The publisher makes no mistake in calling these pieces departures,
but underestimates the degree when he characterizes them as
"dialogue-scenarios that can be read as poems or as brief plays."
The author himself, after suggesting "knots, tangles, rankles,
impasses, disjunctions, whirligogs, binds," modestly adopts the
label "webs of maya"; and though the Hindu reference stopped us
cold for a minute, later on it came to seem perfectly apt. Each
fankle-or-whatever is a little study in the dynamics of
relationship, reduced very nearly to abstract patterns of emotional
logic (or illogic). Given their tail-in-teeth circularity and
hypnotic repetition of basic words (want, distort, devour, stupid,
happy, greedy, cruel, can, can't), they are actually more like a
kind of verbal mandala. A sample: "The more Jill feels Jack is
mean/ to feel she is mean to feel he is greedy to feel she is mean/
the more Jack feels Jill is mean/ to feel/ Jack is mean/ to feel
she is mean/ to feel he is greedy/ to feel she is mean. . . . " We
know who Jack and Jill are and what they are up to; but in order
even to recognize what we know, in this form, we have to look much
longer and harder than we would bother to do if we knew from the
start what we were looking at: forced meditation. The last few,
assuming we've gotten the drift, come right out with some pure
propositions: "All distinctions are mind, by mind, in mind, of
mind/ No distinctions no mind to distinguish." "I have thought up
others," Laing says, but there's no hurry. If you can think about
these at all, you can do it indefinitely. (Kirkus Reviews)
Originally published in 1970, Knots consists of a series of
dialogue-scenarios that can be read as poems or brief plays, each
complete in itself. Each chapter describes a different kind of
relationship: the "knots" of the title: bonds of love, dependency,
uncertainty, jealousy. The dialogues could be those between lovers,
between parents and children, between analysts and patients or all
of these merged together. Each brilliantly demonstrates Laing's
insights into the intricacies of human relationships.
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