THE SCHIZOPHRENIC AGE

Reuben was outside the shopping centre again yesterday, handing out his leaflets. He looked unwashed. Pity. He could've been assistant manager of Office Furniture Direct. His wife kept me up all night last night too and not in the good way she used to. She doesn't discretely pop by anymore. She spends most of her nights standing on the roof of her car, pointing at the sky and screaming that the Moon is coming.

People believe all sorts on my street. We've lied to each other so often about infidelities, unreturned lawnmowers, whose kid hit whose first and so on that notions such as trust and truth have completely dissolved. In the absence of a unifying narrative, everyone has picked their own story. James down the end of the street thinks that I'm a member of the Illuminati because of the way I close my curtains - a sinister left to right that apparently corresponds with a certain occult ritual. Michael and Anne from number 38 are convinced that Madge, the dog from number 12, barks a secret code to spies that are housed in the garden shed of number 23. And no one even knows who lives in number 23. The residents of number 23 are so paranoid that they never emerge from their house. Some of us think that they may not even be in there. Who knows the truth? Who knows if there is even a truth anymore? Was there ever a truth? Everyone has their own ideas and no one has the same ideas. There are just so many ideas. A multitude of ideas. A mess of ideas. What is the collective noun for ideas? An 'insanity' of ideas?

The only thing myself and all my neighbours agree on is that we can't trust each other. This sometimes seems impractical. Take the time number 4 caught fire. We all stood watching as the Sweeneys banged their fists against their upstairs triple glazing, their faces contorted in muted screams as they were swallowed by flames. All we could say to each other was 'false flag'. In fact we chanted it: 'False Flag! False Flag! False Flag! False Flag!' In the morning, the authorities came and cleaned away the family's charred remains as we viewed suspiciously from our windows. We all agreed that the whole thing was a staged event involving special effects and we all thought that each other were behind it. No one mourned the loss of life. If you die on our street we think you are secretly still alive and if you are alive we think you died and were replaced by an impostor. Everyone on my street is an impostor. Even me, according to everyone else. But they would say that because it is they who are the true impostors. Not me. I think. I think I think. I'm fairly sure I think.

Despite our mutual distrust, everyone on my street shares pride in one thing. We won a prize for being the most atomised vicinity in our borough. The county councillors said that we were leading the way. A member of government even paid tribute to us at a business function. He said we were an alert and vigilant community and what was great about that was that we applied our alert vigilance to fantasy and not reality. 'Reality is all ours lads and we can do what we like with it,' he told the vested interests and they all raised a glass to toast the death of community and the advent of the schizophrenic age.

You know, I sometimes feel as if I don't know what anything is. What anything really is. I just know what things look like and what others call them. It's the same with people. They could be anyone. You could be anyone. I could be anyone. Just who are we anyway? And why are we all so frightened?

SWEETHEART COME

If you look at things close up, really close up, they cease to be what they seem to be. A person stops being a person with arms and legs and a torso and a head and becomes a vast epidermal surface instead. Look even closer and even this understanding is lost. Closer up than close up, everything becomes an indivisible hubbub of subatomic particles. We might see a room but really there is no furniture, no ceiling, no floor, no window and no door. At the most micro of micro levels the room is all just trashing static but on our macro level it takes on the illusion of separate objects. It's like a Monet painting, it's an incomprehensible mess close up and only makes sense at a distance. This distance from real reality is the range we operate on. We all know it but we put the knowledge of the eternal fuzz out of our heads. We operate under a required interpretation of 'reality' that is actually an illusion. We pretend that the world is an arrangement of things with contexts. To approach existence in any other way would drive us crazy.

Are you with me? Do you understand what I'm saying? Do you agree? You kind of have to agree. You've no choice. It's the truth. It's reality, really.

The above image is an extract from a letter written by a German woman called Emma Hauck. Considered insane, Emma was committed to a mental institution where she lived out what remained of her life. Emma had lost the ability to see things on our macro range. All context had broken down for her. She was being swallowed by the subatomic hiss, the eternal fuzz of what reality really is. It must have been like sinking in quicksand and she was calling out to be rescued. She was calling out to the memory of the thing that gave her life meaning. That thing was love.

On proper examination, you can make out that Emma wrote the same two words over and over and over again; a simple phrase in her native language, 'herzensschatzi komm'. It means 'sweetheart come'. Emma's letter was to the father of her two children. Emma sat and wrote 'sweetheart come' over and over and over again. The words, the punctuation and the letters merge and end up looking like the static snow on an old television screen. Did you know that the snow on old televisions is leftover radiation from the Big Bang, the Big Bang that created all reality? It is. I'm not sure if that's relevant but I thought I'd mention it in case it is relevant. Very relevant. Anyway, Emma wrote a great many letters like the one pictured above. She sat and wrote them all day. All day, every day. None Of Emma's letters were ever sent.

Now, I want you to imagine that you're sitting and listening to static emitting from a receiver of some sort. I want you to imagine that you are listening out for the voices of those trapped in Limbo. Imagine you hear the words 'sweetheart come' repeated over and over, lost amongst the hiss. Imagine you hear this pleading from a ghost. A ghost trying to communicate to a memory, a memory of a meaning, a meaning called love.

'Sweetheart come, sweetheart come, sweetheart come, sweetheart come', over and over in the eternal fuzz. Oh my. My oh my. Tell me now about this reality. Has it broken your heart yet?

NEARLY FRIENDS

by Frank Shanley

He was going out for the night. Out to Dun Laoghaire. The place he thought was strange and far away when he was young. The place where the boats came in. He had lived there for a year and knew it quite well now. He was going to get drunk to bring some excitement to his life. 

It was a dark winter evening. The sharpness of the night and the sense of tension it should have created didn’t make an impact on him. He went down to get the bus, down a dimly lit laneway. The fence on one side and the bushes on the other were more or less ignored. The laneway led onto the road, the road that the bus came down. It came by him just then. He started to run for it, a long run down the road and then around the corner near the church. He caught it up as he was coming near the stop. He got on it with another person. Breathless, he was looking around at the things that really scared him, people. He stared at them a bit. He wasn’t aware why. His mother said it was fear. He believed everything his mother told him. When he got off the bus and changed to another one, he was still feeling deadened. The people on the bus and outside the window meant nothing to him. He was finally in Dun Laoghaire and now he went to the hostel where he lived until recently. 

Cathleen met him at the door. He remembered thinking of her as the Countess Cathleen. She brought him up the stairs and into the kitchen. There were a few people there – friends, nearly friends, anyway. Martin said hello. ‘Martin do you want to go out with me tonight’, he felt like saying but he didn’t have the courage. He waited a while and then started to talk to Martin. A few inappropriate comments and a few weak jokes later, he asked Martin to go out. It was cool Martin said so they went out.

They went first to a shop to buy cider. The two litre bottles, big brown bottles full of intoxicating liquid which tasted like poison, a few years earlier would have been very precious but now they didn’t mean that much. They went down a laneway to drink them. They really didn’t taste like poison. Drinking it wasn’t nice but the talk and repartee were and all he was thinking about was good. He wasn’t drunk but felt invigorated.

 

He and Martin were both schizophrenic. A dirty horrible thing both for the sufferers and non-sufferers. They were both suppressed, depressed, downtrodden human beings. Both in a chain gang of psychiatrists.

'DEAD BODIES and CARDBOARD'

All the poets decided to write poetry about the telly. They decided to write poems about the telly and keep them short. 'Keep the writing as short as fuckin possible lads,' decreed a leading laureate and a new movement in verse was born. The poets thought people might like their new stuff because it was a bit shit and empty and people love shit empty things.

Don't you though? You do. You do indeed you hopeless shower of...

.....aaannyway, the poets justified their efforts to no longer make an effort by citing Wolves by Louis MacNeice – where the poet chooses to no longer dwell on the ineffable and inevitable and instead joins the rest of humanity, hand in hand, in a circle of frivolity, protected against encroaching fear and infinite mystery.

Do you follow me? Are you still with me? I hope mentioning a poem didn't send you running back to TMZ, you cognitively subpar f...

...soooo, the poets wrote poems about what happened on TV and labelled them with hashtags and poetry became a big hit again. The poets were called the voices of their generation and they got on the covers of glossy magazines and were seen on the town with breast implantees and debonair industrialists. Dermot O'Leary wrote the introduction to a collection of their greatest works. It was called #Reality and here's the eponymous entry...

#Reality

LOL, did you see it?

It was on TV!

WTF happened, like.

I'm glad it wasn't me.

People loved the poems while they were reading them. Once they were finished reading them they forgot all about them. Instantly, in that wilfully anencephalic way that was de rigueur at the time. No memory whatsoever of ever having read ...'like whatever'. 

'Did I retweet that? I don't remember.'

Are you still reading? Good, stick with me now. I can't promise it'll be worth it but we'll get to the end soon enough.

Where was I? Oh yeah, after a while the cultural world became a kind of vapor that floated and faded over the graves of a generation that never testified to its times and left the future with no past to learn from. The only thing bequeathed to the future was footage of things once thought to have mattered but never did ...at all ...not even one tiny fucking bit.

To conclude...

...it was Bill Oddie's schizophrenic mother who said: 'television is all dead bodies and cardboard' and she was quite right. Schizophrenics find it hard to infer anything from the cadaverous pretence of the telly. All I see myself, when I turn the thing on, is false smiles, dead eyes and fake sets. All I see is dead bodies and cardboard.

#DeadBodiesAndCardboard

Dead Bodies and Cardboard

Tonight at 8pm

and straight after it,

once you're done tweeting about it,

you can switch channels

and watch Dead Bodies and Cardboard again.

Ok, we're done here. Return to your beloved telly.