Concerning Telepathy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The brick asserted its right to be

More than an idea in someone's head,

And soon as the press got wind of this

A thousand ghouls gathered round his bed

And started demanding to be fed.

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

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

Just speak out whatever's on your mind."

So I obliged and they, in return,

Vouchsafed a vision of Heaven's domain,

A million bubbles adrift in primordial goop,

Endlessly repeating each its own name.

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

Others and their idle chat, that's just noise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the end theres something still can be said

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concerning Poems; The Last Month

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

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

The first lines of the poem, recall, are

There is a robot in this poem,

because I want it, and you get what you want

when you call the shots in a poem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am invisible.

The lovers reach through my life to touch each other,

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

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

There next lines in the poem are:

I am carried in nobody's head as knowledge.

I give freedom to the dancers,

to the telling of truth.

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

The next lines in "I Am Invisible" are

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

And I learn things I am not entitled to know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard Sell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a robot in this poem,

because I want it, and you get what you want

when you call the shots in a poem.

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

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

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

I walk the talk and sometimes I worship dogs,

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

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

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

There are two people with empty speech bubbles

looking down the barrel of a telephone jack.

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

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

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

of storefronts. The robot is still here.

Soft determinism puts pineapple on my pizza,

and I want to agree that fruit and saccharomnyces 

are the Bonnie and Clyde of unsuspecting kitchens.

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

know the results of his Turing test. God!

the pineapple is something that you can take or leave,

and you will, you will. 

I'm doomed to put pineapple on pizza.

I might be the theandry of parts and pieces,

predicated on a harder problem that catches itself in snatches.

I might drop something about objective collapses

because I know more about poetry than physics

but want you to register the reverse.

I want to wear my limited knowledge of quantum superposition

and radioactive decay on my t-shirt,

like I could be a cool cat, or not.

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

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

and the stars to be unavoidable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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