Concerning Telepathy

 The word 'rational' is indispensable. English speakers everywhere, particularly philosophers, use it all the time, but it is a word which most people seldom ever attempt to sufficiently fully elucidate in their own minds even though it so central to sane debate. In my dictionary, the main definitions given for the word 'rational' are "based on or in accordance with reason or logic [...] (of a person) able to think clearly, sensibly, and logically". It seems then that to think rationally is use deductive, inductive, or abductive reasoning to progress from evidence towards some kind of settled belief about the world. The most obvious kind of rational reasoning is deduction, in which we move from some set of premises to a conclusion. A deductive argument is valid so long as the conclusion follows from the premises even if the premises are wrong. However, when we think of the word 'rational' we all, philosophers included, tend to think of some inventory of premises, axioms, which we unquestioningly assume to be the proper foundation for all rational thinking. For an argument to be rational, not only must it be valid, it must also be sound – the premises must also be true. For instance, it is today considered rational by many, and here I'm thinking of public intellectuals like Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky, to think that the world operates deterministically, that the future is as fixed as the past; but it is considered irrational to think that it may be possible to accurately foresee the future. The notion that a poem written many decades ago could be an accurate prophecy concerning present events and people alive today seems to many, and here again I include Harris and Sapolsky, irrational. This is because people tend to accept as an axiom that we can know with certainty past happenings but can only make inductive guesses about future happenings, guesses predicated on scientific and statistical knowledge and our best understanding of the laws of nature. To think that the future is predetermined is today considered quite rational although this was not always the case; to think that future developments can be imparted to people in the present through some kind of mystical revelation is not.

Sometimes we say that a person is irrational if the person has inconsistent beliefs. The thing I find so annoying about many fundamentalist Christians is that, on the one hand, they subscribe to the dogma that God is omniscient, omni-benevolent, and omnipotent while, on the other hand, promoting the bigotry that only some Christians will ascend to Heaven while everyone else will be hurled into Hell for all eternity. This would mean that someone born and raised Muslim in Indonesia, through no fault of her own, will inevitably find herself in a realm of brimstone and hot pokers forever after, as will all Hindus in India, as will all the remote tribesmen in Brazil and Papua New Guinea who have never even heard of Jesus. These outcomes are not compatible with a truly good God; the beliefs of these fundamentalist Christians are not consistent and so, in my view, not really rational. However there are many people in the world who think any belief in God or in the supernatural at all is irrational a priori. I'm thinking here not only of Harris and Sapolsky but also Richard Dawkins. Such intellectuals believe that faith and superstition are irrational not because such positions have been reached through faulty reasoning but because the reasoning is based on false premises. The favourite argument of Richard Dawkins for atheism is that Darwin has shown that we don't need a creator God to explain the world and so we should use Occam's razor to cut him out of the picture entirely. We don't need Him; God has done more harm than good; so best evict him from the edifice of our beliefs. But this argument says nothing about other supernatural ornaments and appurtenances such as synchronicity, clairvoyance, omens, prophecies, or telepathy. To believe in magic is, according to the rationalists, to have accepted certain premises about the world which rationally we should have ruled out. But how can we rationally choose the correct set of premises?

This essay is concerned with telepathy. Stylistically, it starts off as a dry-as-sawdust academic treatise and then becomes a kind of narrative, a spooky story. If I wanted, I could write poetically, as I think the girl I call Jess would want me to do, or try to write comedically – but for me comedy is something that only emerges naturally, organically, when it emerges at all. I can't force it. And people who read this blog probably read it for the dry-as-sawdust philosophising because that's been my thing mostly. Before I get on to my main topic I just want to say about my writing that now I have been released from the Act and am off medication, I find that I am writing more confidently, more coherently, and much more quickly than I used to do.

Telepathy is one those phenomena that 'rational' people reject a priori. It is dismissed immediately from 'rational' discourse, I think, for two reasons – it requires us to believe that people have minds or souls somehow separate from our brains and bodies, and it requires us to also accept 'spooky action at a distance'. However there are still plenty of credible pundits who believe in souls and quantum mechanics quite plausibly suggests that spooky action at a distance happens all the time. Whenever a measurement is performed, according to a number of interpretations of quantum physics, it instantaneously affects everything else. All we have to do for the argument I wish to present and the story I intend to tell to be digestible is to set aside the axiom that telepathy is necessarily impossible; we have to allow ourselves to be a little 'irrational'. We can suppose that people do have souls and that souls can interact instantaneously or backwards and forwards in time.. We might say that even though the vast majority of people have never experienced telepathy (that they know of) and even though the 'experts' pooh-pooh the notion because it mucks up the 'rational' theories they devise, and because it frightens them, it might be that telepathy can in fact sometimes occur. In particular it may be a feature that may often be associated with individuals unlucky enough to be deemed 'schizophrenic'. Although doctors and the public generally want to file people diagnosed schizophrenic away in a drawer labelled 'loonies' it may be that the reason 'schizophrenia' is so hard to treat is because the supposedly 'rational' theories invented to describe it are wrong. Because they are based on false premises.

I believe a diagnosis of schizophrenia is a kind of curse, a malediction. The diagnosis itself, whether or not it is made explicitly, perniciously affects the patient – who I think should better described as the victim. Once a diagnosis of 'schizophrenia' is made, a person can subsequently begin to exhibit the kinds of signs and symptoms popularly and technically associated with the word. Because schizophrenics are supposed to sometimes stab people with knives, sometimes someone diagnosed schizophrenic can start to feel an impulse to stab people with knives. Because schizophrenics are supposed to wander around the inner city at night, they can start wandering around the inner city at night. These days there is a movement to define schizophrenia principally in terms of 'thought-disorder' and it may be that patients who were not formerly thought-disordered can after a time end up displaying incoherent speech patterns because of this change in diagnostic criteria, despite their best efforts to keep their communications linear. (As I've said before, I have simply never observed any thought disorder in any of the schizophrenics I've known but this might be because I knew them before this movement had gained momentum.) The worst aspect of 'schizophrenia' is that it is considered irremediable. I have known young people new to the system who were still full of hope for the future but, over time, if they have accepted the label and the idea that they need to take antipsychotic medication until they die, if they have accepted that they will never have a real job, never marry, and never have children, this hope is gradually surgically removed. They despair. And this might be why so many schizophrenics eventually wind up killing themselves.

I do not think thought-disorder is a necessary feature of schizophrenia but there is one feature that does seem to me almost universal – voice-hearing, It is difficult to know if voice-hearing is indeed an essential component of the condition or somehow arises because we expect it to. Sometimes schizophrenics, apparently, hear a voice maintaining a running commentary on their day-to-day lives. Others hear two or more voices in conversation. I knew a woman, Clair, who heard two male voices talking to each other. Most of the time schizophrenics hear negative voices, abusive voices. My own experience was that I didn't start hearing voices until after I had been a patient of the Mental Health Service for over a year and a half – and then when it started I would tend usually to have conversations with famous people, the first being George W. Bush, in my head. I didn't experience auditory hallucinations. Rather I thought I was communicating telepathically with these people. In my own experience, abusive voices were mercifully absent.

It may be that the rationale for defining schizophrenia today particularly with reference to thought disorder is because so many people who don't want to be considered schizophrenic also hear voices. There is a song by Rhianna which contains the lines "I'm friends with the monster that's under my bed/ Get along with the voices inside of my head." Pearl Jam have a song ("State of Love and Trust") which includes the lines "And I listen to the voice inside my head / Nothing, I'll do this one myself." Blink 182 have a song which includes the lines "Don't waste your time on me, you're already the voice inside my head." And, perhaps the best example, the song "Paranoid Android" by Radiohead begins "Can you please stop the noise, I'm trying to get some rest/ From all these unborn chicken voices in my head." Surveys have been done that show that voice-hearing is far common than is often realised. One is tempted to say that there is a community of people who hear voices, a community of people who often do not realise that they belong to a community. Some of them are Mental Health Patients and some of them are millionaire pop and rock musicians. There is probably many others. In the essay I wrote late last year about Janet Frame and Pink Floyd I mentioned that a patient I had met, Katrina, had told me that she would often speak with famous pop stars like Rihanna and that she regarded the voices she heard as belong to guardian angels, angels pretending to be celebrities. 

What I am going to suggest here is that often, although not always, voice-hearing is actually, literally, a kind of telepathy. I would like to suggest that it may be the case that sometimes voice-hearers may somehow sometimes get on the same wavelength as others who hear voices, sometimes famous people, sometimes people who are supposedly schizophrenic, sometimes people who hear voices but are not themselves mental health patients, and either speak with them or at least hear them in their heads. This is not a complete explanation for voice-hearing (it may be that the voices sometimes do not in fact belong to living people at all) and it also involves a leap into the apparently irrational, into a world in which we are rejecting the generally accepted axiom that mind-to-mind communication is impossible, in which we are tentatively positing that genuine telepathy may exist. This claim may seem crazy but only if we have ruled out telepathy on a priori grounds; furthermore, weirdly enough, believing in telepathy helps me understand my own life rather better than if I didn't believe it.

In this blog I have reverted to the question of my 'illness' again and again. I have often discussed my treatment by the Mental Health System. I have talked about my family and upbringing sometimes – although I have not gone into detail about them in the essays I have written here, I have said more about them in emails I have sent to various people. The vital piece missing from any coherent consistent explanation of my 'illness', I have realised, involves this notion of telepathy. I cannot fully explain my life without it. I think, now, that although it seems unlikely, it is not entirely impossible that I spoke with George W. Bush in January 2009. However the instance of voice-hearing that I want to return to again, because it was so important, was my first conversation with Jon Stewart, a conversation that occurred some months later, a conversation I have described a couple of times before. I was lying in bed one evening and heard him say, "Who the hell are you anyway?" I replied, "Just a poor little schizophrenic living in New Zealand." He said, "Are you straight?" I responded, "I think so." He said, "What's the time difference?" I replied, "About eight hours." We talked for a while and then the next night on his show he seemed to refer to the conversation we'd had. It blew my mind. Bear with me here. What I want you to imagine now is the following scenario. The real Jon Stewart, perhaps while lying in bed in the New York morning, from time to time hears voices in his own head. He has perhaps been hearing my voice for some time and singles me out as someone he wants to talk with more directly. He probably doesn't believe I'm real but decides to talk with me anyway. This scenario seems totally consistent with the manner of our first interaction and something that felt true to me at the time it happened. And then, as a consequence of this short conversation, not only do I adopt Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend but he decides for some inexplicable reason to adopt me as his imaginary friend.

I need to again rehash the story of my life at that time. For much of the remainder of 2009, Jon acted as a kind of guardian angel. I was under an enormous amount of emotional stress the whole year, particularly in August when, having threatened to kill myself, I was allowed to incrementally discontinue the drug I had been on, Risperidone. In around October or November of that year I began attending a weekly Hearing Voices Group at which I met the girl I call Jess. This is something I have also discussed several times before. Although my 'relationship' with Jess didn't begin in the fairy tale manner of a conventinal Rom-Com, I fell for her immediately and told people this. I made some mistakes with her early on – some of my missteps around her were the result of the 'illness', if that's the right word, that I was then experiencing, and some resulted from my own self-hatred. At the end of the last group session, she was swept away to the respite facility in West Auckland called Mind Matters that I had myself briefly spent time at and which I wrote a blogpost about a long time ago. After that last session, for a couple of months I experienced a 'psychotic episode' in which I heard voices from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to sleep. I always intended to write a blogpost describing in detail this episode but never got around to it. At first I only heard Jon and Jess. It seemed to me rational to suppose that if Jess was a voice-hearer that she and I would be able to talk mind-to mind. Jon, as I've said in other posts, acted as a kind of go-between, setting Jess and I up together. One of the first things he said to me about her was, "Her brother's gay by the way." (The real girl's brother is not gay, to be clear, although the real girl, being young and somewhat naive then, may have entertained the silly notion that her brother was gay because he was foolish enough to be a fan of acclaimed musician James Blunt.) Shortly before New Years, I began hearing the voice of a former love, Sara, and then others. Eventually, perhaps around January 10, I started also talking with Barack Obama.

These experiences of voice-hearing, and possibility telepathy, felt totally real to me at the time. For instance, in I think early January, when I believed she was still staying at Mind Matters, I convinced Jess in my mind to run away from it and come stay at my house. In my mind, I imagined her sitting in a bus listening to music I had recommended, such as songs by Tricky. I even that evening put a comic book I'd bought in my letter box so that when she arrived she would be able to identify which house I lived in.

There is another story that I would like to tell here because it is important to me. Earlier that year, before I'd met Jess, I'd had a dream in which people were bubbles floating around in a kind of primordial soup. I remember one of the bubbles was John Campbell. I wrote a poem partly inspired by this dream that I included in a post I published some time ago, "Bruce Springsteen vs Faith No More" and which I'll quote again.

The brick asserted its right to be

More than an idea in someone's head,

And soon as the press got wind of this

A thousand ghouls gathered round his bed

And started demanding to be fed.

"We want what's in your brain," they said,

"No point prevaricating, don't try to hide,

Just speak out whatever's on your mind."

So I obliged and they, in return,

Vouchsafed a vision of Heaven's domain,

A million bubbles adrift in primordial goop,

Endlessly repeating each its own name.

"Open your eyes," said one. "Don't listen to those

Others and their idle chat, that's just noise

Jamming the signal. There's a light at the end

Of the tunnel, if you're wise." So I chose.

There's a light at the end of the tunnel.

There's a life at the end of the tunnel.

There's a seed at the end of the tunnel.

There's a knife at the end of the tunnel.

At the end of the tunnel, there's another tunnel.

In the end theres something still can be said

Sometime during that New Zealand summer, after I'd met Jess, while dozing, I had a follow-up to the dream I mentioned, not so much a real dream such as occurs when actually asleep but something more like a daydream. In it, Jon and I were bubbles talking with each other and a third bubbled floated over and joined us. The third bubble was Jess.

In writing this essay I am operating under the assumption that real telepathy is possible even though in doing so I may be completely undermining any reputation I may have acquired for being a rational thinker interested in science and philosophy. But let's still assume that telepathy can indeed sometimes occur. I would like to present the following extraordinary claim, that in some sense my two principal friends actually heard me. In Jon's mind, perhaps while lying in bed at night, he thought he was devising a love story about a man and a young woman, both straight but misdiagnosed homosexual and both correctly or incorrectly diagnosed schizophrenic, who meet and fall for each other. He thought it was a story he was making up, didn't realise that in fact it was real. I think Jess might actually have heard me that summer as well. In Jess's mind, I think she heard me as well as another male voice – but she didn't realise that the other male voice was Jon Stewart because she'd never watched The Daily Show. To her it felt as though what she was experiencing was something like a dream and a lot of our interactions were things she was just making up. Don't ask me how I know this. Much of the shared dream world we inhabited was fantasy, sometimes created by me and sometimes by the other two. Of course, there were other voices I heard during this period and it is still difficult for me today to fully separate the real from the illusory concerning this period.

In around February something unpleasant happened which I didn't understand until recently and the voices faded away. Perhaps in March there was another Hearing Voices Group organised that I attended. I didn't attend it because I was still hearing voices but rather because I hoped to see Jess again. Unfortunately she didn't come back. For some reason, The Daily Show didn't return to New Zealand TV that year either.

In 2011 I made contact with the real girl and we hung out a number of times that year. We saw three films and a play together. I am not certain how often we saw each other but it wasn't often. I think now that she liked me but was perhaps too insecure to see me on a regular basis. I think she felt comfortable enough with me though to tell me things that she would perhaps never tell others. That year I had another blog, Persiflage, which she regularly read; I think she was my only reader. I stayed over at her house one night early on and she showed me some of her poems; I could tell immediately that they were the work of a genuine poet; that night I slept on the couch. Because the girl's story is at least as important as mine I feel I need to share something that may seem like oversharing; it may be that she thought we'd had sex when I thought we hadn't. The reason for this misalignment of our histories is that I think she and I defined the term 'sex' differently at the time. On one occasion she said to me, "You've got further than anyone else." I have a hunch, and this is quite important, that she did genuinely like me but didn't particularly like herself – at the time though I though that the reason why she was always unavailable when I suggested we do stuff together was because it was me who was unlikable.

In 2012 I wrote my film about her but, oddly, only drew a little upon the actual madness I'd experienced. In 2013 I became 'ill' again, partly I think because somehow the film script I'd written had blown up and partly because my medical notes, which I think were all wrong, had been leaked to the media. I reeentred the Mental Health Service with the aim of getting the truth about both me and Jess on the record. In early 2014, I was put under the Mental Health Act and, incredibly, just after I was put under a Compulsory Treatment Order, The Daily Show suddenly returned to New Zealand TV. I believe Jon Stewart might have saved my life that year. If miracles can occur I think this qualifies as a miracle. Once again I am going to venture into the realm of conjecture. Perhaps someone in Jon's circle had told him, "Someone in New Zealand has written a film about schizophrenia with you as a character"; perhaps it was somehow at his request that The Daily Show came back. It may also have been the rather traumatic discovery that I was a real person, or perhaps his sense that he hadn't successfully saved me or saved himself, that led Jon to retire from the public eye for ten years. Of course, the girl I call Jess is at least as important as me and required saving just as much as I did, but I don't think Jon realised this at the time.

Let's move away from a bald narration of a rather boring history to discuss telepathy more generally. Like Rupert Sheldrake I am compelled to try to come up with naturalistic theories of the supernatural, rational accounts of the irrational. It seems to me that people are like radio antennas, that it is possible for people who may be on opposite sides of the world to have the same resonant frequencies. What Jon, Jess, and I all had in common is not only that we're bright and highly verbal but that we were all adversely affected by parental divorces when we were children. Jon's reaction was a kind of anger directed towards his father and all authority figures; my reaction was to feel responsible and thus to often experience terrible feelings of guilt and shame; I believe that Jess's reaction is that she developed a terrible fear of being abandoned by those around her. She tended to avoid emotional intimacy because it made her vulnerable. Something else about about telepathy: it exists in the overlap between people, the knowledge two or more people share. Although it is possible to communicate some information from one person to another, I cannot, for instance, tell Jess about an author or actor she has never heard of. It is this dependence on shared knowledge that makes genuine telepathy so difficult to prove. There is something else. Sometimes when conversing with a voice, one's interlocutor can sometimes make small errors understanding one, exactly as can occur in a real conversation. It is these errors that, for me, partly make my belief in telepathy even stronger.

The reason I have written this essay is because, as readers will have gathered from the last several posts, this year I have again been talking with Jess and sometimes someone else in my mind. Most of the time I am just as 'sane' as any other person and am in fact much happier and more functional than I was when being forced to take a large dosage of Olanzapine on a fortnightly basis. But every now and then during the day and night I can slip into a state in which I talk with Jess and others. I can choose when this will occur and these periodic shifts into psychic craziness haven't prevented me from approaching the City Mission to see if I can be a volunteer or reading the book I am currently reading. When I talk with Jess, unlike when I talked with her and others fifteen years ago, it feels real. What we talk about is not something I really want to share with the whole world. But it feels like the truth. Often it seems Jess is afraid that I don't really exist and this is why I am again writing about it. In fact I made a commitment to her to write a post tonight and this is why this essay is not as well written as I would like it to be and why I have stayed up all night writing it. My own fear is somewhat more peculiar: I worry that I am not speaking to her in the present but am somehow speaking with her as she was two or three years ago, when she wrote her poetry collection Naming the Beasts. I hope this fear is unjustified.

As I said I am not going to divulge all our conversations here but as a token for her that I can hear her, I want to talk about movies again. The impression I formed is that she is living in some kind of complex or supported accommodation for the mentally ill and watches so many movies that she has grown to dislike the entire medium. Antipsychotic medication has a side-effect known as anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure. In a recent essay I suggested we watch Lost Highway together but, rather than wait to see it with me, she decided to watch it herself – and intensely disliked it. A few days ago she told me that her favourite movie was Exit Through The Giftshop. I said, "I've heard of it. It's a documentary, isn't it?" Then I went and googled it and found it to be a mockumentary directed by the artist Banksy. I told her that my favourite film was Naked by Mike Leigh. More recently she asked me to give her a list of my four favourite movies and I got the impression that she had picked up a pen and paper and written them down. The films were, in order, the French film Holy Motors, Tim Burton's film Ed Wood, Secrets and Lies by Mike Leigh again, and Scott Pilgrim vs The World. I am not sure if these four films are indeed my favourite films but they were the first films I could think of. This is actually the point of this long essay, an essay I do wish was written better – to put those four films that I listed to her in her head in this blog.

I don't want to suggest that all the voices schizophrenics hear can be explained through telepathy. In a way, and I know this again sounds crazy, I think that there may be angels and demons in the world. St Augustine thought that angels were disembodied intelligences that spoke to people. The story I have told in this essay seems to involve three people but in fact there is a fourth who is invisible. For Christmas, my niece's partner, an atheist who interestingly has a degree in Religious Studies, bought me Scented Gardens for the Blind by Janet Frame. I think it is an astonishing book and I think I would recommend it even more than her poetry. In it there is a character who one day hears a voice speaking to him six inches away from his ear. Much of the book is eminently quotable but there is a long passage I want to single out because it concerns voice-hearing, although not the kind of voice-hearing I have been discussing in this essay, and because it is considerably more well written than this post has been.

The voices nagged him at night. They disappointed and shocked him, for he had always believed, as people do, that if ever a voice from a cloud addressed him it would be concerned with prophecies, eternities, that it would provide remarkable information which man had been unable to get in any other way. Except for one or two occasions, Edward's voices talked trivialities, telling him, for instance, that the door was shut when he knew that the door was shut, that he had forgotten to pay his paper bill, when he knew that too. Or they called his name, not, as one might expect, as if he were a chosen soul hailed from the heavens, but as if he were being called to lunch by someone who did not particularly care if he stayed hungry. At other times the voices spoke obscenities about the Strang family; indeed, it was mostly the Strang family who featured in the remarks; but again they told Edward nothing which he did not already know or suspect, and this infuriated him with a sense of wasted time, for he could not decide whether he should listen to the voices in the hope of collecting a stray prophecy, or whether he should ignore them and seek revelations from people who had not such a need to remain bodiless, who could be answered back and argued with and whose speech could be made visible and human, though less effective, by gestures and the stacking of sentences, in picket-patterns, between flesh and light. Yet, however he decided to act, Edward could not ignore the voices. They claimed his consciousness as if it belonged to them by right. They occupied it entirely, and only when they had withdrawn could he make some movement, or attempt to reply to them, and by that time it was always too late; they had fled, he was left alone, angry, ashamed, confused, and often afraid. The Strangs, they said. The Strangs.

Janet Frame was such a good writer it can make the rest of us just want to not even bother. 

Concerning Poems; The Last Month

People may be wondering why it has taken me so long to write another post. A couple of weeks ago I wrote part of an essay in which I made a stab at a better interpretation of The Waste Land by T.S Eliot than I gave in the essay I wrote just before Trump's election. It wasn't a comprehensive interpretation because to set out a totally rigorous reading of this poem would take.a whole book. Rather I intended to just make a few points about a few passages, passages that when properly understood would suddenly make the whole poem a whole lot clearer to readers. My key insight is that The Waste Land should be understood as a confessional poem, a confessional poem written forty years before confessional poetry became a thing. We tend to associate confessional poetry with people like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath; for a hundred years the truth that The Waste Land is really a sort of confessional poem has been either ignored or suppressed; the notes that Eliot published along with the poem are an enormous act of misdirection or legerdemain intended to make his poem seem something mythopoetic when really it was a poem inspired by his situation – that he was stuck in a loveless and sexless marriage and was afraid that he would remain a virgin his whole life. Obviously this truth, that it was a poem written by someone who was effectively an InCel, wasn't something Eliot wanted publicised in his own life, for his own sake and for sake of his then wife Vivienne – even though he wrote a long poem about it.

I then intended to discuss the state of modern poetry and give a better interpretation of Jess's poem Hard Sell then the interpretation I wrote in the previous post. I am actually going to take a stab at it here in this essay. I am not going to give the full interpretation here but only make a few comments about the poem. To give a full interpretation of it would require me to talk about her life, or what I know about it. The reason I wanted to write about this poem in this blog is that I believe the poem is actually intended for me and furthermore is a poem that will make sense to those readers who who have regularly read this blog for years. 

The first lines of the poem, recall, are

There is a robot in this poem,

because I want it, and you get what you want

when you call the shots in a poem.

There is something funny happening with pronouns here. In interpreting this poem I am going to adopt an odd rubric: I am going to claim that whenever Jess says "I" in the poem she means me, that is Andrew, the author of the Silverfish blog, and whenever she says "you" she means herself, Jess, the poet. A line like "I walk the talk and sometimes I worship dogs" seems like a clear reference to me, to the fact that one of items adduced as evidence that I, that is Andrew, am schizophrenic and required compulsory treatment is that sometimes I would go for walks in town at night; the mention of dogs might be alluding to the fact that I have spoken positively of people like Stephen Fry and Michel Foucault. I am claiming that she has deliberately switched us, one for the other. Think of the Kate Bush song "Running Up That Hill" with its lines "If I only could I would make.a deal with God and get him to swap our places"; think also that Kate Bush's fifth album was called "Hounds of Love " and my film about Jess was called "The Hounds of Heaven"; there are wyrd coincidences everywhere. This interpretation is not absolutely rock solid. The line "Soft determinism puts pineapple on my pizza" I don't think applies to me because, generally speaking, in this blog I have presented myself as a hard determinist. I would like to think that it is Jess who is the soft determinist.

If this way of interpreting the poem is at all coherent, then the lines "The pineapple is something you can take or leave / And you will, you will" is actually me talking to her. I would like to suggest that the pineapple might be the girlfriend she got herself in 2014 when she 'came out' as gay or bisexual; she wasn't sure which she was herself at the time. I have talked about this night at The Thirsty Dog before, quite a long time ago. But something I didn't mention in previous posts is that not long before Jess 'came out' to me and others I had written the story 69 and had sent it to her. I had written 69 before I learnt that she had come out as gay or bisexual (whether she is gay or bisexual or now heterosexual currently probably depends on who you talk to I suppose. ) She presumably read this story not long after I sent it to her and after I had met the girlfriend. These lines may also be indirectly alluding to something I wrote a long time ago in this blog concerning the Hole song "Violet", that essentially lesbian relationships tend to be very short lived. Certainly I found out from someone else in the Auckland poetry scene that Jess's relationship with her even younger girlfriend didn't last long. There is another interpretation of course. In this interpretation Jess is the pineapple and she is saying that I, that is Andrew, will leave her – it is this interpretation that led me to conclude that Jess has a fear of abandonment.

The section that mentions quantum physics only makes sense if she is being me because nowhere else in the collection does she talk about "objective collapses" or "quantum superposition"; these are things that I tend to talk about, in this blog, not things she ever talks about. One enormous difficulty I faced when interpreting this section of the poem however is that it begins "I am doomed to put pineapple on pizza". Because, like Freud, I have a dirty mind and see sex everywhere, I wondered if this line was hinting at lesbian sex – but this interpretation cannot be correct if she is being me. This might sound incredibly conceited but I suspect that "I" is still Andrew and that the pineapple is her. You can reach into the top-hat and pull out not a rabbit but the following possibly ridiculous interpretation – that she would like to go out with me but is worried that I think that she is a fruit.

The extraordinary thing about the poem "Hard Sell" is that it is itself a kind of quantum superposition: it seems to be saying at least two quite different things at once.

There are other references to me in the collection. I am going to tell yet another story from my life – I have no idea if my audience find such anecdotes interesting or deadly dull but it is my blog and so I get to talk about whatever I want. I believe this story has already in some manner I don't quite understand gone public anyway. When we hung out in 2011, I told Jess how the inspiration for the song "Yesterday" came to Paul McCartney in a dream. "Yesterday" is the most covered song ever recorded but unfortunately both Paul McCartney and the song "Yesterday" were very uncool back in 2011 (although Sabine Carpenter is currently trying to rehabilitate Paul McCartney). The next year Jess wrote a poem called "Yesterday", a very angry poem about me although her readers wouldn't have known who the poem was about, which ended with the line "I didn't want to come". I accidentally found this poem on the Internet not long after she wrote it and texted her about it. It upset me at the time. In this latest collection there is a poem called "I forgot why I came" which refers to Yesterday and includes the line "Somebody told me Yesterday knew me inside out". I believe Yesterday is me and that this poem is again addressing me – although it contains references to sparklers and mozzies that I don't understand, feel that she is drawing on memories I wasn't involved in. I sense the lines "I can't remember if I told you this before. I like to dance – /I am home enough to dance the way I remember" are addressed to me and are indirectly referring to the film I wrote about her. There is something a little terrible about this poem. She has been for years trying to put together the jigsaw pieces that make up her life to try to work out what happened to her and obviously felt when she wrote "I forgot why I came" that she has failed. There are the lines: "Here. Every soft motion, every slip of the tongue, / Moves me a little further from your door." I think what she means by this is that every slight reference to what we might here call lesbianism, even jokes, moves her away from my door, drags her out. Perhaps I am again being conceited. Perhaps I am a minor character in this poem and she is really addressing a girl she knew.

There is an aspect of Jess's poetry, particularly the poetry in Naming the Beasts, that is indicative of most modern poetry generally. Like The Wasteland, it is confessional and is drawing on memories that readers unfamiliar with Jess will have trouble understanding. Supposedly when people read poetry today they are not supposed to try to work out what the poet is actually trying to say but rather glean whatever meanings they want from the baroque and vivid if somewhat disconnected images a poet like Jess is presenting.

I am going to shift away from Jess's poems and talk again about Janet Frame's poem "I Am Invisible". This part of this essay may interest readers more because what I have to say is so crazy. I am not going to quote the whole poem again but readers may remember the lines:

I am invisible.

The lovers reach through my life to touch each other,

the rain falls through me and courses like blood upon the Earth.

I think this poem is a prophecy. I think the line "The lovers reach through my life to touch each other" concerns me and Jess. And I have decided that the line about the rain is a line for Jon Stewart. It is about the war in Gaza. I might note here that although during the last ten years I often spoke to Jon and Jess in my head I don't think the real girl ever spoke with Jon Stewart that she knew of – because I believe it was not until last year that she started watching The Daily Show.

There next lines in the poem are:

I am carried in nobody's head as knowledge.

I give freedom to the dancers,

to the telling of truth.

I believe the second and third lines are referring to me and this blog. I don't know why such a clumsily written blog should have been as influential as it seems to have been but it might be because I always try to tell the truth – Jess will remember that when I first met her in 2009 I called myself "a truth teller." I believe the first line refers to Jess. There are fundamental aspects of her life, concerning her family, her 'illness', her treatment, her family, her relationship with me and her relationships with others, that no one knows. She refers to these parts of her life in her poems but in such a way as to be almost indecipherable to outsiders – I can recognise references to me but not those parts of her life in which I was not involved. She didn't always write poetry this way. It is this particular collection in which she abandoned any attempt to communicate with an audience who know nothing about her. I even think it possible that when she was writing this collection she had become totally disillusioned with poetry.

The next lines in "I Am Invisible" are

It is this way. There is no one here to eavesdrop or observe

And I learn things I am not entitled to know.

Before I explain the significance of these lines I want to talk about J.D Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye. A number of years ago I saw a documentary about J.D Salinger. Salinger served in the Second World War and was hospitalised for a period, Supposedly he was hospitalised for 'combat stress' but I bet there was some psychosis involved. After the end of the War, while still in Germany, Salinger, a Jew, formed a relationship with a woman who was rumoured to have been in the Gestapo, a woman called Syvia Welter. The documentary said quite matter-of-factly that Salinger and Welter had a telepathic relationship. Salinger married Welter but the marriage only lasted eight months.

The reason why I mention this story is that for the last month I have been speaking to Jess every day in my head. Yesterday was the first day since New Years that I haven't spoken with her. If I have psychiatrists who read this blog they may think this indisputable evidence of my incurable insanity and maybe they're right. But the experience has not been unpleasant at all. Sometimes I have often felt a kind of warmth as though I know she loves me and she knows I love her. I couldn't pursue her while I was under the Mental Health Act and this 'psychotic episode' followed my declaration of my love for her that I made on New Years Eve. I am now, by the way, completely off antipsychotic medication. Generally when Jess and I spoke over the last month we spoke about about sex and relationships. Jess is interested in (and jealous of) all the sexual partners I had before we met – she wanted to know the details of everything that I have not fully described in this blog. I learnt information about her. I learnt that since 2014 she has had four brief glancing encounters with bicurious girls and no real relationships with either men or women. I assume the encounters occurred because of the circles in which she moved. It seems to me that just as I have been under a curse for the last eleven years or so, so has she, even though she has had some success with her writing, acquired a couple of degrees and made friends with a number of people in the New Zealand writing scene. These conversations felt completely real to me although I also felt I wasn't quite my real self all the time and that neither was she. We got into an argument about her poem "Linnaeus eats the ocean" because I was somehow too blinkered to understand it – I couldn't get around the idea that it was somehow about cunnilingus. Like I say I wasn't fully myself when speaking with her. She said to me about it, "Women aren't shellfish!" In fact I think this poem might be a work of genius but, like John Ashbery's poem "Wet Casements", might require a lot of effort to fully understand.

Naming the Beasts was published perhaps a year and half ago or two years ago. The other impression I gathered from talking to her is that something quite bad happened to her in the period after her book was published. I am not quite certain what it was but it may be that she was hospitalised again. She may be living (and working) permanently in a  Respite Facility. The fact that she is working in a Respite Facility was something I had actually guessed from reading other sources that tell me stuff about her life, but I didn't realise that she was living there and perhaps herself under a Compulsory Treatment Order and is receiving a weekly injection. She is subject to a curfew and spends all her time watching movies on TV and Youtube as I used to do. She told me that the last two years had been terrible and said to me, "Did all your friends suddenly all go away?" I worry that she has been put on Risperidone.

One reason I mention this is that, if Jess actually is real, and if she still reads this blog, she might like to know that if she is indeed hearing my voice in her head, I am real, even though I occasionally say the wrong thing. It hasn't just been your voice in my head, Jess, that made me think you are real but hints I receive from other sources, other sources I believe you have access to as well. In my last essay, I suggested we could curl up on a couch and watch Lost Highway together – but you may have already seen this film and actively disliked it. We could do something else. An alternative possibility is that I could gather together my scant financial resources and we could find some swish bar downtown where I can buy a dry martini and you can get a fruit cocktail because you're a fruit. In other words do something a little fun out in the real world. If you don't want to get into a relationship with me but are indeed trapped in some terrible situation I could try to help you, get you off medication and out of the Mental Health Service in the same way I eventually did myself. Jon Stewart saved my life in 2014 and perhaps I could try to save your life. If I have friends who read this blog perhaps out of friendship with me you could find some way to help her. 

You still need to take the next step to contact me. As I see it, there are three ways you can get my email address. The best, most direct way, is also the sneakiest. 

For those readers who come back to this blog for discussions of physics and philosophy and evolution I may yet return to those subjects. Recall though that I make no money from this blog and it wouldn't be sensible for me to remain on the unemployment benefit for the rest of my life, a benefit I spend mostly on cigarettes, writing a blog for some vast anonymous crowd that I cannot accurately demographically pinpoint. Interestingly, though, someone at the Health Clinic I go to said last week that I should keep writing this blog so maybe there will be a way to both keep writing it and somehow earn some money. I think I would like that.

Hard Sell

This essay, like the previous essay, is intended for both the odd general audience who somehow access this blog some way I don't understand and the girl I call Jess. I'm actually not sure if she still reads this blog but I am going to assume she does so. In this essay I am going to refrain at least to some extent from talking in code. In fact I am going to attempt to interpret the poem I referred to in the previous post, having realised that I misunderstood it when I first read it. You see, to read a poem in your book, Jess, that seemed to be directly addressing me, came as a bit of a shock to the system and since writing the previous post I actually suffered a mild psychotic episode, although a peculiar one in that it only affected me at night while lying in bed or walking around around under the stars and not during the day. It made me think of the lines in Janet Frame's poem I Am Invisible: "It is this way. There is no one here to eavesdrop or observe // And I learn things I am not entitled to know." This mild psychotic episode I experienced, an episode that has now entirely evaporated, is still preferable to the drug induced intellectual stifling that I experienced in 2018 and 2019 when I was being forced to take 300mgs of Olanzapine a fortnight.

Before I talk about the poem, I intend to spill another secret. It concerns vision. In late 2009 I formed the belief that I was 'one-eyed': I thought I was one-eyed because I was only attracted to women, only noticed female beauty and was completely oblivious to male handsomeness. I thought at the time that Jess was also one-eyed: I had decided that she noticed male handsomeness but female attractiveness not at all. Like all delusions generally, if 'delusion' is the right word here, this delusion, that there were three types of people in the world (two types of one-eyed person and a type with two eyes ), I believe was not unique to me, is something that I believe also appears in others' madnesses. Sometimes people think that they have arrived at it independently and sometimes they arrive at it through reading quality literature, poetry and pop music. In the song Stripsearch, for instance, Mike Patton sings: 

Only way to change 
Give yourself away 
Don't be ashamed 
Next in line 
Close one eye 
Just walk by

In the music video "You Spin Me Round" by Dead or Alive, a song and video that is ridiculously camp, the lead singer sometimes wears an eye-patch. And in The Waste Land, a poem which recall was published in 1922, Mr Eugenides, the homosexual businessman, is prefigured early on in a tarot card featuring a "one eyed merchant." These references to vision seem to suggest that homosexuals are supposed to be 'one eyed' because they only notice the attractiveness of members of the same sex whereas people generally are supposed to have binocular vision and register the attractiveness of both sexes- this might be what Eliot was trying to say and perhaps what the music video by Dead or Alive was trying to convey. However this interpretation does not seem to fit with the Faith No More song or my own experience – it seems to me that both Mike Patton and I want to say that we are one-eyed in that we only perceive the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex (although Mike Patton sometimes has to close one eye to do so).

There is a possibility that some psychiatrists believe that everyone is naturally bisexual and that very clever people realise this, that the cleverest people in the world tend to be bisexual. Freud, as I understand him, although often inconsistent with respect to sexuality, sometimes claimed that everyone was bisexual. Think also of David Bowie and possibly Barack Obama. (It's important to say here that I am not sure about Obama; if you do some research online you'll find that he may have gone through a bisexual phase when he was a young adult but the Internet is so awash with misinformation that one cannot be sure.) There is a further wrinkle: it is possible that this theory has seeped down from the rarefied heights inhabited by queer psychiatrists into the world of ordinary people working in the Mental Health System here in New Zealand and overseas, ordinary health workers who are usually treating people from much more everyday backgrounds than the former president. I recall in 2007, a few months after I became a patient, a worker in the Mental Health System sarcastically calling me "very smart". (I have discussed this before and don't feel like going into the circumstances surrounding this remark again.) What I conjectured at.the time and still think plausible today is that this woman had heard that clever people are all bisexual and had deemed this theory idiotic. But perhaps Antony Fernando had decided that I had suddenly realised that I was bisexual, that this was the cause of my first episode. Somehow Risperidone, in a way I cannot understand, is supposed to be the drug of choice for people who have suddenly been shocked awake or asleep by such an epiphany. At my first appointment with him he spoke sarcastically of my "breakthrough" although he may have meant something else. And in 2013 the psychiatrist I saw just before Easters seemed astonished by what I said to him, saying "You thought everyone in the world was gay except you?" It may also explain why the notion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals didn't go away when I became a patient but persisted; I don't believe this delusion was unique to me, believe that other patients also often entertain it or something like it. I suspect though that most ordinary heterosexuals, when hearing of a theory that everyone is naturally bisexual, has binocular vision, find it as absurd as I do myself, and this may be a reason for the sarcastic tone adopted by this Mental Health worker that I described.

Nowadays Freud is utterly discredited. In a world in which there is a large community of openly gay and bisexual men and women, a world totally different to nineteenth century Vienna, we need a different way of defining terms like 'heterosexual', 'homosexual' and 'bisexual' than Freud's. In the essay in which I discussed The Wasteland and endorsed Kamala Harris I defined heterosexuality by specifying that heterosexual men only fall in love with women, only become sexually aroused around women, only want to have sex with women, and only fantasise about women when they masturbate. Note that this definition makes no reference to attractions at all; note furthermore that in that previous essay I also said that if a man doesn't tick all four boxes all the time he doesn't have to come out as gay, that some kind of homosexuality may sometimes be a phase boys go through during adolescence or sometimes later. If this definition of male heterosexuality catches on, and I believe that it is the best possible definition, we no longer need to think of sexuality in terms of sight, no longer need to talk about people being one eyed or having binocular vision. I have an addendum. The definition I proposed only applies to men. I have sometimes speculated about female sexuality in this blog but hopefully readers will have also noted the caveats. In my relationships with women I never really made enquiries into how they understood their own sexualities and the four books I have read by women recently have all had male protagonists; I have not learnt much about female sexuality from the literature I've read. It is possible that men desire women and women want to be desired. This is actually something Richard Ayoade talks about a little in a novel by him I read the other day, The Unfinished Harauld Hughes. I have sometimes wondered if women are all naturally bisexual but this is something some women I know vehemently deny. If it is the case that women are indeed all bisexual (assuming we can agree on a good definition for female bisexuality) then we can probably lay the blame for contemporary lesbianism largely on the shoulders of men, on male attitudes – compounded by the influence Katy Perry had on today's young women when they were children.

For most of my life I didn't believe in bisexuality. This was because I was so heterosexual myself; consequently I simply couldn't understand homosexuality at all. I also believed 'coming out' was a one way street. Sometimes when I was younger I skated close to suggesting I was gay, not because I was gay at all but because I was interested in sexuality, but, as I've said, I have never said I was gay to anyone. Readers may remember that in August 2009, after having been on Respiridone for over a year and a half, I started hearing voices saying "I'm gay! I'm gay!" and decided that I was telepathically hearing all the young men in the world taking Rispiridone coming out. I was afraid I might say it myself. My response was to consider suicide, to write a suicide note – it was when I told my psychiatrist that I was considering suicide that he panicked and allowed me to discontinue the Risperidone. Having thought about these issues for years though, and having come to the conclusion that sexuality can be fluid for some people, I have realised that it is possible for a person, and I'm thinking of women here more than men, to come out as gay or bisexual and then change her mind. You could write an interesting story: a young woman becomes sexually muddled as a result of her treatment by the Mental Health System, gets herself a girlfriend, tells people in the small community in which she participates, say the New Zealand poetry scene, about the girlfriend, and then finds herself trapped in the prison of others' opinions. It's not like she can tell people later on that she was muddled for a while and that although she is attracted to both men and women would now prefer to sleep only with men. To make matters worse, it may be almost impossible for her to get a boyfriend at all if all the men she knows think she's a lesbian or are intimidated by her, and if she is not in love with any of them.

I feel very lucky with the imaginary friends I talked to in the past and recently. This week and last week, watching The Daily Show, I have been reminded of how cool I think Jon Stewart is. The girl I call Jess, in the poems in her latest book, a book admittedly a couple of years old now, writes poems that are often (but not always) inscrutable, seemingly thought-disordered, but there is no denying how clever a poet she is. I would like to climb to the altitudes they have reached; the other night I heard Jess in my head saying, "You write so well when you want to!"Although there is a chance I might be infringing on her intellectual property,, I am going to take the risk of printing a poem by her, a poem that is to me at least somewhat scrutable, and then attempt to interpret it. The poem is called "Hard Sell".

There is a robot in this poem,

because I want it, and you get what you want

when you call the shots in a poem.

I am a victim in this poem because I choose to be.

This is not free will. This is choosing to put pineapple on pizza,

not because it's good, but because it's necessary.

I walk the talk and sometimes I worship dogs,

like their agenda is telic. Like they are pulling me in the direction

of finish lines, where all things are greeted by ticker tape 

and water. The robot in this poem doesn't want to be here.

There are two people with empty speech bubbles

looking down the barrel of a telephone jack.

And I might be one one side of a limerick about a man from Huntly.

and you might be on top of a senryu peering down on commercials bins

and people who carry themselves like nits, cutting in and out 

of storefronts. The robot is still here.

Soft determinism puts pineapple on my pizza,

and I want to agree that fruit and saccharomnyces 

are the Bonnie and Clyde of unsuspecting kitchens.

The robot does what he's told, but doesn't want to

know the results of his Turing test. God!

the pineapple is something that you can take or leave,

and you will, you will. 

I'm doomed to put pineapple on pizza.

I might be the theandry of parts and pieces,

predicated on a harder problem that catches itself in snatches.

I might drop something about objective collapses

because I know more about poetry than physics

but want you to register the reverse.

I want to wear my limited knowledge of quantum superposition

and radioactive decay on my t-shirt,

like I could be a cool cat, or not.

If I were a robot, I would be in a better poem

If I were a person, I'd want the telephone wires to hum like stars,

and the stars to be unavoidable.

When interpreting a poem, sometimes one wants to relate it to oneself and, in interpreting this poem, I cannot help but take it personally. Let's start with the obvious. The poet is addressing a robot but the poet, Jess, is mixing herself up with the robot: sometimes she is being herself and sometimes she is being the robot. The thing about robots is that they lack free will but the poet seems to me to be saying that the robot can free himself from the situation he is in, a situation in which he is a victim, through an act of free will: he can choose to be a person rather than a robot. Does free will exist? This is a question that for some reason that evades me now has been a recurrent concern of this blog. (You might be interested to know, Jess, that when I write fiction I often imagine myself a robot trying to imagine what it's like to be other robots, often women, because I find women interesting, and want to better understand them.) At the end of the poem, however, the poet seems to be suggesting that she would prefer the subject of the poem to be a robot rather than a person because, to put it bluntly, 'people' are all crazy.

At one level robots are a concern of this poem because robots lack free will. However there are, possibly, other meanings at work. I am going to take a detour through etymological history now because it might be relevant and because it is definitely interesting. This digression, even if it is not actually relevant to an accurate interpretation of the poem, may teach my readers something they have not thought much about before. In the nineteenth century, the word 'gay' meant something like 'happy, blithe, carefree' but by the middle of the twentieth century its meaning had totally changed, had come to mean 'homosexual'. Why the meaning of the word shifted as it did has puzzled me for decades but the explanation for this shift occurred to me recently and, when it did, as usual, made me feel incredibly foolish for not realising it sooner. The homosexual community certainly existed in, say, 1922, and they needed to communicate among themselves in a way that would not be understood by the wider heterosexual community. So they used the word 'gay' as code. A homosexual might say of another homosexual, "He's a gay fellow!" in the knowledge that by using this word this way he wouldn't 'out' the one spoken of, wouldn't alert the authorities that something depraved and illegal might potentially be taking place. However, as inevitably happens, the secret leaked out to the wider heterosexual population and the whole linguistic community gradually arrived at a different understanding of the word 'gay, to see it as a synonym for 'homosexual'. And so the homosexual community, particularly those who wanted to remain in the closet, such as the gay men and women who work in the film or music industry, had to invent new codes. One such code is to call homosexual men 'dicks' and heterosexual men 'pussies' – I learnt about this code from the film Team America: World Police, a film by the South Park bros that I rented from a video shop in 2007. More recently, some code associated with the terms 'cats' and 'dogs' has become popular. I have arrived at my own conclusions as to the meanings these terms should have but there is no point in having a secret code if one spills all the beans – although I would like to say, Jess, that even though you talk about cats and dogs in this poem, I am not sure if when you wrote it you had a clear idea about what these terms should mean yourself.

In 2009, when I was psychotic, the terms 'person' and 'robot also seemed to me to be code. I thought 'people' were gay or bisexual and 'robots' were heterosexual. I remember reading in a student magazine that year a comment by a male writer: "Girls like robots!" If this is a meaning intended by the poet, if these more esoteric connotation of the terms 'person' and 'robot' are something she is wanting to communicate, it might be that she is suggesting to her addressee that he 'come out' to the individuals treating him as gay or bisexual, that this is the only way out of his predicament. She is saying furthermore that, even if he does so, this does not commit him to actually putting pineapple on his pizza. Speaking on behalf of the robot in this poem, I would like to tell the poet that the robot in this poem would never come out as gay or bisexual to anyone, simply because to do so would be to tell a lie. I'll say something else. It irritates me when you say I worship dogs. My American friends who I watch on Youtube are not dogs and they don't give me instructions; in fact it has seemed to me for years more like I am giving them instructions rather than the reverse. Next week, despite your pessimism, I will cross the finishing line. I think this is possibly because of a change in psychiatric practice, the abandonment of a policy I believe invented by queer male psychiatrists who cum in the pants whenever a good looking male patient appears in their consultation rooms. Whether or not there will be water on the other side of the finishing line remains to be seen.

For readers who are perhaps confused by the interpretation I am presenting, I should spell out that I believe I  myself am the robot in the poem. The limerick about the man from Huntly is a coded reference to a story I have published in this blog, "A Refusal to Mourn" and the senryu, a silly little jokey poem, is one I saw Jess recite at a poetry reading at the Thirsty Dog many years ago when egged on by her audience and which she followed with a peal of nervous giggles. I can't tell from the lines in "Hard Sell" concerning my story whether she liked it or not; it may be she thinks it was condescending towards the people it described and perhaps she is right. Certainly her senryu was not written by someone arrogant at all. Probably one of the most significant differences between us, Jess, is that you had been living in the bizarro world of the Mental Health System since you were seventeen but I didn't end up in it until I was twenty-seven. The interpretation I am offering may not be wholly correct. I admit that I don't understand the lines concerning a phone jack and empty speech bubbles but wonder if it is a reference to our first telephone conversation – perhaps these lines were not intended to be understood by me. Whatever impressions people might form of me, I am not God.

There is another thing that I can't help but find irksome. It's the reference to quantum mechanics. After you must have written this poem I actually wrote a very clever essay about quantum mechanics, "Quantum Physics for Dummies and a New Idea". Then, after having bought your book but before having reading "Hard Sell", I wrote a very dumb essay in which I admitted that I didn't fully understand superposition. Your poem was a prophecy, had jinxed me before I had even read it. Just so you know, when I studied quantum physics at university a long time ago, there was no mention of superposition in the course at all: the leap from waves and the Schrodinger equation to superposition is something that none of the science educators I have watched on Youtube have ever fully explicated. Perhaps I should take Sabine Hossenfelder's free online course on quantum mechanics to understand how this leap occurs.

All in all there is a passive-aggressive tone to the poem that is absent from the other poems in the book. Perhaps this poem was written for me and the other poems were written for people who read poems differently than I do. It seems to me, and I hope I'm not being too egotistical, that you can imagine us as Bonnie and Clyde but are warning me that you are doomed to put pineapple on pizza. Or perhaps you are trying to break up with me even though we never got together. Jess, you are not doomed to put pineapple on your pizza if you don't want to. I know you're a glutton for punishment and I suspect that over the last, what, twelve years you've been much more unhappy than I realised and perhaps than the others who think they know you realise. I believe, though, that if I can get out of the Mental Health System and off the drugs you should be able to as well.

You know I don't believe in the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics but it seems to me at the moment that we live in one of two possible universes. In the first universe you've come out fully as a lesbian and have no intention of changing your mind; in this universe you're working in the Mental Health Service and may be trying to convince schizophrenics to come out as gay, something I hope to God is not the case because it's a surefire way of making a lot of young men kill themselves. In the second universe you change your mind or have already changed your mind; in this universe your private life is a good deal more complicated than you might have led people to believe. (I get hints of this from your poetry.) In the second universe we get together and curl up snugly on a couch watching the films Lost Highway and If, films I think you would enjoy. Or we do something I imagine you might prefer we do, wandering around together in art galleries. Sex may or may not be involved. In both universes you're still a girl but in one you're a bit catty and in the other you're a bit of a bitch. In one or both universes, we've changed star signs; you're now a Leo and I'm a Scorpio/Sagittarius. In one universe you find some way to contact me and in the other I give up on you and start probably fruitlessly trying to chat up women twenty years younger than me in bars. This further attestation of heartfelt feeling is perhaps less romantic than the previous post but at least you can't fault me for a lack of perseverance.

It might interest you to know that I approached a political party to see if I could volunteer for them yesterday and was interviewed by a man with blue nail polish and earrings in both ears. Last night I went to pub quiz. Although my team was greatly reduced we still won a jug – for coming second to last. Nevertheless I felt very happy last night. Elon Musk may currently be trying to make himself Emperor of the Whole World but I don't have to worry about this unless I choose to. Perhaps the happiness I felt last night is a good omen. 

Cryptic Messages and Not So Cryptic Messages

It is odd to write a post on New Year's Eve but I have no exciting plans and so I might as well just write because I can. When its your own blog you can call the shots. I suspect this post will be quite dull stylistically, quite prosaic, but there is still one important idea intended for general consumption concerning the reality of voices. The first part of this post is directed at the amorphous anonymous mass of people who somehow access this blog in some somehow clandestine fashion and which I have never been able to  satisfactorily categorise demographically in my mind; most of this post is a coded message to my friend Jess. In the future I do intend to get back to topics that made some people like this blog in the first place – perhaps one day I may even be able to come up with some adequate way of explaining or conceptualising the idea of probability. (In order to actually deal with the measurement problem in quantum mechanics we need some better understanding of the notion of probability but we cannot arrive at a better understanding of what probability actually is scientifically but only philosophically.)

I'll start by elaborating on something I said in the previous essay, concerning the voices I used to hear. Over the Southern Hemisphere summer of 2009 and 2010, I spoke almost continuously with a number of people: Jon Stewart, Jess, people from bFM, Barack Obama. On one occasion I heard John Ashbery. To remind readers, I had been speaking sometimes with Jon Stewart for quite a few months: after I met Jess he acted as a go-between, setting me up with her in my mind. (To my male readers: if you have a male friend it can be a truly generous and kindhearted act to play the part of intermediator between him and a girl. I got together with my first girlfriend after my best friend at the time told me; "That girl Danielle likes you.") During this period I was told or uploaded a lot of information about the situations of my imaginary friends: for instance, I thought Jon Stewart was having a mid-life crisis and had left his wife for a half Black, half Native American woman he'd met at a buffet. (Jess and I together convinced him to recommit to his wife.) I learnt stuff about Jess too, things I have never put in this blog – because I subsequently learnt that they were almost all untrue. To give a trivial example, I thought her father was Mark Sainsbury, at that time a television presenter on a New Zealand evening current affairs program. The voices faded away a few months into 2010 but the experience had been so intense, so realistic, that I continued to believe that I had actually spoken to all these people right up until the end of the year. In 2011, I hung out with Jess, actually only a few times, and interrogated her sneakily about her life, finding out in this way that most of the biographical information I had learnt about her was wrong. This is how I came to realise that you can't fully trust the voices in your head to impart true facts about themselves and why, when I started hearing voices again in 2013, I usually knew to take everything they said with a grain of salt.

There is a difficult choice I have to make now: should I be 'rational' (whatever that means) or admit that I see the spookiness of the world we live in? You see, even though the biographical information I picked up was incorrect somehow I knew all my friends, understood who they really were underneath. They always sounded like themselves. (I remember when Obama first spoke to me, at a hostel in Fjordland, he said, "I speak slowly – but I think like lightning!") It's at this point in the essay that I am going to stop being prosaic and start waxing lyrical, start becoming at least a little cryptic. What I am going to say now is that, perhaps, reality is a collective hallucination and during psychosis one shifts outside this shared dream into some other kind of dream. But it is not healthy to remain outside reality forever. I was thinking today about all the celebrity musicians who must hear voices – Eddie Vedder, Rhianna, Thom Yorke, Tom DeLonge from Blink 182, probably many others. I think though that in the end one must return to reality although it may be sometimes that one can change the reality one is returning to. It's a choice between the moon and the sun; some might say between being a person and being a robot. Is is possible to be a robot who knows that he is a robot but also knows what it was like to be a person? To spell out what I mean here, because some readers may be muddled, by 'robot' I mean an ordinary sane human being and by 'person' I mean someone who, for instance, can't help but be spookily aware of the full moon when it is hanging over the housetops.

In the film I wrote about you, Jess, I pilfered a whole lot of little bits of your life, your real life, not what I had been informed of by voices, not details that had come to me during the summer of 2009 and 2010. I mixed in elements of my own experience. It might interest you to know that both the psychologist I saw in 2014 and my father said to me, after having read the screenplay, "Why do you always write about yourself?" But I knew things about you that I didn't put in. I remember when I first met you in 2009 you told me that the New Zealand literary scene was full of arse-lickers and when I asked you what writers you liked immediately rattled off a list of female authors I had never heard of. This, together with some serendipitous shared recollections of a Larkin poem and an Eliott poem might be why I fell for you, although I think I fell for you the moment I saw you.

I still like you. The last time I saw you was a long time ago. We passed each other on Ponsonby Road and I think both didn't realise we had passed each other until after the fact – but I did see you. I was wearing a jacket that probably made me look like a rough sleeper. It was just after I had written the post about An Angel at My Table. In a less literal sense, you might have passed me in a supermarket. But I am trying to catch up. I only know tidbits of your life. I know you have two degrees that you must have done remotely although I wonder how you paid for them. I know you that you have many friends, often creative souls, although I wonder if they know the real you. I say this because I do have a few friends myself, friends I quite like but who don't know me at all. I know you've worked as a reviewer and poetry tutor. There is an aspect of your life, an aspect I can't be sure about and obviously don't know the details of, which makes me feel a painful mix of jealousy and envy, a mixture ordinary men wouldn't ordinarily feel because they wouldn't ordinarily fall for girls like you. I might be wrong of course. I suppose, assuming for the moment that one story in my head is true, one could say that this part of your life was a consequence of falling in with the wrong crowd and from poor impulse control. The psychiatrists probably think it's something akin to kleptomania. 

I look for signs in the world around me for clues as to what path to follow through the labyrinth. The signs recently have been mixed. There's a lot of Fleetwood Mac around these days and I wonder if maybe I'm Lyndsey Buckingham and you're Stevie Nicks with a twist. It might be you hate me or it might be that you're afraid I will abandon you. I actually don't easily end relationships myself even when the relationship is a dead end, a cul-de-sac. Leos are loyal. I've been with you a long time already in a sense. We could just be friends or we could be something else. The last ten years I have been under a curse, a curse which manifested itself in an inability to find the right words when writing and, I know you think this, a morbid fascination with quantum mechanics. An interest in science is the other side of my personality, something you should sympathise with given your interest in neuroscience. The dopamine hypothesis, anyone? I feel finally, though, that my life is going to change. Given the recession I am not sure how I'll find a job, let alone acquire a house either on the hill or off it. If you wanted that. So I'm not sure how to look after you, particularly considering how bad I am at looking after myself. I am thinking of volunteering for a political party, if they'll have me, and hoping that it may lead somewhere. I don't know whether I should write a novel, keep writing this blog, or become some kind of teacher. In a perfect world I could travel the country and talk to ordinary people about their concerns and in this way help inform public policy. Or perhaps I could help improve the Mental Health System. I haven't worked it out yet. Nevertheless I feel a change is coming. 

Thirteen years ago I accidentally killed you with a film script and I have spent the last thirteen years, without realising it until recently, trying to bring you back to life. On Ponsonby Road someone has written in chalk "Sell your soul for $" but even if I have brought you back to life, and I don't know if I have, I didn't sell my soul to do it. Certainly there hasn't been any money come my way. You wouldn't believe it but I think there were people in the world who thought I was going to endorse Donald Trump. I wrote in one post some time ago that I had gravitated towards the anti-woke Left (people like Sam Harris who also endorsed Kamala Harris); Americans may not understand what the terms left-wing and right-wing mean to Kiwis. Perhaps the Democrats themselves need to work out what they think the term left-wing should mean. If we did get together, there might be people who actually do think I have sold out and in a way they would be right: my 'illness', in terms of public perception, would have come circle. There is another option. But that would be your decision. 

I nearly wrote something I think I would regret but instead went to bed and this morning worked out what I really want to say, I think. You might not be chained to me but I am chained to you not only by something that might be love if love exists but also by crime. I said something to you once that to most people might seem inconsequential but which I have hated myself for ever since. It wasn't the question Rick asks Jess in the film I wrote although Rick's question was present in my mind during the time we hung out. You knew that I was Rick as well as myself in the film. Or perhaps Rick was my attempt to present a dumb but charismatic and confident womaniser, a kind of wish-fulfilment fantasy. You can probably guess why I decided to have a a character I'd created try to seduce you rather than someone more like the real me. But there are many things I am not responsible for. I am not responsible for a world in which people are too stupid to understand that a girl might be awkward about kissing a boy because she has never kissed anyone before or possibly because he has stinky cigarette breath or possibly for some other reason. I guess I'm responsible for suggesting that what happened between Rick and Jess was all that happened between us – but I wasn't responsible for the timing of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. I'm not responsible for the way my film blew up the way it did and still don't understand why it blew up the way it did. I'm not responsible for a world in which people lie about their sex lives, a world in which men pretend to have had more sexual partners than they really have and women pretend they've had fewer. I'm not responsible for the hallucination or delusion I told you about (you were the first I told) and which although I never put it in my blog have since told lots of people about. To prove a point. I'm not responsible for a psychiatric profession that puts people on trial but never tells the accused the crime they've supposedly committed. I'm not responsible for clerical errors and bad listeners and deliberate lies and drugs that don't work. I'm not responsible for Mental Health Workers who can't tell that a terrible wind is blowing and that a person is screaming but no-one can hear her. I'm not responsible for Respite Facilities or David Bowie. I'm not responsible for people like my elder brother who won't believe that I'm straight until I have a girlfriend and perhaps not even then; nor am I responsible for young men who get convinced by psychologists that they're sexually muddled and then rush off to get married as quickly as they can to prove to their parents that they're not gay.  I'm not responsible for the fact that the stories we invent to explain ourselves and our actions are all just that – stories. I guess all this sounds like a litany of excuses but I am expressing myself this way for stylistic reasons. I love the fact that you put pineapple on your pizza and, if I'm permitted one joke, would advise my New York readers to give it a go.

Someone told me a little while ago (a real person) that there are some people who are so attractive that others are drawn to them like moths to a flame (although the person didn't use this particular cliche.) I know there are others, girls of course, who have loved you and probably still miss you. The reason I am being so bold is that I have half-read your most recent book of poetry at last and have finally noticed at least some of the references to me. There may be references to those others that I can't recognise.

I'll tell you something that might interest you although considering how well read you are you probably know it already. In 2004 I visited Carcassonne, a town in southern France; Carcassonne was the hub for a semi-Christian religious movement in the Middle Ages called Catharism. The Cathari were Gnostics. There are lots of religions in the world and, even within Christianity, lots of sub-variants; I think people don't pick religions but rather religions pick people; I wondered sometimes if the Cathari had picked me. Some people have a kind of abstract fascination with Gnosticism out of an academic interest in the Problem of Evil even though their own lives are not particularly crappy but there was something about Gnosticism that drew me in. I read some time ago that the cool cats from Carcassonne, the high priesthood, coupled up into male-female partnerships that were celibate; Wikipedia suggests that the Cathari were not particularly sex-positive at all. I'm not sure that I like this and I don't really think I want to be a Gnostic anymore. I don't think the material world is irredeemably evil, I think there are people in the world like the children in Gaza who have it much worse that I do, and I think it might be possible to make the world a better place. 

It might be that by writing this post I have burnt my bridges. If Taylor Swift were here, she might say, "Good for you; you've got it off your chest." I haven't fully assimilated all the poems in Naming the Beasts but I read enough of them, as I said, to notice an occasional detail from our small shared history – call me conceited or suffering from delusions of reference. You seemed to be speaking to me in code and this is why this post is largely written in code. This raises a serious issue: if we are to meet in person, what the hell are supposed to talk about? We can't sit across from each other over a beer or two and quote haiku at each other. Not that I have any haiku memorised. Perhaps we could go to a movie or I could bring you to my pub-quiz: my team-mates don't read my blog or your poetry and I don't think even the genius on my team will recognise your name. You could be an ordinary person among ordinary people. I also think you might not know how to contact me, because of garden-variety paranoia or a fear of secrets being spilled. I have an idea. We have a mutual friend, the guy I watched a play with (remember?). He has my email address. We fell out a number of years ago and if you approach him he'll find it very odd that you might want to contact me but I can't see why he wouldn't give you my email. You could tell him you lent me a book of Maori mythology that you want returned or something. If emails are being read, we'll just have to hope that the eavesdroppers are not wholly malevolent. Of course, like I said, you might hate me. Or you might prefer to stay in your lavender haze and keep me as just an imaginary friend. At some point I will have to stop waiting for you so I'll give you a week or wait for a sign. One last question. do you think I use too many dashes? I like dashes and Emily Dickinson liked dashes. It might annoy people but you can give me punctuation advice if we meet.

***

Despite appearances this essay isn't finished.  I wrote part of this post in the middle of the night last night and the other part this morning and I feel that somehow overnight a weight has been lifted of me. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be a robot again or to have done the impossible – to get out as straight. I'll tell you what I have just been thinking, standing on my verandah under the sun. I don't have to live in the world I lived in in 2007 where there was a secret clique of closet homosexuals controlling the world who would literally kill anyone who outed them. Maybe you're happier being gay. It's funny: I just looked at the poem "We Go Down Together" which, despite its title, so far as I can tell, contains no reference to sex at all. Is it the fate of modern poetry to be read solely by queer people who have no interest at all in understanding what the poet is actually talking about? Is this what the thunder told T.S.Eliot way back in 1922? Perhaps you could teach me how to read your poetry, not just the obvious one "Hard Sell". Also – could you be bisexual? There are lots of bisexual women in the world today. Or does a person get stuck in a rut after a while? I handled you badly back in 2011. Or, rather, to be more frank, I handled you well and you handled me badly. But that wasn't your fault. I said in a post once that when I first met you I thought you were a straight girl who had been misdiagnosed a lesbian. Did you give them any reason to think that or was it all a mistake? Could they have got it wrong with you as they got it so badly wrong with me? Or was it all inevitable? Did I actually do you a favour by accidentally killing you in my screenplay? I could comfort myself by thinking that but its cold comfort. I still want to see you and, if possible, want you to forgive me. It's odd – I got the impression that Jon Stewart, the real Jon Stewart, wanted us to get together but that's hardly surprising. What's more surprising is that the ghost of Janet Frame seemed to want us to get together. It's hard to know because no-one agrees what the word 'love' should mean these days. I'm rambling. Maybe if we could meet we could speak openly and honestly to each other and I could just tell you that I spoke to you in my head two nights ago without being afraid that people will somehow force me to start taking drugs again. And there is one thing about the episode I experienced over that summer which I have never told anyone at all but which I would like you to know and which, perhaps, you should know. You've always been the most interesting I've ever met (sic). I should probably check this post for spelling mistakes but, fuck it, I'm just going to publish it. Que sera sera.

Janet Frame and Pink Floyd

The intellectual interest that has preoccupied me most of my whole life, especially when I studied English literature a long time ago, has been interpretation, the interpretation of poems and novels and films and pop music, the last being, let's recognise this, poetry for the masses. I enjoy interpretation and in the last several months the hidden meanings of many pop songs, meanings almost always to do with sex and relationships, seem to just leap out at me in ways they hadn't in the past. There is a however a problem with interpretation – poems, say, seem to act directly on the unconscious minds of readers, bypassing their conscious minds, and so sometimes one can worry that setting out explicitly the meaning of a poem is to kill it. This is why you should never ask a poet to explain the meaning of a poem she has written and probably why the literary theorist Susan Sontag wrote her famous essay, "Against Interpretation". On the other hand, I think people like to read interpretations, that interpretations can often deepen people's appreciation of poems and novels and films and pop music. Years ago I kept a blog called Persiflage in which at one time I had written a fairly rigorous interpretation of the beautiful poem "Wet Casements" by John Ashbery. I thought this blog had ceased to exist but last year I found that someone somewhere had read the interpretation and had commented on it. In his comment the reader said that he had always loved this poem and had guessed that it had something to do with the Kafka story "A Country Doctor" but that he had never quite understood what it was about. He had greatly appreciated my interpretation and said, "Thank you" – his thanks breathed total sincerity. Presumably, rather than killing the poem I had helped this reader enjoy the poem even more.

Given this uncertainty about the moral value of interpretation, it may be that the best way to present an interpretation of a poem or song to others is to hint at the proper reading rather than to strip the poem or song completely bare. In recent posts I have hinted at proper readings of The Waste Land by TS Eliot and "I Am Invisible" by Janet Frame but I didn't really say exactly what I actually believe these poems to be about. Recently, since writing the post about it, I reread The Waste Land and for the first time in my life felt I actually totally understood it; I feel exceedingly stupid that I didn't understand it when I was twenty-two. The disquietude I feel with respect to the Janet Frame poem is that my understanding of this poem does not seem rational because it felt to me as though Frame was somehow commenting on my own life, even on my own recent life, even though the events I am thinking of occurred before I had read the poem and so could not have been influenced by it; it is a life Janet Frame (surely) could have known nothing about. 

I want to talk about Frame again and say something more about the poem I quoted. In it Frame that says she is invisible (like schizophrenics in the contemporary world and like ghosts) and then goes on to say:

Like decisions.

Like elsewhere.

Like institutions far from the road labelled Scenic Drive.

In the previous essay I speculated that Frame might have been aware of the up-market Respite Facility near Scenic Drive in Titirangi called Mind Matters that both Jess and I had spent time at although separately. The problem with this interpretation is that Frame may well have written this poem decades before Mind Matters opened – it is not easy, reading The Goose Bath, to know when particular poems in it were written; nor am I sure when Mind Matters was first established. Perhaps there is a more 'rational' explanation for the reference to 'Scenic Drive', perhaps a more sensible literary critic might say that it is a kind of pun (the seen vs the unseen). But I do not find this parsing satisfactory. Or perhaps it was a road called Scenic Drive where Frame was living when she wrote the poem – I suppose this might be possible but I don't know. In the previous essay I also speculated that perhaps Frame might have seen in Mind Matters a positive direction for the future of the Mental Health Service but I wasn't being completely honest. To me this line has an ominous quality, a hint of something dreadful, a horror hidden almost in plain sight, seems to be pointing towards some hidden menace. There is something sinister about it. This feeling is induced by the connotations surrounding the words "institutions" and "labelled". Those of us interested in psychiatric practice understand the eddies that coldly whip around this word "labelled": the word "label" is a loaded word. All psychiatrists do is label people, stamp clinical brands on people's foreheads, labels that have a pernicious effect on those labelled. In the 'seventies studies were carried out that showed that the people most likely to recover from schizophrenia were 'label rejectors', people who accepted the label for a time and then later rejected it. I have seen evidence that this is still true today. In her collaborative memoir, Finding Hope in the Lived Experience of Psychosis, Patte Randall, a woman some years older than me who had believed herself schizophrenic almost her whole life (even though her bouts of psychosis were far shorter than mine) says toward the end of the book, "I no longer believe that I have schizophrenia". One reason so few schizophrenics recover today is that the dogma that schizophrenia is a congenital incurable lifelong condition has become so entrenched among psychiatrists that it has become almost impossible to reject the label. 

There is stuff I find in "I Am Invisible" that may not have been consciously intended by Frame; in the end I cannot, therefore, present a fully 'rational' reading of it although I shall hint at an 'irrational' reading of it later.

The Goose Bath, from which I took this poem, contains many poems obviously written over a long period of time. I recommend it highly to readers, both here in New Zealand and in other countries. I think the poems are all works of genius. They are very well arranged. Easier poems appear earlier on and more complex poems later. It is divided into sections with common themes – there is, for instance, a section containing poems concerning Frame's responses to classical music. One section is all poems set in America – Frame had travelled to the United States after the success of her first novel Owls Do Cry and had obviously lived for a while in Baltimore. These poems include references to quintessentially American things like copperhead snakes and birch trees. The poems set in New Zealand, with their references to New Zealand cultural and natural fixtures like Plunket and pahutakawas may be less easily understood by Americans. If you do read her book, it is worth remembering when Frame probably wrote these poems. There is a poem in the American section concerning electric sliding doors, something that to a New Zealander in the 1960s would have been a novelty. There is a very simple jokey poem called "Fleas are Fleas", a poem quite a lot lighter than most of the poems in the book which for my own whimsical reasons I want to quote:

Fleas are fleas

because they do as they please,

they hop, do not sneeze,

and suck blood

from places where it is rude

for a flea

to be.

The reason I quoted this poem is that, even here, where you wouldn't expect it, there is a hint of Frame's capacious and idiosyncratic intellect. "Fleas are Fleas" is alluding to a very sexy poem written in 1633 by John Donne, "The Flea", a work described by Wikipedia as an "erotic metaphysical poem". I haven't yet read all the poems in The Goose Bath (I have been randomly sampling them) but every poem seems to me to be hinting at something profound, sometimes something dark and certainly often something metaphysical.

In 2002, when I was studying for my Masters in English, I took a paper in New Zealand Literature and, as part of the course, read three novels by Janet Frame, Faces in the Water, Living in the Maniatoto, and The Carpathians. The course was taught by Terry Sturm, who was a friend of Frame and who had repeatedly albeit unsuccessfully nominated her for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I recall him saying that Frame had anticipated Postmodernism – of course the idea that reality is a kind of social construction might come naturally to someone who had probably experienced psychosis. I also recall Sturm saying that people didn't realise that Frame had a keen sense of humour. If I remember rightly, there was a recording of Frame reading a short story involving potatoes and the cooked and the uncooked (a binary opposition found in the theories of structuralist anthropologist Levi-Strauss although it is possible that Frame was not aware of structuralism) and giggling at jokes other people probably weren't even aware she was making. Frame, for good reason, dealt with a lot of anxiety and was very shy. I got very good grades that year – except for the paper on New Zealand Literature. I failed it. I had decided that Terry Sturm didn't like me and, as a result of my own anxiety, had stopped attending lectures and didn't submit one of the two essays required for the course.

I might talk about 'schizophrenics' more generally and about a woman I knew, the relevance of this apparent digression being something that will become more apparent as the essay proceeds. There are certain vague stereotypes we all associate with the social kind 'schizophrenic' but in reality people diagnosed schizophrenic are people, as diverse as ordinary people and on average no smarter and no dumber than ordinary people. I met Katrina at a Coffee Group in 2010 or 2011 and found her to be a lovely person with an easy smile. Years later she was briefly receiving a monthly injection at the same time I was, not actually for very long, and she told me a little about her life. She had experienced psychosis when she was a teenager, been totally well and off medication for ten years, and then experienced another episode. Because she didn't want to take medication when she had begun to experience psychosis again, her psychiatrist (Antony Fernando) had prescribed fish-oil capsules; she told me that for a while she was taking fifteen omega-3 capsules a day. Eventually she (briefly) switched to actual antipsychotic medication. Katrina told me that she believed her first episode to have had a lot to do with the peer group with which she was socialising at the time; she also told me that she had during this first episode thought for a while that she was a cat, which I found interesting. She also told me that she would speak with celebrities in her head, celebrities like Rihanna. Katrina shared with me an insight that could be possibly described as achromatic. She told me that she didn't think the people she talked to were really the stars they claimed to be; rather, she told me, she thought they were guardian angels pretending to be celebrities.

Starting in January 2009, I would talk with famous people in my head. The first person I spoke with, readers will remember, was George W. Bush, very shortly after he had left office. Later in the year I adopted Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend. Over the New Zealand summer of 2009 and 2010, I spoke with many people, including Barack Obama, but my main imaginary friends were Jon Stewart and the girl I call Jess, who I'd met at the Hearing Voices group I have talked about before. I hung out with the real girl a few times in 2011 and in 2012 wrote my screenplay about her. Of course in saying all this I am simply recycling things I have talked about many times previously. However there is something I perhaps have not talked about before. In the screenplay, in the scene in which Jon Stewart addresses Jess directly from out of the television, he calls her "Jess Frame". The reason I gave Jess this surname was because the real girl, like Janet Frame, was also a gifted poet, was also diagnosed schizophrenic, and lived in Takapuna where Frame had lived after she was released from hospital and where, in a hutch out the back of Frank Sargeson's house, she had written her first novel Owls Do Cry. I also decided to give the girl Frame's surname because I had an intuition that Frame was a straight woman who had been misdiagnosed a lesbian, and, I know it sounds incredible, now strongly believe that I was right.

In 2013 I became ill again and in early 2014 was put under the Compulsory Treatment Order that I was only released from early this year. Over the last ten years I often experienced fairly severe psychological distress – I kind of had intrusive thoughts concerning the people treating me. I would for instance experience thoughts saying things like, "Today Simon Judkins died" or "Today Jennifer Murphy resigned." These thoughts weren't auditory hallucinations and if they were 'voices' they didn't seem to belong to anyone. These thoughts were my reaction to the terrible stress of having been officially diagnosed schizophrenic and having been put under the Mental Health Act for truthfully saying I was heterosexual, and possibly also an emotional reaction to medication induced cognitive impairment. I guess the term psychiatrists would use for these kinds of cognitions is 'thought insertion'. These intrusive thoughts went away perhaps four or five years ago. At night, while lying in bed, I would again sometimes still talk with my imaginary friends. On one occasion in 2016, I spoke with Stephen Colbert and a week or two later spoke with John Oliver. Mainly though over the last ten years it has been Jon Stewart and the girl I call Jess who I heard in head. Usually Jon would just say, "Where are you now, my friend?" Of the two, it has actually been the girl I call Jess who was the most important voice. On a couple of occasions she would warn me the day before something distressing was to occur. She would sometimes give me important advice. Although I would often pretend that they really existed when speaking with them, during the day I would tend to kind of bracket out these experiences; the fact that I occasionally spoke with people at night while lying in bed didn't affect my day to day life. They were friends who understood my situation when no-one else did. Sometimes, years ago, I thought it might be the real girl who was talking to me – I thought she might be reading this blog and communicating with me telepathically about it. Eventually though I realised that this voice, that I thought belonged to Jess, knew things about my life that the real girl couldn't possibly know. I would say that my subconscious mind had conjured this voice up and, for some reason, had decided to clothe itself in the persona of the girl I had known (I suppose that this would be the most 'rational' explanation) except for the fact that it seemed that this voice seemed to know the immediate future. It seemed to be a guardian angel pretending to be the girl I knew (and wish I could know again). Early this year, the night before the consultation at which my psychiatrist decided, unexpectedly, to release me from the Act, without giving any explanation for his decision, I heard her again in my head. She said, "Usually I warn you when something bad is going to happen."

I have been quite 'well' for some time. I think the clincher was the post about The Wasteland in which I endorsed Kamala Harris. In this post I killed myself. I have been trying to kill myself since 2007 but I didn't know how to do it. Of course, when I say 'kill myself' I am speaking metaphorically but hopefully at least some of my readers will know what I mean. Not long after this I read the poem "I Am Invisible", the poem I quoted in the previous post. After I had read this poem, and I think after I had quoted it in the previous post, while lying in bed during the day I heard the voice I call Jess in my head. She said, "I thought you would have worked it out."

Although I shall come back to Janet Frame later, I would like to switch to a different although related topic. I want now to talk about a couple of songs by Pink Floyd, one of the great rock bands of the twentieth century, a band whose success depended in no small measure on the effect its first lead singer Syd Barrett had on the rest of the band. Syd Barrett's story is devastating and there is value in reading about Barrett's life on Wikipedia. Hopefully the entry on Barrett won't change tomorrow. The real girl Jess is based on kept an enormous poster of Syd Barrett on the wall of her hutch back in 2011, not a picture of him when he was older and had shaved off all his hair including his eyebrows but rather a picture of him when he was still young and cool, still very good looking, before he had lost his mind. What I want to do now is to quote and interpret two songs from the end of Pink Floyd's first great success The Dark Side of the Moon, released in 1975, the first of the two flowing into the next, the first called "Brain Damage" and the second called "Eclipse":

The lunatic is on the grass.

The lunatic is on the grass.

Remembering games, and daisy chains, and laughs,

Got to keep the loonies on the path.

The lunatic is in the hall.

The lunatics are in my hall.

The paper holds their folded faces to the floor

And every day the paperboy brings more.

And if the dam breaks open many years too soon,

And if there is no more room upon the hill,

And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too,

I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.

The lunatic is in my head.

The lunatic is in my head.

You take the blade, you make the change,

You rearrange me 'till I'm sane.

You lock the door and throw away the key,

There's someone in my head but it's not me.

And if the cloud bursts thunder in your ear,

You shout and no one seems to hear,

And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes,

I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.

All that you touch and all that you see

All that you taste, all you feel

And all that you love and all that you hate

All you distrust, all you save

And all that you give and all that you deal

And all that you buy, beg, borrow, or steal 

And all you create and all you destroy 

And all that you do and all that you say

And all that you eat and everyone you meet

And all that you slight and everyone you fight

And all that is now and all that is gone

And all that's to come and everything under the sun is in tune

But the sun is eclipsed by the moon

 

I am not going to give an absolutely rigorous line-by-line interpretation of these songs but just make a few observations about them for people who might miss things. The word 'lunatic' is etymologically related to the word 'lunar' – in olden times madness was supposed to connected somehow to the moon. In 1975 there was a stereotype associated with madmen that they would sit in parks and make daisy chains – I don't know how this stereotype arose or why it went away. There is obviously a reference to newspapers arriving daily at the singer's doorstep containing articles about schizophrenics. The most important part of the song "Brain Damage" though, its core plot point and something that modern listeners often miss, is set out most clearly in the verse which talks about a blade. Roger Waters and David Gilmour are referring to lobotomies. Even though this practice had been, I think, largely phased out by 1975, the idea of lobotomies still featured strongly in the popular imagination back then. People online pretend that psychiatrists had a valid scientific rationale for lobotomising people but this is not true. I believe that the first lobotomy was performed in 1935 but it might have been earlier: back then people had almost no understanding of the human brain at all. Some sadistic psychiatrist one day simply decided that it might be fun to deliberately inflict brain damage on people feared and ostracised by society, people often thought of as animals, to see what would happen, and the practice caught on. One technique was to stick a needle through the ocular cavity of the patient and then swish around the frontal cortex like mixing a martini. It caught on because it seemed to make patients more pliable and compliant (although it also led to severe cognitive deficits in a number of areas including self-reflection), because psychiatrists had no better tools at their disposal, and because of the prevailing nihilistic materialism embraced as scripture by doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists at the time, a view that mental illnesses were organic diseases that required organic solutions, a view that only dissipated in the 1960s when New Age hippy countercultural ideas of 'peace, love and understanding' became more fashionable. The man who came up with lobotomies described the procedure as "soul-surgery" – but I think lobotomies separated people's souls from their bodies. I think lobotomies "locked the door and threw away the key". It is tempting to say that lobotomies exiled people to "the dark side of the moon" but I don't think this is what Waters and Gilmour meant by this phrase - I have a hunch about what "the dark side of the moon" signifies but it is not something I can easily articulate. 

The most famous fact about Janet Frame's life, the fact that everyone knows even if they know nothing else, is that she was almost lobotomised in the 1950s, a catastrophe that was only averted because a book of short stories she had written had unexpectedly won a prestigious award. The psychiatrist treating her apparently told her, according to her autobiography, "I want you to stay as you are. I don't want to see you changed." Later, when she was living out the back of Frank Sargeson's house, she would alarm him every morning by describing the terrible nightmares she had nightly – and who can blame her? Her brush with a more real kind of death, a death of the soul, might have influenced the lines in "I Am Invisible" in which she talks of "a world in which decisions about being and non-being/ are made by light".

What is the significance of the reference to "the hill"? In 1970, John Lennon, after the dissolution of the Beatles, released the song "Working Class Hero", a song which has some relevance to any halfway good interpretation of "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse". I am not going to quote all the lyrics of "Working Class Hero" but only the most pertinent verse.

There's room at the top they're telling you still,

But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,

If you want to be like all the folk on the hill.

A working class hero is something to be.

In Fleetwood Mac's Tango In The Night, Lindsay Buckingham also talks about a hill. The song is "Big Love", a title that also named a TV series readers might remember about a Mormon man and his three wives. It is called "Big Love" because Buckingham is saying that he can love more than one woman at once; I think in it Buckingham is anticipating Elon Musk. 

You said that you loved me

And that you always will.

Oh you begged me to keep you

In that house on the hill.

It seems to me that "the hill" is a metaphor for the social level monopolised by the elite, the rich and powerful, and that there must be a tradition of rock musicians using this metaphor perhaps starting with Lennon. Of course, John Lennon, the members of Pink Floyd, and the members of Fleetwood Mac were themselves rich and influential or aspiring to be so and so "the hill" might have concerned them more than it concerns most ordinary people. However the Pink Floyd songs seem to be saying something much deeper than John Lennon is in"Working Class Hero", something a lot more arcane: they seem to be positing a spooky connection between the people at the bottom of society, the lunatics, and the people at the top, the people on the hill. In early 2010, for a period, I conversed exclusively in my mind with Jon Stewart and Barack Obama. The impression I had at the time was that they were talking with me because I was the only person either could really talk to. Of course I am not saying that I was literally communicating with either Jon Stewart or Barack Obama but the lasting effect of these couple of weeks is that I have since viewed Obama as a real person with his own virtues and flaws, a person I could relate to, even a kind of friend, although he is undoubtedly much smarter than I am. I guess I entertained the delusion that I was talking with them partly because I had the grandiose notion that I was somehow special. The conception is interesting: a 'schizophrenic' wandering around a music festival at Mt Smart Stadium in Auckland in January 2010 by himself, in constant conversation with a popular and influential comedian/political pundit from New Jersey and the then United States president, looking for a girl he has met at a Hearing Voices group and who he is convinced is somehow present somewhere in the crowd. It was a world that my celebrity friends could never experience themselves firsthand, a world of ordinary people that their fame isolated them from. The insight I think I had then was that the real people who I thought I was talking to were probably both voice-hearers themselves – and this is something else we can possibly infer from the Pink Floyd songs. The people on the top of the hill are as crazy as the people at the bottom. Roger Waters and David Gilmour are prophesying a future in which the "dam breaks open", in which the madness spills out and down the hill to infect others, a world in which they themselves and perhaps their audience will go mad and potentially be forcibly lobotomised.

I started watching the Daily Show in 2008 and people may forget what Jon Stewart was like then. There was an intensity, a ferocity, an anger directed at the people he opposed, albeit an anger always tempered by his lewd sense of humour and engaging self-deprecation. A righteous indignation. One of the first interviews I saw him do back then was with Tony Blair, Blair having recently left politics and converted to Catholicism. This interview is impressive and should be viewable on Youtube. In later years Jon Stewart I believe suffered his own spell of mental illness but has come back now older, wiser, and much more mellow than he used to be. He almost always seems to express the exact same opinions I had formed – such as, for instance, when in 2015 he said that Boyhood should have won the Oscar for Best Picture. It is almost uncanny. When our opinions differ it is usually because he is ahead of me. More rationally one should say perhaps that he often expresses views that very many people share but do not realise that they share with others. I know of a number of Mental Health patients here in New Zealand who really like Jon Stewart because he speaks to them (metaphorically). It is also worth comparing the world as it was in say 2008 with the world as it is now. Back then social media existed but was far less prominent than it is today. The major issue back then was still the war in Iraq. Many on the Left, such as Jon Stewart and the journalists I read here in New Zealand, couldn't understand why Bush had decided to invade Iraq. Sometimes it seemed as though there was some kind of hidden conspiracy or secret cabal behind it. Where was the truth? What were the real motivations? There was a mystery, a dark mystique associated with the Bush administration, a sense of shadowy puppeteers pulling strings. Was it all really about oil? When I was 'ill' many years ago I sometimes thought that Bush had invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussain was doing something unspeakably terrible to the population of his country, that it was so terrible Bush couldn't tell the American public or the world about it, and that this is why they had cooked up the 'weapons of mass destruction' pretext to send in troops. I think I was giving Bush too much credit. By contrast today, the US has a president who puts every single dumb stray thought on Twitter or rambles about it during one of his endless rallies. There is no mystery or mystique associated with Trump at all. There is thus a perception today, partly because of social media and Youtube, that the social gap between the top and the bottom has narrowed. Impoverished Americans genuinely believe that Donald Trump is their friend, that even though he is about to become president again he is not part of the deep state and is as ignorant of the conspiracies it is engaged in as they are. In reality there are still underhand dealings and secret handshakes and covert donations and veiled promises and threats occurring in smoky rooms over port and cigars in clubs at the top of the hill as there always have been; economically, in all the ways that really matter, the gap between the top and bottom is larger than ever, while the inner workings of government go completely undiscussed by a mainstream media that is only interested in optics and soundbites and manipulating public opinion. One can only hope that Trump will nevertheless genuinely try to help the people who like him and got him elected. Trump has always liked the people who say they like him. It would be nice to think that there can be genuine communication between the top and the bottom as opposed to something possibly illusory, delusional.

I want to come back to Janet Frame. I made an error in the previous essay when I said that Frame never published any poetry while she was alive – she published one slim book called The Pocket Mirror in 1967. I can remember reading a poem called "The Dead" many years ago, one of several poems by Frame with that title, and another poem called "O Lung Flowering Like a Tree", both of which I found in an anthology of New Zealand verse, and the latter of which I wanted to teach at Secondary School. There is a difference in style between these poems and the poems collected in The Goose Bath. In the second volume of her autobiography, An Angel at my Table, she includes a number of poems she wrote when she was young – these poems are so difficult as to be almost indecipherable, almost as though she had deliberately chosen to put in her most obscurantist poems. There are other things about An Angel at my Table that are odd. In it she is quite disparaging of Frank Sargeson but there are poems in The Goose Bath (which remember was published posthumously), poems about Sargeson and addressed to him, which suggest she was in reality quite fond of him and valued his friendship. I noticed that An Angel at My Table has become a popular pick at local bookshops again but I kind of wish New Zealanders might instead consider reading one of her novels instead. To put it bluntly, Frame had an agenda when she wrote An Angel at My Table. She was deliberately trying to kill herself. Therefore An Angel at My Table may not have been absolutely honest. Years later, the famous New Zealand historian Michael King wrote a biography of Frame called Wrestling with The Angel, a book which I believe is taught in psychology courses around the world – though I haven't read it, the title hints that King must have found Frame a somewhat intractable subject. Of course the mythology that grew up around Janet Frame was that she was a creative free spirit who had been misdiagnosed schizophrenic and almost lobotomised as a result – I think it is possible to say today though that she might indeed have experienced madness or psychosis, perhaps as a result of her diagnosis and treatment, but recovered. Perhaps this is the secret that Frame was trying not to divulge, to King or to most others; perhaps her insight, her creativity, was inextricably linked with the madness she had suffered. 

King said in an interview once that he had found out things about Frame that he had decided not to include in the biography or tell Frame about in order to spare her embarrassment. This fucks me off. He should have told her. I imagine whatever it was was something she had already guessed, and it may well have been something to do with sexuality. It is likely that some people in New Zealand back in the day thought she was a lesbian because she had been institutionalised for a time, was intelligent, was single, and had lived in a hut in the back yard of known gay writer and so probably knew many gay people at a time long before homosexuality was legal in New Zealand; my theory that she had been actually diagnosed a lesbian is something that can possibly be inferred from reading An Angel at My Table but not something I can be absolutely confident about. It is certainly common enough today, as readers will have gathered from this blog, for people who are diagnosed schizophrenic to be deemed queer as well, but I cannot be sure if this was true in New Zealand in the 1950s. Back then, though, homosexuality was still considered a mental illness and, possibly here and certainly around the world, was 'treated' with ECT and sometimes lobotomies. If Frame in An Angel at my Table is not telling the whole, it is worth remembering it was published in 1984 – homosexuality was not legalised in New Zealand until 1986. Attitudes today are far from perfect but they were much worse back then. I am not suggesting Frame was actually gay or bisexual; rather I am suggesting she may have presented herself in her autobiography as more homophobic, and less perceptive, than she actually was when declaring her heterosexuality to the world.

I arrive now at the crazy notion that much of this essay has been circling around. I believe that the voice in my head that I attributed to Jess, the voice of my guardian angel, actually belonged to the ghost of Janet Frame. Although one cannot be absolutely sure why Frame described herself as invisible in the poem I quoted in the previous post, one simple fairly plausible interpretation of "I Am Invisible" is that Frame is representing herself as a ghost. When I read this poem, what, a few weeks ago, after I had a chance to process it, I could only interpret it as concerning my own life and I think the life of the girl I call Jess in this blog. It freaked me out. The notion that the ghost of Janet Frame predicted our lives at least two or three decades ago, and has been helping me and perhaps her as well, is an almost overwhelmingly frightening thought. Who am I? Do I have my own distinct identity or am I just a character created by Janet Frame before I was born? The other day a more reassuring if still preternatural construal of these seeming coincidences occurred to me. In folk religion there is a notion, although not a notion people usually give much serious consideration to these days, of restless spirits that wander the earth seeking closure – think of those fictions people sometimes write or tell in which the ghost of a murder victim lingers around long enough to finger the culprit. Think also of the ghost of Hamlet's father in Hamlet. Perhaps before the ghost of Janet Frame could go to sleep or move on, however you would like to think of it, she needed to help change the world's attitudes to both schizophrenia and to sexual differences; exposing the cruelties inflicted on the mentally ill in her own day had been her life work. Perhaps she needed to fully clear her name. Perhaps she picked me to help her. I suppose an attempt to change people's attitudes to conditions like 'schizophrenia' had become the purpose of this blog although I did not set out to do this initially and although I do not think this blog or whatever Jess is currently trying to do with her own life are sufficient in themselves to effect this change. Or perhaps Frame speaks to and helps other New Zealanders diagnosed schizophrenic. In the introduction to The Goose Bath, eminent contemporary New Zealand poet Bill Manhire quotes some lines from a poem in The Pocket Mirror, perhaps without realising how spooky they are:

I must fight and fight

with my red and yellow head

even after I am dead, to stay

my own way, my own way

Readers may think that I am insane for suggesting that the ghost of Janet Frame once used to speak to me. Should I increase my medication rather than go off it altogether as I intend to do soon? But there are plenty of seemingly crazy notions floating around, plenty of crazy people in the world who we don't think should be sedated. There are people who believe the world was created in 4004BC. There are people who think the hurricanes that recently hit Florida were the result of weather manipulation by the Biden administration. There are people, like my father, an atheist, who told me last week that he didn't believe in the Big Bang because he doesn't believe light can be red-shifted. There are people who think the solution to the Cook Strait ferry debacle is to privatise the operation. Even if this seemingly crazy notion is indeed a delusion, antipsychotic medication can't alter people's beliefs – it is only the passage of time that can enable incremental changes in a person's worldview. I am well at the moment and in a fortnight's time it may well be that I will have changed my mind about this in the same way that I changed my mind a very long time ago about whether or not I had ever literally telepathically conversed with Barack Obama.

Despite all the many coincidences, the girl I call Jess is not Janet Frame. Jess is not only smart but hot. She still has all her own teeth thanks, in part, to the fact that, unlike when Janet Frame was growing up, the drinking water in New Zealand today is fluoridated. Because I don't know how to contact her I would like to ask her to figure out a way to contact me, if only for the two of us to have a beer together and have someone else to talk to who might understand. If your family have have a problem with me, you can tell them that I am almost out of the Mental Health Service and am currently trying to figure out how to find gainful employment. Of course you may not read this essay – although I sometimes think many people read this blog there is not a single person I've ever met in my actual life who has ever admitted to reading it, although a while ago my elder brother, who doesn't like the fact that I keep this blog, brought up physics in a way that displayed his complete ignorance of it, and occasionally in the past my former step-mother, a high court judge now retired, has made cryptic comments that seemed to refer to posts I'd written. If you are reading this essay, you could consider possibility of us walking together "with our crescent moons of sight in our personal darkness".

The unifying idea behind this essay I think concerns the identities behind the voices I heard and it may seem that I have contradicted myself – I have said that I don't think that Jon Stewart or Barack Obama literally spoke with me but I have also just said that, at the moment, I believe that the ghost of Janet Frame might have literally spoken to me. Yet it may be there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. If I could talk with Jess, I would like to ask her if she ever heard a voice that wasn't literally mine but seemed to belong to someone very much like me. I would like to know if Jon Stewart ever heard a voice that seemed to belong to a literature student with an interest in physics and politics living in New Zealand even if this voice wasn't literally mine. I don't think this is something I will ever know for sure; I am resigned to this fact. If it were the case though that Jon Stewart had heard someone like me, it might be evidence, not for God and certainly not a Christian or Jewish God, but for some kind of higher spiritual reality. There is something consoling in this thought. There is another poem by Janet Frame that I want to quote:

 THE ICICLES

Every morning I congratulate

the icicles on their severity.

I think they have courage, backbone,

their hard hearts will never give way.

Then around ten or half past,

hearing the steady falling of drops of water

I look up at the eaves. I see

the enactment of the same old winter story

– the icicles weeping away their inborn tears,

and, if they only knew it, their identity.

I quote this poem not because I ever cry myself but because I want to tell others that, despite what this poem seems to be saying, I believe it is possible to come back from tears; on occasion perhaps something beneficent can act through tears.

All the references in this essay to poems and songs etc may give people the impression that I am incredibly erudite but in fact it's more that I'm like Jamal Malik in Slumdog Millionaire. I'll give an example. The poem "Wet Casements" that I mentioned in the introduction to this essay contains a reference to the bridge at Avignon (a town in the south of France) and is thus alluding to the French folksong which begins "Sur le pont, d'Avignon/ on y dancer, on y danse". I first interpreted this poem in 2004; because I had actually visited Avignon a couple of months previously I knew something vital to any true reading of the poem – that the bridge at Avignon doesn't go all the way across the river. I hope that this essay, though, will reach the people I want it to reach.