The world is full of mysteries, mysteries that are often right under our noses. An example is the phenomenon of dreaming, a process or picture-show constituting an integral part of all human and much non-human life experience, a nocturnal sensory parade or cavalcade that we often dismiss as unimportant because we usually forget much of the content of a dream a few moments after waking. The psychologists, neuroscientists, and cognitive scientists are no closer today to understanding why we dream than Freud was. I have discussed dreams before in this blog; I do not intend to talk about them again in this post. I wish instead to discuss some other mysteries. I want to talk about a mysterious common symptom of psychosis, 'voice-hearing'; then I wish to resolve a mystery within my own life, the mystery of why I have been obsessed with narrative theory for so many years (a conundrum that I didn't realise constituted a mystery until quite recently); finally I wish to discuss one of the greatest mysteries of all, the problem of ghost stories and the paranormal generally. In discussing these mysteries, I am really trying to clarify the problems and my proposals are tentative, provisional; I do not pretend to have all the answers. Rather this blog is an exercise in meaning-making, an exploratory exercise that may serve to raise pertinent questions in the minds of my readers rather than definitively explain these enigmas.
I wish to begin with 'voice-hearing'. First, what do people mean when they say that they 'hear voices'? How can we explain this experience (or symptom) to people who have never heard voices? In this section, I want to make an important and controversial claim, that the standard psychiatric conceptualisation of voice hearing is wrong. Psychiatrists generally, and laypeople as well, tend to explain the experience of 'voice hearing' as terms of auditory hallucinations. We can imagine the following little fable or thought experiment to illustrate what they might mean. Jane is walking through the city when she hears, quite clearly, someone yell "rhubarb!" She turns to look in the direction of the voice. Why is someone yelling "rhubarb!" at her? Who is calling out and where are they? Perhaps Jane begins to experience these anomalous interruptions more frequently; walking through the city, she begins hearing voices, both male and female, both young and old, shouting words like "Tomato!", "Cucumber!", "Gherkin!" "Radish!" Jane begins to worry that she is being persecuted by a conspiracy of greengrocers, a coterie who are following her around and yelling the names of vegetables, fruit, and other condiments at her while remaining studiously out of sight, who are never visible when she looks for them. Perhaps, she wonders, she is receiving signs from the universe that she is a vegetable? Eventually, Jane arrives at the conclusion that these unwanted auditory exclamations are unreal and seeks medical intervention, receiving the (helpful) diagnosis of schizophrenia; she is put on antipsychotics and the crowd of malevolent greengrocers fades away.
The problem with this little story is that it tallies not at all with the actual experience of people who hear voices or have heard voices. For one thing, unless Jane is right in her crazed suspicion that the universe is trying to tell her that she is a vegetable, the utterances she is hearing have no meaningful content. In reality, I believe, the voices a voice-hearer hears are generally relevant to the concerns and interests of the receiver, a claim I shall back up in moment. Second, if the voices a voice-hearer hears are genuinely auditory hallucinations, we would expect the subject of the hallucinations to look around, to try to ascertain the source of the voice. In reality, however, people who experience voice-hearing do not seek to determine where in the world a voice is coming from; rather, they are always aware that the voice has its origin in their own heads. Thus it seems likely that the designation of the unreal voices as auditory hallucinations is incorrect; a better term would be 'thought insertion', a concept I shall explain in more detail shortly.
My central claim, that the voices most voice-hearers hear are not auditory hallucinations but rather examples of 'thought insertion', is, like I said, controversial. I recall that, a number of years ago, I discussed this issue with another patient, Seamus, who was adamant that the voices he heard were genuine auditory hallucinations. But my own experience suggests that, for at least for some people, voice-hearing is more a case of misattributing thoughts to others. My own experience of 'voice-hearing', as I've discussed a number of times in this blog, was accompanied by the delusion that I was telepathic: I would have conversations with George W. Bush, Jon Stewart, Barack Obama, the girl I call Jess, among others, in my head. I have circumstantial evidence that many other patients similarly experience 'voice-hearing' not as auditory hallucinations but rather as 'voices' in the person's own mind. Why then do so many people, including psychiatrists, continue to regard voice-hearing as a form of auditory hallucination? When people first become patients of the Mental Health System they learn early on that voice-hearing is considered one of the tier-one symptoms of psychosis. It is natural, therefore, for these patients to describe their experience of hearing or conversing with others in their own minds in terms of 'voice hearing' even though this description is technically inaccurate. I myself have committed this error – I have often, in this blog and elsewhere, talked about 'hearing voices' even though my experience almost never involved auditory hallucinations. Thus the error that voice-hearing is usually a form of auditory hallucination has been self-perpetuating.
This is not to say that auditory hallucinations do not occur at all. I have experienced an auditory hallucination three times, I think, over the course of my life: I shall describe the first and third now. In 2007, after I had left the Big House and moved home, and in the brief period between my first appointment with Antony Fernando and my agreeing to start taking antipsychotics, one night I was watching David Letterman interviewing Dr Phil. I thought that, during the interview, Dr Phil was 'coming out' as gay, not explicitly but, as it were, cryptically, sub-textually. I went into the bathroom and said, out loud, in shock, "Dr Phil!" I thought (wrongly of course) that Dr Phil was letting the world know he was yet another closet homosexual. The next night I visited the video store and, while I was there, I thought I heard one of the other patrons deliberately say the words, "Dr Phil" as he walked past me. I suddenly decided that this was evidence that I was under surveillance, that either I was being watched to ensure that I didn't 'out' any of the many closet homosexuals who I believed filled the world or that I was being gradually admitted into the secret of the Homosexual Conspiracy. The upset that this caused me was a major reason I agreed to start taking antipsychotics, although I didn't at the time believe I was delusional or hallucinating. The third time I experienced an auditory hallucination occurred, I think, in 2019. I was attending an Anzac Day ceremony and thought I heard someone in the crowd around me say, "Silverfish". I briefly decided that this was evidence a.) that many people in the world read this blog and b.) that people could recognise that I was its author. However, unlike in 2007, I almost immediately decided that this auditory datum was somehow a mishearing. It wasn't real, I had made a mistake, it was an auditory hallucination.
Although I have only experienced auditory hallucinations three times in my life, all very briefly, I still maintain that I have extensive experience of 'hearing voices', if in the past, a claim that only makes sense if we suppose that my experience of 'hearing voices' did not involve auditory hallucinations. To clarify what I mean by all this I shall tell a couple of stories, some that I have told before, that are useful and revealing. I started 'hearing voices' in January 2009, after I had been on antipsychotics for over a year and a half. In 2008, I had spent a great deal of time attempting to derive Einstein's equation E=MC squared from Maxwell's equations and had at last succeeded. In late January 2009, I was lying in the bath and I considered occupying myself by going through the derivation again in my head. I had trouble getting started. Then I heard a voice in my head say, with a Texan accent, "Do you want George W. Bush to help you?" Deciding that the recently out-of-office president would be little assistance, I changed the subject. I asked him, "Are you straight?" He replied, "I think so." I asked him, "Do you believe in God?" He said, "No". I asked him how then we could be communicating. He said "Midi-chlorians". After I got out of the bath I continued talking with him. I asked him what the real reason was for the war in Iraq. He replied with some claptrap about the War of Civilisations. Of course, I know now that I wasn't really talking to the former president of the United States: I suspect that this strange mental dialogue was relevant to me because, first, in 2007 I had believed that Bush was a closet homosexual and, second, in my mind I associated George W. Bush with my father. But, at the time, I genuinely believed that I was talking with Bush.
Not all of my experiences of voice-hearing involved conversations with famous people. Sometimes it would just be thoughts that appeared in my mind that seemed to come from somewhere else – this is where the concept of 'thought insertion' comes in. I'll tell another story that is revealing. Sometimes in 2009 I would 'hear a voice' that said, "Maya is bigger than you." Now, Maya was my sort-of girlfriend from 2003 until 2008. This sounds disloyal to say but Maya wasn't particularly attractive and I wasn't in love with her. And she was literally taller than me. Prior to 2007, I had sometimes met gay men who were still in the closet and were in relationships with women that were, to any perceptive outsider, obviously fake – the significance of this little voice, its relevance to me, was that it was indirectly addressing my fear that people may have thought my relationship with Maya had been of this kind, was a fake relationship. But, at the time, I didn't interpret this mental interruption in this way. I had often thought, back then, that I was famous – I interpreted the meaning of the voice's utterance at the time as "Maya is more famous than you." I believe that my subconscious mind, (perhaps, if we accept the idea of the bicameral mind as proposed by Julian Jaynes and Ian McGilchrist, the right hemisphere of the brain), was trying to inform my conscious mind, my ego, of this fear, a fear that my conscious self couldn't directly confront and which my mind, as a whole, was protecting me from. The voice was imparting information to me that I both knew and didn't want to know at the same time.
I'll tell one last story about my experience of voice-hearing that illustrates what it was like for me. In around October or November 2009, I was walking home when I heard a voice in my head say, "You're long sighted." I replied, "No, I'm short sighted." It said again, "You're long-sighted". I repeated myself, saying, "No, I'm short sighted – I see well at short distances!" The voice laughed and I realised I was talking with Jon Stewart. He said, "There's no help for you." Once again, this exchange had indirect relevance to my own life. I knew that my reprehensible psychiatrist Antony Fernando had decided, perhaps arbitrarily, to diagnosed me as a latent or closet homosexual when, if anything, the truth was the exact opposite. Jon was making light of it, alluding to this knowledge in a facetious, mollifying way to make me more comfortable with it.
These stories demonstrate that for me, and perhaps for many other people who have experienced psychosis, 'voices' take the form of thoughts that seem to come from outside the self and have relevant content. This leads me to make some interesting and perhaps very important speculative claims about the nature of consciousness and psychosis generally. People (all people, not just those experiencing psychosis) talk to themselves in their heads all the time. We engage in 'self-talk'. In 2011, the clinical psychologist Simon Judkins recommended I read the book Madness Explained by Richard Bentall – Bentall spends a whole chapter arguing for this very conclusion, that everyone engages in self-talk all the time, and suggests that we can perhaps explain 'voice-hearing' as arising somehow from this natural activity or process of the human brain. At the time, I thought Bentall was stating a banal truism, a fact obvious to anyone who has read James Joyce's Ulysses or just thought at all about the nature of his or her own consciousness. However, we can perhaps arrive at a more profound conclusion if we go one step further. And to take this step I will enlist the help of everyone's favourite neuroscientist – Sam Harris. Sam, who is interested both in the nature of consciousness and meditation, often says on his podcast that, if we pay attention to the way we think, we are not authors of our thoughts but that rather thoughts just arise in our minds. That is, we possess the illusion of authorship. We imagine that our thoughts originate in our self but, in fact, thoughts just appear. However, perhaps Harris underestimates just how important the illusion of authorship is. What I would like to suggest is that a perhaps universal aspect of psychosis, perhaps even its cause, is a breakdown in the illusion of authorship. This breakdown possibly occurs when a person's core sense of identity is under siege, under assault. Perhaps psychosis occurs in the early stages of ego death and a person can recover from serious mental illness by reconstructing a new iteration of his or her ego. This last idea is very conjectural indeed but the important point is that, if we suppose that 'healthy' people possess the illusion that they are authors of their own thoughts and that this apparent insight is an illusion, we can perhaps view psychosis differently: it is not aberrant or abnormal but a potentiality in the human condition, a calamity that can occur to anyone.
If we look at psychosis in this way, if we say that everyone engages in self-talk and that the common feature of psychosis is a breakdown in the illusion that one is the author of one's own thoughts, certain things become clearer. As I've said before in this blog, I've never once heard abusive voices. Rather, I summoned up imaginary friends, first George W. Bush and then later Jon Stewart and the girl I call Jess (and for a period Barack Obama); these imaginary friends supported me through my ordeal. However, many people who experience psychosis often hear abusive voices. Abusive voices are so common that many laypeople, and very many psychiatrists as well, often simply assume that if someone hears voices, these voices must be abusive. This has often puzzled me. Why should so many people hear abusive voices? Why don't other people diagnosed schizophrenic also conjure up imaginary friends as I did? Consider, however, the following scenario. Imagine a man or woman who has suffered sexual or physical abuse, or neglect, in childhood; such a person may carry into adulthood a negative self image and may often engage in self-loathing self-talk. This could often be true even if such a person never experiences psychosis. However, if such a person does experience psychosis, the dissolution in the illusion of authorship overlays (as it were) the negative self-talk; the person is still engaging in negative self-talk but is now attributing these self-hating thoughts to others. This way of looking at the effects of adverse experience when young may go some way towards explaining the correlation between childhood trauma and later mental illness (a correlation the psychiatric profession, with its medical prejudices, refuses to acknowledge). I would hypothesise that a child may experience trauma, painfully construct a competent, capable ego (perhaps a better word would be the Jungian term persona) and then experience psychosis as an adult when the repressed returns. Perhaps, to misquote Jung, what we don't recognise about ourselves returns as fate. As with the idea I presented in the previous paragraph, this idea is also very conjectural indeed.
I'll finish this discussion of voice-hearing by talking a little about my most intense period of voice-hearing which occurred in December 2009 and January 2010. It was peculiar – I believe very peculiar. I suspect very few people who have experienced psychosis have had experiences at all like the ones I had during this period; I have mentioned it in other posts but it probably deserves a post of its own. As I've said, I had formed the delusion that people are all at least potentially telepathic. During this period, from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to sleep, I would have conversations with a number of others, most especially Jon and Jess (although I also spoke with Obama). One peculiarity of my own experience of hearing voices, as the examples I gave above suggest, is that I often engaged in conversations with my voices. The particular peculiarity of this period was that I also mentally conjured up the situations of the people I spoke with. For instance, I knew that the real Jess, a girl I had met through a Hearing Voices Group towards the end of 2009, had sought refuge in a respite facility in Titirangi called Mind Matters. In my mind, I convinced her to run away, to catch a bus from West Auckland to Remuera and come to my house. Lying in bed, I would recommend songs by Tricky for her to listen to on her trip. At one point, I put the comic book MoonShadow in my letterbox so that, when she arrived, she'd know which house was mine. Naturally she never arrived because all of this was in my mind. Likewise, with Jon, when I spoke to him, I imagined or was told about his setting. I thought that he'd suffered a mid-life crisis and had left his wife for a half-Black, half-Native American woman he'd met at a buffet. He would lie awake all night in bed with her talking to me. Eventually, around January 10th, Jess and I convinced him to go back to his wife. One incongruous detail about this was that, in my head, I thought, wrongly, that Jon's wife was called Sara. (In real life his wife is Tracey.) The girl I'd been in love with for many years prior to the end of 2009 was also called Sara. The woman Jon had left his wife for shared the same name as the girl I call Jess in this blog. I was aware of these coincidences at the time, and sometimes spoke with Sara as well in my head during this period. Something that I realised relatively recently is that I was obviously projecting a major life change onto Jon – being something of a serial monogamist myself, in the sense that I fall in love with one woman at a time, I was rehearsing or acting out the major life transition of falling out of love with Sara and into love with Jess. There is one last thing about this period that seems worth writing about. Sometimes all the voices would fade out and I'd hear another unidentified voice that I addressed simply as, "O disembodied voice". This voice would ask me questions about the American military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. In an earlier post, I believe I said that Obama repealed this policy in February or March 2010, a claim I made based on faulty information. Nevertheless, it seems true that Obama had campaigned on the pledge to repeal it in 2008 and that it was finally formally repealed at the end of 2010.
I shall now turn to the second topic I mentioned in the introduction, a major reason I am obsessed with narrative theory. Obviously my fascination with this topic has a number of causes. I studied English Literature and have always been interested in Theory and theories. However, ten years ago I wasn't so single mindedly interested in narrative theory. I was interested in writing stories themselves. In 2012, I wrote a screenplay about my friend Jess as part of a Masters in Creative Writing through AUT. I have written about this screenplay before, perhaps most appositely in the post "An Interpretation of The Hounds of Heaven". In talking about it again, I don't think I am repeating myself much. As I said in that previous post, I gave the screenplay to a director friend at the beginning of 2013 who told me that it was very well written but that it lacked a story. At the beginning of this year, I gave it to my father's partner Nicola who told me that she couldn't see the point. All the evidence I've received from early 2013 until the present has indicated to me that the screenplay failed. What do I mean by this? I mean that people tend to judge fictional works as good or bad, as successful or unsuccessful. Some stories work and some do not, and the story I had written was in the latter camp. This issue, the issue of why some stories are good and others not, and the closely related question of what makes a story successful are both under-theorised by academia. The English departments of universities teach the Canon, that is works generally acknowledged to be good – Shakespeare, Nabokov, Joyce, Henry James, and so on. The issue of which stories are good and which aren't, the question of why some stories succeed and others fail, is pushed outside the scope of enquiry. The more specialised field of narrative theory has the same problem but arrives at it from the opposite direction. For narrative theorists, any report of a succession of events constitutes a narrative and all narratives are equally open to analysis through the narrative theory prism. The issue of why some stories succeed (that is, are enjoyable or satisfying) and why some do not again lies outside the scope of enquiry. The people who do theorise about this question tend to be people outside academia, authors or advisors giving wannabe writers advice about how to write, such as Stephen King in On Writing or Robert McKee in STORY: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. Personally I think narrative theory would benefit from incorporating the ideas of people like McKee into its conception of narrative but this might involve creating a whole new field.
I might have been interested in this problem anyway but an an important stimulus was my experience writing The Hounds of Heaven in 2012. When I started the degree, I was already halfway through a different film script, a story about two fourteen year old boys who steal a car and their adventures that night. In the middle of the year, I became dissatisfied with this story and abandoned it. It occurred to me suddenly that people generally, despite films like A Beautiful Mind, have no understanding of schizophrenia and it further occurred to me that I could write a film providing a more accurate picture of this 'condition'; I did not want to write about myself and so I sat down and wrote a scene featuring Jess in her psychiatrist's office. (It is important to note here that I had not experienced any psychotic symptoms at all myself since early 2010 and considered myself fully recovered, although I had told no-one my life story then; it is also important to note that I had no contact with the real girl while I was writing the screenplay about her and that, insofar as it was a true depiction of her, it was based on my recollections of the times we'd hung out the previous year.) One of my main intentions was to inform the public about what schizophrenia is. After Nicola read it, she objected to the amount of psychiatric jargon I had put in it; perhaps this was a fault but not only was I was trying to educate my audience, I was trying to present an intelligent young woman who had performed independent research into the condition with which she had been diagnosed, something both I and the real girl had done. A closely related question to "What is schizophrenia?" is "What is the cause of schizophrenia?" Now, films that concern schizophrenia, such as A Beautiful Mind and Benny and Joon do not usually ask or answer this question – in the same way that films like The Whole of the Moon by Ian Mune, a film that concerns cancer, do not attempt to answer the question "What is the cause of cancer?" and films like Supernova, a film that concerns Alzheimers, do not attempt to answer the question "What is the cause of Alzheimers?" this question is assumed not to be a problem. However, in my film, this question is very salient. Right before Plot Point 1, Jess is in the Auckland Public Library and she tells the audience (through voice-over) that there is contention between the psychologists and the psychiatrists about the cause of schizophrenia; she states that she agrees with the psychiatrists, that she believes schizophrenia to be genetic (a position I myself disagreed with at the time I wrote this scene and still disagree with today). So this question, the question "What is the cause of schizophrenia?", if my film had been successful, would have been a driving concern in the minds of the audience. However The Hounds of Heaven does not answer this question. One reason for this is that I did not know the root cause of the real girl's schizophrenia when I wrote the film and still don't know it today – the film ends by suggesting that schizophrenia is as random and causeless as an earthquake or parental divorce. (This particular aspect of the film is something I talked about in more detail in the post "An Interpretation of The Hounds of Heaven.)
After I had written that first scene of Jess in her psychiatrist's office, I initially thought I would write a comedy. I thought that I would present the story of an appealing, intelligent, and eccentric girl and her ordinary (quotidian) life. A couple of days after I wrote this scene, however, a later scene occurred to me and I realised what the film would really be about – that it would present her ordinary life first and then her descent into and recovery from a psychotic episode. I was a little familiar with the stress-vulnerability model of schizophrenia, the theory that schizophrenia is episodic and that episodes are triggered by environmental stressors, and so I considered various possible stressors that might cause her to become psychotic. One idea I considered was that she might have an argument with her mother. And then I realised that there was only one possible stressor that was right for the story I wanted to tell – she would have a bad experience with a man. (I might note that, popularly and according to the psychiatric profession, the sole cause of a psychotic episode is a discontinuation of antipsychotic medication but, for reasons those who read my blog will appreciate, this was not something I wanted to put in my film.) The screenplay I wrote, only a draft and with a couple of spelling mistakes (one deliberate) is on the Internet but I don't expect my readers to fly away and read it and so I will provide a brief synopsis. The synopsis follows.
The film begins, of course, with Jess in the psychiatrist's office (wearing a hat) and then goes on to provide a picture of her ordinary life. She is twenty-five. She lives in a bedsit in Takapuna with only her cat Zoe for company, spending her time reading copious amounts of philosophy, literature, and poetry, and going for long walks. She visits the gym regularly (mental health patients are often encouraged to go to the gym because exercise is considered beneficial to mental health) and attends a weekly coffee group with other patients. Her parents are divorced – she has a good relationship with her father and somewhat ambivalent feelings towards her mother. She is intelligent but eccentric and a little naive, with an unusual view of the world; she is also perhaps a little 'avoidant'. At Plot Point 1, right after the scene at the library (at which she borrows a book about Gnosticism) she encounters a charmer called Rick at a cafe, a womaniser, who asks for her phone number. Several days later he calls her and she agrees, uncharacteristically, to meet with him. She goes out drinking and clubbing with him and several of his friends. It should become apparent to the audience as this sequence unfolds that, although Rick is attractive, he is really just interested in casual sex but it is unclear if Jess realises this. Rick has no knowledge of her 'condition'. At the club Jess says (in voiceover) "Because I first got sick when I was seventeen, there are lots of things I've never done before. For instance, this is my first time clubbing." (I hope the implication is clear.) Jess, a little drunk, ends up at Rick's apartment and then, perhaps sensing that she has got herself into a potentially dangerous situation, becomes increasingly anxious. Rick, assuming that if she has in his apartment she knows the score, makes a move on her which she rebuffs; he then asks her "Are you a dyke?" Unable to answer him, Jess flees the apartment. Over the next several days she imagines writing a long essay about Gnosticism and then, while shopping at the supermarket at night, she begins telepathically hearing the thoughts of the other patrons. In some distress, she starts walking home, gets lost and ends up at the flat of group of young men who are friends of her brother. During a long scene, these boys (but not Jess) smoke pot and discuss various conspiracy theories and other general spookiness, including the idea that humans and Neanderthals once interbred, and culminating in one of the boys expressing his belief that 9/11 was an inside job. Jess melts down and telekinetically causes one of the boys' beer bottles to explode. Panicked, the boys call her brother and take her home. During the next number of days, she descends further into psychosis, for instance removing all the lightbulbs in her house because she believes she is under government surveillance. The February 2011 Christchurch earthquake occurs; that night she is watching the Daily Show and Jon Stewart addresses her directly, telling her that she is responsible for the quake. Despite her evident 'unwellness', Jess has committed herself to seeing a talk about the causes of schizophrenia by a renowned psychologist visiting New Zealand and forces herself to attend. (Jess is the only actual schizophrenic in the room). This psychologist tells the audience that the cause of schizophrenia is childhood sexual abuse. On the bus with her brother on the way back from the lecture, Jess flips out completely. After a dream scene (a scene that marks Plot Pointt 2) we cut to several weeks later. Jess is in hospital and has recovered from her psychotic episode. The tone of the film changes back to the tone it had in the first act, with Jess explaining herself and her life to the audience through voiceover. Her father arrives and together they travel to Christchurch (her father is a civil engineer, a significant departure from my source material). Much of the last act describes Jess's view of Christchurch in the immediate aftermath of the quake and there are a couple of scenes involving a lonely and lugubrious hotel manager that I imagined played by Mikey Havoc. The film ends with Jess and her father eating dinner at the hotel restaurant. Jess's father says, "You know you're not responsible for the divorce? You do know that don't you?" Jess replies, "Of course I know that. I'm not stupid." And the film ends with an aftershock rattling the tableware.
The screenplay definitely had its imperfections. It had spelling and stylistic mistakes that I deeply regret. It uses far too much voiceover. I included a scene, when the stoner boys are driving Jess home, in which Jess recites a poem by John Ashbery from memory, a spiel that is probably pretentious. And if it had been made into a film much would depend on its direction and particularly on the choice of actress to play the leading role. (When I was writing it, I imagined Anna Hutchison.) However, the major reason why The Hounds of Heaven failed as a story was that it was founded on a faulty theory of human psychology – this is the insight that I had recently. Although the film was ostensibly concerned with schizophrenia, in reality it was concerned with sexuality. I was trying to prove that Jess, and by extension the girl Jess was based on, was straight. This theme in the movie, the question of Jess's sexuality, is not overt but there are touches that should ideally raise this question in the viewer's mind. Right near the beginning, immediately after the consultation scene, Jess runs into another patient, Andrew, a man who is obviously romantically interested in her but whom she rebuffs. This should signal to the viewer that Jess's relations with men is an important theme. (The other reason I put myself in the film is that I wanted to show that unlike most people who write about schizophrenia, including most psychiatrists, I know what I'm talking about.) A little later in the first act, when Jess is attending the coffee group, she says (in voiceover), "Katrina is very pretty but I try not to notice that." Obviously, Rick's blunt question, "Are you a dyke?" can be interpreted as a major reason why Jess becomes psychotic a little afterwards. So I was trying to subtly raise the question of her sexuality with the intention of answering it later. Obviously, the simple way to do that would have been to have her enter into a happy conventional relationship with a man – but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to depict this. Instead I thought that I could prove she was straight by showing that she and her father loved each other. My belief, then, was that the cause and evidence of homosexuality was a dislike for the opposite-sex parent. This idea, that I could show that Jess was straight by portraying how good her relationship with her father was, was present from my earliest plans for the story.
In this blog, I have often talked about my life. At this point in the post, I can kill two birds with one stone – I can talk about my life and also explain how I formed the erroneous theory that underlies my film. In January 2009 I became psychotic again and for the first time began hearing voices, as I mentioned before. I have discussed the triggers that made me 'sick' in a couple of posts, specifically "What Happened in 2007 and 2009" and "Corrections and Some More About My Life" but I think I can reconstruct a little more clearly what happened at the very end of 2008 and beginning of 2009 now, having thought about it some more. In 2008, for a long period I had weekly 'therapy' with a Scottish nurse called Avril, although no therapy ever happened. I did not talk about my life or family or what had happened to me at bFM in 2007 or any of the delusions I'd entertained the previous year. Instead I talked about Letterman and the American election. At the very end of 2008, I decided that I should at least try to talk about my family and told her about my dislike for my stepmother. It is understandable that I should resent my stepmother at least a little because, as I've said before, the childhood trauma that made me vulnerable to psychosis in the first place was my parents' divorce when I was seven. (Incidentally I have decided recently that although she has done wrong by me in the past I should forgive my stepmother.) The next time I came into the Taylor Centre I had the appointment with Antony Fernando and Avril (without my key worker or any member of my family present) at which they bullied me into taking antidepressants even though I had never complained of depression. Although this was upsetting and fed my paranoia it did not make me 'ill' immediately. At the next appointment with Avril, at the very beginning of 2009, she said to me, "You were telling me about your dislike for your mother." I said, "No, it was my stepmother I was talking about." But it was too late – a false statement that I supposedly disliked my mother had gone into my record. I believe it is still in the record today. Although my most serious grievance against the Mental Health Service is that the people treating me have thought I was gay when I'm not for nearly fifteen years and perhaps still do today, a secondary grievance is the idea that I might dislike my mother, a false inclusion in my record based on Avril's mistake. I love my mother, she is is my best friend. Although I have been living in my own apartment since early 2016, I have for years visited her every day. Of course, a popular if outdated theory of schizophrenia is the idea of the 'schizophrenegenic mother' or loveless mother but, at the beginning of 2009, I did not know this theory and did not believe I was diagnosed schizophrenic – rather I believed that I was diagnosed as either a latent or closet homosexual. Furthermore, I assumed that the psychiatric profession must know the cause of homosexuality. I immediately leapt to the conclusion that there must be some kind of supposed relationship between my supposed dislike of my mother and my supposed homosexuality. I felt, at that moment, in a way that is hard to describe, a sense that the walls of the Homosexual Conspiracy were descending around me. It was that night that I became psychotic again. As a result of this brief dialogue, for many years afterwards I believed that the evidence and cause of my heterosexuality was my loving relationship with my mother. And so, by analogy, I thought I could prove Jess straight by representing her loving relationship with her father.
The theory that I adopted was quasi-Freudian, the idea that sexuality has its roots in family dynamics. And if this idea had been correct, my screenplay would have been successful. But the truth was, of course, that this theory is wrong. I suspect that many of those who have read the script have been confused about why I devoted the whole last act to Christchurch and to portraying Jess's relationship with her father; this is why Nicola told me that she couldn't see the point. The sense among my readers that the film lacked a point strongly suggests that the theory was wrong because I think that, if it was correct, the film would just have felt right to these early readers even if they were not consciously cognisant of the theory. In depicting Christchurch in the aftermath of the earthquake, I was acting on another motive: although much of the film is fictional, the girl Jess is based on, the real girl, actually did decide she was responsible for the February 2011 earthquake. I thought that the film could persuade her that she wasn't. With respect to theories about the cause of homosexuality, these have been another recurring topic in this blog. Long ago, perhaps as early as 2013, I abandoned the idea that the cause of homosexuality is a dislike of the opposite-sex parent. Another theory is the notion of the 'gay gene' but, although the LGBT community often strongly promotes this idea, the postulation of a 'gay gene' does not stand up to serious scientific scrutiny, as I've discussed in other posts. I also gave up on this theory a very long time ago. The only solution, I believe, is to regard homosexuality as a choice that is not immoral, a choice often though not always made in early adolescence. This explanation may not satisfy but I think that I want to finally put this obsessive concern behind me. If you want a better explanation, you'll have to look elsewhere.
All this, my ongoing efforts to make sense of why The Hounds of Heaven failed, explains my interest in narrative theory. I believe, now, that some stories are successful and others unsuccessful. A successful story is a unified rhetorical argument in favour of some proposition, a proposition that the author and audience want to believe is true even if they suspect or know it is not. If the author's understanding of the world does not align with that of the audience, this is a recipe for failure. This brief exposition is incomplete but I might say more about it in later posts. Something that I have been thinking about recently is why audience love and consume stories that they know are fictive, stories like Harry Potter, Star Wars and The Hobbit. I do not know the answer yet.
Finally, I wish to talk about the paranormal. Most serious intellectuals pooh-pooh people's credence in the supernatural; in Rationality, Steven Pinker despairs at the fact that, by some metrics, young people today are more credulous than their parents. When I was young, I was very much in Pinker's mould, absolutely sure that ghosts, goblins, ghouls, and God were all easily debunkable phantoms of the imagination. But over the course of my life very many people have told me stories about their encounters with ghosts (and about other supernatural experiences). There is a simple argument to be made. If someone tells a ghost story that she says happened to her, there are only three possibilities. 1.) The person is lying. 2.) The person has hallucinated or is delusional. 3.) The person is telling the truth. When I consider all the ghost stories that have been relayed to me, some of which involved family members of my mother's generation, I have to eliminate the first possibility – I simply do not believe that any of the ghost stories I have been told, often by quite respectable people, are deliberate lies. This leaves the second and third possibility. Perhaps mental illness is far more prevalent than we realise. In the introduction to this post, I mentioned dreams: we naturally treat dreams as unreal but perhaps the line between reality and dreams is more porous, blurred. If so, if very many people have had hallucinatory or delusional experiences, this dramatically alters our view of people and the world.
I'll tell a story on this topic that is very relative to the themes of this post. In early 2016 I was staying with my brother and couldn't sleep. At about four or five in the morning I decided to take a walk around Oraki Basin. While I was walking, I began to get the feeling, as though information was being imparted to me psychically, that I would be in the newspaper that day. Then I changed my mind; I decided that Jess was going to be in the newspaper that day. In 2012 and through into 2013 Jess had unwillingly spent eight months in a psychiatric ward, something I found out about in early 2013. I have always thought some scandal, some malfeasance, was attached to that committal; I thought maybe the journalists were going to expose it. I went back to my brother's house and finally managed to doze off. In the middle of the day, I got up and read the front part of the paper looking for references to Jess, half-heartedly though because by that time I though my clairvoyance of the early morning might be bogus. Then I visited my mother. She said, straight away, "Your friend Jess was in the paper this morning!" (Of course my mother used her real name.) It was in the Canvas or TimeaOut section and, as best as I can recall, concerned a volume of poetry by her that had just been published. I do recall that in the article they compared her to Eleanor Catton.
Although the topics I have covered in this post are mainly concerned with rational explanations of seemingly irrational phenomena, I have had experiences that do not seem to me to be rationally explicable. I have had a little experience of ESP, clairvoyance, and precognition. Yes, most of my experiences arose from my own imagination but sometimes little truths slipped through. This suggests to me that the mind, or soul, is something separate from the body and, if this is true, this raises the possibility of life after death. I find this thought comforting because it might mean that I'll get a girlfriend in the next existence. But there is a serious downside. If we allow a little supernatural into our lives, where do we stop? Recently I watched the Youtube clip "A Time Travel Story/ The Dodleston Messages from the past and future". The story it tells is profoundly disturbing. It is impossible that the people involved were delusional and so this leaves open only the first and third option: either it was the most incredibly elaborate hoax or the world is far, far stranger than even I guessed. Both options seem unbelievable. I recommend the reader watch it and make up her own mind.
In this post I have discussed three mysteries: the mystery of voice-hearing, the mystery of why the screenplay I wrote in 2012 was unsuccessful, and the mystery of people's apparent experience of the paranormal. I have gone some way towards explaining the first and second but not the third. As is often the case with this blog, the disparate topics I have covered seem to share a common thread. I guess what I am discussing is the power of the imagination. This is perhaps the most important unexplored subject in the humanities generally and perhaps something I will touch on again in later posts. But for now I'll finish up for now. Adios, reader.
