The Schizo-Stroller

Only a fool sends their best protection spells to their ‘church’.
Ask Uncle WoeDiN how he preserved his claim to wisdom.
The Beat told us how they knew your best friends name,
And Joy Division told you how she lost control again.
But no matter how much you share on Facebook,
There is always Virginia Woolf’s privacy.
RIP.

It was Oscar Wilde who said he is tolerant of everything apart from intolerance.

And then there are people who have a self-perception of a form of liberalism, but one that has failed to do a Copernican Revolution of self-understanding in that they claim to be open-minded but in fact the phrase that describes their self-understanding should be closer to:

“They are fine with all kinds of belief as long as it is their own”

I have a real problem with people like this especially in the realm of language. Say with the word ‘belief’ there is a set of all the possible meanings, ie for this signifier the set contains all possible signified (of course the signifier could also be a phrase such as ‘human nature’ or ‘adult’ or ‘grown-up’). A person like the above has a closed set within this larger set that is quite fixed and unable to perceive the possibility of existence of forms of meaning and knowledge outside this more fixed set. If i am aware of not only the existence of larger permutations of the word, but also for me my understanding of ‘belief’ with regards my own behaviour exists outside theirs AND moreover whilst I am aware of their use of ‘belief’ I am highly aware it does not pertain to my own self-understanding,then whilst I am have a conversation with this person using other words I am highly conscious that I cannot use the word ‘belief’ myself (it does not apply the other way around as I understand theirs) as it will immediately lead to misunderstanding.

If then this closed set of the word ‘belief’ of this other includes, as in the saying above, a strong unchallengeable faith, can I never retain my argument on ‘belief’ with this person if I accidentally use it, albeit as I understand it, because the person will be convinced, due to their ‘belief’, that I have used it in the way they use it, not my own. And furthermore due to the type of use of ‘belief’ they understand they will be even less likely to see my perspective than before I used the word.

In fact any conversation with such people will take a form of aphasic behaviour where I would have to constantly skirt the use of the word otherwise all possibility of recognition is lost.

If this other use of ‘belief’ includes a CS Lewis type of tyranny of conscience, due to the necessary intensity of unmet needs that stem from this impossibility of recognition, even as applied to their own sense of selves (how can such a closed linguistic set ever speak for the greater non-linguistic whole of their being?) even whilst this faith thinks it has a truth-claim to salvation, almost an ideological Bernean Schlemiel, then does it pose a threat to the existence of all other meaning and knowledge and identity? A total eclipse of the self. I am thinking of Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia here.

I also find myself thinking in this case of the Star Trek Next Generation episode 23 ‘Skin of Evil’ with the narcissistically childish but omnipowerful black pool of goo rather than Tarkovsky’s use of a type of Last Universal Common Ancestor sea in Solaris, a Douglas Adams puddle thinking version of such a larger sea of potential being.

The cruel authoritarian pilot of the ship of fools unloaded his cargo into the next town, and as he did so, he sighed, ‘Glad to be rid of that lot, unsufferable, all of them’.

A ship with black sails heading for Athens sailed past, overhearing the pilot on the Ship of Fools, the pilot of this ship, the Ship of Theseus, cried out, ‘it’s still a ship of fools not matter which fools are on it’.

It’s dawn, the morning star is in the sky and she is looking down at us. And whilst I may be hanging upside down from the Ogham tree right now, like Henry Miller listening to the world awake, but it’s ok, I have an ogham’s razor in my pocket and can cut myself down whenever I need to. Like ET I can use a speak and spell to phone home.

Like Odysseus I may be strapped to the mast, but I am a rhizomatic nodal Odysseus with the other Odyssean oarsmen and women out there with there stax of wax and their wild frontiers.

Like Merlin, like the Angel of History, I am living life backwards moving from Oedipus to Wodin and gaining an eye (the Morrigan still have the Other).

But I am tired, world weary, and whilst I may still be strapped to the mast, the helm is in my garden, the ship of Theseus is being dismantled, the pagan gods are doing some gardening with it. There is a heavy metal bird bath there, so the birds may come refresh with some Dewey in this winter, there is a bird house with seeds amongst the jasmine.

Once I reach 50 I won’t have to grow up. And I shall cut myself down. In our late middle ages, we shall have 2020 vision.

I was a high plains drifter.
I who found her, Inertia,
the Rhinoceros
as I cuddled her in my dreams,
enjoying her great savannah,
the occasional Red Ox-size Pecker bird, nit picking and whispering in her ear.

And I fell in love with her.

She was Queen of the Questioning Whim Sea.
The Solar Is.
Otherwise known as the Quym See
Space Station Deep Space 9mm.
And I heard her call.
Whilst trading at the Stone of Gold.
One and jism dreams of genie
She was a Tease Maid of Gold.
And as with most Dr Rye know’s noses,
horns of plenty,
she was mostly Lake Placid.
But she was also quick to anger
with a murderous rage
and would become Queen Boo Jah Dick Aaarrggh,
Queen of the Eye See Nee,
Over seer of, I, the Knight of the Holy Muff
leading me to have to fight off the local Cor! Moron Ants.
But I don’t use any Mortal Kombat finishing moves.
Reluctant to cut their heads off.
I already have too many Leg Ends cumming for me.

Temporarily abandoning my major work
to the pseudo Dionysius autonomous Inter Zone,
the books are left to gril.
I became ‘that’s so itchy and scratchy muffin’.
In such times I, Yo! Jimbo!
had to teach the cowering locals
to paint the town Red.
Telling tall ship tales about who the Real enemy was
And how to defend themselves against it,
with the help of the 13 Roaming Ronin of the Circe Line.

But one question remained.
The song that remaindered the same.
Why The Blind Stagg?
I have no idea.
Married as I,
Pan Theon, the Horny Hunter, Dying Is He Us, Lunar tick, am
to Ariadne of the Quym Sea, Queen of the labyrinth,
Of the Pan Optic Con of the Parrot chasm.
A shibboleth at the Whisky a Go Go.
Being Ash Wednesday Trays-R-Us.
Cross (See you next Tyr Ant’s day) in a dress.
Welcoming people to the World of Work
at the World of Imperial Leather.
Pinhead cowards, jumping around, fleeing the House Of Pain.
The Pied Piper of Hamlyn at the Gates of Dusk Til Dawn,
poisoning the Knucker’s Well in Lymington.
Window lickers, cumming for the Big Mad Daddy.
I, the Woe Seer who ran DiN, both berserker and seydr,
all-father werewolf and ergi,
sitting here supping Elder Vodka,
now that I am cramped.
A slippery nipple
at Sam Faze La Haines.
Happy Birthday.
Big Youth, with Alistair Cowley scars.
It’s not how old’s your arse?
Not the cuckold brides nor the prop as a bar.
Skip to the Lou, my darling.

Oh, Thee See Us?
Jumping bulls at Knossos.
God damned transparent man!
She can see right through you.

Ghouls! Like a high voltage bullet.
Like persistent repetition of zombie phases.
Cumming for me.
Take good care of your self.
Know your history or you’ll be
Perseus instantly and repeatedly asking this old lycanthrope where I am coming from,
when I howl at the moon, as Narcissus fishes for it in the pond. The old fool.
Should have listened to Deadalus. Keep on going down.
Psycho Sexy. Not a lot of people go down stairs (so they say).
And then we will head North.
Saudade.

I have a voice. One of many.
But this one says of me that she has never heard anyone moan about people so much in her life.
I reply that I have never heard anyone moan so much about people moaning in my life.
When life is shit we moan.
We can moan about ourselves, things, events, or other people.
Moaning about other people moaning is what is left for those who haven’t been allowed to do any of the former.
Moaning is a lifesaver.
I think she is a hypocrite and a bigot.
She doesn’t understand the contradiction and thinks it is only ever all these other people moaning.
As such there is little I can do about her making me responsible for her misery.
I sit there and read Hegel.

“Do you pray to King Mob and Queen Mab?” She asked.
I laughed at the little bird, mockingly.

You don’t pray to King Mob or Queen Mab, I replied.
If you do they will only mock you.
Call on them by all means, and they may come,
with wolves and Pharisees,
trolls in chariots and whippersnappers
biting the heels of the aristocracy.
They’re a collective noun.
Like ‘working class hero’.
The lords of mischief and misrule,
making a clean sweep
on Saturnalia.
Every day a Saturnalia.

In the sense that Deleuze & Guattari talk about the arc and the circle, the arc never quite reaching the circle (kind of ‘edging’ in the S&M world), I would say a schizophrenic line of flight is more a tangent of the surface of the BwO. In the sense that Wittgenstein uses his ‘beetles’ to explain the difficulty of labelling emotions (I think Artaud means something deeper here, the base ganglia of the brain that is ultimately linked to speech and language does after all work with all organs in the physiology) then the ‘psychobabble’ of the ‘schizophrenic’ that RD Laing describes as a ‘word salad’, is akin, if one wishes to think of such a Batesonian dynamic and take the word ‘akin’ literally, to escaping unpleasure. A skill useful to interpret word salad is to see them as waking dreams but as sleeping dreams are understood in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams where the line of flight stems from escaping the censoring apparatus.

The idea that being delusional is a problem seems suspect to me, in the ’70s in the UK the Mental Patients Union released a pamphlet with a fish on the hook on the cover. It symbolised mental illness as the ‘struggle to get off the hook’. Think of the illocutionary manipulative language of say converting evangelist Christians or salesmen or women using NLP, think those courses for misogynist blokes on how to ‘pull more women’; and then imagine the schizophrenic’s memories that like a veteran suffering PTSD from one to many firefights flees the emotions associated with trigger words, lines of flight rather than the aphasic returns of a masochist returning to the abusive partner. Think of the language of the sexually repressed family trying to create new capitalist work subjectivities, the language brought home from work, applied to the children, the difference between disciplinarian societies and control societies. Realise that figures suggest that 65% of people diagnosed with psychosis have a history of CSA or CPA (child sexual or physical abuse) and the inability and lack of support families have in dealing with such trauma, rather than blaming them (esp. when clearly not the perpetrators).

But read about antilanguage as well as psychoanalytic interpretations of word salads, as they CAN be broken down and made sense of, think of Carry On films or Hip hop after reading Henry Louis Gates Junior’s signifying Monkey, skat like a jazz singer, read Lefebvre’s Production of Space and think of the archaeology of one’s own knowledge base and learn to surf the signifiers of the linguistic architecture. Think of whether we can elude control? Think the deliberate obfuscation of Deleuze and Guattari. Think Sokal and nonsense, then think of Lewis (or Peter) Carroll.

This is a skill to be mastered, an embodied one at that. Yes, the artist does it more productively, but then we have the autonomist’s refusal of work, what is a greater refusal of work than the schizophrenic refusing to do the abusive Master’s work and making sense. This is where mental health recovery is a form of biopower, it isn’t that we don’t want schizophrenics to discover more joy.. we do! we do!, it is just that the normalisation game is a game of capture.
But the idea that the artist and all the art theory questions of whether art is complicit in capitalist exploitation and may never gain full communism, so ‘edging’ will never make the full Deleuze and Guattari schizophrenic, one needs to know the feeling of rolling the car on the bend. And then make that sensation an art of life.

In Finding Nemo, the fish get caught by a dragnet, the cod have what Nietzsche called a herd mentality, perhaps more a swarm. They escape as Nemo learnt that they need to keep on swimming down..
Knossos is often acknowledged as the labyrinth, rather than the myth seeing it as somewhere within the first city (Lefebvre again).
Daedalus gave two bits of advice to Theseus, one don’t do what you are told. Two to find the minotaur keep going down.
Of course he needed the narrative thread to return.

That said the Minotaur did like eating his virgins.

With regards not just Deleuze and Guattari and the BwO, but Foucault too, especially with respect to biopolitics, it is worth noting that a lot of modern trauma research centres trauma in the body. Neuroscience prioritizes the emotions before cognition and language after that. This is why Lacan makes at least some sense with the symbolic being Law. But here also alongside Wittgenstein’s unknowable or incomparable beetles one has the frustration of Lacan’s Mathemes (we can also think of frustration leading to thought with Bion and his negative K – or partial object theory of Klein that influenced D&G). We then get word salad lines of flight, D&G’s point was to use this embodied tendency for intentional practice.
With regards dissociative states and D&G lines of flight there is a sense that these lead to Laingian ‘word salads’ as the body, rather than the ‘will’ (worth thinking of the bodywork of Moshe Feldenkrais here), tries to work out these unspeakable, unutterable feelings.
In this sense narrative is seen as highly important in mental health recovery studies. But with respect to that we do have the problem of normalisation and agency with regards the relation to the means of production within that subaltern right to speak. or even fight to speak, as oneself, selves.
If one wants to see schizophrenia as a biomedical thing, one will NOT get D&G, because of Guattari and his work at La Borde clinic, rather than anything Deleuze said.

Given the way signifiers work, to be able say that you read something literally, anything, and then come out with only one interpretation, is an act of stupidity bordering on genius.

Last Brexit to Europe.

Article 50, act of completion?
The act of a Boris Johnson on the Eurostar.
It is only a J Arthur Rank.
Just a spectacle?
Onanism Interruptus.
Brief Encounter never consummated.
Repressed English,
poor communication
Crossed mobile lines.
Worse than the phoning Kafka’s Castle from the pub.
Why Major had a problem with such a minor literature.
Shout louder at a foreigner so that they understand you.
Cameron started it,
sent the train into the tunnel
(Some novel about Heathcliff’s burnt hovel).
Hit on the head with a pig iron,
the train driver is comatose
on moonshine
a media tonic of manipulated
resentment.
What fore?
Sifting the remains of Sheffield in the day?
Selling out the history of industry
to low waged
Joy Divison service industry?
Even Stevens?
Regrexit.
Boris’ turn to finish it off.
Sloppy seconds at the workhouse.
Couldn’t commit.
Zipped up his Lord of the Flies.
Caught halfHitchcocked with Vertigo.
Hanging off a railway bridge,
never got to The Chunnel from St Pancreas,
Only got around about 50%.
Who’s going to sign Article 50?
Train’s stuck on an Ouboros.
Serco line, send it to district 13?.
Pull the emergency brake,
Or bring it in to the station.
Will it be the May Queen
taking it into the tunnel?
Illegal aliens to be processed?
Someone needs to tell herr,
deep space blacks hawking down there,
fleeing war children refugees fleeing
999km deep down
in that kind of tunnel space
No-one will hear her scream.