Albert Fish 1934

My Dear Mrs. Budd,
     In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was a famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1-3 Dollars a pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold to the Butchers to be cut up and used for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak-chops-or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or a girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girls behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole two boys one 7 one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet. Then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them-tortured them-to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 11 yr old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was Cooked and eaten except head-bones and guts. He was Roasted in the oven (all of his ass), boiled, broiled, fried, stewed. The little boy was next, went the same way. At that time, I was living at 409 E 100 st., near-right side. He told me so often how good Human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3-1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese- strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said Yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there,I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and Called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run downstairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick-bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.

The Epithalamium of Harry Mathews

Clipped from http://www.kwls.org/lit/kwls_blog/
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The Epithalamium of Harry Mathews

Posted by Arlo Haskell on May 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | ShareThis

Harry Mathews is often introduced as "the only American member of the Oulipo." The introduction is obscure, as few Americans know anything about the Oulipo, and many of those who do came to it by way of Mathews. Short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or "Workshop for Potential Literature," the Oulipo is a group of mostly French writers and mathematicians who invent constricting forms as a means of creating literature. The famous example is George Perec's novel La Disparition, written (to the length of 300 pages) without use of the letter "e." It was subsequently translated into English, as A Void, by Gilbert Adair, also without recourse to that ever-useful letter. While the constraints gather all the attention, like an Olympic sprinter with prosthetic legs, a successful Oulipian text renders them almost beside the point. To his readers, Mathews is known first as a writer of strange and eminently pleasurable novels. None are overtly Oulipian, but each (I'm thinking of The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, My Life in CIA, and The Journalist) is marked by sensations unfound elsewhere in literature. One suspects something is going on, that some exotic form is master of the content, before coming to the sure conclusion that Mathews is the prudent master of each.

Mathews and his wife Marie Chaix divide their time between France and Key West, where, from 2001-'04, he served as a member of our board of directors along with Irving Weinman. In 1998, Mathews, Chaix, and others celebrated the Key West marriage of Weinman to poet Judith Kazantzis. To honor their union, Mathews turned toward Perec's Oulipian re-imagining of the Epithalamium, a traditional poetic form which celebrates bride and groom. In Perec's version, the basic rule is that the letters used are restricted to those of the names of the betrothed. In Mathews' 5-part Epithalamium, a further refinement was added, limiting the letters of the first section to those of the bride's name, the second to those of the groom's, alternating until the final section, where the letters of both names are freely mixed. It sounds complicated, and is, especially when you consider the strict alphabet of this bride, j-u-d-i-t-h-k-a-z-a-n-s, and this groom, i-r-v-n-g-w-e-n-m-a. But what results is a gorgeous rendering of two distinct, isolate, fully-composed entities, finally coming together in a union richer than the sums of each. It is a marriage of language, in other words, to celebrate a marriage of friends.

Until now, Harry Mathews's Epithalamium for Judith Kazantzis and Irving Weinman, with collages by Marie Chaix, has been available only to those friends who attended the wedding of Judith and Irving on February 22, 1998, and received one of the ninety-three copies printed by the Grenfell Press. By special arrangement with Mathews and Chaix, we have created a digital version of the Epithalamium, following the design of the original. Click here to view the Epithalamium as a series of images in a pop-up window. Click here to download a .pdf of the Epithalamium, which will allow you to magnify text size as desired.

Ghosty Men

The Paper Chase

By FRANZ LIDZ
Published: October 26, 2003
New York Times


Correction Appended

MY father never had much use for fairy tales. The fifth of five brothers raised in a one-bedroom tenement on the Lower East Side, he preferred real-life grotesqueries. And so at bedtime, I would listen raptly to his urban horror stories, tales that filled the dark with chimera, bogeymen, golems.

The most macabre was the tale of the Collyer Brothers, the hermit hoarders of Harlem. In lugubrious tones not unlike Boris Karloff's, my father described the vague aura of evil that had endowed the four-story brownstone on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street for much of the 1930's and 40's. It was there, barricaded in a sanctuary of junk, that the blind and bedridden Homer Collyer lived with his devoted younger brother, Langley, the elderly scions of an upper-class Manhattan family.

And it was there that they amassed one of the world's legendary collections of urban junk, a collection so extraordinary that their accomplishment, such as it was, came to represent the ultimate New York cautionary tale.

The Collyer brothers' saga confirms a New Yorker's worst nightmare: crumpled people living in crumpled rooms with their crumpled possessions, the crowded chaos of the city refracted in their homes. It's not that Gothamites hoard more than other people; it's that they have less room to hoard in.

Even now, after more than a half century, the Collyer name still resonates. New York City firefighters refer to an emergency call to a junk-jammed apartment as a ''Collyer.'' The brothers are recalled whenever a recluse dies amid an accumulation of junk; as a middle-aged woman snapped at her parents in a Roz Chast cartoon in a recent issue of The New Yorker: ''You guys never throw anything out! You're starting to live like the COLLYER BROTHERS.''

The elderly Collyers were well-to-do sons of a prominent Manhattan gynecologist and an opera singer. Homer had been Phi Beta Kappa at Columbia, where he earned his degree in admiralty law. Langley was a pianist who had performed at Carnegie Hall.

The brothers had moved to Harlem in 1909 when they were in their 20's and the neighborhood was a fashionable, and white, suburb of Manhattan. They became more and more reclusive as the neighborhood went shabby on them, booby-trapping their home with midnight street pickings and turning it into a sealed fortress of ephemera, 180 tons of it by the end. Children chucked rocks at their windows and called them ''ghosty men.''

My father recounted in great detail the rotting decadence of what had been a Victorian showplace. The Collyers had carved a network out of the neck-deep rubble. Within the winding warrens were tattered toys and chipped chandeliers, broken baby carriages and smashed baby grands, crushed violins and cracked mantel clocks, moldering hope chests crammed with monogrammed linen.

Homer went blind in the mid-30's and was crippled by rheumatism in 1940. His brother nursed him, washed him, fed him a hundred oranges a week in a bizarre attempt to cure his blindness and saved newspapers for him to read when he regained his sight. Hundreds of thousands of newspapers.

Langley was buried in an avalanche of rubbish in 1947 when he tripped one of his elaborate booby traps while bringing Homer dinner. Thanks to my father, I knew all the particulars: how Homer had starved to death, how Langley's body had been gnawed by rats, how the police had searched the city for Langley for nearly three weeks while he lay entombed in the debris of his own house. To my 7-year-old ears, the cruel twist was deliciously gruesome: Homer and Langley had been killed by the very bulwarks they had raised to keep the world out of their lives.

The shadowy world of Homer and Langley was resurrected this month in an exhibition at the Inquiring Mind Gallery in Saugerties, N.Y. In this show, Richard Finkelstein, a Manhattan painter, has reimagined the brothers' lives in 17 black and white drawings called ''Love and Squalor on 128th Street.'' One sketch depicts the brothers dancing in the debris before an audience of female mannequins, the women in their lives.

A murder mystery by Mark Saltzman called ''Clutter: The True Story of the Collyer Brothers Who Never Threw Anything Out,'' opens next February in Burbank, Calif. And last year the Collyers popped up at the Gramercy Arts Theater on East 23rd Street in ''The Dazzle,'' a period drama by Richard Greenberg that was loosely based on the brothers' story.

Very loosely. Like nearly everyone else who invokes the Collyers, the playwright acknowledged he knew next to nothing about them. Mr. Greenberg was less interested in historical accuracy than the ''idea'' of the Collyers; to him, they were just ''two people propelled by the romantic possibilities of life, although perhaps not as we might conventionally define them.''

''Some see eccentrics as 'the other,' and in terms of pure irrationality,'' Mr. Greenberg added in a interview published around the time the play was produced. ''But I see such eccentrics as having a very pure logic, although their needs are different from most of ours.''

Plenty of Nothing

New York has long teemed with pack rats who can't pass a garbage bin without lifting the lid. A few became legends.

In the 1940's, a woman named Theresa Fox was found dead in the kitchen of her three-room hovel -- somewhere in Queens, according to one newspaper account -- with $1,300 stashed in the ratty stockings she wore. Ms. Fox, who was said to have owned property in Brooklyn valued at $100,000, had 100 one-pound bags of coffee in her cupboard, and 500 cans of evaporated milk stuffed in her mattress. The drawers of her bedroom bureau brimmed with sugar, and dozens of loaves of bread were stacked against the walls in a fieldstone pattern.

During the 50's, a shabby, plucked sparrow of a man named Charles Huffman was found dead in a Brooklyn street with no money in his pockets; the police said his $7-a-week room was piled with bank books and more than $500,000 in stock certificates.

And in the 60's a realtor named George Aichele, who lived at 61 East 86th Street in Yorkville, was found dead in a dim catacomb of trash and cash. Amid the stacks of old newspapers, heaps of used razor blades, drifts of pipes and birdcages and zithers was a paper bag containing a single penny and a note explaining that it had been found in front of the house in December 1957.

''New Yorkers live in such tight spaces that hoarding gets out of control faster,'' said Kate Sherman, director of special projects at the New York Service Program for Older People on West 91st Street. She says if New Yorkers moved more, they might edit their junk more. ''But with rent control,'' she conceded, ''people tend to stay in the same place.''

Last year Ms. Sherman gave a lecture at the center where she works titled ''I've Got Plenty of Nothing: the Dynamics of Hoarding,'' in which she cast the malady as materialism run amok.

''Part of it is about living in this age and society where there are so many papers to keep track of,'' she said. ''It is really hard to know what to throw away. And if you are having memory problems or do not have the energy to take bales of paper to the recycling area, it can easily get out of hand. But I think with extreme hoarders, there's a level of it that's kind of beyond rational explanation.''

Social scientists disagree as to exactly what causes obsessive hoarding. In its December 1960 issue, the Journal of Chronic Diseases branded recluses like the Collyers ''deviants who are often surrounded by mystery and violence.''

It is a description that doesn't sit well with Randy Frost, a professor of clinical psychology at Smith College and a consultant to the New York City Hoarding Task Force, a group formed this year by the Weill Medical College of Cornell University to examine hoarding among the elderly.

''If, by deviancy, the researchers meant sinister, that's not true,'' Professor Frost said. ''If anything, hoarders tend to be avoidant and afraid.''

And violent? ''Only in situations where a hoarder's possessions are being taken away,'' he said. ''What is true is that hoarders usually wind up isolated.'' He cited a Boston study of hoarders aged 65 and older. ''Fifty-five percent of them had never been married,'' he said, noting that the figure for the general population is 5 percent.

Secrets of the Pharaohs

Historical accounts of hoarding date back 5,400 years ago to the necropolises of ancient Egyptians. In those vast cities of the dead, rulers of the Memphite dynasties were buried in mastabas, oblong tombs with sloping sides and flat roofs.

Huge storerooms above and below the late pharaoh were jam-packed with his possessions, a collection that typically included furniture, clothing, magical amulets, tools, weapons, game boards, jewelry, jugs of wine and lunch boxes laden with mummified ducks and geese.

''I wouldn't call it junk, exactly,'' said Peter Piccione, a Brooklyn-born Egyptologist who teaches at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.

What would he call it?

''Stuff,'' Professor Piccione replied. ''The ancient Egyptians believed a pharaoh couldn't lead much of a life in the afterlife without his stuff. Basically, they thought you could take it with you.''

All the Collyer brothers took with them were secrets. Though Homer's death and the search for Langley were front-page staples in New York City's 12 daily newspapers, not even the most tenacious reporter could explain why these sons of privilege had been subsumed by their stuff.

'My Junk Is Like a Friend'

The brothers have haunted me ever since my father told me his cautionary tales, and presumably they also haunted the two congenital collectors who helped me tell the brothers' story.

One was Carl Schoettler, a feature writer for The Baltimore Sun and lifelong bibliophile whose apartment is a dark forest of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of books. Together we visited the infamous corner at 128th Street and Fifth Avenue, now a vest-pocket park that is home to a dozen sycamores. We made a pilgrimage to Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Homer and Langley are buried along with Mae West and Paderewski, the pianist whose notices drove Langley from the concert stage. We talked to old Harlem residents who claimed to have actually met the elusive Collyers.

My other collaborator was my Uncle Arthur, 88, so habitual a hoarder that my mother used to call him the lost Collyer brother. Small, bent and eternally boyish, Uncle Arthur dresses in layers of Salvation Army overcoats kept closed with rusty safety pins. Like a Beckett tramp, he holds his pants up with bits of rope.

Uncle Arthur was a 19-year-old novice collector when he moved to a tiny tenement apartment in Harlem, only three blocks from the Collyer homestead. He already knew that Homer and Langley were the preeminent junk collectors.

''I'd walk by their house and wonder what of value did they have,'' he said. ''You got to have brains to collect that much stuff.

''I always wanted to get in touch with them,'' he added. ''I always wanted to get in touch with anybody who collected as much as I did. They collected more. They had their junk up to the windows. I didn't have that much.''

Uncle Arthur does, however, have quite lot, and he has turned squalor into an art form. Until his collection was ''deaccessioned'' three years ago, nearly every cubic inch of his one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, was full, and virtually every surface was covered with heaps of stuff that mounted toward the ceiling. Uncle Arthur hates a vacuum.

Tangled mounds of twine and electrical cord climbed up gentle rolling hills of newspapers still in their plastic sleeves. A riot of shirts and jackets slopped out of stained grocery bags and onto the grubby carpet. The stove and the kitchen counters disappeared from view, lost under a couple of feet of cans, bottles and Calder-like mobiles that Uncle Arthur had fashioned out of clothespins and coat hangers. The bedroom closet was packed with newspapers from the Carter administration; the refrigerator, with English muffins from the end of the Reformation.

He shares the apartment with Wagging II, his cat. ''Collecting junk is my hobby,'' he said. ''My junk is like a friend, another person, another cat.''

An urban prospector, Uncle Arthur trails through the streets of Brooklyn, collecting the detritus of the New York night. He finds his booty in back alleys, subways cars, train stations.

''Believe it or not, I've never bought a single piece of junk,'' Uncle Arthur said. ''I found it all on the street. You'd be surprised what you find once you look. Pennies, nickels, dimes, safety pins, jacks, dice, mirrors, small bottles, dresser handles, screws, wire, cord, moth balls, cigarette packs, pens that say different things on them, bullets.''

He envied the space the Collyer brothers had in their 12-room house. Although by the time he got to Brooklyn in 1975, he was doing pretty well, he never quite got over the feeling that he never met the Collyers' high standards of junk connoisseurship. ''I save this, I save that,'' he said. ''I mix it all together, the good and the bad. So it's my fault.''

He particularly prizes first-edition magazines, bus transfers and parking tickets plucked from windshields. ''People just leave parking tickets on their cars,'' he said wonderingly. ''I must have found thousands of dollars' worth. Every day I could pick one up.''

My father used to claim that Uncle Arthur's hoarding was his way of ''channeling aggression and sublimating it.'' And there is perhaps a defensiveness behind Uncle Arthur's hobby. Like Langley Collyer, he builds barricades, and sets booby traps and nests inside his walls of junk. But he is incapable of aggression. The only time I've ever seen Uncle Arthur really get mad was when my father told him to give it up. The tiny folds that line his pale forehead are not engraved by anger but merely the result of squinting down at the sidewalk.

Uncle Arthur has his own theory as to what lies behind his hoarding. ''Maybe it's something I missed in my childhood,'' he said. ''Like something big. The thing is you don't have to pay for junk. It's free.''

He's not insensitive. He knows that people sniff at his junk, and frequently. ''My landlord doesn't like my hobby,'' he conceded. ''But what can he do? I've got a lease.''


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Photos: The day in March 1947 when the Collyers' mansion on Fifth Avenue and 128th Street was raided, above; the removal of a Steinway piano, above left; relatives examining the ruins, above right; the search for Langley's body, below, and, bottom, Arthur Lidz, a slightly less compulsive pack rat, with his nephew Franz. (Photos by Top left, top right and below, Corbis/Bettmann; above, The New York Times; bottom, Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)(pg. 9); Langley Collyer, below, and the mess in which he and his brother, Homer, lived for decades. Their saga confirms a New Yorker's worst nightmare. (Photos by Top left and top right, Corbis/Bettmann; above, The New York Times)(pg. 1)


Franz Lidz is the author of ''Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders,'' being published this month by Bloomsbury.

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Correction: November 2, 2003, Sunday A front-page article in this section last Sunday about the reclusive Collyer brothers referred incorrectly to another grave in Cypress Hills Cemetery, where the Collyers are buried. The pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski, who died in 1941, is not buried there now; his heart was placed in a crypt there in 1945 but moved in 1986 to the Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Doylestown, Pa. A plaque in Cypress Hills still marks the site.

On Schizophrenic Poetry

To cite this Article: Bakare, Muideen Owolabi 'Morbid and Insight Poetry: A Glimpse at Schizophrenia through the Window of Poetry', Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, 4:3, 217 - 224

Abstract

Creativity, language, and psychotic disorders may share a common neurological and evolutionary background. These processes are uniquely human and may converge in poetic expression that illuminates the inner world of patients suffering from schizophrenia. Two types of poetry that may be written by patients with schizophrenia are identified as morbid and insight poetry. Clinicians are urged to pay attention to the writings of their patients and encourage them to document the experiences of their illness. Writing may help patients gain an in-depth insight into their own inner world and the nature of their illness. Poetry may also help clinicians understand the peculiar individual psychodynamics of their patients' illness.

Keywords: morbid; insight; poetry; language; psychosis; schizophrenia; creativity

Introduction

Individuals with mental health disorders may experience heightened creativity during the course of their illness (Andreasen, 1987; Buck & Kramer, 1977; Claman, 2001; Rihmer, Gonda, & Rihmer, 2006). Patients with schizophrenia, for example, may find an expressive outlet through writing poetry (Buck & Kramer; Miliavskii, 1981; von Keyserlingk, 1978; Zapotoczky, 2005). As individuals with schizophrenia cope with various phases of their condition, the quality of their behaviors and interactions may vary considerably. As such, a particular interest was sparked in exploring the poetic expression of individuals with schizophrenia during periods of remission and active phases of their disorder. From interactions with patients with schizophrenia as they constructed their poetry, and reviews of their work, two broad categories of poetry were identified. Morbid poetry is poetry written while the individual with schizophrenia is experiencing the worst of the disease. Conversely, insight poetry is our term for schizophrenic poetic expression while individuals are lucid and in remission. It is suggested that practitioners can assess the mental well-being of individuals with schizophrenia by analyzing the language and quality of their poems. This can be helpful for clinicians to understand the mental processes of their clients with schizophrenia.

SCHIZOPHRENIA AND ITS ETIOLOGY CONTROVERSY

  Gelder, Gath, Mayou, and Cowen (1996) suggest that schizophrenia is a complex disorder and may be the result of a constellation of brain dysfunctions instead of a single diagnosis as presently classified in modern classifications such as the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10; World Health Organization [WHO], 2007) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2000). However, a recent argument suggesting schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders might originate from a single gene located in a specific region of the brain associated with language development is worth attention (Berlim, Mattevi, Belmonte-de-Abreu, & Crow, 2003; Crow, 1997, 2000). For this recent argument to be fully applicable, presumption of a theory of unitary psychosis with severity continuum needs to be made.

LANGUAGE, POETRY, AND PSYCHOSIS

  Poetry allows access to the inner life, thought process, and emotions of the writer. Poetry can serve as an outlet for emotional expression and description of experience, or it can expand into surrealism. Surrealistic poetry may read like the thought processes and experiences of those suffering from schizophrenia (Al'tima, 1995; Graves & Schermer, 1998; Lombardo, 2007; Powell, 1998; Rhodes, Dowker, & Claridge, 1995; Zapotoczky, 2005). Therefore, it is not surprising that poem writing has been noted as a common phenomenon in patients with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders (Buck & Kramer, 1997; Miliavskii, 1981; von Keyserlingk, 1978; Zapotoczky). The assertion that schizophrenia and language development may be tied together genetically (Crow, 2008) may explain why schizophrenia perpetuates despite its reproductive disadvantage. Crow's work on the genetics of language and psychosis may also explain the associations between schizophrenia, other psychotic disorders, and poetry as a function of brain development and heredity.

MORBID POETRY AND SCHIZOPHRENIA

  Part of the criteria for making diagnosis of schizophrenia is the presence of functional thought disorders (Gelder et al., 1996), which can be revealed in verbal and written expressions. Poems of individuals with schizophrenia during their defective cognitive states can offer a great insight into their thought processes and emotions. Specifically, poetry writing during a morbid state could reveal a peculiar play with words, loosening of associations, derailment of thought, and formation of new words (i.e., neologisms). Holistically, morbid poetry may also offer insight into the delusional themes expressed by patients in their writing. Clinically, Miliavskii (1981) suggested that verses of patients written in the active phase of their schizophrenia could serve as a differential diagnostic tool, helping clinicians assess the severity of the disorder.

Case Illustration of Morbid Poetry

  R is a 44-year-old male with a diagnosis of schizophrenia who was in treatment at Federal Neuro-psychiatric Hospital, New Haven, Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria. R wrote several poems, and two of his poems that seemed to be the best examples of his variable cognitive states were analyzed. The first was written when he was acutely ill and mentally unstable. The second was written when he began his recovery from the acute episode of his psychotic illness. Reproduced below is the first poem, titled, “Accord is Dead,” written in his acute morbid state:

Vanity fair
Of mythology and superstition
Of the moon and stars
Land and sea, sun and sea
Hollandis
Victory boogie woogie by mondriaan
Van Gogh, the sky over Holland
Waterloo plein temple of Budda
China world focus
Of the cross, the soul and of the heart
The loop baan mode, Greek specialiteiten
Paradiso, Hotel Old Dutch
P& T, PTT, No limit records
Oya! Ali baba of turkey? Ali baba of Lebanon?
Camel lights, tiger by the tail
It is Ali again in Venice
Vlisso textites
Familiar variety, caballero
Vlissingen, time will tell
Drummer! Kofi the drummer boy
Drumboy in Africa
Pakistan Linking - Hugo Boss woman
Air freshener misdefined by commission
Hugo Boss Number one of Chavez by Fidel
Acapulco, Mexico after dark
Jonas had a Gucci
London-Paris-Newyork, Cuba-Mexico-Brazil
OBJ with the queen
Some one called the white house
Metropole by night, kingsize
Antwerp, united we stand
How many licks?
Ecstacy the summary

Using the poem as a clinical tool, I found it lacked a key point other than the attempt at citing different regions of the world. Also, there was a peculiar play on words, which was curious and seemed to suggest some comprehensibleness to this poem. There was an obvious loosening of associations and formation of new words. The observation in this poem is consistent with the recommendations of Miliavskii (1981) to use poetry as a diagnostic tool. There were also markers in this poem consistent with some of the diagnostic criteria needed to make a diagnosis of schizophrenia (APA, 2000; WHO, 2007).
The second poem, titled “Accord Concordiel,” was written by the same patient during a more stable mental state:

Above the drumbeats of china
Above the decayed ruins of Egypt
To the world we left behind
Adam and Eve
To a new world order
The C.I.S
To structure and adjust the new era
Robert Mugabe and the white farmers of Zimbabwe
Definite and absolute
The state of independence must be
The rewards and gains of desirable labor becomes state of affair
Of a common interest and general perspective
The right of individuals becomes the rule of law
For all we are and have
Rules of expectation and achievement become unchanged

A close examination of this work in relation to the first poem revealed a lesser degree of play on words, neologisms, and loosening of associations. There appeared to be a definitive goal to which the patient was alluding, possibly a unified world and an egalitarian society. This particular poem seemed to have more meaning when compared to the first poem. Despite this poetry showing some stable thought patterns, I still considered this poem as morbid. Morbid poetry may be assessed along a continuum, with some poems expressing severe surrealistic qualities, while others may display a mix of rational thought and defective thought process. Other researchers have explored how poetry may be a clinical lens for understanding a patient with schizophrenia (Maia & Jorge, 2001).

Clinical Significance of Morbid Poetry

  One clinical advantage of assessing morbid poetry at different stages of a psychotic illness is that it can help assess psychopathology and mental state of the patient. Analysis of the written text may help confirm a diagnosis. It can also help assess a patient's response to treatment by illustrating the differences in coherence and thinking. This was evidenced in the previous poems written at different intervals of the patient's illness. These written works may help clinicians determine when an individual with schizophrenia is at the brink of a lapse into psychotic thinking.

INSIGHT POETRY AND SCHIZOPHRENIA

  When individuals with schizophrenia experience lucid and coherent cognitive states, they may also express themselves poetically. This particular kind of poetry is often found in patients who have insight into the nature of their illness. Insight poetry often incorporates some features of psychodynamic psychotherapy (Wallach, 2005) and cognitive behavioral therapy (Tolton, 2004) to bring about the process of healing, recovery, and adaptation in the affected patients. Therefore, while insight poetry may also serve as a diagnostic tool, this kind of written expression may have therapeutic advantages as well.

Case Illustration of Insight Poetry

  The healing process of insight poetry written by people who suffer from mental disorders associated with psychotic symptoms is well documented (Hayashi, 1998; Powell, 1998; Tolton, 2004). Tolton shared a first-person account of how insight poetry helped him walk through his illness. Taken from his work are two poems partly reproduced below as illustration:

Psychosis
Your delusive way of thinking
Makes you behave eccentrically
And you just don't know you're poorly
Hypersensitivity (Tolton, p. 472)

The above poem showed some element of cognitive restructuring and behavioral modification. It also showed a change in perception of situation as documented in Tolton's account of “How I saw my illness” and “How I see my illness” (Tolton, 2004). Reproduced in part below is another poem in the first-person account of Tolton.

Psychosis, Disturbed Thoughts, Light and Hope
That thought was delusion
I've nipped it in the bud
I can recognize thought rubbish
And split factual from the dud (p. 472)

The above poem also showed some cognition restructuring. The author wrote about recognizing signs of his illness and revealed his ability to differentiate between reality and delusional fantasy.

Clinical Significance of Insight Poetry

Insight poetry may serve several clinical purposes. First, this kind of writing may help clinicians assess patients' recovery by highlighting self-awareness and cognitive changes. It could also help patients understand their inner world and work as a potential coping mechanism by allowing patients to document their change and relevant struggles. By paying attention to the poetic expression of their patients, clinicians can use this tool to better empathize with and relate to their patients' experiences. As clinicians begin to know the subtle nuances of a patient's expression, they can become attuned to changes in the poetry and respond therapeutically. Previous insight poems may work as reminders for patients about their awareness and may be used as examples of therapeutic goals, especially after a relapse. In this way, each person may experience individualized, patient-centered care.

CONCLUSION

  Poetic expression offers patients and clinicians an outlet to explore and document the full range of emotional and cognitive expressions. As seen on a spectrum of healing and illness, morbid poetry represents a form of communication that illustrates the surrealistic quality of the schizophrenic mind. In light of the tie between language and psychotic disorders, morbid poetry may offer a glimpse into the ebb and flow of chronic psychosis. As individuals progress in treatment, their words may move from disorganization and chaos to self-reflection and healing. When this shift happens, a new form of expression, called insight poetry, emerges. While both insight poetry and morbid poetry can be used as assessment lenses, insight poetry offers patients their personalized story of healing. Schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders result in isolation and distress for affected individuals. Poetry is one outlet to help them express their world and connect with a helping professional. Professionals may find poetry helpful to gaining a deeper understanding of their patients' stories of illness and wellness.

REFERENCES

• 1. Al'tima, IaA (1995) The neuropsychological hypothesis of the mechanisms of poetic inspiration. Zh Vyssh Nerv Deiat Im I P Pavlova 45 , pp. 227-241.
• 2. American Psychiatric Association (2000) Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders text rev 4th, Author , Washington, DC
• 3. Andreasen, N. C. (1987) Creativity and mental illness: Prevalence rates in writers and their first degree relatives. American Journal of Psychiatry 151 , pp. 1650-1656.
• 4. Berlim, M. T. , Mattevi, B. S. , Belmonte-de-Abreu, P. and Crow, T. J. (2003) The etiology of schizophrenia and the origin of language: Overview of a theory. Comprehensive Psychiatry 44 , pp. 7-14. [ csa ] [ crossref ]
• 5. Buck, L. A. and Kramer, A. (1977) Creative potential in schizophrenia. Psychiatry 40 , pp. 146-162.
• 6. Claman, H. N. (2001) Creativity and illness: Christopher Smart and Samuel Johnson. The Pharos 64:3 , pp. 4-7.
• 7. Crow, T. J. (1997) Is schizophrenia the price that Homo sapiens pays for language. Schizophrenia Research 28 , pp. 127-141. — ? [ crossref ] [ csa ]
• 8. Crow, T. J. (2000) Schizophrenia as the price that Homo sapiens pays for language: A resolution of the central paradox in the origin of the species. Brain Research Reviews 31 , pp. 118-129. [ crossref ]
• 9. Crow, T. J. (2008) The 'big bang' theory of the origin of psychosis and the faculty of language. Schizophrenia Research 102 , pp. 31-52. [ crossref ]
• 10. Gelder, M. , Gath, D. , Mayou, R. and Cowen, P. Gelder, M. , Gath, D. , Mayou, R. and Cowen, P. (eds) (1996) Schizophrenia and schizophrenia-like disorders. Oxford textbook of psychiatry pp. 246-293. 3rd, Oxford University Press , New York
• 11. Graves, M. and Schermer, V. L. (1998) The wounded male persona and the mysterious feminine in the poetry of James Wright: A study in the transformation of the self. Psychoanalytic Review 85 , pp. 849-869. [ csa ]
• 12. Hayashi, Y. (1998) The expressive psychopathology of the Japanese poet, Sakutaro Hagiwara. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 52 , pp. 621-627. [ crossref ] [ csa ]
• 13. Lombardo, G. T. (2007) An inquiry into the sources of poetic vision: Part I - The path to inspiration. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 35 , pp. 351-371.
• 14. Maia, R. M. and Jorge, M. S. (2001) Understanding the person with schizophrenia from the point of view of Merleau-Ponty. Revista Brasileira de Enfermagem 54 , pp. 558-567.
• 15. Miliavskii, V. M. (1981) Psychopathology of poetry writing of schizophrenic patients while ill. Zh Nevropatol Psikhiatr Im S S Korsakova 81:1 , pp. 104-108.
• 16. Powell, C. (1998) The nameless father in the poetry and life of Francis Webb. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 32 , pp. 488-495. [informaworld]
• 17. Rhodes, N. , Dowker, A. and Claridge, G. (1995) Subject matter and poetic devices in psychotics' poetry. British Journal of Medical Psychology 68:Pt. 4 , pp. 311-321.
• 18. Rihmer, Z. , Gonda, X. and Rihmer, A. (2006) Creativity and mental illness. Psychiatr Hung 21 , pp. 288-294.
• 19. Tolton, J. C. (2004) First person account: How insight poetry helped me to overcome my illness. Schizophrenia Bulletin 30 , pp. 469-472. [ csa ]
• 20. von Keyserlingk, H. (1978) Literary creations of schizophrenics. Psychiatr Neurol Med Psychol (Leipz) 30 , pp. 166-172.
• 21. Wallach, M. (2005) Listening to Oedipus: Two poems by sons about fathers. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 33:1 , pp. 191-206.
• 22. http://apps.who.int/classifications/apps/icd/icd10online/ — World Health Organization. (2007). International statistical classification of diseases and related health problems (10th rev.)
• 23. Zapotoczky, H. G. (2005) Poetry and schizophrenia. Fortschr Neurol Psychiatr 73:Suppl 1 , pp. 84-87.

The Allegory and the Archive-----Vanessa Place

clipped from Conceptual Writing 101 Blog

The Allegory and the Archive/ Vanessa Place
***(*()()*)()(*)(*))(()**((((((********************************(*()*)(*(*()()))(**********


But I must constantly repeat that I say all this in connection with repetition. Kierkegaard Je ne suis point la justice. Place


With luck, I ended yesterday on guilt and shame; now that you are in a proper frame of mind, we will consider—thankfully more briefly—allegory and the archive, which are, after all, ways of mediating and instantiating both. That is to say, how memorials are forgotten and made.

Allegory (from Greek: αλλος, allos, "other", and αγορεσειν, agoreuein, "to speak in public") is a figurative mode of representation conveying a meaning other than the literal. Medieval thinking accepted allegory as having a reality underlying any rhetorical or fictional uses. The allegory was as true as the facts of surface appearances.(Wikipedia)

So Wikipedia defines the allegory historically, as ahistorically represented in Wikipedia. One of the confusions about conceptualism appears to be this issue of the allegorical. We know what allegory was originally, Dante‟s Commedia, Bunyan‟s Progress, Langland‟s Plowman, and my copy of The Marvelous Career of Theodore Roosevelt (and the story of his African Trip). And we all remember that allegory is extended metaphor, wherein objects (signifiers) within a narrative equate with meanings (signifiers) outside the narrative. That there is always a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning, that synthesis between narratives lies with the reader, that personification within the literal is not determinative, and that the allusive is not necessarily the allegorical, but the allegorical is very often allusive. That the allegorical was
further defined by Dante as polysemous in the sense of relating to past events (typological), present events (moral) and future event (anaological). That then Benjamin came with his ange of history, and, upon contemplating the state of German tragic drama, took the baroque too literally and found allegory confounded. So the neue allegory was the skull and the ruin, fractured renditions of imaginary castles.

Wikipedia is ahistorical because it remains paradigmatically unfixed. There is no “edition” or publish date by which to historicize any one entry or the archive as a whole.1

Benjamin wrote extensively and cribbed copiously on Baudelaire, poet of the allegorical; in his Passengenwerk (The Arcades Project), Benjamin writes of his desire to relate the figure of the modern and the figure of allegory, while quoting Baudelaire, who concluded that “almost all our originality comes from the stamp that time imprints upon our feelings.” Benjamin later quotes a 1933 edition of Les Fleurs du mal, which notes in turn that Baudelaire “always concentrates on the inner life, as Dante focused on dogma.” Thus, allegory, via Benjamin via Baudelaire via his 1933 editor is the psychic center that holds, or doesn‟t, as the allegorical internal/external (es-ternal) whole, represented by Dante, is crumbled. The modern allegory is one of despair, melancholy, the man on the move, motored by egoism, mystification, and purely private conversation.

Conceptualism similarly maintains there is no single allegory, and no potential allegorical loss. One of the legacies of post-modernism is that polysemousness is as promised; one of the differences with post-modernism is that there is no ache for, or cognition of, truth, not even in the absence or lack thereof. Rather, there is a recognition of the truth of the soup in which the
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individuated we and you stew. So that there is no divide between subject and object, hence the conceptual “sobject.” Defined by me in Notes on Conceptualisms as existing in an ongoing procedural loop, self-eclipsed by degrees. Thus the antique notion of dogma, or sacred text, or single allegory is as impossible as the modern conceit of sacred interiority. In this sense, all text is equally sacred in conceptualism. Sacred in the sense delineated by Giorgio Agamben as the man who murders, who can be killed for this murder, but who cannot be sacrificed—the murder of the murderer cannot be sanctified. His guilt makes him the exception to both the rule against murder and the rule favoring sacrifice, i.e., giving to the gods. In this way, Agamben‟s sacred man proves the rule that only the sovereign can determine who dies. In conceptualism, all text is sacred, but there is no sovereign, not even the sovereign that once was or was once. Moreover, all text is equally sacred, the living dead of the world, as text has overtaken text, subsumed text, overwritten text, but there‟s not time or space sense to this incessant juxtapose and jockeying, like amazon sales ratings, you may be #32 one day and 4,455,658 another. The blog hit or the Twitter-miss. On the other hand, you can also be issued in limited chapbook form, or spring, fully-formed via print-on- demand, i.e. fetishized or simply snapped into instantiation. No king or king of king determines who dies, for no one dies, just as no one decisively is. On the other hand, one man‟s garbage is another‟s madeleine. Our allegory is the abyss, but our abyss is a mountain, our mountain an archive.

Benjamin reported Baudelaire‟s condemnation, in 1852, of “the puerile Utopia of the school of art for art’s sake” Let us consider, in our post-Duchampian, Wikipedian time, the puerile utopia of the school of anything for any other sake, or, in other words, of anything that is immune from becoming art. So that art that may be extracted or pressed, like oil, from
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everything. Is this true? This changes the question from the utility of art to the art, that is to say, the excess or the residual, of utility.

Though I might aside here that my sense of ahistoricity is itself historical, and specifically American, as geography is always history. We are a people that like to be history-free, a people who pride themselves on assimilation of the melting variety, one in which it is good to fit and fit in and be as ordinary as your average, as uniquely fungible as any perfect snowflake or new masculinist lyric. So we URL our world, which is an historic gesture, historically bound, we‟re Whitmanesque sans Whitman, American without England, though English all the hypertrophic way.

Whereas conceptual art institutionalized the dematerialized, such as Lee Lozano‟s general strike piece (refusing to engage with the “art world”) and Yves Klein‟s proto-work Le Vide (The Void, an essentially empty gallery space, complete with opening party), conceptual poetry valorizes the immaterial. Immaterial meaning irrelevant, such as the yesterday‟s news of Kenneth Goldsmith‟s Day or the unimportant, such as the suburban banality of Rob Fitterman‟s Sprawl, or the neatly eviscerated, such as Craig Dworkin‟s grammatically-correct and contentless Parse or the scientifically and socially denuded, such as Kim Rosenfield‟s re:evolution, or my own vomitous—50k words = 1 sentence—baroque in Dies or the effectively impotent, such as my Statement of Facts. Immateriality also having to do with unreadability. In this sense, “pure” conceptualism is a surface allegory about unreadability because something has already been read (such as the NYTimes) or cannot be “read” (such as grammatical structures), and impure or sampled conceptual work concerns unreadabilty as the gaps and chunks in the mashup (such as when high evolutionary theory meets advice on the lay science of living), and the baroque is unreadable because its de trop (such as war
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itself). If modern art is that which thoroughly exploits a medium‟s surface, and the remainder in Lacan (the psychologist of the post-modern), is that part of the Subject which cannot be thoroughly absorbed into the Other, or the lack in the Other that defines the Subject by way of excess, then conceptualism (heretofore unpsychoanalyized) is concerned with the way that the surface excess of text mirrors the excess of the remainder. That is to say, what cannot be read. What is immaterial because it is dull and contentless, dense and difficult, erased or rococco‟d. These are specific ideas about immateriality, evidenced in specific allegorical forms. By specific, I mean multiple.

Thus, just as ahistoricity is a point of perspective, not a statement of fact, allegory is currently the alienation of realism from the real, and the real from the Real. By allegorizing the real, conceptualism emphasizes its non-reality, its material fabrication, its ubiquitous status as matter of fact, its essential uncontainability, its Reality. Newspapers, dictionaries, shopping mall directories, appellate briefs—all are represented outside their natural habitats, i.e. those webs of ethical and aesthetic conditions and assumptions, including the condition and assumption of communication itself, i.e., readability itself. This is when thinkership takes over and overcomes readership, when readership supplants thinking in the sense of the supplementary. Though it should be noted that there‟s a fight to the photo-finish.

In an appellate brief, statements of facts are that portion of the brief which presents, in narrative form, evidence that was presented at trial. Evidence presented at trial typically consists of two stories, one articulated by the prosecution, one by the defense. A story of guilt and a story of innocence. All stories are told under oath, all sworn to be true. They are “statements of fact.” In my book, Statement of Facts, I take statements of facts from appellate briefs that I‟ve written and represent them as poetry. The allegory here includes an allegory
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about law as subsumed by the case, the case as rhetorical gesture, as linguistic “fact.” The Law is revealed a speech act, a speech act that is fundamentally about witnessing.

The Law of the Father is Lacan‟s response to the Oedipal complex: the child perceives that the mother desires something, and tries to make itself into that something. When the child sees the father intervening in this aspiration, the child must submit to this intervention. If the child understands the intervening father as the representative of a larger social law, a law also followed by the mother, the child will be non-pathologically normalized. The Law of the Father is thus about witnessing and is thus always the allegory of language itself, of ordered interpolation. In Statement of Facts, the Law of the State is an allegory for the Law of the Father. So too with poetry and the Law of Poetry. All that poetry is is witness. On a case-by- case paradigmatic basis.

Agamben analogizes paradigm and allegory as the “singular case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes.” In this regard, Agamben distinguishes between the exemplar—that which is to be imitated—and the exemplum, that which gathers together “a new intelligible ensemble and in a new problematic context.” The archive is exemplum as it is the fusion between paradigmatic structure and institution. The archive creates a gesture of equivalency between things archived (i.e. contained within an archive). To do so, the archive must be authored, that is to say, signed. In other words, it is the authority of the archivist that creates the archive, that says these things are gathered together, to be read as one thing. Let‟s think about signatures for a moment. According to my Black‟s Law Dictionary, signature is “the act of putting one‟s name at the end of an instrument to attest its validity,” to sign something is to “give it effect as one‟s act.” Thus, signatures
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literally “effect what they figuratively express,” as noted by Thomas Aquinas, they efficiunt quod figurant, for, just as in the holy sacrament, the “effect depends on a signator.” In 17th century ontology, exemplified by the philosophy of Lord Edward Herbert of Chirbury, every being presents the signature of unity, unity of truth, truth of good: quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum.

In Roman law, the dies fasti were those days on which courts were open and justice could be administered, when the prætor could pronounce the three words—“do,” “dico,” and “addico.” “Do” is to grant or give, “dico” to speak, “addico” to award. These “triverbial days” were thus days of instantiation and articulation, of bringing into being by speaking. In Latin, the index is the sign, or an informer, that which shows by means of the word, just as the iudex is the one who says the law, and the vindex the one who takes the place of the accused and announces himself ready to suffer consequences of the proceedings. Thus raising the relationship between event and its evidence, evidence and its subject, and subject and its sobjective effect, which are the fundamental questions of the index.

To be archives, materials must be preserved for reasons other than those for which they were created or accumulated. (T.R. Schellenberg)

Archival art tends to manifest in some form of uniform. Andy Warhol archived his documentary stuff—all his documentary stuff: invitations, letters, photos, souvenirs—by regularly filling a series of regularly shaped cardboard boxes. Once one was full, it was taped shut and shipped off to storage. At the time of his death, he had created the archival work, Andy Warhol’s 610 Time Capsules, now neatly shelved in Pittsburgh. Similarly, Gerhard Richter‟s work Atlas, consists of a grid of same-sized framed photos of newspaper clippings,
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photos, and sketches; project was begun in 1964, and is ongoing. Note the role of the signator, for Richter produced some of the original material, and some he simply collected. Too, a number of the photos are reproduced in two forms: blurred and un-, or focused and un- . Too, note how the un- follows and defines the originary intent, alternating, that is to say, what is the image and what does it represent. Benjamin Buchloch‟s essay on Atlas notes that trauma (the originating trauma of WWII) is the one link that binds image to referent in the work‟s archaic photo montage/barrage. Hanna Darboven‟s great installation piece Kulturegeschichte 1880-1983 (Cultural History 1880-1983) was composed of 1,590 sheets and 19 sculptural objects: the work included postcards, pinups, documentary references, doorways, magazine covers, art catalogues, and kitsch. In her introductory essay for its Dia exhibition, Lynn Cooke describes the “libidinal exuberance” of Darboven‟s work, while at the same time, its pathos—there is no synthesis of referent or representation possible, no making it "readable‟—all that is is “the possibility, albeit qualified, of individual demurral.”

Raising for us the important question: what is “it,” that is to say, what is it that is to be read? In other words, while much conceptual poetry is archival, or has the features of the archive, and we can use archival art to understand this kind of conceptualism. It is perhaps more useful to consider how the archive helps us understand the allegorical, given that all conceptualism is allegorical.

Art historian and curator Charles Merewether has questioned the relationship between testimony and record, document and archive. In his consideration of aprés-bomb Japanese poetry and photography, Merewether quotes Allan Sekula‟s definition of a document as that which “entails a notion of legal or official truth, as well as a notion of proximity to and verification of an original event.” In post-Hiroshima Japanese photography, according to
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Merewether, truth is represented either as “a linear progression from past to present or by virtue of the fact that the camera as a mechanical form of reproduction provides a „source of factual knowledge‟ and „objective evidence. The document it produces therefore becomes the source and foundation of the archive and the archive itself authorizes the veracity of the document through its incorporation.‟” Merewether goes on to note that the post-bomb photographic archive became a comment on, not memory, but forgetting: “citation as representation” becoming the “mise-en-abyme of representation....” demonstrating “the impossibility of a lieux de mémoire.”2 The very fact of the very pictoral, i.e. representational, abundance creating a gap between seeing and having seen, a gap characterized by excess in refer-ent and representation, creating in turn, as Merewether puts it, “an archive of the unconscious, an archive of the avant-garde or an avant-garde archive.” Again invoking the remainder, the left-over of our own (arguably traumatic, though which trauma do you prefer, homecrown or soemthing with a more international flavour) present-tense existence, which poetry puts in the futur anterior—the what will have been.i\

For it is the sense of what will have been that incites documentation.

Marjorie Perloff‟s forthcoming Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by other means discusses the role of citation in poetry, of “poetry by other means.” Poetry persists as taste, as selection. But taste must be framed.

Some citations:
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The Raqs Media Collective/First Information Report (2003): “because a document‟s raw material is rhetoric, the practitioner has to constantly evolve a rhetoric of rhetoric to make documents yield.”

Paul Ricoeur: “If history is a true narrative, documents constitute its ultimate means of proof. They nourish its claim to be based on facts.”

Whether factual or no, proof of memory or of what I forget, archival art assumes there is no great difference between event and evidence. Or rather, it taps into a desire to synthesize event and evidence, which the archivist may satisfy or cock-tease. I assume there can be no real synthesis, for there is always a gap between event and testimony, even if the difference is that of the country fact of the witness. Agamben has described tradition as that in which the traumatic event is suppressed or preserved, which comports well with Merewether, and a number of other archive thinkers. I would like to introduce here another definition of archive, put forth by Foucault: archives as “systems of statements.” According to Foucault, “the archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.” That is to say, the archive defines statement‟s “system of its enunciability,” the “system of its functioning.”
Taking up from Foucault, Agamben distinguishes between the archive as a system of relations between the said and unsaid and testimony as a system of relations “between the inside and outside of langue, between the sayable and the unsayable in every language.” The archive presupposes the subject as a function “founded on the disappearance into the anonymous murmur of statements. In testimony, by contrast, the empty place of the subject becomes the decisive question.” Renée Green writes that “to be a subject and to bear witness
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are the same and that same is a remnant.” But we do not have to decide whether it is an object or link that is missing, whether the subject is functionary or functional. Put another way, we must not decide.

For if what a subject is is a witness and what a witness is is a subject, then subject is again defined in relation to object, that is to say an event, even a linguistic event, then we are back to our porous sobject. The one who witnesses some thing it is witnessed by. What is critical to conceptualism is that the one who witnesses is the one who decides what the allegory really is, what is really archived. The encounter is all that is provided. And as I have said, these encounters engage in the discourse of the slave, a discourse in which the signified, suppressing the fact of its excess, addresses the signifier with the language of the signifier, repeating the language of the signifier, producing the split subject, the subject pre-divided by language itself. So the key is not what trauma or whether trauma or this utopia or that utopia but the repetition that comes post-trauma and sans utopia, the Sisyphean move of reiteration, the patterned joy of the same all over again.

Kierkegaard put forth two metaphysics of time: recollection and repetition. Without one or the other, Kierkegaard writes, “all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise.” Recollection is the category favored by the Greeks, repetition “the new category that will be discovered.” In what has been called less a philosophical doctrine and more a thought paradigm, Kierkegaard encourages the “courage to will repetition,” arguing that, as contrasted to the causal bonds of recollection (the new traced to the old) the moment of repetition is when there is no causal chain (the old becomes new).

Why is the grid used in archival art? What is the allegory of the grid?
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Are grids serial? Are they simultaneous?

Is there a difference between the serial and the archival, and, if so, is the difference necessary? Eighteenth century police archives have been described by contemporary art historian Arlett Farge as having “un effet du réel,” an effect of the real, an effect of accident, of contingency; Duchamp referred to his 3 Standard Stoppages (1913), 3 lengths of tailor‟s thread dropped from a height of 1 meter onto a piece of painted canvas, as “du hasard en conserve” (some chance in a can). Later archival art has leaned on chance, and then play, so that Andrea Fraser‟s Information Room (1998) involved her installing the library archive of the Bern Kunsthalle in a gallery, the spines of the boxes unidentified so that visitors, invited to search through the archive, didn‟t know what they were looking through or for until the boxes had been duly dug through, creating chaos out of order. While a nice riposte to the original impulse of the archive, this of course simply reaffirms the conceit that the archive is fundamentally order. What I am proposing is that the archive is no more ordered than any autobiography, that is to say, a real one, one that exists serially only temporally, but is an act of happenstance and repetition, recollection and accident. In my Statement of Facts, I narrativize criminal acts, sexual assaults, many of which are the result of winning the bad luck lottery: you happened to have an uncle who loved you too much, I happened to leave that window open. It was hot. So was he. Each of the thirty-three texts in Statement of Facts forces the question posed by Deleuze: What does it mean, therefore, to affirm the whole of chance, every time, in a single time?”

Books are structurally serial, i.e., they occur sequentially. Books contain their own grid, i.e., the page. I question the relation between the grid and the archive, or rather wonder if there is
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something in the immaterial one that wants its material other. In his book on the document in art, Sven Spieker argues that nonarchival collections are tied to Lacan‟s Imaginary, the library of books to the Lacanian Symbolic, and that the 19thcentury version of the archive, a gesture against contingency and chaos, was the embodiment of the Real. (The Big Archive 6) Not to deluge you, but the Lacanian categories or orders may be roughly and mistakenly equated with their Freudian counterparts: the Imaginary is the realm of the ego, concerned with image, imagination, deception. It‟s illusions are wholeness, synthesis, similarity. The Symbolic may be linked to the superego in the sense that it is also a structuring field, a realm of law and order, essentially linguistic. (Lacan‟s most famous aphorism being “The unconscious is structured like a language.”)3 The discourse of the Symbolic is the unconscious, the topical regulation of desire. The Symbolic is concerned with radical alterity, the big (A)Other, and thus is always a triadic structure. It is the realm of death. (The realm of the Soviet artist Aleksander Rodechenko‟s Productivist archive of Lenin photographs, for example, though Rodechenko wanted a commonplace mythos of the man, i.e., a monument of Lenin created from snapshots.) The Real is that which is neither symbolic nor imaginary. The leftover, the remainder, the excess. The abyss upon which we sit.

To quote Lacan: “At issue, in an analogic or anamorphic form, is the effort to point once again to the fact that what we seek in the illusion is something in which the illusion as such in some way transcends itself, destroys itself, by demonstrating that it is only there as signifier.” According to Kierkegaard, it is only through repetition that there can be transcendence because consciousness itself is “a relation” that is the contradiction/collision between what is

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and what was which opens up into the third possibility. And it is this third possibility which caused Delueze to say that repetition “is against the law.”

To quote Stewie: “Again, again! I love repetition!” (“Bird is the Word” Family Guy)

And so we know that the “same” of repetition refers to the effect of repetition, which is a forced consideration of difference. And here I may have snuck in—finally—meaning. In theory, repetition is endless, the old turning new turning old turning new, the eternal return, the come again again. The Danish word for repetition is gentalgese, “re-taking,” “taking back.” If something is taken back, it can be given again. This makes repetition brutal, unrelenting. Nietzsche countered this horror by advocating amor fati, love of fate, “that one wants to have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.” The embrace of the same, which, again, leads to the new and different. In Tender Buttons, Stein wrote: “the difference is spreading.” Spreading as in spatial, spatial as in archival.

When I wrote in Notes on Conceptualism that all conceptual writing is allegorical, the question became what is it allegorical of—note the preposition. I did not include this preposition. I refuse to assume the prepositional position. If you, reader, writer, audience member, lecturer, do, then you have assumed the position of the enunciation rather than its reiteration. I have quoted a great deal in this paper, saying again what has been said before, gathering these statements into my own archive—this paper, this grid, this series. This allegory. The work I am interested in engages with various registers and disciplines outside those registers and discipline, or at least ostensibly outside, work that resists the false dyad of chance versus premeditation, but understands the triad that meditation is always canned chance—that perception is categorical as well as cant. And categories are contagious. It is a
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serious question to answer to what are you witness? It is a serious answer to question what is poetry?

Agamben writes, “Only he who perceives the indices and signatures of the archaic in the most modern and recent can be contemporary.” Put another way, and here I quote from the 1960 French film “Eyes Without A Face,” (Les yeux sans visage) “The future, Madam, is something we should have started a long time ago.” (“Le futur, Madame, est une chose que nous aurions dû commencer il y a bien longtemps.”)

To quote Walter Benjamin:

“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”

Poetry is witness. Put another way, quoting here from the 1960 French film “Eyes Without A Face,” (Les yeux sans visage) “The future, Madam, is something we should have started a long time ago.” (“Le futur, Madame, est une chose que nous aurions dû commencer il y a bien longtemps.”) What do you want with it?

Vanessa Place, Buffalo 3.2.10
________________
1 When recent news of a Brad and Angelina split hit the Times UK online, one reader said that, being 19, she would not believe it until it appeared on Wikipedia. Thus the idea that truth is a matter of majority opinion, subject to popular rewriting, is now understood by everyone, up to and including sophmores.
2 Baudrillard, “In the exact duplication of the Real, preferably by means of another reproductive medium— advertisement, photography, etc—and in the shift from medium to medium, the real vanishes and becomes an allegory of death. But even in its moment of destruction it exposes and affirms itself; it will become the quintessential real and it becomes the fetishism of the lost object.” (L’écharge symbolique et la mort
3 We could make a small discursive movement here to note how the Freudian notion of the unconscious is hermetic, archival—a mollusk (whose inside Benjamin analogized to the 19th century domestic interior), and the Lacanian is synchronic, temporally pulsating, opening & closing—a vagina (whose interior was not so analogized by Lacan, though he did note that the Other is always woman = A). And how many others unwittingly note this analogue via Clam, Bearded Clam, etc., mollusk-based synonyms for vagina. Is there something envaginated about repetition? As contrasted, for example, with the famous Aristotlian cathartic arc?
Vanessa Place, 2010. This originally appeared as a chapbook, No Press, Calgary 2010.

Pythagoras and Harmonia

On the Music of the Spheres

    

The Inner Self Helpers

Survival of Bodily Death

An Esalen Invitational Conference

December 6 - 11, 1998

Multiple Personality Disorder

Adam Crabtree

Adam Crabtree has been working in this field for many years and is friends with several prominent multiples including Chris Sizemore, who is Eve of the Three Faces of Eve (Thigpen, 1957). There is no single form the disorder takes and no one way to describe it. In the last Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the name was changed to Dissociative Identity Disorder, though in this discussion, he used the old nomenclature. A typical multiple has 20-30 personalities, many of which are fragmentary. They can be of different ages, sexual orientation, or sex. The striking thing about the disorder is the degree to which each personality feels separate and autonomous from the others. Each has a separate body image. Their hallucinatory abilities allow this sense to extend even to their reflections in a mirror; different personalities will perceive their self-imagined body, age, sex, and appearance. Furthermore, these different personalities may manifest unique handwriting, gestures, body language, and speech patterns and can have different preferences and even allergies. For example, Chris Sizemore had one personality with an allergy to fur; only when this personality was "out" did her immune system mount an allergic reaction.

At first these dramatic changes are shocking and fascinating for the therapist, but eventually they become commonplace. A typical multiple, if such a label is even possible, has one main personality that handles most of daily life. Very often that personality knows nothing about the other personalities, and if they do, it is only indirectly. However, all of the other personalities may know about each other. Alliances, friendships, and rivalries are common amongst those who know each other. Aaron DeGlanville related the case of Kit Castle, who had a younger male personality that fell in love with an older female; he was dismayed when he found out they inhabited the same body.

Most therapy with MPD aims toward an eventual integration in which the personalities either subsume into a "main" personality or actually disappear. Adam had one client, though, who did not want to become fully integrated, and she lived successfully as a multiple after her destructive personalities were transformed into positive forces. Integration does not happen in only one way. In some situations, the personalities gradually get to know each other and begin to merge, leading to a final fusion of all. However, it is equally common for the other personalities to just stop coming, leaving only one personality in the end without any real fusion. In the case of Chris Sizemore, who eventually revealed 21 personalities, a new and final personality emerged at the end of her therapy and the others disappeared, which was symbolized for her in a dream. The final personality may or may not retain the skills, knowledge, or characteristics of the previous personalities. The whole therapeutic process is highly individual and unique in its trajectory.

Another common dimension of the healing process is the emergence of one or more Inner Self Helpers. The ISHs often play a dispassionate, all-knowing, and organizing role, forming alliances and healing inner rifts. They can present the situation very clearly and without much emotion. Michael Murphy brought in a possible connection with the Witness consciousness cultivated in many meditative traditions. One aspect of zazen can be seen as an owning of more and more, a dilation of the small mind to include more of the Big Mind. Though Adam felt there were some useful parallels, there are important differences as well. For example, the ISHs typically disappear at the end of the therapeutic process, and they are perceived as a more ethereal and sometimes even angelic entity that is there to guide for a time. Bruce Greyson reported on a fascinating unpublished case in which a multiple had a NDE and recognized the being of light as her ISH. During times of distress, she turned to this ISH as a sort of inner mother figure, and her recognition of the ISH as a being of light during her NDE was healing for her.

MPD has magnetized more controversy than any other psychological diagnosis in recent years for a number of reasons. First, it brings us face to face with the ugly reality of abuse, since it is believed by many that this syndrome usually results from childhood sexual abuse. Second, it forces us to deal with the vagaries and mysteries of memory. Third, there are claims that it is iatrogenic -- induced by the therapist. There may even be a culturally conditioned dimension to the syndrome. In From Mesmer to Freud(Crabtree, 1993), Adam discusses "symptom language," the way in which a person can express an illness or disturbance within a society. Different societies encourage or permit diverse languaging of a disturbance which leads to the existence of culture-specific manifestations of pathology. All of these factors have contributed to the backlash against the existence of the disorder. Furthermore, on a philosophical level, MPD brings into question the unity of the self. Perhaps because it serves as an extreme example of the complexity of the self, humans fear it.

Adam thinks that the negative reaction to MPD amongst professionals and others derives mainly from trepidation around automatism. Automatisms are things we experience as happening to us which come from our unconscious mind. We might think, feel, or do something over which we have no control. We are both fascinated and frightened by these automatisms; for example, almost everyone loves the automatisms generated by a stage hypnotist but we are terrified of the automatism of possession. Because we so value control in our culture, we are threatened by automatisms and seek ways to explain them away, to deny their occurrence, or to account for them in purely physiological terms. Our ego wants full control, or at least the illusion of control. MPD undermines that feeling of control by positing intelligent subliminal action. The discourse around MPD is rarely rational, triggering all manner of primitive fears, even with seasoned professionals.

Multiples bear upon the subject of survival of bodily death for a number of reasons. First, they often perceive an impending integration as a death, an obliteration of the separate sense of self. Both fear and grief are important components of the process and it can serve as a model of actual death. Second, there is a ground of awareness, a naked fact of consciousness, which transcends the particular personalities and acts as a hidden glue to organize them into a fairly cohesive system. This background organization never comes to the fore in therapy, though its presence can be inferred. Third, the personalities seem convincingly separate, including having separate subconscious minds. Even in deep trance, there seems to be no real crossover or connection between the personalities. Bruce Greyson brought up an interesting question: what happens if we regress these alter personalities to previous lives? Do they report different past lives? Adam could not see why not and brought up the case of Chris Sizemore, who feels some of her personalities are from previous lives. Charles Tart suggested one way we could view MPD is as a failure or breakdown of normal karmic repression mechanisms.

For Adam, a model that can account for MPD is one that holds the deathlessness of the "I" (pure consciousness) in juxtaposition to the transitory "me's" (personality clumps) which may well disappear in the process of integration. The true "I" is a presence or point of awareness; the experience of this "beingness" leads to a subjective certitude of immortality. This is relevant to the question of what survives. Perhaps postmortem survival parallels the process at work in MPD: much of the individualized personality "dies" but the pure consciousness (purusha in Sanskrit) remains. The ultimate "I" is free of any qualities or particulars and is eternal, while the "me" is a product of qualities and particulars and is temporal. Between the ground of "I" and the separate particular identity of "me" is a level of inner organization that is still largely unexplored. Adam feels that much of this terrain cannot be explored objectively; only through our subjective experience can we begin to discern its outlines. On this issue, he aligns with Charles Tart's rather radical suggestion for state-specific sciences which would, in this case, take the form of subjective reports from those capable of exploring such terrain.

In terms of the survival issue, Bruce Greyson questioned whether this formulation is useful for us. Most survival discussion revolves around something like a personality surviving, whereas Adam's model only deals with the survival of something stripped of all personality. Adam responded that he feels something of the "me" survives beyond bodily death; however, that something is not necessarily eternal, even if it can transmigrate into another life. Bruce pointed out that in the rebirth cases, there is fairly extensive documentation of memories and personality characteristics from the reported previous life. In Adam's preliminary map, the bare "I" is not necessarily distinct from one person to the next. His primordial "I" is identical with divine reality, the oneness of which mystics so often speak. Habitual patterns of experience come along and snatch up the one "I" into separate identifications which are ultimately temporary and unreal, even if convincing. That said, many of our experiences are very "sticky" and difficult to disidentify from, so our separate, distinctive personalities can seem quite solid. This echoes the conclusions of many nondual mystical traditions.

Michael Grosso pointed out that this discussion leads to a practical point, namely, that our efforts in survival research might be redirected away from traces of individual survival and towards the direct experiential realization of the ultimate "I," leading us to know intuitively that we are immortal beings: a mystical turn for survival research, following the teachings of great masters. The common claim in spiritual circles is that we should not worry about personal survival, that we should focus on something deeper. Unless, Michael Murphy countered, we are part of a supreme evolutionary adventure in which part of our individualized personality is manifesting higher and higher potentials. The "I" witnesses while the self evolves. The dichotomy between the witnessing ground and the evolving self was portrayed in the Rg Veda in the following way: there are two birds on the World Tree, one eats the sweet fruit, while the other watches and eats not. This is the dichotomy between the changeless, primordial Self and the self engaged in the dance of life. In Murphy's view, survival research dwells on the second self, which is equally important; the ecstatic play of lila has intrinsic value and is not just something to be overcome.

Sukie Miller commented that in many cultures, cultivating some kind of multiplicity is desirable and honored, especially for shamanic or healing roles. She wondered whether it is possible to heal the destructive or maladaptive multiples and leave the rest of the system intact. This brought up the issue of whether it is better to "cure" multiples or just help them lead more adaptive lives. Adam made the point that there is almost always tremendous suffering with multiples: personalities conflict and sabotage each other, memories are not integrated, relationships are fragmented. Even so, integration is not a completely positive event since diversity and richness are often lost. For example, Billy Milligan had several personalities that painted, each with a distinctive style, and he successfully sold three or four styles of paintings. When he became integrated, however, only one style of painting remained.

Many high-level skills are lost during integration, though no in-depth study has been done to explore what is lost and what remains. The MPD literature revolves mainly around diagnosis and treatment; very little delves into the implications for metanormal human capacity. MPD is a window into fantastic abilities of the unconscious mind and yet very little phenomenological work has been done, much less work with intentionally cultivating such abilities. Michael Murphy pointed out that multiples are hypnotic virtuosos who have been practicing dissociative skills for a lifetime. Since psychological health often relates to the capacity for multiple ego states and creativity is linked to tolerance of ambiguity, we can perhaps view multiples as a more extreme example of a healthy inner diversity. Some aspects of the disorder may be desirable. Charles Tart wondered whether we could discover more high-functioning multiples who are not in therapy and encourage them to model higher level functioning for other multiples. In Adam's experience, though, the effect of multiples on each other in a group -- which he has led -- often runs counter to therapeutic goals. For example, he saw one person go from not being self-mutilating to self-mutilating.

Adam stressed the importance of addressing our tendency to "entitize" in these discussions; William James wrote that "thought tends to personification," an important point to bear in mind as we discuss this subject. A thought can lead to fixed ideas, and indeed a thought-cluster in multiples organizes into a separate, personalized identity. He feels uneasy when people start entitizing multiple personalities, Inner Self Helpers, and even hierarchies of ISHs. An alternative to entitizing is to admit there are levels of organization involved which we cannot fathom. We can talk to all of the personalities in a multiple and never find one that is the originator of another personality. They are created and organized in a very clever way such that none of the personalities know how the organization happens.

References

Crabtree, Adam. 1993. From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing. New Haven: Yale University Press. (buy at amazon.com)
Thigpen, C. and Cleckley, H. 1957. The Three Faces of Eve. August, Georgia: The Authors.(buy at amazon.com)

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