It is odd to write a post on New Year's Eve but I have no exciting plans and so I might as well just write because I can. When its your own blog you can call the shots. I suspect this post will be quite dull stylistically, quite prosaic, but there is still one important idea intended for general consumption concerning the reality of voices. The first part of this post is directed at the amorphous anonymous mass of people who somehow access this blog in some somehow clandestine fashion and which I have never been able to satisfactorily categorise demographically in my mind; most of this post is a coded message to my friend Jess. In the future I do intend to get back to topics that made some people like this blog in the first place – perhaps one day I may even be able to come up with some adequate way of explaining or conceptualising the idea of probability. (In order to actually deal with the measurement problem in quantum mechanics we need some better understanding of the notion of probability but we cannot arrive at a better understanding of what probability actually is scientifically but only philosophically.)
I'll start by elaborating on something I said in the previous essay, concerning the voices I used to hear. Over the Southern Hemisphere summer of 2009 and 2010, I spoke almost continuously with a number of people: Jon Stewart, Jess, people from bFM, Barack Obama. On one occasion I heard John Ashbery. To remind readers, I had been speaking sometimes with Jon Stewart for quite a few months: after I met Jess he acted as a go-between, setting me up with her in my mind. (To my male readers: if you have a male friend it can be a truly generous and kindhearted act to play the part of intermediator between him and a girl. I got together with my first girlfriend after my best friend at the time told me; "That girl Danielle likes you.") During this period I was told or uploaded a lot of information about the situations of my imaginary friends: for instance, I thought Jon Stewart was having a mid-life crisis and had left his wife for a half Black, half Native American woman he'd met at a buffet. (Jess and I together convinced him to recommit to his wife.) I learnt stuff about Jess too, things I have never put in this blog – because I subsequently learnt that they were almost all untrue. To give a trivial example, I thought her father was Mark Sainsbury, at that time a television presenter on a New Zealand evening current affairs program. The voices faded away a few months into 2010 but the experience had been so intense, so realistic, that I continued to believe that I had actually spoken to all these people right up until the end of the year. In 2011, I hung out with Jess, actually only a few times, and interrogated her sneakily about her life, finding out in this way that most of the biographical information I had learnt about her was wrong. This is how I came to realise that you can't fully trust the voices in your head to impart true facts about themselves and why, when I started hearing voices again in 2013, I usually knew to take everything they said with a grain of salt.
There is a difficult choice I have to make now: should I be 'rational' (whatever that means) or admit that I see the spookiness of the world we live in? You see, even though the biographical information I picked up was incorrect somehow I knew all my friends, understood who they really were underneath. They always sounded like themselves. (I remember when Obama first spoke to me, at a hostel in Fjordland, he said, "I speak slowly – but I think like lightning!") It's at this point in the essay that I am going to stop being prosaic and start waxing lyrical, start becoming at least a little cryptic. What I am going to say now is that, perhaps, reality is a collective hallucination and during psychosis one shifts outside this shared dream into some other kind of dream. But it is not healthy to remain outside reality forever. I was thinking today about all the celebrity musicians who must hear voices – Eddie Vedder, Rhianna, Thom Yorke, Tom DeLonge from Blink 182, probably many others. I think though that in the end one must return to reality although it may be sometimes that one can change the reality one is returning to. It's a choice between the moon and the sun; some might say between being a person and being a robot. Is is possible to be a robot who knows that he is a robot but also knows what it was like to be a person? To spell out what I mean here, because some readers may be muddled, by 'robot' I mean an ordinary sane human being and by 'person' I mean someone who, for instance, can't help but be spookily aware of the full moon when it is hanging over the housetops.
In the film I wrote about you, Jess, I pilfered a whole lot of little bits of your life, your real life, not what I had been informed of by voices, not details that had come to me during the summer of 2009 and 2010. I mixed in elements of my own experience. It might interest you to know that both the psychologist I saw in 2014 and my father said to me, after having read the screenplay, "Why do you always write about yourself?" But I knew things about you that I didn't put in. I remember when I first met you in 2009 you told me that the New Zealand literary scene was full of arse-lickers and when I asked you what writers you liked immediately rattled off a list of female authors I had never heard of. This, together with some serendipitous shared recollections of a Larkin poem and an Eliott poem might be why I fell for you, although I think I fell for you the moment I saw you.
I still like you. The last time I saw you was a long time ago. We passed each other on Ponsonby Road and I think both didn't realise we had passed each other until after the fact – but I did see you. I was wearing a jacket that probably made me look like a rough sleeper. It was just after I had written the post about An Angel at My Table. In a less literal sense, you might have passed me in a supermarket. But I am trying to catch up. I only know tidbits of your life. I know you have two degrees that you must have done remotely although I wonder how you paid for them. I know you that you have many friends, often creative souls, although I wonder if they know the real you. I say this because I do have a few friends myself, friends I quite like but who don't know me at all. I know you've worked as a reviewer and poetry tutor. There is an aspect of your life, an aspect I can't be sure about and obviously don't know the details of, which makes me feel a painful mix of jealousy and envy, a mixture ordinary men wouldn't ordinarily feel because they wouldn't ordinarily fall for girls like you. I might be wrong of course. I suppose, assuming for the moment that one story in my head is true, one could say that this part of your life was a consequence of falling in with the wrong crowd and from poor impulse control. The psychiatrists probably think it's something akin to kleptomania.
I look for signs in the world around me for clues as to what path to follow through the labyrinth. The signs recently have been mixed. There's a lot of Fleetwood Mac around these days and I wonder if maybe I'm Lyndsey Buckingham and you're Stevie Nicks with a twist. It might be you hate me or it might be that you're afraid I will abandon you. I actually don't easily end relationships myself even when the relationship is a dead end, a cul-de-sac. Leos are loyal. I've been with you a long time already in a sense. We could just be friends or we could be something else. The last ten years I have been under a curse, a curse which manifested itself in an inability to find the right words when writing and, I know you think this, a morbid fascination with quantum mechanics. An interest in science is the other side of my personality, something you should sympathise with given your interest in neuroscience. The dopamine hypothesis, anyone? I feel finally, though, that my life is going to change. Given the recession I am not sure how I'll find a job, let alone acquire a house either on the hill or off it. If you wanted that. So I'm not sure how to look after you, particularly considering how bad I am at looking after myself. I am thinking of volunteering for a political party, if they'll have me, and hoping that it may lead somewhere. I don't know whether I should write a novel, keep writing this blog, or become some kind of teacher. In a perfect world I could travel the country and talk to ordinary people about their concerns and in this way help inform public policy. Or perhaps I could help improve the Mental Health System. I haven't worked it out yet. Nevertheless I feel a change is coming.
Thirteen years ago I accidentally killed you with a film script and I have spent the last thirteen years, without realising it until recently, trying to bring you back to life. On Ponsonby Road someone has written in chalk "Sell your soul for $" but even if I have brought you back to life, and I don't know if I have, I didn't sell my soul to do it. Certainly there hasn't been any money come my way. You wouldn't believe it but I think there were people in the world who thought I was going to endorse Donald Trump. I wrote in one post some time ago that I had gravitated towards the anti-woke Left (people like Sam Harris who also endorsed Kamala Harris); Americans may not understand what the terms left-wing and right-wing mean to Kiwis. Perhaps the Democrats themselves need to work out what they think the term left-wing should mean. If we did get together, there might be people who actually do think I have sold out and in a way they would be right: my 'illness', in terms of public perception, would have come circle. There is another option. But that would be your decision.
I nearly wrote something I think I would regret but instead went to bed and this morning worked out what I really want to say, I think. You might not be chained to me but I am chained to you not only by something that might be love if love exists but also by crime. I said something to you once that to most people might seem inconsequential but which I have hated myself for ever since. It wasn't the question Rick asks Jess in the film I wrote although Rick's question was present in my mind during the time we hung out. You knew that I was Rick as well as myself in the film. Or perhaps Rick was my attempt to present a dumb but charismatic and confident womaniser, a kind of wish-fulfilment fantasy. You can probably guess why I decided to have a a character I'd created try to seduce you rather than someone more like the real me. But there are many things I am not responsible for. I am not responsible for a world in which people are too stupid to understand that a girl might be awkward about kissing a boy because she has never kissed anyone before or possibly because he has stinky cigarette breath or possibly for some other reason. I guess I'm responsible for suggesting that what happened between Rick and Jess was all that happened between us – but I wasn't responsible for the timing of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. I'm not responsible for the way my film blew up the way it did and still don't understand why it blew up the way it did. I'm not responsible for a world in which people lie about their sex lives, a world in which men pretend to have had more sexual partners than they really have and women pretend they've had fewer. I'm not responsible for the hallucination or delusion I told you about (you were the first I told) and which although I never put it in my blog have since told lots of people about. To prove a point. I'm not responsible for a psychiatric profession that puts people on trial but never tells the accused the crime they've supposedly committed. I'm not responsible for clerical errors and bad listeners and deliberate lies and drugs that don't work. I'm not responsible for Mental Health Workers who can't tell that a terrible wind is blowing and that a person is screaming but no-one can hear her. I'm not responsible for Respite Facilities or David Bowie. I'm not responsible for people like my elder brother who won't believe that I'm straight until I have a girlfriend and perhaps not even then; nor am I responsible for young men who get convinced by psychologists that they're sexually muddled and then rush off to get married as quickly as they can to prove to their parents that they're not gay. I'm not responsible for the fact that the stories we invent to explain ourselves and our actions are all just that – stories. I guess all this sounds like a litany of excuses but I am expressing myself this way for stylistic reasons. I love the fact that you put pineapple on your pizza and, if I'm permitted one joke, would advise my New York readers to give it a go.
Someone told me a little while ago (a real person) that there are some people who are so attractive that others are drawn to them like moths to a flame (although the person didn't use this particular cliche.) I know there are others, girls of course, who have loved you and probably still miss you. The reason I am being so bold is that I have half-read your most recent book of poetry at last and have finally noticed at least some of the references to me. There may be references to those others that I can't recognise.
I'll tell you something that might interest you although considering how well read you are you probably know it already. In 2004 I visited Carcassonne, a town in southern France; Carcassonne was the hub for a semi-Christian religious movement in the Middle Ages called Catharism. The Cathari were Gnostics. There are lots of religions in the world and, even within Christianity, lots of sub-variants; I think people don't pick religions but rather religions pick people; I wondered sometimes if the Cathari had picked me. Some people have a kind of abstract fascination with Gnosticism out of an academic interest in the Problem of Evil even though their own lives are not particularly crappy but there was something about Gnosticism that drew me in. I read some time ago that the cool cats from Carcassonne, the high priesthood, coupled up into male-female partnerships that were celibate; Wikipedia suggests that the Cathari were not particularly sex-positive at all. I'm not sure that I like this and I don't really think I want to be a Gnostic anymore. I don't think the material world is irredeemably evil, I think there are people in the world like the children in Gaza who have it much worse that I do, and I think it might be possible to make the world a better place.
It might be that by writing this post I have burnt my bridges. If Taylor Swift were here, she might say, "Good for you; you've got it off your chest." I haven't fully assimilated all the poems in Naming the Beasts but I read enough of them, as I said, to notice an occasional detail from our small shared history – call me conceited or suffering from delusions of reference. You seemed to be speaking to me in code and this is why this post is largely written in code. This raises a serious issue: if we are to meet in person, what the hell are supposed to talk about? We can't sit across from each other over a beer or two and quote haiku at each other. Not that I have any haiku memorised. Perhaps we could go to a movie or I could bring you to my pub-quiz: my team-mates don't read my blog or your poetry and I don't think even the genius on my team will recognise your name. You could be an ordinary person among ordinary people. I also think you might not know how to contact me, because of garden-variety paranoia or a fear of secrets being spilled. I have an idea. We have a mutual friend, the guy I watched a play with (remember?). He has my email address. We fell out a number of years ago and if you approach him he'll find it very odd that you might want to contact me but I can't see why he wouldn't give you my email. You could tell him you lent me a book of Maori mythology that you want returned or something. If emails are being read, we'll just have to hope that the eavesdroppers are not wholly malevolent. Of course, like I said, you might hate me. Or you might prefer to stay in your lavender haze and keep me as just an imaginary friend. At some point I will have to stop waiting for you so I'll give you a week or wait for a sign. One last question. do you think I use too many dashes? I like dashes and Emily Dickinson liked dashes. It might annoy people but you can give me punctuation advice if we meet.
***
Despite appearances this essay isn't finished. I wrote part of this post in the middle of the night last night and the other part this morning and I feel that somehow overnight a weight has been lifted of me. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be a robot again or to have done the impossible – to get out as straight. I'll tell you what I have just been thinking, standing on my verandah under the sun. I don't have to live in the world I lived in in 2007 where there was a secret clique of closet homosexuals controlling the world who would literally kill anyone who outed them. Maybe you're happier being gay. It's funny: I just looked at the poem "We Go Down Together" which, despite its title, so far as I can tell, contains no reference to sex at all. Is it the fate of modern poetry to be read solely by queer people who have no interest at all in understanding what the poet is actually talking about? Is this what the thunder told T.S.Eliot way back in 1922? Perhaps you could teach me how to read your poetry, not just the obvious one "Hard Sell". Also – could you be bisexual? There are lots of bisexual women in the world today. Or does a person get stuck in a rut after a while? I handled you badly back in 2011. Or, rather, to be more frank, I handled you well and you handled me badly. But that wasn't your fault. I said in a post once that when I first met you I thought you were a straight girl who had been misdiagnosed a lesbian. Did you give them any reason to think that or was it all a mistake? Could they have got it wrong with you as they got it so badly wrong with me? Or was it all inevitable? Did I actually do you a favour by accidentally killing you in my screenplay? I could comfort myself by thinking that but its cold comfort. I still want to see you and, if possible, want you to forgive me. It's odd – I got the impression that Jon Stewart, the real Jon Stewart, wanted us to get together but that's hardly surprising. What's more surprising is that the ghost of Janet Frame seemed to want us to get together. It's hard to know because no-one agrees what the word 'love' should mean these days. I'm rambling. Maybe if we could meet we could speak openly and honestly to each other and I could just tell you that I spoke to you in my head two nights ago without being afraid that people will somehow force me to start taking drugs again. And there is one thing about the episode I experienced over that summer which I have never told anyone at all but which I would like you to know and which, perhaps, you should know. You've always been the most interesting I've ever met (sic). I should probably check this post for spelling mistakes but, fuck it, I'm just going to publish it. Que sera sera.
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