mannequins. hundreds of millions of mannequins. they circle, in unison but separated, on a time-lost, holographic carousel in repeat. they appear in the orbit, reappear, disappear, with no time or space for mourning, as there is no mourning without true death. i watch them, dizzily, seated on my own horse. i do not know if i am moving or standing in one place. i do not know if i am on the ride. do they know? sometimes i watch from the eyes of the mannequin, sometimes from the horse. the horse knows something i do not. the horse does not speak, but whispers images, images of carnage, the fracturing of the mythical corporeal of which i hear about, but cannot touch, separated in my position either off or on the wheel, as the reality around me secedes like the drawing of a curtain. the horses revolve at different heights; some move up and down, some stay up, many stay down. some of the mannequins morph into their horses, creating monstrous, centaur-like figures of unfathomable strength and consequence, yet still circle and disappear; and reappear; others are chewing off their own legs, unable to exit the ride. others are cannibalizing the other horses, pulling others apart, fornicating, mutating into one another.
time often skips and replays. flashes of carnage. some in black and white, others saturated in gruesome, high-definition color. am i supposed to be seeing it? is it part of the show? i do not know where the show starts or ends. the horse is whispering to me. in the flood lights – which eradicate the revolving form’s attempt at a shadow, illuminating each mannequin to be solely that, personified, emptied, fleshless, three dimensional objects swirling in space – in the flood lights, i can sometimes see them, the strings. i cannot locate any puppeteer, any control center, which i just have to imagine exists somewhere beyond the bright light, if such a place exists. the carousel is operated by something beyond any electrical or mechanical system; by no single man, no machine, and – possibly, if we’re lucky – no god to blame. the merry-go-round consists of nothing but a circling of dazzling lights. the remaining material, the flesh, the destruction from every rupture and fight, exists parallel to it, unseen but heavy in weight, thrown off the ride, off the dimension, invisible particles, going and existing nowhere in particular. the carousel itself is weightless, rotating with laughing ease, and growing, but somewhere unseen, hangs this immeasurable, surmounting weight. bright, spinning lights. the weight. the horse is still whispering to me.
i am, speaking clinically, insane. in our shared reality, i am deemed psychotic because i believed a plush horse i bought on ebay was speaking to me. the horse knew things i did not. the horse had a past. the horse knew the truth of freedom, though i still do not. the horse was also not a horse. this was not the true beginning but marked the beginning of other’s awareness of my “psychotic break.” i’m not here to deny that i am schizophrenic. i recognize there are fragments of my reality that only i can see or experience in my own space-time, which they refer to as hallucinations. i require medication to function efficiently enough in this society. i have, in certain moments, suffered great distress due to some of my “delusions.”
and perhaps many of my experiences read as delusion, simply meaningless hallucinations fabricated by a damaged mind. perhaps it is easier to call them that. but what name is given to a world in which nothing refers beyond itself? what name is given to a world involved in a collective delusion, where the illusions of capital, status holograms, and white supremacy, continue to reign, like a looping, broken tape, even when we know the truth? where the lives of some are held to such importance, others are deemed necessary to eradicate, while their deaths are regarded with the same lack of urgency as shuffled files lost to the system. some slow and quiet, others of such unbelievable, gruesome, dehumanizing acts. if you’re even remotely aware of this world, i’m not telling you anything unknown, or anything i didn’t know before my “break” into madness. these are not even well-kept secrets.
“more interesting to recognize that the surface is already psychotic, that nothing lies beneath…” – mark fisher, k-punk
i am told there is something underneath. a structure. a truth. a solution. a dead body. but each attempt to reach it dissolves into another surface, another signal, another rotation of the merry-go-round.
mark fisher wrote of a condition in which belief is no longer required for participation. the system no longer depends on conviction, only continuation. the system is no longer threatened by critique or unearthing of the truth, the wheel now feeds on the circulation of our emotions. content. every action towards liberation, every subversion, even morality and vulnerability, can be subverted into capital and status. it is not that we mistake the simulation for reality, as much so that the distinction has ceased to matter operationally. an endless game of checkmate, and we are supposed to stay sane?
“it is no longer a question of the ideology of power, but of the scenario of power. ideology only corresponds to a corruption of reality through signs; simulation corresponds to a short circuit of reality and to its duplication through signs. it is always the goal of the ideological analysis to restore the objective process, it is always a false problem to wish to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum…
simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality. the territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. it is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory-precession of simulacra-that engenders the territory.” – jean baudrillard
this is where the language of psychosis becomes difficult to contain, because what is described clinically as a break from reality begins to resemble a heightened attunement to it. not a departure, but an overwhelming exposure, a collision and collapse of the infinite mirrors within oneself. the illusion of the world collapses into the illusion of the self, the self into the world.
the discussion around schizophrenia is complex, and my intention is not to discount any harm caused by disruption in reality, or deny that there is a disruption. i am not stating that those who experience psychosis can see “the truth” more so than any other person. such an experience greatly varies from person to person. nor am i discounting my own “symptoms” or convincing anyone that i have special knowledge or abilities. but is my reality, even if it’s not shared, not a reality? hallucinations are not without origin. dreams do not arise from nowhere, and hallucinations have a similar character to waking dreams. even when i am not in psychosis, i still feel the existence of that weight parallel to the carousel. i fail to believe i’m the only one.
the view around psychosis, and our shared reality in general, deserves reevaluation. diagnoses of insanity have never been neutral or apolitical. prior to the invention of the schizophrenia diagnosis, women were said to be “biologically prone to being mad,” particularly those who refused to submit to passivity, abuse, and domestication to men. and of course, the diagnosis itself became racialized; in protest psychosis, jonathan m. metzl explains how schizophrenia became a diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to black protestors in the 1960s, translating sensical anger into a clinical disorder and suppress movements of equality. the weight of these problems do not disappear. history has not erased either of these injustices. and these are not coincidences. who determines reality, and what is the motivation behind preserving this one?
so when i am told that what i experience is not real, i have to ask: does it not make sense to go insane? to refuse a reality that is so unnecessary and unreal? what is the reality we are willing to accept? is believing i can talk to the dead more insane than submitting to an insane world, to go to work and not believe in it, to consume without believing in what is offered, to continue to perform a self knowing it cannot become anything but a dissociated fabrication, to cope by filtering every emotion through a thousand layers of irony until the world turns into nothing but a looping hallucination? to know it’s all a hologram, one that distorts the very real suffering and carnage, but continue to ride the ride which never stops?
more importantly, what choices do we have? to adapt to reality – or break against it?
thespiritbox.mp3 