Pictured in a Jeff Koons, as I am here, I have been thinking about extended reality. Wondering about the man who lives in there and over there and in this colour (and who would wear those old baggy shorts). I have also been thinking about 'balance' and how often imagination is the thing that lets balance get out of kilter. We all need balance, of judgement, finance, good will, happiness, sadness otherwise we slip into the instability of excess or lack (is lack the antithesis, want, need, perhaps). But as every trapeze artist knows, a balancing act is a difficult thing to pull off. Adam Phillips has written that, 'Excessive behaviour is not so much something we grow out of as something we grow into.' Interesting thought, the older we get the more liable we are to over-indulge - perhaps because as adults we impose our own restrictions, whereas children have their's policed by us adults (who really know no better). But of course, what being out of balance really means is we can sit back and take a look at ourselves to say, I can be better, more than this, I can be more than I am being now by demanding less, taking less, giving less, only occasionally giving into the roller-coastering of great glee or melancholy, re-asserting the balance in my life. Freud implies in the Project that we can satisfy each other but not save each other and he might as well be saying, satisfaction, cumulatively experienced - or even satisfaction risked - can make helplessness a strength. Without it there is no frustration and no possibility of the experience of satisfaction. There is not one without the other. But talking thus, in abstract, is a kind of helplessness too - wonder if Freud ever had the ignominy of having to use a food bank? In the UK in 2013 - this is such a disgrace:
