“They’ve healed me to pieces.” —Paul Celan
originally posted to substack — Sep 22, 2023
i woke up shouting for calm, begging it to be quiet, back and forth from the bedroom and kitchen, tried to get ready for work but
—kneel and put my head to the ground in surges, like shockwaves – something detonated on the far end of a multiverse and felt from the wrong side. it demands a physical reaction so i scream and double over until it passes. i’m wandering around in low light as i pick up the cat’s bowl and my wrist tickles
i look down and it’s covered with ants, already on me. i scream in fear this time throw the bowl and things seem even more unreal – like a cinematic reproduction of schizophrenia or drug delusion i can feel them crawling all over me
(i’d been hearing my alarm going off all morning though faintly, immediately after i woke and turned it off. it wasn’t really happening)
but this is something that also occurs in saner moments, the ants, so it’s even harder to tell exactly what’s going on – like being stunned
(sometimes i think of it as being tasered by god, a holy cattle prod)
and then i have to believe – no human could do this to me, even if i named it: Bipolar II, Schizoaffective Disorder, PTSD…
“the bourgeoning industry of apps that lower the threshold for pronouncing oneself clinically depressed, traumatized, or lacking in concentration” 1
b/c for me diagnosis was like a damnation, and drugs – giving up agency over my own pain so that i was left just suffering. a synthetic ambience – diffuse, nondirectional
even a month after a co-worker’s murder on the job every time i log onto my work website the top banner reads:
[Ongoing Support: Trauma Support Team, EAP, and Mental Health Resources]
and it bugs me. i think of Nietzsche’s forgetfulness, “a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette… no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness” while shopping for black market incandescents. (acutely sensitive to light, LEDs fuck with me – like i can see the frames of reality skipping, reality turns to cinema, again)
and then write this:
at work, looking around the kitchen/community room, feeling nothing…
i’m told they had to replace all the tables, the chairs – hadn’t noticed but i see it now. had to take down the photos on the north wall, the curtain over the large window there – still not replaced, looking out directly into the garbage cans. they’re repainting the room as i work, the same sterile white it was and it looks no different now but i’m sure it’s some comfort to the people spending time there than i (full-time employees, maybe not residents – their sensitivities dulled by anti-psychotics)
i try to imagine the expanse of blood, where and how it pooled – was it navigable, could the other clients avoid it if they even had the wherewithal. there were bloody footprints all the way back to the J’s door, across the court yard to the other side of the facility, the mirroring building where he lived – that’s how they knew it was him. that and a pile of clothes, soiled red stained brown
all the blood, all the blood
and the details settle slowly, coming from disparate sources – he used a kitchen knife, he got it from the sharps drawer, somehow pried it open and i can see how they used wood putty to fill the gap where the lock had been, dark deposits of metal left round the hole as the lock was turned by key over and over until the day it was forced open and then abandoned, the knives now kept in a lock box in the staff office and counted at the end of each shift daily, 3x per
and the sustained contact is unsettling, the spectral residue of pressure left there as he worked the drawer free… i’m hesitant to open it (maybe i do feel something). i don’t
—the employee killed, likely three hours or so before the arrival of day shift, had worked through the night alone
i’ve never had an instinctive sense of the dead, only an intellectual one. which i use in an attempt to pierce the veil or whatever but it feels cheap, ineffective. only my preferred loved ones on the altar, dumbing down my subconscious with drugs, thickening the veil like developing a callous against the constant rub of death
the dead are still present they just speak a different language now, said someone better in tune with the ether than i. maybe like how rocks are really alive, “the hallucinatory pictographic forms inside of stones and their convergence of the brutal, energetic laws of nature with the play of chance”2
—i’d just worked there the day before, could’ve been me
or stone as an archival material, stone as witness, a scribe. a means of communication that brings close the impossible distance of deep time, the unfathomable arc of earth trauma (mutation, fragmentation). is trauma inherent to incarnation? wtf is it anyways, outside the clinical sense
etymology: *terə-, Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to rub, turn,” to the rubbing of cereal grain to remove the husks, and thus to threshing, Latin terere “to rub, thresh, grind, wear away,” or tornus “turning lathe”
come back some subtle friction
…with derivatives referring to twisting, also to boring, drilling, piercing
—metals are in me. i birth them, i self-mine & what’s precious will burn. it’s a practice of distillation, a heavy passage through hell, a condensation
“all things weep toward the ancient heat imprisoned in the heart of the earth”
and one is re-crystallized. b/c the real or whatever is too lapidary to comprehend with only one-self, the self strictly organized by chronology
“The temporal binding window is a timeframe within which multiple stimuli are highly likely to be perceived as one [50]. Extended temporal binding window indicates imprecise temporal coding of sensory stimuli. Most studies on schizophrenia reported that the temporal binding window is tens of milliseconds wider in patients with schizophrenia compared to typical adults for unisensory modalities [51,52,53]. Patients also process stimuli individually rather than in sequence [57, 73, 74].
SCHIZO TIME IS DEEP TIME
COUNSEL CULTURE
“…the modern equivalent of salvation [is] mental health,” says Lasch. like religion vs. contemporary spirituality and it’s lack of blood
“Today, the defense of bare life is intensifying into the absolutization and fetishization of health. The modern-day slave prefers it to sovereignty and freedom. He or she resembles the “last human beings” Nietzsche describes, for whom health per se represents an absolute value. …Where bare life is hallowed, theology gives way to therapy. Or therapy becomes theological. Death has no place in the chronicle of bare life’s achievements. So long as one remains a slave and clings to bare life, one remains subordinate to the master…”
Byung-Chul Han, Agony of Eros
or, WESTERN MEDICINE
—that sedation is the only thing that will heal me, or rather keep me quiet in my pain, tells me that i’m managed and not healed
maybe (my) non-healing is a commitment to fragmentation, active forgetting
(does it need a further witness, really. i’ve seen it all, it has no further privacy – the pain has done its job exposing the last nerve alive it only hurts for a second, then dies. and everything is calm, i can turn out all the lights now)
in this de-escalation training they keep saying “empathy absorbs tension, empathy absorbs tension” like a mantra, the two instructors often in unison
—okay then but where do i store it, where does it go
(i’ve so little patience for martyrdom these days, though i still gently seek the social capital of my profession – telling myself i don’t want to be good, i just want to be interesting. but in the end it’s like “fuck you pay me,” SURVIVAL)
“when people say empathy what they really mean is contagion”
and i think mimesis, all the “empathy” i witnessed in 2020, 2021… people ending close friendships over ideology, over compassion towards some worthier person or cause, so often an abstraction – the application is soured. what about grace, transcendence, divine transmission through the prophylactic of the self. what about care – maybe it needn’t be trauma informed (a valuation), maybe it should just be like… prayer, Simone Weil’s idea of attention
or is understanding solely an intellectual pursuit. i wanted to understand why J snapped, felt a certain sympathy maybe, all of us staff constantly pestering him: to shower, to eat, to take his meds – SOCIAL WORK (white women)
managed but not healed
(( and another moment in training – the exemplary tale of an employee who was immediately fired for withholding meds (it’s very, very hard to get laid off from this line of work), thinking our clients were over medicated, and they “are,” but who am i to say – J was de-comping, wasn’t taking his meds ))
but i could only think – the spirit fucking rides, doesn’t it. some of us just can’t stop it
and maybe the greatest sin would be to justify evil instead of just letting it be, as though one could remove oneself from violence like some veganism of the soul
are gentle souls true – do they exist, do they die
—i’m not a gentle soul, even when i thought i was: good, weak. and i’ve only achieved the middling aim of displacing my anger to art, so
- “I am not primarily concerned here with arguing for or against the validity of diagnoses in individual cases. Although important in the clinical day-to-day, this line of questioning employed to analyze the emergence of clinical phenomena tends to reproduce the neoliberal paradigm of individualizing collective issues and predicaments that are born in wider social and political space. The inflationary use of diagnoses to create identities is a collective symptom of our current political, cultural, and economic moment.”
https://damagemag.com/2022/10/05/the-psychiatric-manufacturing-of-identity/ ↩︎ - “There is certainly a melancholic resignation to the process of ageing and inevitable mortal disappearance in [Roger] Caillois’ writings on stones. While personal, however, this melancholia links the limited human span in terms both ontogenetic and phylogenetic, and—as if meditating through the relative immortality of stones themselves—defines the human in various texts as an “imposter,” describing the species as “transient,” “ephemeral,” and an “episodic species doomed to distinction.”
https://sensatejournal.com/an-introduction-to-caillois-stones-other-texts/ ↩︎