In my post about Obama, written a little while ago, I said that perhaps, as a New Zealander, it wasn't my place to talk about American politics. But, after this last week, how can anyone in the world think about anything else? My local paper is full of columnists expressing shock and anxiety about what a future with Donald Trump as 'leader of the free world' might hold. The 'Muslim ban', promised during the campaign and now made manifest, was instituted only yesterday or the day before but this is not what I want to talk about in this post. I want to talk about the mismatch between Trump's view of reality and the views expressed by almost the entirety of the media.
The gap between Trump's assertions about the world and the facts as reported by journalists has been received with something like incredulity by the journalists themselves. Commentators, such as Seth Meyers, can't decide whether Trump is a compulsive liar or is certifiably delusional – this stunned incomprehension being a natural reaction of honest intelligent people to someone who seems completely blind to all inconvenient truths. Is it really possible that Trump genuinely believes that there were five million illegal votes cast in the election all for Hillary Clinton? It appears, appalling as this conclusion seems, that the answer is 'yes'.
How can Trump and his advisors justify Trump's unbelievable claims? Kellanne Conway has coined a term that provides wriggle room for the President and his supporters. Journalists may have facts – but the President has 'alternative facts'. The tactic here is risible but it seems the only one they can employ. Surely the term 'alternative fact' is a kind of oxymoron? Either a proposition or statement is a fact, is true, or else it is false and thus not a fact. You can't have 'alternative facts'. In one of his shows, Seth Meyers expressed his astonishment that Trump could so completely disregard 'consensus reality'. (Hopefully this is on Youtube somewhere.) But this is not the right tactic. I want, in this post, to argue that the term 'consensus reality' is almost as much of an oxymoron as the term 'alternative fact'.
We can define 'consensus reality' as 'an understanding of the world that everyone agrees on'. Consensus reality, for instance, might include such propositions as 'La La Land won the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy' or 'terrorism is a bad thing'. However in the U.S., on many issues, people are divided and there is no consensus. How then can we speak of 'consensus reality'? A big chunk of the population believes that Obama was a Muslim who wasn't born in the United States; the same chunk believes illegal immigration from Mexico is a serious problem even though over at least the last number of years net migration has gone the other way; the same chunk doesn't think God would permit global warming to happen; the same chunk seriously believes that Hillary Clinton is a criminal and are disappointed in Trump only to the extent that he has not followed through on his campaign pledge to 'lock her up'. It seems that there are two Americas living side by side, one America that gets its news from newspapers and late night political satire shows and another America that gets its news solely from right-wing talk back hosts and Fox News. It doesn't matter how righteous Trevor Noah is, it doesn't matter how passionately and indignantly he points out that Trump is all surface and no substance, it doesn't matter how surgically precise his satire is, the people who support Trump won't be moved because people who support Trump don't watch The Daily Show. And even if a Trump supporter chances upon it accidentally, he won't get the jokes, will feel condescended to, and will only end up hating the 'liberal elite' even more.
It seems apparent that Donald Trump has lived all his life in the second America. Okay, he's a rich New Yorker, not a Kentucky trailer-park resident, but his opinions and even his policy all seem to come straight from talk-back radio and Fox News. And what is scary is that, even as President, with an enormous information gathering apparatus at his disposal, he still gets all his opinions and policy from Fox News. Some people think Vladimir Putin effectively annexed the U.S. by orchestrating Trump's election but I think the true eminence grise, the person really pulling the strings, is Rupert Murdoch.
So the idea of 'consensus reality' falls apart because there is no such thing as a consensus on the issues that underly all political debate in America. However even if there were a consensus about an issue, even if everyone believed the same thing about something, that doesn't make it reality. Up until Copernicus formulated his heliocentric theory of the solar system, everyone believed that the sun orbited the Earth. The geocentric model was accepted as 'consensus reality' even though it was false. This makes the idea of 'consensus reality' highly problematic. Simply put, something can be true even even if only a very few people believe it, or no one at all. I am not, by the way, giving Trump an escape hatch by pointing this out. I don't believe Trump would know the truth if it kicked him up the arse.
This issue is important to me because sometimes in this blog I have asserted ideas which very few people indeed believe. I have argued in "The Myth of the Repressed Homosexual" and indirectly elsewhere that homosexuals are made not born. I have argued that Oscar Wilde was straight. I proposed, rather diffidently or cautiously, that there might be a logical flaw in the Theory of Evolution as it is generally understood. Most importantly I think, I have argued, in "The Big Con", that the idea that anti-psychotic medication is at all efficacious is false. Like Fox News viewers, most psychiatrists only read research that confirms their existing worldviews. If antipsychotics don't work, what are they left with in terms of treatment? Nothing – unless they maybe consider a better kind of couch therapy than was used in the past. On all these issues – sexuality, genetics and psychiatry – I find myself opposed to consensus reality. This may make me seem a screwball. But I don't want people to think that I am presenting 'alternative facts'. I may be on an island by myself in believing what I do and sometimes my beliefs evolve (this blog being a process rather than a conclusion) but I stand by much of what I have said.
As I often do, I would like to furnish this argument with an anecdote. 2009 was probably not quite the worst year in my life but it was definitely my maddest. I believed that I could communicate telepathically with others, that my glasses were bugged, that I was world-famous. Towards the end of the year I climbed Mt. Hobson, a hill near my home, and at the summit asked the voices what I could do to save myself, how I could escape my madness. A voice said, "Accept consensus reality." I replied (in my head of course) "Okay." What followed was the intense episode involving Jess and Jon that I have described in earlier posts and then three years when I was quite well. I was well but, in a way, I wasn't. I had accepted consensus reality. I had an organic illness, it was caused by a dopamine imbalance, I needed medication for the rest of my life to stay sane. I had been bullied into believing bullshit by psychiatrists and nurses and others around me. In 2013, though, it became impossible for me to put my faith in consensus reality any longer and as I have said in earlier posts went back to the psychiatrists to get it finally on the record that I was straight. And then in early 2014 presumably because of that I was put under the Mental Health Act and forced to receive medication that I no longer believed in.
For almost all of my life and for most of this blog I have been a Postmodernist who believed that language shapes reality. It may seem that I am resiling from this position by suggesting that the term 'consensus reality' doesn't make sense. Rather though I am trying to say both things at once. The idea that reality is constituted by beliefs about it is the insight of the mad; the idea that reality is independent of anyone's belief about it is the insight of the sane. I am not truly abandoning either standpoint. Rather I wish to try to hold both perspectives at once, alternately or concurrently, an almost impossible balancing feat. It seems though that in these end-times in which we are living we need more than ever to cleave to the idea of truth. Opponents of Trump sometimes seem to frame the coming war as a battle between love and hatred but, really, it should be framed as a battle between truth and bullshit.
I want to end this post by talking about something close to my heart: language. I sometimes struggle to find the right word and this happened twice in this post. For instance I used the word 'incredulity' to describe commentators' attitude to Trump: I could think of no other word that comes anywhere close to capturing how intelligent people can't quite get their head around the awful truth that Trump is actually just as stupid or crazy as he often appears. In my film, The Hounds of Heaven, I have Jess describe herself as a 'sciolist'. When I wrote the film I was using a definition of this word 'sciolist' in which a sciolist is someone who has a superficial knowledge of many different subjects, who is something of a dilettante. According to Google, a sciolist is "a person who pretends to be knowledgeable and well informed". The different definitions give the word 'sciolist' different shades of meaning. I intended the first but my readers may have thought I meant the second. Even in the last paragraph of this post I decided to double-check my understanding of the word 'resile' and found different definitions floating around the internet, some good, others totally bogus. Recently I was chatting to someone who parroted a received opinion that the United States is the most Communist country in the world – people who espouse this opinion obviously having very little idea what the word "Communism" actually means. Insofar as the terms 'consensus reality' makes sense, we need a consensus about the meanings of words. It is important to use language precisely and know precisely what we are trying to say. And this is my fear, that people don't. The ignorant are calling the shots and the people who control the language control the world.
Monday, 30 January 2017
Tuesday, 17 January 2017
Bruce Sells Out
In the previous post, I said that my methodology is anecdotal. This can be somewhat problematic because it means I sometimes talk about people other than myself. The girl I call "Jess" I call Jess because it would be immoral to use her real name; I feel awkward talking about Jon Stewart because it seems so crazy to say that I was imaginary friends with him for such a long time but it seems to me important to share. I sometimes think of my madness as a kind of mystical experience, that taught me things worth sharing, and this is why I mention him by name. I could just say that I was imaginary friends with a television personality but this wouldn't be enough; I feel that many readers will have been watchers of The Daily Show and, by saying that I often imagined conversing with Jon in my head, that we were friends, I say something about myself.
In the previous post I discussed how, during an intense episode over the summer of 2009 and 2010, I was in a triangular relationship with these two, Jon and Jess. There have been many theories of desire, the most famous being that of Freud's, but a lesser known but still interesting theory is the one devised by philosopher and anthropologist Rene Girard. Girard argued that desire is mimetic and invented the notion of a triangle of desire. The three vertices of the triangle are the subject, the object and the mediator. The mediator desires the object and the subject learns to desire the object by imitating the mediator. Because both subject and mediator desire the same object, Girard argued, this can lead to mimetic rivalry and often violence. Girard proposes that this violence and the strategies required to mitigate such violence is at the root of all culture and even language itself.
Girard's theory is interesting but is it true? I don't think so – but it interests me because, particularly over that summer of 2009 and 2010, as I have said before, I was involved in a kind of triangle. It would be tempting to see this as a Girardian triangle in which I was the subject, Jess was the object and Jon the mediator. But this does correspond very accurately to what actually happened. When I first met Jess, and I'm talking here about the real girl rather than the one I imagined I was talking with in my mind later, and fell for her, I wasn't imitating anyone else's desire. I fell for her because she was smart, cool, pretty and also liked T.S Eliot. When Jon became involved he was an intermediary, a go-between, an imaginary best friend who could recognise and validate my relationship with Jess. Although in this story I was writing in my mind, he was as capable as me of recognising how loveable she was, Jon himself did not compete with me for Jess. In fact, Jon had his own girl, a half Native-American, half black woman he'd met at a buffet. He'd had a mid-life crisis and had left his wife for her but, towards the end of that summer, Jess and I persuaded Jon to leave this girl and return to his wife.
So I don't think Girard's theory is a satisfactory account. To put it simply, at this particular time in my life, I desperately needed a straight best friend and wing-man, and a girl to love. In a way Jon was a role model, not a mediator – I did not learn my love for Jess from him, it was more as if he learned to love Jess from me.
Girard's triangle and love triangles generally relate to sexuality and I would like to propose something now relevant to the treatment of the 'sexually muddled'. As I said before, I felt, when I first became a patient of the Mental Health Service, that I had been 'diagnosed' homosexual. This was appalling for me at the time and generally I just tried to put it out of my mind because I couldn't bear to think about it and because I didn't know how to correct this mistake. You'd think it would be simple to rectify an error like this but in fact it isn't. In 2008, I received 'therapy' of a sort from a middle aged Scottish nurse. At one of my first sessions with her she said something like, "I should be a young beautiful woman!" At the time I had no idea why she said this – I thought we would be talking about my parents' divorce when I was seven, that this was the proper topic of psychological therapy. I didn't understand why her looks would be relevant. Of course, what I know now and sort of knew then, was that she thought I was sexually muddled and obviously believed that the best way to treat sexually muddled men is to present them with beautiful female therapists and hope transference will cure them of their homosexual inclinations. This may be a common misperception among a lot of mental health professionals – but it is incredibly stupid. I wasn't sexually muddled but I was ill and I was in a terrible way under siege by those around me. I didn't need to be exposed to hot women to be 'cured'. What I really needed was a straight male friend who knew I was straight.
In 2012 and 2013, as I said in the previous post, the real Jess experienced a long awful period of psychosis. I sensed somehow the crisis she was going through, that she was on the verge of ego-death, that she might go over to the other side, and thought I should try to help her. Aside from reentering the service again to say that I was straight, I would send her song suggestions every day, the one to which she eventually replied being "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed – but I didn't really know what I was doing. My efforts to help her were complicated, obstructed, by the fact that I didn't just want her to be straight, I wanted her to be mine. Jealousy was a significant component in my feelings about her. But I didn't succeed in 'saving' her and the reason I didn't succeed was fundamentally because I was the wrong gender. Jess didn't need a man saying he loved her to straighten her out. She needed a straight female best friend and this was precisely what she didn't have.
If any readers of my blog have also read the film I wrote about her, The Hounds of Heaven, you'll have noticed that the Jess of that film has only one female friend, her key worker, and this woman is just a fake friend, not a real one. In the writings of the real Jess since, I have noticed that she has, now, an ambivalence towards women, at once a yearning for female friends and an aversion towards them, an indication of the cruelty inflicted upon her.
People need friends of the same gender but if you're in a situation where all such relationships are viewed as suspect, how can one acquire them?
At this point I would like to change the topic but only slightly, and talk about another film I wrote, way back in 2001, when I was only twenty-one. Bear with me reader. It was a comedy called Bruce Sells Out and was a modern riff on Faust indebted to both Marlowe's and Goethe's original plays. The protagonist of the film, an unsuccessful stand-up comedian, encounters and befriends the Devil after a night of dying on stage and general drunkenness and debauchery; shortly after he meets the Devil he somehow acquires a girlfriend. Much of the film shows him torn between his friendship with the Devil, who lives in congnito in Auckland running various tinnie-houses and a multitude of other business ventures, and his relationship with Kathy. The film thus presents a kind of love triangle although Bruce does not tell either party that he loves him or her - in fact his relationship with the Devil is fraught, tense, the Devil being, of course, the Devil and thus not to be trusted. At plot point 2, Bruce accidentally kills Kathy after an argument, enlists the Devil's help in disposing of the body and together they drive north to Cape Reianga to dump the body in the sea. Towards the end of the film, having reached Cape Reianga and emotional rock-bottom, Bruce decides to sell his soul to the Devil to bring Kathy back to life and the film ends with Kathy reviving, Bruce finally telling her that he loves her, the dissolution of his friendship with the Devil and Bruce and Kathy driving off into the sunset. It is a film, at its heart, about a man who sells his soul for love.
The film was obviously playing with issues relating to sexuality but I wasn't unconsciously hinting at any underlying issues I had; it wasn't 'symptomatic' in the psychoanalytic sense. I was playing with these ideas consciously, deliberately. I was taking a risk but I knew I was taking a risk. In the film, Bruce starts sleeping with Kathy almost immediately but his friendship with the Devil is entirely non-sexual. So even then I knew the difference between sex and love.
I wrote the film as part of a screenwriting paper at University. About a year after I wrote the film, I submitted a treatment of it to an international competition. In 2003, I pitched it to a production company and it was accepted into pre-production. Then, shortly after, I was watching Letterman and saw him interview Jim Carrey. Carrey was there to promote the film Bruce Almighty. I felt a sinking feeling. I thought to myself, "Holy shit, they've stolen my idea!" It was the first moment in my life when I experienced real paranoia. I got in touch with my production company and asked them to withdraw my film from consideration – my film was no longer original. Bruce Almighty had rendered my film derivative. Bruce Almighty itself didn't seem like a obvious plagiarism of Bruce Sells Out – the main things it had in common with my film were the title and the fact that it was a comedy with religious themes – yet, when I watched it, all the way through I could detect hints of my original script. It seemed that the writers had taken my film and inverted everything, replacing the Devil with God and having Bruce's wife Grace bring Bruce back to life (via blood transfusion) rather than the reverse. I can't be sure whether someone, or several people, in Hollywood had read my script and ripped it off, but I do know that the writers of Bruce Almighty were paid a million dollars for it, the highest sum then ever expended for a screenplay. I have talked about it with my father since, a lawyer, and he has pointed out that there is no copyright on ideas and so, even if I had proof that people had pirated my film, there is nothing I could do about it.
My film was really a Gnostic film written many years before I knew anything about Gnosticism. God did not feature it it at all– in fact, early on, the Devil says something like, "God buggered off two-thousand years ago. Today there's only me." I was presenting a universe where the Devil existed and participated in the world but God did not. In moments of madness later in life, I would often wonder if the film had some significance that I hadn't realised when I wrote it. Sometimes in 2013 I would wonder if the illness I was suffering was a divine punishment for having written something sacrilegious. At other times I would wonder if the Devil in my film was really God in disguise – some commentators of Marlowe's Faust have pointed out that according to conventional church doctrine it is impossible to sell one's soul because all souls belong to God.
Bruce Sells Out also featured in the psychotic episode I experienced over the summer of 2009 and 2010. Somehow both Jess and Jon obtained copies and read it. When Jess read it, she particularly enjoyed the bit where Kathy suggests Bruce see a psychologist and Bruce says something like, "What are they going to tell me? My mother dropped me down a well when I was seven – thus my obsession with buckets!" Jon for some reason read it secretly in the basement of his house on New Year's Eve. Jon's connection with my screenplay, it became apparent, was that he had been involved with the Hollywood writers who had plagiarised it; he was tormented by feelings of guilt about this. But, even more than the fact that he had done wrong to someone who would later become his friend, he saw himself in the film. Was he Bruce, though, the failed stand-up comic? Or was he the Devil?
I feel that I should point out, perhaps redundantly, that in real life Jon Stewart's favourite singer is Bruce Springsteen.
So this notion of a triangle in which a man is split between a man and woman has been with me for some time. But I don't think it is a Girardian triangle. I think that the idea that desire is mimetic is specious, superficially attractive but utterly wrong. In my life, when I have fallen for someone, it has never been because I was imitating someone else. I always fell for the person. And if I can say one more thing – I detested Bruce Almighty. I think my film was much better.
In the previous post I discussed how, during an intense episode over the summer of 2009 and 2010, I was in a triangular relationship with these two, Jon and Jess. There have been many theories of desire, the most famous being that of Freud's, but a lesser known but still interesting theory is the one devised by philosopher and anthropologist Rene Girard. Girard argued that desire is mimetic and invented the notion of a triangle of desire. The three vertices of the triangle are the subject, the object and the mediator. The mediator desires the object and the subject learns to desire the object by imitating the mediator. Because both subject and mediator desire the same object, Girard argued, this can lead to mimetic rivalry and often violence. Girard proposes that this violence and the strategies required to mitigate such violence is at the root of all culture and even language itself.
Girard's theory is interesting but is it true? I don't think so – but it interests me because, particularly over that summer of 2009 and 2010, as I have said before, I was involved in a kind of triangle. It would be tempting to see this as a Girardian triangle in which I was the subject, Jess was the object and Jon the mediator. But this does correspond very accurately to what actually happened. When I first met Jess, and I'm talking here about the real girl rather than the one I imagined I was talking with in my mind later, and fell for her, I wasn't imitating anyone else's desire. I fell for her because she was smart, cool, pretty and also liked T.S Eliot. When Jon became involved he was an intermediary, a go-between, an imaginary best friend who could recognise and validate my relationship with Jess. Although in this story I was writing in my mind, he was as capable as me of recognising how loveable she was, Jon himself did not compete with me for Jess. In fact, Jon had his own girl, a half Native-American, half black woman he'd met at a buffet. He'd had a mid-life crisis and had left his wife for her but, towards the end of that summer, Jess and I persuaded Jon to leave this girl and return to his wife.
So I don't think Girard's theory is a satisfactory account. To put it simply, at this particular time in my life, I desperately needed a straight best friend and wing-man, and a girl to love. In a way Jon was a role model, not a mediator – I did not learn my love for Jess from him, it was more as if he learned to love Jess from me.
Girard's triangle and love triangles generally relate to sexuality and I would like to propose something now relevant to the treatment of the 'sexually muddled'. As I said before, I felt, when I first became a patient of the Mental Health Service, that I had been 'diagnosed' homosexual. This was appalling for me at the time and generally I just tried to put it out of my mind because I couldn't bear to think about it and because I didn't know how to correct this mistake. You'd think it would be simple to rectify an error like this but in fact it isn't. In 2008, I received 'therapy' of a sort from a middle aged Scottish nurse. At one of my first sessions with her she said something like, "I should be a young beautiful woman!" At the time I had no idea why she said this – I thought we would be talking about my parents' divorce when I was seven, that this was the proper topic of psychological therapy. I didn't understand why her looks would be relevant. Of course, what I know now and sort of knew then, was that she thought I was sexually muddled and obviously believed that the best way to treat sexually muddled men is to present them with beautiful female therapists and hope transference will cure them of their homosexual inclinations. This may be a common misperception among a lot of mental health professionals – but it is incredibly stupid. I wasn't sexually muddled but I was ill and I was in a terrible way under siege by those around me. I didn't need to be exposed to hot women to be 'cured'. What I really needed was a straight male friend who knew I was straight.
In 2012 and 2013, as I said in the previous post, the real Jess experienced a long awful period of psychosis. I sensed somehow the crisis she was going through, that she was on the verge of ego-death, that she might go over to the other side, and thought I should try to help her. Aside from reentering the service again to say that I was straight, I would send her song suggestions every day, the one to which she eventually replied being "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed – but I didn't really know what I was doing. My efforts to help her were complicated, obstructed, by the fact that I didn't just want her to be straight, I wanted her to be mine. Jealousy was a significant component in my feelings about her. But I didn't succeed in 'saving' her and the reason I didn't succeed was fundamentally because I was the wrong gender. Jess didn't need a man saying he loved her to straighten her out. She needed a straight female best friend and this was precisely what she didn't have.
If any readers of my blog have also read the film I wrote about her, The Hounds of Heaven, you'll have noticed that the Jess of that film has only one female friend, her key worker, and this woman is just a fake friend, not a real one. In the writings of the real Jess since, I have noticed that she has, now, an ambivalence towards women, at once a yearning for female friends and an aversion towards them, an indication of the cruelty inflicted upon her.
People need friends of the same gender but if you're in a situation where all such relationships are viewed as suspect, how can one acquire them?
At this point I would like to change the topic but only slightly, and talk about another film I wrote, way back in 2001, when I was only twenty-one. Bear with me reader. It was a comedy called Bruce Sells Out and was a modern riff on Faust indebted to both Marlowe's and Goethe's original plays. The protagonist of the film, an unsuccessful stand-up comedian, encounters and befriends the Devil after a night of dying on stage and general drunkenness and debauchery; shortly after he meets the Devil he somehow acquires a girlfriend. Much of the film shows him torn between his friendship with the Devil, who lives in congnito in Auckland running various tinnie-houses and a multitude of other business ventures, and his relationship with Kathy. The film thus presents a kind of love triangle although Bruce does not tell either party that he loves him or her - in fact his relationship with the Devil is fraught, tense, the Devil being, of course, the Devil and thus not to be trusted. At plot point 2, Bruce accidentally kills Kathy after an argument, enlists the Devil's help in disposing of the body and together they drive north to Cape Reianga to dump the body in the sea. Towards the end of the film, having reached Cape Reianga and emotional rock-bottom, Bruce decides to sell his soul to the Devil to bring Kathy back to life and the film ends with Kathy reviving, Bruce finally telling her that he loves her, the dissolution of his friendship with the Devil and Bruce and Kathy driving off into the sunset. It is a film, at its heart, about a man who sells his soul for love.
The film was obviously playing with issues relating to sexuality but I wasn't unconsciously hinting at any underlying issues I had; it wasn't 'symptomatic' in the psychoanalytic sense. I was playing with these ideas consciously, deliberately. I was taking a risk but I knew I was taking a risk. In the film, Bruce starts sleeping with Kathy almost immediately but his friendship with the Devil is entirely non-sexual. So even then I knew the difference between sex and love.
I wrote the film as part of a screenwriting paper at University. About a year after I wrote the film, I submitted a treatment of it to an international competition. In 2003, I pitched it to a production company and it was accepted into pre-production. Then, shortly after, I was watching Letterman and saw him interview Jim Carrey. Carrey was there to promote the film Bruce Almighty. I felt a sinking feeling. I thought to myself, "Holy shit, they've stolen my idea!" It was the first moment in my life when I experienced real paranoia. I got in touch with my production company and asked them to withdraw my film from consideration – my film was no longer original. Bruce Almighty had rendered my film derivative. Bruce Almighty itself didn't seem like a obvious plagiarism of Bruce Sells Out – the main things it had in common with my film were the title and the fact that it was a comedy with religious themes – yet, when I watched it, all the way through I could detect hints of my original script. It seemed that the writers had taken my film and inverted everything, replacing the Devil with God and having Bruce's wife Grace bring Bruce back to life (via blood transfusion) rather than the reverse. I can't be sure whether someone, or several people, in Hollywood had read my script and ripped it off, but I do know that the writers of Bruce Almighty were paid a million dollars for it, the highest sum then ever expended for a screenplay. I have talked about it with my father since, a lawyer, and he has pointed out that there is no copyright on ideas and so, even if I had proof that people had pirated my film, there is nothing I could do about it.
My film was really a Gnostic film written many years before I knew anything about Gnosticism. God did not feature it it at all– in fact, early on, the Devil says something like, "God buggered off two-thousand years ago. Today there's only me." I was presenting a universe where the Devil existed and participated in the world but God did not. In moments of madness later in life, I would often wonder if the film had some significance that I hadn't realised when I wrote it. Sometimes in 2013 I would wonder if the illness I was suffering was a divine punishment for having written something sacrilegious. At other times I would wonder if the Devil in my film was really God in disguise – some commentators of Marlowe's Faust have pointed out that according to conventional church doctrine it is impossible to sell one's soul because all souls belong to God.
Bruce Sells Out also featured in the psychotic episode I experienced over the summer of 2009 and 2010. Somehow both Jess and Jon obtained copies and read it. When Jess read it, she particularly enjoyed the bit where Kathy suggests Bruce see a psychologist and Bruce says something like, "What are they going to tell me? My mother dropped me down a well when I was seven – thus my obsession with buckets!" Jon for some reason read it secretly in the basement of his house on New Year's Eve. Jon's connection with my screenplay, it became apparent, was that he had been involved with the Hollywood writers who had plagiarised it; he was tormented by feelings of guilt about this. But, even more than the fact that he had done wrong to someone who would later become his friend, he saw himself in the film. Was he Bruce, though, the failed stand-up comic? Or was he the Devil?
I feel that I should point out, perhaps redundantly, that in real life Jon Stewart's favourite singer is Bruce Springsteen.
So this notion of a triangle in which a man is split between a man and woman has been with me for some time. But I don't think it is a Girardian triangle. I think that the idea that desire is mimetic is specious, superficially attractive but utterly wrong. In my life, when I have fallen for someone, it has never been because I was imitating someone else. I always fell for the person. And if I can say one more thing – I detested Bruce Almighty. I think my film was much better.
Wednesday, 11 January 2017
The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name
I said in the last post that that one would be ideally be my last about sexuality but I feel I need to write one more before I can move on from this awkward subject onto other fields. I feel I need to say something more about love. In that previous post I argued that historically and even today there have been different ways of defining sexuality, definitions that privilege different criteria. We can define sexuality in terms of experiences, or relationships (or lack thereof), or the criterion Kurt Cobain alluded to in "All Apologies", sexual arousal ("I wish I was like you/ Easily amused"). But none of these capture what is today considered the essence of sexuality. The prevailing wisdom these days, it seems to me and I'm sure I'm right, is to define sexuality in terms of love: heterosexuals love individuals of the opposite gender and homosexuals love individuals of the same gender. This way of pin-pointing the essence of sexuality has been around since at least the late nineteenth century, since Oscar Wilde coined the phrase "the love that dare not speak its name"– never mind that Wilde's intent in coining this phrase was utterly misunderstood at the time and has been misunderstood ever since. Homosexuality was the love that could never be made public. Until relatively recently this view of the essence of sexuality meant that some kinds of love were condemned as being degenerate or corrupt or morally reprehensible. Today though the love that once dared not speak its name has been 'rehabilitated' – we now celebrate love between two men or two women as an unequivocal good. This change is not altogether surprising. In contemporary culture we tend to elevate romantic or erotic love above all other virtues, regard it as the highest condition to which a person can aspire. Almost all our popular music today takes as its subject erotic love and so there is considerable incentive to view all love as admirable, beneficent.
Readers of my blog will know that I dislike defining sexuality in terms of love. Partly this is because the word 'love' is deeply ambiguous as I discussed in the post "Concerning Love". Partly it is because defining sexuality in terms of love can lead to serious disasters – as I shall show later in this essay. I thought in today's post I would spell out finally why I have such a serious objection to this approach to characterising sexuality. I feel first though that I should say something about my methodology. Philosophers such as Heidegger and Levinas, to pick at random two examples, simply make assertions about nature and reality and psychology without corroborating facts but this does not seem to me a persuasive way of arguing. Social scientists base their assertions on controlled studies and scientific experiments; Michel Foucault drew on written archives when writing his 'archeologies'; Derrida performed deconstructive interpretations on philosophical and literary texts. Apart from the serious philosophers, all these theorists seek to provide evidence in support of their claims. I feel that when proposing a hypothesis one needs to spell out the reasons why one believes it, and my preferred method is anecdotal. That is, I base my arguments on stories from my own life, from the lives of my friends, from what I know about the lives of public figures and on what I can usefully mine from literature. In other words I basically talk about myself. This methodology is not very scientific but autobiography has some utility I hope.
I am unsure how I defined sexuality when I was young, before I experienced my first psychotic episode in 2007. Like most ordinary heterosexuals, I didn't give it much thought. Sometimes I thought of sexuality in terms of experiences, sometimes in terms of love, sometimes in terms of public presentation, but I made no attempt to analyse or clarify my understanding of this dimension of human nature. I had no reason to. And then in 2007 I suffered a terrible psychotic episode; it felt at the time that homosexuality was being forced on me in some terrible way. I am not going to explain here what happened then but I do feel I should say that I understand now more or less the reasons for this catastrophe. At any rate, I formed the paranoid delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, sometimes in that first year believing that there were more gay people in the world than straight people.
In that first year of my illness, 2007, I thought of sexuality more in terms of identity than anything else. People were either gay or straight and I made no effort to dig deeper, to define what these descriptors meant; I simply applied the label to people in my mind, divided the world up into Us and Them. I thought George W. Bush was gay. I decided, based on an episode of David Letterman's show early in 2007 in which he interviewed Dr Phil, that Dr Phil was gay. I never told anyone that I thought I was living in a world of semi-closeted homosexuals because I thought if I outed anyone the people with power would have me killed. It was ridiculous of course, this all encompassing paranoid delusion, a delusion that spanned all history and global politics, this belief in a massive conspiracy of closet homosexuals. But there is a deep truth in the idea that sexuality is most fundamentally a matter of identity – although I shall not explore this idea in this post.
In later 2007, because I believed that there were more gay people than straight people in the world, I became hyper-alert to all possible signs of it, looking for indications of homosexuality among all those who made up both my immediate and extended environment. I started to define sexuality in terms of relationships rather than identity. I found something suspicious in all same-sex friendships. I decided, for instance, that the hosts of Mythbusters, Adam and Jamie, were in a homosexual relationship simply because they gave appearances of being such good friends. Yes, I know I was being stupid – but it is a stupidity that is fairly widespread (particularly, I might say, in the Mental Health Service). Just as there are people who argue that Leonardo de Vinci and Friedrich Nietzche must have been gay because neither married, there are people who find often something suspicious in close same sex friendships. For instance, those unsympathetic to John Nash see something untoward in his close relationship with another man in early adulthood (I apologise for not giving details about this but if the reader does a little research he'll find mention of it in articles about Nash). In the period just prior to his death by overdose, Philip Seymour Hoffman was the object of rumours that he was in a homosexual relationship with a close friend, David Barr Katz. This rumour was published by the National Enquirer and was discredited after Katz sued the paper, but the rumour must have been fairly prevalent before his death because it was reported by my local newspaper just after Hoffman died. In late 2008, as I described in the post "Just Some Stuff", I believe that my psychiatrist decided I was in a gay relationship simply because I had a male friend that I made the mistake of talking about with my therapist. The ridiculous thing about what happened then is that the friend I had at the time wasn't even a particularly good friend. What this suggests is that my delusion was simply an exaggerated form of a more general delusion, the idea that all same sex friendships have a sexual component.
In 2008 I was well and in 2009 I became 'ill' again. The psychotic episode I suffered in 2009 was very different from the episode I suffered in 2007. The delusion that the world was controlled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals featured only a little – but starting either early that year or December 2008 I started hearing voices. It was during 2009 that I adopted Jon Stewart as my imaginary friend. At the end of 2009 I met and fell for the girl I call Jess at a Hearing Voices group and then, over that summer, the summer of 2009 and 2010, I experienced my most intense psychotic episode, an episode to which I can't do justice here but which I have talked about before in the post "Me and Jon Stewart Part 2". During this period, I felt I was speaking telepathically to many people, including Obama, but the two people I spoke to the most were Jon and Jess. Jon was my best friend; Jess was the girl I wanted to be my girlfriend. I heard their voices in my head continuously during this time. The three of us were forever telling each other jokes. Jon's catchphrase seemed to be "dumbass!"; he would say this fairly frequently. When he first started doing it, I thought he was calling me a dumbass and then later I decided later that when the 'real' Jon laughed, I would hear him say "dumbass" in my head. It made me wonder, what did the others hear when I laughed? I decided, and I am a little embarrassed to say this, that what they heard me say was "I love you". So love, whether romantic or platonic, was a central feature of this almost spiritually or religiously intense period. Thoughts of homosexuality were never far away even then but having imaginary friends who knew I was straight helped. As a consequence of years of terrible stress I had retreated into a fantasy world.
The irony which I need to spell out is this. During my first episode I had seen all close same sex friendships as suspect. And I now had an imaginary male friend who I talked with almost continually – when I wasn't talking with Jess. It was fine, though, because I knew for a fact that Jon was straight and because Jess was usually present as well. One night when lying in bed I remember having an earnest conversation with Jess about the pros and cons of different forms of contraception. It was a silly and oddly innocent conversation. Jon took no part in the dialogue but I knew he was listening in and finding it quietly hilarious because every now and again I would hear him say "dumbass!" Bear with me reader – pretend with me for a moment that in some strange way I was speaking telepathically with Jon Stewart at that time– and ask what he got from his friendship with us. For me, I had a girlfriend and a straight best friend at a time in my life when I desperately needed them. For him, perhaps, he got to be sponsor and mediator of a twisted but strangely sweet love story, a love story between two very clever schizophrenics.
Towards the end of this period, Jess faded out and I was left with just Jon and Barack Obama. One night I felt that I needed to try to work out the cause of homosexuality – for some reason these two seemed to expect me to know and wanted me to explain it to them. Both of them seemed also to believe in something like a homosexual conspiracy. Shortly after this night, something fucked up happened and my friendship with Jon soured. The voices faded out entirely over the course of a couple of weeks. I put the fucked up experience in a box in my mind and didn't talk about it, or even think about it, for four years.
In itself this story is enough to suggest that defining sexuality in terms of love is extremely problematic. The episode I suffered over that summer of 2009 and 2010 involved me in an intensely close relationship with two imaginary people, a man and a woman, both of whom I loved. But there is a difference between sex and love. And perhaps one of the causes or distinguishing features of homosexuality is a confusion between the two.
Love by itself is not a sufficient criterion for defining sexuality. I feel I need to tell another story which underscores this claim, that there is a deep problem involved with defining sexuality solely in terms of love, a story not about me this time but about Jess. In 2011 I started occasionally seeing the real Jess in real life. On one of our first times together, she confided in me that she had told her female key worker (the mental health professional she had most to do with) that she loved her. She obviously knew that this was a significant admission because she immediately said, "I can't believe I'm telling you this!" I had been well for a long period of time, had a more normal understanding of the world, but hadn't at this time made sense of my own life, and what she had shared made me suspect that she might in fact be a lesbian. The year progressed and I became reassured that she wasn't. We fell out of contact at the beginning of the next year, 2012. That year I wrote a film about her (The Hounds of Heaven). In 2013, we got back in contact and I found that, in 2012, she had been confined to hospital for eight months and been very ill for much of that time. When I learned this I found it profoundly distressing. We hung out a few times that year and I found that the issue of 'love' was something that greatly occupied her mind and not in a good way. She was still very unwell. She was using the word 'love' quite liberally, for instance addressing her brother as 'love' on the phone. She talked of developing Stockholm Syndrome, the syndrome in which a captive falls in love with the people who are holding him or her prisoner. She asked me ingeniously if I had 'loved' Tony Fernando, the psychiatrist I had seen from 2007 until the beginning of 2012. (I replied honestly that I had loathed him.) I was dealing with my own issues at the time and I confided to her that in a way I had perhaps loved my best friend in Dunedin, where I studied in 1998 and 1999, but that there had been nothing sexual in my love for him; she visibly recoiled. Love had become a problematic concept for her (as it had for me) and I think even the word 'love' itself had been poisoned for her. I told her that I had readmitted myself to the Mental Health Service to get it on the record, finally, that I was straight and she told me, "I thought I was gay for a while – but now I think I'm just a late developer."
It seemed for a brief moment that we might actually go out but it didn't happen and, at the beginning of the next year, I was put under the Mental Health Act myself.
I need to venture out from facts to speculation at this point. I need to say what I think happened to my poor friend. I believe Jess had had the same condition as I had, as Kurt Cobain had, a condition I described in the post "An Anecdote; A Description of a Condition": I believe she was oppressed by thoughts about homosexuality without actually being gay herself. I believe that the 'declaration' she had made to her key worker in late 2010 or early 2011 was a statement of platonic love. I believe it had gone on her record. That those treating her, psychiatrists and nurses and social workers and occupational therapists, had decided that it was an expression of erotic love, that she was a lesbian and, unlike me, they had never corrected this mistake. And because she was utterly dependent on these people this misunderstanding had literally driven her mad. And that it was this that had led her to being sectioned and put in hospital for eight months. And furthermore this ongoing situation even at last instigated a crisis of sexual identity– in 2014, as I have said in a previous post, she got herself a girlfriend. It seems a simple thing for me to say but I don't think you, my reader, can fully appreciate the awfulness of the picture I am painting, a picture of a system that has the power to literally manufacture homosexuals.
If I'm right, and I feel I am, this goes to show two things. First, it shows the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the psychiatric profession. I know from my own experience how bad at keeping records these people are, how unwilling psychiatrists are to admit mistakes, how bogus and idiotic are the prevailing theories of mental illness. It is a system, if I can rant a little, entirely run by incompetents, hypocrites and liars. Consider, dear reader, the mendacity of a system in which 'professionals' decide who's gay and who's straight without ever actually asking the patients themselves. And in my case, and this is the thing which makes me think all psychiatrists should burn forever in hell, decided I was gay at my first appointment and continued to believe it for ten years even when I repeatedly said I wasn't.
Second, and to return to the topic of this post, this story again shows the problem with defining sexuality in terms of love. For all my life, I myself have been reluctant to use this word: even with my second long term girlfriend, I never told her that I loved her. Once, during my initial madness, feeling impelled at least to try to do the right thing by her, I told her that I loved her platonically, a bizarre thing to say to a girl I'd been sleeping with for four years. I am a little ashamed of this now but the truth was that I wasn't in love with her. I guess, like Lou Reed, I believe in "love, not given lightly". I'm picky. I loved Jess and, in a way, when I was very ill, I loved Jon Stewart. But people are different and to Jess the word "love" meant something more inclusive than it did to me. In a world in which we should love our friends and our family as well as our significant others, a world in which one should try to love one's neighbour as ourself, 'love' becomes a perilous word on which to base one's understanding of sexuality.
In this blog I have often had reason to talk about my life and I have told much of it in dribs and drabs. I might say one more thing to fill in at least one gap. When I became 'ill' again early in 2013, having found out that she had spent eight months in hospital in 2012, I was consumed by fear for Jess. My psychosis that year almost entirely revolved around my concern for her. I became involved in the System again, having spent a little over a year seeing a GP monthly instead of psychiatrists, because I wanted it finally on the record that I was straight – but more than that I thought by talking about Jess I could somehow help her, that I could vouch for her, that what I said about her would 'percolate' through the system and correct a false impression of her. At one of my hearings, this was reported about me as evidence of my supposed 'illness'. Perhaps, I admit, I was obsessed. But I believe I was right. Jess's madness, like mine, was not the result of faulty brain chemistry. Madness is a reaction to one's environment, to those around one; it is caused by profound existential stress. I failed to help her. I don't believe, through, that this was entirely my fault. I failed to help her because no one would believe me.
Readers of my blog will know that I dislike defining sexuality in terms of love. Partly this is because the word 'love' is deeply ambiguous as I discussed in the post "Concerning Love". Partly it is because defining sexuality in terms of love can lead to serious disasters – as I shall show later in this essay. I thought in today's post I would spell out finally why I have such a serious objection to this approach to characterising sexuality. I feel first though that I should say something about my methodology. Philosophers such as Heidegger and Levinas, to pick at random two examples, simply make assertions about nature and reality and psychology without corroborating facts but this does not seem to me a persuasive way of arguing. Social scientists base their assertions on controlled studies and scientific experiments; Michel Foucault drew on written archives when writing his 'archeologies'; Derrida performed deconstructive interpretations on philosophical and literary texts. Apart from the serious philosophers, all these theorists seek to provide evidence in support of their claims. I feel that when proposing a hypothesis one needs to spell out the reasons why one believes it, and my preferred method is anecdotal. That is, I base my arguments on stories from my own life, from the lives of my friends, from what I know about the lives of public figures and on what I can usefully mine from literature. In other words I basically talk about myself. This methodology is not very scientific but autobiography has some utility I hope.
I am unsure how I defined sexuality when I was young, before I experienced my first psychotic episode in 2007. Like most ordinary heterosexuals, I didn't give it much thought. Sometimes I thought of sexuality in terms of experiences, sometimes in terms of love, sometimes in terms of public presentation, but I made no attempt to analyse or clarify my understanding of this dimension of human nature. I had no reason to. And then in 2007 I suffered a terrible psychotic episode; it felt at the time that homosexuality was being forced on me in some terrible way. I am not going to explain here what happened then but I do feel I should say that I understand now more or less the reasons for this catastrophe. At any rate, I formed the paranoid delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, sometimes in that first year believing that there were more gay people in the world than straight people.
In that first year of my illness, 2007, I thought of sexuality more in terms of identity than anything else. People were either gay or straight and I made no effort to dig deeper, to define what these descriptors meant; I simply applied the label to people in my mind, divided the world up into Us and Them. I thought George W. Bush was gay. I decided, based on an episode of David Letterman's show early in 2007 in which he interviewed Dr Phil, that Dr Phil was gay. I never told anyone that I thought I was living in a world of semi-closeted homosexuals because I thought if I outed anyone the people with power would have me killed. It was ridiculous of course, this all encompassing paranoid delusion, a delusion that spanned all history and global politics, this belief in a massive conspiracy of closet homosexuals. But there is a deep truth in the idea that sexuality is most fundamentally a matter of identity – although I shall not explore this idea in this post.
In later 2007, because I believed that there were more gay people than straight people in the world, I became hyper-alert to all possible signs of it, looking for indications of homosexuality among all those who made up both my immediate and extended environment. I started to define sexuality in terms of relationships rather than identity. I found something suspicious in all same-sex friendships. I decided, for instance, that the hosts of Mythbusters, Adam and Jamie, were in a homosexual relationship simply because they gave appearances of being such good friends. Yes, I know I was being stupid – but it is a stupidity that is fairly widespread (particularly, I might say, in the Mental Health Service). Just as there are people who argue that Leonardo de Vinci and Friedrich Nietzche must have been gay because neither married, there are people who find often something suspicious in close same sex friendships. For instance, those unsympathetic to John Nash see something untoward in his close relationship with another man in early adulthood (I apologise for not giving details about this but if the reader does a little research he'll find mention of it in articles about Nash). In the period just prior to his death by overdose, Philip Seymour Hoffman was the object of rumours that he was in a homosexual relationship with a close friend, David Barr Katz. This rumour was published by the National Enquirer and was discredited after Katz sued the paper, but the rumour must have been fairly prevalent before his death because it was reported by my local newspaper just after Hoffman died. In late 2008, as I described in the post "Just Some Stuff", I believe that my psychiatrist decided I was in a gay relationship simply because I had a male friend that I made the mistake of talking about with my therapist. The ridiculous thing about what happened then is that the friend I had at the time wasn't even a particularly good friend. What this suggests is that my delusion was simply an exaggerated form of a more general delusion, the idea that all same sex friendships have a sexual component.
In 2008 I was well and in 2009 I became 'ill' again. The psychotic episode I suffered in 2009 was very different from the episode I suffered in 2007. The delusion that the world was controlled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals featured only a little – but starting either early that year or December 2008 I started hearing voices. It was during 2009 that I adopted Jon Stewart as my imaginary friend. At the end of 2009 I met and fell for the girl I call Jess at a Hearing Voices group and then, over that summer, the summer of 2009 and 2010, I experienced my most intense psychotic episode, an episode to which I can't do justice here but which I have talked about before in the post "Me and Jon Stewart Part 2". During this period, I felt I was speaking telepathically to many people, including Obama, but the two people I spoke to the most were Jon and Jess. Jon was my best friend; Jess was the girl I wanted to be my girlfriend. I heard their voices in my head continuously during this time. The three of us were forever telling each other jokes. Jon's catchphrase seemed to be "dumbass!"; he would say this fairly frequently. When he first started doing it, I thought he was calling me a dumbass and then later I decided later that when the 'real' Jon laughed, I would hear him say "dumbass" in my head. It made me wonder, what did the others hear when I laughed? I decided, and I am a little embarrassed to say this, that what they heard me say was "I love you". So love, whether romantic or platonic, was a central feature of this almost spiritually or religiously intense period. Thoughts of homosexuality were never far away even then but having imaginary friends who knew I was straight helped. As a consequence of years of terrible stress I had retreated into a fantasy world.
The irony which I need to spell out is this. During my first episode I had seen all close same sex friendships as suspect. And I now had an imaginary male friend who I talked with almost continually – when I wasn't talking with Jess. It was fine, though, because I knew for a fact that Jon was straight and because Jess was usually present as well. One night when lying in bed I remember having an earnest conversation with Jess about the pros and cons of different forms of contraception. It was a silly and oddly innocent conversation. Jon took no part in the dialogue but I knew he was listening in and finding it quietly hilarious because every now and again I would hear him say "dumbass!" Bear with me reader – pretend with me for a moment that in some strange way I was speaking telepathically with Jon Stewart at that time– and ask what he got from his friendship with us. For me, I had a girlfriend and a straight best friend at a time in my life when I desperately needed them. For him, perhaps, he got to be sponsor and mediator of a twisted but strangely sweet love story, a love story between two very clever schizophrenics.
Towards the end of this period, Jess faded out and I was left with just Jon and Barack Obama. One night I felt that I needed to try to work out the cause of homosexuality – for some reason these two seemed to expect me to know and wanted me to explain it to them. Both of them seemed also to believe in something like a homosexual conspiracy. Shortly after this night, something fucked up happened and my friendship with Jon soured. The voices faded out entirely over the course of a couple of weeks. I put the fucked up experience in a box in my mind and didn't talk about it, or even think about it, for four years.
In itself this story is enough to suggest that defining sexuality in terms of love is extremely problematic. The episode I suffered over that summer of 2009 and 2010 involved me in an intensely close relationship with two imaginary people, a man and a woman, both of whom I loved. But there is a difference between sex and love. And perhaps one of the causes or distinguishing features of homosexuality is a confusion between the two.
Love by itself is not a sufficient criterion for defining sexuality. I feel I need to tell another story which underscores this claim, that there is a deep problem involved with defining sexuality solely in terms of love, a story not about me this time but about Jess. In 2011 I started occasionally seeing the real Jess in real life. On one of our first times together, she confided in me that she had told her female key worker (the mental health professional she had most to do with) that she loved her. She obviously knew that this was a significant admission because she immediately said, "I can't believe I'm telling you this!" I had been well for a long period of time, had a more normal understanding of the world, but hadn't at this time made sense of my own life, and what she had shared made me suspect that she might in fact be a lesbian. The year progressed and I became reassured that she wasn't. We fell out of contact at the beginning of the next year, 2012. That year I wrote a film about her (The Hounds of Heaven). In 2013, we got back in contact and I found that, in 2012, she had been confined to hospital for eight months and been very ill for much of that time. When I learned this I found it profoundly distressing. We hung out a few times that year and I found that the issue of 'love' was something that greatly occupied her mind and not in a good way. She was still very unwell. She was using the word 'love' quite liberally, for instance addressing her brother as 'love' on the phone. She talked of developing Stockholm Syndrome, the syndrome in which a captive falls in love with the people who are holding him or her prisoner. She asked me ingeniously if I had 'loved' Tony Fernando, the psychiatrist I had seen from 2007 until the beginning of 2012. (I replied honestly that I had loathed him.) I was dealing with my own issues at the time and I confided to her that in a way I had perhaps loved my best friend in Dunedin, where I studied in 1998 and 1999, but that there had been nothing sexual in my love for him; she visibly recoiled. Love had become a problematic concept for her (as it had for me) and I think even the word 'love' itself had been poisoned for her. I told her that I had readmitted myself to the Mental Health Service to get it on the record, finally, that I was straight and she told me, "I thought I was gay for a while – but now I think I'm just a late developer."
It seemed for a brief moment that we might actually go out but it didn't happen and, at the beginning of the next year, I was put under the Mental Health Act myself.
I need to venture out from facts to speculation at this point. I need to say what I think happened to my poor friend. I believe Jess had had the same condition as I had, as Kurt Cobain had, a condition I described in the post "An Anecdote; A Description of a Condition": I believe she was oppressed by thoughts about homosexuality without actually being gay herself. I believe that the 'declaration' she had made to her key worker in late 2010 or early 2011 was a statement of platonic love. I believe it had gone on her record. That those treating her, psychiatrists and nurses and social workers and occupational therapists, had decided that it was an expression of erotic love, that she was a lesbian and, unlike me, they had never corrected this mistake. And because she was utterly dependent on these people this misunderstanding had literally driven her mad. And that it was this that had led her to being sectioned and put in hospital for eight months. And furthermore this ongoing situation even at last instigated a crisis of sexual identity– in 2014, as I have said in a previous post, she got herself a girlfriend. It seems a simple thing for me to say but I don't think you, my reader, can fully appreciate the awfulness of the picture I am painting, a picture of a system that has the power to literally manufacture homosexuals.
If I'm right, and I feel I am, this goes to show two things. First, it shows the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the psychiatric profession. I know from my own experience how bad at keeping records these people are, how unwilling psychiatrists are to admit mistakes, how bogus and idiotic are the prevailing theories of mental illness. It is a system, if I can rant a little, entirely run by incompetents, hypocrites and liars. Consider, dear reader, the mendacity of a system in which 'professionals' decide who's gay and who's straight without ever actually asking the patients themselves. And in my case, and this is the thing which makes me think all psychiatrists should burn forever in hell, decided I was gay at my first appointment and continued to believe it for ten years even when I repeatedly said I wasn't.
Second, and to return to the topic of this post, this story again shows the problem with defining sexuality in terms of love. For all my life, I myself have been reluctant to use this word: even with my second long term girlfriend, I never told her that I loved her. Once, during my initial madness, feeling impelled at least to try to do the right thing by her, I told her that I loved her platonically, a bizarre thing to say to a girl I'd been sleeping with for four years. I am a little ashamed of this now but the truth was that I wasn't in love with her. I guess, like Lou Reed, I believe in "love, not given lightly". I'm picky. I loved Jess and, in a way, when I was very ill, I loved Jon Stewart. But people are different and to Jess the word "love" meant something more inclusive than it did to me. In a world in which we should love our friends and our family as well as our significant others, a world in which one should try to love one's neighbour as ourself, 'love' becomes a perilous word on which to base one's understanding of sexuality.
In this blog I have often had reason to talk about my life and I have told much of it in dribs and drabs. I might say one more thing to fill in at least one gap. When I became 'ill' again early in 2013, having found out that she had spent eight months in hospital in 2012, I was consumed by fear for Jess. My psychosis that year almost entirely revolved around my concern for her. I became involved in the System again, having spent a little over a year seeing a GP monthly instead of psychiatrists, because I wanted it finally on the record that I was straight – but more than that I thought by talking about Jess I could somehow help her, that I could vouch for her, that what I said about her would 'percolate' through the system and correct a false impression of her. At one of my hearings, this was reported about me as evidence of my supposed 'illness'. Perhaps, I admit, I was obsessed. But I believe I was right. Jess's madness, like mine, was not the result of faulty brain chemistry. Madness is a reaction to one's environment, to those around one; it is caused by profound existential stress. I failed to help her. I don't believe, through, that this was entirely my fault. I failed to help her because no one would believe me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)