I've heard addiction described as a memory disease, but psychosis is a kind of memory disease, too. How so? There is your self pre-psychosis, stocked reliably with your autobiographical memories, and therefore your autobiographical self. Then there is a break, a kind of catastrophe, a breaking, a shattering. The mind shatters in psychosis. What it sees seems to resist memory formation, like trauma, pushing against the boundaries of rational sense. When we return from psychosis, we might remember certain incidents, but what's hardest to remember is that actual state of mind which we inhabited, which was as close to us then as our own beating heart.
There isn't enough written about psychosis from the first-person perspective, and much of what is written is self-published, since oftentimes publishers are not looking for innovative works on psychosis to swell their coffers. But one book in particular that I've come across recently, Laglands by Five Seventeen, a friend and former book designer for Penguin Random House Canada, is worth checking out.
The best analogy I can come up with for describing the experience of reading Laglands - and you can read the book in one sitting, as it is a neat 100 pages - comes from Seventeen's work in music and sound work, specifically a solo between a piri, which Seventeen plays, and a (not joking) refrigetrator, called "Improvised duet for solo 鄕 (Hyang-p'iri) and W.C. Wood Household Refrigerator (TR1203LW3)." Like a strange La Monte Young performance, the piri wends its way enigmatically through the drone-like sound provided by the humming fridge, and what ensues is this weirdly captivating performance, the piri pushing itself in difference directions, finding new phrases, new cadences, like a jazz solo that is beautiful and sad and mysterious. The sense is of an artist finding his own logic for and to things; and this is what the experience is like reading Laglands.
Laglands is a work of collage, and therefore fits in certain ways - easily and uneasily - within Stephen Fredman's definition of contextual practice. Fredman writes,
A contextual practice initiates an art devoted to contexts, building works not around a central idea, theme, or symbol, but by plucking and arranging images, materials, language, or even people from the surrounding milieu, "fashioning...contexts of a new life way in the making." Of necessity a vernacular procedure tied to the everyday and the overlooked, contextual practice works by uncovering new energies and images through juxtaposing found materials or by directing aesthetic attention to an existing but previously ignored context. (Contextual. Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art, 3)
What Seventeen arranges are poems, short stories, riffs, a series of numbers, memories, meditations on memory, messages on Post-it notes, diary entries, an italicized work of marketing for a manufacturer of electrical farm equipment, numbered observations about being the subject of a parasitical science experiment, language that pushes against meaning, mirror writing, equations, crossed our words, screen captures, a few small idiosyncratic drawings, and a spirit throughout of ephemera and marginalia. What isn't mentioned in the above list is that we also encounter, through these collaged elements, a narrative about the loss and regaining of one's mind, and therefore, strange to say, a kind of narrative about redemption, about being given a second shot at things. How does Seventeen do it?
In another recording, this one of a storm over a highway, Seventeen seems to recognize what John Dewey meant when he described experience itself as a kind of work of art, with a beginning, middle, and end, the way breakfast can be an experience, or a storm, or a walk, or for that matter reading a book. For Laglands ripples with moments, and what these moments tell and show us is the gradual deterioration and recovery of a mind. At times - like psychosis - the speaker does not seem to have insight into his illness, as when, in a series of observations, we read passages like, "I miss the isolation space. LCDR Marshall can't read or write, but they draw schematics or what the Navy thinks may be schematics. Dazzle camouflage, space flight, stealth technology, drones: benchmarks of NAVSTA's past. (Other countries have landed objects, too.)" This is an example of what we could call psychotic thinking, and the experience of reading it is jarring and bewildering, as if the language were seeking to communicate the existential position of the person experiencing it.
Other times, as in this untitled poem, we are given a speaker who seems to have more insight into what is happening within his own mind:
Writing in the dark
As clouds have come in.
It's darker now
That it was an hour ago.
I can't really see the page.
Snowy static:
The storm clouds are the reason.
I was changing sizes last night,
My hand changed as it crossed the hemisphere.
I am having trouble with all this.
A very clear sensation,
muddied-up.
Watercolours stains in negative blacks,
Greens & yellows.
I can't really see the page. (24)
There is a strange dialectic here between seeing and not-seeing, and this seems to be placed on an axis of hallucinating and not hallucinating, or madness and reason. The speaker is writing in the dark, on a page he can't see. He is trying to make sense of symptoms of his illness, including "changing sizes last night" and "My hand changed as it crossed the hemisphere". He doesn't explain these symptoms, but he describes them. And what he describes has the quality of madness - "A very clear sensation, / muddied-up." It is a clear sensation because it is happening to you, and this is why John Nash said once that his madness came to him in the same way as his economic ideas. Mental illness is not like having a strange thought. It is a total experience. But it is also "muddied-up," like the stains of watercolours, which invokes both shame and creativity. Seventeen can't see the page he is writing on, but this of course serves as a metaphor for the legibility of the world, which is gradually growing less and less legible.
At one point in the narrative, Seventeen explores the aboutness of his story, riffing on what his writing might be about. And it's a perfect summation of Laglands. The first riff on aboutness reads:
My story is about where to go. My story is about a (hu)man whose cognitive abilities are slipping. Out of fear of forgetting (& being forgotten) he orchestrates his split selves to categorize and compile a book of old well-researched writing hoping that his former self will soehow reveal a path forward, a diagnosis, a reference to reach.
As he attempts to rebuild, he tries to retrace his steps through 'ephemera' and now comes face-to-face with old trauma at a time when reality is slipping and new voices enter his head.
As he fills the pieces of several puzzles, he steps back and is unable ot make sense of it (nor see the missing pieces from merging sets). He is left with a TESTAMENT. Proof, evidence. The things he is leaving behind are not who he is. But what is he missing by doing these things? Is it comedy or tragedy? Tranferring files to a new format, the computer tries to OCR (optial character recognition) the scans - (64)
Laglands is a testament in both senses of the word - as a kind of will, and as something that serves as evidence of an event. The book is sandwiched between two traumatic events, and therefore chronicles three traumas: the trauma of a boy in school who has cancer, and who shows for show and tell the wig he is wearing; the trauma of madness; and the trauma of losing a brother in a car accident. These three traumas intertwine, and create a kind of space where we can feel free to touch and press ourselves against the windowpane of madness without experiencing madness ourselves. Fredman writes, about contextual practices, "Accepting randomness and dissociation as preconditions, the contextual artist enters the work of art in a new ontological and ethical position, surrendering control and intention and becoming as much a discoverer or spectator as a creator." (17) In Laglands, like some of his sound collages, Seventeen finds secret meanings in the arrangement of language and images. In so doing, he gives us a new language for thinking about the meanings of madness.
Laglands can be purchased here.
Some of Seventeen's haunting and innovative sound collages can be found here.
Seventeen's podcast about John Hughes, not mentioned in the review, but worth checking out, can be found here.
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