Godshattered
Wherein our narrator is humbled by events beyond
his control.
Today, Sunday, is the beginning of Daylight
Savings Time in Sydney. Thankfully. Because this means I'll wake up - more or
less naturally - at 6:30 AM, not 5:30 AM, when the sun starts creeping past the
windows.
So I woke up this morning at 8
AM, feeling very pleased with myself - eight hours of sleep, more or less - and
found a very disturbing email from my friend Kevin, back in
LA:
Hey
Mark,
Things
are very weird right now. I feel a tremor in the force. The sky outside is a
very eerie, hazy orange and there is ash falling everywhere from many fires in
the area. Very surreal. On top of that XXX has been committed to a mental
institution by his parent's. Apparently he went willingly and then when he got
there went even "crazier". Not sure what to think. My mind will not allow me
to think of anything else, which sucks because I have a 4-page paper I have to
write about Parmenides by Monday which I cannot focus on. Anyways, sorry to
send such a weird, ominous message but that is how I feel right now. Hope
things are better for you down under. Don't eat too many Tim
Tams.
Hugs,
Kevin
Oh
boy. I had read about the three fires in the NY Times last night, one of them
is about 15 miles from miles from my sister's house in Carlsbad, and reasonably
close enough to Kevin that it may be the cause of the ash falling down on him.
Hard to say, exactly, because it could be coming from another fire. But in all
the scene sounds fairly hellish back home, not this lovely April-like weather
we've got here in Sydney. Mostly sunny today, and I got a fair dose of it
sitting in the sunshine at a Cafe this morning, having a very civilized, silly
brunch with Nicola (sysop at AFTRS), Lisa (whom I met through Brendan on
Thursday evening at a CoFA opening, and who knows Nicola) and their friends.
The Australian intelligentsia are a quick-witted crew, and fun to be
with.
But that was later. At 8 AM I'm
reading how LA is burning and how XXX has been committed, somewhat willingly, to
the funny farm. I only met this fellow a few months ago, when he came up to
Casa Pesce following the premiere of "Crazy Noise" at the first Invisible
College. Seemed a very nice fellow, well mannered (asked to use my bathroom,
that sort of thing) and very young. Had, at that point, just had his first
psychedelic experience. Which was positive enough that it was followed, in
fairly short order, with another, and another, and another. He had one at my
place, and spent a few hours throwing up, first into my toilet, then into the
bushes on my front lawn, then several times on the way back to his Orange County
home. Euch. But he recovered, physically.
Yet, in these situations, there's
always an element of danger. He's about 19 years old - in my book, really just
still a kid - and I can't say that all the psychedelics I did at that tender age
actually did me a lot of good in the short term. In the longer term, perhaps
yes, but at the time they really only served to confuse me, fill me with all
sorts of strange ideas I could neither confirm or deny, and left me ungrounded,
tense, and, to use a term I'm borrowing from Vernor Vinge's epic
A Fire Upon the
Deep, filled with "godshatter". The term is
used to describe a human being who is used as a "terminal" for a vastly evolved,
god-like consciousness. The force of the intellect is so overwhelming that it
literally fragments the personality of the person thus exposed. And this person
spends the rest of the novel trying to reassemble the fragments of his own being
into a coherent personality. I think that all of my tripping did expose me to
some of the numinous, like someone expecting to get a drink from a water
fountain, but getting a firehose instead. Blown clear across the landscape,
into very unfamiliar territory. It took me about a decade to integrate these
visions, with a generous helping of psychotherapy and a lot of
confidence-building on my own part. Then I could own these visions and move
forward.
I suspect something similar
may have happened to this boy; thrust full-speed ahead into the numinous,
without any guideposts or teachers or grounding techniques to help him interpret
his experiences in meaningful ways. He probably should have slowed down - quite
a bit - taken time to regroup, take a breath, and learn from his experiences,
before he garnered any more. But I don't think it worked that way. He kept
adding and adding and adding to this wealth of experience, and that, coupled
with the weirdness that comes with October's Santa Anna winds in Los Angeles
(positive ions put everyone on edge) pushed him beyond his natural limits. He
started believing that he was god (which is certainly true in some sense, but
has to be constrained appropriately) and telling everyone, and he didn't care
who he told or if they believed
him.
That got him into trouble with his
parents. At least, that's my understanding. And frankly, I can be entirely
sympathetic here. I mean your baby, whom you've spent the last 19 years
nurturing, suddenly announces he's god? That'd strike fear into the heart of
any parent, particularly if they know, as I do, that a person's first psychotic
break tends to happen around age 19. They recommended he go to a hospital for
evaluation. Interestingly - and to his credit - he didn't argue with them. I
wonder if he was skeptical enough of his own feelings of - what? omniscience?
omnipresence? omnipotence? - to say,
okay,
maybe there's something a wee bit wrong here. So, on Friday evening, he was
trundled off to the hospital. If it's a voluntary commitment - and it sounds
like that's the case - it'll be a 72-hour observation and evaluation. As he's
obviously not a danger to himself or anyone else, he won't be compelled to stick
around after that. But I do hope they don't stuff him full of psychotropics.
There's a new diddy, whose name escapes me, which my friend TM was placed onto
back in the summertime, when he was living in a group home. An anti-psychotic,
the 3rd generation descendent of Thorazine. It stops psychotic ideation,
because, well, it stops most ideation: that is, it's as if one's mind is in
handcuffs, and left to amble along well-trodden paths, hampered and powerless.
And my understanding is that this drug has become flavor-of-the-month because it
renders the patient docile and manageable. And in the health care system,
management is all.
Of course, if he
really is psychotic, and is suffering the first of what could be many breaks,
well, anti-psychotics would be more of a blessing than a curse. But if it's
really only just godshatter, shutting him down like that would be rude, and
probably unnecessary. In that case, he doesn't need drugs, he needs a mentor
and a spiritual discipline, something like yoga or Zen or even lots of
monastery-based Catholic prayer & meditation, so he can come back to
baseline. Granted, it would be a new baseline, informed by his experiences, but
the balance would shift: no longer would the experiences rule him. He'd rule
them.
At the moment, LA burns, and he
sits in a hospital, underneath the Santa Anna winds, waiting, I suppose, for a
bursting through of the divine.
Posted: Sun - October 26, 2003 at 01:40 PM