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.