The Great God Pan

I worry that I may have spooked some readers with my last post. I made reference to a very messed-up type of experience. One way to maybe make it more palatable is to approach it indirectly, by analogy, through a short story.

I wrote this short story a few months ago, in the week after I wrote the post "Rationality vs Mysticism". I tried to get it published in a couple of places, Landfall, The New Yorker (!) and more recently I submitted it to Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition, all without success. It was probably too long to have been seriously considered for the Sunday Star Times competition. If I were sensible I would try to get it published somewhere in a journal a little lower down the prestige scale, a little more underground, but, because it relates to subjects I have discussed in this blog, I have decided I might as well publish the story here in my blog. I hope my readers will be as willing to read fiction as critical non-fiction.

 The Great God Pan

        Sofia had been referred to Judith for private therapy by psychiatrists working for the Department of Social Hygiene. Her patient notes were brief. Some six months ago she had been found by the police wandering naked near a public reserve early in the morning; in preliminary interviews she had described an encounter with a number of "tree-people" and a mysterious "goat-man" who had offered her wine from a clay jug and spoken to her in language she didn't understand. Blood tests did not indicate the presence of illicit narcotics. Owing to pronounced thought disorder, general confusion and a family history of mental illness, a provisional diagnosis of hebephrenic schizophrenia had been made and she had been prescribed a high dose of Aripiprazole. Family members having been informed and supplemental treatment having been requested, her psychiatrist, one Dr Bob Chow, had recommended Judith as a capable and sympathetic psychologist who might be willing to treat Sofia for less than market rates.

        Sofia was not unique. Ever since the newly elected Libertarian government had made Atheism official state policy in 2014 and outlawed all other forms of religious practice - Christian congregations, Buddhist retreats, Islamic prayer groups, Yoga classes and so on - the incidence of schizophrenia among the general population had increased four-fold. This was of course an embarrassment to the ruling party. Despite all efforts by the Ministry of Free Speech to censor or suppress news stories about it, rumors of an epidemic or plague of violent crazies were rife and so, its hand forced, the Government had authorized the release of a statement, ostensibly from the psychiatric community, announcing that the schizophrenia gene had finally been located (it hadn't) and reassuring the nation that current forms of treatment, drugs and hospitalization, were all quite sufficient to neutralize this emergent threat to public safety. Everything was fine. The Mental Health Services had been renamed the Department of Social Hygiene and stringent new laws had been passed granting psychiatrists powers they had not enjoyed since the 'fifties. Even so, some psychiatrists weren't averse to ancillary forms of therapy and this was where Judith came in.

        On the morning before her fourth session with Sofia, Judith was in the staff kitchen with one her fellow colleagues, Graham. Graham was making lard sandwiches – recent studies having suggested that a high-fat diet lowered cholesterol. Because the prevailing orthodoxy judged mental illnesses a physical disease, psychologists such as Judith and Graham, who favored nurture over nature, were a beleaguered and often disparaged minority and so sought support from each other; there was no psychological consensus about the causes of, for instance, psychosis though, and so different psychologists tended to espouse different theories. Graham's opinion, Judith knew, was that psychotics exhibited paranoia as the result of disavowed homosexual inclinations, an idea he had adapted from Freud. Consequently Graham saw his role as being to help these unfortunate individuals acknowledge and embrace their hitherto denied bisexuality. 

         "I'm seeing the goat girl this morning," Judith told him.

         "Oh yes? Nymphs and dryads again?"

         "I don't feel up to seeing anyone, honestly. Another nightmare last night. Zombies."

          In the nightmare, the city had been overrun by the living dead. Perambulatory corpses, soulless, seeking to infect with their sickness the few who had kept their brains viable. In the dream, Judith had at last found refuge in Devonport among a small enclave of the living. It was a bad nightmare but at least it wasn't the worst one, the recurring one, the one Judith tried never to think about. 

        "You know what Freud would say. He would say that you secretly desire a zombie apocalypse."

         "Well, yes. Probably." Personally Judith thought Freud was a fraudulent misogynist but she couldn't say this to Graham. Graham, who was married with two children, often exhibited a number of camp mannerisms, something that, together with admiration for Freud, caused Judith some considerable cognitive dissonance – but what was she to do? Graham was a colleague, a comrade in the common battle. 

         "It could be that that dream is an understandable reaction to what we do for a living. It's hard work. Do you know how difficult it is for me to persuade some of my patients that they're latently homosexual?"

        "Well, yes, perhaps," said Judith, evasively. She couldn't tell Graham that, in the dream, he had been one of the zombies.

          Apart from the serious hallucination just prior to her arrest, Sofia displayed a number of other schizophrenic symptoms, subtle and oblique yes, but sensible to any alert diagnostician. She had made reference to voices on at least one occasion. She displayed indications of 'religiosity' – in the current climate, proof sufficient of some kind of neurological disorder. She must surely be under a Compulsory Treatment Order for some good reason. Most significantly, though, from Judith's point of view, was Sofia's description of the "goat-man" she had encountered in the park. He had appeared to her naked with an enormous, erect phallus. Judith's own theory of mental illness owed almost everything to pioneering work by the great Pierre Janet – mental illness resulted from repressed childhood trauma, typically of a sexual nature, that could only be addressed once the victim had remembered the event. Admittedly memories of abuse were often so deeply buried that it could take months or even years of therapy for sufferers to recollect them. Some patients never did at all, although Judith had often found hypnosis useful with more recalcitrant clients. It seemed obvious to Judith that Sofia must have experienced some such trauma in her past.

          The first few sessions were all about building rapport. Sofia was in many ways personally appealing – she presented well, usually wearing to appointments a long turquoise dress, onyx bangles and jade earrings. Only twenty-one, she kept her long blonde hair tied back in a braid. Her speech and opinions were however idiosyncratic to the point of being abnormal. For example, she apparently believed that she could communicate telepathically with plants and animals. She believed that mitochondria were an alien species that had bonded symbiotically with terrestrial organisms. She believed that the Earth's orbit was unstable and that the smallest nudge would send it spiraling into the Sun or out of the Solar System altogether. Judith was little interested in these irrelevant ramblings. Yet it wasn't until the fourth session that she decided to get to the crux of the matter.

        "So what was your relationship with your father like?" she asked.

        Sofia's father was Greek. No, he had never spoken Greek at home and Sofia had never visited Greece herself. Pascoe Stephenolopolous had been a merchant sea-man who had jumped ship in Auckland in the early 'nineties and found work as a florist. Gaining citizenship had been difficult but not impossible. He had met Sofia's mother Kate, a woman some twelve years his junior, through an uncle who also worked in the horticultural industry. Together they had raised five children, the youngest being Sofia. As a child, before she went to sleep, her father would often tell her stories about his life as a mariner – clear nights when an ocean of stars would fill the heavens to brimming, Lebanese chefs who would throw knives at the able seamen when piqued. No, to answer your question, he had never read her any stories from Greek mythology. Sofia knew as little about her cultural heritage as any other ordinary Pakeha New Zealander. A year ago, as the result of a cerebral hemorrhage, Pascoe had slipped away quietly in his sleep. 

       Judith never spoke about her own father with any of her clients

       "Despite what you're saying, I'm sensing some ambivalence in your feelings towards Pascoe," Judith asked. "Could you elaborate on that?

        No, Sofia didn't really have any ambivalent feelings towards her father. At least, she didn't think she did. All of her memories, as far as she could tell, were positive. She remembered one time walking with him down Queen Street, just before the election, and passing a Libertarian supporter in full rant. Her father had turned to her and said, "These people – these people are bad. Dangerous. Never trust the man who says he knows the whole truth. Trust only the one who says he seeks the truth." On another occasion her father had taken her to an opera, the Magic Flute – this was one of the things she remembered vividly about him, his devotion to Mozart. It was one of the many reasons that she had loved him.

        Judith's father was a fifth-generation New Zealander, of Scottish stock originally. In the 'eighties he had invested heavily in property and shares but had been ruined by the bursting of the bubble in '87. Owing to this financial disaster and certain unspecified marital problems, his alcoholism, already bad, had worsened significantly. In 1990, Judith's mother had filed for divorce. Judith had been ten. In later years Judith, an only chid, had tried to maintain contact with her father despite her mother's antipathy towards him, seeing him at least once a fortnight and ignoring his tendency towards alienating behavior. Currently, he resided in a rest home for dementia sufferers. Judith's feelings towards her own father were, to say the least, mixed, but if anyone were to ask she could reply honestly that, no, he, at least, had never sexually abused her.

        At a later session, Judith employed a different tactic. "It's not unusual to have ambivalent feelings towards one's father. Most women do. Did you ever feel uncomfortable around Pascoe?"

        After the divorce, Judith's father had never found full time work again. He had lived alone in a grubby apartment in Glen Eden, allowing dirty dishes to pile up in the sink and always keeping a tumbler of vodka near to hand. Judith remembered visiting him once. At the time she had been halfway through her psychology degree and she had been wondering how to classify him. Did he have Borderline Personality Disorder? Narcissistic Personality Disorder? After a couple of minutes of inane small talk, he had taken a gulp  from his glass and told her, "For me, everything just turned to crap.  Life just let me down. Maybe… Maybe if I'd sold the shares earlier? Or tried harder with your mother? Life… There's no going back. And, honestly, there's no going forward either." He was a shit, yes. But he, at least, had definitely never abused her.

        It was almost immediately following Pascoe's death, unexpected as it was, that Sofia had started hearing voices. She had felt that trees and flowers and hills were wanting to speak with her. She had started sleeping during the day and staying up all night, walking. One night, in a reserve in West Auckland, she had come across a clearing in the forest and found herself witness to a celebration or bacchanal. This was the experience that she had tried and failed to describe over and over again. Lithe women with round buttocks and ample breasts danced ecstatically around a central figure. They were green-skinned and had leaves instead of hair on their heads. Strange music filled the air. The creature who stood in the middle of the dance had the body of a man from the waist up and a goat from the waist down. In one hand he carried a rod tipped by a pine cone and on his horned head he wore a crown of ivy leaves. His penis was huge and tumescent. The almost motionless satyr was the pivot point of the circling dryads' dance. Occasionally one would approach him and he would offer her a draught from the clay jug he carried. Sofia paused and stood at the edge of the clearing. The goat-man turned and fastened his gaze upon her. In a booming voice he spoke. "Sofia, Pan ho megas tethneke!" His voice rang out like thunder. Sofia hadn't the faintest idea what it meant. 

        It was the next morning that Sofia was found wandering naked by the cops and arrested.

        In the 1890s Sigmund Freud had uncovered from interviews with his hysterical patients evidence that childhood sexual abuse was prevalent throughout Viennese society. At the time, the term used was 'paternal seduction'. Often when with Freud's assistance memory of this abuse was restored to them, his patients would suffer extreme distress. Yet later, however, Freud had abandoned his theory of 'paternal seduction' as the cause of hysteria. For one thing he decided that many of the accounts he was hearing could never possibly have occurred. Freud concluded from this that the stories being described to him were actually wish-fulfillment fantasies – that his female patients desired or had desired sexual intercourse with their male parents at some point in their lives. Thus was born the theory of the Electra Complex. Judith believed this theory to be one of the great missteps in the history of psychology, one of the worst and most harmful of errors – the idea that women might actually want to sleep with their fathers. It was positively evil. In Judith's opinion, Freud was little better than Hitler or Stalin.

        "I can't believe you have no negative feelings towards your father," she tried again. "You know it's not wrong to speak ill –"

        "Yes, I get it," Sofia interrupted. "I know what you think. You think I have daddy issues. Of course one of the big reasons I got sick was my dad dying. I know that; you know that. Isn't it obvious? I loved my dad and then he died. Why go on about it? All I want is for you to help me get off this horrible drug."

        In the recurring nightmare, Judith was about eight or nine. She was in bed with the duvet covering her entirely, protecting her against assault by any evil influence in the room. In the dream, her father was outside the door. She knew he was. The door was locked. And she knew he was drunk again. And then he was pounding on the door. "Let me in!" he was yelling. "Let me in!" If she let him in, he would try to rape her. If she didn't he would break down the door. She would awake from the nightmare with her heart pounding. Awake Judith knew this had never happened. It was just a dream. But every time she surfaced from this most terrible of nightmares, she found her skin clammy and her breath ragged and hard to catch. The dream was real – it had happened.–it had never happened.

        It was impossible. Impossible to convince some patients why they were sick. And Judith was tired. Tired to death.

        "Why can't you just admit that your father molested you?" she broke out at last.

        Sofia drew back blinking rapidly several times. A perilous moment hung briefly in the air. Outside the clinic ordinary people were going on about their lives in the sun, bathed in the radiation of a billion cell-phone conversations. Rationalism held sway in a world of doctors and bureaucrats and bank tellers, of nymphs and demigods and djinns, of all those with souls and of all those without.

***
I hope this story is free of spelling mistakes and other errors. I have nor read it for some time. If readers like this story they may want to read others I have published in this blog: 69, Starlight, Beside the Lake, The Good Ol' Days and A Refusal to Mourn. If I am very lucky I may have drawn some spooked readers back into the fold.

An Interpretation of "Evidence" by Faith No More

People have odd rituals when they're drunk. Whenever my best friend in Dunedin had imbibed more whisky than he should have, he would wrap himself in the Welsh flag and watch Braveheart. My own ritual was simpler. Whenever I got drunk, I always felt compelled to play two songs on the stereo: "Come Together" by the Beatles and "Evidence" by Faith No More. This latter song has remained important to me throughout my life and so, in today's post, I thought I would try to interpret it. I hope I am doing the right thing in attempting to spell out what I think it means.

The lyrics are as follows.

Evidence (by Faith No More)

If you want to open the hole,

Just put your head down and go.

Step aside the piece of the circumstance –

Got to wash away the taste of evidence.

Wash it away.

Evidence, evidence, evidence,

Got a taste of evidence.

I didn't feel a thing,

You didn't mean a thing.

Look in the eye and testify:

I didn't feel a thing.

Anything you say we know you're guilty,

Hands above your head and you won't even feel me.

You won't feel me.

Evidence, evidence, evidence,

Got a taste of evidence.

I didn't feel a thing,

You didn't mean a thing.

Look in the eye and testify:

I didn't feel a thing

"Evidence" is a fantastic song. When when interpreting it, we need to start somewhere and the first thing to say about this song is that it is about sex, that it is set, so to speak, in the bedroom. The first couple of lines are surely about cunnilingus and the line "Hands above your head and you won't even feel me" is undoubtedly a sexual image. But to go deeper than that, it is about a man who suspects that the woman he is sleeping with, his partner or wife, has been unfaithful to him but has no solid evidence for this suspicion. He imagines though that he can literally taste her infidelity in his mouth.

Supposing this song is autobiographical, as I believe it is, and that the woman is Mike Patton's wife, the question arises, did he suspect her of cheating on him with a man – or with a woman? I would argue the later and in fact I think this the key to interpreting. A man who suspects or knows his wife is a lesbian may feel he has to play a woman's part when having conjugal relations - "to make love to her like a woman" as a friend of mine who was in the same position as Patton once told me. Hence the reason for an image of cunnilingus. The line "Hands above your head and you won't even feel me" suggests strongly that Patton's partner wasn't that enthusiastic about fucking a man, wasn't that into it. Rather than enjoying sex, the two are just going through the motions. This reading of the song, that it is about sexual insecurity and a crisis of masculinity, seems supported by others off the same album, King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime, the songs I'm thinking of being "Take this Bottle" and "Just a Man".

It is conceivable that Patton, his wife and another woman had a menage a trois but I won't pursue this possibility in this interpretation. 

If we read the song in this way, that it is a song describing sex between a man and a woman who he suspects of having a lesbian affair, how do we interpret the chorus? It seems that Patton is taking his wife's crime upon himself, rather than attributing it to her as he should; he seems to be erasing the distinction between him and her. One approach is to suppose that Patton perceives his wife's infidelity as a personal injury: he is saying to the other woman that she is insignificant and trying to reassure himself, trying to say, in effect, that the adultery might as well have never happened or didn't mean anything even if it did. In other words, it is a cuckold's rationalization. Yet he is still conflating himself with his wife and this is a puzzle that needs further elucidation.

The best songs are often ambiguous and "Evidence" does have interpretations other than the one I have suggested. The ambiguity springs from the chorus. A second interpretation of it is that it is Patton himself, not his wife, who had had the homosexual experience. When he says "It didn't mean a thing" and talks of testifying, he could be defending himself rather than his wife, saying, yes, it was he himself who had some kind of homosexual experience but it meant nothing, didn't count. This raises a strange and mysterious problem. Why does Patton willingly confuse himself with his wife? Is it him or her who has committed the crime? And if he is suggesting that it was he rather than her who had the homosexual experience, is it possible for a person to have a homosexual experience unintentionally, involuntarily, by accident as it were? And for it not to be rape?

To resolve this ambiguity, we need to sail into deeper waters. If a man suspects his wife of having a lesbian affair, it may cause him to doubt his own sexuality. This is a deep truth that few people consider. Add to that the possibility of gossip circulating about Patton's wife's sexuality or extra-marital relationships and we have a recipe for profound psychological distress. After all, the cuckolded husband is himself out of the loop, the last to know, imprisoned in a cone of silence; he suspects but has no proof. And such rumors inevitably cast doubt on the sexuality of the man as well as the woman. Some clues that this is what happened to Patton can be adduced from another song off the same album, "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" (and there is sill another track on the album, not one I can know so well, called "The Last to Know"). Such mental anguish can drive a person a little mad, can manifest in dreams and hallucinations - in other words, it is possible for a person to imagine that he has had a homosexual experience when literally he hasn't. Such a hallucination happened to another friend of mine, not the one I mentioned above, and it happened to me as well, in early 2010 to be precise. It need not occur as the consequence of one's wife having a lesbian affair but this is definitely a viable antecedent.

Patton I feel prided himself on his masculinity, his sexual prowess, and the situation he found himself in I think resulted in a kind of spiritual or religious crisis hinted at in the song "Just A Man". Perhaps Patton himself had such a dream or hallucination.

I would propose that an experience something like this also happened to the novelist David Foster Wallace when he was in college, was the reason for the "spiritual crisis" (as he himself described it) that he suffered then but never talked about, and that nearly led him to take his own life. I have tried to tackle this difficult issue before in an earlier post "An Appreciation of David Foster Wallace". In the film-biopic about Wallace, The End of the Tour, Wallace (or to speak more accurately, the actor playing him) talks of "experimenting" when he was younger – but I believe the film does a disservice to Wallace in presenting him this way, is pandering to those who think they know Wallace better than he knew himself. Talk of "experimentation" or "bi-curiousity" implies volition and the type of experience I am describing is avolitional. I do not believe Wallace "experimented" when he was young; I believe if he suffered such an experience, endured such a delusion or hallucination, it was 'by accident', was non-consensual, if we can use the term 'non-consensual' when no other partner exists. Wallace may perhaps have been the victim of false gossip and perhaps this calumny preceded the experience. I admit this is speculation. However I might say one more thing about it: one might describe this type of dream or hallucination as a kind of rape but the word 'rape' also seems inappropriate – unless a person can be said to be raped by his or her own subconscious mind (or, to give credit where credit is due, raped by the world, by the stupid or the cruel who comprise the victim's milieux).

I know this discussion might make some of my readers uncomfortable. I feel sometimes that I am excavating the secret history of the world. I might finish by saying just this: that although I have loved "Evidence" since I was a teenager, it is only in the last couple of years that I have felt that I knew what it was about and, only now, that I have decided to share what I think it means. 

An Anecdote; and a Description of a Condition

This blog is a strange animal. When I started writing it, it was about narrative theory but, over time, other subjects intruded: I began including short stories I'd written and talking about philosophy more generally. In posts about Kurt Cobain, John Nash, David Foster Wallace and perhaps Virginia Woolf I suggested, sometimes subtly, a different perspective on mental illness – that what drives a person mad is other people's misperceptions of him or her. I also have talked a little about my own life and that's what I want to do again in today's post.

After I left school I studied for two years at the University of Otago. At this time, I was in a long-distance relationship with my first girlfriend. One day, back in 1998, because I missed her, I bought a Cleo magazine, a magazine she liked. My best friend at the time teased me about this but I replied that I was secure enough in my sexuality that I could buy a women's magazine without worrying about it. My friend, a Philosophy major who would write his Masters thesis on Wittgenstein, said, "By that logic, you could prove beyond doubt that you're straight by dressing up in women's clothes." I took this as a challenge. We borrowed a dress, high-heels, and a wig from our lesbian friend who lived down the corridor in the same hall of residence, I dressed up in women's clothes and my friends took photographs. It was a fun night and a little boozy.

The point of this story, of course, is that I was secure enough in my heterosexuality that I could dress in women's clothes without worrying what others would think. It was the same logic that lead me to vocally support gay rights when I was older.

I tell this anecdote not only because it is perhaps amusing and revealing but because it had an effect on my life later on. In 2007, at the age of 27, as I have talked about before, I suffered a serious psychotic meltdown. The reasons for this crisis, which included a consideration of suicide, were complicated but a big part of was that it was caused by people thinking I was gay when I wasn't, perhaps because of false rumors, perhaps because of a misunderstanding of something that actually happen. After the crisis passed, I was briefly well but, at my first appointment with a psychiatrist, I felt immediately, rightly or wrongly, that he had diagnosed me as a latent or closet homosexual: an impossible position to be in because there was no way I could tell him he was wrong. Shortly after this, having become a 'client' of the Mental Health Service, I told my key worker the anecdote I related above. It was the only way I could try to explain the catastrophe that had occurred to me.

I don't believe my key worker understood what I was trying to say. I suspect what happened was that it was recorded in my notes that I was a transvestite. Towards the end of the year, having become increasingly panicky about the situation I was in, at a respite facility, I started trying to say indirectly something I shouldn't have needed to say, that I was straight. With a health worker at a respite facility, I talked about a trip I took to Europe in 2004, about all the pretty girls I encountered. She asked me, "Did you like what they were wearing?" I said, "No, I liked the girls!"

In other words, my anecdote had been interpreted the exact opposite of the way I intended.

This condition I had is far from uncommon and I feel it very important to describe it. I have observed it in very many other patients over the years, many diagnosed 'schizophrenic'. It has three principal features: a paranoid fear that others around them are secretly homosexual, a compulsion to find indirect ways to say one is not and an inability to say the words 'straight' and 'gay'. The root of the condition is the inchoate insight, apprehension, that to have the world think one is gay is almost the same thing as actually being gay, is in fact its cause. (Don't believe me? Check out The Good Son by Paul McVeigh, a harrowing read.) This type of schizophrenia is terrible but there are simple ways to ameliorate it, simple ways psychiatrists don't adopt. The culture of the Mental Health System needs to change. Issues of sexuality should be more openly discussed, homophobia should be eradicated, and, most importantly, the straight patients should be reassured that those treating them know that they are straight. In fact, I think that when a patient is first admitted to the Service, they should be given a questionnaire that asks, along with questions like "Did you suffer anything traumatic in your childhood?", the simple query, "How do you identify in terms of sexuality?" Currently this doesn't happen.

The notion that schizophrenia is an organic illness is profoundly stupid and should be abandoned.

It might be interesting to say a little about what it is like to be a patient of the Mental Health Service in this country at this time. I see my psychiatrist for an hour about once every two months. I almost never see the key workers I've had over the last several years – they may well be reluctant to see me because they know I am an unwilling patient. My main involvement with the Service is my compulsory monthly injection of 300mgs of Olanapine, administered via needle in the backside. It's an involvement I would prefer not to have. On the occasions when I do see my psychiatrist, I go in trying to guess what to talk about. The psychiatrist asks no questions, and says very little in fact. If I present with an opinion that might be a delusion, one would expect her to say, "Why do you believe that?" – but this never happens. If there are strange things in my record, as I assume there must be, I am never asked to explain what I meant. I have almost no idea of what my shrink really thinks of me – I find out a little only at Judicial and Independent Reviews of my legal status of which I have had five. At a recent consultation I decided that it was important to explain why I was well from early 2010 to early 2013: I was asked in surprise, "You were well in 2010?" Presumably they must have thought I was ill then. It is important to say that my current diagnosis is baed on reports from my first psychiatrist, who I saw between 2007 and early 2012, a man readers of my previous post will be aware I have a very low estimation of. To put all this in other words, those treating me don't have the slightest idea about my life or who I am. And yet they have the gall to call me 'schizophrenic' and force me to take a drug that makes me feel nauseous all the time, that honestly hasn't been helpful anyway.

The condition I described above, to reiterate, is not uncommon. I believe Kurt Cobain had it. I believe John Nash had it. I suspect David Foster Wallace had it, although he did a better job at hiding it than others. I think what I am saying here is important because psychiatrists themselves do not understand this condition, classified as a type of schizophrenia, although its cause and cure is really quite simple. But I suspect the prescription I have suggested is the exact opposite of what the psychiatric community believes to be the proper treatment of it Which is why so few people actually recover from it.

The Confidence Man

My best friend in my last year of high school was a compulsive liar. I came to know Shannon Singh, as he was then known (he was half Indian, half Irish) in Chemistry class; he had an extremely bad relationship with his father, needed  to move out of home and so I offered to let him live in my house. Through Shannon, I met my first girlfriend and through Shannon I was introduced properly to art-house film. We would watch David Lynch films, drink cheap vodka and sit and smoke pot together on the roof of my house. When I say that Shannon was a compulsive liar, I am not speaking loosely or hyperbolically; he was and still is genuinely a compulsive liar. I remember once arriving at school prepared to proffer words of comfort or solicitude (he'd had some family fight, I can't remember precisely what now) and him upending all my expectations by telling that he'd had a threesome with two girls the previous night.

After we finished school, we stopped seeing each other as much. Shannon changed his name to Gabriel Ash and moved overseas but would return to New Zealand about once a year, always with outrageous stories of  how he was employed in the different countries he ended up in, telling me once for instance that he was dealing narcotics to film stars in Hollywood. Often, I noticed, he would take urban myths and pretend that they happened to him. The last time I saw him, just last year, having returned to New Zealand because of the death of his father, he told my mother and me that he was the Head of the Law School for the University of the South Pacific; my mother, as savvy to him as I was, performed a little elementary research and couldn't find any mention of him on the university's website at all. During this visit, when we were driving around somewhere, he received a call on his cell phone about some mysterious "package": when the call finished, he justified himself to me extemporaneously by saying that he had a heart condition, was in fact at death's door, and that the package was a special device he required to stay alive. I half suspect that Gabe made what little money he had smuggling drugs internationally.

It seems odd to me that my best friend in Seventh Form was a compulsive liar because I am compulsively honest. The foundation of my friendship with Shannon/Gabriel was that even though I knew he lied all the time, I never called him out for it. The issue of fakes, of liars and phonies, has bothered me since though: I was trapped with a psychiatrist for many years who often gave off a palpable impression of mendacity. These days the psychiatrists I see seem to have a problem accepting such simple facts as that, when I first became ill in 2007, I was put on 2.5 mgs of Rispiridone or that I was taking 10mgs of Olanzapine from the end of 2009 until the beginning of 2012. If a person lies with enough audacity, he'll be believed. Unlike my friend Shannon, who lied because he wanted to be respected or liked, some psychiatrists seem to lie simply because they can. In 2013, I wrote a letter the paper saying that this first psychiatrist I saw was a sociopath and, although it caused me serious problems later, I wouldn't take it back.

When one looks at another country's culture, one always does so from the perspective of one's own. New Zealanders seem much more practical and grounded than Americans who seem to me much more adrift in a world of unanchored high ideals and gaudy lights. It's a country of con-men and the dupes they con, of hustlers and swindlers and snake-oil merchants, of deceivers and those deceived. Shannon/Gabriel would fit in well. As that great American P.T Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute" and America has been this way for a long time. The Confidence Man, Melville's last novel and my favorite by him, was first published in 1857. The American penchant for being taken in by hucksters, by con-men and liars, is arguably part and parcel with the American Dream and its blind optimism, Americans' feeling that even if things seem bad now some simple solution must exist that will improve their situation. The American Dream gave birth to Manifest Destiny, Revivalist Christianity and the self-help movement. It results from a combination of personal unhappiness and the conviction that some amelioration of this unhappiness can be easily achieved. It is a culture that enables con-men to thrive.

This strand in American culture has reached its apotheosis with the election of Donald Trump. To say that Trump is a con-man is to say nothing new. Trump campaigned on the platform that America under Obama had never been so bad and that only he could fix the country; he intimated that he had a grand secret plan for defeating Isis which he didn't want to tell anyone; towards the end of the campaign he was pledging that he was the only one who could end Washington corruption, "drain the swamp". "I will be the greatest job-producing President God has ever created" he said once.Trump is certainly a kind of con-man but what goes less said about Trump is that he is just as much a dupe and a gull as a con-man. For instance, he honestly seems to think Putin likes and admires him, although it is obvious to anyone paying attention that Putin really regards Trump as a puppet, a useful idiot, a bit of a tool. Trump is the American Dream personified, the proposition that someone can rise all the way from the position of humble property tycoon to the highest office in the world. Trump is both the beneficiary and victim of this dream and of his colossally inflated ego.

It can seem that the world is completely full of con-men, of liars. One practical way to cope with this is to try to exercise one's critical faculties. Don't get you news from spurious stories posted in Facebook. Don't believe everything you hear. Work out who to trust, such as reputable newspapers and shows like John Oliver's Last Week Tonight, and put your faith in them. Above all, be suspicious of anyone who seems to good to be true. Con-men thrive on gullibility.

I would like to finish this post by giving one of the reasons I had for writing it. I am just in the process of finishing Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell, a book largely concerned with con-men and people's willingness to be conned. It is a fantastic piece of journalism - Martin Amis says about it "If Borges had been a New Yorker, he might have come up with something like Joe Gould's Secret. But this, alas, is a true story." I don't want to give anything else away by talking about this book here but I recommend my readers have a look at it. It's brilliant.

Books

I have for most of life been a voracious reader. Ever since I was a kid, I measured my self-worth by the number of books I read; a shy, introverted and highly anxious child, I made books (and television) my best friends. I remember when I was about eight or nine I found a girl in my year who I suspected might read as much as I did did; I became extremely jealous of her. She was impinging on my claim to distinction, to specialness. I could possibly write the story of my life by listing the books I've read and, in a way, that's what I want to do a little in this post.

I can't remember when I first learnt to read but I think it was before I started school. My first love was Tintin comics and I collected them. Early on though I turned to real books. When still young I read the collected works of Lewis Carol (my step-mother had a copy); recently I found a school report from when I was in about Standard Two (Year Four) advising my parents to encourage me to read books "more appropriate to my age". I think I read Wild Swans before I was ten although I'm sure I can't have understood it. I know that I read Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Invisible Man when I was still in Primary School because I delivered a speech about them to the school in Standard Three or Four. I was an omnivorous reader, choosing and reading books almost at random.

When I was in Standard Three, one of the two best teachers I have ever had recommended The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. I don't know if my love of Fantasy fiction predated this or not but this book was my favorite for many years. This was a genre at least a little more appropriate to someone of my age. I read and loved Tad Williams, David Eddings, the wonderful Ursula Le Guin (who I still love), all the books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. I would come back to these works over and over again throughout my childhood and adolescence. After a couple of years with virtually no friends, it was through our shared appreciation of The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams that I made one, and the bond that I shared with my best friend in Intermediate School was based at least partly on the Dragonlance series.

One author who deserves special mention is Terry Pratchett. The first Discworld novel I read was Mort. During my childhood and adolescence I read each new Pratchett novel as soon as it came out but, as I grew older, I read them more out of a sense of duty or nostalgia than out of enjoyment, and eventually I stopped reading them altogether. Pratchett was producing Discworld novels right up until his death last year. Personally, I think Pratchett peaked with his eighth Discworld novel Guards, Guards: after that his books gradually lost their edge, the blackly skewed often violent absurdism that characterized the early works, an example of this retreat being how, in his first books, the wizards were all homicidal maniacs bent on murdering each other but, by his later books, they had transformed into stereotypical university dons, absent minded and basically benevolent. Another example of Pratchett's decline is the way Captain Vimes, the hero of Guards, Guards, begins as a cynical and alcoholic loser but in later books becomes a competent and one dimensionally diligent police detective who might have stepped straight out of The Bill. In his later books, Pratchett lost touch with the wild Fantastic imagination that had created a flat world in the first place, eschewing dark irony for simplistic social comment. He lost touch with the well-spring of his humor. Still though he was very important to me when I was young.

In Intermediate (Year 7) or just before, I chanced upon the Thomas Covenant trilogies by Stephen Donaldson. He immediately became my favorite author. I could somehow identify with a self-hating leper - and later in life, the fundamental paradox of these works, of a protagonist summoned to save a world he doesn't even believe in, became unexpectedly resonant. To simultaneously believe in something and not believe in it, to 'suspend my disbelief' in Coleridge's phrase, informed my 'illness' in that ,when talking with Jon Stewart and Barack Obama in my head, it enabled me to pretend that they were real. A few years ago, Donaldson being in the process of writing a third Covenant trilogy, I imagined him one night, suffering from writer's block, rummaging around in my mind for ideas. I was still, of course, to return to my Intermediate years, reading books 'inappropriate for my age'. I remember one time when staying with my family at a club ski field in Arthur's Pass the other guests discovering that the Hugh Cook Fantasy novel I was reading contained explicit sex scenes. It was terribly embarrassing, shaming, for other people to learn this, for others to deem me perhaps a Little Pervert. I feel less embarrassed about this today. So what if I was precocious? I see no reason now why children shouldn't read books intended for adults.

In Secondary School I broadened my tastes, reading not only fantasy and science fiction but also serious literature. I read Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Franz Kafka. I didn't particularly enjoy high school – not because I was bullied but because I never did my homework and consequently was continually in trouble with the teachers. In sixth form I had a genuinely good biology teacher, one who wasn't in my face all the time, one who permitted me to just sit and read Crime and Punishment without pestering me, all I really wanted to do, and, at the year's end, I rewarded him for his negligence by topping the school in the biology exam.

When I was a teenager, the authors I liked were solid intellectual male authors, canonical authors who produced tomes resembling door-stops. I gauged a writer's masculinity by his brains. Although I didn't discover David Foster Wallace until my mid-twenties, he ticked all the boxes; I had for some time been unable to find any writers I could really dig, appreciate, and had worried that maybe I didn't like reading anymore. Oblivion rekindled my faith in literature. It is only recently that I have really started to include woman writers among my favorites, writers such as Virginia Woolf (who I recently wrote a post about) and the wonderful Penelope Fitzgerald whose novel The Blue Flower I cannot recommend too highly.

With respect to poetry… I have never been a really huge poetry aficionado although I imagine I have read more than most people. Yes, I read some verse when I was a child (Carol for instance) but I got into poetry properly in an odd way, by reading an essay by C.M. Bowra in The Creative Experiment about The Waste Land. In this essay Bowra sought to illuminate The Waste Land by interpreting it in light of the myth of the Fisher King – it made Eliot's poem seem like a Fantasy novel to me, and drew me to it. So it was only after I had read a critical commentary on it that I came to the poem. Bowra's essay has colored my understanding of this Modernist masterpiece ever since. If one wants to start reading poetry, by the way, perhapsThe Waste Land is not a bad place to begin.

After I left school I completed first a BA and then an MA in English Literature. I read all the usual suspects: Pynchon, Camus, DeLillo, Joyce, Henry James, all of Melville, Synge, Beckett, Dickens, Frame and so on and so on… I am not going to talk much about the books I have read as an adult because I think it is more interesting to have talked about how got into reading in the first place.

I might say one more thing. For much of my life I have not just measured my self-worth in terms of the number of books I had read but also in respect to the number of words I know. Some people seek to expand their vocabularies by looking up lists of obscure words on the Internet but I can say proudly that all the words I know I have learnt from the books I've read. If I'm reading and I hit on a word I don't know I immediately look it up – a good habit to get into I believe. I learnt the word 'quotidian' from Wallace I think, the word 'kyphotic' from Will Self's Umbrella, more recently the words 'orgulous' and 'cresset' from Woolf and the word 'terpsichorean' from Henry Miller's Nexus. I remember a couple of years ago mentioning the word 'caryatid' to a friend, a noun I'd learnt from a documentary about Parisian architecture, and being very disappointed to find that she already knew it.

In the last couple of months, I've noticed, this blog has started receiving far more traffic than it formerly did. I thought I would conclude this post by recommending some short stories I've published in it – 69, Starlight and A Refusal to Mourn. These posts are a little older and so readers might not think to look for them but I would like people to glance through them anyway, if they feel so inclined; I would like to consider myself an author first and a cultural critic second. At some point I am going to stop writing this blog and put together a proper novel… but not quite yet. 

The End of Capitalism

I had been advised not to write a post about President-elect Donald Trump. As in the Russia of his good friend Vladimir Putin, it is possible that under a Trump regime critics may simply spookily disappear, evanesce away. Hopefully my family's concerns are unfounded. It is always possible that black-suited CIA operatives may knock on my apartment's door to spirit me off to some antipodean Guantanamo bay in the middle of the night but I think this unlikely. And anyway, I don't intend to talk directly about Trump in today's post. Instead I want to talk about the system of capitalism more generally. I want to show that it is in the process of gradually devouring itself and what we, as global citizens, need to do to prevent this happening.

Capitalism itself is implicated in Trump's triumph. Trump's success depended on his appeal to uneducated working-class white males. The men who voted for Trump are part of the first generation since the Great Depression whose living standards and economic prospects are worse than their fathers. Unemployment, underemployment, declining real wages and job insecurity are rife among this demographic. These men, feeling emasculated, clinging to their guns and their religion (as Obama once accidentally and ill-advisedly said to Letterman in 2008), blame their problems on immigration and an 'out-of-touch' Washington elite. The vote for Trump was a big Screw You to the establishment. But these men are making a major error by blaming Democrats for their plight. They are directing their anger in the wrong direction. The cause of these men's declining living standards is not left-leaning politicians. It is Capitalism itself.

To explain what I mean I need to say a little about capitalism so please bear with me for a moment. The aim of businesses in a capitalist society is to generate as much profit as possible, to return to owners, share-holders and upper management as much money as can be reasonably generated. The aim is to sell as much of the product as possible while incurring the least possible cost – and one of the greatest costs most businesses bear is the cost of labour. Consequently businesses, when wanting to be as efficient, as streamlined, as possible, seek to do so by reducing labour costs as much as they can. In other words, companies seek to reduce the number of people they employ to the fewest they need to make and sell their goods, and pay their employees as little as they possible.

There are many ways a business can reduce the cost of labour but the two I'll single out are outsourcing and technological advancement. Outsourcing occurs when corporations relocate factories and other ground-level manufacturing jobs from countries like the US to low-wage economies such as China and India. This is one simple way to reduce labour costs. Technological advancement also reduces costs because machines obviously don't need to be paid an hourly wage like real people and so there is an advantage in replacing people with machines. In a recent article, the journalist Gwynne Dyer, who has also obviously thought seriously about this issue, has pointed out how the advent of driverless cars may soon put hundreds of thousands of lorry and taxi drivers around the world out of work. This is good for the capitalists who own these businesses but bad for those who work for them. It could happen within a decade – yet few had the imagination to anticipate it ten years ago (although Kim Stanley Robinson was one who did in fact predict the advent of driverless cars, in his 1987 Sci-Fi novel The Gold Coast). It is almost impossible to know in advance how innovation will affect economies. All we know is that it inevitably does. Technological innovation should be an unequivocally good thing but, under capitalism, its most immediate effect is simply to cause apparently secure jobs to evaporate.

I have personal experience of this. From 2005 until 2013 I worked part-time for the TAB, the principal semi-governmentally-owned organization through which New Zealanders (and foreigners) could gamble on horse races and other sports events. I worked in a call centre; punters would call us in order to have a flutter on the horses or the rugby without needing to leave home. When I first started working there in 2005 the call centre had over a hundred and fifty operators but, over the years, the number of operators was gradually whittled away to less than fifty. The TAB management was quite candid that paying us operators was the major cost they bore and were jut as candid in letting us know that they were actively seeking to encourage patrons to switch to touch-tone or internet betting, neither of which required a human interface. This policy despite the fact that the TAB was enjoying record profits. At last, in 2013, having successfully diverted almost all transactions into touch-tone or internet betting, the TAB closed the call center I worked in completely and put all those who were left out of work. I'm sure some of my readers may have similar stories.

Technological innovation does not just increase unemployment. The law of supply and demand applies as much to labour as to other commodities and, if supply outstrips demand, if more and more people are competing for fewer and fewer jobs, it pushes wages down. Paradoxically, because there is less work to go around, labour itself decreases in value. Unions lose their teeth and workers lose their bargaining power. Ever increasing efficiency shifts wealth and power gradually and irreversibly from workers to those who own the businesses or are in a position of choosing their own income - upper management. Thus capitalism, combined with technology-enabled improvements in efficiency, naturally leads to an ever widening gap between the rich and poor, between those who own the capital and those who actually carry out the work.

The role of government should be to counterbalance the tendency of capitalism to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a minority, its proclivity to increase inequality, to favor the few over the many. In the mid-twentieth century it was believed that technological advancement would lead to an 'age of leisure' for everyone in which no-one would need to work (think The Jetsons). But those who naively imagined this future failed to put two and two together, that capitalism itself precludes a true age of leisure for everyone. Even supposing that technological innovation leads to cheaper commodities (rather than putting more money in the pockets of share-holders), a person still needs money to buy these goods and some kind of reasonably paying job to provide him or her with that wherewithal to do that. To consume goods and services a person needs cash and he or she can only have cash if he or she has a job.Yet technological innovation destroys jobs. I am not arguing that technological innovation is bad in itself (I am not a Luddite) but, under capitalism, the downside of technological innovation sometimes seems to outweigh the benefits. There are a few things governments can do. The bare requisite governments around the world need to provide is a minimum wage that at least keeps pace with inflation and an unemployment benefit on which people can survive without indignity - not only is this the most humane policy but it reduces competition for work so diminishing downward pressure on wages and, ideally, at least a little compensating for capitalism's natural propensity to make the poor poorer and the rich richer.

I would go further. I think nations around the world should establish a Universal Basic Income. I think every citizen of a country should receive a weekly or fortnightly payment from the government, an income on which they can survive, regardless of whether they are working or not. We need this because full employment will never occur again. If we gave everyone a Universal Living Allowance, we could get rid of the minimum wage – anything a person earned would be on top of what the State already gives them. This would greatly diminish the cost associated with current systems and the bloated bureaucracy associated with them. How would we pay for such a radical scheme? First, simply by closing loopholes that allow wealthy individuals and companies to avoid paying tax. Second, by increasing tax on the most affluent individuals and companies. The only way to save capitalism is to temper it with socialism.

The alternative to such a solution, if we blindly ignore the tendency of capitalism to shift wealth from the many to the few, is self-destruction. Those who supported Trump have failed to recognize the true reason for their discontent, capitalism itself. It feels like we are living in the 'thirties just prior to the Second World War. This last American election is a sign of the End Times: if things continue this way it will only end in civil war, possibly world war. This mis-recognition, this failure to recognize the true villain, is not just an American problem, it is global, as shown by Brexit and by the rise of the Far Right in European countries. But a turn to the Far Right is not the solution, it could only make things worse. The answer to the problems facing the world is not nationalism, not xenophobia and prejudice, not fascism. The answer is Socialism. 

The Hounds of Heaven

In 2012, I completed a Masters of Creative Writing though AUT. My 'thesis', as it's called, was a film script entitled The Hounds of Heaven, and concerned a girl called Jess diagnosed schizophrenic. A couple of months ago, AUT put this screenplay up on the Internet – readers out there who are interested in it can find it easily I imagine by Googling my name and the name of the film. In today's post I want to talk a little about this film and try to explain some of what I was trying to do when I wrote it.

When I enrolled at AUT I did not intend to write The Hounds of Heaven. I was actually partway through a completely different screenplay, about two poor boys who steal a car. Partway through the year I abandoned this project and decided to write a screenplay about schizophrenia instead. I had experience of psychosis that I thought was worth sharing to a public who didn't understand it but, at this time, I had not made sense of my own life and so decided to base my film not on my own experiences but on someone else's, a girl I had met at the end of 2009 and hung out with sporadically during 2011. During this year, 2012, I was no longer a patient of the Mental Health System and was instead having monthly appointments with a GP. My last appointment with a psychiatrist had been the 31January that year (easy to remember as I had been to the Laneway Festival the day before). I had been symptom free for nearly two years and during 2012 was on 5mgs of Olanzapine.

I need to say, first, that the screenplay that has been put up on the internet was only a draft. If people who read my blog take a look at this script, you'll notice that it is full of spelling mistakes and stylistic solecisms. Towards the end of 2012, you see, I had lost faith in it, and had decided that it didn't work as a film. It needed significant revision and I didn't have the time or the confidence that it could be made good enough to made. Second I need to reiterate that the film was not based on my own experiences but on someone else's. I had never asked the real girl her permission to be write a film about her. We had fallen out of contact at the end of 2011. Just before I handed the screenplay in for marking towards the end of 2012 I suffered a crisis of conscience and went through the screenplay changing the protagonist's name to Jess almost throughout. It is not the world's best screenplay.  But it has its moments.

The synopsis is simple. Jess is a girl of twenty-five, diagnosed schizophrenic, who lives on Auckland's North Shore in Takapuna. She has few friends, is unemployed and, apart from her love of books and poetry, has little in her life. The first act depicts her everyday ('quotidian') existence. If Jess is almost friendless it is not her fault: she is sweet and highly intelligent but afflicted by severe social anxiety. The film makes heavy use of voice-over throughout, a device that enables Jess to explain herself to the audience. At plot point one, she meets by chance a handsome Lothario called Rick at a cafe who asks her for her phone number. The two go out on a kind of date and end up back at his apartment where he makes an unsolicited move on her. She flees the apartment and vomits in a rubbish bin. As a result of this incident she descends shortly after into a psychotic episode, during which she decides that she is responsible for the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Her episode reaches its nadir immediately after attending a lecture by a visiting psychologist and she ends up in hospital for six weeks. This marks plot point two. In the last act she goes to Christchurch with her father, a civil engineer, and the film ends with the two of them talking in a restaurant when an aftershock occurs.

The film mixes fact and fiction. Many of the details of Jess's life, and her whole manner of talking, I borrowed from the real girl. However, Rick and Jess's family were completely made up.  The earthquake delusion was real. The real girl did, in fact, decide that she was responsible for February 2011 earthquake after it happened: I was involved with her at the time. But truth is often truly stranger than fiction – and if I had described what actually happened it would seem unbelievable.

Although most of the film was an attempt to represent schizophrenia 'from the inside', it was also, very subtly indeed, concerned with sexuality. I believed that the real girl had been  falsely diagnosed homosexual as I believed I had been misdiagnosed. I was trying in the film to prove Jess and, by extension, the real girl was straight. At this time, I believed that the principal reason in my life for my heterosexuality was my loving relationship with my mother and so, by analogy, I thought I could prove Jess straight by depicting her affectionate relationship with her father. I should say that at this time, in 2012, I was working with an erroneous theory of sexuality and have since decided that it has nothing to do with parental attachment at all.

In order to answer the question of Jess's sexuality in the film, I had first to make it a question. I did so in two ways. Early on, when she is attending a coffee=group, I had her say, in voiceover, about the girl sitting across from her, "Katrina is very pretty but I try not to notice that". Later, at Rick's apartment, when he tries to kiss her and she evades him, he asks her if she is dyke. Arguably, the main trigger for the psychotic episode Jess experiences is having a man she was genuinely attracted to ask her if she is a lesbian.

The line about the girl Katrina was a terrible mistake. It has literally caused me sleepless nights since. I was giving to Jess a psychotic symptom that the real girl probably didn't have. In 2014 I lent the screenplay to my psychologist - his view was that the mistake I made was not the passing reference to a girl noticing that another girl was pretty but having Rick ask her if she is a lesbian. My view is more or less the reverse. I think that when there is any doubt about a person's sexuality, it is appropriate to ask – but to ascribe homosexual desire to someone who doesn't have it is deeply wrong.

When, in early 2013, I again suffered a psychotic episode, one of the beliefs I formed was that many people in the media had read my film – and that they hated it. The director who shared in the duties of marking it wrote in his assessment of it that I "shouldn't show it to anyone else in the film industry"... but I nevertheless received the impression, somehow psychically, that many others had if not read it than somehow heard about it. When I voluntarily re-entered the Mental Health Service again around Easter of that year, I was asked by the psychiatrist I saw if I had been unwell in 2012 and I wondered then and have wondered since if his question had anything to do with the film I wrote. I should make things clear now. In 2012, when I wrote The Hounds of Heaven,  although I hadn't then as I said before made sense of my own life, I was completely sane.

I want to say a little more about the real girl if it is permissible. In 2013 I caught up with her again for the first time since the end of 2011. I found that, in 2012, in the period when I wrote the film about her, the real girl had been in hospital. In fact she had spent eight months there and been seriously unwell for much of that time. I feel sure some scandal should be associated with her sectioning. On the second of the two times we met in 2013, I gave her my film script. She seemed to like it, sending me a text saying "you seem to have access to things that I have no recollection of having told you!" Briefly it seemed possible that we might even enter into a genuine relationship but, for some reason that I still don't understand, the relationship never eventuated. I have only seen the girl a couple of times since 2013 - when I saw her in 2014 she had acquired for herself a girlfriend. I get the impression that this girl (who 'Jess' has since broken up with) was a very nice person but at the time I found out about this relationship, and when I met the girl herself, I found it very, very painful indeed. There is more I could say about all this but this is all I can really say about someone else in a public blog.

If I ever revisited the subject of schizophrenia again in a film, I would do so differently. I would do something that I couldn't bring myself to do when I wrote The Hounds of Heaven: I would argue that the major cause of mental illness is the Mental Health System itself. Yes I know that the first episode of depression or psychosis occurs for environmental reasons that have nothing to do with shrinks and therapists and nurses, but it is the system itself that stops people from recovering, that keeps them sick, that can even make people worse. I would like to say this in a film. But I don't know how a film this controversial could ever receive funding and be made.