I have just finished reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It's brilliant. I could wax lyrical about how wonderful this book is in this post but that wouldn't be very interesting. Instead I am going to critique it a little – it is possible to like a writer without agreeing wholesale with all of his ideas. In particular, I am going to show shortcomings in the particular Darwinian model of evolution he espouses and demonstrate the bogusness of evolutionary psychology. Because I had to leave the book itself in Whanganui (where I spent the last week), this post won't contain quotes and I will be working from memory. Remember, one can like a person or a book without agreeing with all of his, or its, arguments. If this post is a little badly written, I apologise. I might have brain damage.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins is aiming to prove a number of claims. He endeavours to show how all the main arguments normally wheeled out to prove the existence of God are flawed. In particular, he seeks to show that the argument from design, the argument that the complexity and apparent perfect fit between organisms and their ecological niches can only be explained by the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient designer, is unnecessary, that evolution through natural selection is sufficient to explain life today in all its forms; he deploys the anthropic principle to explain why Earth has the perfect conditions for both life and intelligent life, and for the origin of life itself. It is possible to argue, and some have, that morality is grounded in religion; Dawkins argues that morality is independent of religion, and, drawing on evolutionary psychology, seeks to show that a moral sense can be viewed as an adaptation beneficial to the survival and propagation of the humans who have it. Dawkins goes on to argue that religion is not just unnecessary, otiose, to the project of explaining 'life, the universe, and everything', it is positively harmful to those who have been infected by this meme. He shows, for instance, that scripture is not only largely invented but presents a Jehovah who is jealous, vindictive, and possibly even sadistic, and cites examples of believers who had their lives ruined by stories of hell-fire and damnation. (Dawkins doesn't mention James Joyce but Joyce is also someone whose childhood was marred by pulpit sermons about eternal perdition – see Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) This summation of the book of course leaves a lot out – for the full picture, I refer the reader to the book itself.
Dawkins is engaged in a kind of war, the same war others such as Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens are fighting and have fought. On the one side, we have atheists who espouse a particular model of evolution (in which natural selection acts upon small chance mutations to gradually modify species), atheists who accept mainstream scientific accounts of the history and prehistory of the world, and, on the other side, Fundamentalist Christians who believe the Bible to be literally true, that the world was created in seven days by God some four thousand years ago, and that fossils are the traces left of animals who lived on Earth before the Flood but weren't taken on board the Ark. Dawkins explicitly says that the target of his righteous indignation is the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He only briefly mentions polytheism and never engages with Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Confucianism, or any of the other major or minor religions (although there is a fascinating section on Cargo Cults.) It is a war between science and dogmatic monotheism. Interestingly, all of these militant atheists (to the ranks of which we can add Bill Maher) think that atheists are actively persecuted, and that it takes courage to 'come out' as an atheist. Dawkins, in the introduction to his book, explicitly compares the atheist social project to the Gay Rights movement. Dennett has performed a similar rhetorical gambit, saying that atheists should identify as 'Brights' in the same way that homosexuals identify as 'Gays'. The world, Dennett is suggesting, is full of closet atheists who should feel proud of their atheism rather than be ashamed of it, should loudly and proudly proclaim their commitment to a Godless materialism to the heavens, and should take the fight for science to the stupid and ignorant who are threatening to remake America and other countries in their perverse image. The analogy between this fledging "Atheist Pride Movement" and the Gay Pride Movement evinces a misunderstanding of homosexuality itself, and of the Gay Pride Movement. Most obviously, gay men and women didn't pick the word 'gay' themselves. In 1900 it meant 'happy, or carefree'. Starting in the 1930s, through semantic drift, it became a derogatory epithet applied by heterosexuals to homosexuals, and then, later, presumably after decriminalisation, it was re-appropriated by the homosexual community, in a similar way that the African-American community has re-appropriated the word 'nigga'.
Of course, Dawkins and Dennett are opposing people who regard the word 'atheist' as a derogatory epithet. But this is something I've never been able to understand. Although I went to Sunday School when a small child, I was raised by atheist parents in a mostly secular country (New Zealand). I never felt ashamed to call myself an atheist, never felt the need to 'come out' as one, and regarded the religious minority as a stupid but harmless cadre who should be humoured rather than battled against. The direction of my life has been in the opposite direction to the people Dawkins describes in his book – from a scientific materialism to the vague sense that the world has a supernatural dimension. I haven't converted to any Abrahamic religion but I have rejected Darwinian evolution as Dawkins and others characterise it. Dawkins is critical of agnosticism and religious moderates (those who see the bible as figurative rather than literal, and cherry-pick the bits they like while disregarding the bits they don't) – I forget his reasons but they are probably similar to the reasons advanced by Sam Harris when he argues that the majority of Muslims, while not being Islamic terrorists, are sympathetic to terrorism. Even a little religion is a bad thing. The truth Dawkins overlooks is that the vast majority of people, particularly here in New Zealand have a sense that the world has a supernatural dimension but don't subscribe to any organised religion. These are the people who put down their religion as "Jedi" in the census, who read the daily horoscope, practice yoga, get their fortune read by tarot readers, are interested in Feng shui and attend talks by the Dalai Lama. New Age Hippies, in other words. I have a friend, very credible, not at all flakey, who as an adult lived in a haunted house and for several nights in a row saw the ghost of a small girl sitting at the foot of his bed crying. This friend is not religious at all. I have had very many weird experiences myself. Towards the end of The God Delusion, Dawkins describes a women he'd corresponded with who, as a child, had an imaginary friend she called "the purple man". The night before she first went to school, the purple man told her that he was going to stop seeing her because she didn't need him anymore; he vanished from her life for many years, returning, in a dream, when she was an adult, at a pivotal moment in her life. Dawkins reports this story but doesn't seem to register the fact that stories like this suggest that the world is stranger "than is dreamed of in your philosophy", that quasi-religious experiences occur to people all the time. Personally, I don't think Darwin has sewn everything up – this is why I like Rupert Sheldrake as much as Richard Dawkins.
Dawkins seems to suggest that the only alternative to Abrahamic religions is Darwinism, and speaks positively of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is the theory that proposes that behaviours, personality traits, and cultural norms are genetic, and evolved under the influence of natural selection. I don't like evolutionary psychology. I think it is speculative and unfalsifiable. And I can give reasons for this judgement. At one point in The God Delusion, Dawkins discusses romantic love. The explanation for romantic love, the phenomenon of a man and a woman falling passionately for each other to the exclusion of everyone else (with sexual jealousy as a concomitant although Dawkins doesn't mention jealousy), is that it ensures that their progeny will be brought up in a secure, safe, nurturing environment in which their needs will be met. Humans are 'designed' (by natural selection), if this argument is correct, to be monogamous. However, several years ago I read an article in The Listener discussing another theory, also based on evolutionary psychology, which proposes that human beings in our primitive days engaged in group sex. This theory is associated with psychologist Christopher Ryan. The evidence for it includes the fact that women are capable of multiple orgasms, suggesting that, in prehistory, women would have sex with multiple men at the same time. So which is it? Are humans naturally monogamous or promiscuous? To answer the question, we would need to go back in time a hundred thousand years to observe the sexual mores of our ancestors. Which is impossible. All evolutionary psychology is is a set of Just So stories (a reference to Kipling which I hope is not too obscure); it is a set of hypotheses almost unsupported by evidence. We could attempt to reconcile the two hypotheses discussed above by suggesting that primitive humans engaged in group sex in the caves they lived in, and that the impulse to love monogamously appeared later, making the capacity of women to experience multiple orgasms a vestigial trait, a little like the appendix. But this would also be simply another Just So Story.
There is a deeper problem with Dawkins's argument. Dawkins's most important book was his first, The Selfish Gene. In it he proposed (this is not an exact quote) that organisms are effectively vehicles for their genes, robots that are 'designed' to carry and replicate DNA. This view of organic life follows directly from something that a friend of mine, a biologist, calls the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. Organisms are born with a set of chromosomes, DNA, that acts as a blue-print for the organism, and which never changes. Yes, mutations can occur (and must occur if we are to accept conventional Darwinism) but these mutations almost always occur in the space between successive generations, in the gonads, so to speak. These mutations are small and random – usually they are detrimental but occasionally they are advantageous, meaning that the organism with the mutation has an improved chance of surviving longer and having more offspring than its rivals, thus passing the mutation on to its own offspring. This is, more or less, the standard picture of Darwinian evolution.
The Selfish Gene was published in 1976. During the 'nineties, a shift away from the Central Dogma occurred, a shift christened 'epigenetics.' It has been gaining steam ever since. Epigenetics is the idea that the environment, both within and without a cell, affects DNA, and that these alterations can be passed on to future generations. In a way, in retrospect, this notion should have been obvious. Liver cells are different from red blood cells and both are different from neurons, yet all three sorts of cell contain exactly the same DNA. Presumably, in different types of cell, different genes are turned on and others are turned off. But how does a cell know which genes to turn on and off? The instructions presumably can't come from the DNA itself but rather from the cell's location with respect to other cells.
But epigenetics does more than suggest that genes can be turned on and off by environmental influences, that environment can affect gene expression. It is possible that the environment can alter DNA itself. I don't have any solid evidence for this hypothesis. When I planned this post, I intended at this point to discuss a newspaper article I read last year I think. This article reported the extraordinary story that one of a set of identical twins who had spent time in space away from his brother, returned to Earth with DNA 7% different from his brother's DNA, presumably as a result of the effects of weightlessness. Unfortunately, when researching this article on the Internet the day before yesterday, I found some evidence that this story, widely reported by world-wide media, was wrong – what changed was not the astronaut's DNA code but gene expression. (See https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/03/20/space-astronaut-twins-dna-changed-how-some-reports-botched-the-story-and-what-we-really-know/). Nevertheless, I remain committed to the idea that it is possible that environment can alter DNA, not in the sense that random mutations can occur, but rather in the sense that DNA can be altered constructively, that genes can change in order to improve the fitness of an organism with respect to new environments.
There is a third possibility, one I have mentioned in the posts "On Evolution" and "The Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia". It seems to me that, for evolution to occur, when a significant mutation occurs, it must occur in a number of individuals in a population in the same vicinity at the same time. This idea puts me at odds with conventional Darwinism and the neo-Darwinism espoused by Dawkins et al. This is why I am sympathetic to the 'morphic resonance' hypothesis devised by Rupert Sheldrake. Interestingly, Noam Chomsky, who is irreligious but doesn't share the militant atheism of people like Dawkins and Dennett and is sometimes sympathetic to religious people, believes that the language instinct evolved all at once, in one massive step, rather than as a series of incremental chance mutations. So I have good company in rejecting conventional Darwinism.
At this point I want to turn to the hypothesis that homosexuality is genetic, that there is a 'gay gene'. The idea of a 'gay gene' runs completely counter to conventional Darwinism because, if homosexuals don't have children, this particular gene shouldn't be passed on to future generations – this is why it is so odd that Dawkins and Dennett continually compare the atheistical movement to the Gay Rights movement. If traditional Darwinism is correct, the gay gene shouldn't exist or, at least, shouldn't be prevalent as it apparently is. The estimate often trotted out by commentators on sexual politics is that 10% of the world's human population is homosexual. Let us suppose for a moment that the gay gene does exist. I believe all other living creatures are heterosexual so it is reasonable to suppose that a hundred thousand years ago, all humans were heterosexual. Suppose homosexuality is a chance mutation. How could it be passed onto future generations if the individual born with this mutation wasn't sexually attracted to the opposite sex? If 10% of the world's human population is homosexual, this suggests that for hundreds of thousands of years gay men and gay women have been procreating , that the secret history of the world is a history of closet homosexuality. This kind of reasoning, by the way, is what drove me mad back in 2007.
We could turn to evolutionary psychology to help solve this puzzle. One hypothesis I read about a long time ago is that, although gay men don't children, their sisters do, and the gay uncles assist and support in the rearing of their nieces and nephews. This is known as 'kin selection' (look it up). Now, if this hypothesis is correct, it is empirically testable. We could consider the sisters of gay men, today and in the past (assuming we can know for sure who in the past was homosexual when the word 'homosexual' hadn't been coined), and find out if they had more children who survived infancy than women from solidly heterosexual families. I suspect that even if such a research project was undertaken, nothing would be found.
So far I have treated the gay gene as something that people either have or don't have, but this treatment requires finessing. In fact, every human is diploid, like other animals that procreate using sexual reproduction, and inherits two versions of every gene, one from his or her mother and one from his or her father. The technical term for different versions of the same gene is 'alleles'. If we presume, reasonably enough, that the homosexual allele is recessive, it becomes possible to suppose that homosexuals have two gay alleles, are what is technically known as 'homozygous recessive'. A person can only be gay is he or she carries both alleles. The much larger number of people who are 'heterozygous' (who carry only one copy of the gay allele) are heterosexual because the straight allele dominates over the gay allele. According to my calculations, if 10% of humanity is homosexual, homozygous recessive, 60% of the world's population would be heterozygous.
Particularly in Africa, large numbers of people have sickle-cell anaemia. People with this congenital disease are born with blood cells that are defective. The disease is genetic but it is a recessive allele that causes sickle cell anaemia – sufferers are homozygous recessive. They need both alleles to be sick. People with only copy of the allele, however, people who are heterozygous, are more resistant to malaria because of the shape of their red blood cells. There is thus an evolutionary advantage to being heterozygous that balances out the possibility of being born with the congenital disease, meaning that the frequency of this allele occurring in Africa remains constant in the population as a whole. Is the same perhaps true of the gay gene? Perhaps carrying one copy of the gay allele confers some evolutionary advantage? Once again this hypothesis is empirically testable but, to test it, we would need solid statistics about who is gay and who isn't, who is homozygous dominant, who is heterozygous, and who is homozygous recessive.
Up to this point, I have discussed the gay gene as though it were only a postulated entity. But in 2012, New Scientist published an article citing research by a couple of geneticists who claimed to have found the gay genes (there were two of them). One gene is active in foetuses shortly before birth, and the other affects the thyroid gland. (Google "the gay gene" and "New Scientist", and the article should pop up.) Dawkins, in The God Delusion, says that when confronted by Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God, one immediately senses it must be false but that it can be difficult to say why it is false. I feel the same way about this New Scientist article. It must be false. Perhaps it is simply bullshit. Although in this post I seem to have tentatively accepted the notion of a 'gay gene', in fact I abandoned this hypothesis many years ago. Either the article is bullshit or there is some other explanation for the geneticists' findings than the conclusion that some people are simply born gay. Perhaps the genes don't directly code for homosexuality but for something associated with homosexuality, like a love of opera, and it is because others think the person gay that he turns gay. (I met a gay man once, by the way, who said that he felt he was letting down the gay community because he didn't like opera.) Or perhaps everyone is born heterosexual and a person's experiences and decisions cause his DNA to change. This is a radical idea but no more radical than the theories proposed by Sheldrake.
I'll finish this post by saying where I am, mentally, since my dosage was increased. I am not at all psychotic. But then I haven't experienced any psychotic symptoms at all since around halfway through the year before last and my dosage was increased only two or three months ago, for very little reason at all. I do feel physically sick a lot. I worry that in this blog I may make mistakes from time to time (I nearly said that I had experienced psychotic symptoms, a typo that could possibly have had very dire consequences.) I wish the arseholes would just allow me to discontinue a medication that does more harm than good.
I went into the Taylor Centre yesterday to receive my Olanzapine injection and, before my injection, the nurse said, "Do you consent to having an Olanzapine injection?" I'd never been asked this before. As the people treating me know, I'm under a fucking Compulsory Treatment Order and have been since around February 2014; I have requested and received multiple Independent Reviews to try to get out of a Mental Health System that is so badly broken there is no way to fix it, and lost every time. I have never had a choice. I asked her, "What would happen if I said 'no'"? but got no real answer. The fact that she even asked me this question reveals how insane the Mental Health System is.
Wednesday, 23 January 2019
Wednesday, 2 January 2019
The Causes of Schizophrenia Part 2
A part of the purpose of this blog is to show two things – that mental 'illness' has causes and that a person changes over the course of his or her life – although when I started writing this blog it wasn't my intention to talk about myself. In today's post, I want to talk about another element that fed into my first psychotic episode. I am going to take the risk of talking about my family a little. It is the only way to prove my point.
Although I am completely heterosexual, I have had an interest in homosexuality for a long time, although this interest didn't lead me to talk about it with others or to read Queer Theory such as the work of Michel Foucault or Judith Butler. From my early teens onwards, I had a fairly simplistic view of sexuality. I thought people were born either gay or straight. In the post "What Happened in 2007 and 2009", I said that I believed in a gay gene but in fact I never had any clear idea about the cause of homosexuality – I just felt sure that people were born either one way or the other. (Kurt Cobain evidently believed it had something to do with the hormones in utero.) I could generally tell who was gay and who was straight by their body language. As I grew older, I observed that some gay men and women could take a long time to come out of the closet but I believed such men and women were in denial of the True Selves and that they tended to be happier after they had come out. I had no evidence for this belief.
The truth is that the world is far messier than I believed when young. I'll tell a story that illustrates this. When I was twenty-one I had a friend, not a good friend, who I would occasionally go to strip clubs with. This is a period in my life I am not proud of. I believed this chap to be straight. One evening we went back to his place to drink and he said to me, "Did you ever feel like kissing a man?" I got out of the house as quick as I could and didn't see him again for thirteen years. When we caught up again, he was in a relationship with an Asian girl. Although he didn't reference the moment that ended our friendship back when we were young directly, he indirectly apologised saying that at the time his parents were going through a messy divorce.
When I went to study at Dunedin when I was eighteen I made a friend called Sarah McConie. More than anyone else, she has influenced my views on sexuality. When I first knew her, she was a brazen lesbian and was in a relationship with a girl who majored in contact juggling at Circus School. I think in first year, Sarah went to Wellington and slept with a man; when she came back she told us all (my friends and I), "Guess what? I'm not a lesbian anymore!" Soon enough she went back to loving women. After I came back to Auckland, I fell out of contact with her. But then a couple of years later I bumped into her at Borders. She introduced me to her fiancĂ© John. I was surprised and she said, "Oh, that's right! Andy knew me when I was a lesbian!" Sarah and John were married for several years but eventually the marriage fell apart when she fell for someone else – her female riding instructor. When I heard about this, I took it as confirmation of my basic beliefs. Her marriage to John had been a phoney marriage during which she'd been in denial of her True Self.
The problem can be illustrated with a thought experiment. Suppose we have a man who is married to a woman, who even has children by her, but is sneaking off for homosexual liaisons at restrooms and public parks. Such men are not uncommon among Republicans in the US. Two terms are available to be applied to such a man – we can either say he is a "closet homosexual" or we can describe him as "bisexual". The American pundits I like, such as Jon Stewart and Samantha Bee, tend to use the term "closet homosexual". As I have argued elsewhere in this blog, the views of the Left on this issue are conflicted: openly gay men and women are ostensibly praised and commended while closet homosexuals are ridiculed and condemned. The term "closet homosexual" is pejorative across the political spectrum. The term "bisexual" however is problematic for many people, both on the left and the right, because of the belief, that I myself shared, that people go either one way or the other. In fact, there are many famous women today who identify as bisexual – examples include Anna Paquin and Miley Cyrus. But there are very few men who identify as bisexual. The only example I can think of is Green Day frontman Billy Joe Armstrong (and I could be wrong.) For men, coming out as bisexual is a step on the road to coming out, or being outed, as gay. Elton John came out as bisexual prior to coming out as gay, and Freddie Mercury came out as bisexual to his girlfriend before immersing himself in the gay scene; although he never came out as gay this is how the world knows him. I think the difference between men and women with respect to bisexuality has a simple cause: men are prepared to have relationships with bisexual women, but women are unwilling to form relationships with bisexual men.
The beliefs I had are in fact typical of the American Left today. In an episode of The Big Bang Theory, an Indian woman reveals to Raj that she is a lesbian but that because of attitudes to homosexuality in India wants to keep it hidden. She wants to marry Raj because she thinks he is also gay and might like the idea of a "phoney-baloney marriage". Raj says, "My baloney prefers women!" In the episode he considers the idea of marrying her anyway and discusses it with Howard and Bernadette. At the end of the episode, Howard says, "I think gay people should marry gay people." Raj says, "Do you have any idea how homophobic that sounds?"
Even Bill Maher, a straight man who supports gay rights, exhibits the prejudice that people simply go one way or the other. On one of his shows, he had Ryan Seacrest as a guest, and Maher took the opportunity to ask him the meaning of the word "queer", saying that most of his gay guests were in the closet as so he couldn't ask them. Now, as I understand it, men and women who identify as queer do so because their sexual identities are not conventionally heterosexual – it is a term for men and women who have had a consensual homosexual experience or two but otherwise identify as heterosexual. Anthony Kiedis is an example of a man who identifies as 'queer'. Seacrest was bullied by Maher into saying that the words "gay" and "queer" are synonyms, when they're not.
For many years, there has been a debate in the Left between those who see sexuality as fixed and those who see it as fluid. Lady Gaga expresses the first view in the song "Born This Way" while Katy Perry expresses the second view in the song "I Kissed a Girl". Ten or fifteen years ago, people often spoke about 'experimentation' or 'bi-curiosity' but this particular paradigm appears to have evaporated. I think the reason Gaga triumphed over Perry is that the idea of sexual fluidity leads directly to the Republican idea that sexuality is a choice and to draconian forms of treatment such as Conversion Therapy. In 2012, a couple of geneticists published an article in New Scientist claiming that they had discovered the two genes responsible for homosexuality, proving that sexuality isn't a choice. I suspect that there is some kind of problem with their methodology but this isn't something I intend to explore here. As a consequence of this change in the political landscape, 'experimentation' and 'bi-curiosity' have been consigned to the dustbin of history.
At this point, I shall turn to my own life.
In 2001, a friend who had come out as gay the previous year or year before came up to Auckland with a girl I'd also known in Dunedin, Renee, who I'd had a crush on. The three of us went to a gay club – I was curious about such places, not because I was in any way bi-curious but because I am open to experience. The next night Renee and I ended up at my father's place for dinner. Also present was a friend of Jan, Helen. All through dinner Jan and Helen were laughing at jokes like high-school girlfriends but every now and again Jan would direct glares of pure hatred at me. After that dinner I decided two things: first, that my step-mother hated me and second that she was having a lesbian affair with Helen under my father's nose. Of course, I never told anyone about the second suspicion. My subconscious belief, or delusion, that my step-mother was a lesbian, wasn't helped by the fact that for many years Helen was always present at the family Christmas parties and birthday parties. The convention, I believe, is that only family members and partners of family members should be present at occasions like these. But Helen was always there, as though she were a member of the family.
(To round off this story, I should say that during this visit I entered into a kind of relationship with Renee, a relationship that became a long distance relationship when Renee went back to Dunedin, but which completely broke down when I sent her an ill considered email which was racier than it should have been.)
The subconscious conviction that my step-mother was a lesbian is part of the reason I decided in 2007, when I had my psychotic meltdown, that my father was gay. I couldn't understand why a straight man would willingly marry a lesbian. (I need to note, by the way, that the marriage between my father and Jan had been on the rocks for years.) In the interval between leaving the Big House and being put on antipsychotics, I had dinner with them and erupted at them, an eruption a long time coming. I said, "It's not natural." Now, this might seem like a right-wing assertion, that I was saying that homosexuality isn't natural. In fact, I believed that some people were naturally straight and others naturally gay – like Howard in The Big Bang Theory I believed that gay people should marry gay people. I thought it unnatural for a gay man to marry a lesbian woman and have children; I thought homosexuals should all come out.
My opinions on sexuality are today, in 2019, totally different than in 2007. Back then I believed that the world was ruled by closet homosexuals; in 2009 I believed there was a vast community of bisexual swingers having clandestine sex with each other, an idea that horrified me. By 2014, I had changed my views, as shown by the story I have published in this blog, "69". I now think bisexuality exists and is not something to condemned. It should, however, be out in the open, rather than hidden from view. I also spent years working out the cause of homosexuality and no longer regard it as being as natural as heterosexuality. Of course, the one thing that hasn't changed is my own sexuality: I am as heterosexual now as I was then.
Of course, as my readers know, from the beginning I was misdiagnosed. The people treating me thought, I think, that I was sexually confused, when, in fact, my first episode resulted, in a way, from an excess of homophobia. (I have talked about this in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode", "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM" and "Cannabis and The Causes of Schizophrenia".) In 2007, I sometimes believed that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals. The psychiatrists are completely unwilling to admit that they made a mistake. In 2017, I told my psychiatrist that I believed my stepmother was a closet lesbian; I thought it was the kind of thing I was supposed to talk about with my psychiatrist. At the independent review held shortly after, she wrote in my report that I had said my step-mother was bisexual. Given the preceding discussion of the difference in connotation between the terms "closet homosexual" and "bisexual", it should be obvious that this misreporting of what I had said had implications that went against me. Evidently Murphy didn't feel it worth reporting that I disliked my step-mother. This is just one example of the way the Mental Health Service has distorted and falsified its records about me to confirm a misdiagnosis.
In this blog I have said Murphy, a couple of months ago, doubled my dosage. I want to explain what happened because I distrust everything she has ever written about me. At an appointment about halfway through last year I brought in a friend with whom I have been going to a pup quiz since 2010. I wanted a witness who could see for herself how dishonest and incompetent Murphy was. Murphy said almost nothing during the appointment. A day or two later, at my friend's place, we discussed the appointment; my friend had had nightmares about it. She said about Murphy, "She's a lesbian, isn't she?" My friend had decided that Murphy was a lesbian because she was so badly dressed. I stuck up for Murphy, saying that it was unlikely she was a lesbian because she'd been pregnant in 2013 when I first became a patient. A couple of months ago, during another appointment, I reported to Murphy what my friend had said. Before I could tell her that I had stuck up for her, she threw me out of the room. When she allowed me back in, she told me that she had decided to massively increase my dosage. In a letter she told me it was because I had laid a complaint against her with the Disability Commissioner, and told me, being the hypocrite that she is, that the increased dosage would help me. The hypocrisy is that I had given her an opportunity to correct the mistake; people in the Mental Health Service lie about their patients all the time and the patient is never given the opportunity to correct their mistakes.
Because people have always misunderstood the nature of my illness, I live in a kind of hell. I'll illustrate this with a couple of stories. In 2015, I think, I told my older brother about the time a jerk had got in my face when I was about 22 or 23, something I have described in the post "Definitions of Sexuality." My brother said, "Did you love him?" I said, "No, he was an arsehole. But the point is, that's the only homosexual experience I've ever had." My brother flinched. I have a friend, Rene (not to be confused with Renee, the girl I mentioned above) with whom I occasionally meet to drink red wine and discuss philosophy. Last year or the year before last, I was visiting my aunt, a late-in-life lesbian (although I didn't know that then) and friend of Jan, when my mother brought up my friendship with Rene. My aunt said, "Why don't you introduce him to your father?" On two occasions, one of Jan's brothers, someone I see very infrequently, has asked me if I was brought up by fundamentalist Christians. Obviously all three of them, including my brother, completely failed to understand me.
I'll finish this post by filling in a couple of details. My father and step-mother divorced a number of years ago, I think in 2010 although I am not sure. It is possible I was wrong that she was having a lesbian affair, but it is no longer something that occupies me much, because she is out of my life. I wish also to briefly describe what has happened in Sarah's life in recent years. For a long time she has been in a civil union with a woman much older than her called Sue. A couple of years ago (some time after I wrote "69") we caught up and she told me that she had a lover, a man called Gordon. Sarah, Sue and Gordon were in a kind of triangular relationship: they all lived on the same property but Sarah and Gordon lived together in a caravan. Last year, Sarah fell pregnant and recently had a baby. When she was going to antenatal classes, she didn't take Gordon, as you might expect – she took Sue. The schemas we create to try to make sense of the world often fail. The real world can be very messy indeed.
Although I am completely heterosexual, I have had an interest in homosexuality for a long time, although this interest didn't lead me to talk about it with others or to read Queer Theory such as the work of Michel Foucault or Judith Butler. From my early teens onwards, I had a fairly simplistic view of sexuality. I thought people were born either gay or straight. In the post "What Happened in 2007 and 2009", I said that I believed in a gay gene but in fact I never had any clear idea about the cause of homosexuality – I just felt sure that people were born either one way or the other. (Kurt Cobain evidently believed it had something to do with the hormones in utero.) I could generally tell who was gay and who was straight by their body language. As I grew older, I observed that some gay men and women could take a long time to come out of the closet but I believed such men and women were in denial of the True Selves and that they tended to be happier after they had come out. I had no evidence for this belief.
The truth is that the world is far messier than I believed when young. I'll tell a story that illustrates this. When I was twenty-one I had a friend, not a good friend, who I would occasionally go to strip clubs with. This is a period in my life I am not proud of. I believed this chap to be straight. One evening we went back to his place to drink and he said to me, "Did you ever feel like kissing a man?" I got out of the house as quick as I could and didn't see him again for thirteen years. When we caught up again, he was in a relationship with an Asian girl. Although he didn't reference the moment that ended our friendship back when we were young directly, he indirectly apologised saying that at the time his parents were going through a messy divorce.
When I went to study at Dunedin when I was eighteen I made a friend called Sarah McConie. More than anyone else, she has influenced my views on sexuality. When I first knew her, she was a brazen lesbian and was in a relationship with a girl who majored in contact juggling at Circus School. I think in first year, Sarah went to Wellington and slept with a man; when she came back she told us all (my friends and I), "Guess what? I'm not a lesbian anymore!" Soon enough she went back to loving women. After I came back to Auckland, I fell out of contact with her. But then a couple of years later I bumped into her at Borders. She introduced me to her fiancĂ© John. I was surprised and she said, "Oh, that's right! Andy knew me when I was a lesbian!" Sarah and John were married for several years but eventually the marriage fell apart when she fell for someone else – her female riding instructor. When I heard about this, I took it as confirmation of my basic beliefs. Her marriage to John had been a phoney marriage during which she'd been in denial of her True Self.
The problem can be illustrated with a thought experiment. Suppose we have a man who is married to a woman, who even has children by her, but is sneaking off for homosexual liaisons at restrooms and public parks. Such men are not uncommon among Republicans in the US. Two terms are available to be applied to such a man – we can either say he is a "closet homosexual" or we can describe him as "bisexual". The American pundits I like, such as Jon Stewart and Samantha Bee, tend to use the term "closet homosexual". As I have argued elsewhere in this blog, the views of the Left on this issue are conflicted: openly gay men and women are ostensibly praised and commended while closet homosexuals are ridiculed and condemned. The term "closet homosexual" is pejorative across the political spectrum. The term "bisexual" however is problematic for many people, both on the left and the right, because of the belief, that I myself shared, that people go either one way or the other. In fact, there are many famous women today who identify as bisexual – examples include Anna Paquin and Miley Cyrus. But there are very few men who identify as bisexual. The only example I can think of is Green Day frontman Billy Joe Armstrong (and I could be wrong.) For men, coming out as bisexual is a step on the road to coming out, or being outed, as gay. Elton John came out as bisexual prior to coming out as gay, and Freddie Mercury came out as bisexual to his girlfriend before immersing himself in the gay scene; although he never came out as gay this is how the world knows him. I think the difference between men and women with respect to bisexuality has a simple cause: men are prepared to have relationships with bisexual women, but women are unwilling to form relationships with bisexual men.
The beliefs I had are in fact typical of the American Left today. In an episode of The Big Bang Theory, an Indian woman reveals to Raj that she is a lesbian but that because of attitudes to homosexuality in India wants to keep it hidden. She wants to marry Raj because she thinks he is also gay and might like the idea of a "phoney-baloney marriage". Raj says, "My baloney prefers women!" In the episode he considers the idea of marrying her anyway and discusses it with Howard and Bernadette. At the end of the episode, Howard says, "I think gay people should marry gay people." Raj says, "Do you have any idea how homophobic that sounds?"
Even Bill Maher, a straight man who supports gay rights, exhibits the prejudice that people simply go one way or the other. On one of his shows, he had Ryan Seacrest as a guest, and Maher took the opportunity to ask him the meaning of the word "queer", saying that most of his gay guests were in the closet as so he couldn't ask them. Now, as I understand it, men and women who identify as queer do so because their sexual identities are not conventionally heterosexual – it is a term for men and women who have had a consensual homosexual experience or two but otherwise identify as heterosexual. Anthony Kiedis is an example of a man who identifies as 'queer'. Seacrest was bullied by Maher into saying that the words "gay" and "queer" are synonyms, when they're not.
For many years, there has been a debate in the Left between those who see sexuality as fixed and those who see it as fluid. Lady Gaga expresses the first view in the song "Born This Way" while Katy Perry expresses the second view in the song "I Kissed a Girl". Ten or fifteen years ago, people often spoke about 'experimentation' or 'bi-curiosity' but this particular paradigm appears to have evaporated. I think the reason Gaga triumphed over Perry is that the idea of sexual fluidity leads directly to the Republican idea that sexuality is a choice and to draconian forms of treatment such as Conversion Therapy. In 2012, a couple of geneticists published an article in New Scientist claiming that they had discovered the two genes responsible for homosexuality, proving that sexuality isn't a choice. I suspect that there is some kind of problem with their methodology but this isn't something I intend to explore here. As a consequence of this change in the political landscape, 'experimentation' and 'bi-curiosity' have been consigned to the dustbin of history.
At this point, I shall turn to my own life.
In 2001, a friend who had come out as gay the previous year or year before came up to Auckland with a girl I'd also known in Dunedin, Renee, who I'd had a crush on. The three of us went to a gay club – I was curious about such places, not because I was in any way bi-curious but because I am open to experience. The next night Renee and I ended up at my father's place for dinner. Also present was a friend of Jan, Helen. All through dinner Jan and Helen were laughing at jokes like high-school girlfriends but every now and again Jan would direct glares of pure hatred at me. After that dinner I decided two things: first, that my step-mother hated me and second that she was having a lesbian affair with Helen under my father's nose. Of course, I never told anyone about the second suspicion. My subconscious belief, or delusion, that my step-mother was a lesbian, wasn't helped by the fact that for many years Helen was always present at the family Christmas parties and birthday parties. The convention, I believe, is that only family members and partners of family members should be present at occasions like these. But Helen was always there, as though she were a member of the family.
(To round off this story, I should say that during this visit I entered into a kind of relationship with Renee, a relationship that became a long distance relationship when Renee went back to Dunedin, but which completely broke down when I sent her an ill considered email which was racier than it should have been.)
The subconscious conviction that my step-mother was a lesbian is part of the reason I decided in 2007, when I had my psychotic meltdown, that my father was gay. I couldn't understand why a straight man would willingly marry a lesbian. (I need to note, by the way, that the marriage between my father and Jan had been on the rocks for years.) In the interval between leaving the Big House and being put on antipsychotics, I had dinner with them and erupted at them, an eruption a long time coming. I said, "It's not natural." Now, this might seem like a right-wing assertion, that I was saying that homosexuality isn't natural. In fact, I believed that some people were naturally straight and others naturally gay – like Howard in The Big Bang Theory I believed that gay people should marry gay people. I thought it unnatural for a gay man to marry a lesbian woman and have children; I thought homosexuals should all come out.
My opinions on sexuality are today, in 2019, totally different than in 2007. Back then I believed that the world was ruled by closet homosexuals; in 2009 I believed there was a vast community of bisexual swingers having clandestine sex with each other, an idea that horrified me. By 2014, I had changed my views, as shown by the story I have published in this blog, "69". I now think bisexuality exists and is not something to condemned. It should, however, be out in the open, rather than hidden from view. I also spent years working out the cause of homosexuality and no longer regard it as being as natural as heterosexuality. Of course, the one thing that hasn't changed is my own sexuality: I am as heterosexual now as I was then.
Of course, as my readers know, from the beginning I was misdiagnosed. The people treating me thought, I think, that I was sexually confused, when, in fact, my first episode resulted, in a way, from an excess of homophobia. (I have talked about this in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode", "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM" and "Cannabis and The Causes of Schizophrenia".) In 2007, I sometimes believed that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals. The psychiatrists are completely unwilling to admit that they made a mistake. In 2017, I told my psychiatrist that I believed my stepmother was a closet lesbian; I thought it was the kind of thing I was supposed to talk about with my psychiatrist. At the independent review held shortly after, she wrote in my report that I had said my step-mother was bisexual. Given the preceding discussion of the difference in connotation between the terms "closet homosexual" and "bisexual", it should be obvious that this misreporting of what I had said had implications that went against me. Evidently Murphy didn't feel it worth reporting that I disliked my step-mother. This is just one example of the way the Mental Health Service has distorted and falsified its records about me to confirm a misdiagnosis.
In this blog I have said Murphy, a couple of months ago, doubled my dosage. I want to explain what happened because I distrust everything she has ever written about me. At an appointment about halfway through last year I brought in a friend with whom I have been going to a pup quiz since 2010. I wanted a witness who could see for herself how dishonest and incompetent Murphy was. Murphy said almost nothing during the appointment. A day or two later, at my friend's place, we discussed the appointment; my friend had had nightmares about it. She said about Murphy, "She's a lesbian, isn't she?" My friend had decided that Murphy was a lesbian because she was so badly dressed. I stuck up for Murphy, saying that it was unlikely she was a lesbian because she'd been pregnant in 2013 when I first became a patient. A couple of months ago, during another appointment, I reported to Murphy what my friend had said. Before I could tell her that I had stuck up for her, she threw me out of the room. When she allowed me back in, she told me that she had decided to massively increase my dosage. In a letter she told me it was because I had laid a complaint against her with the Disability Commissioner, and told me, being the hypocrite that she is, that the increased dosage would help me. The hypocrisy is that I had given her an opportunity to correct the mistake; people in the Mental Health Service lie about their patients all the time and the patient is never given the opportunity to correct their mistakes.
Because people have always misunderstood the nature of my illness, I live in a kind of hell. I'll illustrate this with a couple of stories. In 2015, I think, I told my older brother about the time a jerk had got in my face when I was about 22 or 23, something I have described in the post "Definitions of Sexuality." My brother said, "Did you love him?" I said, "No, he was an arsehole. But the point is, that's the only homosexual experience I've ever had." My brother flinched. I have a friend, Rene (not to be confused with Renee, the girl I mentioned above) with whom I occasionally meet to drink red wine and discuss philosophy. Last year or the year before last, I was visiting my aunt, a late-in-life lesbian (although I didn't know that then) and friend of Jan, when my mother brought up my friendship with Rene. My aunt said, "Why don't you introduce him to your father?" On two occasions, one of Jan's brothers, someone I see very infrequently, has asked me if I was brought up by fundamentalist Christians. Obviously all three of them, including my brother, completely failed to understand me.
I'll finish this post by filling in a couple of details. My father and step-mother divorced a number of years ago, I think in 2010 although I am not sure. It is possible I was wrong that she was having a lesbian affair, but it is no longer something that occupies me much, because she is out of my life. I wish also to briefly describe what has happened in Sarah's life in recent years. For a long time she has been in a civil union with a woman much older than her called Sue. A couple of years ago (some time after I wrote "69") we caught up and she told me that she had a lover, a man called Gordon. Sarah, Sue and Gordon were in a kind of triangular relationship: they all lived on the same property but Sarah and Gordon lived together in a caravan. Last year, Sarah fell pregnant and recently had a baby. When she was going to antenatal classes, she didn't take Gordon, as you might expect – she took Sue. The schemas we create to try to make sense of the world often fail. The real world can be very messy indeed.
Saturday, 29 December 2018
The Authorial Imagination
A month or so ago, I was talking with a girl I know, Sarah, who stays with my mother a couple of days a week. During the conversation among the three of us, the fact that when I was a child I had a pet dog called Rosie came up. The conversation turned to fiction – my mother opined that I should start writing stories again. I said that I didn't currently have any ideas for stories. Sarah said, "Why don't you write about Rosie?"
If I have, among my readers, any authors or anyone who knows something about fiction writing, this anecdote may make them cringe. Sarah is lovely but like almost everyone who doesn't write, she is stupid about authors – ordinary people assume that writers write autobiographically, that fiction is 'self-expression'. I had a pet dog called Rosie who I was fond of and so I should write about her. The truth is that there is a gap between fiction and its writer's life. Authors write about problems that they observe in the world around them, they write about conflict, and, most importantly, they make stuff up. This should be obvious but to people who don't write and don't read much, it isn't.
Authors, and I include screen-writers among this coterie, want most of all simply to write a good story. An author will be trucking through life and an idea will occur to him or her – it may be inspired by something that happens in his or her life, it may be something that he or she reads in the newspaper, it may be inspired by something that happens to a friend. It may be that he or she is thinking about something abstract, a philosophical or psychological issue, and wants to try to express this abstract idea concretely through characters, locales, and actions. From this idea, a story grows. In fact, both Stephen King and Stephen Donaldson have said that the genesis of a story is the collision between two different ideas. Donaldson had the an idea for a man plucked from the real world and put into a fantasy world in which he is unable to believe. But the story didn't get going until this idea collided with a second idea– that this protagonist should be a leper. Lincoln in the Bardo quite obviously also grew from a collision between two ideas – the author's fascination with the idea of an intervening stage between death and rebirth as described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead and his fascination with Abraham Lincoln. The two germinal ideas behind every story may sometimes be easily identified, and may at other times be very difficult to identify indeed.
The obvious truth that authors make stuff up, or, to put in another way, draw from material outside their own lives, is simple to demonstrate. Bret Easton Ellis wrote American Psycho even though he wasn't a serial killer. David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest even though he wasn't a drug addict. Nabokov wrote Lolita even though he wasn't a paedophile. Obviously Tolkien wasn't a hobbit and had no experience of orcs and elves. Donaldson wrote The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant even though he wasn't a leper. David Lynch wrote and directed Mulholland Drive even though he isn't a lesbian; Annie Proux wrote Brokeback Mountain even though she isn't a gay man. The novel Trespass by Rose Tremain, which I'm reading at the moment, features a gay man, his lesbian sister, and a woman driven partly insane by childhood sexual abuse. I am sure Tremain herself is none of those things. What happens, obviously, is that a story idea occurs to an author and then the author explores the idea and draws it to its logical conclusion.
Of course, aside from fantasy works, stories require a real-world backdrop. My godmother wrote a novel called Waiting for Elizabeth set in Renaissance-era Ireland; before and during her writing of it she carried out extensive research into the time and place it was set. Proust and Flaubert both sought to realistically depict the culture and society of respectively mid and late nineteenth century France. Darkness at Noon is intended to be a believable depiction of the mock-trials that occurred in Stalinist Russia. Although Donaldson isn't a leper, his father worked with lepers, and so Donaldson understood this disease. Of course, autobiographical material does creep in – authors write best when they write about what they know. Stephen King features alcoholic protagonists in several of his works, such as The Shining and The Tommyknockers, I am sure because he battled with alcoholism himself. Often, such as in The Shining, Misery and The Dark Half his protagonists are themselves authors. Frame's Faces in The Water could only have been written by someone who had spent time in a mental asylum as a patient. Joyce's "The Dead" was inspired by Joyce's own reaction to a disclosure by his wife that she'd passionately loved another man before she'd met Joyce – however, Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of the story, is in no way a self portrait (in fact, I think Joyce disliked Gabriel). The point I am making is that it takes a skilled reader, perhaps even a reader who has written fiction him- or herself, to distinguish the autobiographical from the purely fictional in a novel, film, or story, written by someone else.
I think all of the stories I have written have resulted from a collision between two ideas. The gay spy film I wrote emerged from the juxtaposition of John Le Carre type spy stories and the games played in the homosexual underworld, a world I knew nothing about but had heard of. Bruce Sells Out grew from a collision between the idea of a misanthropic, failing comedian who befriends the devil, and the idea of a rocky relationship between a man and a woman. (In this film Bruce accidentally kills his girlfriend at plot point 2 and sells his soul to bring her back to life at the film's end. I have discussed this film in the post "Bruce Sells Out".) The story "A Refusal to Mourn" (included in this blog) also grew from two ideas: the idea of a youthful adventure recollected in adulthood, and the idea of a seduction and casual sex. (This is a bad summation of the story. You can read the actual story by looking up the post "A Refusal to Mourn".)
I think the fundamental reason for the 'illness' I have experienced is people's reactions to some of the screenplays I have written. The gay spy film was pure invention but I think people decided it was autobiographical. The film "The Hounds of Heaven", by contrast, was an accurate depiction of a girl I knew but I think people thought I had made it up and had done a bad job presenting the main character, Jess. In fact, although many people didn't know this when I wrote it, "The Hounds of Heaven" is a roman a clef and is largely an accurate picture of a real person. I'll list briefly some of the details in the film that were in fact true. The real Jess did keep an enormous poster of Syd Barrett on her wall. She did study neuroscience. She did have a jacket she wore because she thought it could magically ward of other people's thoughts. She did go through a period of not brushing her teeth because she thought someone was putting poison in her toothpaste. On one occasion when I was with her, when putting on makeup she justified it by saying, "the male gaze and all that" (an utterance that only makes sense if you know something about feminist film theory); I put this in the film. She did have an obsession with Nietzsche – in fact, in late 2011 the real girl had a quote from Nietzsche tattooed somewhere on some part of her body. Many aspects of the film were inventions. Rick is almost entirely fictional and the real girl's father is a lawyer rather than a civil engineer – I made him a civil engineer to provide an excuse for him taking her to Christchurch in March 2011. One of the mistakes I made is that I allowed people to think that Jess was intended as a 'typical' schizophrenic when in fact there is no such thing as a typical schizophrenic. I was describing a real person, but a person so unusual readers couldn't believe she was real.
There is a link between creativity and mental illness. Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and David Foster Wallace all killed themselves. Van Gogh famously cut of his ear and sent it to a prostitute. However, the link is not simple or intuitively obvious. Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals deal with 'abnormal psychology' as though normalcy is easily identifiable and unproblematic, as if there is such a thing as a normal person. Often creativity itself is seen as a sign of abnormality, of mental illness. I met a patient once, new to the service, who told us that she had written a sci-fi film in which great clouds of methamphetamine descend on the citizenry – I suspect that, even though she wasn't fully conscious of this fact, even though it was just an intuition that she had which she was trying to express, her illness may have in some way resulted from this film she wrote. The people treating her may even have decided she was a meth addict because of it. (I know this seems unlikely but, trust me, psychiatrists are stupid.) I also suspect it possible that a cause of this illness that the real Jess suffered may have had something to do with something she wrote, perhaps a poem that others misinterpreted.
I found it quite difficult writing this post. There may be mistakes (solecisms?) in it that I have overlooked. Since the increase in my dosage and my change of psychiatrist, I feel often as though there is no point in fighting, that it is impossible to escape, that I am trapped forever by other people's errors. It has taken me days to muster up the motivation to finish this post – I originally intended to say more about the authorial imagination but I have forgotten what I intended to say. In the next post, however, if I can summon up the will to write it, I want to add to the post "Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia" and explain finally the nature of my illness – supposing that people have not already worked it out from what I have already said. I can't save myself. Somehow, someone else has to save me. But I don't know anyone willing to.
If I have, among my readers, any authors or anyone who knows something about fiction writing, this anecdote may make them cringe. Sarah is lovely but like almost everyone who doesn't write, she is stupid about authors – ordinary people assume that writers write autobiographically, that fiction is 'self-expression'. I had a pet dog called Rosie who I was fond of and so I should write about her. The truth is that there is a gap between fiction and its writer's life. Authors write about problems that they observe in the world around them, they write about conflict, and, most importantly, they make stuff up. This should be obvious but to people who don't write and don't read much, it isn't.
Authors, and I include screen-writers among this coterie, want most of all simply to write a good story. An author will be trucking through life and an idea will occur to him or her – it may be inspired by something that happens in his or her life, it may be something that he or she reads in the newspaper, it may be inspired by something that happens to a friend. It may be that he or she is thinking about something abstract, a philosophical or psychological issue, and wants to try to express this abstract idea concretely through characters, locales, and actions. From this idea, a story grows. In fact, both Stephen King and Stephen Donaldson have said that the genesis of a story is the collision between two different ideas. Donaldson had the an idea for a man plucked from the real world and put into a fantasy world in which he is unable to believe. But the story didn't get going until this idea collided with a second idea– that this protagonist should be a leper. Lincoln in the Bardo quite obviously also grew from a collision between two ideas – the author's fascination with the idea of an intervening stage between death and rebirth as described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead and his fascination with Abraham Lincoln. The two germinal ideas behind every story may sometimes be easily identified, and may at other times be very difficult to identify indeed.
The obvious truth that authors make stuff up, or, to put in another way, draw from material outside their own lives, is simple to demonstrate. Bret Easton Ellis wrote American Psycho even though he wasn't a serial killer. David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest even though he wasn't a drug addict. Nabokov wrote Lolita even though he wasn't a paedophile. Obviously Tolkien wasn't a hobbit and had no experience of orcs and elves. Donaldson wrote The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant even though he wasn't a leper. David Lynch wrote and directed Mulholland Drive even though he isn't a lesbian; Annie Proux wrote Brokeback Mountain even though she isn't a gay man. The novel Trespass by Rose Tremain, which I'm reading at the moment, features a gay man, his lesbian sister, and a woman driven partly insane by childhood sexual abuse. I am sure Tremain herself is none of those things. What happens, obviously, is that a story idea occurs to an author and then the author explores the idea and draws it to its logical conclusion.
Of course, aside from fantasy works, stories require a real-world backdrop. My godmother wrote a novel called Waiting for Elizabeth set in Renaissance-era Ireland; before and during her writing of it she carried out extensive research into the time and place it was set. Proust and Flaubert both sought to realistically depict the culture and society of respectively mid and late nineteenth century France. Darkness at Noon is intended to be a believable depiction of the mock-trials that occurred in Stalinist Russia. Although Donaldson isn't a leper, his father worked with lepers, and so Donaldson understood this disease. Of course, autobiographical material does creep in – authors write best when they write about what they know. Stephen King features alcoholic protagonists in several of his works, such as The Shining and The Tommyknockers, I am sure because he battled with alcoholism himself. Often, such as in The Shining, Misery and The Dark Half his protagonists are themselves authors. Frame's Faces in The Water could only have been written by someone who had spent time in a mental asylum as a patient. Joyce's "The Dead" was inspired by Joyce's own reaction to a disclosure by his wife that she'd passionately loved another man before she'd met Joyce – however, Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of the story, is in no way a self portrait (in fact, I think Joyce disliked Gabriel). The point I am making is that it takes a skilled reader, perhaps even a reader who has written fiction him- or herself, to distinguish the autobiographical from the purely fictional in a novel, film, or story, written by someone else.
I think all of the stories I have written have resulted from a collision between two ideas. The gay spy film I wrote emerged from the juxtaposition of John Le Carre type spy stories and the games played in the homosexual underworld, a world I knew nothing about but had heard of. Bruce Sells Out grew from a collision between the idea of a misanthropic, failing comedian who befriends the devil, and the idea of a rocky relationship between a man and a woman. (In this film Bruce accidentally kills his girlfriend at plot point 2 and sells his soul to bring her back to life at the film's end. I have discussed this film in the post "Bruce Sells Out".) The story "A Refusal to Mourn" (included in this blog) also grew from two ideas: the idea of a youthful adventure recollected in adulthood, and the idea of a seduction and casual sex. (This is a bad summation of the story. You can read the actual story by looking up the post "A Refusal to Mourn".)
I think the fundamental reason for the 'illness' I have experienced is people's reactions to some of the screenplays I have written. The gay spy film was pure invention but I think people decided it was autobiographical. The film "The Hounds of Heaven", by contrast, was an accurate depiction of a girl I knew but I think people thought I had made it up and had done a bad job presenting the main character, Jess. In fact, although many people didn't know this when I wrote it, "The Hounds of Heaven" is a roman a clef and is largely an accurate picture of a real person. I'll list briefly some of the details in the film that were in fact true. The real Jess did keep an enormous poster of Syd Barrett on her wall. She did study neuroscience. She did have a jacket she wore because she thought it could magically ward of other people's thoughts. She did go through a period of not brushing her teeth because she thought someone was putting poison in her toothpaste. On one occasion when I was with her, when putting on makeup she justified it by saying, "the male gaze and all that" (an utterance that only makes sense if you know something about feminist film theory); I put this in the film. She did have an obsession with Nietzsche – in fact, in late 2011 the real girl had a quote from Nietzsche tattooed somewhere on some part of her body. Many aspects of the film were inventions. Rick is almost entirely fictional and the real girl's father is a lawyer rather than a civil engineer – I made him a civil engineer to provide an excuse for him taking her to Christchurch in March 2011. One of the mistakes I made is that I allowed people to think that Jess was intended as a 'typical' schizophrenic when in fact there is no such thing as a typical schizophrenic. I was describing a real person, but a person so unusual readers couldn't believe she was real.
There is a link between creativity and mental illness. Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and David Foster Wallace all killed themselves. Van Gogh famously cut of his ear and sent it to a prostitute. However, the link is not simple or intuitively obvious. Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals deal with 'abnormal psychology' as though normalcy is easily identifiable and unproblematic, as if there is such a thing as a normal person. Often creativity itself is seen as a sign of abnormality, of mental illness. I met a patient once, new to the service, who told us that she had written a sci-fi film in which great clouds of methamphetamine descend on the citizenry – I suspect that, even though she wasn't fully conscious of this fact, even though it was just an intuition that she had which she was trying to express, her illness may have in some way resulted from this film she wrote. The people treating her may even have decided she was a meth addict because of it. (I know this seems unlikely but, trust me, psychiatrists are stupid.) I also suspect it possible that a cause of this illness that the real Jess suffered may have had something to do with something she wrote, perhaps a poem that others misinterpreted.
I found it quite difficult writing this post. There may be mistakes (solecisms?) in it that I have overlooked. Since the increase in my dosage and my change of psychiatrist, I feel often as though there is no point in fighting, that it is impossible to escape, that I am trapped forever by other people's errors. It has taken me days to muster up the motivation to finish this post – I originally intended to say more about the authorial imagination but I have forgotten what I intended to say. In the next post, however, if I can summon up the will to write it, I want to add to the post "Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia" and explain finally the nature of my illness – supposing that people have not already worked it out from what I have already said. I can't save myself. Somehow, someone else has to save me. But I don't know anyone willing to.
Monday, 17 December 2018
Tying Up Some Lose Threads Part 2
My previous post was a little badly written, and I don't think this one will be any better. But I still hope I gave some idea of my situation. In tonight's post, I want to add a little to that previous post. I should get back to talking about philosophy but this post is going to be a pure rant.
I have to deal with psychiatrists and Mental Health workers so incompetent Darwinian evolution should have weeded them out of the gene pool long ago. In this blog, I have described how around February or March 2007, I suffered a complete psychotic breakdown. During this first episode, I divided my flatmates into angels and demons and though I was under surveillance, that there were listening devices in my flat and that everything I said was being relayed to third-parties. When I last saw my psychiatrist, a new one (because I laid a complaint against the last one), he seemed not to be aware that what happened to me back in 2007 was a complete psychotic break. It was a reaction, as I've spelt out in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and BFM", to misperceptions of me by people working at bFM and the my flatmates. I mentioned to my new psychiatrist how stupid it is to suppose people "present with delusions and hallucinations for no reason at all" and he seemed surprised, as though he didn't know that I was psychotic when I first came into the Taylor Centre. Oddly enough, the fact that I was quite mad back in 2007 works in my favour, because my behaviour and reports then were uncharacteristic of my behaviour and reports when I am well. The psychiatrists want to downplay just how sick I became as a result of my experiences. At my last independent review, for instance, there was no mention of the fact that, starting at the Big House and continuing through 2007 and then 2009, I believed people were listening to everything I said, that shorty after my first appointment with the sadistic quack Tony Fernando I formed the belief that there was a listening device in my glasses. My whole treatment has been a farce. Since Easter 2013, I have been saying that I'm straight, perhaps not at every appointment but often enough to show it isn't a delusion, and to every new key worker I've ever had. How often does a person have to say he is straight to be believed? I suspect that Fernando stuck his foot or some other appendage in his mouth in 2013, and ever since the fucking Mental Health System has been covering up his utter inadequacy, as a doctor and as a human being.
In the previous post, I said that there was no justification for the fuckwits treating me to think that I was gay. I never used the words "gay" or "straight" with any of them from shortly after my first contact with the system around March 2007, until Easter 2013. I know I didn't because, as I've said, for a significant period of time I believed that there was a listening device in my glasses and that if I used either word I would get into trouble. I would like to adduce some further evidence that I never used either word.
In July 2009, so after I'd been on Rispiridone for close to two and half years, and after I'd been hearing voices for about six or seven months, I started hearing voices saying "I'm gay! I'm gay!" I thought it was everyone in the world taking Rispiridone coming out as gay. It was truly terrible. I was scared I might say it aloud – even though I wasn't in the slightest homosexual. (I had always been only sexually attracted to women. In fact, I was very attracted to women.) Hearing these voices was part of the reason I experienced suicidal ideation. I told that arsehole Fernando about my suicidal ideation shortly after August 6, although I didn't mention the voices, and was allowed to discontinue Rispiridone. I never mentioned these voices to anyone then or since.
In December 2014, after I'd been seeing a narcissistic clinical psychologist for some seven or eight months, I was lying in bed during the day and heard a thunder storm. With every thunderclap, I heard a voice, the voice of Old Testament God, saying, "I'm gay!". For Christmas, my mother and I drove to Wanganui and I felt a compulsion to say that sentence out loud. I didn't. These experiences prove that 'coming out' is a one way street. If I'd ever said "I'm gay" to my mother, or father, or brother, or anyone in the Mental Health Service, it would have gone in my record as evidence of sexual confusion, sexual confusion I didn't feel. You sometimes hear stories of gay men who deliberate with themselves long and hard before deciding to come out (one such is Ricky Martin). This wasn't the case with me. I was terrified of accidentally coming out because I knew that even if it was accidental, I wouldn't be able to get back in again.
In the post "Definitions of Sexuality Part 3" I described a terrible psychotic symptom I experienced from 2013 or 2014 until late 2016. I never discussed it with anyone at the time because I knew that this symptom would go away eventually, and also knew that the people treating me would assume it was a permanent trait or feature of my personality. No one knew that during this period I felt I might be attracted to men (this description of the psychotic symptom is inexact but I have difficulty describing it). I made the decision to talk about it in mid 2017 in this blog as a consequence of a truly dreadful lecture I attended about Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. I had never talked about it before then.
Obviously, it might seem that I am getting myself into trouble by writing about this. I have no choice – the truth will find its way out even if the labour pains are agony, even if the truth is still-born. The truth is that the cause of my illness has always been other people thinking I'm gay when I'm not. You see, when you sense that other people have decided that they think you are a latent or closet homosexual, it is impossible to say that they're wrong. Since Easter 2013, I have been saying that I'm straight but the cunts treating me evidently decided that this was either a lie or a delusion.
I wish now to describe again some interactions I had with the narcissistic incompetent clinical psychologist I saw in 2014. He was unable to even say the word "heterosexual", told me that sexuality was "fluid" (and called me aspergerous for refusing to believe him) and proposed that there was some homosexuality in everyone. Logically, he must be talking to about himself so one can only conclude he's fucked men up the arse from time to time or at least fantasises about buggery when he jerks off. The truth, of course, is that even though I had said I was straight at my first appointment wit him, he spent eight months trying to convince me that I was gay or sexually confused – as though the route to recovery is for heterosexual men to admit that they are really bisexual. Judkins is going to hell when he dies. On one occasion, I gave him the story "69" that I have published in this blog under that title: he said, "Why do you always write stories about yourself?" I think now that he was referring to the gay spy film I wrote when I was twenty-one. This question was indicative of his stupidity. Judkins seemed not to know that authors make stuff up. Judkins made another couple of insane remarks during that year. On one occasion he said, "Whether a person is gay or not is between him... and God." He'd obviously decided I was an evangelical Christian. On another occasion he said, "So you think gay men can't get sick?" This was another insane remark because I had known openly gay patients as well as other patients whose sexual identities had been fucked up by their treatment.
On one occasion, I told Judkins a true story about George Clooney. A gay magazine in the UK had run a front-page article saying that Clooney was "Gay, gay, gay". Clooney, who is obviously straight, responded with the following statement. "I don't want to offend the gay community by saying that I'm not gay but the third gay seems a little excessive. I may be gay, gay, but I'm definitely not gay, gay, gay." Evidently, Clooney tried to deal with the predicament he'd been put into through humour.
When I told Judkins this story, he said, "Why don't you say that?"
My eight months with Judkins as a psychologist were a complete failure. In order to make sense of why I'd become ill in the first place, I needed the person I was talking to to recognise that I was heterosexual first. He never did. Instead he'd decided, even before meeting me, that the most helpful treatment he could provide for me was to try to convince me of my hitherto denied homosexuality.
Readers of this blog will know that about a month or two ago, my medication was doubled. I was well, sane, when this decision was made – the reason for the doubling was that I had laid a complaint with the Health and Disability Commissioner against my former psychiatrist. Readers may want to know the effects of this increase. My weight has increased even as, ironically, my appetite has diminished. I suffer from some anhedonia sometimes, the feeling that the activities that once gave me pleasure no longer do. The other night I had a nightmare about zombies again, a nightmare I hadn't experienced for a long time, in which the pestilence was spread between victims through vomit. In the post "The Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia" I tried to give an account of what antipsychotics actually do but I have reconsidered it a little. If we went back to the 'seventies, people in fact did recover from schizophrenia. What I think happens today is that the brains of people diagnosed schizophrenic adjust to the medication – antipsychotics are in a sense addictive by which I mean people become neurologically dependent on them. This is the reason some people become psychotic again when they try to go off them. Sufferers suffer withdrawal effects when they attempt to discontinue the medication. The idiot psychiatrists interpret these withdrawal effects as the reappearance of the condition; consequently schizophrenia today is considered a life-long condition when any rational appraisal of real people diagnosed schizophrenic shows that this idea is bullshit. In the same way millions of Americans have been turned into opioid addicts by prescription painkillers, millions of 'mentally ill' people have been coerced and bullied into becoming addicts to antipsychotics and antidepressants.
I do not know if this hypothesis is true. In January 2012 I reduced my medication from 10mgs daily to 5mgs with no ill effects at all, and remained well until February of 2013. But it is more logical to assume that the brain adjusts to the major tranquilliser patients are encouraged to take and that consequently patients become dependent on it, than to suppose that madness is a life-long, causeless, congenital disease that can only be treated by putting the sufferer on tranquillisers for the rest of his or her life.
I once wrote a post about the film "A Beautiful Mind" in which I said how much I hated it. I recently bought the biography on which it is based and, although I haven't read it, had already learnt how much it departs from the facts. For a long time now I've wanted to say what I really think of this film and its director, Ron Howard. When Howard made this film, he might as well have gone around and fellated the psychiatric community and the executives in charge of the pharmaceutical industry. During my dark times, I console myself by thinking that, if there is a hell, the whole psychiatric profession is going there.
I have to deal with psychiatrists and Mental Health workers so incompetent Darwinian evolution should have weeded them out of the gene pool long ago. In this blog, I have described how around February or March 2007, I suffered a complete psychotic breakdown. During this first episode, I divided my flatmates into angels and demons and though I was under surveillance, that there were listening devices in my flat and that everything I said was being relayed to third-parties. When I last saw my psychiatrist, a new one (because I laid a complaint against the last one), he seemed not to be aware that what happened to me back in 2007 was a complete psychotic break. It was a reaction, as I've spelt out in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and BFM", to misperceptions of me by people working at bFM and the my flatmates. I mentioned to my new psychiatrist how stupid it is to suppose people "present with delusions and hallucinations for no reason at all" and he seemed surprised, as though he didn't know that I was psychotic when I first came into the Taylor Centre. Oddly enough, the fact that I was quite mad back in 2007 works in my favour, because my behaviour and reports then were uncharacteristic of my behaviour and reports when I am well. The psychiatrists want to downplay just how sick I became as a result of my experiences. At my last independent review, for instance, there was no mention of the fact that, starting at the Big House and continuing through 2007 and then 2009, I believed people were listening to everything I said, that shorty after my first appointment with the sadistic quack Tony Fernando I formed the belief that there was a listening device in my glasses. My whole treatment has been a farce. Since Easter 2013, I have been saying that I'm straight, perhaps not at every appointment but often enough to show it isn't a delusion, and to every new key worker I've ever had. How often does a person have to say he is straight to be believed? I suspect that Fernando stuck his foot or some other appendage in his mouth in 2013, and ever since the fucking Mental Health System has been covering up his utter inadequacy, as a doctor and as a human being.
In the previous post, I said that there was no justification for the fuckwits treating me to think that I was gay. I never used the words "gay" or "straight" with any of them from shortly after my first contact with the system around March 2007, until Easter 2013. I know I didn't because, as I've said, for a significant period of time I believed that there was a listening device in my glasses and that if I used either word I would get into trouble. I would like to adduce some further evidence that I never used either word.
In July 2009, so after I'd been on Rispiridone for close to two and half years, and after I'd been hearing voices for about six or seven months, I started hearing voices saying "I'm gay! I'm gay!" I thought it was everyone in the world taking Rispiridone coming out as gay. It was truly terrible. I was scared I might say it aloud – even though I wasn't in the slightest homosexual. (I had always been only sexually attracted to women. In fact, I was very attracted to women.) Hearing these voices was part of the reason I experienced suicidal ideation. I told that arsehole Fernando about my suicidal ideation shortly after August 6, although I didn't mention the voices, and was allowed to discontinue Rispiridone. I never mentioned these voices to anyone then or since.
In December 2014, after I'd been seeing a narcissistic clinical psychologist for some seven or eight months, I was lying in bed during the day and heard a thunder storm. With every thunderclap, I heard a voice, the voice of Old Testament God, saying, "I'm gay!". For Christmas, my mother and I drove to Wanganui and I felt a compulsion to say that sentence out loud. I didn't. These experiences prove that 'coming out' is a one way street. If I'd ever said "I'm gay" to my mother, or father, or brother, or anyone in the Mental Health Service, it would have gone in my record as evidence of sexual confusion, sexual confusion I didn't feel. You sometimes hear stories of gay men who deliberate with themselves long and hard before deciding to come out (one such is Ricky Martin). This wasn't the case with me. I was terrified of accidentally coming out because I knew that even if it was accidental, I wouldn't be able to get back in again.
In the post "Definitions of Sexuality Part 3" I described a terrible psychotic symptom I experienced from 2013 or 2014 until late 2016. I never discussed it with anyone at the time because I knew that this symptom would go away eventually, and also knew that the people treating me would assume it was a permanent trait or feature of my personality. No one knew that during this period I felt I might be attracted to men (this description of the psychotic symptom is inexact but I have difficulty describing it). I made the decision to talk about it in mid 2017 in this blog as a consequence of a truly dreadful lecture I attended about Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. I had never talked about it before then.
Obviously, it might seem that I am getting myself into trouble by writing about this. I have no choice – the truth will find its way out even if the labour pains are agony, even if the truth is still-born. The truth is that the cause of my illness has always been other people thinking I'm gay when I'm not. You see, when you sense that other people have decided that they think you are a latent or closet homosexual, it is impossible to say that they're wrong. Since Easter 2013, I have been saying that I'm straight but the cunts treating me evidently decided that this was either a lie or a delusion.
I wish now to describe again some interactions I had with the narcissistic incompetent clinical psychologist I saw in 2014. He was unable to even say the word "heterosexual", told me that sexuality was "fluid" (and called me aspergerous for refusing to believe him) and proposed that there was some homosexuality in everyone. Logically, he must be talking to about himself so one can only conclude he's fucked men up the arse from time to time or at least fantasises about buggery when he jerks off. The truth, of course, is that even though I had said I was straight at my first appointment wit him, he spent eight months trying to convince me that I was gay or sexually confused – as though the route to recovery is for heterosexual men to admit that they are really bisexual. Judkins is going to hell when he dies. On one occasion, I gave him the story "69" that I have published in this blog under that title: he said, "Why do you always write stories about yourself?" I think now that he was referring to the gay spy film I wrote when I was twenty-one. This question was indicative of his stupidity. Judkins seemed not to know that authors make stuff up. Judkins made another couple of insane remarks during that year. On one occasion he said, "Whether a person is gay or not is between him... and God." He'd obviously decided I was an evangelical Christian. On another occasion he said, "So you think gay men can't get sick?" This was another insane remark because I had known openly gay patients as well as other patients whose sexual identities had been fucked up by their treatment.
On one occasion, I told Judkins a true story about George Clooney. A gay magazine in the UK had run a front-page article saying that Clooney was "Gay, gay, gay". Clooney, who is obviously straight, responded with the following statement. "I don't want to offend the gay community by saying that I'm not gay but the third gay seems a little excessive. I may be gay, gay, but I'm definitely not gay, gay, gay." Evidently, Clooney tried to deal with the predicament he'd been put into through humour.
When I told Judkins this story, he said, "Why don't you say that?"
My eight months with Judkins as a psychologist were a complete failure. In order to make sense of why I'd become ill in the first place, I needed the person I was talking to to recognise that I was heterosexual first. He never did. Instead he'd decided, even before meeting me, that the most helpful treatment he could provide for me was to try to convince me of my hitherto denied homosexuality.
Readers of this blog will know that about a month or two ago, my medication was doubled. I was well, sane, when this decision was made – the reason for the doubling was that I had laid a complaint with the Health and Disability Commissioner against my former psychiatrist. Readers may want to know the effects of this increase. My weight has increased even as, ironically, my appetite has diminished. I suffer from some anhedonia sometimes, the feeling that the activities that once gave me pleasure no longer do. The other night I had a nightmare about zombies again, a nightmare I hadn't experienced for a long time, in which the pestilence was spread between victims through vomit. In the post "The Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia" I tried to give an account of what antipsychotics actually do but I have reconsidered it a little. If we went back to the 'seventies, people in fact did recover from schizophrenia. What I think happens today is that the brains of people diagnosed schizophrenic adjust to the medication – antipsychotics are in a sense addictive by which I mean people become neurologically dependent on them. This is the reason some people become psychotic again when they try to go off them. Sufferers suffer withdrawal effects when they attempt to discontinue the medication. The idiot psychiatrists interpret these withdrawal effects as the reappearance of the condition; consequently schizophrenia today is considered a life-long condition when any rational appraisal of real people diagnosed schizophrenic shows that this idea is bullshit. In the same way millions of Americans have been turned into opioid addicts by prescription painkillers, millions of 'mentally ill' people have been coerced and bullied into becoming addicts to antipsychotics and antidepressants.
I do not know if this hypothesis is true. In January 2012 I reduced my medication from 10mgs daily to 5mgs with no ill effects at all, and remained well until February of 2013. But it is more logical to assume that the brain adjusts to the major tranquilliser patients are encouraged to take and that consequently patients become dependent on it, than to suppose that madness is a life-long, causeless, congenital disease that can only be treated by putting the sufferer on tranquillisers for the rest of his or her life.
I once wrote a post about the film "A Beautiful Mind" in which I said how much I hated it. I recently bought the biography on which it is based and, although I haven't read it, had already learnt how much it departs from the facts. For a long time now I've wanted to say what I really think of this film and its director, Ron Howard. When Howard made this film, he might as well have gone around and fellated the psychiatric community and the executives in charge of the pharmaceutical industry. During my dark times, I console myself by thinking that, if there is a hell, the whole psychiatric profession is going there.
Saturday, 1 December 2018
Tying up some loose threads
In tonight's post, I want to try to finish what I've started. I want to summarise the situation I've been in for the last eleven years, pull together threads from various posts and express a little better the meaning behind my experiences. I hope that Jess reads this blog from time to time.
A couple of times in the blog I have said that when I first became psychotic, back in 2007, I decided that my father was gay. I have talked about this in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM". I need to try to explain why I formed this delusion. At the Big House, in my madness, I had decided that the world was full of closet homosexuals. I thought of Lacan and his theory that the Name of the Father is the centre of the system – I decided that my father must be also gay. I went for a walk and decided that the reason that my father had divorced my mother when I was seven was because he didn't want me to be gay as well. In other words, I decided that my father had divorced my mother because he loved me and wanted to save me.
There were other things entering into for this delusion, some of which I can't talk about. I can say, however, that my mother's oldest brother, Tom, was probably gay, but that gay men and women of his generation didn't come out. He had died, of emphysema, when I was seventeen. In fact, to go back in time a little, after I had decided that Mikey and Jose were gay, I had asked my mother, for the first time, if Tom was gay, and she had confirmed it. It's always possible he wasn't.
I get so tired of using the word 'gay' all the time.
After I decided that my father was gay, I returned to the Big House and told them "My father's gay but I'm straight!" It was the first time I had used the words out loud when talking to anyone during the entire psychotic episode. And saying this cured the psychosis. I stopped believing there were listening devices in the flat and stopped dividing my flatmates into angels and demons. I told them that I either had schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder. My flatmates called my family to tell them they were concerned about me and the next evening my brother came and picked me up.
The next day I was taken into the Taylor centre. At my first contact with the staff there I asked them if we were under surveillance and decided that we weren't. I could use the words 'gay' or 'straight' if I wanted now – I was under the protective umbrella of caring, intelligent professionals after all. (How wrong I was.) I told them about my father and why I believed he had divorced my mother; I said that I wanted to "come out as straight" by which I meant that I was always straight and that I wanted people to know. I told them how I'd had some gay friends in high school. In the post "Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia" I said that the only real crime I ever committed was that I wasn't homophobic enough; back then in March 2007, at some level, I knew this, that I'd fallen ill because I was less homophobic than other people; I thought that the explanation for my lack of homophobia was because my father was gay and I loved him. I know now that my lack of homophobia probably had more to do with my uncle and the fact that, despite appearances to the contrary, I was basically a good person.
Shortly afterwards I had my first appointment with Fernando. I immediately got a bad vibe off him. I discussed my symptoms, said that I thought the flat was under surveillance, that the horoscope seemed to be uncannily accurate, that the radio had been directing songs at me. I ran through a checklist of psychotic symptoms, all of which were true, but never used the words 'gay' or 'straight' at all. I didn't mention that I had formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. He asked me if I heard voices and looked surprised when I said "no". At the end of either the first or second appointment he told me to "Stop avoiding". I had intuited immediately that he was a closet homosexual. To be told by a closet homosexual to "Stop avoiding" only had one possible meaning. He had decided, out of the boundless compassion of his Philippino heart, to diagnose me as a latent or repressed or closet homosexual.
I was put on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone. After seeing Fernando, the delusion that I was under surveillance returned; I decided that there was a listening device in my glasses. The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals also returned, stuck with me for the rest of the year, and returned intermittently in 2009.
I will return to my father briefly. I should say about my father that he and I, although sharing some traits such as a strong capacity for abstract reasoning, are very different. I support the Greens; he supports ACT. If I was American, I would be a Democrat and would have voted for Hilary; he would be a Republican and even today still supports Donald Trump. I believe in anthropogenic climate-change; he is a still a climate change denier. I like Noam Chomsky; he has an almost fanatical devotion to the novels and philosophy of Ayn Rand. For much of my life, I have found it challenging continuing to love and respect him when I disagree so entirely with his politics. Back in 2007, there were times, in fact, when I thought he was a double-agent – a heterosexual who had infiltrated the ruling homosexual elite by pretending to be a closet homosexual.
In 2007, I believed that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals and sometimes thought that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals. This was partly a result of having Fernando as a psychiatrist. I was almost well in 2008. In January 2009, after I'd been on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone for over a year and a half, that I first started hearing voices. The first voice I heard belonged to George W. Bush. I asked him the reason why he had invaded Iraq and was told some bullshit about the clash of civilisations. In 2009, my principle delusion was that I could communicate telepathically with other people. For instance, after Tony Veitch was subjected to intense public condemnation after allegations that he had physically abused his partner, I tried to project the thought "I love you" into his head. In 2007, I had believed that everything reported in the news was made up, but it was thought Veitch's case that I started believing some of the news was true. My psychosis that year often had an almost religious dimension; I sometimes thought I was being picked to save the world. I visited a nunnery with my mother and a friend of hers at one point, picked up a book by St Thomas Aquinas and decided that he was gay. I thought one of the male priests there had projected the thought into my head, "None of them?" During this year I thought I could psychically know who was gay or straight.
My psychosis in 2009 involved sexuality but not in an obvious way. I wasn't in the slightest sexually muddled. I sometimes thought, in fact, that I might be the straightest man in the world. In late 2009, I think after I was put on Olanzapine, I decided that the world might be ruled by a heterosexual elite and that the second tier down consisted of homosexuals, in the same way that Smithers is the personal assistant to Mr Burns.
I have said that if I had been treated better by the mental health service I would have got better in a year. The reason I was so sick was because I sensed that I had been diagnosed as a latent or closet homosexual at my first appointment; when someone senses that people around him think him a latent or closet homosexual, there is no way to tell them that they are wrong. This was the cause of my psychosis in both 2007 and 2009. I know I should adduce evidence, and there is some, but it is easier if you just trust me. I knew. The question is – why did they think me gay? I never used the words 'gay' or 'straight' with anyone in the Mental Health system until 2013, apart from a couple of times right at the very beginning. (For a description of the one time I used these words, see the post "An Anecdote; and A Description of a Condition".) I certainly have never said I was gay or even that I was sexually confused – because I wasn't. For much of 2007, I believed there was a listening device in my glasses and that if I used either word something terrible would happen to me. In 2008, this delusion receded; I thought that so long as I said nothing controversial no one would be listening. It came back in early 2009 and was succeeded by the delusion that everyone was telepathic. From early 2010 until 2013 I was totally well – but I had made a kind of bargain with the devil to simply allow people to think whatever they wanted of me. I was well but I was vomiting every day. In 2011, I made no secret with my Key Worker or with the other patients that I was pursuing the girl Jess – but I believe that my Key Worker thought of me as a gay man who didn't want to come out.
So why did they decide I was gay? In late 2008, I re-established a friendship with a man I'd known some years earlier, who had just recently returned from the Czech Republic. He wasn't even a particularly good friend. I would call him 'straight' but he was actually a little fuzzy around the edges, something I sensed that sometimes made me uncomfortable. He had been married to a woman I'd known in Dunedin. Sometimes I would go and hang out with him at Piha. I made the mistake of telling those treating me about this friendship – I believe that they decided it was a homosexual relationship. And this is why I went completely nuts for all of 2009.
The most generally accepted definition of homosexuality is that it is a sexual attraction towards members of the same sex. Heterosexuality is when a person is sexually attracted towards members of the opposite sex. The mistake I have made when talking to people in the Mental Health Service is that I sometimes talk about catching up with male friends. Sexuality has nothing to do with who a person likes and everything to do with who a person wants to fuck. In this blog I have found it difficult to talk about sex. But with both my longtime girlfriends I had sex with them a lot. It is a cause of deep despondency that I haven't had sex since 2011 (a one night stand in Wellington with a girl who was deeply enamoured of me). I am approaching middle age, am unemployed, and am officially diagnosed schizophrenic. So even if I meet girls, which is difficult, I am not a fetching prospect. Nevertheless, I have always been profoundly attracted to women – it is a basic aspect of who I am. From 2013 or 2014 until 2016, I thought I might be attracted to men as well, as I described in the post "Definitions of Sexuality Part 3", but fortunately this incredibly unpleasant psychotic symptom went away some years ago.
How can you can describe an aspect of consciousness, sexual attraction, to others, especially when the others are all sexually squeamish?
A mistake the arseholes who run the Mental Health System make is that they do not consider that mental illness has a cause – sometimes they will decide an experience is a delusion simply because they have decided that the patient is delusional. In 2013, I was called a fag in the New Zealand Herald. This sounds like a delusion but it actually happened, and I want to detail the circumstances around it.
From mid 2010 until 2013 I was well. In January 2012, I was discharged from the service; for the whole of that year I was on 5mgs of Olanzapine. That year I completed an MA in Creative Writing through AUT. In early 2013, I became 'ill' again – I thought that people in the Media knew something about the film I'd written in 2012 and also thought that a rumour that I was gay had got into the media. I have talked about this in the posts "What Happened in 2013" and "Screenplays and Their Reception". My psychosis in 2013 totally revolved around Jess Ë€– I was scared she might turn into a lesbians. Aside from the fact that Jess was intelligent and pretty and cool, she was also the proof that I was straight. By the middle of the year, my psychosis had pretty much abated. In September 2013, I went to the Wanganui Literary Festival – the speakers included Witi Ihimaera, Grant Smithies, and Joe Bennett. One evening, patrons had the opportunity to have dinner with the guests. I was sitting near Smithies. He seemed uncomfortable around me. I went outside for a cigarette and Joe Bennett came out to have one as well. He said, "I have a small erection! Of course, there's no such thing as a small erection." Now, this is an deeply fucked up way to start a conversation. I decided that he must be gay. He asked me which authors I liked and I mentioned The Catcher in the Rye which I had recently read for the first time. He disparaged Salinger, saying that Salinger was a fraud for thinking he could understand, as an adult, what it is like to be teenager. He suggested that if I wrote any fiction, I send it to him for advice and criticism.
Shortly after the Festival, Smithies wrote a column in the Herald about it. In the column, he mention that the first time he'd slept with a woman occurred in Wanganui. 2013 was the year gay marriage was legalised in New Zealand, and I think, after his experience in Wanganui, Smithies wanted it on the public record that he was straight. In the column, he talked about the dinner. And about Joe Bennett "going outside for a fag."
Shortly after this I saw my psychiatrist Jen Murphy. I told her that Joe Bennett had made a pass at me and described him as "openly gay". I didn't mention that Grant Smithies had called me a fag in his column.
In the post, "Cannabis and The Causes of Schizophrenia", I said that I didn't know if the reason people thought me gay was the result of a rumour or me giving off some kind of gay vibe. After Smithies's column, and after Fernando had been interviewed in the Herald saying "There are signs you learn to look for", I decided that Fernando had spread a rumour about me. Perhaps Fernando spread it deliberately because he'd heard about my film and realised that it could be damaging to the psychiatric profession. He was then a darling of the media. This is why I sent Steve Braunias a kind of letter, a letter in the style of his "Secret Diary" column, strongly suggesting Fernando was a homosexual sociopath who serially misdiagnoses patients and falsifies patient records.
In early 2014, of course, I was put under the Mental Health Act, and have been receiving Compulsory Treatment ever since.
In the years since I have struggled with the problem of gay-vibe vs. rumour. You must remember that in 2012, I didn't think I was famous, so to be subject to media attention was incredibly distressing. I now think it was a rumour. There were two possible sources for this rumour, Tony Fernando. Or Jose Barbosa. But it is almost impossible for me to confirm that this rumour existed. Earlier this year, I wrote to Duncan Greive, who runs the internet news site The Spinoff, to ask him if he knew of any gossip about me. I had gone to school with Duncan and knew him as a man who had always understood that the way to get ahead in life is to play the game and suck up to the teachers. He said, "I can honestly say I have not heard any false rumours about you." I believe, now, that he was being disingenuous. What I didn't know when I wrote to Duncan is that Jose works for The Spinoff. So Duncan almost certainly had heard something about me, and it was probably false.
Incidentally, in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM", I said that Jose was either uncertain of my sexual orientation or thought I was gay. Jose is a fuckwit. He should have known that I was straight. A couple of years before I went to work at bFM, I bumped into him at a party. I suggested he meet my girlfriend – I brought up the fact that I had a girlfriend because I was unsure of his sexual orientation and I wanted him to know that I was heterosexual. The world is full of stupid cunts, I think.
I'll finish this post by making an observation about the Mental Health System. It is all founded on lies. The good people get out; the rest know that to keep their jobs they must stick to the party line. This means that if a person is, for instance, diagnosed schizophrenic, no one is willing to say that the psychiatrists made a mistake. And they look for evidence to justify the diagnosis. I think New Zealand would be a healthier and happier place if we just got rid of the psychiatric profession entirely.
I know by the way that this post is not brilliantly written. But I hope it conveys something of my life.
A couple of times in the blog I have said that when I first became psychotic, back in 2007, I decided that my father was gay. I have talked about this in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM". I need to try to explain why I formed this delusion. At the Big House, in my madness, I had decided that the world was full of closet homosexuals. I thought of Lacan and his theory that the Name of the Father is the centre of the system – I decided that my father must be also gay. I went for a walk and decided that the reason that my father had divorced my mother when I was seven was because he didn't want me to be gay as well. In other words, I decided that my father had divorced my mother because he loved me and wanted to save me.
There were other things entering into for this delusion, some of which I can't talk about. I can say, however, that my mother's oldest brother, Tom, was probably gay, but that gay men and women of his generation didn't come out. He had died, of emphysema, when I was seventeen. In fact, to go back in time a little, after I had decided that Mikey and Jose were gay, I had asked my mother, for the first time, if Tom was gay, and she had confirmed it. It's always possible he wasn't.
I get so tired of using the word 'gay' all the time.
After I decided that my father was gay, I returned to the Big House and told them "My father's gay but I'm straight!" It was the first time I had used the words out loud when talking to anyone during the entire psychotic episode. And saying this cured the psychosis. I stopped believing there were listening devices in the flat and stopped dividing my flatmates into angels and demons. I told them that I either had schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder. My flatmates called my family to tell them they were concerned about me and the next evening my brother came and picked me up.
The next day I was taken into the Taylor centre. At my first contact with the staff there I asked them if we were under surveillance and decided that we weren't. I could use the words 'gay' or 'straight' if I wanted now – I was under the protective umbrella of caring, intelligent professionals after all. (How wrong I was.) I told them about my father and why I believed he had divorced my mother; I said that I wanted to "come out as straight" by which I meant that I was always straight and that I wanted people to know. I told them how I'd had some gay friends in high school. In the post "Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia" I said that the only real crime I ever committed was that I wasn't homophobic enough; back then in March 2007, at some level, I knew this, that I'd fallen ill because I was less homophobic than other people; I thought that the explanation for my lack of homophobia was because my father was gay and I loved him. I know now that my lack of homophobia probably had more to do with my uncle and the fact that, despite appearances to the contrary, I was basically a good person.
Shortly afterwards I had my first appointment with Fernando. I immediately got a bad vibe off him. I discussed my symptoms, said that I thought the flat was under surveillance, that the horoscope seemed to be uncannily accurate, that the radio had been directing songs at me. I ran through a checklist of psychotic symptoms, all of which were true, but never used the words 'gay' or 'straight' at all. I didn't mention that I had formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. He asked me if I heard voices and looked surprised when I said "no". At the end of either the first or second appointment he told me to "Stop avoiding". I had intuited immediately that he was a closet homosexual. To be told by a closet homosexual to "Stop avoiding" only had one possible meaning. He had decided, out of the boundless compassion of his Philippino heart, to diagnose me as a latent or repressed or closet homosexual.
I was put on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone. After seeing Fernando, the delusion that I was under surveillance returned; I decided that there was a listening device in my glasses. The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals also returned, stuck with me for the rest of the year, and returned intermittently in 2009.
I will return to my father briefly. I should say about my father that he and I, although sharing some traits such as a strong capacity for abstract reasoning, are very different. I support the Greens; he supports ACT. If I was American, I would be a Democrat and would have voted for Hilary; he would be a Republican and even today still supports Donald Trump. I believe in anthropogenic climate-change; he is a still a climate change denier. I like Noam Chomsky; he has an almost fanatical devotion to the novels and philosophy of Ayn Rand. For much of my life, I have found it challenging continuing to love and respect him when I disagree so entirely with his politics. Back in 2007, there were times, in fact, when I thought he was a double-agent – a heterosexual who had infiltrated the ruling homosexual elite by pretending to be a closet homosexual.
In 2007, I believed that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals and sometimes thought that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals. This was partly a result of having Fernando as a psychiatrist. I was almost well in 2008. In January 2009, after I'd been on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone for over a year and a half, that I first started hearing voices. The first voice I heard belonged to George W. Bush. I asked him the reason why he had invaded Iraq and was told some bullshit about the clash of civilisations. In 2009, my principle delusion was that I could communicate telepathically with other people. For instance, after Tony Veitch was subjected to intense public condemnation after allegations that he had physically abused his partner, I tried to project the thought "I love you" into his head. In 2007, I had believed that everything reported in the news was made up, but it was thought Veitch's case that I started believing some of the news was true. My psychosis that year often had an almost religious dimension; I sometimes thought I was being picked to save the world. I visited a nunnery with my mother and a friend of hers at one point, picked up a book by St Thomas Aquinas and decided that he was gay. I thought one of the male priests there had projected the thought into my head, "None of them?" During this year I thought I could psychically know who was gay or straight.
My psychosis in 2009 involved sexuality but not in an obvious way. I wasn't in the slightest sexually muddled. I sometimes thought, in fact, that I might be the straightest man in the world. In late 2009, I think after I was put on Olanzapine, I decided that the world might be ruled by a heterosexual elite and that the second tier down consisted of homosexuals, in the same way that Smithers is the personal assistant to Mr Burns.
I have said that if I had been treated better by the mental health service I would have got better in a year. The reason I was so sick was because I sensed that I had been diagnosed as a latent or closet homosexual at my first appointment; when someone senses that people around him think him a latent or closet homosexual, there is no way to tell them that they are wrong. This was the cause of my psychosis in both 2007 and 2009. I know I should adduce evidence, and there is some, but it is easier if you just trust me. I knew. The question is – why did they think me gay? I never used the words 'gay' or 'straight' with anyone in the Mental Health system until 2013, apart from a couple of times right at the very beginning. (For a description of the one time I used these words, see the post "An Anecdote; and A Description of a Condition".) I certainly have never said I was gay or even that I was sexually confused – because I wasn't. For much of 2007, I believed there was a listening device in my glasses and that if I used either word something terrible would happen to me. In 2008, this delusion receded; I thought that so long as I said nothing controversial no one would be listening. It came back in early 2009 and was succeeded by the delusion that everyone was telepathic. From early 2010 until 2013 I was totally well – but I had made a kind of bargain with the devil to simply allow people to think whatever they wanted of me. I was well but I was vomiting every day. In 2011, I made no secret with my Key Worker or with the other patients that I was pursuing the girl Jess – but I believe that my Key Worker thought of me as a gay man who didn't want to come out.
So why did they decide I was gay? In late 2008, I re-established a friendship with a man I'd known some years earlier, who had just recently returned from the Czech Republic. He wasn't even a particularly good friend. I would call him 'straight' but he was actually a little fuzzy around the edges, something I sensed that sometimes made me uncomfortable. He had been married to a woman I'd known in Dunedin. Sometimes I would go and hang out with him at Piha. I made the mistake of telling those treating me about this friendship – I believe that they decided it was a homosexual relationship. And this is why I went completely nuts for all of 2009.
The most generally accepted definition of homosexuality is that it is a sexual attraction towards members of the same sex. Heterosexuality is when a person is sexually attracted towards members of the opposite sex. The mistake I have made when talking to people in the Mental Health Service is that I sometimes talk about catching up with male friends. Sexuality has nothing to do with who a person likes and everything to do with who a person wants to fuck. In this blog I have found it difficult to talk about sex. But with both my longtime girlfriends I had sex with them a lot. It is a cause of deep despondency that I haven't had sex since 2011 (a one night stand in Wellington with a girl who was deeply enamoured of me). I am approaching middle age, am unemployed, and am officially diagnosed schizophrenic. So even if I meet girls, which is difficult, I am not a fetching prospect. Nevertheless, I have always been profoundly attracted to women – it is a basic aspect of who I am. From 2013 or 2014 until 2016, I thought I might be attracted to men as well, as I described in the post "Definitions of Sexuality Part 3", but fortunately this incredibly unpleasant psychotic symptom went away some years ago.
How can you can describe an aspect of consciousness, sexual attraction, to others, especially when the others are all sexually squeamish?
A mistake the arseholes who run the Mental Health System make is that they do not consider that mental illness has a cause – sometimes they will decide an experience is a delusion simply because they have decided that the patient is delusional. In 2013, I was called a fag in the New Zealand Herald. This sounds like a delusion but it actually happened, and I want to detail the circumstances around it.
From mid 2010 until 2013 I was well. In January 2012, I was discharged from the service; for the whole of that year I was on 5mgs of Olanzapine. That year I completed an MA in Creative Writing through AUT. In early 2013, I became 'ill' again – I thought that people in the Media knew something about the film I'd written in 2012 and also thought that a rumour that I was gay had got into the media. I have talked about this in the posts "What Happened in 2013" and "Screenplays and Their Reception". My psychosis in 2013 totally revolved around Jess Ë€– I was scared she might turn into a lesbians. Aside from the fact that Jess was intelligent and pretty and cool, she was also the proof that I was straight. By the middle of the year, my psychosis had pretty much abated. In September 2013, I went to the Wanganui Literary Festival – the speakers included Witi Ihimaera, Grant Smithies, and Joe Bennett. One evening, patrons had the opportunity to have dinner with the guests. I was sitting near Smithies. He seemed uncomfortable around me. I went outside for a cigarette and Joe Bennett came out to have one as well. He said, "I have a small erection! Of course, there's no such thing as a small erection." Now, this is an deeply fucked up way to start a conversation. I decided that he must be gay. He asked me which authors I liked and I mentioned The Catcher in the Rye which I had recently read for the first time. He disparaged Salinger, saying that Salinger was a fraud for thinking he could understand, as an adult, what it is like to be teenager. He suggested that if I wrote any fiction, I send it to him for advice and criticism.
Shortly after the Festival, Smithies wrote a column in the Herald about it. In the column, he mention that the first time he'd slept with a woman occurred in Wanganui. 2013 was the year gay marriage was legalised in New Zealand, and I think, after his experience in Wanganui, Smithies wanted it on the public record that he was straight. In the column, he talked about the dinner. And about Joe Bennett "going outside for a fag."
Shortly after this I saw my psychiatrist Jen Murphy. I told her that Joe Bennett had made a pass at me and described him as "openly gay". I didn't mention that Grant Smithies had called me a fag in his column.
In the post, "Cannabis and The Causes of Schizophrenia", I said that I didn't know if the reason people thought me gay was the result of a rumour or me giving off some kind of gay vibe. After Smithies's column, and after Fernando had been interviewed in the Herald saying "There are signs you learn to look for", I decided that Fernando had spread a rumour about me. Perhaps Fernando spread it deliberately because he'd heard about my film and realised that it could be damaging to the psychiatric profession. He was then a darling of the media. This is why I sent Steve Braunias a kind of letter, a letter in the style of his "Secret Diary" column, strongly suggesting Fernando was a homosexual sociopath who serially misdiagnoses patients and falsifies patient records.
In early 2014, of course, I was put under the Mental Health Act, and have been receiving Compulsory Treatment ever since.
In the years since I have struggled with the problem of gay-vibe vs. rumour. You must remember that in 2012, I didn't think I was famous, so to be subject to media attention was incredibly distressing. I now think it was a rumour. There were two possible sources for this rumour, Tony Fernando. Or Jose Barbosa. But it is almost impossible for me to confirm that this rumour existed. Earlier this year, I wrote to Duncan Greive, who runs the internet news site The Spinoff, to ask him if he knew of any gossip about me. I had gone to school with Duncan and knew him as a man who had always understood that the way to get ahead in life is to play the game and suck up to the teachers. He said, "I can honestly say I have not heard any false rumours about you." I believe, now, that he was being disingenuous. What I didn't know when I wrote to Duncan is that Jose works for The Spinoff. So Duncan almost certainly had heard something about me, and it was probably false.
Incidentally, in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM", I said that Jose was either uncertain of my sexual orientation or thought I was gay. Jose is a fuckwit. He should have known that I was straight. A couple of years before I went to work at bFM, I bumped into him at a party. I suggested he meet my girlfriend – I brought up the fact that I had a girlfriend because I was unsure of his sexual orientation and I wanted him to know that I was heterosexual. The world is full of stupid cunts, I think.
I'll finish this post by making an observation about the Mental Health System. It is all founded on lies. The good people get out; the rest know that to keep their jobs they must stick to the party line. This means that if a person is, for instance, diagnosed schizophrenic, no one is willing to say that the psychiatrists made a mistake. And they look for evidence to justify the diagnosis. I think New Zealand would be a healthier and happier place if we just got rid of the psychiatric profession entirely.
I know by the way that this post is not brilliantly written. But I hope it conveys something of my life.
Monday, 26 November 2018
Why I Am So Clever (complete draft)
[Note: for some reason, the last post I published only included half the essay I'd written. It doesn't include mention of the Postgraduate Diploma of Communications I completed last year. If you've already read the first part, skim through it (I may have revised it a little) until you find the paragraph dealing with MA in Creative Writing. I hope this post was written well enough. I didn't do a fine edit.]Once again I am in two minds about what to write about. I originally thought to write something about the concept of "mental illness". I regard "mental illness" as a metaphor, that one should more honestly talk of people experiencing sadness or madness or anxiety, usually occasioned by life experiences. Today, however, most people, influenced by the current vogue in language use, tend to regard this metaphor as a literal truth rather than a figure of speech, to assume that "mental illness" is literally an illness, to be treated like an illness. Like I said, this was originally what I intended to write about. Instead, however, I want to talk about my life again, following on from the previous post. I hope it will be interesting.
I want instead to talk about my academic history. I sometimes think that others out there in the wider world know a little of my grades and I wish to furnish some explanation for why they are so uneven. The intention is to justify a claim to cleverness – "Why I Am So Clever" was the title of the last book Nietzsche wrote before he completely lost the plot in 1888. Hopefully, I won't descend into catatonic insanity as a result of writing this post.
After leaving school, having received an A Bursary, I went to study in Dunedin. In seventh form, I had started 'going steady' (as the Americans say) with my first girlfriend, Danielle, but I had made up my mind to study at Otago the next year before I'd met her and for reasons I can no longer remember stuck to this plan. I lived in Dunedin for two years at the Hall of Residence, Knox College. For the first term, Danielle and I were in a long-distance relationship; during the holidays we broke up (oddly enough because I accidentally told her that I loved her) and I was single for a term. Then we got back together again at the next holidays and remained in a long-distance relationship with her for the rest of my time in Dunedin. Danielle was two years younger than me. We spoke on the phone for hours at least once a week; I saw her every holiday; she came skiing with me and my family on one occasion; her mother even flew me back to Auckland in 1999 so I could accompany her to her seventh form ball. I think she regarded my life in Dunedin as glamorous or exciting because, at our age, a two year difference seems like a lifetime.
I loved Dunedin. I'd hated being forced to go to school, being given detention repeatedly for failing to do my homework, being continually in trouble with the teachers, being graded and ranked. In Dunedin, I could skip lectures if I wanted to. I performed badly academically, and even failed a few papers, not because of a lack of aptitude, but because of the number of lectures I missed, often by sleeping right through until lunchtime. I did a film paper, which I should have loved, but which I failed because I only attended one lecture. In the first year, I was enrolled in a conjoint, first English and Biology, then English and Physics, then finally just English after I dropped out of the BSc altogether. I now regret this waste of money and squandering of educational opportunity very much, this failure to engage with the University. But my time in Dunedin was far from a waste. Knox had a vibrant culture and social life, much of it revolving around binge drinking. I made friends, my best friend being a chap called Caleb, from Whangarei, who started off doing an LLB and BA in Philosophy and dropped out of the LLB in second year. We drank whiskey, played chess, listened to Jeff Buckley and Radiohead (when I had control over the stereo) and Bob Marley (when he was in control of it) every night. It was, by and large, a good time in my life.
Knox College had a friendly rivalry with another Hall of Residence, Selwyn College. The two colleges would compete through 'sports' and through cultural activities. There was a drama competition. In my first year, 1998, I wrote a kind of extended skit about a scarfy flat, featuring the devil, and performed in it alongside a friend who was known at Knox by the moniker "The Eighties Man" because he only liked hair metal. At the beginning of 1999, I asked if for that year's competition I could write a proper, real half-hour play, and the student in charge of Cultural Affairs allowed me. I would spend hours, often very late at night, writing it, over several months. It was my first serious sustained effort to write a story; it took me a chunk of the year. The play, called "Skimmers" was totally straight: it was about the breakup of a relationship between a boy and girl, both second year students at Otago University. I can remember, when writing it, having an insight into the protagonist's character: I decided after struggling with the writing for a while and failing to find an authentic feel, that she should be self-aware enough to almost know that she was a character in a play. It was in this way that I found her voice. The play was rich with references to Dunedin, to the pubs, to university, to the cultural scene. When it was performed, to the other students at Knox and the students at Selwyn, I noticed that the audience burst into coughs at every scene change; I worried that this meant they were bored but my friends told me afterwards that the people watching were holding their breath and waiting for scene changes to cough. A little later, I was in at the English department and a lecturer, who had attended the play, decided to introduce me to another lecturer as "the next Roger Hall". I hope this was intended as a compliment. The Master of Knox College even wrote a glowing tribute, pinned to the cork wall that messages were pinned to, saying something about how the play was a true depiction of student life and saying that I had depths that he hadn't expected.
At the end of second year, I had a choice. Either I could stay in Dunedin with my friends or I could go back to Auckland to be with Danielle. I chose my love for Danielle over my friendship with Caleb. My mother sometimes says that I made a mistake coming back to Auckland, that I was making a name for myself in Dunedin, but coming back to Auckland did have some beneficial effects. I started going to lectures regularly and, in the second semester of third year, received my first A+. It was in a paper called Critical Thinking. This was a fantastic paper: at every lecture a different lecturer would present a summary of some facet of modern theory, such as Derrida's theory of deconstruction, Said's theory of the Orientalism, or Lacanian ideas about desire. I learned that they way to approach the study of English literature was through the prism of Theory. The essay that I wrote for this paper was about desire and in the exam I wrote about rhetoric, using a scene from the Lord of the Rings as an example.
Danielle and I would at least once a week go to play pool at a pool hall, and sometimes went clubbing with her friends. I think this was the best year of my life.
When I finished the BA, I went to London to visit my brother. I had made up my mind to do an MA in English Literature, largely because I enjoyed it and because it just seemed natural to remain at the University for a little while longer. I decided to enrol in a screen-writing paper. When applying, you had to provide a brief outline of a short film and a feature film. I had an idea for a feature film about a failing stand-up comic who makes friends with the devil. I had two ideas for a short film. One was about God, in which God is a motel owner living in Tolaga Bay. The other was a gay spy film. I sent my application from London, I think.
When I returned to New Zealand, Danielle broke up with me. She had met someone else.
For the next two years, I studied for the MA. I received fairly good grades, usually As and sometimes A+s. However, as I said in the previous post, I believe that my decision to write a short film about gay characters rebounded badly on me. The screen-writing course was taught by Schuchi Kuthari (I may have spelt her name wrong). I think the short film led her and the other lecturers to believe me to be gay. In fact, none of the essays I wrote over those two years had the slightest relation to sexuality. I tended to try to come up with my own theories and my own interpretations of the books we studied. For instance, when writing about Huckleberry Finn, I devised a theory of humour. I wrote an essay about a poem by Alan Curnow, "Spectacular Blossom" in which I argued that the influential interpretation of it by CK Stead was wrong. I didn't engage with Queer Theory at all – my knowledge of Foucault was then limited, inaccurate, based mostly on hearsay.
Although I mainly received excellent grades, I did fail one paper, the paper on New Zealand Literature. I failed it because I sensed that the lecturer, Terry Sturm, didn't like me – I didn't show up for lectures and didn't hand in an essay. Sturm had been a friend of Janet Frame and this may be partly why he took a dislike to me. Because of that failed paper, I didn't get a First Class Honours and had to return to Auckland University for another semester in 2003. In 2003 I did a paper on Old English and Middle English for which I received an A+. For that paper, I wrote a Lacanian interpretation of Sir Gawain and The Green Night.
Even during my MA, I wasn't always the best student. But then none of us were. I remember at the beginning of a lecture on Modern Poetics the lecturer, Wystan Curnow, asking the class, "What did you think about Creeley's essay?" We had been tasked with reading Creeley's important manifesto "Projective Verse." We all looked at each other. Wystan said, "None of you have read it?" and then stormed out of the class. He returned after a couple of minutes and resumed the lecture anyhow. However, neither was I an altogether bad student. An MA in English involves a considerable amount of reading – for instance, when studying Herman Melville, we had to read a novel a week (we had a fortnight for Moby Dick). It was tough enough reading the required texts, let alone the supplementary readings, but, in the main, we succeeded.
In 2003, I decided that I wanted to become a lecturer I was told that I really needed a PhD from an American University. In 2004, I went to Europe and, when I returned, completed a Certificate of Proficiency researching the poet John Ashbery, with Wystan as my supervisor. The reason I decided to write about Ashbery was that I had never really 'got' postmodern poetry, and I thought that if I undertook an intensive study of his work, I could understand one of the pioneers. As I said in the post "Bullshit" and the previous post, I decided, after reading his incredibly long and difficult poem Flowchart, that in it he was coming out as gay. The essay I ended up writing about Ashbery was convoluted, impenetrable. Aside from the gay-spy film I wrote in 2001, this was the only work I wrote which tackled gay topics at all.
Although I didn't think much about this at the time, in the years since I completed my study at the Auckland University English department, I have worried about a terrible question. Did I receive the grades I did out of merit? Or was it because they thought I was gay? To put it another way, was I perhaps the victim of reverse-discrimination or affirmative action? When I look back, I seek evidence that I was indeed quite clever. I gave a presentation on James Joyce's "The Dead" which was well received. I had worked out my interpretation of it the morning before I gave it. Afterwards, one of my fellow students said, "You worked that all out this morning?" When wanting to go study in the States, I had to sit a series of examinations for prospective postgraduate students there, a set of exams called the Graduate Recruitment Examinations. I sat three multiple-choice exams, one testing my knowledge of literature, one testing the size of my vocabulary, and one testing my mathematical abilities. I also had to write a short essay testing my ability to construct an argument. I did badly in the essay for some reason but quite well in the other three exams. Shall I tell you my marks? I'll tell you my marks. In the literature test, I think I beat 94% of the other applicants. In the vocabulary test, I beat 99% of the other applicants. In the mathematics exam, I only beat 95% of the other applicants – but then I got 100% and so this only shows that 5% of those sitting this test also got 100%.
Using my results in the GRE and my essay on Ashbery, I applied to five or six American universities. I only applied to top tier universities, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Berkeley... This may seem arrogant but in fact my self-esteem was direfully low. Subconsciously, I didn't want to go and so I sabotaged myself by only applying to universities that wouldn't accept me. It was an act of self-sabotage. I have a good friend who applied for scholarships to a few American universities but had a back-up school, Perdue, to which he was accepted. He would go on to complete a PhD specialising in disability studies.
I floated around for six months, worked briefly as a Barista (I should add that I'd worked at the Royal New Zealand Yacht squadron between 2001 and 2004) and then, halfway through 2005, my father and step-mother effectively coerced me into studying to become an English teacher. I decided that I wanted to try to teach Physics as well, and went back to University in the second semester. I did papers in the Philosophy of Science, in Physics, and in Pure Math. I scraped a pass in the Physics paper and failed the Math paper – I failed it because I thought I could jump straight into a second year course but didn't understand matrices.
In 2005, I also started working as phone-bet operator for the TAB, a job I held until the phone-bet centre was shut down in 2013.
In 2006, I went to the Teachers Training College run by AUT. It wasn't really a graded course and so I don't remember my grades. I dropped out in the second semester. The reasons I dropped out are various. That same year I went to live at the Big House and it was hard to juggle my social life, the intense work schedule of the one year postgraduate course in teaching, and my job at the TAB. Plus, I didn't really want to be a teacher at all. When I was on placement, I would wake up at 4AM, go to my mother's house, and plan the day's lessons there, with little idea of what I intended to tach. At night, I would deliberately put the next day's lessons utterly out of my mind, because I disliked teaching so much. The support I received from other teachers at the school was utterly inadequate. The third school I was sent to was my old school, Auckland Boys Grammar, and I taught there, or tried to teach there, for six weeks. During my placement, my father had his sixtieth birthday party, which was held in Sydney. I was flown to Australia for a week-end, time I really couldn't afford to spend on something frivolous. At the party, my father sat with the bigwigs of the Commonwealth Bank (he was then Chairman of the ASB Board of Directors); my older brother and half-sisters sat at a table near him. I was stuck in a corner of the room with my father's younger brother Ian – we both sensed we were somehow redundant to proceedings. The seating plan had been arranged by my step-mother. Now, I don't talk much about my family in this blog but I think I need to say that my then step-mother is Jan Doogue, who is currently New Zealand's chief district court judge. I never liked her and she never liked me. I think it fair to say that the only member of my family with whom I've never had tension is my mother.
I hated being back at Auckland Boys Grammar and this party utterly ruined my self-confidence. I was only studying to become a teacher because I had been emotionally blackmailed into studying it by my father and step-mother, and then they didn't even have the courtesy to sit me near my father at his birthday. I also believe that the rumour that I was gay followed me to Teachers Training College and then to the schools at which I taught. I remember during a class on the North Shore one of lecturers, not at my instigation, asked me to explain Foucault to the class. I did a very ham-fisted job because, at that time, I knew very little about Foucault at all.
In September I dropped out. For a period, I didn't know what to do with myself, and then decided that maybe I should go to bFM, to reacquaint myself with Jose Barbossa and maybe help out at the radio station. My reasons for doing so weren't clear to me but it was partly that I thought that bFM represented a kind of community, a culture that would accept me, a culture totally different to the one I had found myself in at Teachers Training College and particularly at Auckland Boys Grammar. It was after I worked there that I went nuts. I have talked about this in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM".
In 2007, of course, I was 'unwell'. I recovered in January 2008. I was now a patient of the Mental Health Service and on the sickness benefit and so I felt licensed to do what I wanted, which was simply to study. I went back to Auckland University and took a philosophy paper on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. I wrote an essay about the Platonic aspects of Schopenhauer's philosophy and, although I passed, think I only got a C+. I couldn't understand why I'd got such a low grade. This essay was at least as good as the ones I'd written during my MA. My friend Jess, who also took the same paper, had a similar experience: I think, like me, she had been penalised for not simply regurgitation the lecturer's trite banalities. In the exam, I left after an hour because I couldn't think of anything more to say about Nietzsche. In the second semester, I did papers on French and German philosophy but dropped out, although I continued to attend lectures.
In January 2009, I again became 'unwell' and for the first time began hearing voices. Back then, my mother and I both believed that my 'illness' was temporary (which it would have been if I had been treated better by the Mental Health System) and we were still thinking in terms of a future career. My mother had heard that there was lots of jobs in IT, so I went back to AUT to study computing. In the first semester, I did a paper on Programming for which I received an A. In the second semester, I dropped out. Now, if someone were to compare my periods of wellness and illness to my academic transcript, it would be reasonable to assume that during the first half of 2009, when I was taking rispridone, I was well, and that I became ill in the second half of the year after I went off it, and this is the reason I dropped out of AUT. Incredibly, the reverse is true. I was quite psychotic during the first semester. I have experienced visual hallucinations perhaps two or three times and one of those occasions was in early 2009 – I thought my fellow students were wizards from the discworld series. On another occasion, I was in a computer lab and I thought an Asian girl had telepathically projected the thought, "You will fail" into my mind. I was allowed to discontinue rispiridone in August 2009, and was very close to sane for a month or two. It was during this period of sanity that I decided to drop out, because I had realised that I simply didn't want to go into IT.
In 2010 and 2011, I didn't study, although I was well. In 2012, I went to AUT and completed a Masters in Creative Writing. I have talked about this before, particularly in the post "Screenplays and Their Reception." It was a pointless degree; the only thing I got out of it was that I finished a draft of the film about Jess. The lecturers were uninterested. The truth is, either a person is a writer or a person isn't. I can't remember my grade (it was probably some kind of B) but I think the lecturers and examiners didn't know much about film and didn't know how to grade the film I'd written.
Last year, 2017, I went back to AUT again, this time to study a Postgraduate Diploma in Communications, a degree that can pave the way for work in advertising, journalism and PR, among other fields. My marks again weren't brilliant but, although I withdrew from a paper, I passed everything else. My best mark, an A-, was in Brand Management, ironically the subject I knew least about and for which I just regurgitated one of the set texts. The subject I knew the most about, Popular Culture, was the one for which I got the lowest mark. A number of the essays I wrote for this degree I included in this blog; I think I wanted my actual essays in the public domain so that readers could judge for themselves whether the marks I received were reflective of the quality of the essays. In fact, I suspect, without hard evidence, that the reason I received such a bad mark for the first Pop Culture essay, one I have included in the blog under the title "Genre and The Much Reported Death of the Author", is that it was so original my lecturer thought I'd plagiarised it. Later in the year, I think the department decided that I might have self-plagiarised. In fact, although I'd thought about the films I talked about a lot, such as the sequel to Trainspotting, I'd never written about them before.
If I did badly in this degree, there were a number of factors in play. I was a mature student; I had low-self esteem; I was tranquillised; I didn't put in all the required work. I missed lectures, didn't do the homework and wrote the essays a day or two before submitting them. I didn't see how I could translate this degree into any kind of real employment.
Because I'd withdrawn from a paper, I decided to complete the degree by doing a Research Paper on Narrative Theory through the University of Auckland at summer school, and I want to say something about this paper. My supervisor, Brian Boyd, is a very nice man but I am going to be a little critical of him in discussing this experience. Brian is, I think, best known for writing a book called The Origin of Stories and is the department's resident expert on narrative theory. After consideration, Brian decided to take me on as his student, based on my grades from my MA, and in our first email communication told me in effect of his dislike of pop culture texts like The Lord of the Rings. At AUT, I'd been taught by a lecturer who was a pop-culture partisan, a woman who I think looked down on high-culture fans as pretentious snobs, who had contemptuously dismissed me, without evidence, as a devotee of WH Auden; back at the University of Auckland, I was being taught by a high-culture snob who looked down on pop-culture fans and who had dismissed me as a fan of Star Wars and fantasy books likewise without knowing anything about me. The truth, in fact, is that I don't distinguish between high-culture texts and popular culture texts – I like them both. I have just finished Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler but I also enjoy Rick and Morty and Family Guy. I suspect in fact that, even though I'm not gay, I was the victim of homophobia, from both ends of the spectrum. Both high culture partisans and popular culture partisans want to see gay men as stupid, both seek to distance themselves from it – intelligence is confused with pretension by some, while others cling to their pretensions because their self-image depends upon it.
In the Humanities, fashions in philosophy come and go, and success as an academic depends upon hitching one's horse to the right theory, the currently in vogue. During my MA, I once told a lecturer that I liked Baudrillard. She put in my place by saying, "Oh, no one reads Baudrillard any more" – as if whether a person is read has any bearing on whether that person is right or not. Twenty years ago, the fashion in the Humanities was postmodernism, that strain of thought that began perhaps with Nietzsche and stretches through Derrida and Foucault, among others. Today, although there are still postmodernists around, the fashion is neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, a reaction against postmodernism in favour of science. I don't like either. Neuroscience is still far too underdeveloped to have any bearing on literary interpretation, if it ever will, and evolutionary psychology is all speculative and unfalsifiable, in the same way that Karl Popper said that Freud was unfalsifiable. Brian had hitched his horse to the evolutionary psychology bandwagon. I read a little of his book because he kindly sent me a chapter. I found it rich in reference to subjects like zoology and anthropology but unconvincing – Brian seemed to be seeking to show a continuum between animals and humans, and between story-telling and other forms of communication. At one point, he suggests that reading competence is genetic but that there are probably many genes involved (as there are many genes involved in stature) and approving cites "selfish gene theory". I think to the contrary that if I, for instance, am a highly competent reader, it isn't because of my genes but because I've read so much. And, as I've already said in this blog, I don't agree with Richard Dawkins (the architect of selfish gene theory). In fact, I believe that Dawkins, in recent years, has been disproved, as a Lamarckian view of hereditary supplants Mendelian genetics.
Brian and I approach literary interpretation from two entirely different perspectives. There is something paradoxical in both our positions. Brian is, in a sense, more 'objective', more 'scientific' than I am– but at the same time he seems to believe that there is no such thing as a correct interpretation. I am more postmodern in the sense that I believe reality is mostly composed of our beliefs about it – but at the same time I believe there is always a best interpretation of a book, film, or poem. Brian seems to regard stories as representations of more or less realistic characters in more or less realistic settings acting in more or less realistic ways, as a 'display of a state of affairs'. I see stories as having a subterranean logic, as being rhetorical arguments, instantiations of an interplay between abstract ideas. For instance, I believe There's Something About Mary dramatises an uncertainty in the public mind as to difference between 'love' and 'sexual obsession' – the humour and conflict arises from this uncertainty. Are the two perhaps the same thing? The film ends, reassuringly, by providing a criterion for the difference – true love puts the love-object's happiness first while sexual obsession doesn't. Star Wars is a rhetorical argument dedicated to the premise, "Good always triumphs over evil." Joyce's "The Dead" concerns 'vanity' – it dramatises the way Gabriel Conroy, who egotistically views himself as the centre of the universe, finds his vanity threatened and then finds a way, through self-pity, to restore his vanity. A Beautiful Mind is a rhetorical argument in favour of the idea that 'schizophrenia' is a causeless disease that can only be treated with medication. More recently, Bohemian Rhapsody presents an argument that a heterosexual man can turn homosexual – a position that has led it to be attacked from both ends of the spectrum, has offended both right-wing homophobes and many members of the LGBT community. In other words, I see stories as emerging from the culture and speaking back to it, as being rhetorical in the sense that they seek to persuade the community of the truth of some set of propositions.
Brian and I communicated a couple of times by email and I tried to give him some sense of my philosophical position. He told me that the postmodern assertion that there is no such things as objective truth is self-refuting – a sentiment I had heard before which I regard as a trite banality (it had been expressed by the Nietzsche lecturer as well). He lent me Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction. I wrote a draft in which I interpreted Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, There's Something About Mary and The Shining. I worked out my interpretation of The Shining after watching it again – my conviction was that, if my approach was valid, it should be applicable to all 'good' (i.e. popular and successful) stories, including ones I hadn't already analysed. When I sent my draft to Brian, I said that I also wanted to interpret Joyce's "The Dead" and he wrote back to say that he didn't think "The Dead" would fit with an essay "of this sort". He also said, rightly, that I hadn't done enough research and suggested Levin's "New Readings of Old Plays". Levin's work was crushing, I think deliberately so. Brian thought my approach was basically a kind of thematic reading, was pointing out that thematic interpretations were old-hat, and trying to convince me that nothing new can be said about anything. I think he possibly dislikes thematic readings on principle.
So I borrowed a couple of books from the library on narrative theory to try to get some sense of the state of the field. I discovered a discipline with no idea of its subject. The word "narrative" is defined so broadly as to be virtually meaningless. Narrative is "a report of connected events" and some have even argued that a narrative can consist of a report of a single event. I found that the theorists accepted this definition and would then move on to interpret writers like Proust and Homer, when they could just as justifiably have been discussing newspaper articles, advertisements, and anecdotes, even obituaries. I found that the theory I wished to formulate didn't fit with the concerns of modern narrative theory at all, with concepts like sujet and fabula, with problems to do with reference and verisimilitude. I abandoned my original essay entirely. Having noticed that a weakness in narrative theory is that it doesn't consider stories from the author's perspective, doesn't account for where fictions come from, I suggested to Brian that I write interpretations of two of my own stories, the films "Bruce Sells Out" and "The Hounds of Heaven" explaining the creative process behind them. If I'd pursued this plan, it would have made for a very odd essay indeed. Brian, knowing that I was interested in narrative as rhetoric, had recommended two books by modern theorists, one of them The Rhetoric of Fictionality by Richard Walsh. When I plunged into Walsh's book, I found it almost incomprehensible. But I noticed that he had used, as examples, Kafka's The Trial and an excerpt from Gaiman's The Sandman, two works I had loved as a teenager. I took this as a sign. I wrote to Brian and said that I had decided to write about Walsh instead.
I wasn't altogether well during this period. From the beginning, I felt that Brian was trying to squash me. Perhaps it is is the attitude of a well-respected, tenured professor to an upstart nobody who has pretensions to originality without being versed enough in all the scholarly literature. Perhaps the English Department knew something of my situation and he was trying to squash me deliberately. Perhaps I am just stupid. Re-reading Walsh, I made more sense of it. There were reasons I had difficulty understanding it, though. First, Walsh references a number of narrative theorists I knew little about. Second, although the book is dense, interesting, and thought provoking, it is fundamentally incoherent. Walsh defines 'fiction' differently at different times and never defines the term 'rhetoric'. Although I think most people view 'rhetoric' as a form of 'persuasive speech' (employing devices like irony, analogy, figurative language, and so on), Walsh never addresses the idea of 'persuasion' at all. Although his ostensible intent is to draw a line between fiction and non-fiction, to reintroduce fictionality as a necessary term in narrative theory (which often doesn't draw the distinction between fictional and non-fictional narratives), Walsh often seems to be suggesting that everything is fiction, that there is no distinction between dreams and reality, that narrative is a way of imposing order on chaos when everything is chaos. Walsh is postmodernism in narrative theory taken to its logical conclusion. In my essay I said that I thought Walsh was "on the lip of a precipice he couldn't bring himself to look over."
My essay was partly a summary of the book and partly an extension of the book. I raised the problem at the books heart, the problem of definitions. What do the words 'fiction', 'rhetoric' and 'narrative' actually mean? Central to Walsh's argument, is his notion of 'relevance theory' – after the essay was marked, Brian told me that he thought I had misunderstood the notion. In fact, I think Walsh's idea of 'relevance theory' is also unclear, incoherent, and in the essay I had tried to improve upon it. I discussed biopics and concluded by suggesting that to make sense of fiction, of stories, one requires a fusion of Karl Jung and Michel Foucault.
I want to say something about why I ventured to bring Foucault into an essay on narrative theory. People with a rudimentary idea of Foucault know him only as a gay philosopher or social historian who wrote about madness, the prison system, and homosexuality. In fact, what I get from Foucault is the idea that society's understanding of the world is informed by abstract concepts (like 'schizophrenia' and 'homosexuality') and that these concepts have a history. Foucault is a 'nominalist' – that is, he denies the existence of abstract objects. As I understand him, perhaps imperfectly, he argues that the concept of 'homosexuality', homosexuality itself in fact, was invented in the late nineteenth century by psychiatrists, and didn't exist before then. In the essay, I suggested that Walsh was groping towards an 'aesthetic' understanding of narrative and, although I didn't spell this out in the essay, my decision to bring aesthetics into the essay was stimulated by my thinking about Foucault. It had occurred to me that if the concept of 'homosexuality' only came into existence in 1888 or 1893, whenever it was, and didn't exist before then, perhaps there were concepts that once existed but now no longer do. After pondering this question for a little while, it occurred to me that the concept of the 'aesthetic' is a good candidate for an idea that once meant something but which disappeared sometime in the early or mid twentieth century. "Aesthetics" literally means "the study of beauty" and is completely absent from modern narrative theory and almost completely absent from the study of English literature today. One could perhaps write a whole a book about how and why 'aesthetics' as a concept vanished.
Brian gave me a B, a middle of the road grade suggesting he wasn't really sure what grade to give me. In a way, we were always too different. I think Brian relates to the characters in the fiction he loves, characters like Emma Bovary or the characters in Shakespeare, as though they are real people; I see films, TV shows, novels, and poetry as physics problems to be solved or puzzles to be deciphered, and treat all fictions, whether Moby Dick or an episode of Friends in the same way. My attitude can suck the joy out of fiction consumption among those who live vicariously through the novels they love. Ironically, however, although I am not a copious writer of fiction, I have written enough to understand fiction from the author's point of view. Many English professors don't. (This includes Walsh.)
I want to make two general observations about Universities today. Successive governments have promoted the policy that the role of tertiary institutions is to prepare people for work – this has put the squeeze on subjects like philosophy, sociology, anthropology, English lit, classics, and art history, subjects that don't clearly point people in the direction of jobs. Even during my MA, a long time ago, I felt that there were only three careers open to me – becoming an English teacher at a high school, becoming a university lecturer... or becoming a writer (a career that makes no money at all). I wish to make a plea for the benefits of these 'soft' subjects. The study of English literature teaches reading comprehension and critical thinking. Most importantly, though, it teaches empathy – a good novel takes one inside someone else's mind. The medical schools these days encourage trainee doctors, who are good at rote-learning which antibiotic to prescribe for a boil but often lack social skills, to watch The Simpsons, because research has suggested fiction consumption can improve a person's understanding of others. If watching The Simpsons can bolster a person's ability to empathise, perhaps reading Woolf and Joyce and Hemingway, would help even more.
But there is a problem in these soft subjects. How can we objectively assess the quality of an essay? During my brief stint working as a trainee teacher at Auckland Boys Grammar, I set as homework for a class of extremely bright Year 9 students the task of writing a short story. This school has the ridiculous system of placing students in classes ranging from A to M, in some years, based on their aggregated exam results. At the end of each semester, each student receives a report stating his relative position in the class for every subject and his place in the class overall. The night after I received the boys' stories, I sat for hours in the school staff-room, by myself, long after darkness had descended all around me, trying to put thirty mostly excellent and totally heterogenous short stories in order from best to worst so that I could grade them – an impossible task. If I could go back in time to those terrible days, I would have just given them all Excellences for having completed the assignment.
In this blog, I have written multiple posts about the clinical psychologist I saw weekly for about eight or nine months in 2014. At one of the last appointments, he said to me, "Are there any gay people you like?" I couldn't understand why he'd asked me this question and said, "I like Michel Foucault." I could have easily said that I liked Stephen Fry, or Graham Chapman, or Michael Stipe. But I sensed I was in a trap – there was no right answer. To say you like Michel Foucault, among many people, is seen as a sign of homosexuality (the wikipedia page on Foucault is enough to show this bigotry). To say that I didn't like any gay men at all would have made me a homophobe. And homophobia is also considered a sign of homosexuality. It's the trap I've been in for much of my life. This is yet another reason why I hated him.
I want instead to talk about my academic history. I sometimes think that others out there in the wider world know a little of my grades and I wish to furnish some explanation for why they are so uneven. The intention is to justify a claim to cleverness – "Why I Am So Clever" was the title of the last book Nietzsche wrote before he completely lost the plot in 1888. Hopefully, I won't descend into catatonic insanity as a result of writing this post.
After leaving school, having received an A Bursary, I went to study in Dunedin. In seventh form, I had started 'going steady' (as the Americans say) with my first girlfriend, Danielle, but I had made up my mind to study at Otago the next year before I'd met her and for reasons I can no longer remember stuck to this plan. I lived in Dunedin for two years at the Hall of Residence, Knox College. For the first term, Danielle and I were in a long-distance relationship; during the holidays we broke up (oddly enough because I accidentally told her that I loved her) and I was single for a term. Then we got back together again at the next holidays and remained in a long-distance relationship with her for the rest of my time in Dunedin. Danielle was two years younger than me. We spoke on the phone for hours at least once a week; I saw her every holiday; she came skiing with me and my family on one occasion; her mother even flew me back to Auckland in 1999 so I could accompany her to her seventh form ball. I think she regarded my life in Dunedin as glamorous or exciting because, at our age, a two year difference seems like a lifetime.
I loved Dunedin. I'd hated being forced to go to school, being given detention repeatedly for failing to do my homework, being continually in trouble with the teachers, being graded and ranked. In Dunedin, I could skip lectures if I wanted to. I performed badly academically, and even failed a few papers, not because of a lack of aptitude, but because of the number of lectures I missed, often by sleeping right through until lunchtime. I did a film paper, which I should have loved, but which I failed because I only attended one lecture. In the first year, I was enrolled in a conjoint, first English and Biology, then English and Physics, then finally just English after I dropped out of the BSc altogether. I now regret this waste of money and squandering of educational opportunity very much, this failure to engage with the University. But my time in Dunedin was far from a waste. Knox had a vibrant culture and social life, much of it revolving around binge drinking. I made friends, my best friend being a chap called Caleb, from Whangarei, who started off doing an LLB and BA in Philosophy and dropped out of the LLB in second year. We drank whiskey, played chess, listened to Jeff Buckley and Radiohead (when I had control over the stereo) and Bob Marley (when he was in control of it) every night. It was, by and large, a good time in my life.
Knox College had a friendly rivalry with another Hall of Residence, Selwyn College. The two colleges would compete through 'sports' and through cultural activities. There was a drama competition. In my first year, 1998, I wrote a kind of extended skit about a scarfy flat, featuring the devil, and performed in it alongside a friend who was known at Knox by the moniker "The Eighties Man" because he only liked hair metal. At the beginning of 1999, I asked if for that year's competition I could write a proper, real half-hour play, and the student in charge of Cultural Affairs allowed me. I would spend hours, often very late at night, writing it, over several months. It was my first serious sustained effort to write a story; it took me a chunk of the year. The play, called "Skimmers" was totally straight: it was about the breakup of a relationship between a boy and girl, both second year students at Otago University. I can remember, when writing it, having an insight into the protagonist's character: I decided after struggling with the writing for a while and failing to find an authentic feel, that she should be self-aware enough to almost know that she was a character in a play. It was in this way that I found her voice. The play was rich with references to Dunedin, to the pubs, to university, to the cultural scene. When it was performed, to the other students at Knox and the students at Selwyn, I noticed that the audience burst into coughs at every scene change; I worried that this meant they were bored but my friends told me afterwards that the people watching were holding their breath and waiting for scene changes to cough. A little later, I was in at the English department and a lecturer, who had attended the play, decided to introduce me to another lecturer as "the next Roger Hall". I hope this was intended as a compliment. The Master of Knox College even wrote a glowing tribute, pinned to the cork wall that messages were pinned to, saying something about how the play was a true depiction of student life and saying that I had depths that he hadn't expected.
At the end of second year, I had a choice. Either I could stay in Dunedin with my friends or I could go back to Auckland to be with Danielle. I chose my love for Danielle over my friendship with Caleb. My mother sometimes says that I made a mistake coming back to Auckland, that I was making a name for myself in Dunedin, but coming back to Auckland did have some beneficial effects. I started going to lectures regularly and, in the second semester of third year, received my first A+. It was in a paper called Critical Thinking. This was a fantastic paper: at every lecture a different lecturer would present a summary of some facet of modern theory, such as Derrida's theory of deconstruction, Said's theory of the Orientalism, or Lacanian ideas about desire. I learned that they way to approach the study of English literature was through the prism of Theory. The essay that I wrote for this paper was about desire and in the exam I wrote about rhetoric, using a scene from the Lord of the Rings as an example.
Danielle and I would at least once a week go to play pool at a pool hall, and sometimes went clubbing with her friends. I think this was the best year of my life.
When I finished the BA, I went to London to visit my brother. I had made up my mind to do an MA in English Literature, largely because I enjoyed it and because it just seemed natural to remain at the University for a little while longer. I decided to enrol in a screen-writing paper. When applying, you had to provide a brief outline of a short film and a feature film. I had an idea for a feature film about a failing stand-up comic who makes friends with the devil. I had two ideas for a short film. One was about God, in which God is a motel owner living in Tolaga Bay. The other was a gay spy film. I sent my application from London, I think.
When I returned to New Zealand, Danielle broke up with me. She had met someone else.
For the next two years, I studied for the MA. I received fairly good grades, usually As and sometimes A+s. However, as I said in the previous post, I believe that my decision to write a short film about gay characters rebounded badly on me. The screen-writing course was taught by Schuchi Kuthari (I may have spelt her name wrong). I think the short film led her and the other lecturers to believe me to be gay. In fact, none of the essays I wrote over those two years had the slightest relation to sexuality. I tended to try to come up with my own theories and my own interpretations of the books we studied. For instance, when writing about Huckleberry Finn, I devised a theory of humour. I wrote an essay about a poem by Alan Curnow, "Spectacular Blossom" in which I argued that the influential interpretation of it by CK Stead was wrong. I didn't engage with Queer Theory at all – my knowledge of Foucault was then limited, inaccurate, based mostly on hearsay.
Although I mainly received excellent grades, I did fail one paper, the paper on New Zealand Literature. I failed it because I sensed that the lecturer, Terry Sturm, didn't like me – I didn't show up for lectures and didn't hand in an essay. Sturm had been a friend of Janet Frame and this may be partly why he took a dislike to me. Because of that failed paper, I didn't get a First Class Honours and had to return to Auckland University for another semester in 2003. In 2003 I did a paper on Old English and Middle English for which I received an A+. For that paper, I wrote a Lacanian interpretation of Sir Gawain and The Green Night.
Even during my MA, I wasn't always the best student. But then none of us were. I remember at the beginning of a lecture on Modern Poetics the lecturer, Wystan Curnow, asking the class, "What did you think about Creeley's essay?" We had been tasked with reading Creeley's important manifesto "Projective Verse." We all looked at each other. Wystan said, "None of you have read it?" and then stormed out of the class. He returned after a couple of minutes and resumed the lecture anyhow. However, neither was I an altogether bad student. An MA in English involves a considerable amount of reading – for instance, when studying Herman Melville, we had to read a novel a week (we had a fortnight for Moby Dick). It was tough enough reading the required texts, let alone the supplementary readings, but, in the main, we succeeded.
In 2003, I decided that I wanted to become a lecturer I was told that I really needed a PhD from an American University. In 2004, I went to Europe and, when I returned, completed a Certificate of Proficiency researching the poet John Ashbery, with Wystan as my supervisor. The reason I decided to write about Ashbery was that I had never really 'got' postmodern poetry, and I thought that if I undertook an intensive study of his work, I could understand one of the pioneers. As I said in the post "Bullshit" and the previous post, I decided, after reading his incredibly long and difficult poem Flowchart, that in it he was coming out as gay. The essay I ended up writing about Ashbery was convoluted, impenetrable. Aside from the gay-spy film I wrote in 2001, this was the only work I wrote which tackled gay topics at all.
Although I didn't think much about this at the time, in the years since I completed my study at the Auckland University English department, I have worried about a terrible question. Did I receive the grades I did out of merit? Or was it because they thought I was gay? To put it another way, was I perhaps the victim of reverse-discrimination or affirmative action? When I look back, I seek evidence that I was indeed quite clever. I gave a presentation on James Joyce's "The Dead" which was well received. I had worked out my interpretation of it the morning before I gave it. Afterwards, one of my fellow students said, "You worked that all out this morning?" When wanting to go study in the States, I had to sit a series of examinations for prospective postgraduate students there, a set of exams called the Graduate Recruitment Examinations. I sat three multiple-choice exams, one testing my knowledge of literature, one testing the size of my vocabulary, and one testing my mathematical abilities. I also had to write a short essay testing my ability to construct an argument. I did badly in the essay for some reason but quite well in the other three exams. Shall I tell you my marks? I'll tell you my marks. In the literature test, I think I beat 94% of the other applicants. In the vocabulary test, I beat 99% of the other applicants. In the mathematics exam, I only beat 95% of the other applicants – but then I got 100% and so this only shows that 5% of those sitting this test also got 100%.
Using my results in the GRE and my essay on Ashbery, I applied to five or six American universities. I only applied to top tier universities, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Berkeley... This may seem arrogant but in fact my self-esteem was direfully low. Subconsciously, I didn't want to go and so I sabotaged myself by only applying to universities that wouldn't accept me. It was an act of self-sabotage. I have a good friend who applied for scholarships to a few American universities but had a back-up school, Perdue, to which he was accepted. He would go on to complete a PhD specialising in disability studies.
I floated around for six months, worked briefly as a Barista (I should add that I'd worked at the Royal New Zealand Yacht squadron between 2001 and 2004) and then, halfway through 2005, my father and step-mother effectively coerced me into studying to become an English teacher. I decided that I wanted to try to teach Physics as well, and went back to University in the second semester. I did papers in the Philosophy of Science, in Physics, and in Pure Math. I scraped a pass in the Physics paper and failed the Math paper – I failed it because I thought I could jump straight into a second year course but didn't understand matrices.
In 2005, I also started working as phone-bet operator for the TAB, a job I held until the phone-bet centre was shut down in 2013.
In 2006, I went to the Teachers Training College run by AUT. It wasn't really a graded course and so I don't remember my grades. I dropped out in the second semester. The reasons I dropped out are various. That same year I went to live at the Big House and it was hard to juggle my social life, the intense work schedule of the one year postgraduate course in teaching, and my job at the TAB. Plus, I didn't really want to be a teacher at all. When I was on placement, I would wake up at 4AM, go to my mother's house, and plan the day's lessons there, with little idea of what I intended to tach. At night, I would deliberately put the next day's lessons utterly out of my mind, because I disliked teaching so much. The support I received from other teachers at the school was utterly inadequate. The third school I was sent to was my old school, Auckland Boys Grammar, and I taught there, or tried to teach there, for six weeks. During my placement, my father had his sixtieth birthday party, which was held in Sydney. I was flown to Australia for a week-end, time I really couldn't afford to spend on something frivolous. At the party, my father sat with the bigwigs of the Commonwealth Bank (he was then Chairman of the ASB Board of Directors); my older brother and half-sisters sat at a table near him. I was stuck in a corner of the room with my father's younger brother Ian – we both sensed we were somehow redundant to proceedings. The seating plan had been arranged by my step-mother. Now, I don't talk much about my family in this blog but I think I need to say that my then step-mother is Jan Doogue, who is currently New Zealand's chief district court judge. I never liked her and she never liked me. I think it fair to say that the only member of my family with whom I've never had tension is my mother.
I hated being back at Auckland Boys Grammar and this party utterly ruined my self-confidence. I was only studying to become a teacher because I had been emotionally blackmailed into studying it by my father and step-mother, and then they didn't even have the courtesy to sit me near my father at his birthday. I also believe that the rumour that I was gay followed me to Teachers Training College and then to the schools at which I taught. I remember during a class on the North Shore one of lecturers, not at my instigation, asked me to explain Foucault to the class. I did a very ham-fisted job because, at that time, I knew very little about Foucault at all.
In September I dropped out. For a period, I didn't know what to do with myself, and then decided that maybe I should go to bFM, to reacquaint myself with Jose Barbossa and maybe help out at the radio station. My reasons for doing so weren't clear to me but it was partly that I thought that bFM represented a kind of community, a culture that would accept me, a culture totally different to the one I had found myself in at Teachers Training College and particularly at Auckland Boys Grammar. It was after I worked there that I went nuts. I have talked about this in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM".
In 2007, of course, I was 'unwell'. I recovered in January 2008. I was now a patient of the Mental Health Service and on the sickness benefit and so I felt licensed to do what I wanted, which was simply to study. I went back to Auckland University and took a philosophy paper on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. I wrote an essay about the Platonic aspects of Schopenhauer's philosophy and, although I passed, think I only got a C+. I couldn't understand why I'd got such a low grade. This essay was at least as good as the ones I'd written during my MA. My friend Jess, who also took the same paper, had a similar experience: I think, like me, she had been penalised for not simply regurgitation the lecturer's trite banalities. In the exam, I left after an hour because I couldn't think of anything more to say about Nietzsche. In the second semester, I did papers on French and German philosophy but dropped out, although I continued to attend lectures.
In January 2009, I again became 'unwell' and for the first time began hearing voices. Back then, my mother and I both believed that my 'illness' was temporary (which it would have been if I had been treated better by the Mental Health System) and we were still thinking in terms of a future career. My mother had heard that there was lots of jobs in IT, so I went back to AUT to study computing. In the first semester, I did a paper on Programming for which I received an A. In the second semester, I dropped out. Now, if someone were to compare my periods of wellness and illness to my academic transcript, it would be reasonable to assume that during the first half of 2009, when I was taking rispridone, I was well, and that I became ill in the second half of the year after I went off it, and this is the reason I dropped out of AUT. Incredibly, the reverse is true. I was quite psychotic during the first semester. I have experienced visual hallucinations perhaps two or three times and one of those occasions was in early 2009 – I thought my fellow students were wizards from the discworld series. On another occasion, I was in a computer lab and I thought an Asian girl had telepathically projected the thought, "You will fail" into my mind. I was allowed to discontinue rispiridone in August 2009, and was very close to sane for a month or two. It was during this period of sanity that I decided to drop out, because I had realised that I simply didn't want to go into IT.
In 2010 and 2011, I didn't study, although I was well. In 2012, I went to AUT and completed a Masters in Creative Writing. I have talked about this before, particularly in the post "Screenplays and Their Reception." It was a pointless degree; the only thing I got out of it was that I finished a draft of the film about Jess. The lecturers were uninterested. The truth is, either a person is a writer or a person isn't. I can't remember my grade (it was probably some kind of B) but I think the lecturers and examiners didn't know much about film and didn't know how to grade the film I'd written.
Last year, 2017, I went back to AUT again, this time to study a Postgraduate Diploma in Communications, a degree that can pave the way for work in advertising, journalism and PR, among other fields. My marks again weren't brilliant but, although I withdrew from a paper, I passed everything else. My best mark, an A-, was in Brand Management, ironically the subject I knew least about and for which I just regurgitated one of the set texts. The subject I knew the most about, Popular Culture, was the one for which I got the lowest mark. A number of the essays I wrote for this degree I included in this blog; I think I wanted my actual essays in the public domain so that readers could judge for themselves whether the marks I received were reflective of the quality of the essays. In fact, I suspect, without hard evidence, that the reason I received such a bad mark for the first Pop Culture essay, one I have included in the blog under the title "Genre and The Much Reported Death of the Author", is that it was so original my lecturer thought I'd plagiarised it. Later in the year, I think the department decided that I might have self-plagiarised. In fact, although I'd thought about the films I talked about a lot, such as the sequel to Trainspotting, I'd never written about them before.
If I did badly in this degree, there were a number of factors in play. I was a mature student; I had low-self esteem; I was tranquillised; I didn't put in all the required work. I missed lectures, didn't do the homework and wrote the essays a day or two before submitting them. I didn't see how I could translate this degree into any kind of real employment.
Because I'd withdrawn from a paper, I decided to complete the degree by doing a Research Paper on Narrative Theory through the University of Auckland at summer school, and I want to say something about this paper. My supervisor, Brian Boyd, is a very nice man but I am going to be a little critical of him in discussing this experience. Brian is, I think, best known for writing a book called The Origin of Stories and is the department's resident expert on narrative theory. After consideration, Brian decided to take me on as his student, based on my grades from my MA, and in our first email communication told me in effect of his dislike of pop culture texts like The Lord of the Rings. At AUT, I'd been taught by a lecturer who was a pop-culture partisan, a woman who I think looked down on high-culture fans as pretentious snobs, who had contemptuously dismissed me, without evidence, as a devotee of WH Auden; back at the University of Auckland, I was being taught by a high-culture snob who looked down on pop-culture fans and who had dismissed me as a fan of Star Wars and fantasy books likewise without knowing anything about me. The truth, in fact, is that I don't distinguish between high-culture texts and popular culture texts – I like them both. I have just finished Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler but I also enjoy Rick and Morty and Family Guy. I suspect in fact that, even though I'm not gay, I was the victim of homophobia, from both ends of the spectrum. Both high culture partisans and popular culture partisans want to see gay men as stupid, both seek to distance themselves from it – intelligence is confused with pretension by some, while others cling to their pretensions because their self-image depends upon it.
In the Humanities, fashions in philosophy come and go, and success as an academic depends upon hitching one's horse to the right theory, the currently in vogue. During my MA, I once told a lecturer that I liked Baudrillard. She put in my place by saying, "Oh, no one reads Baudrillard any more" – as if whether a person is read has any bearing on whether that person is right or not. Twenty years ago, the fashion in the Humanities was postmodernism, that strain of thought that began perhaps with Nietzsche and stretches through Derrida and Foucault, among others. Today, although there are still postmodernists around, the fashion is neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, a reaction against postmodernism in favour of science. I don't like either. Neuroscience is still far too underdeveloped to have any bearing on literary interpretation, if it ever will, and evolutionary psychology is all speculative and unfalsifiable, in the same way that Karl Popper said that Freud was unfalsifiable. Brian had hitched his horse to the evolutionary psychology bandwagon. I read a little of his book because he kindly sent me a chapter. I found it rich in reference to subjects like zoology and anthropology but unconvincing – Brian seemed to be seeking to show a continuum between animals and humans, and between story-telling and other forms of communication. At one point, he suggests that reading competence is genetic but that there are probably many genes involved (as there are many genes involved in stature) and approving cites "selfish gene theory". I think to the contrary that if I, for instance, am a highly competent reader, it isn't because of my genes but because I've read so much. And, as I've already said in this blog, I don't agree with Richard Dawkins (the architect of selfish gene theory). In fact, I believe that Dawkins, in recent years, has been disproved, as a Lamarckian view of hereditary supplants Mendelian genetics.
Brian and I approach literary interpretation from two entirely different perspectives. There is something paradoxical in both our positions. Brian is, in a sense, more 'objective', more 'scientific' than I am– but at the same time he seems to believe that there is no such thing as a correct interpretation. I am more postmodern in the sense that I believe reality is mostly composed of our beliefs about it – but at the same time I believe there is always a best interpretation of a book, film, or poem. Brian seems to regard stories as representations of more or less realistic characters in more or less realistic settings acting in more or less realistic ways, as a 'display of a state of affairs'. I see stories as having a subterranean logic, as being rhetorical arguments, instantiations of an interplay between abstract ideas. For instance, I believe There's Something About Mary dramatises an uncertainty in the public mind as to difference between 'love' and 'sexual obsession' – the humour and conflict arises from this uncertainty. Are the two perhaps the same thing? The film ends, reassuringly, by providing a criterion for the difference – true love puts the love-object's happiness first while sexual obsession doesn't. Star Wars is a rhetorical argument dedicated to the premise, "Good always triumphs over evil." Joyce's "The Dead" concerns 'vanity' – it dramatises the way Gabriel Conroy, who egotistically views himself as the centre of the universe, finds his vanity threatened and then finds a way, through self-pity, to restore his vanity. A Beautiful Mind is a rhetorical argument in favour of the idea that 'schizophrenia' is a causeless disease that can only be treated with medication. More recently, Bohemian Rhapsody presents an argument that a heterosexual man can turn homosexual – a position that has led it to be attacked from both ends of the spectrum, has offended both right-wing homophobes and many members of the LGBT community. In other words, I see stories as emerging from the culture and speaking back to it, as being rhetorical in the sense that they seek to persuade the community of the truth of some set of propositions.
Brian and I communicated a couple of times by email and I tried to give him some sense of my philosophical position. He told me that the postmodern assertion that there is no such things as objective truth is self-refuting – a sentiment I had heard before which I regard as a trite banality (it had been expressed by the Nietzsche lecturer as well). He lent me Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction. I wrote a draft in which I interpreted Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, There's Something About Mary and The Shining. I worked out my interpretation of The Shining after watching it again – my conviction was that, if my approach was valid, it should be applicable to all 'good' (i.e. popular and successful) stories, including ones I hadn't already analysed. When I sent my draft to Brian, I said that I also wanted to interpret Joyce's "The Dead" and he wrote back to say that he didn't think "The Dead" would fit with an essay "of this sort". He also said, rightly, that I hadn't done enough research and suggested Levin's "New Readings of Old Plays". Levin's work was crushing, I think deliberately so. Brian thought my approach was basically a kind of thematic reading, was pointing out that thematic interpretations were old-hat, and trying to convince me that nothing new can be said about anything. I think he possibly dislikes thematic readings on principle.
So I borrowed a couple of books from the library on narrative theory to try to get some sense of the state of the field. I discovered a discipline with no idea of its subject. The word "narrative" is defined so broadly as to be virtually meaningless. Narrative is "a report of connected events" and some have even argued that a narrative can consist of a report of a single event. I found that the theorists accepted this definition and would then move on to interpret writers like Proust and Homer, when they could just as justifiably have been discussing newspaper articles, advertisements, and anecdotes, even obituaries. I found that the theory I wished to formulate didn't fit with the concerns of modern narrative theory at all, with concepts like sujet and fabula, with problems to do with reference and verisimilitude. I abandoned my original essay entirely. Having noticed that a weakness in narrative theory is that it doesn't consider stories from the author's perspective, doesn't account for where fictions come from, I suggested to Brian that I write interpretations of two of my own stories, the films "Bruce Sells Out" and "The Hounds of Heaven" explaining the creative process behind them. If I'd pursued this plan, it would have made for a very odd essay indeed. Brian, knowing that I was interested in narrative as rhetoric, had recommended two books by modern theorists, one of them The Rhetoric of Fictionality by Richard Walsh. When I plunged into Walsh's book, I found it almost incomprehensible. But I noticed that he had used, as examples, Kafka's The Trial and an excerpt from Gaiman's The Sandman, two works I had loved as a teenager. I took this as a sign. I wrote to Brian and said that I had decided to write about Walsh instead.
I wasn't altogether well during this period. From the beginning, I felt that Brian was trying to squash me. Perhaps it is is the attitude of a well-respected, tenured professor to an upstart nobody who has pretensions to originality without being versed enough in all the scholarly literature. Perhaps the English Department knew something of my situation and he was trying to squash me deliberately. Perhaps I am just stupid. Re-reading Walsh, I made more sense of it. There were reasons I had difficulty understanding it, though. First, Walsh references a number of narrative theorists I knew little about. Second, although the book is dense, interesting, and thought provoking, it is fundamentally incoherent. Walsh defines 'fiction' differently at different times and never defines the term 'rhetoric'. Although I think most people view 'rhetoric' as a form of 'persuasive speech' (employing devices like irony, analogy, figurative language, and so on), Walsh never addresses the idea of 'persuasion' at all. Although his ostensible intent is to draw a line between fiction and non-fiction, to reintroduce fictionality as a necessary term in narrative theory (which often doesn't draw the distinction between fictional and non-fictional narratives), Walsh often seems to be suggesting that everything is fiction, that there is no distinction between dreams and reality, that narrative is a way of imposing order on chaos when everything is chaos. Walsh is postmodernism in narrative theory taken to its logical conclusion. In my essay I said that I thought Walsh was "on the lip of a precipice he couldn't bring himself to look over."
My essay was partly a summary of the book and partly an extension of the book. I raised the problem at the books heart, the problem of definitions. What do the words 'fiction', 'rhetoric' and 'narrative' actually mean? Central to Walsh's argument, is his notion of 'relevance theory' – after the essay was marked, Brian told me that he thought I had misunderstood the notion. In fact, I think Walsh's idea of 'relevance theory' is also unclear, incoherent, and in the essay I had tried to improve upon it. I discussed biopics and concluded by suggesting that to make sense of fiction, of stories, one requires a fusion of Karl Jung and Michel Foucault.
I want to say something about why I ventured to bring Foucault into an essay on narrative theory. People with a rudimentary idea of Foucault know him only as a gay philosopher or social historian who wrote about madness, the prison system, and homosexuality. In fact, what I get from Foucault is the idea that society's understanding of the world is informed by abstract concepts (like 'schizophrenia' and 'homosexuality') and that these concepts have a history. Foucault is a 'nominalist' – that is, he denies the existence of abstract objects. As I understand him, perhaps imperfectly, he argues that the concept of 'homosexuality', homosexuality itself in fact, was invented in the late nineteenth century by psychiatrists, and didn't exist before then. In the essay, I suggested that Walsh was groping towards an 'aesthetic' understanding of narrative and, although I didn't spell this out in the essay, my decision to bring aesthetics into the essay was stimulated by my thinking about Foucault. It had occurred to me that if the concept of 'homosexuality' only came into existence in 1888 or 1893, whenever it was, and didn't exist before then, perhaps there were concepts that once existed but now no longer do. After pondering this question for a little while, it occurred to me that the concept of the 'aesthetic' is a good candidate for an idea that once meant something but which disappeared sometime in the early or mid twentieth century. "Aesthetics" literally means "the study of beauty" and is completely absent from modern narrative theory and almost completely absent from the study of English literature today. One could perhaps write a whole a book about how and why 'aesthetics' as a concept vanished.
Brian gave me a B, a middle of the road grade suggesting he wasn't really sure what grade to give me. In a way, we were always too different. I think Brian relates to the characters in the fiction he loves, characters like Emma Bovary or the characters in Shakespeare, as though they are real people; I see films, TV shows, novels, and poetry as physics problems to be solved or puzzles to be deciphered, and treat all fictions, whether Moby Dick or an episode of Friends in the same way. My attitude can suck the joy out of fiction consumption among those who live vicariously through the novels they love. Ironically, however, although I am not a copious writer of fiction, I have written enough to understand fiction from the author's point of view. Many English professors don't. (This includes Walsh.)
I want to make two general observations about Universities today. Successive governments have promoted the policy that the role of tertiary institutions is to prepare people for work – this has put the squeeze on subjects like philosophy, sociology, anthropology, English lit, classics, and art history, subjects that don't clearly point people in the direction of jobs. Even during my MA, a long time ago, I felt that there were only three careers open to me – becoming an English teacher at a high school, becoming a university lecturer... or becoming a writer (a career that makes no money at all). I wish to make a plea for the benefits of these 'soft' subjects. The study of English literature teaches reading comprehension and critical thinking. Most importantly, though, it teaches empathy – a good novel takes one inside someone else's mind. The medical schools these days encourage trainee doctors, who are good at rote-learning which antibiotic to prescribe for a boil but often lack social skills, to watch The Simpsons, because research has suggested fiction consumption can improve a person's understanding of others. If watching The Simpsons can bolster a person's ability to empathise, perhaps reading Woolf and Joyce and Hemingway, would help even more.
But there is a problem in these soft subjects. How can we objectively assess the quality of an essay? During my brief stint working as a trainee teacher at Auckland Boys Grammar, I set as homework for a class of extremely bright Year 9 students the task of writing a short story. This school has the ridiculous system of placing students in classes ranging from A to M, in some years, based on their aggregated exam results. At the end of each semester, each student receives a report stating his relative position in the class for every subject and his place in the class overall. The night after I received the boys' stories, I sat for hours in the school staff-room, by myself, long after darkness had descended all around me, trying to put thirty mostly excellent and totally heterogenous short stories in order from best to worst so that I could grade them – an impossible task. If I could go back in time to those terrible days, I would have just given them all Excellences for having completed the assignment.
In this blog, I have written multiple posts about the clinical psychologist I saw weekly for about eight or nine months in 2014. At one of the last appointments, he said to me, "Are there any gay people you like?" I couldn't understand why he'd asked me this question and said, "I like Michel Foucault." I could have easily said that I liked Stephen Fry, or Graham Chapman, or Michael Stipe. But I sensed I was in a trap – there was no right answer. To say you like Michel Foucault, among many people, is seen as a sign of homosexuality (the wikipedia page on Foucault is enough to show this bigotry). To say that I didn't like any gay men at all would have made me a homophobe. And homophobia is also considered a sign of homosexuality. It's the trap I've been in for much of my life. This is yet another reason why I hated him.
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