Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001
Subject: ~~Re: Hannah's
visions
I was in an unofficial
"counselling" relationship with one particular
schizophrenic (among others) for over two years. He phoned me every
day
(sometimes many times in one day or in succession, of course, just like
a
schiz'. For a long time he didn't have a phone in his apartment and
had to use
pay phones. Invariably, he let his nickel after nickel run out to its
absolute
last drop, triggering the automated [female!] robot operator voice to
interrupt
["I'm sorry, but your time has run out" or whatever. "Please
deposit another
five cents for another X minutes"]. Speaking of "desiring
machines," it was a
curious mechanism by which he, innocently, forced the "hearing
voices"
experience on the listener.)
I'll relate a text-related
moment that occured with him, peripherally relevant
to Camille's questions about hallucinated text, etc.
I used to leave tongue-in-cheek
messages on my answering machine. At one
point, I had a message that said "T-H-I-S I-S J-E-F-F-R-E-Y"
(spelled out
letter by letter like that, jokingly) "P-L-E-A-S-E L-E-A-V-E A
M-E-S-S-A-G-E."
People who called would
usually respond similarly ("H-I! T-H-I-S I-S . . ."),
or laugh, or say something about spelling bees or the alphabet, or whatever.
My schizophrenic caller, phoning daily, had left messages for several
days
without acknowledging whatsoever my outgoing message.
Finally, after about a
week of messages, he said something about it (he was,
like many schizophrenics, highly intelligent and well-educated): "That's
a
very interesting message you left. Mysterious. You'll have to tell me
sometime if it means anything."
The surprise to me was
that he was unable to amalgamate the obvious parts,
letters of the alphabet, back into a meaningful whole, the way everyone
else,
people in fact much less clever than him had done in a flash.
He hallucinated voices
sometimes, in his case voices of people he was really
around at the time, usually when he or they stepped into the next room.
(A
schiz' friend of his hallucinated celebrities voices but, we found this
hilariously funny, they were the voices of extremely minor celebrities.
I
wish I could remember whom, but I don't know a lot about television
of popular
culture.) He would go to the bathroom and hear the people he had just
stepped
away from saying ugly things about him through the door.
What was amazing about
him was that he had the ability to double-check with
the sources of his hallucinated voices whether they had just been talking
about
him. He could reality text by going up to the person and saying, "Excuse
me,
but were you just whispering under the door that I should drop dead,"
etc.
By Weiner transcribing
her reported text hallucinations, she may have had a
unique reality-grounding technique like that, which brought what otherwise
would be lonely "pathology" into a public and interpersonal
realm that
neutralized them. . . . not that most of the transcribed text hallucinations
of
hers that I've read were especially malevolent or remarkable in themselves.
That, too, says something: the depletion in her "clairvoyant"
messages . . .
most that I've read of hers were as banal as street signs, perhaps even
moreso
. . .
I find much of what you've
written here, Camille, to be very beautiful and
eloquent, literary in and of itself, almost a new genre of mental epiphenomena
reportage, a realism of privacy:
>> it's as if the
words were rising to the surface from a place over which I
have little conscious or intentional control. More commonly, I have
the
feeling of "losing myself" while writing, in which I seem
to be allowing inner
voices, mental movements and desires (and the voices & feelings
that I have
absorbed from others) to shape the work. Sometimes, in a hypnogogic
state, I
seem to be dipping into an ongoing chatter within my subconscious mind,
as if
this chatter might be happening almost all the time, but I'm only allowed
access to it during certain twilight states. When I close my eyes at
night, I
often see a parade of images of faces that seem so particular as to
be real
individuals, but they are people I don't recognize. Where do they come
from?<<
That last touch ("Where
do they come from?") is reminiscent of the opening
quote in Chairman Mao's Little Red Book ("Ideas . . . Where
do they come from? Do they fall from overhead?" [I don't have it
verbatim])
It's very Proustian,
his bedside magic lantern, falling asleep in bed and all
that (especially, for me, now after having recently concentrated on
Susan
Howe's Bed Hangings lullaby):
>>In addition to
the "dictation" mentioned, there's the more quotidian inner
stream, the seemingly incessant chatter or parade of images and symbols
that we all experience, a kind of roiling conversation among memories,
perceptions, and other mental / bodily events. The "conversational"
feel,
or the feeling of "otherness" of such voices might be due
to the fact that the
brain is interconnected in such complex ways that ongoing neural events
of different types may appear like different voices to us -- perceiving,
explicating, commanding, commenting, evaluating, emoting, symbolizing,
visualizing ? not to mention the voices contending with each other to
place
different values on things perceived and tugging at you to behave in
different ways, the proverbial angel and devil on your shoulders.<<
I'd like to try to imitate
it some time.
I used to (or can kind
of at will re-activate it) "see" either the words that
were being said to me (in reality) or the words of my thinking, going
back very
fast in a sort of teletype closed caption monitor way. They weren't
exactly
in front of my retina and in my visual field, the way Weiner
reports hers,
but sort of like a transparency and somehow coming from "behind"
my eye, as
there was no question but that they were thought and my experience,
in no way
externalized as Weiner imagined hers.
I worked for a few years,
way back, as a dictaphone operator. My typing speed is high (over 110
w.p.m. when last test 15 years ago on an electric
typewriter), and I often found it easier to transcribe by closing my
eyes: I
would work, literally, "with my eyes shut." Although I was
already a sort of
"hyper-literate" guy to start with, I think that that prolonged
enforcement of
having to bring to mind mentally the spelling of words, very rapidly,
and then
getting faster at it, somehow "helped" to accentuate or embed
these "seen"
spellings in this way.
Also, developmentally,
I might mention:
My father worked as a sign
painter. He would often have me help him out on
Saturdays. Sometimes we'd go up and work on billboards, and so on. So,
for
one thing, I was raised in this household where down in his basement
workshop
there were letters, big plastic or wooden letters, boxes of them.
I might
either play with them when very young or, in helping him out, have to
"go and
get" a B or an H or whatever from these stacks. In proportion to
my childhood
physique, they must have been quite large, by ratio, maybe from shoulders
to
knees, some of them. --- And then with the billboards, we would be hanging
mid-air on scaffolding with letters of the alphabet three times our
size,
painting them in.
I think by growing up around
the alphabet on such a Brobdingnagian scale, it embedded the
alphabet very palpably into my psyche. Hence, "seeing" or
semi-seeing words while they're being heard comes "quite naturally,"
later
deepened by other reenforcing. (I think they used to clock typing speed
with
five [six?] characters per word, so at over 100 w.p.m., typists are
manifesting
internal thresholds of transcription, of about 500 or 600 letters/units
per
minute, language micro-pulsations of around 8+ per second. [New Math?]
. . .
about the rate of musical sixteenth notes at MM = quarter-note = 60)
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I would prefer if psychodiagnostic
terminology were phrased as verbs rather
than nouns. Rather than "a schizophrenic," to say,
"She was
'schizophrenicizing,'" the way we say "obsessing" in
place of OCD. I think it
makes it easier to understand, somewhat more relax to discuss.