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.
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.
