The following is a first-hand account of self-induced psychosis composed “in real time” one evening in June 2018 with some post-production—minor edits and the occasional addendum—for clarification and improved readability.
Vertigo. Bah roo hoo! I’ve donned a purple jester hat. Or someone has. The scene feels vague, temporary, like a dream. I laugh and laugh and laugh. Laughter turns about my chandelier and evaporates, unrequited. Then I’m speaking wif an accent. The Queen’s English, then with a lisp. Who are you? I want to know. Sombreros suddenly. Electricity. People snap like guitar strings into place. Curlicues with every exhalation weaving and undoing. Imminent madness. A chorus of voices blathering ad infinitum. Changing, shifting. Faces, too. The ocean. Floor to ceiling to the asteroid belt. A drifting abyss of faces. Savage longing. An immense crimson door, waxen and impossibly ornate. So incredibly strange. The possibility of events now, but I’m in my pajamas. My God, the things I could do if only I had on pants! Ricocheting percussion. Burrap brap brap. Unheard of sounds. A volley of metallic snowballs, breaking up into innumerable oblivions. Harmonies, woven like rope. I want to congratulate the singers. Thank them. I see twins. Very good, thank you. How can anything be captured? I mean, written down? All senses having collapsed into a field, like a soup, it cannot. Yes! No. No, I’m talking the living phenomenology of sensory soup. Recorded, like this, it is dead. I am a madman. I am a bad man. Dead man. The tyranny of the ever-changing absurd theater of clownery. I keep thinking, “Just fall asleep.” Courage!
The light speaks. How? I want to know. There are no wrong answers. Frequencies, vibration. The company of a woman. Could I be saved? Movement, sound, none of it makes much sense. This is a spilling. The internal neon tumbleweed landscape of a mind, perhaps mine. I’m only trying to explain to you. In the absence of sound and/or thought, fools rush in. And they won’t shut up. Clowns everywhere, riding invisible geometries like carts on rails into a maze of mines. True silence is simply an issue of resolution. And architecture, how crude or fine the ornament. Below the talking is, I hope, peace. Like, physically below language. Another plane. The twaddle is only superficial, crust. I run my hand through my hair. They won’t shut up. Nothing makes sense. Clarity is slippery, belongs to someone else. “Just go to sleep.” What have I become?
Incredibly strange. I repeat it over and over like a mantra that becomes visible and unspools like sausage links. The picture frame is peopled, a crumpled shirt shows a face. My own feels massaged by invisible hands. One minute a smile, the next furrowed in confusion. At one point I feel my legs oscillate, though I’m still, contained in a sleeping bag. They wave and hum, become pure vibration and heat. I’m overrun with little babbling elves, goblins smirking and conversing with me. They want to stunt me, to keep me as a child. Their hands are working me over. I feel I’m in a crib. “Away with anything that holds me back,” I say, and reach for the cross around my neck as if for a rescue raft. As if for a binky. I try to conjure Christ, to summon him to my predicament. But my thoughts have been hijacked. Clicks and pops echo, become visual streaks, code-like. I’m whirring in the machine, chez moi. This cannot possibly be my bedroom. And yet. And yet each time I raise my head there it is: my closet door, woofing in a silent undertow.
“You want to play?” I ask the voices. Indeed they do. And yet they seem intent on instructing also. Do this, do that. Later, I remark, “Your strange little games.” Who am I talking to? I feel I’m to be their audience, the recipient of the night’s entertainment. It is a play starring creatures of the subconscious with infinite acts, the stage the cluttered skull of a schizophrenic, his mania manifested as furniture. “Bah roo hoo!” They cheer. I laugh aloud (didn’t I?) and can’t fathom what it means. Another instruction: “Had I thanked everyone enough?” It seems I have not. Gratitude, again. Squiggles. Wiggles. Emanations. Cowboy barroom flashes. Desert heat lightning in ripples when I wave my arms. Jades, violets, sky blues. It’s free jazz, blown by the invisible mouths of flowers. I feel as if I’ve gone insane. Mind as mother, reproducing. Separations beget totality, immersion. I’m wading through sonic weather, soaked in it. Who are you? Pieces to pick up. A world to reconstruct from things misremembered, forgotten songs, lost feelings found in dark recesses. Breaths as gentle as a blink becoming musics unfathomable, impossible. I’ve gone over the threshold. And the whole time, the clock of the heart, set against the fevered pace of the no-man’s-land I’ve traversed tonight and seeded with “sacred love.”
What was spoken to me that I did not hear? Could not translate? Would not swallow? Who do I believe I’ve become? Who did I turn away? I’m insane. I say “I,” but there are two of us. One is gently arranged on a queen bed, tossing, turning, chuckling maniacally into an indifferent darkness; the other seems to hover a few inches above, mediating and communicating with the anti-matter that has invaded the room. Which one am I? Ah-ha. Sleep, I think, at last. But it’s paper-thin. I awake with “In Remembrance of Me” pirouetting through my headphones. I’ve turned sideways but my consciousness has remained righted, lighter than bones, submerged and slotted into a confined space. Like a lost birthday balloon it seems to be groping for the highest gable. Guaraldi’s piano is above me, the rustling of the parishioners in Grace Cathedral, impeccably defined to these new ears, below.
Synesthetic terror. Shapes morph into sound. Scccruuuunch. A pop can is crushed into a rainbow. It’s inexplicable. The supremacy of physical existence, of the body, is illusory. A panopticon of Lilliputian synaptic apocalypses has been erected, against my will and by an anonymous architect. It is a costume of light that I wear like a crown of thorns. The King of Nobody. Or Blake’s Nobodaddy. It is a threshold of immense ambiguity, hesitating between utter transformation and the bric-a-brac of the still-life that is my bedroom. Panic lingers at the edges of my vision, pushing streaks of white hot light into view like an overdeveloped film. The choreography of an unremarkable Wednesday falls apart, the wheels have come off and yet there is a patterned order that begins to reveal itself. “Beneath the wool, a pattern.”
At any rate, forgive me. “It cannot,” as Terence McKenna discovered, “be Englished.”
Image: Seliger, Charles. Don Quixote. 1944.
Impolitic 