TELEPATHIC ELEPHANT

TELEPATHIC ELEPHANT

Once upon a time, I conducted an experiment into a cassette of Pearl Jam ‘VS’ which had a small pause where cut and resealed in the reel.

The tape came to me in a broken state, so I performed an operation on it, a delicate operation.

When I had sealed the reel, it left some one or two CM overlap of plastic which meant there was a pause in the song.

The ideal became to do away with the pause.

In those days I had what I thought was my only poem:

“Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.”

I also kept a tough diary for a few weeks and aside from the physical object of the tape that’s all I had, or all I thought I had.

It strikes me now that having less is more attractive than having 1000’s of recursive files and no audience. Some people still say that the aforementioned poem is the best I have done, if I want to be a poet with a mathematical edge.

Experimentation began on the tape in earnest when I was in a band called Secret Chord H at Oundle School. I wrote a song called ‘Dream With Open Eyes’ which remains my finest song unto some. But there was also a B-side that was never recorded… I sat the year above in a circle and got them to chant to words

“another, another, another f***ing joint,

another, another, another f***ing joint,

another, another, another f***ing joint,

another, another, another f***ing joint,”

over and over, ad infinitum, as if rhythm, mantra, repetition, and double-entendre could “do away with the pause.”

Later, in a few poems, I also started to use the word “ette” spelled “e pi e” but said as if the pi sign were a double lower case t.

It took years before the pause was gone, the fusion successful.

When the fusion was successful, the volume of the rest of the tape seemed slightly dimmed – but there was no longer any pause in the opening number ‘Go’ where there was still some one or two CM overlap of tape reel.

That’s when I thought the object was an objet d’art, a Strange Attractor like in Chaos Theory, a dream-meet connector, an Utilitarian Martianist wedding ring.

It lived under my pillow for a while.

It gave me dreams of “The Ninero Ratio” which I tried to smuggle out of the unconscious, when my best work seemed lost on the shores of sleep.

Then one night as the night wind enwheeled through the dark garden trees, and an alchemical base metal feeling pervaded my soul, and I recalled the formula for mud from primary school -

water + soil = mud -

I was persuaded by voices, which by now in mental illness I heard, to sneak downstairs in the midnight and cook the tape in the dark blue AGA, top oven, hottest one.

While the tape was inside the oven, I said to myself I would write, but could only really conjure a quote from the father-poet Neil Curry.

“Nothing can be said for certain about poetry except Pound’s claim that the poet chooses where to end his lines, selecting a tiny pause instead of letting the type-writer run on.”

A nacreous, plastic stench filled the kitchen as I took the tape out of the oven.

In years to come I would photo the tape for the online world, as its final resting place, and give the physical object, which was by now a carcass of a metaphysical idea, to my gf.

Overall I am pleased with my process.

There are a number of other things that I had going for me at the same time that also might qualify as “halfware” such as the idea that a sensory overlay of my name was to be tattooed on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, such as a purple-bleeding screen, such as an effervescent mobile phone reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, such as the album we recorded on binaural earphones where I said I would “plug my senses in the mains,” and even the sheet where pictures grew could be portentous of the end of the chip… as I say all of this was going on more or less at the same time. I was saturated in creative things.

The eventual work of art I call ‘Telepathic Elephant’ is for Rachel, with whom I shared a taste in Pearl Jam music when I was young. Rachel was the nicest girl to talk to at school.

‘Telepathic Elephant’ wouldn’t have worked if it was a video. If I had cut an old-school video of, say, The Doors film, at the moment Patricia the witch dangles in her legs into the interview with Jim Morrison and says “what do you think of the dreadful reviews your new poetry book has received Mr. Morrison?” – and if I had resealed the reel, cutting out the bit where he responds “I guess they didn’t understand it,” - then that video would never “grow back.”

I still don’t know how the switch was thrown on this one… was it Mr. Obama saying “yes you can” all the time? Was it managing to get a full on lip to lip goodbye kiss from Rachel? It’s hardly as big as space travel, quantum or A. I, and in fact quite minor, but it still meant a lot to me.

IS MENTAL ILLNESS CONGENIAL TO THE SUFFERER?

Is mental illness congenial to the sufferer? Certainly, when my voices all go away all of a sudden, I could think of the Bush lyric “lonely without my impediments,” and start to wish they would return as if my mental illness were something I hold close to myself.

I used to be of the New Lakes, Slow Art, eco-poetic school who believed that a poet couldn’t be on anti-depressants because poets are translators of feelings and the feelings you get on chemicals are all fake.

But then again I knew a very fine poet in Simon Pomery who was on chemicals whose names do not belong in poems – and through him, I suppose I would’ve felt that mental illness is congenial to my self-image, and being on meds okay.

What I mean is, I think there was actually a moment of admiration where I looked to Simon for equivalents and wanted to be on anti-depressants myself – as if it would mean my poems were as good as his!

They’re not but I am on Sertraline now.

I find that Big Pharma can advertise anywhere, that writing can become a machine for remembering to take your medication…

as stated I don’t think the names of meds belong in poems. Voices meanwhile, in the aesthetic creed of the ill, could be “onjects,” quavers, syllabubbles, sonic machinations at the periphery of sound.

Mental hospital becomes Monopoly Jail – as we fill in the government’s application forms for £ove with a yellow crayon and join the dots and spot the difference - for being ill, the mode of Homo-ludens dawns on us again.

Stephen Fry says if there was a button he could press to get rid of the illness he wouldn’t press it because the concomitant creativity would go.

I don’t think he’s been in some of the hell-holes I have had to endure, but does have a valid point.

Then again I seem to remember that Fry went to prison so he might’ve had a tough time too.

As for whether or not mental illness is congenial to self-image, I think the very question of self-image disappears when you are truly ill – it matters little how you present andctera.

You become exempt from the overall Social Order.

Naturally one cares less about their image the older they get...

but I still wonder if self-image is what becomes destroyed by mental illness.

I can’t see how it is congenial to the sufferer.

Maybe you could argue the illness goes hand in hand with being a creative genius, so is congenial to self-image; or that it grants you impunity, a license to do what you will with exemption from society; or even that it is a secret thrill – but still, I wouldn’t recommend it.

I would recommend working hard, having a family, a car, a house and a partner more than I would being as I am skint, single, unemployed, mentally ill, medicated, carless and living with my mother in the sticks, stuck.

With me it was said I never came back from an atrocious acid trip before I had even left school and more recently I was also cursed by a hypnotist who lead me to believe he was healing my intelligence.

There’s also the question of childhood trauma, being left alone as the witness in and of and to and from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison.

One of my symptoms is having accrued 1000’s of files and paying to bring out work that is still not bad but repeating it later, becoming recursive.

There is still stigma attached to mental illness which means if I talk to a woman in the pub and let on that I have schizoaffective disorder, she will walk away and won’t want to talk anymore.

I actually like living here with my mum and brother, keeping out the way, rarely leaving the house, just working at my screen.

I do think that if you’ve been through true psychosis, like when you first start hearing voices, it is a good moment when a doctor gives you a name, an appellation, for your condition, because it grounds your madness in science.

I suppose when in the grips of suffering, going through something uncomfortable in terms of headspace, there is nothing to recommend mental illness, but if symptoms are in remission, you could argue that it becomes congenial to self-image.

Certainly, it would seem that after the blacks, the women and the gays, it is now in our age the Rights of the mentally ill that come into play.

More than ask whether or not illness is congenial to the sufferer, one should ask if illness is congenial to Big Pharma and those in charge of care.

I used to think the nature of visionary experience was not amenable to the language of sterile medicalese and the dialectic of sickness and recovery, that my illness was more congenial than my health unto those in charge of my health, for monetary reasons, meaning Big Pharma, who as stated can advertise anywhere, and with-hold a cure until the price is right, but these days I see the illness is not a conspiracy, that there is veracity to the notion that I am ill.

I also think the ill are capable of increased lucidity.

My father used to say that, also that it is good we can talk about mental illness in this day and age where old-fashioned melancholia was a taboo subject.

My dad thought there should be more talking therapy, to help address issues head on, and that the business of medication-taking is crude.

The paradigm of psychoanalysis has given over to the paradigm of neuro-science meaning all mental illness is seen as chemical imbalances in the brain, which are therefore treatable with medications, which some deem to be crude.

More progressive doctors like Dr. Tom Pollak say that medicine wastes packaging, and these doctors can reach you on a human level, in among more sadistic voices.

Dr. Tom Pollak also says “they diagnose on form not content,” and “the science works,” and that I should “plug in.”

It becomes time to accept the nosological validity of the illness, and engage in as many psycho-social interventions as is possible, and keep taking the medication, and maybe keep a diary, in this world where nothing’s private, in avid detail too.

There is also Pound to think of… when Ezra Pound went on trial for Nazi leanings, he claimed insanity, and some said he was feigning it to get out of going to prison. And is there not an extent to which someone who truly does suffer from mental illness should be granted leniency?

Such a question is more for a philosopher like Simon Blackburn who wrote Think and considers the philosopher more “a conceptual engineer.”

He was discussing the ethics of the question as to whether or not it is fair that someone mentally ill is liable to be punished the same way as someone sane, if it is their illness that led to the crime.

One would be forgiven for thinking to be let off a prison sentence and only have to go to mental hospital would be a relief, but none of this has ever happened to me so I wouldn’t know.

I did meet someone once who said he’d prefer to go to prison than mental hospital, because in hospital the doctors and nurses can do anything they want to you with impunity.

The meaning of a building can change while you’re inside it, and we need look no further than Foucault to gain that information.

He says mental asylums sprang up when leprosy was cured and leprosy houses had no more function.

People can and do still die inside mental hospital to this day and it doesn’t seem like a nice way to go out or a nice place to go out.

In hospital all the surfaces are sterilised clean… one’s mood is made stable upon a sterilised table. If you flare up and show spirit or residual grit they are extra harsh on you, may keep you in for longer.

In my first psychotic episode I went to hospital for a literal head wound sustained in a scrap. The nurse in A and E put a square, white bandage on; and I touched it to see if it was paddy and it was; and I touched it a second time and it was gone. The bandage had vanished into thin air. The nurse had to put another bandage on.

So the mental health were alerted and I had to stay in the psychiatric hospital overnight. They told me it was because they had run out of beds so were tricking me really. The next day I was outside the door and a nurse said “you are free to leave or you can come back in for a cup of tea.” I fancied a cup of tea so went back in and the door was bolted! I was sectioned! And not only did I have to spend time in hospital but was shipped up to the acute ward for extra srs cases by Ambulance. This was in the middle of my undergraduate degree.

When the 28 days were over, I had the rest of the year off before I started my second year at Lancaster University, so I used the time to read every book the course could possibly throw at me and more.

By the time I went back and by the end of the second year I was already guaranteed a First.

What happened to the bandage I still don’t know, but I suppose an object can vanish when emotions are high on the periphery of madness.

I got my First and after wards was free of admission to hospital until my dad died. Then there were a further three sectionings when I was with Mary, making it 5 overall. I don’t intend to go back to hospital. Such an event as being sectioned can be soul-destroying.

The diagnosis actually came after my degree, when symptoms from my first episode recurred. It was almost at the exact same time as it was confirmed that I really was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures in boyhood; and my father said “that will make it harder to be believed.”

He thought the story of my running away from the first hospitalisation was funny. I made it to Scotland where I thought there’d be a different jurisdiction but was caught by the cops and brought back. I was ticked off though it was a sign of my sanity returning. My dad thought it amusing but it was actually rather sad because I would then be forever in and out of hospital.

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