"A non-Zoroastrian could think of Zarathustra as simply a
madman who led millions of naive followers to adopt a cult
of ritual fire worship. But without his "madness" Zarathustra
would necessarily have been only another of the millions or
billions of human individuals who have lived and then been
forgotten."
--John Nash, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics
and rat-shit crazy
Hi. How's it going? Welcome to (for lack of better terminology) a symbolic representation of the workings of my mind. (Sorry if any of it’s poorly communicated, as I’m not always real clear, and tend to jump around.) I hadn't intended to tell a story from here, but this is simply where I happen be myself. Um... basically, here's my program: this paper you're holding possibly has on it the squiggly lines necessary to create a story about stories, the self, and their emergence, using the closest example I've got -- which would be me, my mind, and I. This romance is a hook.
It's also a sequel to my life story. This time the theme is reconstruction. (Sorry for the crypticity.)
This is also revenge.
Setting: It's a mental ward! (Yes. Spent time in the cuckoo's nest; yay for me! You know it's like a badge of honor for an artiste, the kind of thing that says, "Hey, I’m dealing with some serious shit here." Unless I am simply nothing more than an idiot. (Of course, I like to think I have other charming characteristics as well.) But account that I'd already published a play[1] at the ripening ol' age of 22, too... okay, it was deeply goofy comicalness, yes, nowhere near as respectable as this here will be, but still... overall, it lends an authority. Please fear me.[2])
Specifically, its lounge. TV bolted to the upper corner, open space below centered around a low table filled with out-of-date magazines and coloring books, surrounded by vinyl couches in colors that look like they were rejected even from the 70s. Just beyond the couches, two more tables, side by side, taller, the kind for eatin' off of. We're on the fifth floor, so the windows along one side reveal nothing but overcast cream sky, along with some glass and brick of the nearest center for cross-disciplinary study. The door's on the other side, leading to the hallway parallel, and the nurses' station across its width.
[1] See footnote [3].
[2] I will not be the clever one who leaps out to early success and then is heard from no more.
Characters: There's Diana, mid-70s, recently homeless and toothless, with only a few tufts of grey hair left growing in random patches, and brown beaten skin, sitting in the far corner watching Regis Philbin.
There's me, 21, but you'd guess 18, with proudly disheveled hair, and twenty pounds not recommended by doctors, slouched over Apple Jacks.
There's some others. Depressives mostly. Uncomfortably numb. Not in eyesight now, so easy to forget. There's a new person shuffling in.
"Good morning. Do you mind if I sit here?"
Crunch. Throat-clears. Grunt with a heavy n-sound to it.
"So what's your name?"
I'm Jim Trapp.
"Hello, Jim Trapp. I’m Emily Stevens."
Yep.
Crunch.
Man, I hope one of us blinks soon.
Note: Why am I here? Ah... long story. An overview, something along the lines of -- "Go ahead flunk me I wasn't going to class anyway... Man, not a lot of people in this apartment... bah, I don’t need love anyway... oh, I am destructive, yes, but I can help you, you fucking humans... if I could just get ahold of, say, some nuclear weapons... damn, I'm clever, I bet I could do it... yes, yes! Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!... wait, perhaps this is not healthy functioning..."
Remembering the experience leaves me with the strange mix of shame and pride that, come to think, marks nearly all my notable experiences.
"Hey, I wrote a damn funny play.[2] Kinda dumb though. Hey, the production was a lot of fun. Kinda sucked though. Hey, that was some charming girl. Kinda completely fucked it all up though."
Lately, I’ve taken to identifying myself alongside your various trickster figures, brilliant idiots, clever retards, because maybe playing an important, time-honored role in the socio-creative[3] process will excuse it all... wait. Damn. Writing is a means of discovery.
I'm still looking to excuse myself. Shit, that’s an old problem. Heh - what the fuck is wrong with me... Hmm...
"The mind that has been corrupted in youth can never be washed clean." - Mark Twain
That worries me. A lot. I don’t care about moral corruption, just that I developed bad taste in thought.
[3] Mad Scientists in Love, published by Baker’s Plays, and available in the UIUC area's finer local collegiate bookstores. Please, please, please buy a copy.
[4] I'll make up all the damn words I want.
Another note: It was February. It was cold. They took my stuff. Shoelaces, wallet, belt, coat...
I loved that coat. A soft armor of black and blue, thick and long enough to hide my uneven bulk; looking at my reflection while wearing it, I see my body beneath as average and proportioned -- no pear-shaped thighs, or stomach cliff, or man-boobs, or flabby arms tapering down to a wrist too thin or hands too small for the rest of me. Honestly, I look like I was drawn by Rob Liefeld.[5]
My mom got me that coat for Christmas. What I really wanted was a life.
[5] Rob Liefeld drew X-Force, my least favorite comic book the presence of the letter "X" in the title my Pavlovian buying habits forced me to buy during puberty. Apparently, millions of us drooling, acne-scarred virgins truly could catapult to stardom a man with a knowledge of anatomy that might make you wonder if he himself was merely more like some brain in a jar, or if maybe, just maybe, drawing men with monstrous thighs and teeny hands was some bit of irony within his testosterone driven stories of militant mutants beating the living shit out of each a few times a day mainly because, dammit, someone’s gotta do it.[5]
[6] Okay, no more fucking annotations.
Emily is strikingly nice, lonely, and talkative. A circuit wide around the hallway was her favorite place to ramble. While we did this, I tended to run my hand along the walls, (and honestly this is something I still do) for the touch. Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll forget what it feels like to feel it, before the experience blurs to memory. Sometimes I want to know where my hand stops and the wall begins. I'd describe it, but here there’s only the representation, not the reality anyway, and what do you care?
Which has almost nothing, almost, to do with what I was thinking:
You are not Angelina Jolie.
"You have to keep the soup pressurized..." she says.
Uh-huh. The ward is co-ed. Co-ed! And no hot psychotic chicks. Not a one.
"...pressurization is key..."
There's that fat, suicidal girl who came in this morning...
"...and as the temperature increases..."
No. I’m not that desperate...
"A lot of people think it's easy to do."
Yeah, sounds like it... Wait, wait... yes, I am that desperate...
"But I came in at the lowest level and became manager..."
Though, man, would it be embarrassing to strike out with the fat, suicidal girl... And if I ever got into a serious drinking game, is the story I'd want to tell of my deflowering?
"It's a lot harder than it sounds."
Yeah, sounds like it... Could I even get it up with these meds I'm on?
I never did find out why it's important to keep the soup pressurized.
"The materialists’ metaphysical claim "mental states are nothing but neural states" can be cheaply bought... without the need to do anything as laborious or as shady as "philosophical analysis." We can say that although in one sense there just are no sensations, in another sense what people called "sensations," viz., neural states, do indeed exist. The distinction of senses is no more sophisticated than were we to say that the sky does not exist, but that there is something which people call the sky (the appearance of a blue dome as a result of refracted sunlight) which does exist..." (Richard Rorty, "Persons Without Minds", The Nature of Min)
If the illusion is all there is, doesn't that make it real?
While I'm at it - what matters, why am I still writing, who cares, how do I know, where am I, how do I get out here, what's my next question...
"The brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Other people's brains might shut out this same information through a process called "latent inhibition" - defined as an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition.
"‘This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment,’ says co-author and University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson. ‘The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities.’" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, September 2003)
Imagine I just gave you a brief description of the inner workings of a television including precisely how many photons a second were jumping off the screen, across eight feet of hospital lounge, into my pupil, smacking me upside the retina, triggering an electrical onslaught to the back of my brain, and painting an image of an image of a cluttered office, with its own image of a fuzzy disc on the wall with more symbols beneath it, saying "I want to believe." Also add in that you were impressed by all that.
"You'll need to change the channel."
"What?"
"No X-Files."
But I made that bit up. Suggestive though, no? And suggestive that I'd suggest it, and suggest that it's suggestive...
While I’m at it - at dusk, the shadows on Mars turn the rocks into faces.
Each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. What saves this from becoming a vast undifferentiated mass of data and situation is one’s ability to make distinctions. The experience of feeling overwhelmed by undifferentiated material is like claustrophobia. One feels panicky, closed in.
Chaos, the state of undifferentiated everything, is a state of sameness. It is eventless. It’s swirling doesn’t even happen. It is only by virtue of differences, that anything can occur at all… (Lyn Hejinian, The Rejection of Closure.)
Coloring. My past time of choice. I always used up the blue.
Blue is traditionally the color of sadness. And tranquility. And the appearance of a dome that results from refracted sunlight. And Smurfs.
And my eyes. And her eyes....
"Oh, what made you choose that picture?"
It was the first one in the book.
"You colored in Pooh and Piglet. Don't you think that’s significant?"
Not really...
"Pooh and Piglet are friends. We're friends."
Uncomfortable sound from throat, as words die and I swallow them.
"I just think it's interesting."
Yeah, I guess.
"I know why you're here," with a voice, low enough for a conspiracy of only two, "God’s been talking to you."
I...
"He talks to me too."
No... the only one talking to me was myself.
"We are conscious of our thoughts, [one] argument suggests only because we first evolved the capacity to imagine the thoughts of others... As philosophers have long noted, to be self-aware means recognizing the limits of selfhood. You can’t step back and reflect on your own thoughts without first recognizing that your thoughts are finite, and that other combinations of thoughts are possible... without any recognition of other thoughts to measure our own thoughts against, our own mental states wouldn’t even register as something to think about..." (Steven Johnson, Emergence)
Let me look into your eyes.
I think you are. Therefore, I think I might be too. Then… I think I am, therefore I think that I'm thinking. Therefore, I am. I think.
Do you get that it’s a theory – you follow the story?
You see, I’m asking if you get it, and what you’re supposed to be getting is that "you" follows from a story.
Sorry I'm more clever than smart.
We were supposed to talk in group therapy. Diana, shampoo dried on her scalp, her voice monotone, among other monotones, started one day,
"This is the first morning in fifteen years that I haven't heard any voices."
I start one day,
I'm here because it's safe.
...But Emily always finished,
"And I know, I know that I am to become the bride of Christ, a God of War as well, while my son will grow up to become the Anti-Christ and lead the nations into the greatest of wars."
Or,
"I just want to see my kids..."
Then sink into tears, while only our pudgy, drowning facilitator can look at her long enough to offer some hollow platitudes. The rest of us sit with a subdued squirm, only getting worse as he continues not helping. I mean, I'd do something, but... well, honestly, isn't the whole Anti-Christ thing a little cliché?
No... don't be sarcastic. About this one thing.
You of all people, you should know by now what she's looking for.
Here’s a part where I and whatever narrative skip way out:
Isaac Newton loved apples. They reminded him of the moon.
"You will die a virgin," they would have said, if anyone had known him, and spoken to him, and spoken like that.
Then he invented physics. Along with a big chunk of math, the language that speaks it.
"Genius," they said because now everyone knew him and would think he was right, for about three hundred years.
Then he locked himself in a laboratory and tried to turn lead into gold.
"You will die a virgin," they would have said again.
Except... how could he know for himself that you really couldn't turn lead into gold? Sure, people told him. But, dammit, those are the same idiots who hadn't noticed the universal principle of gravitation.
Maybe we have to get off the old, safe, known path to get anywhere new. Maybe reach different ground, a fresh perspective, new connections. Maybe that means getting lost. Maybe it means going wrong before we can find out what's right.
Then he died a virgin.
"Why, today, we don't even know where real life is, what it is, or what it's called! Left alone without literature, we immediately become entangled and lost - don't know what to join, what to keep up with; what to love, what to hate; what to respect, what to despise! We even find it painful to be men - real mean of flesh and blood, with our own private bodies; we're ashamed of it, and we long to turn ourselves into something hypothetically called the average man. We're stillborn, and for a long time we've been brought into the world by parents who are dead themselves; and we like it better and better. We're developing a taste for it, so to speak. "Soon we'll invent a way to be begotten by ideas altogether." (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground)
Some other asks the rest of the breakfast table if we're going to hear the speaker this afternoon. I didn't realize it was an option. Emily says,
"I'll have to check with my husband..."
Don't look towards me.
She looks towards me.
Ohshit. I'm the Messiah.
I mean, dammit, I have my own delusions; I can't get caught up in someone else’s.
Plus, to mention... frankly... I wanted to be the Anti-Christ.
No, really. I really wanted to be the Anti-Christ.
I only returned trite mumbles to Emily, any unspoken prayers were unanswered by a god closed for business...
Except, wait long enough, and out of his nowhere, he speaks the word of the Lord:
Listen. You need to listen. Pay attention to the people around here. They can help you.
"No, my aunt took medication and it-"
No. They help. Your problems are in your mind.
"I'm not having problems. Other people are the ones having problems with me."
Please...
"I know what you are. Mr. Jim Trapped. That's what you are, isn't it?"
I can’t even escape my own damned name.
"Let's change the channel. These clever programs. Those old-time shows; they've got heart. That's what’s missing in people nowadays. Don't you think? Some people could use a little more heart."
See, here, I’m trying to go every direction at once, but going nowhere at all. I could force something, but it'd only be a story. But I want to leave so badly.
Don’t I?
Here’s a tall tale I came up with once. It was important: Boy meets girl. Boy wants girl. Boy will win. Because Boy wants, wants, needs...
Then my emotion stopped, then my motion stopped, with a punch to my guts.
"It's selfish, and mean, and everything that’s wrong with the world."
You see, really, why I couldn't stop from thinking I was so important?
I was everything that’s wrong. If I could save myself, I could save everyone. I could save the world. I could save you. We’re all connected. We're all suffering in the same way, right?
"He who suffers from a want of life revenges himself on all things by forcing his image, the image of his torture on them, branding them with it." --Nietzsche
Aah... excuse me, sometimes I go back to thinking my mind here just has nothing to do with anything. Maybe all its story needs is for my brain to work the way it’s supposed to... or something. And something.
Was there something else?
Okay, then... Here’s a start. It can’t be the ultimate truth itself, the truth being too absurd, but that’s in this direction. Here’s what I have for you:
Life only lives. There is no answer... because there isn't a question; just human beings -- frightened, arrogant, and confused, thinking that the universe owes them some kind of explanation.
Trust human eyes to find a human face.
Mainly, mostly, I don't know.
But apparently this, right here, is what I do. My way is a way with words.
I think. I usually only think. So what is it that I wanted?
"...distortions of sensory processing are apparent, with attendant difficulties in screening out various unwanted sensory stimuli or ideations (leading to delusions or hallucinations) which is suggestive of a decreased capacity to filter and process information. The resulting disorganized thought and display of behaviors that do not meet with social expectation are often associated with the development of poor memory and a shortened attention span. The apparent decline in cognitive processing is often reflected in disorganized speech, further suggestive of a deficit in information processing. A decrease in emotional tone and of reaction to social and other external stimuli may parallel a decline in social functioning..." (Rhodri Walters, A Brief History of Schizophrenia)
"If anything, schizophrenia can be a ratiocinating illness, particularly in its early phases. From the turn of the century, the great students of schizophrenia noted that its sufferers included people with fine minds and that the delusions which often, though not always, come with the disorder involve subtle, sophisticated, complex flights of thought... Louis A. Sass, psychologist at Rutgers' University, calls it "not an escape from reason but an exacerbation of that thoroughgoing illness Dostoevsky imagined-- at least in some of its forms-- a heightening rather than a dimming of conscious awareness, and an alienation not from reason but from emotion, instincts, and the will." (Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind)
You don't fucking get it, do you? You fucking humans, you fucking spoiled humans who get to be with the other fucking spoiled humans and fuck with everything and everyone because you know what's real and decide for the entire fucking universe.
You stories. You fucking stories. You fucking functional fictions.
Your abandoned are not slobbering freaks. We are empty, and filled to the brim with imagination. Listen to me, look at yourselves, look in the funhouse mirror. Look into my eyes! You need to see ourselves!
Look at me.
Don't look at me like that.
Here's my idea, my revenge - you suffer, I suffer more, you imagine, I imagine more; I will save you with this power. Remember who we remember? Now you'll remember me. But I'll remember me as you remembering me as not from you, not quite a human boy, my potential so limited the world seems unlimited; all will be won, all will be one - here we attach, here we –
Are not there.
Here is a lie. Here is bullshit. Here is a trick. Here is an escape. Here is an over-lived defense mechanism. Here is a blender that's a blinder in a binder unbound.
Here is non-trusted, distorted mirroring working to inaction.
Here is a riddle for me and you– and think about everything we haven't learned about me.
"The most fundamental finding of self psychology is that the emergence of the self requires more than the inborn tendency to organize experience. Also required is the presence of others, technically designated as objects, who provide certain types of experiences that will evoke the emergence and maintenance of the self. The perhaps awkward term for these is selfobject experiences, usually abbreviated to selfobjects. Proper selfobject experiences favor the structural cohesion and energic vigor of the self; faulty selfobject experiences facilitate the fragmentation and emptiness of the self. Along with food and oxygen, every human being requires the concrete physical presence of the caregiving object as the provider of proper selfobject experiences, the maturely developed adult can maintain the structural integrity of his or her self by selfobject experiences generated in symbolic representations...." (Ernest Wolf, Treating the Self)
As soon as I get my coat back, I put it on and keep it on.
"I left you something. You don't have to take it. But I hope you do."
I look down. On the table is an envelope addressed to Jim Trapped. I don't touch it.
In a moment, they wheel me down the hall (taking two nurses, my questions answered with something about insurance) into the lobby, out the revolving doors. I don't enjoy the ride.
Outside, the sky is blue. The sky IS blue. The sky is crystal, and clear, and yet only blue to me.
I say it was winter when I came in...
"Yeah, the weather's been crazy lately."
Always the fucking symbolism and triple meanings getting in the way.
"If they do sustain a conversation, [the schizotype] may press it beyond the appropriate or suitable, digressing into highly personal, odd, or metaphoric topics. More commonly, they lack the spark to initiate action or to participate socially, seemingly enclosed by some force that blocks them from responding to or empathizing with others. This inability . . . to become a member of a real society, and to invest their energies and interests in a world of others, lies at the heart of their pathology." (Millon, Disorders of Personality: DSM-IV and Beyond, p. 629)
Then in my thick blue coat with the sleeves too long I took a cold breath and stepped off the curb and opened a door to a cab and sat down and it drove off and I looked at the sky through a window...