I must be totally wrong about my previous supposition or theoretical ideas, but at one time I drew the conclusion that there was a certain open window into knowledge that came from those who had at least some schizoid attributes. The reasons for this have nothing to do with the kind of sensitivity that is presumed to exist in schizoids, that would have them crawling into their shell, in a kind of self-effacing inward movement. Rather, it was in the idea that they had stilled their soul in a manner that would prevent excessive emotional noise from coming between them and their perceptions of the world.

My PhD thesis — despite being in the realm of literature — was really concerned with this totally different idea than analyzing literature, and was more in terms of what I have described above.

To understand the schizoid (for want of any better word) mind, I went very deeply into a work of literature that deeply puzzled me. Perhaps the writer was the schizoid here, or perhaps it was me?

The novel I looked into was pretty much an expression of extreme violence, not just psychological violence, but political and social violence, and even viscerally described sensations, from beginning to end.

It was hard to read the book —Black Sunlight — because of the difficulty of keeping one’s mind open to it from beginning to end, and this was because there was really no emotional relief from the denotations of violence, which was multi-layered in meaning and in terms of crowding into the same time sequence. I had to read the book many, many times, as much as twenty Then finally I took in the sense of violence from beginning to end. It was as if my mind finally made room enough to receive it.

After that, I felt a tremendous sense of release from would impose any sort of restriction on us through threatening violence. It was weird. The book was set in Zimbabwe. And it is worth noting that I had previously been instructed by all sorts of well-meaning associates that my homeland was no longer a place I would be able to return to, given my skin color being white. But after reading the book, I understood that this psychological embargo was just a threat of violence that had no real, tangible meaning. In fact was free to go (and go, I did) It was perfectly safe for me to return home.

It was all very strange, that mental break through, and I became very, very interested in understanding the meaning of violence after that, though, I think I went too far finally, with all my investigation. I was trying to understand how much imagination of violence I could take into my mind, in order to see more deeply into things. But I think I went too far.

First let us talk about “why” there is a current popular emphasis on “narcissism”.

A lot of it is that people have not the basic means to conceptualize the stresses that come about through modern living. Also there is a tacit prohibition against speaking about a great deal of differences that we experience — in particular cultural and social differences between ourselves and others. Unexpected encounters with those who have extremely different values from our own produces stress. The fact that there is no socially condoned or acceptable means of talking about this leads to paranoia and desperation.

As a consequence of both this confusion and this prohibition, popular culture resorts to speaking of things in narrow, psychological terms. The stress that we experience is reduced to the concept of “narcissism”, which is generally applied to other people, not ourselves.

So now we are facing a certain apparition, a certain mode of naming and identifying, that is an attempt to come to terms with an acute social stress. A large part of it is the alienation from emotion and from our own experiences, that is imposed by the market place, because of its emphasis on performance and efficiency above any human values. Clinical psychology cannot come to terms with this, because all it sees are “individuals”.

Sorry—can’t offer much more.

Perhaps we should stop looking for “signs” including “red flags” or special messages written in the stars. This is indeed a quintessential form of contemporary primitivism. To an acute observer, life does not give “signs”, but rather an overall pattern, a sense of things, written against the backdrop of other complex or meaningful things. Like a fabric, like is woven with complexity, and does not bestow on us mysterious signs or figures, as if dropped from above.

Those who look for “signs” are almost always dense.