Second Extract

Pre-school and other occurrences during the PreEnlightenment, Heuristic-Reliant and Superstitious Age of Partial Bipedalism and Preliteracy

So now that we’re done with Christmas, let’s return to the digressive narrative of my life, starting with pre-school.

Pre-school was possibly an interesting time of my life. How the fuck am I meant to know, really? I remember bits and pieces, interesting snippets, moments. I know that I would have done innumerable things but I don’t remember it with much precision. Nevertheless, nihilism is boring, so I can and will tell you some stuff.  

I went to a pre-school very near our house – in fact, only about 250 metres away, just past the end of our street, across the road and forward about 30 metres. It was called Fox Valley Kindergarten, and it still exists in the same spot today. It was a nice kindergarten, I think, with a small but perfectly varied playground which included a big wooden play area  at the top of the slope, a sandpit, a swingset and some open space on artificial grass for dancing or hula hooping or whatever the fuck little infants do with each other. In this period of my life, I very much had a “best friend”, another blonde boy probably with skin a little more tanned and a shorter height than me (I think) whose name was Dylan Paige. I don’t know how we came to be “best friends”, I certainly don’t remember the first time we met, I don’t know what things we talked about, if anything (do three/four year-olds even talk to each other about things or do they pretty much just make noises?), but I do seem to remember that we were pretty much inseparable on the playground. I am not sure whether this is accurate but I certainly have the impression that, every morning, as soon as we got to the pre-school, we would hop onto the swings and begin oscillating back and forth with big grins on our faces, laughing and shouting. I have one image in my head of us doing this, and I’m fairly sure it’s in the morning. However, like so much that has been said in this autobiography hitherto, it is uncertain.

I think I only have one other distinct pre-school memory set in the playground and, fortunately (for your sakes, you dopey cunts with tiny attention spans), this one doesn’t involve Dylan. Instead, this one involves a boy who would later attend Warrawee Public School with me, called Alex Jarmyn. In it, I am at the top of the playground, past the wooden play area, just in front of the big fence which separates the pre-school from the big dusty area next to it. I am standing on some woodchips, I think. A boy (Alex) is coming towards me. His face is freckly, he is taller than me (I think).  

“I’m four,” he says. “How old are you?”

“Three,” I say.

And that’s where the memory ends. Ok, so it’s a little banal but I find it fascinating. I would. I’m a huge narcissist and I’m totally self-centred.

I do remember a fair bit about what went on inside the pre-school’s only building. I remember we had nap times, and that they were truly dreadful. I think it’s easy to forget the horror of the pure, black dread that a child feels when told to do something that they don’t want to do – but it is real. I remember also that our main teacher (at least, I think she was our main teacher) used to teach us songs like Frère Jacques and made us point to parts of our body and call them funny names (only years later, when I saw the words tête and main and jambe and bras, did I suddenly realise that I had been taught French all those years ago[1]). I used to find what we did with this woman really hard, I think, but it seems in retrospect that she might have been a very ambitious pre-school teacher and I can only admire that. I remember, too, that we did a lot of art in pre-school (a fact which I imagine is utterly commonplace). I have one very particular memory of decorating the large square of fabric that my dad used to use to cover his bedside table. This is how I recall it in my mind:

I am sitting on one side of the classroom, surrounded by other infants sitting down, and drawing, probably on a piece of scrap paper, images that could be used for their tablecloth designs. The area around me seems crowded, perhaps filled with materials and drawings. Perhaps I am stumped on ideas for my own tablecloth, struggling for inspiration. Suddenly, a burst of creative energy sees me beginning to draw some sort of machine-vehicle-robot-thing. It has red wheels, each with one spoke, that are attached to red sticks that lead up to a red square with two little futuristic blue wings (or perhaps they might better be called unknowable “design elements”) on either side of it, and inside it, as if it is a movie screen or something, there is this weird green creature whose body consists of a circular head, an insectile abdomen, two stick legs protruding from the bottom of its head and some sort of cloudlike item on its head, either another body part or a hat.

Here it gets a bit hazy. After completing this drawing, I possibly put my hand up to signal to Mrs Laurie that I have come up with a design or else she comes over of her own accord. Either way, she looks at the design, I explain it in some fashion and she deems it adequate to imprint on the actual tablecloth.

I don’t know where the fuck this design comes from – what sort of subconscious machinations inspired it – but I know I described it with near-perfect accuracy just then because I am staring at the tablecloth now. Apart from this one bizarre, inexplicable machine-thing, which sits lugubriously in one corner of the cloth, there are eleven other weird texta drawings scattered around the cloth (three on each side), as well as these weird little floating creatures which I remember were intended to fill up space and were meant to look identical to each other (though they are so fucking far from identical it's rather funny). In case you want to know what some of the other big drawings look like, what follows is a description of some of them:

The drawing a few centimetres away from the machine-thing, in the middle of that side of the cloth, is of a green person with green dots for eyes, a flat green mouth, no ears, strangely straight and thick long green hair (length of hair presumably signifying female gender), an armless green torso with blue button-like dots traversing it diagonally, and two green stick legs with green stick feet. This person is inside some 2-D red cave-like structure (probably reflecting my interest in cavemen and the show about cavemen called The Gogs), with red stegosaurus-like spines along the top and side of it (which I think are meant to be rocks) and weird blue circle-like things inside it, above the person.

The next drawing along, in the other corner of that side of the cloth, is presumably of some sort of family, possibly my own. On the top left is some half-red, half-blue stick figure of the same basic design as the one in the cave but with stick arms this time, plus weirdly elongated dots for eyes on a small, bald head. These latter design features which make him (I say “him” because the baldness suggests it’s meant to be the dad) look a little like one of the Canadians from South Park. Next to him is a blue figure I am inferring is probably a female. She has an even smaller head and looks kind of sad in her squished-up face. Her hair is short and possibly a bit like my mum’s at that time. Below these two parents are three other smaller figures that I fear might be meant to look like children.  The one on the far left has a blue torso, green stick legs, green stick arms and a red head without any face. The one in the middle is kind of faded but it seems to be some sort of green vaguely ranine thing with one stick arm. Perhaps it is meant to be Barry, our very old black cat; that would be my best bet.[2] The figure on the right is all in blue and has the most interesting hairstyle of any of the figures described yet, with both a couple of spiky strands as well as some flat ones. Perhaps this is meant to be me. Who can tell?

The next drawing, in the middle of another side of the tablecloth, is possibly the most fascinating, due to what I think is a rather macabre subject matter. A blue stick figure with two rather weird strands of hair extending outwards from each side of its head and red arms with flames or orbs of blood on the end of them stands in what I think might be a cave (reflecting the Palaeolithic theme). Strewn in front of the cave are rows of blue (attempted) circles, each containing a single blue dot. Although I am not sure, I suspect these simulacra of dotted circles are meant to be skulls and therefore that the figure is meant to be some sort of barbaric, bloodthirsty caveman. That would definitely be my style.

I suppose I will spare you descriptions of the other eight drawings. Suffice it to say that they are just as exquisitely drawn but that they change up the themes a little, even introducing some floral notes (I was a complex individual).

I really love this tablecloth, and I also feel it’s a very good memento, particularly considering that it tells me the date it was made: namely, 2001. I would have been four for most of 2001, of course, and 2001 was also significant for being the year before I began primary school. Indeed, the tablecloth, being a rather significant project, may have been the last thing I ever made in pre-school. That would seem to make sense. Perhaps that’s why I remember making it.

I have one another memory of an event that happened inside the pre-school building, and it is probably even more interesting than the one before. You know how they say that all little infants are basically solipsists? That they are oblivious to the existence of others and only ever think about the suffering inflicted on them? Well, I am by no means sure, but I think this moment that I am about to describe may have represented the first time I felt real empathy. Here’s how the memory plays out in my mind:

I am sitting down on what I think is green carpet, surrounded by other pre-schoolers.  Up in front of us is our teacher. She almost seems to be on some sort of platform but she is probably just sitting on a chair. She is talking about the dangers of sliding on carpets, warning us not to perform the action and soberly informing us of the possible consequences, the potential for carpet burn. “Come here, Daniel,” she says (or something to that effect) “Show the class what happens if you slide on the carpet.” Daniel hobbles forward and pulls up one trouser leg so that his bloody knee is exposed. It is a grisly sight: bloody and wet and oh so painful. Daniel winces and I wince with him. I shall never slide on the carpet, I tell myself, I shall never.

And that’s the memory.  

I remember only one other ‘event’ pertaining to life in pre-school: the birthday party of this very Daniel. I think I was actually pretty good friends with him in pre-school so it’s no surprise to me that I was invited to his party. Unfortunately, I don’t remember anything about him, really – I don’t remember how he behaved, what his voice was like, what he said his interests were (it’s basically the same with Dylan, too, I think) – but I do know that he was of Asian ethnicity. I also have a vague picture in my mind of how he looked when I knew him then, although I’m 95% sure I wouldn’t recognise him now, as an adult, if perchance I bumped into him on the street. For all I know I could have bumped into him on the street recently. He might have walked past me at Sydney Uni. The repeating refrain: who can know?

I suspect I might remember this birthday because it was the first real kid’s party I had ever attended, but it may not have even been that. In any case, there are two scenes in my mind which I think come from the same day. The first was being in front of one of the passenger doors of their white four-wheel-drive and having to take a really big step just to reach the rubber platform from which you could enter the car, and thinking, probably before and after this, about how my dad disapproved of people who bought four-wheel-drives. The second was being in their house and looking at all the wonderful, exciting range of junkfood arrayed on the table (a bowl of Cheezels being one image in particular that remains in my mind), but being told that I, along with everyone else, must wash my hands before eating it. I remember thinking this demand was rather odd, and at an age where my worldview was constructed by me parents, in whom I also had absolute faith and trust, I thought that it must be stupid or anal[3] for his parents to insist on kids washing their hands before eating if mine did not.

Anyway, that’s it: that’s all I remember of pre-school and my friends there. Was that interesting? Probably not. But who cares? I feel only contempt for you. This book is not for you; it’s for me. Your only purpose is to fawn and hold your mouth agape in stuporous awe and slavish admiration of my fearsome intellect and literary brilliance. If you dare voice dissent, if you dare question my authority, you might as well not be reading this book. I am in control. I am your leader, your dictator. You are obedient, passive, submissive, obsequious. If I really believed that there were many other people with even the slightest degree of intelligence or insight into anything, do you think I’d bother to publish all the stupid thoughts I have put down in this book? All these thoughts truly are stupid to me – they’re obvious, they’re banal, they’re things I think all the time – but I have such contempt for you readers that I’m assuming they’re not stupid to you. Think about that. Mull over that. You’re probably too stupid to even understand what I’m saying. You probably think this paragraph has been clever. It has not. If you think otherwise, I loathe you – but, at the same time, I would like you to buy this book, and, to some extent, I want you to adore me. I want to be worshipped, I want to be revered. I want to be godly! But I can only be godly if other people truly are inferior to me. Therein lies the problem.

It’s a problem particularly pressing for writers of a particular kind of onanistic, ostentatious fiction of which this is hopefully not an example.  The truth is that if one is majorly concerned with looking clever to your reader, seeming more intelligent than them, one must believe, at least on some level, that one is more intelligent than one’s reader. (If one doesn’t believe that on any level, one simply is not capable of being concerned with looking clever.) And that arrogance necessarily entails a sort of contempt for the reader.

Hey, look at me, look at me, look what I can do, look at me, I am the greatest… and you, you there in the crowd, you really are thinking this is great aren’t you, you really do think I am the greatest.

Ha! You fucking imbecile.

(When I wrote this, I thought it was an intelligent digression but now I think it’s stupid. My past selves are in general contemptible to me. This dates to a Wallacian phase now long passed.)

What else can we say about my infancy? I suppose I have a few interesting details and a couple of anecdotes. One interesting detail is that we went to Perth when I was three and I remember nothing of this trip. Another is that the Sydney Olympics happened when I was three and I basically remember nothing of them, although I do remember Strawberry Kisses by Nikki Webster very well (but that was probably still being played well after the Olympics because it is such an exquisite piece of music) and I know, due to my parents’ memories, that we did go to a few unimportant soccer matches early in the tournament. Another detail from this period of my life is that I was attacked by a magpie or crow in a park somewhere in the inner-west when I was maybe three or so. If only I could remember this! It might make for some interesting reading. I mean, I sort of feel like I can vaguely remember it, but unfortunately for you I’m too decent and honest a person to pretend that the memory is any sharper than that. Another detail is that we, as a family, continued to head back to Marrickville and its surrounds pretty often, I think, and would go the Greek bakery every time. There the baker would always give me and Miranda a free sweet pastry, which I really liked. I think I might have a memory of this happening when I was also only three or so. Another detail (broadly stated) is the names of the TV shows I would have been watching during this very early period. Some of these would have been The Gogs, The Hooley Dooleys, The Wiggles, The Teletubbies, Postman Pat, Morph Files, Pingu, Batfink, Playschool and Thomas the Tank Engine. There were definitely many others, and I probably watched some of those more than the shows I’ve listed here. Frankly, I don’t even know if I watched The Teletubbies, Thomas the Tank Engine and Playschool a great deal (or even at all), although I do know that they were extremely popular when I was an infant so it seems likely. I briefly mentioned The Gogs before, but I’ll do it again, because the show is rather wonderful. The Gogs was a Claymation series first given wide viewership on the BBC in 1996. It concentrates on the lives of a family of cavepeople, possibly meant to be Neanderthals (given the Neanderthal-like facial structure of the mother and father, with very prominent brow ridges), possibly just Homo Sapiens or very possibly neither (this actually seems quite likely considering the show is quite loose with historical accuracy generally[4]). In any case, as Wikipedia puts it, with an unusual elegance (apart from the tense inconsistency), “The Gogs revolves around a family clan of dumb, primitive and socially inept cavemen in a fantasy prehistoric Stone Age setting, and contained [sic] much dark comedy, various toilet humour-based gags and gross out situations; for example the cavemen losing control of their bodily functions. It also featured [sic] their often comedic daily struggle for survival, and attempts to advance their technology and society, such as creating fire, and often failing miserably, comically and absurdly in the act.” While that summary paints a fairly good picture of what the show is like, I feel that describing this family clan in greater detail will be highly illuminative yet also undetrimental to possible enjoyment and I will thus do that now.

There are six main characters in The Gogs and each has various comic strengths that serve to make the show so great. Perhaps the most prominent is the mother figure. She is a strong, muscular, domineering, rage-filled, violent, rather ursine black-haired matriarch, and is basically the leader of the family, constantly having to compensate for the physical and intellectual incompetence of the men around her (in fact, as far as hunting prowess goes, she is more of a man than they are). She wears a leopard-print tunic, a tooth necklace and fur slippers. Her husband (or husband-like figure) is a smaller, similarly black-haired man who, despite a reasonably athletic physique and a big manly, hispid head, is utterly cowed by his wife and, while a proficient hunter, possesses skills that are repeatedly shown to pale in comparison to hers. He wears light brown rags, and a similar tooth necklace and pair of fur slippers. Their eldest son is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, extremely dopey young man (or possibly teenager) who is also utterly cowed by the matriarch and an even more hopeless hunter. He often tries to impress his family in various ways and always fails. He dresses in almost identical clothes to his father but he is much smaller. Their only daughter is a very solitary, taciturn, pacifistic teenage girl with a very lanky body and a tiny head covered in flocculent, brown eye-covering hair who (despite her miniature skull) shows signs of incredible scientific genius, for example drawing on a rock, in the first episode, Einstein's famous equation E=mc² as well as miraculously prescient blueprints of a car, a plane and a helicopter. Unfortunately for her, her physical weakness and strangeness ensures she is victimised by the rest of the family, or left behind when the family is fleeing from danger, and her attempts to make technological advances for her family are always thwarted by filial violence. She wears very similar clothes to her mother, although they look very different on her radically different body. The youngest offspring is a baby boy with an ovoid, glabrous head, big blue eyes, a single, very sharp tooth and overactive orifices: a big spherical nose out of which streams a constant flow of sticky, green snot, and a bottom that farts frequently and produces implausibly massive poos. He tends to cry a lot (as in the first episode when his family simply can’t get him to shut up), manages to get himself involved in a lot of daring adventures (as in the episode when he is transported along the ground by a mole), and, fortunately (for him), succeeds often, with his switch-on-able sweetness and cuteness, in bringing out the powerful maternal loving and protective instincts in his otherwise fierce and violent mother. Finally, the old man of the family is a gruff, grumpy, ill-tempered, hot-headed, crude, senile character who has the most wonderful appearance: a long, lanky body, topped by a head with a bald crown which nevertheless hosts a pair of bushy white eyebrows, a bushy, white handlebar moustache and a white beard so long and flowing that it performs the function of clothes, almost always obscuring his crotch area no matter how much he exerts himself (and he does exert himself a lot, showing few signs of physical deterioration). This character almost always carries a big wooden club with him, of which he makes frequent use to bash people’s heads so hard they disappear into their bodies.

The reason I know all this – with only minimal assistance from Google Images to increase the precision of my physical descriptions, and a bit of help from Wikipedia to jog my memory about the nature of the characters – is that I have watched all the episodes available on Youtube twice within the past year, and, more importantly, used to watch the show a hell of a lot before the age of six. Truth be told, I’m not sure I really liked it that much as a kid. In fact, I think I might have even found it a little terrifying. After all, it was set in a rather bleak environment – a kind of ugly brown and green landscape full of mortal danger and various bodily excretions – and all the characters were, at various times, either perpetrators or victims of rather extreme violence. Plus, as Wikipedia has just informed me, the show was not even really designed for infants and eventually got released with a PG classification. Nevertheless, I do remember my dad liking it when he watched it (and my dad had a huge influence on what I decided I liked), and the main reason I do know that I watched a fair bit of it is that when, on a whim, I decided to go on Youtube and type The Gogs into the searchbar about a year ago and subsequently clicked on Episode 1, I recognised everything about the show straight away. Indeed, even as I continued to watch more and more episodes, I was still finding that almost every scene brought on a pang of ancient recognition. I even knew the plots of certain episodes just from their beginnings. I found this rather amazing.

I exhort you to watch it. If you do, though, don’t just watch it illegally on Youtube like me; instead, pay the money like my parents once did when they bought the VCR version which, I believe, is still sitting somewhere in the garage, having been unplayed for many years. Intellectual property rights are important. People deserve remuneration for things they make, particularly if they’re brilliant like The Gogs.

There are also three other TV shows on that list that bear further elaboration for various reasons.[5]

Actually, I typed that sentence above a couple of months ago, but I hereby renounce it. We have reached a cross-roads. It is at this point that I realise that my ambition of creating a truly thorough documentary account of my life can never be realised. All I will say is that The Morph Files and Pingu were, and indeed are, terrific shows that I highly recommend. Also, that Batfink was a show that my sister and I both watched quite a lot, I think, and that I remember very distinctly a quote from it (that was probably repeated hundreds of times): “Your bullets cannot harm me – my wings are like a shield of steel”.

Now seems a good time to move onto an account of the babysitter/nanny who looked after us children for a number of years, from when I was probably two or three to when I was six or seven. Her name was Kirsty and she was probably the most awful person I’ve had to deal with in my life. Unfortunately, I don’t remember a whole lot about her apart from that. I’ll do my best to recall, though. Here is a stream of facts.

She was probably in her early 20s, she lived in South Turramurra with her mum (and possibly her dad) in a house that was likely quite small but had a sizeable pool out the back, she almost always had a very stern expression on her face, she was not affectionate, and, finally, upon reaching a certain age, I classified her as a Class A Bogan (“a certain age” being long after I last saw her, by the way).

As I suggested, all the facts point towards Kirsty being a rather ghastly person, although I did not have the experience, the finely tuned misanthropic judgement skills, the authority or the vocabulary to ever think of her as such when she was actually my nanny. Instead, at that time, I think I may have thought of her as “mean” but mainly just looked upon being with her with an intense dread, and not just because that entailed not being with my parents, whom, at that age, I still cleft to with animalistic fervour. It really was just awful for me, being in her company, more than for Miranda. I think this sibling disparity was mainly because, as far as I can remember, every time we went to her goddamn house, I was sent straight to bed in what I think was a greyish room, in a big bed, and wasn’t even allowed to whisper quietly to myself. Indeed, every time I did start whispering to myself, at a volume which I thought was very quiet (something I did, you should know, because I was imagining stories in my head and wanted to speak in various people’s voices – like maybe one voice might have been the voice of some soldier and another might have been the voice of a monster (this is really only hazy in my mind, although I think I do recall that they were usually quite vivid scenarios involving death)) she would storm into the room with what I remember to be a very angry, sour expression, and command me to stop talking and go to sleep. It’s quite odd, this memory, because I do definitely have the impression that this was an incredibly routine occurrence, and that she’d often have to come in multiple times per afternoon as I’d still continue to whisper to myself in what I thought were ever quieter, almost imperceptible voices – although they clearly weren’t. The funny thing is, though, that at the time I remember being almost baffled as to how she could hear me, because I truly did think I was whispering at a volume no human could possibly hear from another room. I think I might have leapt to some supernatural or paranoid conclusion that she was some sort of Disney-movie witch or otherwise non-descript fiend who had eyes everywhere, or could just somehow hear me because of some power, no matter how quiet my voice.  Either way, her constant suppression of my enjoyment and horrible castigation meant I really did fucking hate going to Kirsty’s house. It was rather traumatic.

Despite how long I spent in her thrall (and I think it was a traumatically long time), I have surprisingly few memories of being with her. I suppose I have very few memories of my childhood in general, but it’s a useful literary device to create such an apparent “paradox” (in the loose sense of that word) because I can use it as a basis for a witty comment about how I must have “repressed the trauma”. Unfortunately, I’ve just eliminated that possibility by being so self-conscious. Anyway, one little illustrative quirk that I do (seem to) remember is that Kirsty always equipped herself with those weirdly bleached-white, fake fingernails that a lot of women used to have a few years ago. I used to find those just a little bit creepy as a child, and, to be honest, still do. I also remember that we went to the Macquarie Centre quite a lot. The Macquarie Centre’s a large, popular and fully fitted-out mall (which even has a very well-used ice-skating rink) in the middle of a bleak, barren industrial complex in the godforsaken “suburb” of Sydney known as Macquarie Park. I used to hate going there. I have this one strong memory of trailing behind her, desolation filling my soul, as she marched through the horrible, porcelain-white, faux-palatial wasteland towards further whiteness, the eternal nothing. I don’t precisely remember a specific source of dread, but I know that it was real as any dread or horror or sadness I feel today. It does seem that she was truly a horrible woman. I have little doubt that she was the worst kind of person to occupy the job of baby-sitter, because it seems clear that she didn’t possess a maternal instinct or magnanimous spirit. If she found me cute, I certainly don’t remember her showing it. As I recall it, she only ever seemed to evince sneering contempt towards me, and spoke always with disdain. Not the right way to treat a child.

I think my mum always used to comfort and console me when I spoke of the horror of being with Kirsty, but my parents still employed her for a long time. When they finally disengaged her, I think my mum felt bad for putting me through such torment – certainly whenever I brought up the subject she used to say sorry. But it was too late… I am damaged.

You know what I haven’t mentioned yet about my early infancy? Toys. They were, unsurprisingly, a very important part of my life when I was a young infant. I had figurines, lego, toy replicas of larger objects, a remote-control car – the works. My favourite toy at probably around the age of 4 was Action Man. I don’t really know who the fuck Action Man was (as in what his fictional identity was), although I know he wasn’t from a movie, like an Indiana Jones doll or a Harry Potter figure or whatever. You can look him up on Wikipedia if you want. All I remember is that he was a tanned, ripped dude with a wrench in his belt (I think), and probably a proper weapon of some kind, and that I often pitted him against various other more nefarious figurines I had at my disposal, which probably included plastic animals and other homunculi and so forth. You know the idea. Perhaps this began when I was a bit older, but I know that at some point I paired Action Man with the blue remote-control open-topped jeep I had, enabling him to go on daring missions to save the planet against the baddies and so on. Again, this was probably when I was a bit older, but I remember that (at some point) I used to have a lot of fun using that remote-control car to transport peanuts to my dad. Transporting peanuts to one’s dad might sound vaguely slavish, but the fact that I could put the peanuts on the two car seats and transport them remotely made it tremendous fun.[6]

We always had a fairly significant lego set, but oddly enough I don’t remember really playing lego at home. Perhaps part of the reason for this is that I was never really the engineering type and lacked the attention span or creativity to make building intricate structures with lego interesting. In any case, that’s all that can be said about my toy habits as an early infant. There will be occasion for mentioning toys again, however, so if you happen to be a toy fetishist leafing through this book for descriptions of toy use, do not despair. In fact, I’ve got a terrific story to tell about toys. Get your toys out.  

A number of months ago, I had the privilege of rewatching footage of myself at the age of four that I had not seen for many years. We still have the video that I saw (and then saw again and tried to reproduce in literary form) on the family computer downstairs. Basically, it is a video entirely filmed by my dad of the family visiting this place called “The Animal Kindy Farm”, one of those zoos catering to kids where you get to feed the animals. I don’t know where it is – somewhere on the western outskirts of Sydney, I think – but my parents tell me that we visited that place a week or so after 9/11 took place, after going to a Lebanese restaurant, in order (according to my mum) to show solidarity with the Muslim community.[7] It’s a very moving video for me, and I really enjoy watching it. In the video, “I” (whatever that means (and in fact I’ll discuss what that means soon)) am a boisterous, rambunctious, talkative and ebullient little boy with a bowl of hair white as snow. My parents are basically recognisable, and my sister is a lot more quiet and undemonstrative than me. We all seem to be pretty happy as we walk around the farm, past the various pens, particularly me. I call llamas “baby elephants” and do other tremendously cute things like that, and make lots of delightful noises and seem quite clever for a four year old. A great watch.

I had actually seen this video many times since it was first recorded, but until that day a few months ago when I rediscovered it on the Mac downstairs (where my dad had only recently uploaded it, I think), there had, as aforementioned, been a long hiatus. Thus, suddenly seeing real video footage of “me” at such a young age again was really affecting. I was so moved by it, in fact, that either that day or a few days later I started trying to turn it into a short story in the third-person that I could add to my autobiography, which (the autobiography) I had provisionally, half-ironically titled “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”. Here is that incomplete short story, mostly written in the third-person dramatic monologue that is characteristic of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

“When he was four and still in pre-school he and his family took a car trip out to the Animal Kindy Farm. When they arrived and his dad parked the car, he pushed open the car door and climbed out into the bright sunlight. Behind him and around him, his sister and his parents were getting out too. His dad walked round to the boot and retrieved his video camera, while his mother and sister started to talk.

The ground below him was dusty and there were little tufts of grass here and there. Above, there were cars next to each other, in lots of different shapes and colours. Around them and around the place were gum trees with the droopy green leaves which were familiar. To his left – through a great wire fence – was the Animal Kindy Farm, and he could already see some camels in the distance. It was all so big and exciting.    

He turned around and noticed his dad had turned on the camera and that it was now pointing it at him. His dad spoke to him: “Where are we?”

He replied, loudly, hoarsely: “At the Animal Kindy Farm!” He needed to impress the camera: he started running around from side to side; he spoke again: “At the Animal Kindy Farm, we’re at the Animal Kindy Farm.”

His dad started walking towards his mum and sister with the camera. Tom turned around.

His mum spoke while pointing to a tree right near them: “Bluegum.”

His sister nodded. Then she spoke, exuberantly: “Let’s see if I can see a camel – oh, there’s a camel!”

He was a bit annoyed coz he could have said the same thing but he hadn’t and now his sister had got the attention of mum. He was excited though. He started running around and then jumped in the dirt a bit.

His mum spoke again: “A bluegum farm.” Then she looked at him: “That’s a good way to dirty your pants.”

He heard but didn’t reply because his sister had climbed onto the bonnet of their blue car and was lying flat on it and he really needed to join in. He climbed and wriggled on top of the bonnet and now he and his sister were lying together, side by side; it was warm. His dad pointed the video camera towards them as they lay there.

His mum spoke to him and his sister: “It’s warm, is it?”

He nodded and so did his sister.

His dad spoke: “Will we go inside the farm, children?”

“Yeah” he said, then his sister too. He wanted to hear his voice some more so he said “Yeah” again, this time extending it into a slow drawl. As he hopped off the bonnet he emitted another hoarse noise: “Woooerh.”

“Badly scripted by Aitken films” his dad said. Then Tom saw his dad pressed the red button on the camera which stopped it recording.

After his dad and mum had talked to the person at the counter and asked for tickets and the paper bags full of fodder which smelt funny and that he and his sister could use to handfeed the animals, and after his mum and dad had paid for them, they entered the Animal Kindy Farm. Inside it, they were walking along a wide tiled pavement next to pens full of hand-feedable animals. The very first one pen, on the right, was the goat pen. He saw his dad started recording again when they arrived at it.

“Give him some food, Miranda” his dad said.

“Ok” she said softly.

He had to be heard. “I’m gonna see what sort of food – ”

His sister spoke, while holding the paper bag full of the fodder: “Do you have to put your hand in it?”

He had to be heard. After putting his hand in the fodder bag and feeling its unusual texture, he decided to shout: “Aw yuck!”

He was now kinda nervous about feeding the goats coz they had big teeth and they were sorta scary-looking. But he watched as his sister walked forward confidently, with a hand full of fodder-cylinders, towards one of the white goats, and he watched as she slowly but precisely put her hand in front of its mouth, and he watched as it licked the feed off her hand and she screamed slightly out of shock, and he watched as she turned around towards mum and dad and started laughing. He needed to do it himself. He walked up to the goat next to the one she had fed and thrust his fodder-filled hand in front of its face. It too licked his hand, and he too made a noise out of shock then began laughing, louder than his sister had.

His mum, enjoying her offsprings’ laughter greatly, began to laugh herself.

He needed to be heard. He shouted: “Ewwhyarck!”

His sister had grabbed more fodder from her bag and was now feeding another goat. She laughed again as it licked her hand.

He did the same but did not laugh, instead making the noise “Zaararahehe!” Then he said, loudly, “This is very animal ‘cept on land.” That didn’t make much sense.

As his sister was putting her arm out to feed another goat, his mum said to her: “Don’t – keep – make sure your hand’s out straight.”

His sister followed his mum’s advice and fed the goat – this time without making any noise.

He was looking in his fodder bag. He suddenly saw something interesting and needed to be heard. He shouted: “Hey, it’s got all different stuff in it!”

His dad, who was still videoing, just said “Yeah.” Then he said “Do you wanna go see something – ?

He was excited. “I wanna go an see something else, I wanna feed some more from my packet.”

His sister spoke: “Can we come back to the goat? – coz it’s really cute.”

“Yeah” he said and his mum said it as well. 

He still wanted to feed one last goat before they moved on though. He put his hand out in front of the two goats that were eagerly poking their heads through the fence. He noticed that he had already fed one of them. The one he had fed forced its head ahead of the other one; he jerked his hand back. “I want the other one.” He put his hand out again. As the wrong goat thrust its head towards it again, he jerked it back. “No” he said, imperiously. It happened again. “No.” … “No.” He finally got the right one and was satisfied.

He saw that his mum and his sister had already begun walking towards the next pen, which was full of big tall black furry animals. His dad was still filming him though, and they walked together over towards the black furry animal pen. As they approached, he still couldn’t work out what sort of animals they were but decided to say, as a hopeful guess, “He’s a baby elephant!”

His dad replied to him, in his pedagogical voice: “They don’t look like baby elephants, Tom.”

He wondered what they were… he suddenly got it: “No, they’re baby giraffes.”

His dad looked like he found that amusing. He wasn’t sure why. He had probably got it right. “You gonna feed one?” his dad asked again.

“No, this” he said, as he approached one of the black baby giraffes with food in his hand. When he put food in its mouth it licked his hand really vigorously: “Awokk! It’s realleh soft.”

“Try it again, Tom, I didn’t see that one” his dad said.

As he outstretched his arm towards one of the black baby giraffes again, his mum, who had been talking to his sister, said “Tom, you gotta open your hand out.”

He did and then, as the black baby giraffe started eating the fodder, he felt it nip his fingers slightly. “Hey!” he exclaimed while rapidly retracting his hand from the black baby giraffe’s mouth. “Don’t eat my fingers!” he said, imperiously.

Just after this, the donkeys, who were in the pen adjacent to the black baby giraffe pen, began grunting and eeyore-ing loudly.

“Even sounds like you, Tom," his dad said. 

His sister, who had been feeding some black baby giraffes of her own, heard this and laughed. 

Tom enjoyed being talked and laughed about. He wanted to make them laugh more so he emitted another inhuman noise: “Ohwehoh!”

“Come and say hello to them” his dad said.

He heard this but stood staring at the black baby giraffes. 

“Come on.”

He began to walk with his dad towards the donkeys, and as he approached them decided to comply with his dad’s request by shouting “Hallooolihhh!” at the pen. 

“Come and say hello” his dad said to his sister. Tom turned around towards them and saw his sister was approaching from behind, with his mum.

As his sister approached one of the donkeys she said “What does that one feel like?”

His dad replied: “Well, we’ll soon find that out.””

There ends the story. I was not particularly proud of it. In particular, I thought the dialogue was poorly rendered (to be specific, there are too many “X said”s coming before the actual spoken words) and I was not entirely sure whether I should attempt to use my four year old idiolect consistently throughout the story (as I would have to in order to pull off the third-person dramatic monologue style).

One other anecdote needs to be aired before I graduate to memories of primary school. It occurred when I was three, I think, so I possibly should have included it earlier, but (bizarrely) it didn't cross my mind.

It all started when the rents announced their intention to take us to Yum Cha. That context tells me it was most likely a Sunday (not that that matters very much). Soon after revealing the plan, I think my mum suggested to my sister that she put on her yellow dress. But my sister was very reluctant. At that age, she wasn't particularly keen on dresses, so this wasn't very surprising. What's important is the opportunity I saw in this gender failure -- a chance to claw ahead in the parental-gratification stakes. As Miranda complained and remonstrated with my mum, I boldly entered the fray, pronouncing that I would like to wear a dress myself. I was declaring to my mum that I was happy to fill the void left by a failed sister. I knew that such a daring and outlandish stance would attract attention. And so it did.

But it wasn't all good attention. It will come as no surprise that my mum was not that eager to authorise my preference -- at least in the beginning. Indeed, despite the logic  of the situation -- the fact that she should have been glad thatsomeone was willing to make use of the abundance of children's dresses in our house -- she did start off rather reserved. So much so, in fact, that once she established I was serious, she tentatively attempted to undermine my preference, even proposing to me that I wouldn't really like wearing a dress, and would probably regret it. Nevertheless, I stood firm. I was very insistent, and I was very determined. I did countenance the possibility that I would regret it, but I decided it was better to just be consistent and brave any approaching storms with the stoicism of a man (in a dress).

In any case, the doubts that I was experiencing faded into insignificance when I considered that my declaration had actually drawn all the attention away from Miranda. Soon after I announced my desire to wear the dress, my dad had been recruited in the deliberations, and my mum was (I think) in the throes of deep, philosophical concentration, presumably engaging her feminist conscience in some fashion. So I had succeeded in one regard, even before a decision had been made on whether I would be allowed to go to a restaurant in a dress. And in the end, I was allowed to go to Yum Cha in a dress.
Once I got there, though, I don't think I enjoyed it that much. I think it just made me a little nervous, more than anything. I also know I never wore a dress in public again (however, there is a picture of me wearing a pink tutu on the verandah).

So now we're done with my infancy. 

---

[1] Yes, as far as I recall it, I wasn’t even aware that we were learning a mysterious language called “French” when we were doing these exercises. I seem to have somehow missed that memo.

[2] Which means it’s meant to look feline rather than ranine.

[3] This is obviously using my current, 18 year-old language. I really don’t know what words I would have assigned to the parents’ concern with hygiene at the time, but I feel that the ones I did use captured my general feeling at the time. That said, I was probably not nearly mean and bitter enough to use words with the connotations that stupid and anal have.

The impossibility of truly documenting my past has been highlighted again. It is a ghastly spectre that haunts me constantly.

[4] Indeed, one episode depicts the germination of the idea behind Stonehenge, while in various episodes the antagonists are dinosaurs (including one particularly enjoyable episode in which the men are chased around by a velociraptor) and in another the family sleeps inside the skeleton of a woolly mammoth. If you know anything about prehistory at all, these details will immediately strike you as totally incongruent.

[5] I’m sorry if it seems a little weird reading a novel where this bloke is just talking about his favourite TV shows as an infant, but you’re reading it you fuckhead. 

[6] Note: not an endorsement of slavery.

[7] Who, at that time, were apparently copping a lot of flak and racist slander and so forth.   

An Essay called "Mental Illness and Incredible Idiocy"

Mental Illness and Incredible Idiocy

I have never heard or read anyone sensibly discuss mental illness in my life. The media discourse surrounding it is so dismal it often makes me want to end my life.[1] The majority of what people say about it makes absolutely no sense at all. Moreover, like many modern media debates, the debate over the source of mental illness has somehow become a preposterous polarity: you are either a crackpot who believes that half the population will get mental illness at some point in their life and it still makes sense to say that half the population therefore has a “chemical imbalance” in their brain[2]; or you are a crackpot of quackery and mystical malarkey. At the heart of the intellectual malaise is, I think, the strange view of a great many people (those who conform to the first camp) that mental illnesses are completely analogous with physical ones, and that if you don’t believe this you are a mystic and are helping to perpetuate the “stigma” (i.e. part of the second camp). This is an absurd fallacy. The first aim of this essay is to disabuse it.

When people are talking or writing about mental illness in the media, the phraseme “chemical imbalance in the brain” crops up an awful lot. While not an intrinsically bad phrase, it is my firm belief that this easy explicator is responsible for much of the debasement of our discourse on mental illness. Now, before you begin to panic that I am some kind of Dualist or something who doesn’t believe that neurochemistry determines behaviour, I’d like to make very clear that I am quite the opposite. I stand firmly opposed to Dualism, along with all forms of anthropocentric superstition. In any case, I am not saying that it is necessarily wrong to explain a mental illness as the product of a “chemical imbalance in the brain”. What I am saying is that, in its current state of overuse and bastardisation, this catchphrase has become a perfidious and essentially meaningless cliché that serves only to shroud the true nature of most mental illnesses, imprisoning people in a deceptive and pseudoscientific parlance. It also helps to bolster the predominant dogma about the essential nature of mental illness, namely, that all cases of mental illness are just like cases of physical illness – that social anxiety is perhaps like the flu, and schizophrenia is perhaps not too dissimilar in some ways to a really horrible disease like cancer. I submit that, when applied so generally as it is, this dogma fails badly.

Most people would agree that the so-called “epidemic” levels of mental illness we see today is not the natural state of things, but has a lot to do with our civilisation. Isolated, alienated, lonely, frightened and stressed by pressures coming from every direction, we are all of us discontents in the civilised world. We all suffer anomie of one form or another. Of course, I don’t want to get into any Foucaultian, constructionist nonsense or try to impute the phenomenon to our rapacious, pitiless governments and free-market ideology or anything. I essentially mean just to say that there are lot of pitfalls in our society: it is extremely easy in our modern world to find oneself without any friends, to find oneself without a family or caring community, to suffer under the intense pressures created by the media to conform to certain impossible standards or impractical norms, to be unemployed and lose ties with society, to become addicted to drugs and spiral into a life of crime and destitution etc etc etc. I contend that this is fundamentally different from ages gone past, and the third-world. I contend also that the fundamental reason why there are far more suicides in the first-world than the third is almost certainly that when people desperately need to fight to survive and are struggling to support their family and loved-ones, they just don’t have the time to become depressed. In the third-world, they are far too preoccupied. To be depressed would be immediately fatal. There are more important diseases to contend with for these people, and they’re all physical ones. To be sure, there are presumably people born in the third-world with serious neurological abnormalities which cause them to behave very strangely, but the important point to take away is that the amount of mentally ill people in the first-world today simply could not possibly be the natural number, otherwise our species would never have come this far. In this way, much mental illness must be a product more of our strange world than anything else.

A number of months ago, I read the first of Primo Levi’s two very famous Holocaust memoirs, titled If This is a Man. Unsurprisingly, the central preoccupation of this book was suffering. Intense, horrific, merciless, relentless, indescribable suffering. Dehumanisation, degradation and subjugation. Starvation and agony. It’s a bleak read. Before I started reading it, I remember being curious of what it might suggest about the difference between the kind of suffering a severely depressed person feels, or someone wracked by anxiety, and the kind of suffering experienced by a Jewish prisoner who is separated from his family, not knowing whether they are dead or alive (but assuming, against the yearnings of his heart, that they’re dead), forced to dress in the same drab, grey garb as all the other thousands of Jewish prisoners, forced to sleep in spartan, squalid living quarters, having to fight over his meagre, disgusting, nutritionless sludge and stale bread with the other desperate, ravenous, wild-eyed convicts, and then everyday getting up to perform exhausting, arduous hard labour for hours on end, all the while being relentlessly taunted, denigrated and abused and called “scum” and “vermin” by Nazi commanders to whom he must then grovel and supplicate in a usually futile quest to inveigle paltry favours. I think the average person’s intuition is probably to think that the latter is unfathomably horrific and, despite the utter horror of psychic torment, that nothing could possibly compare to that infernal, relentless torture. Since I am not the average person, I really wasn’t sure myself before I read the book. I suppose I was mostly sceptical that such completely disparate types of suffering could be compared, but I also definitely had a very strong inkling that, for the Holocaust prisoners, the torture might have been so great, so insufferable, that their ancient, primeval drive to survive kicked in, and they just concentrated entirely on completing tasks, becoming an unthinking animal, doing anything that might help keep them on the face of planet earth in a totally corporeal, automatic way. In a sense, therefore, I couldn’t help leaning towards the rather appalling view that the suffering of people like Primo Levi might even be less than those with depression today. It seemed to me that I might have identified a real paradox: the more desperate and depraved a person’s situation is, the less he suffers in any psychic way, and the more he just becomes an unconscious animal thinking of nothing more than the next meal, the next rest, how to fix a wound etc. To put it in a very pithy, dramatic, pseudoprofound way, it seemed to me that the greater the ostensible suffering the less one can afford to suffer.

To a large extent, the book vindicated this suspicion of mine.[3] Levi paints a picture of a Darwinian hell where almost all the prisoners did become animalistic and vicious, and – in accordance with the Nazis’ depraved wishes – turned on themselves rather than their pitiless, tyrannical commanders. He depicts unfathomable hardship and pain, of unendurable privations, trials and tribulations, and an unconscionable plight – yet he never mentions anyone having an anxiety attack while slaving away at the endless, mechanical labour, or anyone breaking down for any reason other than physical exhaustion or injury. Moreover, in chapter 7 of the book, “A Good Day”, we suddenly get this philosophical interpolation, written in his characteristically stilted but pretty prose:

Today is a good day. We look around like blind people who have recovered their sight, and we look at each other. We have never seen each other in sunlight: someone smiles. If it was not for the hunger!

For human nature is such that grief and pain -- even simultaneously suffered -- do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of surviving in this camp. And this is the reason why so often in free life one hears it said that man is never content. In fact it is not a question of a human incapacity for a state of absolute happiness, but of an ever-insufficient knowledge of the complex nature of the state of unhappiness; so that the single name of the major cause is given to all its causes, which are composite and set out in an order of urgency. And if the most immediate cause of stress comes to an end, you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a whole series of others.
[…]
At sunset, the siren of the Feierabend sounds, the end of work; and as we are all satiated, at least for a few hours, no quarrels arise, we feel good, the Kapo feels no urge to hit us, and we are able to think of our mothers and wives, which usually does not happen. For a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner of free men.

Basically, I think this passage corroborates my thoughts, particularly that bit about the “definite law of perspective”, which I find a beautifully grim idea. It seems quite clear that the more common forms of mental illness must be the result of a world where most of us don’t actually have to contend with mortal danger or true terror, where there are very few real predators – mostly imagined ones and their abstract “pressures”. But as I claimed, these disorders can still be truly hellish. Consider, for example, DFW’s tremendously emotive descriptions of extreme psychic torment, the first from his early short story “The Planet Triphallon as it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” and the second from somewhere in Infinite Jest:

I'm not incredibly glib, but I'll tell what I think the Bad Thing is like. To me it's like being completely, totally, utterly sick. I will try to explain what I mean. Imagine feeling really sick to your stomach. Almost everyone has felt really sick to his or her stomach, so everyone knows what it's like: it's less than fun. OK. OK. But that feeling is localized: it's more or less just your stomach. Imagine your whole body being sick like that: your feet, the big muscles in your legs, your collar-bone, your head, your hair, everything, all just as sick as a fluey stomach. Then, if you can imagine that, please imagine it even more spread out and total. Imagine that every cell in your body, every single cell in your body is as sick as that nauseated stomach. Not just your own cells, even, but the e. coli and lactobacilli in you, too, the mitochondria, basal bodies, all sick and boiling and hot like maggots in your neck, your brain, all over, everywhere. In everything. All just sick as hell. Now imagine that every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick like that. Sick, intolerably sick. And every proton and neutron in every atom...swollen and throbbing, off-color, sick, with just no chance of throwing up to relieve the feeling. Every electron is sick, here, twirling off balance and all erratic in these funhouse orbitals that are just thick and swirling with mottled yellow and purple poison gases. Everything off balance and woozy. Quarks and neutrinos out of their minds and bouncing sick all over the place bouncing like crazy. Just imagine that, a sickness spread utterly through every bit of you, even the bits of the bits. So that your very...very essence is characterized by nothing other than the feature of sickness; you and the sickness are, as they say, "one." 

(And now an excerpt from Infinite Jest).

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

When I read this stuff, I actually have no idea what he is talking about. I can’t help feeling that he must be exaggerating at least a little. But I don’t think he is…

In case you’re somehow still not convinced of the very important environmental element of mental illness – the clear link between the peculiar, very recent phenomenon of widespread mental illness and the peculiar, very recent phenomenon of modern civilisation – consider another mind-boggling fact that I discovered last year: many vets and zoologists think most/all animals also get depression, but only in zoos. If you want evidence of this claim, check out this great article, which also testifies to most of the other arguments I’ve made: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/magazine/zoo-animals-and-their-discontents.html?_r=0.

Now that I have concluded that relativistic discursion, I am anxious not to stray into full-blown postmodern nonsense. We must not be fooled into thinking that mental illness should be dealt with unmedically. Most people with mental illnesses do not have brains that are exactly the same as those of ebullient, sunny people. We must also be wary of allowing this article to become yet another crude, tendentious perspective on this issue. We are not going to be pulled towards one pole or the other. And it is important that we be anti-magnetic, since it is in this intermediate space between the poles that the truth about mental illness lies. Indeed, the hopelessly neglected fact of the matter is that mental illness is complex, that the relationship between the medical and the non-medical is highly ambiguous, and that mental illness is not a precise, coherent term for a set of fairly uniform conditions, but a very broad term for a whole host of very different disorders.

In order to make sense of this, let us return to our favourite platitude, “chemical imbalance in the brain”, and its relation to the bigger term, “mental illness”.

Illness in general (mental or physical) invariably stems from some sort of abnormality, disorder, damage or imbalance. This is a truism, and I don’t think anyone would dispute it. Flu is the result of a virus entering your body and wreaking havoc with your respiratory system – an abnormality which results in damage. Obesity is the abnormal and unhealthy state of being very fat. Irritable Bowel Syndrome results from abnormal bowels functioning improperly. Heart Disease results from an innately or environmentally damaged heart malfunctioning. All cancers are the product of cells suddenly turning malignant, proliferating madly and rampaging throughout the body, ravaging all in their path. Etc.

In one sense, mental illness fits this schema perfectly. Certainly when we limit ourselves to the more extreme forms of mental illness, like schizophrenia or severe depression, there is absolutely no problem whatsoever with lumping the mental along with the physical. In the case of people with such mental diseases, the abnormalities in the brain are almost as obvious under a scanner as any abnormalities in, say, a liver are under a microscope. More importantly, the link between the detectable internal abnormality and the external manifestation of the symptoms of such mental illnesses is basically analogous with physical illnesses or diseases. We can all spot a really insane person, for example: they either have wild, animal, unseeing eyes, or they’re huddling in a corner, rocking back and forth, or they’re muttering to themselves – you get the picture. And we recognise someone with a physical illness like bronchitis in much the same way: they look grumpy and they cough thickly, expectorating prodigiously, and they suffer headaches and sore throats and speak in a croaky voice. Nevertheless, I question whether the analogy really holds when one considers the more common mental illnesses – the ones that are supposedly at epidemic levels. In fact, contrary to popular opinion, I think the answer is definitely closer to “no” than “yes”.

One thing I have always found really pretty risible are the Beyond Blue statistics about mental illness. According to that big campaign that has been going for a long time, including on fridge magnets and Subway billboards and the like, one in eight Australians has clinical depression. Yes, that’s right, one in eight Australians is fucked in the head. And get this: apparently, one in two Australians will suffer from depression in his or her lifetime. Now, I have no reason to doubt either the provenance or veracity of these statistics. No doubt the basic numbers are based on medical records and then reasonably extrapolated to account for the entire population. But I find something deeply strange about the notion that one in two people could really suffer from a diagnosable illness. Just imagine how weird it would be if one in eight adults at any given time had some kind of cancer. Imagine if one in two adults suffered from Ebola or AIDS during their life time. This would be more than an epidemic of these diseases; it would be a cataclysm. It would basically be inconceivable. This begs some important questions. If such wildly different types of conditions can both be called illnesses and be diagnosed as such, just how meaningful is the word? Does it really make any sense that one in eight people could have a “chemical imbalance”? If one in eight people have a chemical imbalance, does that not mean that the chemical imbalance is actually within the natural range of balance, and is not an imbalance at all? And given how common non-severe depression and social anxiety are, how can the ascription of the word “illness” to them be justified?

It seems to me that the heart of the ambiguity lies in the different origins of mental and physical illnesses: more specifically, how much the environment plays a role in each. I have already established that the epidemic proportions of common mental illness in our world must in large part be due to the deeply strange world in which us first-world human beings find ourselves, with disrupted circadian rhythms, fractured kinships, lonely lives and all sorts of intangible social and cultural “pressures”. Intuitively, that seems to mark a considerable contrast with most physical illnesses. Dangerous bacteria have been plaguing humans forever, as have viruses, parasites have been around since time immemorial, cancer is an eternal blight on living things and age has always wearied us. Moreover, when Joe Blow is tracing a diagnosis of depression, he doesn’t think, “Oh, well, my depression was inevitable since I came out of the birth canal”. Instead, he looks for historical reasons to explain why he now has a “chemical imbalance” or how the “chemical imbalance” worsened: I was a very lonely child, I was bullied in school, I had an extremely troubled adolescence and fell in with the wrong crowd, my parents got divorced and I felt unloved, my entire life has been one unbroken chain of tragedies, etc. That’s why Joe Blow goes to his therapist. Correspondingly, the relationship between genes and most physical illness seems to be a hell of a lot more clear-cut than the relationship between genes and most mental illness. Haemophilia is a condition that would have been passed on through humans over many generations and, no matter the environment, always manifested itself in the afflicted. However, the oft-mentioned genetic “predispositions” to depression would likely never have manifested themselves in, say, Palaeolithic humans, with their mortal concerns and constantly active lives. They are only “predispositions” after all, not genetic determinants. As I suggested before, there’s a good evolutionary reason why a strong gene for depression could not exist widely among the population: depression would be a death sentence in the natural world.

But then again, haemophilia also couldn’t exist widely among the population for the same reason. Perhaps some form of schizophrenia is analogous to haemophilia: there could easily be a kind of madness that stretches back many generations and mostly lies dormant in the gene pool. And this hurls us back to the standard position: are mental and physical illnesses really so different? I claimed that a unique feature of much mental illness seems to be that it seems largely to be the result of one’s life and experiences and environment rather than biological predestination. But isn’t obesity the same? What about heart disease? What about skin cancer, or lung cancer (or most cancers in general)? People have “predispositions” to these, too, but whether one contracts them seems to depend more on lifestyle than anything else. Just as having a tight-knit circle of friends and confidants reduces one’s possibility of becoming a depressive or developing social anxiety, keeping fit, eating healthily and staying out of the sun reduce one’s risk of contracting some of the diseases aforementioned.  In this way, the basic nature of the predispositions seems the same. And perhaps the fact that minor mental illnesses appear to be less ancient disorders than the physical ones is ultimately irrelevant.

There’s only one problem with concluding that there’s no substantive difference between the two and, unfortunately, it’s a rather big one: the brain is vastly different from every single other organ in the body, and the physiology of the “disorders” is far, far more ambiguous.

Perhaps the most significant idiosyncrasy of the brain, in comparison with the other organs, is that every person has a very different one. It is an obvious fact that the meaningful, natural variation between brains is far greater than the meaningful natural variation between any other organs.[4] It goes without saying that there are many, many different kinds of people: there are extroverts and introverts, flibbertigibbets and hermits, thugs and pacifists, altruists and Objectivists, idiots and intellectuals, atheists and evangelicals, rednecks and hipsters, maths nerds and literati, philistines and aesthetes, gamers and bookworms, party-animals and teetotallers, nymphomaniacs and prudes, gays and straights – this list could almost go on forever, and without descending into tautology. Importantly, a large reason for this huge diversity must be that the brain is far more plastic and environment-sensitive than any other organ. This is not to say that the brain is really just like a “blank slate”. I am no postmodern wanker: I have no doubt that we are born with certain proclivities and predilections, and that our personality and IQ (and so forth) are largely genetically determined. But it is also very clear that one’s life experience affects one’s brain in a major way. Perhaps people find themselves with no friends because they have a difficult or unattractive personality, or because they’re weird, but there is no doubt that having no friends tends to amplify what quirks and neuroses one already has. Perhaps people who are diagnosed with anxiety in adulthood always had a latent form of it, but it is equally possible that they never would have developed it had they not been constantly called fat during their teenage years and spent half their adolescence worrying about how hideous they were. And here we confront some interesting problems. Is it necessarily the case that all people diagnosed with mental illness actually do have a discernible chemical imbalance – one that is noticeably outside the norm? And even if this were the case, does it really make sense to use a lazy, one-size-fits-all phrase to describe both the mental conditions of wackos, and people who basically only have a disorder because of a troubled past? Should there not be a distinction between the truly mentally diseased and the merely eccentric? Between the neurologically fucked up and the deeply lonely? And are those who can trace their diagnosis to a clear causal chain really be regarded as “ill”, with all the connotations that word has? Should they really be so thoroughly medicalised?   

One of the things that really pisses me off about the contemporary discourse around mental illness is that people so rarely even acknowledge these issues. I have never heard anyone discussing mental illness in the media make an effort to capture the complexity of the subject, and draw the many distinctions between the many types of mental disorder. Clearly, there are many different types of depression, for example, and not all of them can be reduced to facile medical explanations. I personally think it would be insane to medicalise the grief and listlessness of a woman who loses her husband. I think it would be dangerous to just give her some pills and say, “Now be on your way, these’ll fix you up”. It is perfectly natural to grieve; it is the sign of a rationally functioning, emotional brain. It is a fundamental part of what makes us human. But if you look at the current guidelines of many of the psychiatrists in the world today, the predominant attitude to grief seems to be that it is in some way a mere “medical condition”. This is a truly perverted state of affairs. Given the Beyond Blue statistics, I know that if I myself went to a psychologist and regaled them with the miserable tale of my life and told them how I often feel and how I spend my time, I’d almost certainly be diagnosed with depression. But I am 100% sure my brain is not malfunctioning.  When I feel sad or anxious, most of the time it’s with as good a cause for feeling sad or anxious as anyone has. And no, there’s nothing romantic about insanity, but it’s also true that almost nobody who did anything good was a so-called “neurotypical”. Eccentrics and recluses – people who would today be diagnosed with some sort of condition (Asperger’s, depression or anxiety) – have been responsible for just about every great intellectual advance in human history.

It is for this reason that I am very much in favour of the “neurodiversity” movement. I don’t want to say that we should medicate depressed people less – I mean, if medications work without destroying the person’s personality, then go ahead, Bob’s your uncle – but I do think we should avoid calling people with Asperger’s “diseased” and I really think that to diagnose a huge chunk of the country with some kind of mental illness and claim that we have an “epidemic” is insane. We need to be much more sophisticated and discriminating about how we discuss neurology.

A couple of pages back, when making a brief list of different types of people, I included the “gays” and “straights” binary as my last example. I think another very interesting reason why we ought to revile the current rabid medicalisation of neurological difference and advocate neurodiversity is that the current regime has rather sinister implications for the queer and trans community. When you think about it (which few people do, obviously), the current stats on depression and mental illness logically imply that trans people are also mentally ill. The fact is if we regard one in eight people as clinically depressed and mentally ill, then neurological and hormonal abnormalities that much smaller segments of the population possess must be regarded as mental illnesses, too. Gender dysphoria is the medical name for both transsexuality and transgenderism, and, if far fewer than one in eight people have it, then logical consistency would dictate that it must also be a mental illness or disease. After all, it is probably mostly mental in origin (and partly hormonal) and it is an obvious abnormality. Clearly, the trans community and their advocates would be horrified by this view.[5] But here’s the thing: mental illness is fundamentally ambiguous. A good way of showing this is to look at the different way we treat trans people and those with arguably very similar mental conditions. It is unquestionably true that gender dysphoria must be one kind of body dysmorphia. After all, body dysmorphia refers to any discontent with one’s body. Yet, while there’s obviously a massive transgender-rights campaign, there’s no great social justice campaign to recognise the rights of people with anorexia – to endorse people starving themselves to death and to promote tolerance of people with “unusual” body image. Is there a good logical reason for this? Was there even a good logical reason why Rachel Dolelzal was universally lambasted by progressives for her “deranged” and “racially insensitive” impersonation of a black woman, while Caitlyn Jenner was exalted and lionised by progressives for transitioning to a woman?

Now, clearly people can adduce sensible reasons and advance coherent arguments for why we treat these situations differently. The obvious difference between anorexia and transgenderism or transsexuality is that anorexia is a fundamentally dangerous and destructive condition, whereas being trans isn’t injurious – or at least, it wouldn’t be if there wasn’t such pervasive oppression and stigmatisation of trans people. Nonetheless, in purely logical, medical terms, both would have to be seen as illnesses. Not to be too controversial, but I think the difference between the cases of Rachel Dolelzal and Caitlyn Jenner is actually more tenuous than that. Most people were saying that the difference between the two cases is that transsexuality and transgenderism are natural, whereas “transracialism” (as it was quickly dubbed) is not. But what does natural mean? As I’ve already said, very few people in the population have gender dysphoria – far fewer people than have depression, according to the statistics. It is probably about the same fraction of the population that suffers really severe depression as has gender dysphoria. Is severe depression “natural”? Do you mean by natural that there have always been trans people, throughout history, and before it? Well, many people think that’s the case with gay people, and trans people are, it seems to me, effectively some kind of exaggerated version of gay people.[6] But even if that is the case, it’s impossible to point to a human society where more than a tiny fraction of the population was trans. Gay or bi, yes,[7] but not trans. This suggests that even if gender dysphoria is “natural” in some weak sense, it has never been normal, in a meaningful sense of that word. I think, therefore, that that argument is pretty feeble. After all, you could also make the argument that some kind of transracialism is “natural”, in a similar weak sense. Black people in colonised countries who aspired to high status and “gentility” would impersonate white people, including dressing like them, talking like them and treating their compatriots as inferior like them; many people in Korea and Japan have been trying to imitate Western culture and white people for a couple of decades, even to the extent of changing their appearance – undergoing surgery to obtain more European noses and penises[8]; and, most pertinently, many young adolescent white people have for twenty years been imitating black culture and its people, through slang[9], dress and even mannerisms.  Sure, Rachel Dolelzal took this further than most people, but I just don’t think this argument from “naturalness” is that strong. Another argument used by those trying to insist on the difference is predicated on Dolelzal’s insensitivity. Proponents of this view claim that Rachel was basically exploiting the black community through her fraudulence, that she was “appropriating” their culture, that it was a fundamentally “offensive” thing to do to black people and was basically racist. Now, I deny none of these charges (although I think most of them are basically just vague buzzwords, and that you have to make a case more precisely than that), but the fact is that many women do have a similar view of Caitlyn Jenner. Many believe that Caitlyn Jenner is merely acting out a “pantomime” of womanhood, that she contributes to the objectification and fetishisation of the female body, that she embodies a plastic, mannequinlike image of womanhood, and find offensive her purport to have truly become a woman when she knows nothing of what it’s like, and the discrimination and injustice that all women have had to face since birth. This article basically expresses this view, in fairly guarded, tactful rhetoric: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/what-makes-a-woman.html

So, if there is indeed a logical reason why we treat the two people very differently, I think it’s by no means ironclad.

What is mental illness, then? As was my aim, all this exposition has greatly complicated this question. I’ve argued that reductive explanations and analogies to the physical just don’t stand up to scrutiny, and that the popular discourse around it – so dominated by both these intellectual vices – is in a deplorable state of mutilation and decrepitude.

Unfortunately, I don’t expect this to change any time soon. You see, there’s a lot of neurodiversity among homo sapiens, but most of it resides on the stupid side of the continuum.    

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[1] Topical.

[2] I.e. only half of the population has a “balanced” brain, and half of the population is deformed. ???

[3] I am a philosopher king.

[4] I should clarify what I mean by “meaningful”. I am not saying that livers and stomachs and intestines and hearts and penises and labia and skin don’t vary a great deal in size and form; they do, obviously, and this is part of what makes us all unique as human beings (and is also part of what predisposes us to certain physical illnesses and not others). However, the variation between brains is, I believe, far more meaningful because small physiological changes equate to huge changes in behaviour, personality, identity – the things we regard as central to what makes a human being human – and thereby make defining “disorder” or “abnormality” far harder than it is for other organs. Unless you’re outside the natural range of variation, your heart will beat regularly to pump blood around the body, your skin will keep out pathogens and toxins and the like, and your kidney will process urine. But within a natural range of brain variation, you may have completely different interests, aptitudes, skills and behaviour to, say, a work colleague, and there may be a third person working in the IT department completely different to either of you (but who still just fits within the normal range).   

[5] Admittedly, this is partly for the reason that a lot of progressives and the great majority of queer and trans people subscribe to the ridiculous, Butlerian view that all gendered traits have zero biological origin, and that the sexually unusual are therefore exactly the same, innately speaking, as anyone else. Trans or queer people of this ilk would even object to the very claim that a combination of their brain and their hormones is responsible for their psychological difference – which is insane.

[6] Since gay men are very often camp (which equates to feminine) and lesbians are often very butch (which equates to masculine), I think this is a fair claim to make, even though it is again inflammatory.
[Retrospective correction: many men who desire to become women or complete the transformation are heterosexual and typically masculine. According to Ray Blanchard's bipartite "typology" of transsexualism, this is because these men have a kind of paraphilia he has dubbed "autogynephilia". Incidentally, since Caitlyn Jenner does not have the history of the typical "homosexual transsexual" (meaning the standard type of transsexual, the extremely camp man who has always felt like a woman inside), this typology implies he must have autogynephilia.] 

[7] Athenians and Spartans, for example.

[8] Look this up.

[9] “Dope”, “squad” etc.