I remember thinking, way back as a senior in high school, what I wanted out of life. I am a bit amazed by my humility at that time, for I believed that my greatest achievement would be as a footnote in some student’s research paper sometime after I were dead and gone. This was well before my madness, of course. Then I remember in college, as I was really drugging it up, that my aspirations climbed the stratosphere — I wanted to be the savior of all the world, and nothing less — and then in my madness, to possess powers beyond reckoning, to bring about EUTOPIA for all the universe.
When I was recovering from beyond the edge, my desire became simply to be normal again. Nothing fancy. Just to do better than be continuously hanging on by a thread. And then, since having recovered (more or less), I have thought briefly at times that I would create something revolutionary, become something like the next Einstein; and now... and now, it seems I my desire has come full circle. I don’t think I want that kind of cataclysmic fame. Perhaps I knew, way back then, what was the best for me: remembered, useful, a footnote in history that makes some sort of point somewhere....
Anonymous
9:22pm wednesday, 16th march
"and then in my madness, to possess powers beyond reckoning, to bring about Eutopia for all the universe.".....................I myself have been there. I almost died laughing when I read that. ................................Your allright Stand.
Anonymous
2:43am friday, 18th march
I'm waiting for your comments stand, you are truly one of my only true friends.
Anonymous
3:28am friday, 18th march
well then let me put it to you this way, I can play circles around hendrix, and I have just met a true Zen Master. And by the way, to meet a true zen ,a master has to speak to you first.
Anonymous
3:33am friday, 18th march
If you want to be true zen,well you have to understand true zen .
Stand
3:58am friday, 18th march
What did you want my comments on? Zen?
be not but do
do not but be
In this is the whole of the Tao.
Anonymous
4:04am friday, 18th march
No,from a true zen master. Imagine you cut a space in the wall for you to fit in. Then erase all your thoughts.
Anonymous
4:08am friday, 18th march
erasing all your thoughts, is the hard part. With time you will be on the level.
Anonymous
4:14am friday, 18th march
Although I must say. Dealing with the madness etc, etc, gives you a great if not overwelming advantage.
Anonymous
4:28am friday, 18th march
no time is worth the time.
Strawberry
5:05pm friday, 18th march
Ah, Stand. I too would like to be a footnote in history. Do you know that our kind, the schizophrenics who take anti-psychotic drugs and then go on to write coherently and create product for society....do you see that we have never before existed in the history of human kind?
Sometimes I tell people that I am a cyborg. I am half human and I am half science. Perhaps a girl who has had a heart or kidney transplant might feel a bit like a cyborg, with another person's organ in her body. Then to keep that organ in place and functioning she must submit to a chemical cocktail of 40 pills a day. Science is enabling a human to live under physical conditions that no human in history has ever known. But I myself am a truer cyborg than the transplant recipient, for I am faulty human consciousness mended and patched together with science. The natural or real Strawberry who is thinking out and typing these words is a composite of the organic and the inorganic. The girl with the new heart got the gift of a continuation of her natural personality and conciousness for many more years of life. The modern schizophrenic can be given the gift of altered consciousness. Not healed. Not returned to normal. We are just given enough medical aid to increase the order and coherence of our thought away from the direction of incoherence and chaos. Thus the personalities that we have are not what has naturally matured....take me off medication....meet my natural self....well, that would be sad for both the audience and the player.
I am not insulted, if we concider for a moment that my brain is a chemical soup. Left on it's own my brain will chemically run amonk. Left on it's own I probably would have killed myself from the pain. I never took hallucinogens, all I had to do as a teen was let my natural genetic code unvale itself. Schizophrenia runs in my family on my father's side, his brother is a serious schizophrenic and my aunt is a mild schizophrenic. I saw what became of that generation of schizophrenics. Massive doses of haldol and later life institutionalization in a vetren's home has enabled my uncle to recover to the point where he could grow pointsettas and lillies in the hospital greenhouse. With the aid of trilifon my aunt was able to work in a laundry and have a happy marriage. But before this marriage (and the trillifon) her child was taken away from her because she was deemed unfit to raise him. I know that I was born different. As a child I was mostly interested in talking to adults and in kindergarden the children spit out the bus windows aiming for my head. My mother said I loved to talk and ask questions and had no fear. At five I can remember imitating children on the playground at play, jungle gym play really wasn't a concept that came too easy to me. But I got good at studying people. In high school I started reading Vogue so to know how to dress the best to be pretty and admired, I went to debate camp to learn how to argue, and I pushed myself in all sorts of ways so that I would be able to succeed in being liked and having friends. And succeed I did. I got voted president of this club and that. I had boyfriends. The true queerness of my being was clamped down upon and hidden from view. I became so good that I even fooled myself.
My Dad tells me my schizophrenic uncle was his hero growing up, an older brother who was really funny and smart and someone who all the girls in town had a crush on. But when my uncle became ill, there was no recovery. There was no rebirth. I remember asking him as a little girl (who knew nothing of mental illness) why he never talked. My uncle said, "because there is nothing to say."
So here I am, the next generation, and because of social sciences and advanced chemistry I have come back from the edge, back from the onset of my genetic heritage, and in that crisis my human heritage and culture stood ready to heal me better than my uncle. "Anonymus" said in the earlier post that most people don't know how deep the rabbit hole is. It is true. We schizophrenics have either seen something or learned something that make us now experience life continuously different from others. In the last decade I have seen autistic people writing books discribing what it feels like to live in their world. What it feels like to have an autistic brain. These discriptions come from not the doctors, not the family, not a journalist, but from the primary source. In the next decade I predict that we are going to see schizophrenics write about their world unaided as well. An authentic voice that has not been heard before will be recorded. Stand, I believe that you have already created your footnote in history. And if you want more, you are going to get that too.
Schizophrenics have spoken before in history. They have been shamen and oracles and saints and strange poets. I beleive that every day I add human engineered chemicals to my chemical brain soup there is then created the set of skills to climb out of the rabbit hole and to say with the language of the common folk what I have seen underground. I now have the choice not to write like a mystic or a madwoman. But I do believe that without the long years of taking these antipsychotic drugs and without the practice and disipline over those years of retraining myself to think logically and write logically I would be as my uncle is today. I would be a person with nothing to say. Or I would be as other schizophrenics in history have been. Intriging, teasing, poetic and frustrating.
Anonymous
Stand