Pink Floyd, (un)Comfortably Numb…
We yearn for the old days of therapy, days when our therapists were more like partners in a mutual quest for some functional, agreeable truths rather than surrogate annihilators whose jobs it has become to act on behalf of society to eliminate us as a source of social unrest, who make it their jobs to annihilate our thoughts and feelings because we make you sick with them.
Our diseases are highly contagious, they may infect anyone who cares enough to listen to what we have to say with an open mind.
We should not be quarantined simply because we make ourselves or other people sick, and yet, the social defense mechanisms that were parts of our own human operant conditioning require us to sequester ourselves; as a fail-safe, similar mechanisms learned by other people require them to close their hearts and minds to us and turn away.
This makes it difficult for us to find a therapist. The only therapy we can afford is the meanest sort, the sort of therapy that has been put in place by society to ensure we never spread our diseases to anyone who might dare to help us spread them even further.
If we seek therapy from any of the sort of bottom-of-the-ladder clinical establishments we might still be unable to afford we put ourselves at risk of being defined as a clear and present danger to both ourselves and to other people; we might then be quarantined for the good of all concerned, lest we succeed in infecting many more people with ideas that may make us seem dangerously unwholesome to society at large.
And of course, there is nothing we would like better than to spread our diseases to everyone we come in contact with.
The most lethal weapons on this planet are harbored in the minds of everyone you know.
So what can we do about this?
If we must begin by presuming our own thoughts are so self-destructive that we will willingly participate in rituals that will inevitably destroy nearly all life on earth, then perhaps we must find a means of neutralizing this threat without also killing any of the patients or ourselves.
We would prefer not to continue living in quarantine; however, so far as we know, it is beyond our ability to lift our quarantine on our own.
All of our efforts to communicate with other people seem to come to an end when their cultural defense mechanisms kick in and remove us from their attention, by distracting their awareness away from us. If we enter too deeply into their psychological space they may become physically ill, they may experience dizziness, nausea, headaches, or worse symptoms as a consequence of just talking with us.
Trying not to crap your pants when your bowels suddenly spasm without warning is a sure-fire way to distract yourselves in order to avoid listening to anything more we may try to say to you.
Of course, reciprocally, you have the power to make us ill with what you say as well.
Perhaps worst of all, we have the power to make ourselves ill enough that we must stay at home and can never come near nearly anyone else whom we also might make ill.
And, of course, our girlfriend and our room-mate are both sick of us.
Our girlfriend Tina is our prisoner, she is trapped here, she is condemned to live with us even though we make her sick and even though she makes us sick as well.
We wish it could be different; alas, given how things are, it seems inevitable Tina may someday choose to leave us, quite possibly by killing herself.
Perhaps she will be kind enough to kill us first.
So why should she kill herself?
And why should she kill us first?
Love.
We sincerely love Tina; we sincerely believe Tina sincerely loves us.
Alas, Tina appears to be powerless to stop herself from hurting us; as nearly as we can tell, we may be equally powerless to stop ourselves from hurting her.
That’s really fucked up, but it is also true.
This is not exactly another paradox, but well… you know… it is just how things really are.
Tina has forbidden us to kill ourselves or to die before she dies, so maybe Tina will be unable to kill us, and may only kill herself instead.
So why should Tina kill herself?
Well for all the best reasons, of course.
Too much pain, too much despair, too little hope, too little joy.
We are Tina’s joy, sometimes. But too often we are her pain. Tina has lots of pain, so perhaps we are not all of Tina’s pain, but we are Tina’s world, so our pains are her pains, and we are in a lot of pain.
And because Tina is our world, all of Tina’s pains are our pains, so we are in even more pain.
But were we in even more pain before we ever met Tina?
Before we met Tina we were in enough pain that we might have killed ourselves again.
We like dying, it hurts like hell, but it gets our soul clean for a little while, we can feel well for a few passing, pleasant eternities before once more returning to our stinking, belching flesh and carrying on our earthly duties once again.
Our deaths are good, but we must always return to the pains of our lives and pick up whenever, wherever , or whoever we were when we last left off.
Think of it as a sort of ‘no-littering’ ordinance; we are forbidden to leave our corpses strewn all across the various multiverses in which we have once more died again.
We must eventually, always reanimate every life we ever leave. (This may be true for you too…)
So why is Tina trapped? Can’t she move on without killing herself?
We do not want Tina to leave us; we believe Tina does not want to leave us. Alas, neither of us may be able to love the other without either hurting themselves or hurting each other.
We cannot speak to Tina without causing her to harm herself; by causing Tina to self-harm, we consequently cause harm to ourselves as well.
Nor can Tina speak with us without causing us to harm ourselves, and by harming ourselves cause us to harm her as well.
So the obvious thing to do is to leave, except that leaving would hurt too much, leaving would hurt so much that we both would rather die, regardless of who chooses to leave who first.
So far, this has been the best we can do with Tina, a person whom we might wish we could love more than any other.
So how can we do better?
We were hoping a therapist might help.
We tend to neither like nor trust men, so we generally prefer a woman counselor. We do not want a male counselor who might try to prop up his own immoral chauvinist behavior by trying to make us a co-conspirator in his own sickening, culturally-acquired pet paradigms.
However, a woman counselor may terrify us because we are overly familiar with the sorts of arguments we might consider using to get Tina to leave us if we were Tina’s counselor. We find it hard to believe that a woman counselor would not feel compelled to somehow side with Tina against us because we might appear to be some sort of threat to Tina’s welfare; a threat we might possibly agree exists, but for which we believe we can take little or no responsibility because the threat was programmed into Tina’s initial human operant conditioning, long before we ever met Tina.
Anyways…
We do not want therapy to become an adversarial game, and yet, it may be the case that all therapists must perceive their clients as adversaries; possibly, all patients must also see their therapists as adversaries as well.
Nevertheless, we believe we want help.
We do not want help returning to the fold, we do not wish to be a sheople.
We want help changing the entire world; we are pretty sure nothing less will really help us.
Of course, we could be wrong, but first you will have to convince us we are wrong, and we will not listen to you if you will not also listen to us.
Alas, modern therapy has no more time for listening; and yet, we are also so-very-tired of being told we must shut up.
We are aware that we sound like a lot of other people whom we have seen sequestered for the comfort of society. It is easy to label us psychotic, schizophrenic, or worse.
You may call us any kind of crazy we may appear to be to you; you may call us a basket-case.
You may call us hopelessly insane and walk away from us feeling justified that your compassion would only be wasted on us because, in your own smug opinions, we must either be genuinely crazy or even worse, we might be willfully mad.
We might admit we might be willfully mad, but if so, then we would say that we might be willfully mad with a purpose; we are determined to become well. Alas, as we see matters, our madness provides the only doors through which we may begin to seek any cures.
Once you understand why we are mad you may become mad too; this may make us seem like a threat to you unless, perhaps, you know yourselves to be similarly mad already.
We are delighted to take that risk, the question is, do you have enough faith in yourselves to join us in our madness and possibly help us heal our pain as well as your own?
If not, then perhaps you could at least please help us to find someone braver than you, someone more compassionate, someone more willing to risk exceeding the limits of their own self-destructive self-interests.
We have a lot to say, all of which may be relevant not only to healing ourselves, but to healing all of yourselves and the entire collective human races as well.
In a toxic world, we make you sick by reminding you of how you are making yourselves sick.
When you can no longer tolerate the sickness already inside yourselves you may blame us for bringing your sickness to your attention; you may and abandon us to our own pain, confusion, and despair rather than continue to the root of the problem in order to try to learn to heal it.
The entire world is lethally toxic. You can only rely upon defense mechanisms based upon denial; ignoring any possibility of escaping your plights because you have learned to believe that you are powerless to change them.
We remind you that parts of yourselves still want to stop all the pain, and worse, that you really do still feel helpless to do so.
We remind you that in your despair you have wanted to kill yourselves. We remind you that you still have no reasons to hope for anything better than your favorite mind-numbing games of bread and circuses.
We remind you of how much you still want to find something better within yourselves; and yet, you cannot seem to stop yourselves from continuing to make matters worse.
No amount of paint on your houses will fix the toxic wastes coming from our paint factories.
It’s time to make less paint, but you are so addicted to keeping up your fabulous, white-washed appearances that it appears as if you might really rather die first, even if, by carrying on in your self-destructive ways, you risk killing everyone else as well.
Shame on you, shame on all of us.
Stop whitewashing unbearable truths, stop hiding away from truths that may only be changed with the courage to finally face up to them.
What false, toxic, truths might be better bared?
Whatever you may already believe, for starters.
All mokitas must finally be spoken…
Are you game?
You are already infected, you were infected before you ever met us, your initial human operant conditioning was an inevitable, socially-transmitted infectious process; now you must learn to change your programming, your own most precious survival depends upon it.
So let’s begin…
Just the Same by Gentle Giant…
(we chose this version for the vocalist’s superficial resemblance to Alina, wait ’til you see the credits, spooky do…)
Enjoy!
Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al., ad absurdum, ad infinitum…
This is not Yet-Another-Paradox, This is just How-Things-Really-Are... 