persiflage

It is a little known fact that therapy sessions between psychologists and clients are routinely recorded and transcribed by the SIS, the CIA and MI5, although the clients themselves work this out pretty quickly.

Fortuitously I have access to the tapes. Recently I came across a conversation between a psychologist and Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit (an identikit picture is included below). I include it here for posterity’s sake.

Lichtenstein: So Mr Duck-Rabbit, I understand you’ve got problems …

Duck-Rabbit: Problems, he says! Have I got problems? I’ve got problems. I don’t know whether I’m a duck or a rabbit.

L: So how does that make you feel?

D-R: How does that make me feel, he asks! How do you think that makes me feel? Like a schmuck is how it makes me feel.

L: Go on.

D-R: I get pretty depressed at times. Nobody understands me.

L: We diagnosed you with dissociative personality disorder-

D-R: Dissociative personality disorder! What it is  is a lifelong existential crisis. I have duck days and rabbit days. I keep a journal and when I’m having a duck day I just write down “D” and if it’s a rabbit day I write down “R”. What’s worst is when I experience a– what’s the word? Paradigm shift., and switch between them.

L: And what does that feel like?

D-R: I can’t even bear to look at myself in the mirror… It gives me a terrible headache. But what’s the point of trying to explain? There’s no way you can understand what it’s like.

L: I think you’re being unduly pessimistic. The point of these sessions is that I try to understand you so that I can give you advice.

D-R: There’s no point at all. Let me explain … you know that you’re a human being but do you ever experience that you’re a human being? Presumably you have a sensation of being human but because that sensation is pretty much continuous you never recognise it. Can’t see the wood for the trees, so to speak. but I can recognise ‘duck days’ and ‘rabbit days’ because I distinguish between the two sensations.

L: So what it is it like when you’re  a duck?

D-R: I want to paddle in the river and eat algae.

L: Oh yes?

D-R: And I suffer terrible migration anxiety in the autumn. But I should really explain how I got this way. It all started in the fifties…

L: Go on…

D-R: It all started in Cambridge in the ‘forties. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore… I’d fallen in with a bad crowd. We used to go out after class and throw cuts of beef shoulder at the undergrads.

L: Go on…           

D-R: I was in the room when Wittgenstein brandished a poker at Karl Popper. But I’m explaining… Wittgenstein wrote a book called Philosophical Investigations and put a picture of me in it.

L: Oh yes, I’ve heard of the book…

D-R: But that’s not what got my gander. He put this argument into his book saying that there’s no such thing as a private language. He said that it would be impossible to do what I do – keep an account of one’s own personal, subjective experiences in anything like an objective language.

L: Why not?

D-R: Well, get this … because the person keeping the diary would not be infallibly certain that he had not misremembered his experience! Or had successfully defined it in the first place; there’s some confusion here…

L: I can see why that might vex you…

D-R: Well yes! Because the argument, if correct, applies to public speech as well, in the sense that in act of speaking any word requires an act of recollection to ensure that you’re using it correctly. Alternatively, you could argue that my diary is a social activity because I’m communicating with earlier, and later, versions of myself. The duck in me speaking to the rabbit and vice versa.

L: He said something about a beetle in a box as well…

D-R: Oh yes, but I get confused enough without bringing beetles into the picture. Anyway, enough of my kvetching. How are you?

****

I notice having that, in the previous dialogue, I have made the duck-rabbit speak a little like Woody Allen. This is easy enough to do. Why don’t you give it a try writing like Woody Allen? There you go. That was easy, wasn’t it?

I was thinking today of what I could do with this blog. One idea I had was to turn this it into a kind of poetry journal, reviewing contemporary New Zealand verse. Such journals already exist of course, but in some alternate reality that I never visit. This goes to show how far under the radar these journals are.

 Once upon a time, in this country, we did have a high-profile weekly magazine that used its clout to support local poets and, even occasionally, short story writers. I speak of The Listener of course, It seems that magazine now devotes its pages, every second week it seems, to the burning literary issue of whether the time is right for its readers to take out a second mortgage on their house.

In moving to the right and diminishing its commitment to the arts, I believe The Listener has seriously misjudged its readership. The weekly poem was, for many people I am sure, the first page to which they would turn. I even had a poem published there once, a number of years ago now, which goes to show that The Listener was willing to back even unknown writers. I may just incorporate that poem into a later posting.  

Several months ago, I submitted another couple of poems to the same magazine. In the interests of complete avowal, I shall describe the process. Having a note directing me to a certain address in an anonymous part of the city, I arrived to find a door and, by the side of the door, a door-keeper. “Does this door provide access to The Listener?” I asked. “Indeed it does,” he replied. “May I pass through?” I enquired. “Not yet.” So, suitably humbled, I took a seat and began waiting.

To pass the time. I enquired what The Listener offices were like.

He replied, “That I cannot tell ye. For behind this door lies another door and another doorkeeper, and behind that door another, and so on, each more terrible then the last, until one finally reaches the reception. Even the third doorkeeper is, however, too terrible for me to gaze upon.”

“Is there anyway I can, like, speed up the process?” I enquired (inquisitively).

“None,” he responded (responsively). “You may if you wish pawn all your possessions to bribe me; I shall take them but only to show that you have left nothing undone.”

Eventually I reached the point where I was considering imploring the nits in his beard to grant me access. (In aspect the doorkeeper resembled one of those hirsute, restless, tenured souls that haunt the faculty rooms of university campuses.) Eventually though I just got bored and left him to it…

At least, this is what happened in one universe. In another, closer universe, I forgot to enclose a self-addressed envelope and so never received the rejection letter.

I notice that I have become totally side-tracked from my initial subject matter. I was going to name-drop some contemporary poets and discuss aesthetics. Ah, well, it’ll give me something to talk about tomorrow.

***

I notice that I failed to publish my previous post. I shall publish it now – you should remember however (if it makes a difference) that A Dialogue with Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit was written first. I also apologize for being unable to include a picture of the duck-rabbit – images of it can be found easily on the Internet.

I saw the Auckland Philharmonic last night and it gave me an idea for a story, possibly even a novel. We have a character whose life-long wish is to perform as part of a professional orchestra. The problem is that the only instrument he plays is the triangle. By some fluke of chance, one day the National Orchestra requires his services: a symphony by Beethoven with a small but integral role for a triangulist. By good fortune our hero is given this role.

Conscientiously, he attends all rehearsals and eventually comes to grip with the part. The night before the performance he sleeps poorly; nerves and bad-digestion keep him awake. And then the day arrives. The audience files into the hall, and then the orchestra take their places on the stage. The Symphony begins. Our hero sits at the back, trying his best to stay awake and vigilant but the gentle strains of string, wind and brass lull him into a kind of stupor so that when the decisive moment comes, towards the end of the third movement, he misses the cue completely. The orchestra pauses; the conductor casts a furious glare in his direction, then carries on. Our protagonist has botched it! The audience knows that something is missing but they cannot tell what.

On his way home the protagonist throws himself from a bridge. At that moment, an endless stream of humanity is passing by.

***

 On a completely unrelated topic … How about that Joe Biden? His apparently off-the-cuff comment to Barack Obama, about health-care reform, that “This is a big f**king deal” couldn’t be improved upon if they had tried. How better to underline the fact, in passing the health-care bill, the Obama Administration is living up to its promise of Change? This is the sound-bite that people will remember when they think of the bill. It makes you wonder if Biden’s remark was premeditated. Perhaps Obama is Mr. Serious and Biden is the clown who gets the administration’s message across?

 ***

The New Zealand film Boy, directed by and starring       First off, let me say that it is a fantastic film, certainly the best movie I have seen recently (the last two were La France and Alice in Wonderland). But that does not stop one from imagining how it might be improved.

Boy is about an eleven year old Maori kid growing up in a West Coast town who idealises his absent father. When the father, Alamein, comes home the boy must come to terms with the fact that his father is not all that he is cracked up to be.

At least this is one way you could pitch the film. Alternatively, you could argue that the central character is the father and the film is about him accepting responsibility for his own life and the lives of his children. A tenet of professional storytelling is that every major character should have a character arc, learning something or developing in some way. Alamein’s character arc is really Boy’s central narrative, but the finished film fails to dramatise this properly.

So how could we change the film to make this stand out? Alamein’s real reason for returning home is to collect the stolen loot that he has buried in one of the paddocks. A snatch of dialogue could have been included where Alamein tells his mates that they are going to “blow this one-horse-town” as soon as they find the money. Boy could desperately want his father to stay, but Alamein fobs him off with empty promises. The ending of the film (which is great as it is) would then have been a more satisfying resolution of conflict, the conflict between Alemain and Boy, and the conflict within Alamein himself.

 

I attended a Hearing Voices workshop yesterday. Not as a therapist but as a client – ‘client’ being the operative term used to describe those receiving psychiatric treatment in New Zealand. The Hearing Voices Network is a network of support groups for people who experience ‘auditory hallucinations’, and is an approach to mental health care only recently experimented with in New Zealand.

Voice Hearing is the label for the experience of thoughts occurring that seemingly cannot have originated in the ego; they feel as though they have been received from outside the Self. In psychiatric practice, Voice Hearing is considered a symptom of major mental illness, such as psychosis or full-blown schizophrenia, and the Psychiatrists attempt to medicate it away with tranquillisers such as Respiridone and Olanzapine (both of which I’ve been on). However, between 4 and 10% of the population ‘hear voices’ apparently – of whom less than a quarter end up in the aegis of the mental health services. This suggests that it is about time that Voice Hearing be re-evaluated.

Of course, in talking about this I’ve implicitly admitted that I hear (or at least have heard) disembodied voices. My voices are unusual because they all belong to real, living people. Apparently, people who hear voices can vividly remember their first experience, so I thought I would describe mine.

 I was in the bath thinking about the Theory of Relativity… I should say that in the preceding months I had found maths a good way of distracting myself from persistent feelings of anxiety and paranoia. I’d set out to write a derivation of the E=MC² , succeeded and then forgotten it. I was lying in the bath, trying to re-prove from the beginning and having trouble when a voice suddenly intruded and said (in a distinctive Texan drawl) “DO YOU WANT GEORGE W.BUSH TO HELP YOU?”. Naturally, I was a bit startled.

 I asked him, “Do you believe in God?” (I was toying with theism at the time). “Mitochlorians,” he replied. Later, like any good liberal, I asked him for the real reasons for the war in Iraq, hoping he’d spill something about Halliburton or something but only elicited some balderdash about the Clash of Civilisations.

 I hardly hear any voices now (at the present, I should say). However one did pop up yesterday to say that I should really have named the blog “The deranged ramblings of a crazed psychotic”. I dunno. It’d make a better title than “Persiflage”.

See Blog. See Blog run. Run, Blog, run!

Yesterday I had a dream, or a vision, in which I saw my name written on a gravestone. The vision’s message was immediately obvious: unless you’re careful, an epitaph with your name on it will be all  you leave after you when you die. The pathos I this overwhelmed me. I had been thinking of starting a blog but this would be the stimulus to actually getting underway on my first entry.

Mental note to self: write out postings on Word before pasting into blog. Rather than editing online.

Presumably there are people out there who keep an eye on start-up blogs, so this is addressed to you,  O intrepid soul, gold-panner of the digital Clutha, the one who has stumbled upon my first entry. Do you want me to tell you about myself, so you’ll know whether to read later postings? Or should I give you an idea of what this blog will be about? Unfortunately I’m not sure myself. I’ve titled it ‘persiflage’ mainly because I like words that are almost but not entirely obscure – ‘persiflage’ connotes something facetious and throwaway, which is what I want this blog to be. About anything and everything, eventually. At the moment I’m just finding my feet (they’re under the desk).

Anyway – tune in tomorrow. I’ll have something to say then.