Despite God officially being declared dead, his funeral long past, its attendees too dead, and the marketplace partially swept of the drunken funereal debris (though a surprising number of priests and churches seem to be loitering, lurching, lying, among the living), we continue to act and think as if we were still his undeveloped children, unable to come into our own, perhaps even unable to know what “our own” is, dependent as we were for so long on that heavenly paternalism. Our strident belief in our freedom, despite little evidence of its practice, is one sign of our unacknowledged insecurity about our prolonged and perhaps eternal childhood.
One of the many areas in which we seemingly unwittingly perpetuate God’s continued dominance over us is psychology. Not surprisingly, psychology being theology’s golem, our dark freakish attempt to consciously create spiritual life. (Yet it hobbles, doesn’t it, this lump of desperate fumbling theories and methods, and may end up attacking its creators. Perhaps it already is.) One of the many areas in psychology in which we see God’s continued pervasive presence is that of disease—particularly in the taxonomies, hierarchies, enforcements, enculturations, linguistic solidities and artilleries, evolutionary and maturation norms, and dogmatisms with which we typically relate to what is typically called mental disease.
But if we wish to get beyond Our Father and create ourselves in our own image, might we not want to experiment a little? Might we rather think that diseases—particularly psychic ones—must become individual, transient, and capricious with individual names and descriptors? Might we not want to grow up?
I don’t have schizophrenia, bipolarity, or depression; tardive dyskinesia, kleptomania, dyspareunia, Münchausen syndrome, or DID; ADHD, adjustment or depersonalization disorder, bulimia, or onto- or etio- or epistemophobia. I have the disease of myself. And that’s it. That’s all I have. That’s all anyone has. My disease is inescapable (and so beloved), ineffable (and so numinous), and inarticulate (and so naturally potent). It is my responsibility—my primary responsibility in this schplot of a life—to search for the best possible way in the moment to precisely describe my illness … a description that is perpetually shifting. The ossified disease—collective, static, borrowed, imposed—is wholly passé; it is psychically analogous to witch-burnings and racial and sexual inequality. An ossified disease is tedious, clinical, and dead. A living disease is vibrant, creative, and flexible. Living disease is individual, free (in the sense that I may describe it in any way I choose), original, and thoroughly transient. Yet it is also as whole and constant as myself.
My job is to self-diagnose myself, write papers analyzing myself from as many perspectives and in as many forms as possible, and attempt to sustain myself vitally for as long as possible, primarily if not exclusively to prolong the amount of time I can study my diseases. Self-disease creation, analysis, and management are the future of the psyche and, if enacted, would be a prime indicator of our capacity to evolve. I am my disease and therapist. There are no diseases and therapists other than me, other than in the sense that everyone is a disease and therapist.
I never wake up with the same disease, other than the disease of myself. My diseases never have one name or one that lasts; sometimes a day’s disease is the sum of all the words used in that day … and the disease perhaps might be the words.
{Hey, you psychiatrist who’s never gone nuts, who sleeps with needle-sellers, who walks on the souls you claim to heal, who doesn’t believe in the soul … we’re all fucked up. And that’s our crown and lubrication.}
That this infers the acceptance—even celebration—of disease is obvious … but not in any way typically associated with these words. This is not some self-victimization, some whiny withdrawal, some geriatric capitulation … just the opposite: it’s humanity becoming itself: confronting itself: accepting imperfection as a necessary condition of perfection: assuming the necessary multiple roles toward our essential condition (participant, observer, therapist, artist, researcher, circus performer, machine …).
I long for disease, for new diseases, for new descriptors, new mutations, new remedies. You treat your diseases with pills and purchased pomposity and pedantic pity if you want. I treat mine with disease—a little vaccination (homeopathy, if you’re the placebo type) of the spirit. The best treatment for any disease is itself. A spiritual inoculation strategy.
Healing is hell. People frequently ascribe a teleology to it. They make it a substantive whereas it’s a participle. They assume too much: a disease’s goal is unknown, arbitrary, and tautological. They sanitize the process: healing is dark, destructive, ecstatic, and may cost you your life. If it doesn’t carry this risk, it’s coddled kindergarten healing. Adult healing has been to hell and loves it. It knows healing is just a path to another disease. Life is a disease-collection ritual, an afflicted ceremony, and those who collect the greatest number of interesting and novel diseases and survive the longest are closest to god. Diseases add more surfaces, more ways to articulate darkness, to play with life.
And if someone should say, None of this sounds like freedom! For freedom is surely escaping disease and fleeing freely, smilily, to the sunny meadows of health and healing! … I say to you, You understand nothing of freedom, says my god, for you pretend you have no god.
What then is my god’s relationship to my disease, my diseases, my diseased state, my ambivalence and love of disease, my endless talk of and research into it? Is it the cause, the effect, both, some other thing?
I don’t know what my god is. Maybe it’s my disease or my therapist, maybe that which allows both to co-exist in one body, this body, my body … home of my god and my love. My disease, which I do not call my disease, but my ease—my inspiration and my comfort. My disease, which I don’t try to heal but instead transform into a liquid I blow bubbles with. My disease is my god, my disease is myself, my disease is you.
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