After years of talk therapy and antipsychotics did nothing to assuage my friend’s fear of fear that, once again, she might lose her mind completely, she returned to psychosis intentionally. She tired of talking about it, words always one step removed from the truth of things. The logic of the day is senseless when it is brought into the night, she said. The night has its own logic.
The hope was that this time, she would touch it, learn to move with it, she would greet it like an old friend. The hope was that she could come into a new way of living with the world. She took 250 micrograms of LSD on an empty beach crested with honeycombed cliffs that pierced a sheer hundred metres into the ocean, hours from the city, and without phone service.
She returned, thankfully. Having finished with fear. I was with her as much as she needed me to be, trip-sitting, as it were. I write this alongside her, at her request. She no longer tastes the metal that would materialise in her mouth before the fear. It turns out the metal taste was a self-fulfilling prophecy, not a premonition.
The ‘treatment,’ could it be called that, is by all metrics warned against. Despite its outcome, we might just call it insane, a terrible naïve idea. A precarious way of dealing with oneself that shouldn’t even be talked about lest it be encouraged. Thank Goodness nothing bad happened. Going against that, I think it deserves consideration. It speaks to the way we orient ourselves towards the world, and ourselves.
The logic of artifice is one of pure repetition, and it is everything that my friend resisted through her return. This logic recognises that every object that is the same can be treated the same, explained the same way, and exists consistently overtime. From laptops and kettles, to forces like gravity or causality. I call it artificial not to moralise – it is not fake or dishonest – but rather because it smooths over details to create models of the world that are nevertheless separate from it. It is about explaining things that are made to be identical or construed as consistent. So, we are speaking both of a method of explanation, and of the objects it appropriately applies to. I call it a logic of artifice knowing that a category is necessarily reductive, but I am not immune to convenience.
This kind of thinking can be very useful, proceeding from observation to generalisation. However, thinking predicated on artifice has bled into how we think about singular phenomena, too. Things that can never be repeated, whose essence lies in their difference: nature, history, self. I worry about what happens when we subdivide interconnected systems into smaller and smaller objects and then turn these objects inwards. An isolated organism is a dead organism.
It would be reductive to heap responsibility for this thinking on ‘the sciences’ as it may be easy to do, because this would be too narrow a genealogy. We must look at the individuals who reflect it. All of us are tempted by neat explanations and treatments, to make sense of the world. To bring this close to home, we want an answer to ourselves. A narrative that makes sense of our choices and troubles, an explanation that comes neatly wrapped up with a clear way forward. Further afield, to explain war, historians might look for an explanandum that focalises one individual or event to justify how and why atrocities became possible. Trying to force rational systems to explain irrational processes comes up against the problem that the logic of the day is senseless in the night.
Like with any paradigm or ideology, artificialist thinking becomes an identity, carving out the angles of a glass prism up against which the individual presses their face. They see the world through it, eventually forgetting the prism itself. Categories and the language that rigidifies and repeats them, set limits upon what is conceivable.
Despite how rationality laughs at faith, the artificialist mode of rationalising feels a little bit religious. It aligns with the aspiration to find a single reason for all of this. Treating parts of the world as though they were repeatable and explicable brings us closer to that elusive theory of everything. The whisperings underpinning psychiatry and religion, personified, say turn yourself over to those who have the answers, to the world, to your pain, and you too might be saved.
In her book Romantic Empiricism, on the titular tradition in philosophy, Dalia Nassar writes of the assumption in experimental research “that the only way by which to understand natural phenomena is by looking for something behind or beyond them, looking for a force than can somehow “explain” them.” Expositing artificed laws places us behind or beyond the phenomena in question into the hidden realm of explanations. But to fully know something, we must see for ourselves. You could read a hundred books on meditation, pouring over descriptions of the steps of the practice and relevant phenomenology. But until you have lived through the exercise, you don’t really know it. Words, always one step removed from the truth of things.
My friend was no longer thinking through the artifice of repeatable categories: sane, insane, sickness, treatment. Her afflictions simply could not be comprehended or softened in a state of measured reflection. The causal chain of events that led her to psychic break, if there ever was one, was certainly remote from her after the fact. So, in trying to create an explanation of herself, she fell beyond herself into the chasm that always heaves between concepts. To pass through the vertigo staring down into a fractal of divisions, return was necessary.
I am not worried about encouraging her course of action because for anyone else it is no longer the same action. Actually, it would probably be a terrible naïve idea. Were we to call it treatment, this would be the very move that leads us back to artifice: to suggest that her actions are in any way repeatable.
“I was at the start and end of time. The years between this and the other breaks were illusions that had been dropped into me through a pipette. I had voted that morning, election day. So I thought I had just made up politics, this was darkly hilarious. But still, I had either died or never lived in the first place. And there was just purgatorial nothingness, forever. I was so lonely. After the terror I can’t speak of, I slowly invented physics, ethics, and language… Then the sky became beautiful. Hiking back to the port was coming back into the hands of things that make sense.”
Bringing the logic of artifice into my friend’s life forgot, for a long time, that the categories heaped upon her were just that. They were names for approximate parts of a flow that is unyielding, unreeling, vital and vulnerable. A whole body in place and time, whose environment and self exist through each other. Becoming is not linear, not hierarchical. She was never something made, broken, to be taken for easy repair. Certainly, she is hardly replaceable.
