The Schizo-Stroller

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.

In the wake of the result of Brexit

and the purloined responsibility for austerity

and the crisis.

I found myself wondering,

a quickly drying up pondering on,

a thought related to a shibboleth,

merely as vast as La Manche.

Channelling ideas via the representation of

the ferry of light

the local distribution hub

bringing grumbling truckers thoughts, and tourist dreams

from Europe, twice a day,

who are just passing through the ground air space

as they drive on into England

first facing the incinerator,

the Glade air anti-freshener.

In the port that is the reason

for the locality of my hearth being

currently in the edgelands

of a local interzone, a non-place,

where musings like these,

influenced by the genii loci like that

come up with this:

With regards the British saying

referring to the veracity of a statement,

“Is the Pope Catholic?”

Is Lacan Catholic?

Or was he a huge knot?

Guattari was a

smelly, shaggy dog.

As I, a schizo,
sit here analysing the unreason
from Deep Space 9 millimetre,

The gatekeeper at the end
of a wormhole connecting to

the time warp and woof woof of life.
Is New heaven a safe space,
for theoretical refugees?
At least there’s a last exit to Dieppe
For when the huge Brits get too close.

I’m a materialist (and I use this term here rather than atheist as there are plenty of dualist atheists), however having read a fair amount of and being aware of our pattern making sensory apparatus and neurological make-up, combined with the work of sociologists such as Durkheim and Levi Strauss on the importance of ritual, myth and imagination in the realm of ideas, I therefore have a healthy respect for imaginative practice as a form of poiesis.

However when struggling with this realm, and trying to understand spiritualistic beliefs as a materialistic representative practice that is a perfectly reasonable navigatory practice especially with regard concrete embodied life stresses and experiences, I sometimes, triggered by what seems to be a reactionary remnant of a religious idealism, hear a voice arguing for me to ‘prove it’, now if something is materialistic it must be provable and part of this is my uncomfortability at not being able to get the work done, knowing it is probably a life time’s work that will never be finished coupled with my difficulties at the current time, however another aspect of this phrase is the paradox of a demand from the ideal realm (as a signified discursive realm at least) that a paradox be solved, the problem is that this paradox is demanded from the metaphysical realm, that in a materialist sense, doesn’t exist so it is like asking me to prove something that itself is unprovable doesn’t exist.

I am well aware that this is in many ways a rehashing of Marx’s overturning of Hegel’s dialectic via Feuerbach. However in the realm of both praxis AND poiesis it seems to be a problem that stubbornly and frustratingly remains in the ideological apparatus and as a form of alienation is directly associated with the experience of psychosis.

I will be talking here January 21st 2015 at Housman’s London.

The ASSOCIATION OF MUSICAL MARXISTS present an evening of free improvised music, and discussion of the left’s relation to the current state of “mental health” service provision, including the work of Psychopolitics author Peter Sedgwick, and critique of the hegemonic neo-liberal “Recovery Model.” Speakers: Robert Dellar (author, Splitting in Two: Mad Pride & Punk Rock Oblivion); Alastair Kemp (editor, Newhaven Journal). Entry: £3 redeemable against purchases of books or t-shirts. People with beards will be refused entry.

Facebook event page

There is a belief in the possibility of hearing the voices of the dead in acoustic media: tape, short-wave radio hiss, vinyl etc. called Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP); and then amongst voice hearers there is the experience of hearing what are called acousmatic voices.
An acousmatic sound is a sound where the original source is not known. Tristam Vivian Adams has written a fair bit about them and their use in film, such as Psycho, at the Vocalities blog (part of the Aural and Visual Cultures Department at Goldsmiths). Voice hearers can hear acousmatic voices either where they are disembodied, or embodied but in something alter such as a car tyre screeching, or a fox squealing, music, or even superimposed over someone else’s speech, almost as if a shadow impression.
Electronic Voice Phenomenon seems similar it is hearing ‘messages’ in different media, often accompanied by the belief that they are messages from the dead. Amongst other things I will be exploring any similarities or correlation between the two on this blog over the next couple of years.