Who Am We?

CC0

Walt Whitman once said we contain multitudes. If Walt Whitman was in a psychiatrist's office in the 21st century, he'd probably get lumped with a diagnosis, dumped on Seroquel, and refused his place as a nurse volunteer in the Civil War.

What a stupid name for a war. There is nothing civil about any war. Parker Palmer once said, "Violence is what happens when we don't know what else to do with our suffering." I think too that violence and some mental illness happens when we don't know what to do with all of our selves. We are not allowed to be a multitude. That would make us mad. We are not supposed to have conflicting parts. That would make us unfit consumers.

The night's sleeping with its dreaming non-linearity clinged to me all morning. That dreamyspace is a creative release; the stories come most easily when I'm closest to its borders. Not so much in the stress of the afternoon, with its insistence on relating back to me how unproductive I've been with the day, and therefore how unfit I am to inhabit the earth on which I must pay someone else for the privilege of clinging to. But the world rests in the night, as John O'Donohue says. Where do I go - the me that does my taxes - while I lie sleeping prone for those hours on end? The dream expert Robert Moss would say I go to places other than here, to worlds other than here. But I guess he would. As a child he was clinically dead during an emergency appendectomy. He reports the usual - seeing his body from up on the roof, and being rather uncaring about returning to it. But then, he claims, he went somewhere else, another place with other beings. He lived there for years and years, developed relationships, grew, had children, aged, had an entire life in this world that was much nicer than ours currently is. Then one day he returned with a start, bam, years later, into his body, back into the body of a nine year child, to pick up where he'd left off.

I very much like that story whether it's true or not. There is a fluidity about it, an expanding of that which we call "I" out beyond our own consciousness, beyond the mere constrictions of this body, wonderful as it is with its skin and bones and its wisdom, out into something bigger. But I mustn't hold to anything further than this being a story, they tell me. If I thought this was possible, it would prove I am naive, prone to childishness, they would say. Requiring a crutch, a magical thinker, harbouring a refusal to face the world as it is with its singular plane, singular existence within a body that is simply a mass of different bits, nothing more, nothing less.

We all live within our own stories.

Maybe dreaming is not merely a dusting off from the day, a trash-chuck of your daily bits, but a multidimensional travelling into lives forward, lives backward, lives in different places. Maybe we are more connected than we think. Maybe we're everything gone before and everything to come. It would be nice if we were. We could then learn that what we're fucking up now we'll only have to deal with in the future.

My friend dreams she is a man, or that she has given birth to a baby whale in a swimming pool and they commune in beauty. Lately I keep dreaming that I'm staying in a motel. My dreams are often bleak, pedestrian, dull, logistical mundanities trying to get from one place to another. My friend dreams she's having sex with Adam Hills except it's not his leg that's detachable but his dick. I could dream about anything I want but instead I'm catching a train, or a bus, or driving, trying to get from one undefined place to another. Trying to work out how to move my persona through the world. I dreamed once that my car was parked in my parents' driveway, the brake lights broken.

Decades ago when I was collagen-rich and budding I dreamed I was flying in technicolor. I flew effortlessly over English fields of differing shades of green with occasional blotches of flowering color. More recently I've dreamed of dark monotone streets of industry and chainlink fences where I was being chased by dark figures with indeterminate features. When I reached a fence, I would push off through my feet and my body would rise clean away, up and over. I could bounce up from a standing start and hover in the air, easily, like breathing. I rode the streets like a skateboard.

Jung reckoned that we dream all the time, even when we're awake, but that we suppress the images in order to get the dishes done and avoid the psych office and the Seroquel. Perhaps I dream mundane because I'm dreaming all day. I let them come, the images. I don't often know what they mean, but I know they come from the same space that stories do. They could scare me if I thought they were indicative of something pathological. Pictures, flashes. Some must be fragments forgotten from my own life, splinters and shards. Some are up-close shots of things I do not recognize until my vision pans back to show weirdly random things - a whirling spinning top, or a person I've never seen before, a shoe, or an enormous wooden cabasa, an instrument that creates a percussive sound by twisting its top, likely seen on a Fleetwood Mac music video in the 70's or something.

I shouldn't lump all the psychiatrists in together, as if every one of them insists on being conformed in the straightjacket our society and their herd has shoved them into, bookended by the DSM at one end and Glaxo Smith Kline at the other, with a pure materialist view of our multitudes that will be conveniently silenced on the matter-only plane by a bunch of pills. But how can they not think like this, though it's such a long way from Freud and Jung? They live in a world where our souls, for want of a better word (or any word or concept), are separated from our bodies, like our minds are, as our bodies are separated from the earth. All that fragmentation, wreaking havoc.

The collective has an effect on us though. And we have an effect on the collective. Depending on where you live in the world your experience of schizophrenia will be different. If you're in the most culturally fragmented countries, those of the West, the voices you hear will be different too. When 60 schizophrenics were interviewed, 20 each from California, Acora in Ghana and Chennai in India, they all heard good and bad voices. But in the US the voices were not positive. Not once. The opposite was the case in Ghana and India. The anthropologist who conducted the study said the Americans seemed to have less of a relationship with their voices. She surmised that the difference between the two may be because India and Ghana are not so troubled by these things, and so it's not something they need to push aside with revulsion as an example of their loserhood. She wonders if something about the more interdependent life of those two countries makes space for foibles, which translates into the US as personal failure.

In a world that demands proof and thinks truth should be facts, to entertain the notion of how far we go, even if it is in my own imagination, gives breathing space. Round and round and round we go. Where do we stop? Well, we all have our stories and ideas and preferences about what makes up an "I" and where it fits into the we. Ultimately, nobody knows. And maybe we don't even need to.