luka
Well-known member
i don't want to close down the madness conversation either. i'm not a policeman. i think the only interesting way to approach it, or the only useful way, would be to ask (not just blissblogger, but i'll aim it at him)
what are those traits and tendencies and abilities of yours that you associate with madness?
i think in my case, what draws the schizophrenic to me, and has done for many years, particularly when i was working in the coffee shops and they could visit me every day, is that i know i don't live inside a box. i know it is a shared spatial environment but that it is also, to a large degree, a shared mental and even emotional environment. emotions leak. consciousness is, at some level, shared, a commons.
they can talk to me at the level at which they want to talk, with those truths implicitly acknowledged.
and i can talk like that with them. and for both of us it is very liberating and we feel we can breathe normally. speaking for myself i get physically sick and emotionally despondent if i am starved of conversation on that level. i feel trapped and suffocated.
and yes, also, as you say, the ability to make connections, and to form patterns of information, overarching and interlocking patterns from the data.
but the root of it is porosity and the shared space and this is why paranoia is the the one overriding danger for all schizophrenics. we are the object of hostility and scorn. we are sneered at and looked down upon. we are feared. we are mocked. we are surveilled and spied on. none of this is imaginary and to be exposed to that, really feeling the density and the ubiquity of that can be overwhelming.
i learned this from being a young skunk addict. in my late teens i realised that every conversation has a subtext comprised of insult and mockery and attack. that because language is artfully ambiguous (and this is the whole point of finnegans wake) it can embed multiple meanings in the same phrase.
and if you develop an ear for it you will know that friends and family as well as strangers, are tearing shreds off one another all the time. which is why i like the hashtags here because it's a kind of literalisation of that... the composed superego and ego above the line and the snarling, thrashing (and very funny and truthful) id beneath it.
where you can run into serious problems is when you take that hidden id of any conversation, that hostility and scorn, for the only true reading of the text, or even just as more real, than the love and camaraderie and support which is also present and also very real and true.
what are those traits and tendencies and abilities of yours that you associate with madness?
i think in my case, what draws the schizophrenic to me, and has done for many years, particularly when i was working in the coffee shops and they could visit me every day, is that i know i don't live inside a box. i know it is a shared spatial environment but that it is also, to a large degree, a shared mental and even emotional environment. emotions leak. consciousness is, at some level, shared, a commons.
they can talk to me at the level at which they want to talk, with those truths implicitly acknowledged.
and i can talk like that with them. and for both of us it is very liberating and we feel we can breathe normally. speaking for myself i get physically sick and emotionally despondent if i am starved of conversation on that level. i feel trapped and suffocated.
and yes, also, as you say, the ability to make connections, and to form patterns of information, overarching and interlocking patterns from the data.
but the root of it is porosity and the shared space and this is why paranoia is the the one overriding danger for all schizophrenics. we are the object of hostility and scorn. we are sneered at and looked down upon. we are feared. we are mocked. we are surveilled and spied on. none of this is imaginary and to be exposed to that, really feeling the density and the ubiquity of that can be overwhelming.
i learned this from being a young skunk addict. in my late teens i realised that every conversation has a subtext comprised of insult and mockery and attack. that because language is artfully ambiguous (and this is the whole point of finnegans wake) it can embed multiple meanings in the same phrase.
and if you develop an ear for it you will know that friends and family as well as strangers, are tearing shreds off one another all the time. which is why i like the hashtags here because it's a kind of literalisation of that... the composed superego and ego above the line and the snarling, thrashing (and very funny and truthful) id beneath it.
where you can run into serious problems is when you take that hidden id of any conversation, that hostility and scorn, for the only true reading of the text, or even just as more real, than the love and camaraderie and support which is also present and also very real and true.