Rationality vs. Mysticism

I occasionally discuss, via email, various philosophical issues with a friend of mine. This friend, Rene, is highly intelligent and extraordinarily well-read. He is also blind, writing his doctoral thesis on blind memoir. He has an older brother diagnosed schizophrenic and so has an interest, not only in disability studies, but also in madness. The reasons for my interest should be plain from earlier posts. I find Rene a very interesting and helpful interlocutor in discussing these matters. I thought I would share with you an email I had written to him about madness. (I had hoped that his reply would be as interesting as they typically are but, in this case, his response was positive but quite brief).

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Hi Rene. I thought I would share with you, if you don't mind me bothering you, some of my recent thoughts about schizophrenia.

The dominant attitude among psychiatrists and psychologists, it seems to me, is 'rational' and 'scientific'. Schizophrenia is an objective condition, probably a disease, that exists objectively out there in the world, independently of their observations of it. The role of psychiatry is to describe the symptoms of this 'illness', to try to determine its causes and to seek a cure - although it seems to me that today psychiatrists have basically given up on the idea that it can be cured and have more or less given up on the idea that they can work out its cause.

Over time, the definition or symptomology of schizophrenia has changed considerably. When Kraepelin coined the term "demential praecox" in the late nineteenth century, he categorized it in terms of loss of cognitive function and in impairment of memory. He does not mention voice hearing at all. In fact, I don't believe he even made reference to delusions or hallucinations. All of that came later. I don't know when voice-hearing became the key defining symptom of schizophrenia but I am fairly sure that it did not originate with Kraepelin – despite the fact that he is considered the father of schizophrenia.

It's not just that the definition of schizophrenia has fluctuated considerably over time - I think that the condition itself changes as a result of different theories or descriptions of it. I'll give an interesting example. A number of years ago, when I started researching schizophrenia, I read that one of the supposed symptoms was a diminishment of verbal fluency. When I wrote my film about Liz, I decided to attack this idea by making her as verbally fluent as I could - in fact I incorporated a running joke into the film of her using obscure and difficult words like "sciolist" and "tergiversate" that caused her considerable difficulty in being understood by others. I wrote the film in 2012. Early this year, 2016, there was an article in the paper that reported that schizophrenics tend to like using obscure or made-up words - it was almost as if someone had read my film and had based their understanding of schizophrenia on my film without realizing that I was just trying to paint a picture of an individual rather than of the whole group. In my experience, in fact, the verbal fluency of schizophrenics is on a continuum and this continuum is no different than that displayed by the population at large.

The implication of this story is, of course, that the idea of schizophrenia found in the collective consciousness and even among 'experts' is in a state of constant flux. This raises a serious question about whether the condition does, in fact, exist independently of a people's observations of it. I think that doctors, rather than basing their diagnoses on symptoms, label a patient 'schizophrenic' first and then look for symptoms to justify their diagnosis later.

I am going to pitch a couple of strange ideas to you now, if you don't mind. Let us suppose that within civilization there is in a constant tension between two opposed tendencies - the mystical and the rational. In a book I just read by Patrick Harpur the author calls these two world-views sometimes 'soul' and 'spirit' and sometimes 'Dyonisian' and 'Apollonic'. We live in a very rational and scientific age and anything that smacks of mysticism, phenomena such precognition and clairvoyance for instance, is excluded, expelled from society. Mystical experiences are labelled signs of a disease and those who experience them are treated as pariahs. The interaction between a schizophrenic and a psychiatrist is a battle between someone who in a former age might have become a tribal shaman rather than an invalid, who is a vessel for gods and daimons, and someone who could be considered a high priest of the modern rational world. But hyper-rationality itself contains the secret seed of irrationality, just as sometimes a mystical perspective may be the most rational perspective.

Plotinus and Jung, among many others, have argued that there is a world-soul. What we collectively believe about the world influences the world we live in and so we must all bear collective responsibility for the evils that occur in it. Descriptions of schizophrenia create the condition they ostensibly describe. This is a problem for me. I was thinking about this last night. If I want to change the way schizophrenics are treated, should I tell the world this truth - that the world is constructed of beliefs about it? Or should I invent an alternative quasi-rational theory of schizophrenia, one I don't really believe myself, but which might be more helpful to sufferers than the medical model? I don't know. I suspect, by the way, that the psychiatrists who invented the stress-vulnerability model took the second road.

Incidentally, although I believe that schizophrenia has a spiritual origin, I know that many illnesses and disabilities are simply organic. I just don't believe this true of schizophrenia. I am unsure where to draw the line between mind and body and so I am unsure to what extent most illnesses are mental and to what extent physical.

Anyway, I'll talk to you again on Sunday. I hope you are well.

A Reaction to the Orlando Shooting

I never thought I would agree with Bill O'Reilly on an matter but even Republicans can occasionally express a simple truth. In an interview with Stephen Colbert the other night, O'Reilly was asked if he thought one of the issues raised by the massacre was mental illness. O'Reilly replied, "This man wasn't mentally ill - he was evil."

Ever since Obama was elected he has steadfastly refused to use the term "Islamic extremism". The rationale behind this is simple. The more non-Muslims demonize and alienate Muslims the more we push borderline individuals towards acts of mass violence. It is important to remember that Islam is a major world religion and that most Muslims are good people, people who would never consider violence. Islam is not the problem. It is not religion that encourages people to commit violent crimes. It is prejudice and discrimination that drive people to murder, a culture of mutual hate. This is what breeds terrorists. The Troubles in Northern Ireland did not occur because of "Catholic extremism"; they occurred because the Northern Irish divided themselves into two tribes, Catholic and Protestant, and based their group identity on allegiance to one tribe and animosity towards the other.

The situation is similar with the mentally ill. Just as we should not stigmatize all Muslims because of the actions of a tiny minority, we should not label a whole subset of the population as dangerous because of some misguided notion that mental illness alone is the explanation for these events. I know very, very many people who have been diagnosed mentally ill - people diagnosed with depression, bi-polar and even schizophrenia. None of them are violent. None of them are capable of planning and carrying out the kind of crime that occurred in Orlando. Yes, mental illness is a general, social issue. But what we require today is a recognition that the mentally ill are victims, are sufferers, and that current forms of treatment are ineffective or even detrimental. What we don't need is to increase the stigma surrounding mental illness by blaming events such as the Orlando shooting on some kind of sickness of the brain. 

Even if the gunman Omar Mateen was mentally ill, then, it would be wrong to consider him representative. But, in fact, there is no real evidence that he even was mentally ill. The human tendency when confronted with a terrible event is to seek explanations, and mental illness, because it is so foggily understood by most people, is the easy answer. In the interview with O'Reilly, Colbert described Mateen as "schizophrenic". Aside from a statement from an ex-wife saying that Mateen was "sick", we don't have any reason to believe that Mateen was mentally ill at all. 'Evil', yes, but not 'ill'. We certainly don't have any reason to believe he was schizophrenic. Colbert was presumably employing the term in a very vague, generic way, as a synonym for 'crazy'. People in the media often seem to apply the word "schizophrenic" to anyone they don't like and don't understand, a habit that really irritates those like me who actually know what the term entails. I would like a world where commentators at least try to use language in an informed way. Colbert is manifestly a very intelligent person but he doesn't have the foggiest idea what the word "schizophrenic" actually means.

The shooting raises many other issues. The principal one for me, as a New Zealander, is the insanity that a person in American can walk into a shop and buy a machine gun over the counter. That couldn't happen here; it's madness that most Americans can do it. You don't need an assault rifle to hunt ducks or to defend yourself from a home invader - the only purpose of an assault rifle it to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible. If there is a lesson to be learned from this horrer it is not, as O'Reilly suggested, that the West should declare a war on 'radical Islam' or, as others imply, that society needs to identify and somehow neutralize (by bringing back institutions perhaps?) the mentally ill as early as possible. It is simply that the US should ban the sale and possession of assault rifles. Perhaps Hilary Clinton might  be the one with the balls to carry this out?

Modern Mythologies

A culture or society may not be defined by its myths but it is nevertheless fascinating to try to explore the way in which patterns and motifs recur throughout a society's stories, and to seek some underlying meaning within these traditions. The ancient Greeks had their own particular mythology as did the Scandinavians, the Celts, the Maori, the Australian Aboriginals… every traditional people in fact. The dominant tropes, symbols and structures exhibited by mythologies vary from people to people but every community seems to require some kind of mythology, to bind it together and to help it make sense of the world. Fairy stories, for instance, such as the story of Cinderella who marries the king, can be considered a more recent, Christian-era European mythology that promulgated the consoling idea that upwards mobility was possible in an era of social stratification. Mythologies change over time and it may be possible to learn something about a people from the stories it tells and consumes. In this post, I want to talk about a few modern mythologies and hazard some guesses about what they say about the world we live in now.

The first trope I wish to discuss is the story of a war between Good and Evil, a war in which the whole of creation is at stake, where Evil wishes to eliminate Good utterly from the world and vice versa. This narrative form is common to almost all modern Fantasy works – obvious examples include The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and the Harry Potter series. It is so common today that it is easy to forget that it is a twentieth century invention, that it was created principally by Tolkien. The trope of a war between Good and Evil does not really feature in traditional mythologies - in ancient Greek mythology, for instance, the gods are as willful, capricious and morally ambiguous as ordinary people and, in the Iliad, the Trojans are presented as sympathetically as the Greeks. It is tempting to see this trope as originating during the Christian era, with Christianity's tendency to divide the world into polar opposites (virtue and vice, God and the devil, heaven and hell, truth and falsehood, Church doctrine and heresy)… except that the trope of a war between Good and Evil did not really gain traction until a time when the Christian mythology (along with many other great meta-narratives such as those used to justify the British empire) was disintegrating.  It would also be tempting to see the trope of a war between Good and Evil as a metaphor for the Cold War - it was Reagan (I think) who described the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire' after all – except I think it is more likely that it was Reagan who borrowed his rhetoric from Fantasy fiction rather than the other way around. Both of these tempting suppositions must be wrong. I would argue that the emergence of this trope, and of Fantasy fiction in general, occurred as a reaction against a world that had become increasingly rational and morally relativistic, at a time when Christianity was in decline. In an age of science and moral relativism, the simple absolutes presented by Fantasy fiction were enjoyed as an antidote.

The trope of a war between Good and Evil is, of course, not the only modern mythology. Another common myth is the myth of the 'superhero'. Superman is a quite a lot like Hercules or Thor, a man of massive power who vanquishes monsters or giants. The difference is that Superman uses his strength to save ordinary people from natural disasters or criminals, a vocation that never occurred to Hercules or Thor. Superman is a kind of savior figure; superheroes are almost always vigilantes. And they are members of the community they serve and protect; Superman is secretly Clarke Kent, Spiderman is secretly Peter Parker. It is tempting to assume that America summoned the 'superhero' trope out of its collective imagination because people had become much more afraid of crime in the 'fifties then they once were…. but again this supposition must be wrong. The problem with it is that the Middle Ages were vastly less safe, vastly more violent, than the twentieth century, and villagers then felt no need to invent superheroes. It is almost as though modern citizens in the twentieth century invented the idea of the 'superhero' because they didn't need one.

The anthropologist Levi-Strauss has argued that many myths associated with a culture are variants of each other, according to rules 'of symmetry and inversion' (I take this quote from a book by Patrick Harpur). Superman dresses gaudily and gains his power from the sun; Batman only works at night and dresses as a bat. Superman is an extraterrestrial who has descended to earth as a child; Batman is an ordinary man who was 'made' by the murder of his parents. Batman is the purer vigilante. Superhero stories are also stories of Good versus Evil but Batman, who is a good guy, deliberately associates himself with darkness and fear as though, by doing so, he can hold them at bay. Bruce Wayne is like the child who dresses as a vampire or witch at Halloween. But every good guy needs a bad guy and, in the two best Batman films, his adversary is a homicidal clown. The Joker is an inversion of Batman - for one thing, he takes nothing seriously while for Batman everything is in deadly earnest. The Joker does not just pose a physical threat to the Batman, he poses an existential threat - he threatens to expose the absurdity of Wayne's play-acting. In a way, the Joker is more real than the Batman.

Earlier in the post, I said that modern citizens invented superheroes because they didn't need them. Real life Jokers, super villains from whom we require protection, simply don't exist in our world.  And neither, in fact, do real life vigilantes. Is it not strange that, in the twentieth century when vigilantes disappeared from the real world (at least in America and Europe), they returned in our stories?

The last myth I want to investigate are 'vampire' stories. Vampire myths have been around a long time. Bram Stoker did not invent the idea of the vampire but Dracula is the definitive text. Yet the type of vampire fiction on which I want to focus is typified by films such as The Lost Boys and Near Dark. Before I discuss these films, I need to make a sociological point. In primitive cultures, people were divided into children and adults and engaged in initiation rituals when passing from one life stage to the next; in the 1950's though, in Western society a third category was invented, the category of teenagers and young adults. Children now sought membership in this social group, the group of peers slightly older then them, and their way of achieving this was through a flouting of adult rules – through drug use, graffiti, long hair, rock music, piercings, tattoos, casual sex… To be initiated into the world of the cool kids, one needed to transgress. And this is what these vampire films represent. In both films, the young male protagonist is unwittingly initiated into the world of the vampires, either through a bite from an attractive female vampire or by accidentally drinking vampire blood. For a time, the protagonist lives outside the safe adult world with its moral regulations but, in both, he somehow and with help escapes the clutches of the vampires and he returns to society as a human. Both films at their ends reject teen culture. And yet these films were both made in the late 'eighties when teen culture was arguably at its strongest. Is this not also strange?

I think I have reached a point in this post where I can draw some conclusions. It is tempting when interpreting the mythologies of a culture to assume that the mythology somehow represents that culture. But this is not the case. The dominant myths are in fact concerned with everything the culture excludes. If the dominant culture, what Jung calls the 'collective consciousness', represents the Ego, stories emerge out of the Shadow instead. In a world of science and moral relativism, we enjoy the magic and absolutes of fantasy fiction. In a world that no longer requires vigilantes, we seek out vigilante stories. In a world which celebrates and exalts teen culture, we take pleasure in vampire stories that present teen culture as dangerous. Myths in some strange way act as a counterbalance to the culture; for instance, the more violent the literature, the less violent the society. Perhaps we can examine the culture of a society by interpreting its stories backwards. The culture is in key respects the exact opposite of its stories.

This is perhaps a provocative thesis, although it is one I have hinted at before in this blog. I may return to this idea in a later post. 

Definitions of Sexuality

In early 2014, I was more or less compelled by my psychiatrists to see a psychologist. This psychologist works with people diagnosed schizophrenic at the same clinic- I knew of him a little before I entered into a formal relationship with him and had already formed the opinion that he was a know-all who entertained the delusional belief that he could understand his patients better than they understood themselves. Consequently, at my first session, I decided to define the parameters of our conversation. I said, a couple of times, that I was straight. His eyes took on a weird shifty look. He said, "You shouldn't divide the world into homosexuals and non-homosexuals." I said, "Do you mean homosexuals and heterosexuals?" He said, "No - I mean homosexuals and non-homosexuals." I said, "Do you mean homosexuals and bisexuals?" He again said, "No - I mean homosexuals and non-homosexuals".

Obviously, my psychologist and I possessed very different world views. At a later session, after he had regrouped from the shock of a patient actually saying that was straight, he asked me, "So you seriously believe that if a person has one homosexual experience, they must be gay?" I replied that I did. He asked did I believed in "bi-curiousity"? I replied that I didn't. Now, it may seem to you, dear reader, that I was being somewhat inflexible in my world-view. But by expressing myself in this way I was trying to tell him that, not only was I straight, that I had never had a homosexual experience. I had nothing to hide.

In fact, my psychologist and I were committed to two very different ideologist, two very different ways of looking at the world, two very different ways of defining sexuality. To be honest, I subscribed to the exact opposite view of this psychologist. I don't divide the world into homosexuals and non-homosexuals; I divide the world into heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals. In this I am very similar to my 'imaginary' friend Jon Stewart - like him, I abhor homosexuality so much that I tend to regard anyone who has had a single homosexual experience as a homosexual. It is an extreme view. It may seem disloyal to Jon Stewart to suggest that he is secretly homophobic - he endured hell fighting for marriage equality after all - but this attitude is not uncommon among people on the left. Kurt Cobain was both intensely compassionate for gay people and intensely homophobic, and his inability to reconcile these two aspects of his personality may probably have a large part of the reason he killed himself. (This aspect of Cobain's personality, that he was secretly quite homophobic, is often swept under the carpet by biographers, as happened with the documentary  "Montage of Heck", but it is still true. For a discussion on the contradictions inherent in the Left, see my post "The Disease of the Left".)

Obviously I did not have a very good relationship with this psychologist. Rather than trying to help me, he seemed to want to coerce me into accepting his perspective on the world, to bully or bludgeon me into submission. As time passed, my relationship with him descended into a kind of war. One time, for instance, he told me that sexual identity is "fluid" and called me "aspergerous" for refusing to believe him. What world, I wondered, did he live in? Because he obviously wasn't living in the same world in which I lived. I suspect that, for whatever reason, he was trying to coerce me to confess some kind of homosexual experience or desire, perhaps because of whatever theory of schizophrenia was now in vogue now among psychologists, or perhaps because he had been fed false information. Rather than trying to help me, he was making me worse. On another occasion, to give a revealing example, I described a story I had heard - a Gay magazine in the UK had written a headline saying that George Clooney was "gay, gay, gay". Clooney, who is obviously straight, issued a press release saying, "I don't want to offend the gay community by saying I am not gay, but the third gay seems a bit excessive. I may be gay, gay, but I am definitely not gay, gay, gay." After I told this story, the psychologist said, "Why don't you say that?"

Now, although I said that I regard anyone who has had a single homosexual experience as gay, in fact I have modified this belief over the years. I now regard anyone who has had a single consensual homosexual experience as gay. Once, when I was about twenty-two, some five years before I my first psychotic episode, I was drinking and smoking pot with work-mates at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron. One of my work-mates, not one I knew well, asked if I wanted 'seconds'. This meant that he would blow cannabis smoke in my face and I would inhale. It was about 4AM. I agreed. When he exhaled, he put his lips against mine. I neither wanted nor enjoyed this intimacy with another man and, in fact, it has caused me some distress over the years - especially in the time since I have talked about it. In my last session with the psychologist, I mentioned this story to him - in fact, I thought he already knew about it because I had written about it before in an essay I had given to a psychiatrist. I decided to mention it for two reasons, first because I always try to be honest and, second, because I still thought his role was to help me. Instead of reacting with sympathy, his reaction was unmistakably one of triumph – perhaps because I hadn't expressed myself clearly enough but mainly because it was what he wanted to hear. He said, "You see- there's a little homosexuality in everyone." 

Over that summer, after a year of this incredibly sensitive and helpful therapy, I gave serious thought to killing myself. To spend a year saying one is straight, a year of trying to talk honestly about one's life and why one had became unwell in the first place, and not to believed, is an awful thing. I was under the Mental Health Act and no one seemed willing to recognize that a mistake had been made and that I shouldn't be under it.  I worried that my psychologist might be deliberately misrepresenting me to others. Instead of suicide, I tried to find another solution – I wrote an abusive email to my psychologist, saying some vile things and discontinuing our relationship. I won't describe this email because it is not really fit for public consumption. It didn't go down well. The psychologist succumbed to what can only be described as 'homosexual panic' and complained to a supervisor about 'sexual harassment'. I find this quite ironic, coming from this man whose job is obviously based around a kind of sexual harassment.

I would like to make a more general point now. In 2013, there was a news report in the local newspaper about the suicide of a young army officer. This young man had apparently had some kind of 'homosexual experience' and had told several people about; shortly after, I think about a month later, he suffered what could only have been a psychotic episode, told a fellow male soldier that he loved him and, immediately after, returned to the barracks where he shot himself. In the aftermath, his family said that they had no idea that he was gay. The point I want to make should be obvious. If, as the result a 'homosexual experience', a person suffers a psychotic episode and then kills himself, that experience simply can't have been deliberate or consensual. People don't suddenly turn gay. The attitude of people, such as this psychologist, to sexuality beggars belief.

I should spell out one final irony. This psychologist I described, who was incapable of identifying himself as 'straight' or even of using the word, is married with two children; I, who have suffered the agonies of the damned over many years trying to convince people in the Mental Health Service that I am not gay, or even secretly gay, have been without a girlfriend for some considerable time. Not because I don't want one but because it is difficult to get one when one is unemployed and quite often seriously depressed. It makes me wonder about karma and what I must have done wrong in a previous life.

For a post that relates to this topic, I recommend "Concerning Recruitment".

Why I Hate "A Beautiful Mind" Part 2

In a previous post, one that was quite popular, I put forward a number of reasons why I hate the film A Beautiful Mind. In this post, I want to approach the story of John Nash's life from a different perspective. First, though, I want to say something generally about schizophrenia. For the last couple of decades, the most favored explanation for schizophrenia has been that it results from a dopamine imbalance. Older theories, though, such as the stress-vulnerability model and the theory of the double-bind, attributed madness to environmental stressors. I prefer these older theories. My own theory of psychosis is so simple it may seem banal- that a person experiences a psychotic episode because there is a problem in his life which he has trouble identifying and no idea how to fix.

Consider the following scenario concerning a hypothetical subject we shall call John Nash. Nash is a mathematical genius and is reasonably famous, especially in his field. In his mid-twenties, he is engulfed in a scandal - he reputedly exposes himself to another man in a public bathroom. The circumstances surrounding this event are confused and Nash himself is unable to give a satisfactory account of what happened. As a result of this scandal, he is dismissed from his position at the research facility at which he is working. Because of this, and because perhaps of other, less publicized incidents that may or may not have occurred, rumors start to spread that Nash is gay. Nash senses that he is the subject of rumor but, because he is in fact straight and finds the idea that others might think him homosexual utterly repugnant, is unable to make sense of what is happening. In his late twenties, he forms the paranoid delusion that he is the victim of a Communist conspiracy and that everyone who wears a red tie is a member of this conspiracy. Nash suffers a complete breakdown and is institutionalized. 

Unfortunately treatment does not improve his condition. In fact, it actually makes it worse. This is the 'fifties after all. Schizophrenia is completely misunderstood by the general public; homosexuality is not only illegal but a dirty word that is never spoken out loud. People assume that Nash is being treated not for schizophrenia but for homosexuality. Perhaps his psychiatrists themselves believe that he is homosexual - at this time homosexuals were also given insulin shock therapy and were thrown into the same asylums as the schizophrenics. Nash's problem, a problem of how he is perceived by others, has been exacerbated rather than ameliorated.

What can Nash do? It turns out that Nash, who is married, has an illegitimate child from a previous relationship. At one time, to pick a fairly revealing moment in his life, he writes a letter to a friend saying that he believes this child will be his "gay redemption". What does he mean by this? Nash means that he believes or at least hopes that his illegitimate child will prove that he is straight. But he can't use the word 'straight' because in the 'fifties and 'sixties use of the word 'straight' as a synonym for heterosexual has not yet caught on. The bigotry of the era prevents those who say they are straight from being believed.The more Nash fights, the more enmeshed in the situation he becomes. Nash is in a double-bind and cannot escape.

As time passes, knowledge that Nash is schizophrenic rather than homosexual spreads among Nash's acquaintances. Bizarrely, this change in public perception cures Nash's psychotic symptoms – Nash prefers people to believe that he is schizophrenic than believe that he is gay. The change in how he is perceived resolves the problem in his life. In 2000, Ron Howard directs a film about Nash, putting him forward as an archetypal schizophrenic, completely misrepresenting his condition and life, and sweeping all references to sexuality under the rug. Perhaps, in a way, this is something that Nash might want. But it is nevertheless bullshit.

I have written this short  film treatment based on my memory of the little I have read about John Nash. I am not an expert on Nash, but I believe it is more or less accurate. For a more detailed but in a way less true account of the his life, you can take a look at my original post, "Why I Hate A Beautiful Mind".

Concerning Love

One sign that a person has too much time on his hands is that he or she starts to worry obsessively about the nature of love. Ordinary people do not tend to think about this issue overly much. And yet it is a problem. In English, the word 'love' has an extraordinarily broad compass, ranging from Christian love (which can be described as love for one's neighbor, love for the poor and the oppressed, a love that is general and political) through love for one's friends, love for one's family, to love for one's inamorato or inamorata. It is only with respect to the last type of love that a sexual component is involved. This profound ambiguity in the meaning of the word 'love' presents a genuine problem. The concept of love has been integral to Western society for generations, to a culture where marriage is based on free choice rather than arrangement; furthermore the concept is the lynchpin of discourses ranging from religion to sexuality. Love is sometimes exalted as the highest good; sometimes, by contrast, it has been viewed as dirty and evil. (See my post "Concerning Kafka and Wilde" for a discussion of this.) In the contemporary Western world, love is just as problematic as it was in Wilde's day. (A good example of a contemporary film that  explores this problematic is "I Love You, Man".)

Perhaps the reason that the concept of 'love' is so complex and confused is that the word encompasses too many different types of phenomena. The ancient Greeks distinguished between four different types of love - agape, eros, philia and storge. Perhaps the English speaking world would be better served by discriminating between different types of love by using different words for the different attitudes people adopt towards each other. At the very least, we could discriminate between love that has a sexual dimension and love that does not. The issue, as ever, is one of language. Our terms are ambiguous and vague. How much confusion and conflict could we resolve if people found ways to use language more clearly and precisely, to find common ground with respect to words?

A issue related to the problematic surrounding the word 'love' is a confusion concerning the terms people use to characterize their relationships. It is quite common among many people on the left, at least in this country, for a person to describe his or her significant other as a 'partner'. I was once attending a coffee group, a group for people who were patients of the Mental Health System, where the Occupational Therapist present alluded in conversation to her "partner"; one of the young patients there asked her if she was a lesbian.  The poor OT  had no idea how to reply. The young patient explained that, where she came from, Hamilton, only gay people ever used the word "partner". The OT defended herself, as best she could, by saying that she preferred the word "partner" because it seemed more mature.

Now, personally, I dislike this use of the word "partner". There may be good grounds for using it from a Feminist perspective, in that employing this word avoids buying into the power relations historically implicit in gendered speech, but I prefer language that is transparent, that is gender specific: it seems to me more honest. For example, I prefer the words "boyfriend" and "girlfriend", immature though they may seem, because they specify the sex of the one referred to and because they indicate that the relationship is in the public domain. I tend to describe my father's current squeeze as his 'girlfriend', despite the fact that my father  is in his sixties, because it seems to better describe their relationship. The word "partner", by contrast, makes the relationship seem like a commercial arrangement.

Another anecdote that demonstrates how difficult issues of language can be with respect to relationships concerns a friend of mine who identifies sometimes as a lesbian and sometimes as bisexual.  This friend, despite being in a Civil Union with a woman some years older, recently acquired, with the full knowledge and consent of her partner, a male paramour. The word my friend used to describe her inamorato was "lover". Although I think very highly of my friend, use of the word 'lover' in this context put my teeth on edge. For two reasons. First, because it is again gender nonspecific and second, because of the ambiguity surrounding the word 'love' that I described earlier. Use of the word 'lover' in this context seems to cheapen the concept of love somehow; it seems to reduces all love to sex. The battle for Marriage Equality in recent years was based on the idea that Gay people can enter into committed monogamous relationships as much as Straight people can, that homosexual and heterosexual erotic love are of the same quality. My friend's story makes me wonder why we went to such lengths to fight for marriage reform. In my strange and admittedly quite poorly written post, "Me and Jon Stewart Part 3", I described Jon as "a lover" - my intention was not to say anything about sex but rather to suggest that he displayed the virtues of Christian love, a strange thing to say I admit of a Jewish atheist, but true nonetheless. Love and sex are often two separate things. It is possible to have sex without love and love without sex. But the battle for Gay marriage was a battle premised on the notion of love, on the the idea that erotic love, regardless of who it is between, is sacred.

Given these ambiguities and confusions surrounding the concept of "love", it may seem that a solution could be to follow the Greek model and have different words for different types of love. There may, however, be a reason why we use the same word to describe all these many different ways of orientating ourselves towards others. Perhaps all love contains an element of sublimated sexual desire, as Freud no doubt would say; or perhaps when we tell our beloved that we love her we are inviting her into our family. I don't know. I admit I may seem to contradict myself. I haven't resolved this issue in my own mind. But the question certainly deserves further investigation.

You might ask what my own attitude to love is. I would say that I don't fall in love easily. I think I try to follow the example set by Lou Reed in Venus in Furs, where he sings about "love not given lightly"; in fact, I was in a relationship and sleeping with my first girlfriend for several years before I told her that I loved her and, when I first did so, I did so accidentally. We broke up briefly as a result. All in all, I think it is better to profess love too little than too much; people who love excessively have, I think, significant issues. I think of the refrain from Fleetwood Mac's song Tusk: "Don't tell me that you love me. Just tell me that you want me."

The Good Ol' Days

Yet another short story... This one I wrote around October or November 2013. I should say something about it. It is set in 1981 during the Springbok Rugby tour of New Zealand (I was two years old at the time). Because there should was a sporting boycott on South Africa, New Zealand anti-apartheid protestors took to the streets and sportsgrounds to agitate and otherwise to try to prevent the tour going ahead. This is the context of the story

I shold also say something else about it. In my stories I can be subtle, perhaps oversubtle. This story is also concerned with lead pollution, with the fact that in the later half of the last century there was very probably widespread brain damage associated with lead in paint and petrol. This theme is so subtle that it can be easily missed. If you are interested in the lead epidemic of the twentieth century, check out "Lead: America's Real Criminal Element" on Mother Jones or listen to the song "Gaskrankinstation" by the Headless Chickens, a great New Zealand Band from the 'eighties and 'nineties.

The Good Ol’ Days

The paint was fraying from the banister. Terry picked at it while he waited for Kathy to arrive and thought about the general decrepitude of the house – the peeling wallpaper, the empty beer bottles scattered across the floor of the lounge, the dishes gathering mould in the sink. The hot water cylinder was broken. Terry’s flatmate Brian had asked the landlord to do something about it; the landlord – a fervent Tour supporter who thought the protesters were all hippies and had burst capillaries all over his nose - had looked around pointedly, thrust out his chin and asked sarcastically if they wanted to go to the tenancy tribunal. Terry thought about all this while he stood on the deck and waited for Kathy to arrive with the car. He had a headache, a dull pounding behind his forehead. He didn’t think it could be withdrawal. You couldn’t get addicted to heroin if you’ve only tried it once.

            Headlights swept across the garden, picking up the bamboo and then Terry, standing in his leather jacket and black jeans on the veranda. Terry was skinny to the point of emaciation and emanated a kind of sickly, wasted aura. There was a Sex Pistols sticker on his jacket but that was Terry – always five years behind the times. When Kathy stopped the car, he ran around the back to get in. As he ran, he caught a whiff of exhaust from the idling car, a sweet smell that he’d associated with petrol stations ever since childhood and which he had always quite liked. He arrived at the side door, opened it and climbed in the passenger seat.

            The stray thought, “It hurts!” passed through his brain.

             “Have you got everything?” asked Kathy.

            “I think so.”

            “Good. Let’s go!” she said. And then screamed for no reason.

            Kathy was twenty-two, the same age as Terry. They had met a year ago at a Ban the Bomb march on Queen Street, found that they had a couple of mutual acquaintances and had started hanging out on an weekly basis. Neither one of them enjoyed very many friends and their alliance was partly based on convenience, partly on desperation. Terry looked sidelong at her. Ordinarily Kathy would be listening to the current top ten but tonight she had the radio tuned to the news. Kathy was wearing a denim jacket, a short leather skirt and had her hair gelled up in spikes. Terry often entertained romantic thoughts about Kathy, and frequently lusted after her in his private moments, but the times he had made sexual advances towards her – an arm around her shoulders walking away from a gig, a hand on her knee when they were sitting at his place listening to a Clash record – she would flinch and shift away. Seriously, he thought she might be frigid. Still he continued to hang on and hope. Tonight, he knew, though, would be the same as any other night they went into town: an aimless drifting from bar to bar interspersed by jugs of cheap piss and conversations about politics until one or both of them would have to excuse themselves and go vomit in the bathroom.

            The car flew through the night on rain-slicked streets. It was very cold.

            “Are you going to watch the wedding?” asked Kathy.

            “Probably not. All this Royal bullshit makes me nauseous. People bowing and scraping to a bunch of rich inbred tossers in fancy clothes. The fact that we’re still ruled over by a Queen is ridiculous. It’s just stupid.”

            “I’m going to watch it,” said Kathy firmly. “I want to see what Diana is wearing. Even if the monarchy is an obsolete institution and an historical anachronism.  I hear that they’re planning to honeymoon in Gibraltar.”

            The news muttered away in the background. Apparently there had been a riot or something in Wellington, a street battle between anti-apartheid demonstrators and the police, but Terry found it difficult to concentrate on the report as a consequence of his headache. He decided to wait until tomorrow and read about it in the paper.

            When the man had come over the other night, the three of them – Terry, the man and Brian– had sat around the lounge for a while and made small talk. The man was a paid-up member of the Communist party and expressed strong opinions on a number of subjects. They’d talked about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and exchanged theories about why the CIA might have assassinated Norman Kirk. Terry had picked at the yellow foam spilling from a tear in the sofa and watched a mosquito buzzing between the corner of the room and the bare light bulb in the centre of the ceiling; the whole vibe felt slightly awkward and forced. There they were, the three of them, going through the motions of pretending the man was there on a social visit when really they all knew he was a dealer come to negotiate a business transaction. Eventually though he’d come to the point. I’ve a special sale going, he said, for virgin users who want a good time.

            “Shit,” said Kathy suddenly.

            “What?”

            “I think I’ve left my purse behind. Can you check the back seat for me?”

            Terry turned and rummaged around the back.

            “No. It’s not there.”

            “Shit. We’d better go home so I can get it.” Kathy indicated and executed a sharp u-turn.

            Kathy lived with her elderly aunt in a state house in Kohimaramara. The aunt had taken her in during the spring of the year before when Kathy’s mother had committed suicide, an overdose of sleeping pills. The front curtains of the house were open and light spilled into the garden. Terry suggested he wait in the car while Kathy recovered her purse.

            “You might as well come in,” said Kathy. “You can say hello to my aunt.”

            Kathy opened the front door – it was unlocked – and Terry followed her gingerly into the house. In the sitting room, Terry saw, the aunt was hosting a small gathering, a man and woman as old as she was. The three old people were sitting on sofas around a small table, on which sat a plate of wine biscuits, balancing china cups full of tea in their knees. When she saw Kathy, the aunt’s creased face lifted in a smile that exposed the gold fillings in her incisors.

            “Kathy! You’re back early!”

            “I’m just here to pick up my purse. I left it behind.”

            “We’re not staying long,” said Terry quickly.

            “That’s fine, dear! Don’t mind us.”

            “I’ll go get it from my room,” said Kathy.

            Kathy often saw auras, especially in the months since her mother had committed suicide. Walking to and from her job at the garments factory, the people she passed seemed surrounded by radioactive clouds, shifting prismatic halos in blue or yellow shot through with vermilion and magenta. For some reason, she related these auras to health. She seemed able to see how healthy people were. But more and more these days, the people she saw when she walked seemed sick; it was as though a great pall of illness hung over the city, a fog of sickness compounded of beer fumes, car exhaust, ignorance and stupidity. It seemed to her that the illness was spreading. The world was broken and nobody was prepared to fix it.

            “I’ll just be a minute,” she said.

            “Why don’t you sit down?” said the aunt to Terry. “Albert, Anne, this is Terry, a friend of Kathy’s. Terry, these are my old friends Albert and Anne Galbraith.”

            “Say hello to Terry!” said Anne loudly to her husband. Albert grunted inarticulately.

            “You can do better than that, Albert!” She leaned forward confidentially. “Poor darling had a stroke last year. He hasn’t been quite the same since.”

            Now that Terry had opportunity to look at him properly, he could see that one side of Albert’s face seemed to sag in such a way that, even though he was obviously trying to smile in an amiable way, the effect was as though an unseen puppeteer was lifting one corner of his mouth with an invisible string. Terry perched uncomfortably on an armrest and looked around. He’d never liked Kathy’s aunt’s house. To him the place always seemed to have a kind of antiseptic quality, a feel and smell he associated with rest homes and hospitals. As always the air in the house carried a hint of boiled cabbage; he could just about taste it. He massaged his forehead as if he could knuckle away the headache.

            “Do any of you know anything about some kind of incident in Wellington?” he asked tentatively. “Some kind of riot or…”

            The aunt batted aside his question.

            “We’ve been talking about the Royal wedding! We’re all quite obsessed by it. It’s so heartening to think of that nice young man Charles finally getting married. And to such a sweet looking girl too! A kindergarten teacher…”

            “It’s like a fairy tale,” said Anne. “That’s what it’s like.”

            “I think it’s wonderful. You know, there are some people who think we should get rid of the royal family. But I think they’re just ungrateful. We’re British after all. Personally…” The aunt paused for effect. “Personally I’ve always found it such a consolation imagining Elizabeth and Phillip up there. Looking down over us. Such a reassurance.”

            “It’s what we fought the War for,” said Anne briefly. “Albert got gassed during the War. In Greece. They say they didn’t use gas but really they did. Didn’t they Albert?”

            Albert grunted once more, presumably in confirmation.

            Terry rubbed his forehead again. The stray thought, “It hurts!” passed through his brain.

            “Excuse me,” he said. “Do you mind if I use the bathroom?”

            “Of course not Terry.”

            Terry stood and walked out of the living room into the corridor. On the door to the bathroom hung a yellowing calendar showing bucolic scenes of lambs frolicking in lush English pastures. Terry opened the door and went inside; the medicine cabinet was on his left going in. After Terry had urinated, he pulled ajar the door of the cabinet and started furtively rummaging through the contents. He felt a little guilty about ransacking the aunt’s mediation without her permission but what he wanted, what he really needed, was something to kill the pain in his head. The inventory of the cabinet was a glossary on the ailments of the old - in addition to band-aids, bandages and disinfectant, he found cough syrup for bronchitis, cream for lumbago, antacids for indigestion, pills for gout and constipation and even a bottle of cod-liver oil that had obviously not been touched for years as the lid was crusted shut - but what he couldn’t find, in fact, was any analgesic stronger than Aspirin. Did the aunt never get a migraine or a head cold? At last he decided to take an Aspirin, washing it down with a glass of cloudy water from the tap, and returned to the sitting room. The pounding in his head felt stronger than ever.

            The aunt and her friends were still talking about the War.

            “Do you remember the rationing?” said Anne. “I remember how hard it was to find a tub of butter. And you couldn’t get a leg of lamb for love nor money.”

            “I remember when the Americans would drop anchor in the harbour and the sailors would come into town on shore leave,” said the aunt. “Such strapping, fit young men all done up in their uniforms! They would come to the dances when the big bands played. You know, there was one of them took a fancy to me but, of course, I was stepping out with George at the time. I look back at myself and I think ‘what a silly young girl’.” The aunt laughed a little partly out of embarrassment and partly out of remembered lasciviousness. “But of course that’s the story of youth. Missed opportunities.”

            If Terry were to be honest with himself, he would have to admit that most of his political attitudes had been shaped by a desire to impress Kathy. Even when he had attended the Ban the Bomb rally, that time they had first met, it had been more because Brian had persuaded him that it would be a cool thing to do rather than out of any deep solidarity with the cause of nuclear disarmament. It was Brian who had introduced him to the punky looking girl with the anti-Muldoon placard. Since then Terry had become much more politically active and had even started showing up to Union meetings that he had no particular interest in but which he made sure he told Kathy about afterwards. He had joined the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and started volunteering at the City Mission. He had even become a vegetarian for her sake. It seemed like a lot of effort to go to for a girl who was probably frigid.

            “Have you any idea why Kathy is taking so long?” he asked the aunt.

            “Of course, Charles has served in the military himself,” said the aunt to Anne, ignoring him. “He’s a Commander in the Royal Navy. I shouldn’t be surprised if he attends the ceremony in his naval uniform. Don’t you think that would be splendid?”

            “I’m not so interested in what Charles wears,” replied Anne. “It’s what Diana wears that I want to see. I want to see her dress.”

What with his headache, Terry found it difficult to remain patient with all this talk. After all, why should anyone care what the hell some stupid posh bitch wore to her wedding? It was all beside the point. Perhaps, Terry thought, this was what hell was like: an eternity spent trapped with a bunch of old women gossiping about upcoming Royal nuptials in a small room smelling of linemen and boiled cabbage.

“I’m just going to see what’s keeping her,” he told the aunt.

After he and Brian had shot up, they had lain on the floor of the lounge for a while. Terry had felt fantastic, as though he was levitating.  After he’d lain there for a while, he’d decided, for some reason, to have a shower. The hot water felt fantastic and he had suddenly developed the strong impression, while standing in the shower, strangely but not unpleasantly, that the top of his skull had lifted off his head and was floating six inches above his exposed brain. He felt fantastic and wanted only to feel this way forever. He tilted his head back to allow the water to rain into his mouth. And then screamed for no reason. That was the night the hot water cylinder broke.

            When Terry arrived at Kathy’s room, he found the door ajar. He pushed it open. The light was off so he fumbled for the light switch and switched it on. Kathy, he saw, was lying, fully dressed, with her face down in a pillow, in bed.

            “Kathy, are you alright? What are you doing in bed?”

            “I was looking for my purse and I couldn’t find it and so I thought… I’d just lie down for a moment…”

            “You couldn’t find your purse? Look, it’s right here – behind the door.”

            Kathy didn’t answer. Terry moved across the room and kneeled by the bed.

            “What’s wrong, Kathy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look,” he said. “If you don’t want to go out tonight anymore, that’s all right. I’ll uh… I’ll find my own way home…”

            Kathy turned her head to look at him. He saw that her face was streaked with tears. She was very beautiful.

            “Terry, do you think things will ever get better?”

            Terry hesitated. He didn’t know what to say.

            “Yeah, well,” he said at last. “I’m sure things aren’t going to be this way forever, I mean…” He lifted his hands, helplessly, giving up. “I mean, I really don’t know.”

            From that night on and for the rest of the tour, after the events at Molesworth Street, the protestors took to wearing helmets to protect their heads from the nightsticks of the police.