Monday, August 07, 2006

Reams of Conciousness

“Change is much of the essence of life. Death is the final change. We can not hold on, even to a day; how, then, can we capture life itself? Perhaps our whole awareness of individuality, of self, is an illusion. If so, it is better not to grasp unduly at that illusion, but rather to live our lives in such a manner that when we must at last lay them down, we will not be ashamed.
Life has meaning only if we live for meaning.”


-- Piers Anthony, Author’s Note.

There are three things I worry most about losing in life. The people I love, my sight and my sanity. The first two, however, are rectifiable and controllable, to an extent. The last is something of an inexplicable oddity.

I finally finished reading On A Pale Horse today and I really really enjoyed it. The writing style was not great and the tone could be a little stilted at times, but the premise was novel, the logic interesting and there were some very exciting (sacriligeous?) ideas such as the fact that God, Death and the Devil were equal and separate in their functions and spheres.

The personification of Death made the book likeable, a Death with compassion, with a conscience as opposed to a mindless worker in a scheme of cogs and wheels. It was a little strange in parts, but then Anthony is a strange author and in part, it comes with the territory.

One of my favourite parts of the book was when Nature describes to Death the five different trains of thought that can be taken to reach a conclusion. It was not scientific by any means, but so intuitive and simple that it needed no proof. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I often took on the schizoid train of thought and went round in circles, asking never ending questions and always getting the same answers, something that is supposed to be slightly abnormal by way of logical consideration.


The other night, M and I were watching an episode of Criminal Minds. For some reason, the series appeals greatly to me, perhaps because they care enough to delve into the minds of the people committing offenses rather than proceeding on purely technical know-how. It means something to me that the psyche can be studied, if only on the most obvious, “textbook” level.

This episode was about a man with paranoid schizophrenia, subject to hallucinations and delusions of grandeur. At the height of the episode, a member of the crime team tries to talk him out of holding a carriage of people hostage by trying to understand his point of view and alluding to the fact that he knows what it is to see through different eyes. That is, to be crazy.

That spoke to me deeply.

I understood exactly what the forensic expert was trying to say in some oblique manner, I felt like I knew what he meant when he spoke about the voices in the head that would not stop talking, the way the patient could see things from odd angles that added up together to provide a kind of universal puzzle that was complicated past understanding. In some ways, he was talking about me.

Do I hear literal voices? No.

Do I believe that the government is planning to implant a microchip so they can control my every move? Highly improbable.

Am I paranoid and sensitive to the fact that people around me have the potential to affect my life in unpropitious ways? Yes. And schizoid thinking is just a small facet of that. There are other parts of me that worry excessively about things that do not exist and a constant dialogue in my mind that won’t let me rest for all the questions and second-guessing.

And while I am sane at this point, (clinically sane as M will say), I look at pictures of schizophrenic people standing fully clothed in the shower, dazed and catatonic on random street corners, and I glimpse myself in them. I glimpse that rambling disconnection of thoughts, the echolalia, the complete and total loss of control.

And it worries me that one day, I will cease to separate fact from fiction. That the weird and sometimes abnormal scenarios that I concoct in my head will become real to me.

That scene in A Beautiful Mind where John Nash plasters his walls in a demented attempt to gain coherence? I get it.


It would be a terrible thing to be mad. A part of me embraces this insanity –when I watched Das Kabinet Des Dr. Caligari with its gnarled sets, crazed, frightened, directionless characters and acid soundtrack, I wanted to climb into that world and live there, mad and formless as all the rest of them. But, god, can you see it? A life with no anchor of reality? Not knowing whether you truly have any friends or people who will hold fort for you, losing all the things that once meant something to you for an illusion created by your mind? Not being able to trust anything or anyone?

A worse kind of purgatory than even God could make.

I have a kind of grasp on life.
But a mind is only as good as the person who owns it. And sometimes, the only thing keeping me from losing it is the fact that I know where the lines lie between behaviour that is socially acceptable and behaviour that will land me in an asylum. I see hints of schizophrenic and bi-polar traits in myself all the time. Where does it stop being a coping function to everyday life and become harmful to its host?

Supposing one day my rationale failed me altogether?

Could anybody stand by a truly crazy person?


I do not fear losing my mind because I am simply fearful.

I fear losing my mind because it is a very real thing for me.

Because sometimes I truly believe I am closer to the edge than most. Because I worry that one day, that dialogue in my head will become voices with different, dangerous personas. People from all walks of life become afflicted at a multitude of ages. I would just be another one of many.

Right now, I am grateful to be able to crystallise and vocalise my thoughts and have a grasp on a world that is real and that stands the right way up. I’m not saying that I’ll ever be crazy, naturally that probablity should be maintained at a minimum. But I want to be more understanding of the people who cannot comprehend this world anymore. To stop pretending that I do not know what it is to be off-kilter.

To acknowledge that it is a possibility that lies in me.

And to be empathetic rather than to shun.

Because in some madness, there really is no method.

4 Comments:

Blogger e.x.o.d.u.s said...

sometimes, i worry abt my sanity too, especially when i start thinking too much about things that inherently have no answers. But don't worry!!!!!! I will take a bat and hit you back into your senses if you lose them one day!! hahahaha

8:49 pm  
Blogger Girl said...

Hahaha! Thanks babe! That's some serious encouragement! I hope you don't literally mean you will hit me, but it's good to know you got my back... heh... and that I'm not the only one who's going a bit mad sometimes!

10:57 pm  
Blogger Uryale said...

I thought it was natural to "hear" voices? I have two "characters" in my head.. one of it is cynical... very bitter.. almost bitch-like.. nasty sometimes..
the other is very impulse driven.. a little demanding and carefree..
two completely different "characters"..
I've always thought that it was some sort of conscience or some sort of voice which stems from our insecurities or deep core issues that we have...

I don't know. Maybe all of us are mad.. just that few realise it.

Or maybe it's the people whom we love and who loves us that keeps us sane.

8:14 pm  
Blogger Girl said...

That's absolutely true that we all have different voices in us and different "characters"... and perhaps it's an important coping mechanism that everyone has to have, maybe because one can't be the same person all the time.

I'm just wondering, what happens when the mechanism goes into overdrive and the "voices" become VOICES which we can't tell apart from reality anymore? Can we still be brought back into sanity then?

11:51 pm  

Post a Comment

<< Home