There Is Only One Story

E. Jay O'Connell

... There are only perhaps a dozen or so people in the world.

We resonate to the vibration of one or more of the twelve - we are archetypes all.

I am always Daedalus.

I believe that somewhere, the archetypes are imprisoned, drugged, chained; that only this could explain the perversity of the 20th century.

The earth mother preserves me for some unfathomable purpose.

Prometheus is not the only one chained to that stone.

Odin and Jehovah told Zeus to change his name to Jupiter, and so Rome was built in a day...

(Fragment from notebook one week before the hospital.)

It was the beginning of my sophomore year at college. I thought of myself as an artist in those days. I had just moved out of the dorm, and into my first apartment. It was a bit of a walk to campus, through the park, and although the place was a blue asphalt-shingled dump, it was fairly nice inside.

My room was tiny, but I didn't care. I was going to build a loft.

My schedule was a little odd. I have never been able to budget my time. I spend my time freely, and only when there is some sort of deadline looming do I begin to apply myself. Peculiarities in my schedule created a hellish 48-hour "day" once a week. Afterwards I would sleep eighteen hours and feel much better. Gradually, I noticed that I really didn't need to go to sleep the next day, but could simply stay up until bedtime, creating a 72-hour day.

Eventually I found that I didn't need to sleep at all.

Should I mention the drugs? I did them in moderation - my circle of friends were more deeply involved than I. I smoked a lot of pot, drank less than most frat boys, and did a little acid. One hit of acid acted like a permanent catalyst. We found it on the kitchen floor, in a baggie. No one could identify either the source or type of acid. Acid like manna. We, my roommate and I, gobbled it immediately, after splitting it down the center with a razor blade.

I wouldn't come down for months.

My relationship with my lover was coming apart, although I hadn't really noticed it at the time. I remember the last night with her, making love until she had come several times, and was getting tired of the wear and tear. She blew me for what seemed like hours, while in the muted darkness of my loft I watched kaleidoscopic patterns of color flash across my eyelids. This was the activity which had replaced sleep for me. I spent an hour or two a night in a sort of reptilian stupor, watching my own private light show. She wanted to help. She begged me to come, and go to sleep.

But while I had no difficulty maintaining an erection, I could no longer come. She would quietly slip away from me soon afterwards, while I was away in the hospital. Not until I realized that she had become the girlfriend of an old friend of mine would I think to question her reaction.

After the manna, I noticed I could see things clearly. It was like the beginning of the acid experience, when it seems that a gray film has been pulled off the world, showing it to be a brighter and more colorful place than you had previously imagined. I could see. Photos taken of me at this time are alarming; my eyes are literally wide, open too far, the pupil almost entirely visible.

I was never tired anymore, but was instead filled with a manic energy which never seemed to translate into useful work. I was too busy talking. And walking. I would walk anywhere, miles in any weather, at any time. It felt good; my body now obeyed me in a new way. I drove it like an animal. I didn't really inhabit it anymore. It was simply a beast to be bullied into submission.

I made tapes, long ranting diatribes against those I had begun to feel were persecuting me, those who would stand in the way of my ascension. I dispensed wisdom freely. I played the part of mad prophet.

"Reality is an emulsion... thin and fragile to the extreme. Acid gradually eats away at this emulsion, leaving scratches, and holes through which is glimpsed a light, but be careful, it burns; the trick is not to be blinded..."

In the end I walked home and began drinking my father's scotch, in an effort to lose consciousness. I suppose this was what you might call a cry for help. I certainly didn't see it as such at the time. I was interested in the writings of James Joyce, of which my father was something of a student. Glancing through various works and letters, sipping warm scotch, I felt an amazing sense of kinship with the Irish writer. I believed I might well be the current incarnation of his spirit. Daedalus, father of artifice, creator of the labyrinth, archetypal artist - I happily defaced the books with my own speculations concerning the past and present of my immortal spirit.

Within 24 hours my family had signed me into a mental hospital.

I remember the lounge of the ICU, the intensive care unit, as a consciously calm place. It struggled mightily in its lighting and decor to be as pleasant and neutral as possible. The result was an almost supernatural silence, a mind-numbing subliminal drone. Even the TV was turned off here, on occasion.

"Oh boy, look at this one," the Constant said.

"He's a live one, all right," the Genius agreed.

"So, what did you do to land you here? What's your problem, kid?" the Constant asked, from within her perpetual halo of cigarette smoke.

"You mean, you don't think that maybe we're all onto something here?" I asked. Laughter all around. It was like joining a fraternity, we who had learned that the world was simply a series of nested asylums.

I struck up a relationship of sorts with the nervous anorexic Constant. A Constant is a person who can never be left alone. She would think of imaginative ways to commit suicide, if she ever were. Light bulbs, omnipresent, and potentially lethal, were her main strategy. I drew her (I was an artist, remember?) at her request, trying to subtract the pain from her face, trying to draw her as if she had never been raped and gone mad. I drew her in a shaky hand, palsied by the drug, Haldol, that was my only treatment.

Another friend was Trick. He was called Trick because, as a trick, a few of his friends had dosed him with over a thousand hits of LSD. He was tripping for over a week before they hauled him in. He was a wide-eyed teen, with frizzy, dirty blond hair, and a thermometer protruding from his mouth. The thermometer reminded him he was alive, I think. He walked slowly and perpetually up and down the small locked hallway. The side effect of his medication was called ecesthesia. Calling it a "side effect" is funny in a way, because practically everyone on Haldol has it, a continuous nagging restlessness. Walking back and forth was all you could do about it in a locked hallway.

It was a private hospital. Expensive. The food was excellent. Some people checked in with a cheery hello at the front desk, as if this were some kind of cruise or vacation. I called it the Mars Hotel, or the Pit. The address, when I went there, was 666 South Salina. I made a fuss about the number. It was a joke, I think, because the address was changed to 672 and they started changing the number on all the official stationery while I was there.

The modern psychiatric institution has no bars. That's because the prison is erected within the cranium of the patient. When the mind is caged, the body may be left to wander purposelessly. The main activities at any mental institution are cigarette smoking, television watching, and drug taking. There were therapy sessions, but I never was allowed to attend. My doctor was no longer interested in insight-based therapy. He had reduced the human experience to a pure chemical state. Nothing else had any meaning for him.

Had I stayed with him, I would still be on Haldol. The long-term side effects of Haldol include wild facial tics and uncontrollable tongue extensions, not to mention the overpowering dullness that makes hallucination of any sort impossible. But the tissue drying was my major complaint. It made my eyes hurt unbearably. I wore contact lenses then, so I had to remove them. I had no glasses at that point, so I was forced to tape together an old pair, with an old prescription. (My vision is so bad that without correction, I am virtually blind.)

I was not allowed my contact lens solutions, which consisted of distilled water and salt tablets, when I was moved from the adult ward to the ICU. I suppose I could have squirted the water down my esophagus and drowned. Or I could have deftly swapped the salt tablets with poison and attempted my own small scale Guyana-style tragedy. I had to put my lenses in a cup of water that first night, and then try to impress upon the staff that no one should throw away the cup or accidentally drink it. The maid came by while I was sleeping and threw them away.

I was convinced that my roommate, a brain-damaged Czechoslovakian man who spoke no English, had drunk them in confusion. I may have mentioned that fact to someone. The staff wrote in my file that I'd drunk my contact lenses in order to gain "inner vision."

If you are ever hospitalized for psychiatric problems, try getting your records afterwards. They're full of bogus insights like this. Half-truths and outright lies.

Schizophrenia is the ultimate indictment. As with cancer, you are never considered cured, but instead, it is thought to go into remission - with the proper medication, mind you. You don't get better. The assertions of the chemical men are that, once you have exhibited this predilection, for any reason, you should probably be medicated for life.

Antipsychotics do suppress the symptoms of insanity quite nicely, to the point where many think that they are a cure. However, I ask for those who have not actually experienced these drugs to reserve judgement on their value. This "cure", if not worse than the disease, is hardly much better.

I remember being asked, "Do you hear voices?"

"Yes," I replied, "when people are talking."

"Do you hear voices of people who aren't there?"

"Yes, on the phone, on the television, radio, and sometimes from sources more obscure..."

Delusions of reference were my only hallucinations in the beginning. What's that? Think about it. We exist at the center of our own personal worlds. We are the main characters of our stories. This is normal. Simultaneously, we watch the media, we read the paper, and we learn of the world of others, more important than ourselves. We are intimate with the lives of a thousand strangers. Celebrities and politicians. They make the decisions, they have their fingers on the buttons and we live in their collective shadow.

And we know that nothing we say has any effect on them.

Now, put that way, it is fatalism. Talking like that overlong would get you labeled as depressed. But, if you want to put it any other way, you are having delusions of grandeur. Sanity, you will learn, if you ever lose yours, is a tightrope you walk without thinking about it.

What happened to me was a mixture of the outside and inside, a confusion of self and other. I saw the news as a reflection of self. I saw the headlines of tabloids, and thought it was a veiled reflection of my own life. I saw the weather as indicative of my mood. People on television talked to me, and me alone.

And I knew that the world was ending.

That was the reason for this mingling of souls, this telepathic contact with the powers. The end was a fireball. Ronald Reagan was its mother, and when he gave birth to it, we would be consumed instantly. The world was struggling to communicate this to me. We were the last generation. And we needed to participate in the ceremony of its dissolution. I would soon be elevated into the sphere of the greats. An apocalyptic, personal Christian mythos, as in the music of Peter Gabriel, pervaded my waking dream.

I had more or less totally departed from what, for want of a better term, we can call "consensual reality".

What's the best thing to do with someone who has, for whatever reason, built up a series of inaccurate ideas about themselves, and their place in the world? How do you get them to give up their delusions, and invite him back into our shared world? I'm not sure, but I'll give you a good example of what not to do. Don't put him in a room surrounded by intelligent people with little notebooks who write down everything he says. All my rants were dutifully taken down, round the clock, by my private team of jailers/secretaries. I felt I had been imprisoned because I had become too potent a force to be allowed to wander freely.

I ran through the mental hospital in nothing flat - the first time. What seemed to me to be a few days was actually more like ten, but I was sleeping most of it. That was a pleasure in itself. Sleep. Pure, blissful unconsciousness. I had lost the ability to sleep, and had thought myself better off without it, but that, I later knew, was nonsense. Like it or not, healthy humans need sleep.

I had taken their drugs, and watched TV, and listened to the problems of a lot of people much worse off than I was. My first roommate was a Vietnam vet. He was there because he had begun blacking out, losing days. He had been living in a cabin in the woods, drinking and smoking a lot of weed, when things began to melt away from him. He had nightmares.

I heard some pretty grisly war stories.

An interesting aside: I have never been as wasted as I was on these therapeutic chemicals. In fact, throughout my decade or so flirtation with what we used to call recreational drugs, I cannot remember ever having been so completely incapacitated. When I talk about major tranquilizers, don't get them confused with minor tranks, like Valium and Librium. Major tranquilizers are a different kind of drug entirely. They have no perceptible buzz, other than a certain all-pervasive dullness.

I remember sitting at home on a pass, tranked to oblivion, drinking beer with my family, watching reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Everyone was happy. I was cured.

Then my roommate gave me an article about the long-term side effects of antipsychotics. In the piece, a long-term Haldol patient's face writhes with muscular tics. His speech is punctuated by pauses for uncontrollable tongue extensions. "You have to be fucking crazy to get mixed up with psychiatrists..."

I was not pleased. I switched doctors.

Dr. Morrow was much more to my liking. He had a beard and a glorious disorganized manner. When we talked, there was a connection. He admitted that the world was probably a lot crazier than the average psychotic. The trouble was, to get off the medication, I had to go back to the hospital.

In retrospect, this was not a good idea; my brain at that time was something like a coiled spring, packed with poisonous visions. The drugs compressed that spring, allowing me to live a "normal" life, while preventing me from rooting them out at the source. The drugs should have been withdrawn slowly, over a period of months. Instead I went cold turkey. Disaster.

I couldn't sleep. I remember walking back and forth along the carpeted hall of the ICU. Ecesthesia, restlessness, a side effect of antipsychotics, doesn't seem to want to go away. Walking and crawling, miles and miles.

This was when the serious hallucinations began.

I began to dimly perceive, as I trudged the corridor, translucent warriors flanking me, emerging from the closed steel fire-door at the end of the hall, disappearing into the steel front door of the ICU, GIs in fatigues, with rifles and packs. They were totally silent, and although others couldn't see them, I perceived a certain nervousness in the staff when they were around.

Gradually I became aware of a noise which we have all heard our entire lives, but have tuned out, like an odor that's around so much you can no longer smell it. The beast. Some gigantic, tortured organism at the center of the earth, upon whose eternal suffering we depend. It screams and gibbers constantly, roaring obscenities, calling out for help which never comes. Again, when it was at its loudest, I sensed nervousness from those around me. I wonder now if I was mouthing those obscenities without realizing it.

One day I woke up, and looked out my bedroom window at the snow covered lot, to discover there was no longer any world outside at all. No cars, no people, just nothingness, a dull gray twilight sky merging with an endless field of dirty gray snow. I wandered out of my room. Static blared from the TV and radio in the lounge. The two patients there seemed stunned. The ICU door was open.

I passed through the verboten door. Most everyone was together in the main lounge, where two movie projectors had been set up, back to back, spraying light at opposite walls. Everyone was standing or sitting, milling around, staring at the movies. The projectors made a clattering noise that almost drowned out the soundtrack of the films. I heard someone talking about the amount of fuel for the backup generators.

One of the nurses saw me and smiled and led me to a seat in the front row.

"We've got to bring it back," she said to me. "Watch the movies, and remember what the world was like. This has happened before. We know how to deal with it. Something happened last night."

I had a blank place in my memory.

"Last night?" I asked.

"Yes, last night, but of course, you won't remember..."

She wanders off.

I have fragmentary memories of standing in my room, making some sort of deal with the beast, where I promised to lead the rest of my life as a normal, if it would bring the world back.

I sank deeper and deeper into some sort of belief system whereby color was extremely important. I could only move if I was in contact with white. White purified. I crept around the edges of rooms, brushing the white baseboard, destroying red objects whenever I could. Red was the fuse for the coming inferno. The ICU seemed to disintegrate around me. Workmen were always around patching cracks that kept appearing. Extra fire sprinklers were installed.

Dr. Morrow showed up one day, saw the state I was in, and prescribed Stelazine and an immediate exit from the madhouse. I had learned a lot about being insane there. He figured I would be better off just about anywhere else. We filled out the 24 Hour Release forms. (In New York and many other states, if you can write a coherent letter and behave in front of a judge, and if your doctor is on your side, you can be immediately released from any psychiatric institution.) Much later he told me he never expected me to stay away; he figured I would do something unforgivable and probably end up in some state institution for life.

But I didn't. I escaped into this wider, freer asylum called reality. I have been happy here, although sometimes I feel a twinge of nostalgia for that lost world in which I was a far more important person, the inscrutable Agent Orange, badge number 666, caught in a cosmic web of conspiracy... sometimes, but it's just a twinge. It's so easy to romanticize.

I've recently had the opportunity to watch the process from the other side, as my friend Ron had a relapse into that other state. It wasn't pretty. I'm a lot less smug concerning the value of my episode, and psychosis in general. I realize that my attitude about the whole thing at times has reeked of spiritual superiority, which I think misses the point entirely. But as suspicious as I have become of hallucinogenic wisdom and shamanic-style initiation, the experience remains an important part of what I am.

[Shareright (S) 1989 by E. Jay O'Connell for Singularity magazine, 89 Mass. Ave., Suite 199, Boston, MA 02115. You may reproduce this material only if your recipients may also reproduce it, you do not change it, and you include this notice.]