers.
Silent_Water
first I introduce myself: I am new here and I'm the rather scientific type of a madman what seems to be a speciality of Germans, Austrians and some Eastern Europeans. Terribly enough, my family is and was partly Austrian, Hungarian and Romanian and I really still have distant relatives in the former German / Austrian colonized parts of Transsilvania (= almost the same territory as the former German territory of “Siebenbürgen”). If you want to know something about the German / Hungarian / Romanian history there, ask me.
But I would like to ask YOU some questions and to learn more about the reason and history of my obsessions (and yours as well, if possible ;-) ) by writing and showing you some pictures of my own archive. I guess, there have already been similar discussions here but I would also like to ask different questions.
For example:
1. Do you know any literature - possibly really scientific (!?) – about the coherence / context between civilisation and perversions, maybe as a kind of “civilisatory sublimation”? What I mean will be explained further down.
2. When did you first remark that there is a dark side of your mind and was there a single reason like in my case?
In my case, I can tell and show you it exactly: In 1976, August 16, "Time" magazine published a leading article about "Torture as State Policy", which shocked a lot of readers in those times because of the graphic drawings included. There were even complaints about the five drawings but not about the text!
I was a very young subscriber of Time in order to improve my school lessons and I was really shocked, too. I was growing up in a really perfect childhood without any remarkable violence and I was more than shocked. But there was not only shock, there was also the feeling of being fascinated by the graphic material and at first, I was shocked by my own feelings. I thought, I must be crazy because I wanted to see more and not only male victims as in this article but also female ones.
Soon afterwards, I read in a scientific newspaper that in human brains - as in those of many other beings on this planet - the most receptive brain segments for recognition and acceptance of violence are in the same area as the receptive segments for sexual attraction. The scientists explained it as typical remains of the times when our more animal-like ancestors possibly needed aggressions and brutality when they may have fought for the females in rutting-seasons.
Hey, I was really somehow glad to read that! (So, it was also not an "unfortunate accident" that the monks of the middle ages as a whole were often the best artists (sublimation!) and at the same time the best inventors of torture techniques in witch-hunt proceedings.)
So I could explain my own desires for looking at torture pictures as an easily explicable human atavism and a typical perversion of human beings in times of high civilization.
Maybe, I thought, I am even more civilized than others because I am the always friendly and helpful guy who will always help old people to cross the streets.
Later, I was surprised how much this article engraved on my thoughts and later, when I tried to calm down some aggressions, I drew almost automatically and more and more perfect pictures from my nightmares. In that way, I am really similar to H.R. Giger, illustrator of the alien monster in the Alien movie series with Sigourney Weaver. He once said in an interview on TV, he always had these pictures in his nightmares and they did no longer haunt him at night, when he painted in reality these alien and not only extraterrestrial monsters at day-time.
So, maybe I will show more but on the other hand, I am really busy in my profession and I must apologize because I cannot post or answer every day or even every week.
Thank you for your interest and your answers.
Silent_Water
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