😷

Joe Strummer  

listen much more to new order but think the condition of possibility of their music's technical perfection (e.g. true faith being the single greatest song made) is the negative space carved out by curtis' mania self-imploding. cannot overstate how deeply i feel ian curtis' epilepsy and suicide to voice the suppressed fervour in myself (also half-epileptic, functionally epileptic) and in much of the other music coming out of late-20th-century england. the immaturity of joy division's sound issues directly from that unsulliedness of conduction (transmission) -- but closer is the more sonically 'mature' of these albums, so is my preference

Freud on Dostoevsky's epilepsy:

'...it is therefore quite right to distinguish between an organic and an ‘affective’ epilepsy. The practical significance of this is that a person who suffers from the first kind has a disease of the brain, while a person who suffers from the second kind is a neurotic. In the first case his mental life is subjected to an alien disturbance from without, in the second case the disturbance is an expression of his mental life itself [...] at times when the activity of the energy operating in the mind reaches crisis-pitch. Behind this dichotomy we have a glimpse of the identity of the underlying mechanism of instinctual discharge. Nor can that mechanism stand remote from the sexual processes, which are fundamentally of toxic origin: the earliest physicians described coition as a minor epilepsy, and thus recognized in the sexual act a mitigation and adaptation of the epileptic method of discharging stimuli.'

'One thing is remarkable: in the aura of the epileptic attack, one moment of supreme bliss is experienced.'