The Collected Schizophrenias

Woodman was always, her friend Giuseppe Gallo said, single-mindedly thinking about photography. Never distracted. “Every moment of Francesca’s life,” he said, “was in preparation for a photograph.” One is more easily prepared with an always-ready model, and what subject is more available for exploration than the self? What better stuff to make art of if one is an ambitious artist, which Woodman undoubtedly was? Why not, as a writer, create essays in which I myself appear?

Again, from On Photography: “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses,” says Susan Sontag in On Photography. I

McQueen said about his clothing, “I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress,” which is another truth about fashioning normalcy: the way I clothe myself is not merely camouflage. It is an intimidation tactic, as with the porcupine who shows its quills, or the owl that puffs its body in a defensive offensive: dress like everyone should be terrified of you.

John Nash, who has said that the same mind that produced his delusions produced his brilliant ideas.

How can I go on this way?

And how can I not?

—Susan Sontag

Recovery [from schizophrenia], almost never complete, runs the gamut from a level tolerable to society to one that may not require permanent hospitalization but in fact does not allow even the semblance of normal life. More than any symptom, the defining characteristic of the illness is the profound feeling of incomprehensibility and inaccessibility that sufferers provoke in other people.

—Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind

But regardless of whether Morgellons is “real” or whether it originates from bacteria as Lyme disease does, I can no longer put myself at a comfortable distance from “those people” who self-diagnose with Morgellons. We are, in the end, linked by desperation based in suffering, and based on a system of conventional medicine that not only has no method of alleviating that suffering, but also accuses us of psychosomatic pathology.

When the self has been swallowed by illness, isn’t it cruel to insist on a self that is not illness? Is this why so many people insist on believing in a soul?

Why was I doing this? Some PTSD sufferers consciously or unconsciously put themselves in danger to “fix” the original trauma. I decided that I was, in vicariously living through these girls and women, doing the same thing. Perhaps it was a kind of exposure therapy. If I could only experience enough violence, if I could only hear enough descriptions of women’s bodies being found in pieces, I could convince my sympathetic nervous system to calm the hell down.