An Altered Sense of Birdsong: On Poetry and Schizophrenia-Spectrum Illnesses

Poetry can give us insight into the phenomenology of schizophrenia and schizophrenia spectrum illnesses.  How?  Perhaps it has something to do with the inner life, and its relationship to seeing and hearing.  Think of the intense forms of listening we find in Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man,” or the poems of Mei Mei Bersenbrugge in Empathy that seems to speak uncannily to our minds in a form of mental listening.  Living with a schizophrenia-spectrum illness often means responding to internal stimuli, and in a way, writing a poem is no different, for we follow the tracks laid down by an internal voice, what Walt Whitman called, speaking to his soul, “the hum of your valved voice.”  Poetry gives us mental images; schizophrenia gives us visual hallucinations.  Poetry gives us cognitive music; schizophrenia gives us auditory hallucinations.  These are phenomena of the mind, inward experiences, that carry certain phenomenological similarities and differences, which we explore in this blog post.

Poetry and schizophrenia also share an interest in the experience of alterity, of a chasm between the self and me, or between voice and thought, or me and you, that we will also explore.  There is something innately speculative, philosophical, uncategorizable and theoretical about living with schizoaffective, because its experience can be so uncannily strange or other, and strangeness and otherness, like wonder or pain, is an impetus for thought.  Louis Sass writes, in his original Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought:

Many schizophrenics do seem to be highly preoccupied with experiences involving revelations of such cosmic or totalistic proportions - about the nature of existence in general or its fundamental relationship to the self.  The experiential transformations they experience often have an all-encompassing quality, affecting not just this or that object but the look or feel of the entire experiential world.  And as schizophrenics disengage from the social and pragmatic world, any focused, practical concerns they may have had tend to be replaced by preoccupations of a highly abstract or universal nature.  (Sass 190-191)

This tendency towards speculation, philosophy, the uncategorizable and theory can often find a home in poetry, which creates profoundly moving mental environments through black marks on a white page.  In other words, although we speak of poetry as concrete or abstract - contrasting William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” with a poem by Berssenbrugge, say - the truth is that poetry is mostly not concrete but abstract, because it is mimetic.  (In the same sense, the term “abstract art” is a bit misleading, since abstraction is more mimetic rather than sensuous.). This mimesis would seem to resonate with people, like me, whose is diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, and whose “experiential transformations” naturally raise questions about epistemology and ontology, say, or inside and outside, or boundaries more generally, be they formal, generic, intrapersonal or interpersonal.

I remember walking down the street.  It’s summer in Ann Arbor, and it’s beautiful.  A sunny street, lined with big houses, many of them co-ops where students live, and I am leaving my co-op to go work as a barista at a coffee shop downtown.  I’ve been spending a lot of time meditating, feeling as if this is an important method for helping me develop as a person; and in the meditation practice, they use the word “evolve” rather than “develop,” which strikes me as important, a way to grow into a different kind of person, to raise the consciousness of things.  That’s when I hear, “Andrew!”  I turn around, but there’s no one behind me, and there’s no one in front of me.  There’s no one across the street either.  But I hear it distinctly, “Andrew!"  I can’t make sense of it.  But I turn down the street towards Main Street, and start thinking.  There’s so much to think about.

What are auditory hallucinations?  How are they similar to a mental listening?  Let’s start by making a differentiation between what Jonathan Lang, a man living with schizophrenia, terms “overt” and “introvert” acts.  He writes, in the context of auditory hallucinations,

These two respective styles correlate fairly highly with various orientations of the ego.  When the ego has an overt orientation, as in reading or writing, or in observation of the environment, the verbal productions of the thoughts-out-loud take the form of a running presentation of verbals suited to the activity holding the interest of the ego, adding an occasional side remark addressed to the ego.  For example, if the individual is reading, the thoughts-out-loud reproduce the words of the book the individual is reading, sometimes making a comment on a passage.  When the orientation of the ego is more strictly introvert, as for example in reflection, the verbal productions often take the form of an imaginary conversation between the individual and some person with whom the individual is acquainted.  (qtd in Sass 231)

The phenomenology of auditory hallucinations - what Lang terms “thoughts-out-loud” - is polyvocal, monologically dialogical, evidence of a kind of private heteroglossia.  There is a self, and there is a voice; the voice might read words on a page that the self would otherwise read, suggesting a deep alterity.  When an individual is engaged in overt activities involving the perceptual world - holding a pencil while writing, taking down a book to read, noticing a change in the weather as the sky darkens before rain - auditory hallucinations manifest as a kind of parallel set of verbal activities that correspond in different ways to the overt activity being engaged in.  They are like a form of commentary, heard footnotes in real time addended to the perceptual activity, and they occur along a continuum of pleasant to despair-inducing, as they can distract and/or alleviate loneliness depending on the voices.  For Lang, when he is reading, an auditory hallucination will both read the words on the page in a book, while also commenting on the passage.  When an individual is engaged in introvert activities, such as thought, the auditory hallucinations often become unstuck from overt activities in the perceptual world, and there is a shift into the imaginary which involves a conversation between the person and the hallucinations. These voices are involuntary, and can be very cruel, versus the experience of the poet’s voice, which is voluntary; but the sound of the voice seems to be similar.   

What do auditory hallucinations sound like?  What is the difference between cognitive music and thoughts-out-loud?  Do we hear auditory hallucinations in the same way we hear a lyric speaker of a poem?”  Sass writes, “By far the. most frequent kind of hallucination in schizophrenia is, in fact, of highly intelligible voices; and these voices (unlike the auditory hallucinations of patients with alcoholic hallucinosis, the other group that very commonly hears voices) generally have more of a conceptual or cognitive than a sensory or perceptual taint, as if heard with the mind rather than the ear.”  (Sass 233). “As if heard with the mind rather than the ear” - this too suggests a kind of mental-verbal experience, a cognitive experience, not unlike the reading of a poem.  What is the sound of thought?  What is the music of thought?  Lang writes, “Mind is here defined as an organ of thought, and thinking has meant to me the meaningful production of words, but so softly that only I could hear them.  I experience these silent words as freely arising inside my head out of nothing, but they are sufficiently under my control that I feel that I am thinking them.” (qtd in Sass 233)  So the phenomenology of auditory hallucinations is a mental-verbal experience that involves words heard softly, at low volume, in addition to being an unshared one - “so softly only I could hear them” - involving a kind of personal otherness - “I feel that I am thinking them.”

Poetry also often gives us an experience of intense privacy, where it is as if only we are hearing the thoughts in the poem, that they are intended for us.  The difference in this experience, however, and the experience of auditory hallucinations is that poetry is shared and sharable, while auditory hallucinations are unsharable.  For example, imagine stopping a stranger in the street to show them a newspaper you are holding.  You ask, “what do you see?”  Presumably the stranger would be able to identify the newspaper as a newspaper, and this conversation and perception would occur in a shared perceptual world.  But when one is experiencing visual or auditory hallucinations, that is not the case - the perceptual world of the schizophrenic is not sharable, even if there is an attempt on the part of an artist, for example, to communicate something of this world, as in various works of Art Brut, or the poetry of Hannah Weiner.

Lately I’ve been seeing colors, although I haven’t told anyone about this, not even the therapist I see, Dr. Lehman.  But the colors are important, so important that I keep them a secret.  They tell me things about other people, whether the people are good or bad, whether I can trust them or not, whether they are identifying with the Holy Spirit or the ego.  The Holy Spirit and the ego are things I read about in a book called A Course in Miracles that I’ve become more and more interested in since I’ve started meditating.  For if we can evolve through meditation, into different kinds of human beings - maybe human beings with different kinds of powers - then who’s to say there aren’t other powers out there, like the Holy Spirit, or the ego?  And so I become vigilant about these things.  At the co-op, where I live, when people are hanging out on the porch, I listen very intently to what other people are saying, trying to divine whether or not they are identifying with the ego or the Holy Spirit. Once I know, I speak; in other words, I only know what to say, how to behave, once I know which team you are on.  If you identify with the ego, my whole goal in life is to wrest you from that state of consciousness by saying something that comes from the good state of consciousness, because that shines a light that dispels the darkness.  I am an ego-destroying machine.  I have a purpose in life.

Sometimes this purpose freaks people out, though, so I need to be careful.  One night in the co-op, at dinner, Hannah, with dark black hair, outspoken, is talking about religion, and I speak up.

“The Holy Spirit is what saves.”

“Andrew I thought you were Jewish.”

I look at her very seriously, but say nothing.  I”m trying to figure out what team she is on.

But by then other people at the table are visibly affected.  No one says anything, but that’s how I know.  A level of discomfort has fallen over the table, something about my conviction.  But my conviction is my purpose, and I am at a loss for words, too.

That night I talk to my roommate, Peter, who is standing in his underwear.  He is Chinese and super smart.  “I think you freaked them out downstairs.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Just cool it with the Christian stuff.”  

“Okay.”

But I don’t cool it.  If anything I rev it up more.

The internal conversation in a poem, between voice and thought, (think of Wordsworth’s thoughts being composed by the voice of the river and his nurse in the opening of the Prelude), between the self and the soul (think of Whitman wanting to loaf with his soul, and hear “the hum of your valved voice”), between writer and character, or writer and protagonist, like the internal conversation in auditory hallucinations, makes a world that is more ontological than ontic, since one is not so much experiencing life while casually hearing a voice now and then about furniture or budgeting, but rather the the mind becomes or is the dynamic that is occurring with the thoughts-out-loud.  Schizophrenia is as much a how disease as a what disease.  Like a lyric essay, it argues for a stance in the world by its very being, its very way of leaning into the wind.  The whole person is involved with auditory hallucinations, which is why some people talk out loud or respond to them more than people around them.  Thus we should not be surprised that Wallace Stevens, for example, an intensely speculative poet, in “The Idea of Order at Key West” argues in his poem that the world is shaped by the song, and not the other way around, just as the world in schizophrenia is shaped by the auditory hallucination.  “She was the single artificer of the world / In which she sang.  And when she sang, the sea, / Whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song, for she was the maker.”  (Stevens 128)  As the sea becomes the self of her song in this overt act, so the world becomes a place where the hallucinations create a kind of ontological environment that can feel just as real as living without hallucinations.  To call hallucinations symptoms might be right in a psychiatric context, but in the context of the phenomenology of hallucinations, they are more like aspects of living or forms of life.  This is why, when “The Idea of Order at Key West” ends, we find that the song has shaped the world.  Stevens writes,

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,

Why, when the singing ended and we turned

Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,

The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,

As the night descended, tilting in the air,

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,

Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.   (Stevens 130)

The world - the night, the sea, the fiery poles - has been shaped by the singing, by the inward phenomena.  The mind, developed by the song, sees what the song indicates.  Consciousness sculpts in an ontological way.  We can compare this to the opening of The Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, where the phenomenology of the experience is similar.  Renee writes,

I remember very well the day it happened.  We were staying in the country and I had gone for a walk alone as I did now and then.  Suddenly, as I was passing the school, I heard a German song; the children were having a singing lesson.  I stopped to listen, and at that instant a strange feeling came over me, a feeling hard to analyze but akin to something I was to know too well later - a disturbing sense of unreality.  It seemed to me that I no longer recognized the school, it had become as large as a barracks; the singing children were prisoners, compelled to sing.  It was was though the school and the children’s song were set apart from the rest of the world.  At the same time my eye encountered a field of wheat whose limits I could not see.  The yellow vastness, dazzling in the sun, bound up with the song of the children imprisoned in the smooth stone school- barracks, filled me with such anxiety that I broke into sobs.  I ran home to our garden and began to play “to make things seem as they usually were,” that is, to return to reality.  It was the first appearance of those elements which were always present in later sensations of unreality: illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and smoothness of material things.    (qtd. in Sechehaye, 3-4)

For Renee, things are not what they seem.  She can say “it was as though,” since she is reflecting on the experience, but this analogical phrasing comes after a moment when metaphor has collapsed - “it had become as large as a barracks” rather than “it seemed to have become” or “it was as if it became.”  After these experiences of the unreal, which are instantiated by song, Renee runs home and plays “’to make things seem as they usually are.’”  For Renee, then, reality is a seeming, and unreality is a different kind of seeming.  But both seeming seem intimately related to song, to the phenomenological experience of hearing or listening to a song, as if the strangeness of music causes a corresponding strangeness in the landscape the mind sees.

This seeming is written about by powerfully by Stevens in his “Description Without Place,” which again prioritizes the how, the ontological - how the furniture in the room is seen, say, how it seems - over the what, the ontic - the furniture in the room.  The first part of the poem reads,

It is possible that to seem - it is to be,

As the sun is something seeming and it is.

The sun is an example.  What it seems

It is and in such seeming all things are.

Thus things are like a seeming of the sun

Or like a seeming of the moon or night

Or sleep.  It was a queen that made it seem

By the illustrious nothing of her name.

Her green mind made the world around her green.

The queen is an example…THis green queen

In the seeming of the summer of her sun

By her own seeming made the summer change.

In the golden vacancy she came, and comes,

And seems to be on the saying of her name.

Her times becomes again, as it became,

The crown and weekday coronal of her fame. (Stevens 339)

For Renee, as for Stevens, the mind presents what is seen, but what is seen is inflected by the mind, or, in Stevens words later in the poem, “The difference that we make in what we see”.  The world is mediated by the mind.  This can explain why living with schizophrenia can be so crippling, for when the mind is not functioning correctly, the world is not experienced “correctly.”  The slant feels wrong, the method not a good fit for the social and practical world.  Yet this is something that for many people is hard to understand, by which I mean the lived experience of mental illness.  It is a kind of style, and perhaps this is why Hannah Weiner refers to the writing in her clairvoyante journals as “clair-style.”   

For a different seeming that is being, we can look at a passage from the Book of Margery Kempe, dictated by the medieval Christian mystic Margery Kempe, and considered one of the first autobiographies written in the English language.  Kempe speaks of an experience of madness in the third person:

And in this time she saw, as she thought, devils opening their mouths all alight with burning flames of fire, as if they would have swallowed her in, sometimes pawing at her, sometimes threatening her, sometimes pulling her and hauling her about both night and day during the said time.  And also the devils called out to her with great threats, and bade her that she should forsake her Christian faith and belief, and deny her God, his mother, and all the saints in heaven, her good works and all good virtues, her father, her mother, and all her friends.  And so she did.  She slandered her husband, her friends, and her own self.  She spoke many sharp and reproving words; she recognized no virtue nor goodness; she desired all wickedness; just as the spirits temped her to say and do, so she said and did.  She would have killed herself many a time as they stirred her to, and would have been damned with them in hell, and in witness of this she bit her own hand so violently that the mark could be seen for the rest of her life.  (qtd. in Shannonhouse 4)

One wants to read this as fiction, but the phenomenological experience of madness is not fictive, but real-feeling, where the “as if” collapses.  What seems is what is.  Yet there is something in the accounting of her experience that is unshared, which forces us to reach for fictive orientations in order to understand.  We need the “as if” to enter into the world of the passage, though what the passage is describing is the collapse of the “as if.”  Empathy is a metaphorical art and act.  Although it is very hard to convey, Kempe experiences these devils as one would experience a mug of coffee lifted to the lips, in the sense of the seeming of it.  But I am speaking metaphorically, and we are speaking not only of content but the constituting aspects of content.  Sass writes brilliantly on this:    

I would argue, rather, that these delusional phenomena function as something like symbols for subjectivity itself, for the self-as-subject, and thus that they are not objects within the world, whether real or delusional, so much as expressions of the felt, ongoing process of knowing or experiencing by which this world is constituted.  If this is true, such phenomena would be expected to be doubly ephemeral and unreal - difficult to locate not only because they have no existence in the objective world independent of the subject’s consciousness but also because, like the eyeball that sees, they are unlikely to appear even as immanent objects within their own (subjectivized) fields of vision.  (Sass 286)

Living with mental illness is that “felt, ongoing process of knowing or experiencing by which this world is constituted.”  It is a total experience, not a dalliance or flirtation.    

I want to teach, is the thing.  I have a purpose, and I’m good at using my purpose to dispel darkness.  There are moment of profound and extreme discomfort, yes, but it’s part of the job.  The problem is that I have tried teaching before - before I moved into the co-op, I was enrolled in a masters in education program at the University of Michigan, but because I was meditating then, and seeing colors, and feeling disconnected, I have a very hard time connecting with my students.  Even my grades suffer, something I did not experience as an undergraduate.  One day, after another failure in teaching, when the kids are out of control, and I do not understand what I”m doing wrong, I’m called into a meeting with my supervisor.

“You’re not listening to me.”

I look up.  Eye contact has been hard for me lately; it feels like, when I look into a person’s eyes, they have the power to suck up my soul and my own sense of my self, my presence, dissolves and disappears.  I look at her once, then look back down at the desk.  We are sitting in the same classroom where I’ve been student-teaching for the last two months.

“Why aren’t you listening.”

I don’t know what to say.  I don’t know what’s going on exactly.  I don’t have words for it.

“You need to take a break,” she says.  She is in her forties, African-American, with long braids and glasses.  “Think about it like swimming.  If you have a hard time swimming, you keep practicing.  That’s what we’re going to do with your student-teaching.  You’ll take a break, and try again in the winter.  With practice, you can become a good teacher, too.  But now we need to assert control over this class again, so Mr. Brown will take over.”

“Okay.”

I run my hand through my bald head, because recently I’ve shaved my head.  It makes me feel more spiritual, more weightless.  I go jogging for miles with my shaved head, miles and miles where I feel I am jogging in a kind of John Ashbery poem of the mind, as if every turn, every bend of grass and tree, is a kind of wacky euphoric surprise.

“Andrew.”

“Sorry.” I look up.  We make eye contact.  I look down again.

“Do you understand?”

An important similarity between the phenomenology of auditory hallucinations and the phenomenology of cognitive music is that thought functions within a context of alterity, of a person or a poet experiencing thoughts as other.  Let me share an example by John Ashbery, who is also significant in the context of schizophrenia for his usage of apophany, a significant feature of the prodrome phase of schizophrenia, in poems like “Two Scenes” and many others.  Here, chosen somewhat randomly, is a poem, “On the Terrace of Ingots,” from Shadow Train;

It was the bitterness of the last time

That only believers and fools take for the next time

Proposing itself as a chore against an expressionist

Backdrop of skylights and other believed finial flourishes, and

You wash your hands, become a duct to drain off

All the suffering of the age you thought you had

Put behind you in defining it, but the sense mounts

Slowly in the words as in a hygrometer - that day

You stood apart from the class in the photograph.

The trees seemed to make a little sense, more precious

Than anything on earth.  For the clamor

Was drawing it all away, as in a parade; you saw

How much smaller it all kept getting.  And the fathers

Failed.  I don’t think it would be different today

If we are alone up here.  The flares of today

Aren’t like suffering either, yet are almost everyone.  (Ashbery, 718)

There is the sense in this poem of a center, a kind of deep epistemology, related to the moment with the photograph, with suffering, that we are not able to totally identify, out of which the thoughts of the poem manifest, which seems to connote a personal philosophy about poetry.  We want to know the center, but cannot - in the words of another poem from Shadow Train, “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” “The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, but cannot.”  (Ashbery, 698)  As if somehow impossibly knowing or understanding the sphere at the heart of the poem’s concern would unlock it in such a way as to give us a more robust coherence, a larger sense of the way things hang together in the poem, even though all the while we know that this understanding in its fullness is impossible.  We are given a meaningful foreground, a sort of gestalt, but the totality of the background is denied us.   

Our experience of the poem is similar to auditory and visual hallucinations that occur to people along the schizophrenic spectrum, where what we are experiencing is profoundly real, but it is also inaccessible in some ways because it is not capable of being totally shared.  It is the limits of empathy.  Or it is the reason why we read, an argument for sharing, a kind of essay, an attempt.  We encounter speculation around this dynamic very profoundly in Ashbery’s “Wet Casements,” which opens with a quote from Kafka, “When Eduard Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open doorway, he saw that it was raining.  It was not raining much.”  We are presented with the intimacy between author and character - who is making these remarks, who is seeing the rain (Kafka or Raban?), and how?  Ashbery then opens the poem with, “The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected / In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through / Their own eyes.  A digest of their correct impressions of / Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your / Ghostly transparent face.”  What would it be like to enter into another person, the way Kafka does with Eduard Raban, and see through their eyes?  What would it be like to be well, though sometimes symptomatic, but to try and remember what a psychotic break was like?

I remember nothing of what happened.

I remember nothing.  I’m scared.

It was - a tree with ants running up and down its branches,

a house I had been inside of,

a song I heard.  It was

a blank space now.  No, it was a person

hiding in my ribcage, a memory

of a person and his behavior; it was

the memory of a mind.  It had been

my mind; my mind had been it,

and I remember sitting at a desk

in an apartment, and time had been burned alive.

There was this paleness to everything - I don’t know how else

to describe it - like the world turned inside out.

All the colors in the room seemed bleached.

Were bleached. Like some kind of porcelain.

I was sitting at a desk with a mind

that was not my mind.  I was trying

to write something.

Meanwhile, there was

a house with light that I had forgotten.

I could only barely register it,

so in love I was with my new mind then,

how it branched into startling configurations

and infused my me with tremendous fireworks.

But I wasn’t me, so who was I?

A stranger in a hollow room, a man

who could not see or recognize his face in the mirror.

I was an altered sense of birdsong.

I was a conversation with voices disembodied,

I was a bicyclist in a cemetery with no way out.

The lighted house was a residue.

I stomped on it, I danced on it.

It had been real, though it was not real.

And when the song ended, and I heard

The old song, the tree was touchable

Again with my mind, for it had changed

As I had, leaving the hospital in winter

With a bag of my belongings under my arm.

Works Cited

Ashbery, John. Collected Poems, 1956-1987.  New York, The Library of America, 2008.

Sass, Louis. Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought.  New York, Basic Books, 1992.

Sechehaye, Marguerite, editor and commentator.  The Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl. New York, Grune & Stratton, 1951.

Shannonhouse, Rebecca, editor.  Out of Her Mind: Women Writing on Madness.

Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.  New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.  New York, The Modern Library, 2000.