The intellectual interest that has preoccupied me most of my whole life, especially when I studied English literature a long time ago, has been interpretation, the interpretation of poems and novels and films and pop music, the last being, let's recognise this, poetry for the masses. I enjoy interpretation and in the last several months the hidden meanings of many pop songs, meanings almost always to do with sex and relationships, seem to just leap out at me in ways they hadn't in the past. There is a however a problem with interpretation – poems, say, seem to act directly on the unconscious minds of readers, bypassing their conscious minds, and so sometimes one can worry that setting out explicitly the meaning of a poem is to kill it. This is why you should never ask a poet to explain the meaning of a poem she has written and probably why the literary theorist Susan Sontag wrote her famous essay, "Against Interpretation". On the other hand, I think people like to read interpretations, that interpretations can often deepen people's appreciation of poems and novels and films and pop music. Years ago I kept a blog called Persiflage in which at one time I had written a fairly rigorous interpretation of the beautiful poem "Wet Casements" by John Ashbery. I thought this blog had ceased to exist but last year I found that someone somewhere had read the interpretation and had commented on it. In his comment the reader said that he had always loved this poem and had guessed that it had something to do with the Kafka story "A Country Doctor" but that he had never quite understood what it was about. He had greatly appreciated my interpretation and said, "Thank you" – his thanks breathed total sincerity. Presumably, rather than killing the poem I had helped this reader enjoy the poem even more.
Given this uncertainty about the moral value of interpretation, it may be that the best way to present an interpretation of a poem or song to others is to hint at the proper reading rather than to strip the poem or song completely bare. In recent posts I have hinted at proper readings of The Waste Land by TS Eliot and "I Am Invisible" by Janet Frame but I didn't really say exactly what I actually believe these poems to be about. Recently, since writing the post about it, I reread The Waste Land and for the first time in my life felt I actually totally understood it; I feel exceedingly stupid that I didn't understand it when I was twenty-two. The disquietude I feel with respect to the Janet Frame poem is that my understanding of this poem does not seem rational because it felt to me as though Frame was somehow commenting on my own life, even on my own recent life, even though the events I am thinking of occurred before I had read the poem and so could not have been influenced by it; it is a life Janet Frame (surely) could have known nothing about.
I want to talk about Frame again and say something more about the poem I quoted. In it Frame that says she is invisible (like schizophrenics in the contemporary world and like ghosts) and then goes on to say:
Like decisions.
Like elsewhere.
Like institutions far from the road labelled Scenic Drive.
In the previous essay I speculated that Frame might have been aware of the up-market Respite Facility near Scenic Drive in Titirangi called Mind Matters that both Jess and I had spent time at although separately. The problem with this interpretation is that Frame may well have written this poem decades before Mind Matters opened – it is not easy, reading The Goose Bath, to know when particular poems in it were written; nor am I sure when Mind Matters was first established. Perhaps there is a more 'rational' explanation for the reference to 'Scenic Drive', perhaps a more sensible literary critic might say that it is a kind of pun (the seen vs the unseen). But I do not find this parsing satisfactory. Or perhaps it was a road called Scenic Drive where Frame was living when she wrote the poem – I suppose this might be possible but I don't know. In the previous essay I also speculated that perhaps Frame might have seen in Mind Matters a positive direction for the future of the Mental Health Service but I wasn't being completely honest. To me this line has an ominous quality, a hint of something dreadful, a horror hidden almost in plain sight, seems to be pointing towards some hidden menace. There is something sinister about it. This feeling is induced by the connotations surrounding the words "institutions" and "labelled". Those of us interested in psychiatric practice understand the eddies that coldly whip around this word "labelled": the word "label" is a loaded word. All psychiatrists do is label people, stamp clinical brands on people's foreheads, labels that have a pernicious effect on those labelled. In the 'seventies studies were carried out that showed that the people most likely to recover from schizophrenia were 'label rejectors', people who accepted the label for a time and then later rejected it. I have seen evidence that this is still true today. In her collaborative memoir, Finding Hope in the Lived Experience of Psychosis, Patte Randall, a woman some years older than me who had believed herself schizophrenic almost her whole life (even though her bouts of psychosis were far shorter than mine) says toward the end of the book, "I no longer believe that I have schizophrenia". One reason so few schizophrenics recover today is that the dogma that schizophrenia is a congenital incurable lifelong condition has become so entrenched among psychiatrists that it has become almost impossible to reject the label.
There is stuff I find in "I Am Invisible" that may not have been consciously intended by Frame; in the end I cannot, therefore, present a fully 'rational' reading of it although I shall hint at an 'irrational' reading of it later.
The Goose Bath, from which I took this poem, contains many poems obviously written over a long period of time. I recommend it highly to readers, both here in New Zealand and in other countries. I think the poems are all works of genius. They are very well arranged. Easier poems appear earlier on and more complex poems later. It is divided into sections with common themes – there is, for instance, a section containing poems concerning Frame's responses to classical music. One section is all poems set in America – Frame had travelled to the United States after the success of her first novel Owls Do Cry and had obviously lived for a while in Baltimore. These poems include references to quintessentially American things like copperhead snakes and birch trees. The poems set in New Zealand, with their references to New Zealand cultural and natural fixtures like Plunket and pahutakawas may be less easily understood by Americans. If you do read her book, it is worth remembering when Frame probably wrote these poems. There is a poem in the American section concerning electric sliding doors, something that to a New Zealander in the 1960s would have been a novelty. There is a very simple jokey poem called "Fleas are Fleas", a poem quite a lot lighter than most of the poems in the book which for my own whimsical reasons I want to quote:
Fleas are fleas
because they do as they please,
they hop, do not sneeze,
and suck blood
from places where it is rude
for a flea
to be.
The reason I quoted this poem is that, even here, where you wouldn't expect it, there is a hint of Frame's capacious and idiosyncratic intellect. "Fleas are Fleas" is alluding to a very sexy poem written in 1633 by John Donne, "The Flea", a work described by Wikipedia as an "erotic metaphysical poem". I haven't yet read all the poems in The Goose Bath (I have been randomly sampling them) but every poem seems to me to be hinting at something profound, sometimes something dark and certainly often something metaphysical.
In 2002, when I was studying for my Masters in English, I took a paper in New Zealand Literature and, as part of the course, read three novels by Janet Frame, Faces in the Water, Living in the Maniatoto, and The Carpathians. The course was taught by Terry Sturm, who was a friend of Frame and who had repeatedly albeit unsuccessfully nominated her for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I recall him saying that Frame had anticipated Postmodernism – of course the idea that reality is a kind of social construction might come naturally to someone who had probably experienced psychosis. I also recall Sturm saying that people didn't realise that Frame had a keen sense of humour. If I remember rightly, there was a recording of Frame reading a short story involving potatoes and the cooked and the uncooked (a binary opposition found in the theories of structuralist anthropologist Levi-Strauss although it is possible that Frame was not aware of structuralism) and giggling at jokes other people probably weren't even aware she was making. Frame, for good reason, dealt with a lot of anxiety and was very shy. I got very good grades that year – except for the paper on New Zealand Literature. I failed it. I had decided that Terry Sturm didn't like me and, as a result of my own anxiety, had stopped attending lectures and didn't submit one of the two essays required for the course.
I might talk about 'schizophrenics' more generally and about a woman I knew, the relevance of this apparent digression being something that will become more apparent as the essay proceeds. There are certain vague stereotypes we all associate with the social kind 'schizophrenic' but in reality people diagnosed schizophrenic are people, as diverse as ordinary people and on average no smarter and no dumber than ordinary people. I met Katrina at a Coffee Group in 2010 or 2011 and found her to be a lovely person with an easy smile. Years later she was briefly receiving a monthly injection at the same time I was, not actually for very long, and she told me a little about her life. She had experienced psychosis when she was a teenager, been totally well and off medication for ten years, and then experienced another episode. Because she didn't want to take medication when she had begun to experience psychosis again, her psychiatrist (Antony Fernando) had prescribed fish-oil capsules; she told me that for a while she was taking fifteen omega-3 capsules a day. Eventually she (briefly) switched to actual antipsychotic medication. Katrina told me that she believed her first episode to have had a lot to do with the peer group with which she was socialising at the time; she also told me that she had during this first episode thought for a while that she was a cat, which I found interesting. She also told me that she would speak with celebrities in her head, celebrities like Rihanna. Katrina shared with me an insight that could be possibly described as achromatic. She told me that she didn't think the people she talked to were really the stars they claimed to be; rather, she told me, she thought they were guardian angels pretending to be celebrities.
Starting in January 2009, I would talk with famous people in my head. The first person I spoke with, readers will remember, was George W. Bush, very shortly after he had left office. Later in the year I adopted Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend. Over the New Zealand summer of 2009 and 2010, I spoke with many people, including Barack Obama, but my main imaginary friends were Jon Stewart and the girl I call Jess, who I'd met at the Hearing Voices group I have talked about before. I hung out with the real girl a few times in 2011 and in 2012 wrote my screenplay about her. Of course in saying all this I am simply recycling things I have talked about many times previously. However there is something I perhaps have not talked about before. In the screenplay, in the scene in which Jon Stewart addresses Jess directly from out of the television, he calls her "Jess Frame". The reason I gave Jess this surname was because the real girl, like Janet Frame, was also a gifted poet, was also diagnosed schizophrenic, and lived in Takapuna where Frame had lived after she was released from hospital and where, in a hutch out the back of Frank Sargeson's house, she had written her first novel Owls Do Cry. I also decided to give the girl Frame's surname because I had an intuition that Frame was a straight woman who had been misdiagnosed a lesbian, and, I know it sounds incredible, now strongly believe that I was right.
In 2013 I became ill again and in early 2014 was put under the Compulsory Treatment Order that I was only released from early this year. Over the last ten years I often experienced fairly severe psychological distress – I kind of had intrusive thoughts concerning the people treating me. I would for instance experience thoughts saying things like, "Today Simon Judkins died" or "Today Jennifer Murphy resigned." These thoughts weren't auditory hallucinations and if they were 'voices' they didn't seem to belong to anyone. These thoughts were my reaction to the terrible stress of having been officially diagnosed schizophrenic and having been put under the Mental Health Act for truthfully saying I was heterosexual, and possibly also an emotional reaction to medication induced cognitive impairment. I guess the term psychiatrists would use for these kinds of cognitions is 'thought insertion'. These intrusive thoughts went away perhaps four or five years ago. At night, while lying in bed, I would again sometimes still talk with my imaginary friends. On one occasion in 2016, I spoke with Stephen Colbert and a week or two later spoke with John Oliver. Mainly though over the last ten years it has been Jon Stewart and the girl I call Jess who I heard in head. Usually Jon would just say, "Where are you now, my friend?" Of the two, it has actually been the girl I call Jess who was the most important voice. On a couple of occasions she would warn me the day before something distressing was to occur. She would sometimes give me important advice. Although I would often pretend that they really existed when speaking with them, during the day I would tend to kind of bracket out these experiences; the fact that I occasionally spoke with people at night while lying in bed didn't affect my day to day life. They were friends who understood my situation when no-one else did. Sometimes, years ago, I thought it might be the real girl who was talking to me – I thought she might be reading this blog and communicating with me telepathically about it. Eventually though I realised that this voice, that I thought belonged to Jess, knew things about my life that the real girl couldn't possibly know. I would say that my subconscious mind had conjured this voice up and, for some reason, had decided to clothe itself in the persona of the girl I had known (I suppose that this would be the most 'rational' explanation) except for the fact that it seemed that this voice seemed to know the immediate future. It seemed to be a guardian angel pretending to be the girl I knew (and wish I could know again). Early this year, the night before the consultation at which my psychiatrist decided, unexpectedly, to release me from the Act, without giving any explanation for his decision, I heard her again in my head. She said, "Usually I warn you when something bad is going to happen."
I have been quite 'well' for some time. I think the clincher was the post about The Wasteland in which I endorsed Kamala Harris. In this post I killed myself. I have been trying to kill myself since 2007 but I didn't know how to do it. Of course, when I say 'kill myself' I am speaking metaphorically but hopefully at least some of my readers will know what I mean. Not long after this I read the poem "I Am Invisible", the poem I quoted in the previous post. After I had read this poem, and I think after I had quoted it in the previous post, while lying in bed during the day I heard the voice I call Jess in my head. She said, "I thought you would have worked it out."
Although I shall come back to Janet Frame later, I would like to switch to a different although related topic. I want now to talk about a couple of songs by Pink Floyd, one of the great rock bands of the twentieth century, a band whose success depended in no small measure on the effect its first lead singer Syd Barrett had on the rest of the band. Syd Barrett's story is devastating and there is value in reading about Barrett's life on Wikipedia. Hopefully the entry on Barrett won't change tomorrow. The real girl Jess is based on kept an enormous poster of Syd Barrett on the wall of her hutch back in 2011, not a picture of him when he was older and had shaved off all his hair including his eyebrows but rather a picture of him when he was still young and cool, still very good looking, before he had lost his mind. What I want to do now is to quote and interpret two songs from the end of Pink Floyd's first great success The Dark Side of the Moon, released in 1975, the first of the two flowing into the next, the first called "Brain Damage" and the second called "Eclipse":
The lunatic is on the grass.
The lunatic is on the grass.
Remembering games, and daisy chains, and laughs,
Got to keep the loonies on the path.
The lunatic is in the hall.
The lunatics are in my hall.
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paperboy brings more.
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon,
And if there is no more room upon the hill,
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too,
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.
The lunatic is in my head.
The lunatic is in my head.
You take the blade, you make the change,
You rearrange me 'till I'm sane.
You lock the door and throw away the key,
There's someone in my head but it's not me.
And if the cloud bursts thunder in your ear,
You shout and no one seems to hear,
And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes,
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.
All that you touch and all that you see
All that you taste, all you feel
And all that you love and all that you hate
All you distrust, all you save
And all that you give and all that you deal
And all that you buy, beg, borrow, or steal
And all you create and all you destroy
And all that you do and all that you say
And all that you eat and everyone you meet
And all that you slight and everyone you fight
And all that is now and all that is gone
And all that's to come and everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon
I am not going to give an absolutely rigorous line-by-line interpretation of these songs but just make a few observations about them for people who might miss things. The word 'lunatic' is etymologically related to the word 'lunar' – in olden times madness was supposed to connected somehow to the moon. In 1975 there was a stereotype associated with madmen that they would sit in parks and make daisy chains – I don't know how this stereotype arose or why it went away. There is obviously a reference to newspapers arriving daily at the singer's doorstep containing articles about schizophrenics. The most important part of the song "Brain Damage" though, its core plot point and something that modern listeners often miss, is set out most clearly in the verse which talks about a blade. Roger Waters and David Gilmour are referring to lobotomies. Even though this practice had been, I think, largely phased out by 1975, the idea of lobotomies still featured strongly in the popular imagination back then. People online pretend that psychiatrists had a valid scientific rationale for lobotomising people but this is not true. I believe that the first lobotomy was performed in 1935 but it might have been earlier: back then people had almost no understanding of the human brain at all. Some sadistic psychiatrist one day simply decided that it might be fun to deliberately inflict brain damage on people feared and ostracised by society, people often thought of as animals, to see what would happen, and the practice caught on. One technique was to stick a needle through the ocular cavity of the patient and then swish around the frontal cortex like mixing a martini. It caught on because it seemed to make patients more pliable and compliant (although it also led to severe cognitive deficits in a number of areas including self-reflection), because psychiatrists had no better tools at their disposal, and because of the prevailing nihilistic materialism embraced as scripture by doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists at the time, a view that mental illnesses were organic diseases that required organic solutions, a view that only dissipated in the 1960s when New Age hippy countercultural ideas of 'peace, love and understanding' became more fashionable. The man who came up with lobotomies described the procedure as "soul-surgery" – but I think lobotomies separated people's souls from their bodies. I think lobotomies "locked the door and threw away the key". It is tempting to say that lobotomies exiled people to "the dark side of the moon" but I don't think this is what Waters and Gilmour meant by this phrase - I have a hunch about what "the dark side of the moon" signifies but it is not something I can easily articulate.
The most famous fact about Janet Frame's life, the fact that everyone knows even if they know nothing else, is that she was almost lobotomised in the 1950s, a catastrophe that was only averted because a book of short stories she had written had unexpectedly won a prestigious award. The psychiatrist treating her apparently told her, according to her autobiography, "I want you to stay as you are. I don't want to see you changed." Later, when she was living out the back of Frank Sargeson's house, she would alarm him every morning by describing the terrible nightmares she had nightly – and who can blame her? Her brush with a more real kind of death, a death of the soul, might have influenced the lines in "I Am Invisible" in which she talks of "a world in which decisions about being and non-being/ are made by light".
What is the significance of the reference to "the hill"? In 1970, John Lennon, after the dissolution of the Beatles, released the song "Working Class Hero", a song which has some relevance to any halfway good interpretation of "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse". I am not going to quote all the lyrics of "Working Class Hero" but only the most pertinent verse.
There's room at the top they're telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like all the folk on the hill.
A working class hero is something to be.
In Fleetwood Mac's Tango In The Night, Lindsay Buckingham also talks about a hill. The song is "Big Love", a title that also named a TV series readers might remember about a Mormon man and his three wives. It is called "Big Love" because Buckingham is saying that he can love more than one woman at once; I think in it Buckingham is anticipating Elon Musk.
You said that you loved me
And that you always will.
Oh you begged me to keep you
In that house on the hill.
It seems to me that "the hill" is a metaphor for the social level monopolised by the elite, the rich and powerful, and that there must be a tradition of rock musicians using this metaphor perhaps starting with Lennon. Of course, John Lennon, the members of Pink Floyd, and the members of Fleetwood Mac were themselves rich and influential or aspiring to be so and so "the hill" might have concerned them more than it concerns most ordinary people. However the Pink Floyd songs seem to be saying something much deeper than John Lennon is in"Working Class Hero", something a lot more arcane: they seem to be positing a spooky connection between the people at the bottom of society, the lunatics, and the people at the top, the people on the hill. In early 2010, for a period, I conversed exclusively in my mind with Jon Stewart and Barack Obama. The impression I had at the time was that they were talking with me because I was the only person either could really talk to. Of course I am not saying that I was literally communicating with either Jon Stewart or Barack Obama but the lasting effect of these couple of weeks is that I have since viewed Obama as a real person with his own virtues and flaws, a person I could relate to, even a kind of friend, although he is undoubtedly much smarter than I am. I guess I entertained the delusion that I was talking with them partly because I had the grandiose notion that I was somehow special. The conception is interesting: a 'schizophrenic' wandering around a music festival at Mt Smart Stadium in Auckland in January 2010 by himself, in constant conversation with a popular and influential comedian/political pundit from New Jersey and the then United States president, looking for a girl he has met at a Hearing Voices group and who he is convinced is somehow present somewhere in the crowd. It was a world that my celebrity friends could never experience themselves firsthand, a world of ordinary people that their fame isolated them from. The insight I think I had then was that the real people who I thought I was talking to were probably both voice-hearers themselves – and this is something else we can possibly infer from the Pink Floyd songs. The people on the top of the hill are as crazy as the people at the bottom. Roger Waters and David Gilmour are prophesying a future in which the "dam breaks open", in which the madness spills out and down the hill to infect others, a world in which they themselves and perhaps their audience will go mad and potentially be forcibly lobotomised.
I started watching the Daily Show in 2008 and people may forget what Jon Stewart was like then. There was an intensity, a ferocity, an anger directed at the people he opposed, albeit an anger always tempered by his lewd sense of humour and engaging self-deprecation. A righteous indignation. One of the first interviews I saw him do back then was with Tony Blair, Blair having recently left politics and converted to Catholicism. This interview is impressive and should be viewable on Youtube. In later years Jon Stewart I believe suffered his own spell of mental illness but has come back now older, wiser, and much more mellow than he used to be. He almost always seems to express the exact same opinions I had formed – such as, for instance, when in 2015 he said that Boyhood should have won the Oscar for Best Picture. It is almost uncanny. When our opinions differ it is usually because he is ahead of me. More rationally one should say perhaps that he often expresses views that very many people share but do not realise that they share with others. I know of a number of Mental Health patients here in New Zealand who really like Jon Stewart because he speaks to them (metaphorically). It is also worth comparing the world as it was in say 2008 with the world as it is now. Back then social media existed but was far less prominent than it is today. The major issue back then was still the war in Iraq. Many on the Left, such as Jon Stewart and the journalists I read here in New Zealand, couldn't understand why Bush had decided to invade Iraq. Sometimes it seemed as though there was some kind of hidden conspiracy or secret cabal behind it. Where was the truth? What were the real motivations? There was a mystery, a dark mystique associated with the Bush administration, a sense of shadowy puppeteers pulling strings. Was it all really about oil? When I was 'ill' many years ago I sometimes thought that Bush had invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussain was doing something unspeakably terrible to the population of his country, that it was so terrible Bush couldn't tell the American public or the world about it, and that this is why they had cooked up the 'weapons of mass destruction' pretext to send in troops. I think I was giving Bush too much credit. By contrast today, the US has a president who puts every single dumb stray thought on Twitter or rambles about it during one of his endless rallies. There is no mystery or mystique associated with Trump at all. There is thus a perception today, partly because of social media and Youtube, that the social gap between the top and the bottom has narrowed. Impoverished Americans genuinely believe that Donald Trump is their friend, that even though he is about to become president again he is not part of the deep state and is as ignorant of the conspiracies it is engaged in as they are. In reality there are still underhand dealings and secret handshakes and covert donations and veiled promises and threats occurring in smoky rooms over port and cigars in clubs at the top of the hill as there always have been; economically, in all the ways that really matter, the gap between the top and bottom is larger than ever, while the inner workings of government go completely undiscussed by a mainstream media that is only interested in optics and soundbites and manipulating public opinion. One can only hope that Trump will nevertheless genuinely try to help the people who like him and got him elected. Trump has always liked the people who say they like him. It would be nice to think that there can be genuine communication between the top and the bottom as opposed to something possibly illusory, delusional.
I want to come back to Janet Frame. I made an error in the previous essay when I said that Frame never published any poetry while she was alive – she published one slim book called The Pocket Mirror in 1967. I can remember reading a poem called "The Dead" many years ago, one of several poems by Frame with that title, and another poem called "O Lung Flowering Like a Tree", both of which I found in an anthology of New Zealand verse, and the latter of which I wanted to teach at Secondary School. There is a difference in style between these poems and the poems collected in The Goose Bath. In the second volume of her autobiography, An Angel at my Table, she includes a number of poems she wrote when she was young – these poems are so difficult as to be almost indecipherable, almost as though she had deliberately chosen to put in her most obscurantist poems. There are other things about An Angel at my Table that are odd. In it she is quite disparaging of Frank Sargeson but there are poems in The Goose Bath (which remember was published posthumously), poems about Sargeson and addressed to him, which suggest she was in reality quite fond of him and valued his friendship. I noticed that An Angel at My Table has become a popular pick at local bookshops again but I kind of wish New Zealanders might instead consider reading one of her novels instead. To put it bluntly, Frame had an agenda when she wrote An Angel at My Table. She was deliberately trying to kill herself. Therefore An Angel at My Table may not have been absolutely honest. Years later, the famous New Zealand historian Michael King wrote a biography of Frame called Wrestling with The Angel, a book which I believe is taught in psychology courses around the world – though I haven't read it, the title hints that King must have found Frame a somewhat intractable subject. Of course the mythology that grew up around Janet Frame was that she was a creative free spirit who had been misdiagnosed schizophrenic and almost lobotomised as a result – I think it is possible to say today though that she might indeed have experienced madness or psychosis, perhaps as a result of her diagnosis and treatment, but recovered. Perhaps this is the secret that Frame was trying not to divulge, to King or to most others; perhaps her insight, her creativity, was inextricably linked with the madness she had suffered.
King said in an interview once that he had found out things about Frame that he had decided not to include in the biography or tell Frame about in order to spare her embarrassment. This fucks me off. He should have told her. I imagine whatever it was was something she had already guessed, and it may well have been something to do with sexuality. It is likely that some people in New Zealand back in the day thought she was a lesbian because she had been institutionalised for a time, was intelligent, was single, and had lived in a hut in the back yard of known gay writer and so probably knew many gay people at a time long before homosexuality was legal in New Zealand; my theory that she had been actually diagnosed a lesbian is something that can possibly be inferred from reading An Angel at My Table but not something I can be absolutely confident about. It is certainly common enough today, as readers will have gathered from this blog, for people who are diagnosed schizophrenic to be deemed queer as well, but I cannot be sure if this was true in New Zealand in the 1950s. Back then, though, homosexuality was still considered a mental illness and, possibly here and certainly around the world, was 'treated' with ECT and sometimes lobotomies. If Frame in An Angel at my Table is not telling the whole, it is worth remembering it was published in 1984 – homosexuality was not legalised in New Zealand until 1986. Attitudes today are far from perfect but they were much worse back then. I am not suggesting Frame was actually gay or bisexual; rather I am suggesting she may have presented herself in her autobiography as more homophobic, and less perceptive, than she actually was when declaring her heterosexuality to the world.
I arrive now at the crazy notion that much of this essay has been circling around. I believe that the voice in my head that I attributed to Jess, the voice of my guardian angel, actually belonged to the ghost of Janet Frame. Although one cannot be absolutely sure why Frame described herself as invisible in the poem I quoted in the previous post, one simple fairly plausible interpretation of "I Am Invisible" is that Frame is representing herself as a ghost. When I read this poem, what, a few weeks ago, after I had a chance to process it, I could only interpret it as concerning my own life and I think the life of the girl I call Jess in this blog. It freaked me out. The notion that the ghost of Janet Frame predicted our lives at least two or three decades ago, and has been helping me and perhaps her as well, is an almost overwhelmingly frightening thought. Who am I? Do I have my own distinct identity or am I just a character created by Janet Frame before I was born? The other day a more reassuring if still preternatural construal of these seeming coincidences occurred to me. In folk religion there is a notion, although not a notion people usually give much serious consideration to these days, of restless spirits that wander the earth seeking closure – think of those fictions people sometimes write or tell in which the ghost of a murder victim lingers around long enough to finger the culprit. Think also of the ghost of Hamlet's father in Hamlet. Perhaps before the ghost of Janet Frame could go to sleep or move on, however you would like to think of it, she needed to help change the world's attitudes to both schizophrenia and to sexual differences; exposing the cruelties inflicted on the mentally ill in her own day had been her life work. Perhaps she needed to fully clear her name. Perhaps she picked me to help her. I suppose an attempt to change people's attitudes to conditions like 'schizophrenia' had become the purpose of this blog although I did not set out to do this initially and although I do not think this blog or whatever Jess is currently trying to do with her own life are sufficient in themselves to effect this change. Or perhaps Frame speaks to and helps other New Zealanders diagnosed schizophrenic. In the introduction to The Goose Bath, eminent contemporary New Zealand poet Bill Manhire quotes some lines from a poem in The Pocket Mirror, perhaps without realising how spooky they are:
I must fight and fight
with my red and yellow head
even after I am dead, to stay
my own way, my own way
Readers may think that I am insane for suggesting that the ghost of Janet Frame once used to speak to me. Should I increase my medication rather than go off it altogether as I intend to do soon? But there are plenty of seemingly crazy notions floating around, plenty of crazy people in the world who we don't think should be sedated. There are people who believe the world was created in 4004BC. There are people who think the hurricanes that recently hit Florida were the result of weather manipulation by the Biden administration. There are people, like my father, an atheist, who told me last week that he didn't believe in the Big Bang because he doesn't believe light can be red-shifted. There are people who think the solution to the Cook Strait ferry debacle is to privatise the operation. Even if this seemingly crazy notion is indeed a delusion, antipsychotic medication can't alter people's beliefs – it is only the passage of time that can enable incremental changes in a person's worldview. I am well at the moment and in a fortnight's time it may well be that I will have changed my mind about this in the same way that I changed my mind a very long time ago about whether or not I had ever literally telepathically conversed with Barack Obama.
Despite all the many coincidences, the girl I call Jess is not Janet Frame. Jess is not only smart but hot. She still has all her own teeth thanks, in part, to the fact that, unlike when Janet Frame was growing up, the drinking water in New Zealand today is fluoridated. Because I don't know how to contact her I would like to ask her to figure out a way to contact me, if only for the two of us to have a beer together and have someone else to talk to who might understand. If your family have have a problem with me, you can tell them that I am almost out of the Mental Health Service and am currently trying to figure out how to find gainful employment. Of course you may not read this essay – although I sometimes think many people read this blog there is not a single person I've ever met in my actual life who has ever admitted to reading it, although a while ago my elder brother, who doesn't like the fact that I keep this blog, brought up physics in a way that displayed his complete ignorance of it, and occasionally in the past my former step-mother, a high court judge now retired, has made cryptic comments that seemed to refer to posts I'd written. If you are reading this essay, you could consider possibility of us walking together "with our crescent moons of sight in our personal darkness".
The unifying idea behind this essay I think concerns the identities behind the voices I heard and it may seem that I have contradicted myself – I have said that I don't think that Jon Stewart or Barack Obama literally spoke with me but I have also just said that, at the moment, I believe that the ghost of Janet Frame might have literally spoken to me. Yet it may be there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. If I could talk with Jess, I would like to ask her if she ever heard a voice that wasn't literally mine but seemed to belong to someone very much like me. I would like to know if Jon Stewart ever heard a voice that seemed to belong to a literature student with an interest in physics and politics living in New Zealand even if this voice wasn't literally mine. I don't think this is something I will ever know for sure; I am resigned to this fact. If it were the case though that Jon Stewart had heard someone like me, it might be evidence, not for God and certainly not a Christian or Jewish God, but for some kind of higher spiritual reality. There is something consoling in this thought. There is another poem by Janet Frame that I want to quote:
THE ICICLES
Every morning I congratulate
the icicles on their severity.
I think they have courage, backbone,
their hard hearts will never give way.
Then around ten or half past,
hearing the steady falling of drops of water
I look up at the eaves. I see
the enactment of the same old winter story
– the icicles weeping away their inborn tears,
and, if they only knew it, their identity.
I quote this poem not because I ever cry myself but because I want to tell others that, despite what this poem seems to be saying, I believe it is possible to come back from tears; on occasion perhaps something beneficent can act through tears.
All the references in this essay to poems and songs etc may give people the impression that I am incredibly erudite but in fact it's more that I'm like Jamal Malik in Slumdog Millionaire. I'll give an example. The poem "Wet Casements" that I mentioned in the introduction to this essay contains a reference to the bridge at Avignon (a town in the south of France) and is thus alluding to the French folksong which begins "Sur le pont, d'Avignon/ on y dancer, on y danse". I first interpreted this poem in 2004; because I had actually visited Avignon a couple of months previously I knew something vital to any true reading of the poem – that the bridge at Avignon doesn't go all the way across the river. I hope that this essay, though, will reach the people I want it to reach.
