a Time Machine

I am on the #2 uptown subway, the express line that goes directly from Times Square to 72nd Street and then on to 96th. Hurtling through time and space, faster and faster. Suddenly everything goes black.

The train comes to a dead halt in the middle of the tunnel. I sit there waiting in the darkness with the other passengers. And then I hear the conductor, speaking over the intercom: “This is the Collective Express.” [crackle, crackle] “There will be a short delay…..”

And then, I hear another voice: “I am now going to tell the story of the creation of the Universe.” Really?

It was a moment before I realized that the voice was my own and that I was sitting there speaking out loud to the other passengers, as though it was a perfectly normal thing to do. I could say I was on acid, but that would be a lie. I could say it was a dream, and that the dream was telling me to create a story that would make sense of everything. Isn’t that what stories are for? But it wasn’t a dream. It was more like a vision.

And then I blacked out. And off I went. When I came to, I got off the train and found myself where I’d begun, on the uptown platform of the #2 express line, at Times Square. How I got there, I’ll never know.

It was freezing. I was in a daze. I walked up the stairs, crossed over to the other side and got onto the downtown local, heading for the Village and home. But I got off again a few stops later, at 19th Street, and found a phone booth — yes, they still had phone booths all over New York way back in 1977. By then, it was almost midnight, but I dialed anyway. Just to hear her voice. She answered. “How are you?”

I hadn’t seen her for 9 years. Until a few nights ago. I was an editor at a documentary company that had just been hired by the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts to record Meredith Monk’s theater “opera,” Quarry, which even back then was considered a seminal work in the history of 20th-century theater. And since I was the one who would be putting it together in the editing room, for posterity, my boss told me to go and see it for myself. So off I went.

And there she was, center stage, right in front of me, just like I’d last seen her, before she closed the door and left me standing in the dark.

Her voice rang out through the theater. “R E A L L Y?” That’s what she said. Really.

A few years later, around 1983, I tried to make my subway vision a reality. I bought a computer, a DEC Rainbow, for $3k. I sat there wondering what I could do with it, other than keep the books for my own little film company on a “spreadsheet.” The computer had a “memory” — 128 kilobytes of Random Access Memory, so you could access data instantly, non-sequentially, no matter its actual location, just like in your mind — and a hard drive with a whopping 5 megabytes! of storage memory. What could all of that memory be used for?

To remember, of course! Not just what had happened to me on my train ride, but to everyone, everywhere. What if you could take people on a trip through Time, on a kind of collective express, and tell a Creation Story? So that people would understand where we came from, and how we all got here, and where it was all going.

It would be a kind of “adventure game,” a journey from a first-person perspective, where you had to decide where to go next, the future always somewhere up ahead. The first of its genre appeared in 1975 on a computer at Stamford that shared a link with a handful of other university mainframes — computers SO big that each had its own room — on ARPANET, the first network in cyberspace. In fact, it was cyberspace. The game was called Colossal Cave Adventure, based on a map of the Monmouth cave system in Kentucky. But all it had was a description. “YOU ARE INSIDE… A WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE SPRING. THERE ARE SOME KEYS ON THE GROUND. A SHINY BRASS LAMP IS NEARBY…”

It was dark down there. You had to use your imagination, as you went from one place to another.

Back then there wasn’t any way to show drawings or maps on a computer screen. Even text was new and only in UPPERCASE. Before that, there were only squiggles on a cathode ray tube and before that you had to punch holes in a card with a special typewriter and to see what you’d “written,” you had to monitor a panel with dozens of light bulbs — which is why computer displays were once called “monitors.”

The idea for punch cards? Well, that came from IBM, which got it from a guy who used them to record the 1890 census. And that idea went all the back to 1801 when M. Jacquard tied a bunch of them together in a sequence to control the patterns his loom created on cloth. And that idea went back to 1725 when it occurred to another Frenchman that it might be possible to automate the tedious process of raising and lowering a single warp thread on a loom depending on whether or not a paper tape had a hole in it. [O or 1]

Before then, weavers had to remember the pattern, and raise and lower the warp over and under the weft by hand. The more complex the pattern, the harder it was to remember what came next. Just as in the ancient Art of Memory, invented by the Greeks before orators wrote their speeches down — the more complex your argument, the easier it was to lose the thread, so to speak. Like in a Labyrinth. [hang on, the trip is almost over]

There had to be some way to connect one Idea to the next, so that when you came to the end of one idea, the next would be recalled spontaneously, without conscious effort. That’s when someone discovered that you could recall your thoughts much more easily if you imagined yourself moving through a physical space, like a palace with many rooms (or a cave with many caverns). Each time you came to a new thought, you linked it to a picture of an object in a new room. The more striking the image the better, like a blue bull or a god standing on his head. Then all you had to do was retrace your steps through the palace, and each picture would re-mind you of the Idea to which it was linked. One link would lead to another, in a chain of visual metaphors. [breathe]

With the gradual adoption of the written word, the art of constructing Memory Palaces fell into disuse and was all but forgotten, surviving only in a few Greek and Roman texts about rhetoric (and in the locution, “in the first place,” etc.) But when these finally became widely available again with the advent of printing late in the fifteenth century, it wasn’t just an argument that needed reconstruction, it was an entire world of knowledge and experience, lost for over a millennium. [relax, you’re almost there, at the end of the ride]

The Art of Memory underwent a radical transformation. The Memory Palace became a theater in which to re-enact the past, to recover not only ancient texts, but their hidden order and meaning. Memory Theaters were erected — some were actual physical structures — containing a set of symbolic images (archangels, signs of the Zodiac, mythological heroes) and writings drawn from Greek and Hebrew sources (Aristotle, Plotinus, the Kabbalah), all carefully selected to induce in the spectator a state of Enlightenment.

But spectator is perhaps a misnomer, for the visitor to a Memory Theater was really its star, its sole performer. Standing at center stage, with the emblems and texts arranged in a tiered semi-circle, each visitor ‘performed’ an act of contemplation, the order of the images and words reflecting the order of the cosmos, which, in turn, reflected the order of the perfected human spirit. A spiritual reawakening. A Renaissance. Ta-da!

Just like the book I am writing. Another Memory Theater.

I’d already acquired some experience constructing a universe on the floor of my bedroom so as to locate myself within its space. Now I wanted to see if it was possible to make a model for everyone, to locate us all in time, to renew a link with the great urban civilizations of the past, just as all those humanists of the Renaissance had attempted to do.

I played around with several ideas. Perhaps a big clock? Then I tried a Shakespearean model, a Globe Memory Theater in the round, a series of concentric circles, beginning with a Neolithic village, and spreading outward, like ripples in a pond, or planets in a solar system, with Athens (430 BC) and Rome (AD 110) or a medieval city (Bruges about 1200) arranged in a widening arc. But I soon abandoned this in favor of my original vision, a subway line, with express stops arranged vertically, my Neolithic Village at the bottom and the Global Village of 2025 at the top, extending further into an unknown future.

Click on an urban button and you’re given a choice of eight locations to explore — a visit to the Count of Flanders’ castle in Bruges, a chance to be part of a pageant put on by the various town guilds, a trip to the bathhouse or a Capuchin monastery — each location in every city loosely representing a common theme: Commerce, Power, Public Spectacle, Social Interaction, Knowledge, Faith, Domestic Life, Exclusion. A shared vision of communal space at a moment in time, stacked one on top of each other, an evolving space/time.

Click on the Up or Down buttons at the lower left and you can move forward or backward between two urban centers, making local stops at significant events or cultural trends — the rise of the Hopewell Indian cultures in America (AD 150); the development of the Noh play in Japan (1375); the invention of double-entry bookkeeping in Italy (1390); the first minute hands on watches (1671); the goose-step is introduced in Prussia (1698); price tags appear in Western Europe (1700); canned food is invented (1810); the appearance of paperback novels in England (1850); the first state law to make wife-beating a crime (1890); the theory of continental drift (1912); Disneyland opens (1955); the first artificial brain transplant? (2250) — about 2000 in all, each represented by a slide. You could even add your own. “My grandfather arrives in America (1905)”.

Hold one of the arrow buttons down, instead of just clicking, and off you go, as though you’d stepped on the gas, the slides zooming past the window like a flip book or a time-lapse movie, images of clothing and buildings and inventions and wars flying by, faster and faster, all evolving or devolving, cycling back and forth as though you were at the controls of a Time Machine, like the driver of the Victorian contraption in the 1895 novel by H. G. Wells, itself one of the events.

The goal: to allow you to weave your own path through Time — unmediated by second-hand texts that impose some rigid interpretative schema or wall everything off into separate disciplinary categories — so the inter-relationships and larger connections can be experienced directly, a fresh take.

In order to create a prototype of my Memory Theater, I spent a year teaching myself Turbo Pascal, one of the first programming languages for personal computers (by now long extinct), and after another 2 years, I rented a car and lugged my Rainbow (now extinct) down to Washington to give a demo to a panel at the “Division of Exemplary Projects” (extinct) of the National Endowment for the Humanities. I was given $60k, most of which went to pay for another panel — distinguished professors (almost all extinct) to supervise the creation of “appropriate” content. Two years after that, another grant came from FIPSE — the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, a division of the U.S. Dept. of Education (soon to be extinct).

Alas, all to no avail. As fast as I ran to make METROPOLIS into a usable program that would fit on a set of CD-ROM discs, everything else ran faster still. While I and my panel plotted the course of Civilization, as though we were outside time, the WorldWideWeb overtook CD-ROMs and METROPOLIS and the past, leaving it all behind in a cloud of dust.

Faster and faster, hurtling through time and space. This is the Collective Express.

from my book, ‘PLAY’

Some people on the ward were real psychos, and I don’t mean the patients. Psych wards attract them, the way police departments attract the best criminal minds. (If you want a good description of the phenom, try Jean Genet’s classic, The Thief’s Journal.)

Mine was Dr. P******* R******* – I wish I could give her full name, because people like her shouldn’t be allowed to practice. Anywhere. She was the head psychiatrist of the unit. She took all the “difficult” cases, the ones with lots of attitude, like those who didn’t want to take their meds. She was what you’d call a… “bronco-buster,” though for some reason, she spared the ladies and only went after the men.

It didn’t matter what you said, she’d just look back at you serenely, seeming to offer her sympathy, but with this big fake grin plastered across her face, a grotesque rictus she either couldn’t control or didn’t bother to.

Like Sri Chinmoy.

Ever hear of him? He was a Hindu spiritual teacher who advocated “selfless service” as the path to inner and outer peace. Instead of lectures, he’d give concerts of recorded “music-to-meditate-by,” usually with lots of flutes. And just sat there on stage, and smiled. Just like my doc. But it wasn’t funny to me at the time. It was the grin of a sadist.

She decided to put me on Lamictal. An anti-convulsant used in the treatment of epilepsy, but also prescribed for members of the Club.

Did I agree?

Yes, I agreed. What choice did I have? Ask if you can refuse and they’ll tell you “Of course. We don’t force people to do anything. If you don’t want to take the medication, just refuse.” What they don’t tell you is that refusing treatment means you DON’T get released. You’ll have to file a complaint with the Mental Hygiene Legal Service advocate, the nice lady who makes the rounds of the ward twice a week, and ask for a hearing before a judge. The average time for a hearing to be scheduled? Two to three weeks. Refuse meds and you’ll be released in about a month, if you’re lucky. Take them and you’ll be out in less than 2 weeks.

But if you’re really wacko, like many street people who wind up as regulars, you’ll be back on the street in 2 or 3 days, because you have NO insurance. Or because the staff is convinced they are only pretending to be insane, in exchange for a bed and 3 square a day, while the rest of us are pretending to be sane so we’ll be let out.

The higher up the chain of command, the more adversarial the relationship. The less authority, the more compassion and decency. A general rule of thumb in all prison systems. (Or maybe any system.)

So of course I took the meds. You’d be crazy not to. But just two days into my new drug regimen, I broke out into a rash on my wrists. My tongue swelled, my neck began to have spasms. I went to the nurse’s station and showed them the rash. They gave me Benadryl to counter the adverse reaction. About a half-hour later the rash began to disappear, the muscle spasms stopped. I was relieved.

I’d been sweating, so I thought I’d take a shower. But as soon as I turn the water on, I become dizzy. So dizzy I can’t stand. So dizzy I can’t get out of the shower. So I sit there and just wait. After about 10 minutes, I’m able to crawl my way out of the bathroom.

Here are some of the side-effects of Lamictal, which I looked up after my release (they won’t tell you beforehand, as they think you’ll use it to get out of taking the pills): fever, swollen glands, body aches, flu symptoms, headache, neck stiffness, increased sensitivity to light; easy bruising or bleeding, severe tingling, numbness, muscle weakness; upper stomach pain, loss of appetite, dark urine, jaundice; chest pain, irregular heart rhythm, shortness of breath; confusion, dizziness, nausea and vomiting, swelling, rapid weight gain, urinating less than usual (or not at all); pale skin, rapid heart rate, difficulty concentrating.

What I reported wasn’t on the list, except the extreme dizziness, because those are just the classic symptoms of a severe allergic reaction to any drug.

The next day, I tell my doc what happened. When I get to the part about how I couldn’t get out of the shower because of the dizziness, she refuses to believe me. “Did anyone… see you in the shower?” “See me? Who would see me? The shower’s the only private place in this whole fucking hospital!”

She smiled. “I’d like you to go back on Lamictal, at a higher dose.”

Of course I said no. She picked up her pad, and wrote it on my chart, repeating the words slowly, out loud, “Patient…. refuses…. medication.” And then she looked up at me, and smiled.

The very next day, I confide in B., the male nurse who did my daily 6 am weigh-in/blood pressure checkup. I trusted B. There are people you meet and just know they’re ok. I tell him I think my doc is trying to screw me over. He asks me who that was. When I answer, he just nods. But after recording my numbers, he leans and whispers in my ear, “R*******-CHOP!” I look at B. “Did you say… Karate Chop?” “No, I didn’t say that.”

He smiled and walked out of the room.

That made all the difference to me. I knew I couldn’t repeat it to anyone on the staff. B. would just deny it. Nothing a patient says is ever taken seriously. We’re nuts. We make stuff up all the time. But he knew, and I knew that he knew. He’d seen (or heard) it all before – perhaps R*******-CHOP was even the staff’s nickname for her… I relaxed, and proceeded to plot my escape. I went to Dr. Chinmoy and abased myself.

I begged her not to make me take any more Lamictal. I’d take anything else she ordered. I’d do whatever she asked. Pleeeze! Again that nasty grimace, laced with venom and satisfaction. Another notch on her gun.

The next day she put me on a monotherapy of Abilify (5 mg, take one tablet q.d. by mouth), which would cost about $10,000 a year, but only half as much if I got Medicare Part D. I thanked her profusely.

That was almost two years ago. After 11 days, they finally let me go, a tiny Jonah, spat out by the Leviathan, cast adrift on the shore, like so many hundreds of other little Jonahs and Joans released each day from penal servitude to Big Pharma. Whether volunteers or forced conscripts, we must all now row our own boat. But at least, we managed to get out. We’re the lucky ones. Thousands of others will be in the system until they die.

The first thing I did was write a check to a local realtor, a down payment on a house in the woods my friend had asked me to take a look at about a month earlier. The moment I walked in the door, I knew it was for me. So I bought it as soon as they let me out, and told my friend I needed somewhere to stay for a few months, and if she really wanted the house for herself, she could reimburse me for the cost and I would find somewhere else.

So now I am typing this on a keyboard in the office of that house. And KiKi is asleep next to me on the couch.

It is the first time I have owned a home. On my own, at last.

Meds? I won’t touch the stuff unless forced. I don’t even take aspirin. Just a Tbs of fish oil a day keeps those nasty doctors away. That and Tibetan Buddhist sitting practice, a little Reiki, some tai chi, and KiKi, who only looks like a dog, but is really a Medicine Buddha. (In fact, most of these appear on my “Safety Plan” – everyone must fill one out and have it witnessed by a staff member as a condition of release – listing “things you will do if your coping resources do not work.”)

Most important of all, I try to get a full 8 hrs. of zzzz’s and stick to a strict schedule of mealtimes – like Rinpoche always said, “90% of life is sheduling.”

I’ve managed to go med-less 872 months out of 873. Chances are I’ll make it to the exit ramp without having to do any more. But don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those anti-pharmaceutical zealots. I’ve been fortunate. Some people are so far to the right on the BP spectrum that without meds, they’d be dead.

Take lithium, for example. Or maybe don’t. Go online and check out the responses from people who’ve done lithium for more than six months. Half will tell you it’s been a life-saver. But a third say it’s the worst thing they ever did, and wish they’d never heard of lithium. The side-effects can be lethal. The remaining one-sixth can’t make up their minds if the hell they’ve gone through was worth it.

All the so-called “anti-psychotics” are like that – the longer you’re on them, the harder it is to get off them, and the more lasting the side-effects. They shorten your lifespan and your chances for a full recovery. So to my mind, unless it’s a matter of life or death, don’t. But sometimes it is. And who am I to judge?

I’d been married for 22 years, and that was after a 9-year engagement. Which was after two previous, albeit much briefer, tries, going all the way back to 1968, both of which ended in divorce, though not in the legal sense, unlike this one.

Back in 1968, my wife had simply had enough. And married someone else. But after he died in a car accident, she came back. Was it Love? Karma? Perhaps mutual chemical attraction might be a better way to describe it, though I don’t really know how that works. Or if, in the long run, it does. But if you’re a moth, maybe you don’t have a choice.

Suffice it to say we are both better off in our own separate places. To be perfectly honest, I don’t see how anyone could live in the same space with someone like me.

But I am here. And life is good. And I am free.

CODA: NEMESIS

It’s January, 2018, my 900th month, and a letter has arrived from my local hospital letting me know my GP is leaving and I’ll need to find someone to replace him. So I go online to look through the listings and up pops a familiar name: Dr. P******* R******** — the head shrink on the psych ward in Cooperstown, my witch doctor. Could she still be there, drugging her victims, like Circe, and turning them into swine?

So I google her. And at the very top of the search results is a scathing 23-page legal decision. Back in 2005, it seems she was having a fling with her married boss (10+ yrs. her senior) at ********** Med. College and when he told his wife and dumped her, she accused the swine of rape and posted it on the university website, then sued him. He counter-sued for defamation and was awarded $3 million, including punitive damages. Later, the award was reduced to only $520k.

Doctor R. moved to another university, but after she published a research paper, he pursued her like a Fury. So she fled north, and somehow wangled a position as head of our psych ward, though her clinical experience with psychiatric patients appears to consist mostly of using them as… guinea pigs – administering drugs (e.g. meth) and measuring their dopamine levels, etc. then publishing the results in academic journals. I counted 20, including the only one she authored herself, in 2010, about male rape survivors and their “lost sense of manliness” – her special area of expertise.

Apparently her ex-lover was still trying to get his money while I was under her care. A month or so after I was released, she suddenly left town.

Gone. Disappeared. The hospital says her listing in their network is “out of date” – no one even ‘remembers’ who she was. She has listings at several other rural hospitals in New York, but no record of her in their directories either. It’s as if she never existed. Like I made her up. Isn’t that what crazy people do?

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from my book, ‘PLAY’

Therapy? Psycho-therapy, of course, is out of the question. The Holy Grail is “monotherapy” – a once or twice a day dose of a single medication that will adequately “treat” your “condition” without having to resort to an increasingly lethal combination of psychotropic substances that may boost the effectiveness of the first, or counter some of its more insidious side-effects, only to add even more serious ones to the mix.

In most “cases” it never gets that far, as it almost always takes at least a few months to figure out a proper “regimen” – meaning the awful effects of the drugs are somewhat less awful than the symptoms they attempt to suppress – and usually you only get to stay a couple of weeks in the Hotel Bassett. So it’s a stab in the dark, a best guess – say, Lamictal or Depakote, or Lithium – and you’re out on your own, and supposed to work out the rest with professional Help, preferably from your local licensed “nurse practitioner.” If you’re a repeat offender, then they’ll put you on a second or even third “trial” of monotherapy. Three strikes, however, and you’re considered more or less “chronic” (i.e. hopeless) and from then on, the door simply revolves.

At least that is what I’ve learned from talking to fellow inmates, as my own personal experience is somewhat limited, my sentences (unlike these) being short and infrequent, my symptoms relatively benign (e.g. hypo-mania) and given my hypersensitivity to drugs of any kind, which makes any regimen impractical, though whether this fact is in fact a fact remains a bone of contention between myself and the medical establishment.

Likewise my “diagnosis” – Bipolar NOS (Not Otherwise Specified) being the most recent, with possible “schizo-affective tendencies” thrown in for good measure, but what any of this is based on I have no idea, as no one ever paid the slightest attention to what was going on inside my head – all that mattered was whether I was behaving myself. Perhaps it didn’t matter to them to be any more specific, though it seems I’m unfit for any of the three or four standard categories listed in the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the official psychiatric Bible).

But no doubt about it, I am definitely somewhere in the ballpark. Perhaps camping out in left field, pretending to play the game, but really just hoping to pass for “normal,” blending in with everyone else in the bleachers.

In less enlightened cultures (Haiti, for example), they see it all very differently – your “symptoms” are signs of a need for spiritual mediation – so instead of the nuthouse, it’s off to the local Vodou temple, the Hounfour, where you can let it all go for a few hours, entering a trance state with all the other supplicants, under supervision of the head priest (a Houngan or Mambo, depending on gender), offering yourself up to the gods of the Underworld, so you can be taken over and danced back into a state of balance with the cosmos. This is considered perfectly normal, a part of everyday life. Without ritual contact with the spirit world, you’d just be a lost soul.

The rest of the therapeutic regime in the American System (aka “the medical model”) – besides the pills, which are designed to ensure you never have any contact with anything remotely resembling a god – consists mainly of routine instruction in a variety of “coping skills.” As, for example, The Short Term Goal, on this card:

Handed out daily, to be filled out prior to group therapy, where you go round the room and are “encouraged” to share what you’ve written down when your turn in the spotlight arrives.

9 out of 10 an honest response would be something along the lines of “Get out of jail FREE.” But if you write something like that, then of course you won’t. So you write something more… practical: “Write letter to mom. 1: Find paper/pen; 2: Find time; 3) Find something to say.” And if you’ve failed to “obtain your goal” today, ponder what you can do “differently” to achieve it tomorrow. Never give up. Try harder. “Think more about mom.”

What have I got against goals? Haven’t I set myself a goal of writing at least 500 words of this book each and every day. Guess what? I’m already at 739 – so see ya tomorrow. Just kidding.

But seriously, look at it from the other side. Why does one need a goal in order to live? Do you need one to eat, or sleep, or visit the bathroom, or sit quietly for a few minutes and think of… nothing at all? Well, yes, if you’re clinically depressed, any one of those might present a challenge. But the main reason behind the logic seems to be a matter of achieving basic satisfaction, achievable, by definition, only through the conscious application of effort and willpower. Put your mind on X and once you’ve done it, you’ll have some sense of… “agency” – “the capacity of an entity to act independently” in a given environment.

In more enlightened cultures (ancient China, for example), the notion of acting as an independent entity was frowned upon. If there was a goal, it was not to have one. Wu-wei (NON-action) was the ideal – to act only in accord with the Tao (the Way). Try to get the Tao to accord with your goals and you are just getting in the way and asking for trouble.

The ancient Greeks didn’t frown quite so much on independent action, as long as it was for the public good, but purely private goals, merely to further your own ends, were another matter. Then you were behaving oddly, like an idiot – idiotes is Greek for a private person, as in idiosyncrasy.

And even today, in Buddhist cultures (Tibet, for example, now (alas) the Tibet Autonomous Region of China), it’s very difficult to be goal-oriented. You are a part of the community. You have your place. You don’t need a goal to get through the day. Just do whatever is necessary. Instead of self-reliance, you take refuge in the Buddha (the model of a real human being in the world), the Dharma (how to be one), and the Sangha (your fellow practitioners, practicing together, to be one, right now). If you have a problem, you rely on them.

Not that you aren’t a separate person. Except that none of us started out intending to be a person. We all just turned into one, and are still at it, everyone and everything “arising co-dependently,” all of us adrift together, each on our own private continent. If our world is ill, so are we. If I am here, it’s only because you are there, reading this (are you?). No light without shade, or life without death, nor strength without weakness.

My real beef with the setting of daily goals: if we are always here, but wanting to be somewhere else, there is this continual sense of dis-satisfaction with whatever is happening now. Not enough just to be here, we must always be doing something to be better, or better off, at some point in the future, when we will have reached our……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..goal.

Give up your fixation on a goal, and chances are your problem will go away too, or solve itself. But of course, far easier said. At least, you’ll know what you’re missing. Like my teacher always used to say, “The best nostalgia is nostalgia for the present moment.”

—————————–

Irene: My diagnosis? I’m Angry.
Me: That’s not in the DSM.
Irene: Not yet. But I’m working on it.

—————————–

I’m working on it too. The constant dry mouth, the constipation. From the meds and the anxiety. The hairs of my mustache always getting in my food, because they won’t let me trim it. Or let you have anything sharp. After a week, the ear wax doesn’t get any thicker, but forget about Q-tips. The food gets stuck in your teeth, and of course there are no toothpicks. If you have a broken nail, you just have to chew it off.

And the food… You fill out a menu card the day before for your meals, from a list of what’s available. But half the time, you get something else, or something is missing, but complain, and they’ll tell you you’re on a restricted diet, because your blood pressure is too high. Guess why it’s too high? (But sir, if you want, we can give you a pill to lower it.) After a week I developed a gum abscess and just tried to ignore it. Ask for a doctor to look at it and by the time anyone shows up…

And though there’s a Rule about NO LOUD MUSIC, for some reason that never gets enforced, and the radio in the day room is always blasting. The same cheesy pop tunes about Love & Betrayal, played over and over, written according to the same deadly formula.

And then there’s the boredom, endless and mind-numbing. You look at the clock. How much timebeforedinner? Time for your… meds? Time to leave? If you weren’t crazy when you came in here, you will be by then.

                                     *  *  *

                                [to be continued]

Alvin Ailey, choreographer • Chantal Akerman, filmmaker • Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, astronaut • Alexander the Great, king • Sherman Alexie, writer • Hans Christian Andersen, writer • Ann-Margaret, actress • Adam Ant, musician • Diane Arbus, photographer • Antonin Artaud, writer • Honoré de Balzac, writer • Azealia Banks, rap singer • Samuel Barber, composer • Roseanne Barr, actress • Drew Barrymore, actress • Lionel Barrymore, actor • James Barrie, writer • Rona Barrett, columnist • Charles Baudelaire, poet • Shelley Beattie, athlete/artist • Ned Beatty, actor • Samuel Beckett, writer • Ludwig von Beethoven, composer • Menachem Begin, Israeli head of state • Brendan Behan, poet • Irving Berlin, composer • Hector Berlioz, composer • Leonard Bernstein, composer • John Berryman, poet • William Blake, poet • Charles Bluhdorn, industrialist • Louise Bogan, poet • Ludwig Boltzmann, physicist • Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor • Kjell Magne Bondevik, Norwegian head of state • Robert Boorstin, writer • Clara Bow, actress • Tommy Boyce, musician • Russell Brand, comedian • Marlon Brando, actor • Willy Brandt, German head of state • Richard Brautigan, writer • Jeremy Brett, actor • Rupert Brooke, poet • Van Wyck Brooks, writer • Chris Brown, singer • John Brown, abolitionist • Ruth Brown, singer • Anton Bruckner, composer • Art Buchwald, humorist • John Bunyan, writer • Robert Burns, poet • Robert Burton, writer • Tim Burton, filmmaker • Willie Burton, basketball player • Barbara Bush, former First Lady • Helen Caldicott, activist • Georg Cantor, mathematician • Donald Cammell, screenwriter • Albert Camus, writer • Truman Capote, writer • Drew Carey, comedian • Jim Carrey, actor • Mariah Carrey, singer • Quincy Carter, football player • Dick Cavett, talk-show host • Paul Celan, poet• C. E. Chaffin, writer • Ray Charles, musician • Thomas Chatterton, poet • Paddy Chayefsky, playwright • Lawton Chiles, state governor • Frederic Chopin, composer • Winston Churchill, British head of state • Sandra Cisneros, writer • Eric Clapton, musician • John Clare, poet • Dick Clark, entertainer • Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), writer • John Cleese, actor • Rosemary Clooney, singer • Kurt Cobain, musician • Ty Cobb, baseball player • Leonard Cohen, poet/songwriter • Natalie Cole, singer • Garnet Coleman, state legislator • Samuel Coleridge, poet • Judy Collins, musician, • Shawn Colvin, musician • Joseph Conrad, writer • Pat Conroy, writer • Calvin Coolidge, U.S. president • Francis Ford Coppola, filmmaker • Billy Corgan, musician • Patricia Cornwell, writer • Noel Coward, composer • William Cowper, poet • Hart Crane, writer • Oliver Cromwell, military statesman• Kathy Cronkite, writer • Dennis Crosby, actor • Sheryl Crow, singer • Miley Cyrus, singer • Richard Dadd, artist • John Daly, pro golfer • Rodney Dangerfield, comedian • Bobby Darin, singer • Charles Darwin, scientist • Ray Davies, musician • Thomas De Quincey, poet • Lenny Dee, musician • Sandra Dee, actress • Ellen DeGeneres, comedienne • John Denver, singer • Muffin Spencer Devlin, pro golfer • Diana, Princess of Wales • Paolo DiCanio, soccer player • Charles Dickens, writer • Emily Dickinson, poet • Isak Dinesen, writer • Terence Donovan, photographer • Michael Dorris, writer • Fyodor Dostoevsky, writer • Mike Doughty, musician • Robert Downey, Jr., actor • Jack Dreyfus, hedge-fund manager • Richard Dreyfuss, actor • Patty Duke, actress • Thomas Eagleton, U.S. Senator • Thomas Eakins, artist • Thomas Edison, inventor • Edward Elgar, composer • T.S. Eliot, poet • Elizabeth I, Queen of England • Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer • Florbela Espanca, Portuguese poet • Robert Evans, film producer • James Farmer, civil rights leader • Philo Farnsworth, inventor of television • William Faulkner, writer • Jules Feiffer, cartoonist • Tim Finn, musician • Carrie Fisher, actress • F. Scott Fitzgerald, writer • Alice Flaherty, neurologist • Larry Flynt, publisher • Betty Ford, former First Lady • Harrison Ford, actor • James Forrestal, cabinet member • Stephen Foster, songwriter • Michel Foucault, writer/philosopher • George Fox, Quaker • Connie Francis, entertainer • Albert French, writer • Sigmund Freud, psychiatrist • Brenda Fricker, actress • Stephen Fry, actor • Peter Gabriel, musician • John Kenneth Galbraith, economist • Judy Garland, singer • Alan Garner, writer • James Garner, actor • Rachelle Garniez, songwriter • Paul Gascoigne, soccer player • Paul Gauguin, artist • Harold Geneen, industrialist • Théodore Géricault, artist • George III, King of England • Stan Getz, musician • Kaye Gibbons, writer • Mel Gibson, actor • Mikhail Glinka, composer • Johann Goethe, writer • Nikolai Gogol, writer • Oliver Goldsmith, writer • Dwight Gooden, baseball player • George Gordon (Lord Byron), poet • Tipper Gore, wife of U.S. Vice-President • Arshile Gorky, artist • Francisco de Goya, artist • Phil Graham, publisher • Spalding Gray, performer • Graham Greene, writer • Shecky Greene, comedian • Ivor Gurney, composer/poet • Philip Guston, artist • Halsey, singer • Alexander Hamilton, statesman • Linda Hamilton, actress • Georg Frederich Handel, composer • Pete Harnisch, baseball player • Moss Hart, playwright • Mariette Hartley, actress • Juliana Hatfield, musician • Hampton Hawes, musician • Stephen Hawking, physicist • Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer • Lillian Hellman, playwright • Ernest Hemingway, writer • Margaux Hemingway, actress • Jimi Hendrix, musician • Audrey Hepburn, actress • Herod, Biblical king • Kristin Hersh, musician • Hermann Hesse, writer • Abbie Hoffman, political activist • Friedrich Hölderlin, poet • Gustav Holst, composer • Anthony Hopkins, actor • Gerard Manley Hopkins, poet • Edward Hopper, artist • Howard Hughes, industrialist • Victor Hugo, writer • Henrk Ibsen, playwright • William Inge, playwright • Jack Irons, musician • Charles Ives, composer • Eugene Izzi, writer • Andrew Jackson, U.S. President • Janet Jackson, singer • Jesse Jackson, Jr., politician • Henry James, writer • William James, psychologist • Kay Redfield Jamison, psychologist • Randall Jarrell, poet • Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President • Jim Jensen, news reporter • Jeremiah, Biblical prophet • Joan of Arc, French leader • Job, Biblical figure • Steve Jobs, entrepreneur • Billy Joel, musician • Elton John, musician • Daniel Johns, musician • Samuel Johnson, writer • Daniel Johnston, musician • Ashley Judd, actor • Carl Jung, psychiatrist • Franz Kafka, writer • Karen Kain, ballerina • Chris Kanyon, pro wrestler • Danny Kaye, entertainer • John Keats, poet • Patrick J. Kennedy, U.S. Congressman • Margot Kidder, actress • Larry King, talk-show host • Klaus Kinski, actor • Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, artist • Gelsey Kirkland, dancer • L:incoln Kirstein, writer • Heinrich von Kleist, poet • Otto Klemperer, conductor • Percy Knauth, journalist • Joey Kramer, musician • Kris Kristofferson, singer • Patrick Kroupa, writer/activist • William Kurelek, artist • Pat LaFontaine, hockey player • Charles Lamb, poet • Mary Lambert, songwriter • Jessica Lange, actress • Peter Nolan Lawrence, writer • Edward Lear, poet • Robert E. Lee, U.S. general • Vivian Leigh, actress • John Lennon, musician • Rika Lesser, writer • Oscar Levant, pianist • Jenifer Lewis, actress • Bill Lichtenstein, TV journalist • Abraham Lincoln, U.S. President • Josh Logan, theater director • Jack London, writer • Demi Lovato, singer • Robert Lowell, poet •

The foregoing putative list is woefully incomplete, and not just because it only gets to L. The National Institutes of Health say that “4.4% of adults experience bipolar disorder – who cycle between two or more mood states, such as mania or depression – at some time in their lives,” so I’m talking about somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 million of us, just here in the good old USA.

“Mood-disordered” and potentially lethal, being on the bipolar “spectrum” can be a very bumpy ride. But sometimes it’s as much a gift as a deficit, and does not deserve to be downgraded, degraded, and devalued only as a sign of medical Illness, as though Virginia Woolf, Thelonious Monk, Frank Sinatra, Herman Melville, Little Richard, Bruce Springsteen or Tchaikovsky were all sick, but only when they weren’t being creative.

The bipolar mind, a heightened and deepened sensitivity to whatever is normally hidden from view. And which necessarily involves risk-taking. Go past the known to unfamiliar places, try something untried, entertain new possibilities – to Emerson, “Every wall is a door.” Some of the time, maybe even most, you’ll come up empty-handed, or even go off the deep end, where the dragons live. But the road of excess, according to one of the better-known members of the club, may sometimes lead to a palace.

In the prevailing “medical model,” bipolarity has no biological test and no “cure,” It’s only a list of symptoms, to be controlled and suppressed through a scattershot application of complex and expensive drug regimens.

All have potentially devastating “side” effects that only get worse the longer you’re on them – and no one has been able to provide any clear proof of the basic hypothesis behind all of them, that the fundamental cause is some chemical “imbalance” in the brain, like the imbalance of insulin in the pancreas that causes diabetes.

But even if such were the case, is this the cause, or do the pills themselves cause further imbalances that require ever more concoctions to smooth out the ride? The feedback loops spiral while Big Pharma gets fat.

And if the cause is genetic, one may assume mental “illness” even confers some evolutionary benefit, else why are so many of us nutjobs still around? And guess what, here’s something I read in The NY Times suggesting precisely that:

“Studies on the role of genes… suggest immune involvement, a finding that helps to resolve an old puzzle. People with schizophrenia tend not to have many children. So how have the genes that increase the risk of schizophrenia… persisted in populations over time? One possibility is that we retain genes that might increase the risk… because those genes helped humans fight off pathogens. Some psychiatric illness may be an inadvertent consequence… of having an aggressive immune system.”

In other words, mental “disorders” may arise from a genetic disruption to networks that allow us to distinguish between things that are generated by our self and things that belong to our external world. An auto-immune response, producing antibodies that not only fight infections, but turn on your own body as well. With the result, for example, that you have difficulty telling real voices from the ones yelling at you in your head.

So perhaps what is called mental “illness” is something far more complex. And not merely some intricate Rube Goldberg contraption – a sort of Self-Operating Napkin that has broken down and can no longer clean up after itself. But which can be disassembled (“reverse-engineered”), then put back again from scratch, like a car in need of a total overhaul in the garage, but without the faintest understanding of how and why it all goes together after so many millions of years of becoming.

I am more than a Machine, or just the sum of my parts. And so are you. Everyone is, possibly even Donald tRump. And not just The Donald, but Donald Duck too, and all creatures great and small. And the grass and the trees and even the stones and… All of it evolving together, dependent on each other, on everything that has gone before, and everything that will come after, a single infinitely complex whole, however many pieces are in the puzzle.

No one an island, no island disconnected from all the rest. One big club, all of us members.

A dear friend of mine and I have been having an email exchange about this problem we both have, about finishing stuff. P is a filmmaker too, as I used to be, a long time ago. P (he won’t let me use his name) had been working for a long long long time on a film of his own, and couldn’t leave it alone and just let it be. And kept on doing one version after another after… Just as I have been doing in the book I’m writing — excerpts of which I’ve begun to post here on WordPress, since I don’t know how to stop.

Finally, P’s family — his Significant Other and 2 little others — had enough and threatened “an intervention,” though it never went as far as threatening to have him committed, unlike my own family. So finally P was forced to stop, and settled on one final cut, and let it go off on its own for everyone else to see.

But that led me to thinking, as it always does. And my first thought was about how the term “director’s cut” first came about. The director, in this case, being none other than John Ford, who set a precedent for everyone who followed, at least those with enough box-office clout.

It was in the late thirties, and Ford was finishing one of his cowboy flicks (I think it was Stagecoach) and was afraid that after he left the editing room the producer would come back and make changes. So Ford had all the negatives of the out-takes destroyed, so his film could only be seen his way, the way he had envisioned it.

So in a sense, “director’s CUT” is a sort of double entendre, referring not just to splicing scenes together in their intended order, but to removing everything else, in Ford’s case, permanently. (And in a sense, you could say my book — and these posts are also the “director’s cut” — like everything on WordPress — it can be viewed any way you want, but it can’t be changed or re-edited by someone else.)

Which brings Michelangelo to mind (at least to mine), who said that his Method wasn’t to build a sculpture from scratch, but to take a big block, and just remove chunks of it, until only the abs lut ly e sential was le t.

And indeed that’s what my fave director of all-time did. Krzysztof Kieslowski. The Polish film director who blew my mind with his 10-part Decalogue — each episode about one of the Commandments. And the even more mind-blowing Blue White and Red trilogy.

Whenever Kieslowski finished a film, he’d sit there in the editing room and run the cut over and over, and every time he found something that wasn’t absolutely essential, he just chopped it out. And that’s why his films are so great. The viewer has to watch his films VERY carefully, and pay the strictest attention, or they’ll miss something and lose track of what’s really going on. But if you stay with it, then half of what you are seeing is what you are fil ing in yourself, filling the gaps Kieslowski has left for you to fill. So in the end, the film becomes as much yours as his.

Exactly what Abbas Kiarostami does too. My other top film fave. Especially in the scene at the very end of Close-up, made back in 1991 in Iran.

It’s about this poor shlub who was arrested for impersonating another famous film director, a friend of K’s. Who had told a family that he wanted them to be in his new movie, but after they became suspicious that he was really trying to rob them, they reported him to the police.

Kiarostami read about it in a newspaper and visited him in jail to ask if he’d agree to re-enact the whole story in a real movie. Of course, the guy was thrilled. And everyone else in the story also agreed to play themselves.

But when it came time to re-enact the final scene, where K comes to meet the guy as he’s finally let out of jail, Kiarostami pulls a surprise and instead the guy meets the director he attempted to impersonate! What will the fake director say to his alter ego? Like an Elvis impersonator suddenly bumping into Elvis…

So the guy gets on the back of the director’s motorcycle (the director is wearing a radio-mike) and off they go, with Kiarostami in a car, and the cameraman and soundguy riding just behind in another car, in hot pursuit.

But almost as soon as the conversation begins, the soundtrack suddenly starts to cut i and ou and you hear the soundman complaining about the faulty equipment. So you only get to hear its and ieces of what is said and you have to imagine the rest, filling in the blanks. Which is really the message underlying the whole film – that there is no such thing as “reality” – it’s all something going on in your mind, and you are always having to in the blanks. Ultimately, it’s up to you, the “viewer,” to make sense of it. (nudge, nudge)

CODA

Years later, Kiarostami was giving a film workshop for a couple of dozen aspiring directors and one of them asked if the sound equipment had really failed at that crucial moment. And K had to admit that it hadn’t. Everything had worked perfectly.

So why’d he do it? Was it to make a metaphysical point about the nature of… reality?

No, Kiarostami told them, it was because the impostor had become flustered at unexpectedly encountering the real director, a man he totally idolized, and he completely blew the scene on the motorcycle. The take was utterly ruined, and there was no way to do another. Kiarostami was at his wit’s end in the editing room, until he finally realized that he could just remove sections of the soundtrack and instead insert a fake voice-over from the soundman complaining about the “faulty” mike.

So much for Reality. And so much more for Art.

ps. I cc’d this to P for his approval, as P had special access to the Truth, as one of the workshop participants. P added this bit of info: “The real reason was not because the impostor gave a bad performance, but because the “real” director did! Once astride the motorcycle, he waxed poetic about how the impostor was the real director and he was the fraud. It was all too much meta meta – and ruined the delicate scene, so he was to blame, and then Kiarostami pinned it on his soundman, to cover his friend’s butt.”

And that is Art, no ifs ands or bu ts.

Hologram Performance by Chief Keef Is Shut Down by Police.

According to the article, a rap-singer, with outstanding arrest warrants related to charges of child support, cannot appear at a public concert, and has had himself “holographically” inserted into a live performance.

How? Apparently via a video projected on stage using a modern version of an old theatrical trick, known as “Pepper’s ghost,” brought to popular attention by “Professor” John Henry Pepper and commonly used in Victorian magic shows, but invented in the late 1500s by a Neapolitan scientist, Giambattista della Porta.

An image below the stage is aligned (with a sheet of glass or reflective material placed between the two at an angle), so that when the hidden area is suddenly lit, it appears to be in front of the audience. Like a ghost. As della Porta put it, “what is without will seem to be within… [and the spectator] will think he sees nothing but truth.” I’d never heard of della Porta’s stage trick before. Have you? It opens a whole new door in my head. La porta è aperta.

But della Porta’s screen door may just as well swing the other way: what is within the hidden room will seem to be without… The principle of the camera obscura – Latin for dark chamber – also invented by della Porta!

A precursor of the movie camera, and its projector, yet another metaphor for the Unconscious Mind. One room, the one we live in, or think we do, is lit by the bright sun of our consciousness, but there’s another hidden room, containing objects that are normally invisible, but which may suddenly appear out of “nowhere” on the screen of our mind. No-where suddenly become now-here, an absence unexpectedly intruding its presence. A surprise.

Its sudden appearance may seem like a kind of magic – defined as “the art of producing marvels using hidden natural forces.” But that is the crucial point – though these “forces” seem to be hidden, they are natural, an inescapable consequence of consciousness itself. Before its invention, perhaps only a few million years ago, everything was hiding, in plain sight, seen but observed by no one. When the light went on, whatever wasn’t seen disappeared into the shadows. The brighter the light, the darker and deeper the penumbra it casts.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, the 20th-century French philosopher-anthropologist, invented the phrase “participation mystique” to describe the way “primitive” tribes lived in a magical, unconscious harmony with their environment, due to their supposed lack of self-awareness. They lived like animals (though apparently elephants, gorillas, dolphins, and at least one parrot might take exception to that).

But we are all living in participation mystique, thinking what we see is the only reality. The truth is it’s all a magic trick, like Pepper’s ghost. No matter how aware we may be of ourselves as separate entities, there will always be a roomful of stuff behind the seen that we know nothing at all about.