Southerly winds and rain pelted Wellington for six months of the year. Winters were gargantuan and mythic. Some years guide-ropes were installed downtown so that the city’s lighter residents would not be swept away: thin people in oilskin parkas floating over cars on Taranaki Street, drifting like balloons from the city to the harbor, clear across the Cook Strait to the South Island above the Picton Perry. Every year or so an article by a distinguished cultural celebrity (a writer or a broadcaster who’d travelled “overseas”) would appear in the New Zealand Listener likening Wellington to London or Manhattan. The entire city was delusional.
Sometimes after the floods a fine sparkling day would crack out of nowhere like the 8th Day of Creation, and these were days Ruffo would emerge in his overcoat from his bed-sit on Ohaka Terrace like an animal from its lair. I always felt better after running into him. Unlike most people in this self-consciously provincial burg, Ruffo was intelligent and curious. When he looked, he really saw you. His was a civilizing presence, transforming Wellington into Joyce’s Dublin.
If Ruffo trusted you, he’d invite you to his room, a bedsit carved out downstairs of a woodframe house that the landlord must’ve abandoned years ago to Social Welfare. You reach it walking down a brambly rutted concrete path. In fact Ruffo was a gifted artist. Hardly anyone in New Zealand at that time painted without institutional sanction, three years of art school, then a gallery, but Ruffo did: he painted silkscreens, stagesets, cartoon-posters for his friends with theater groups and bands.
Back in Wellington years later, I learned that Ruffo had been blessed eight years ago with the lobotomy and he was still in town. In fact, he had a show up at the Willis Street Community Center Gallery. I used the money that I’d made from talking at the university about the semi-names I’d worked with in New York to buy my favorite. In it, an ’80s-style Babbitt in a nice gray suit grins into a receiver at the red phonebox on the corner of Aro Street and Ohaka Terrace. The mouthpiece is a human ear. The street is a cacophony of traffic but there’s still a faint mangle of bush peeping out through all the blobby colored cars. Yellow clouds stretch out across a blue-pink mackerel sky. In Ruffo’s postmodern Wellington, One Dimensional Man still meets Katherine Mansfield.
The privilege of visiting Ruffo was always mixed, a little bit, with sadness. His basement room was dark and strewn with garbage. Digging through newspapers and dirty clothes to make a pot of tea, Ruffo never put an optimistic cast on things. He was a schizophrenic realist. He never had false hopes about an art career. If he was feeling really bad he’d disappear, not be at home, but he was never mean. Visits proceeded according to his rules, along a Continental model. He didn’t talk about himself, he didn’t pry into your life or problems. Visiting him was like travelling in another country. I didn’t mind this ’cause I wanted him to teach me how to be. I loved him. I was 16 and a foreigner.
3. According to David Rosenhan, schizophrenia is a self-fulfilling diagnosis. In his experiment, eight sane people gained admission to psychiatric hospitals by claiming to hear voices. Though from that point on they acted “normally,” the staff used everything they said and did as proof of the original “psychosis.”
4. Since schizophrenics are at home in multiple realities, contradictions don’t apply to them. Like cubist chemists, they break things down and rearrange the elements.
5. I like the phrase “paleologic” because it sounds Egyptian. At the end of AC/DC, a play by Heathcote Williams, the character Perowne performs an operation known as self-trepanning. Perowne, a vagrant mathematician, just gets bored by all the sex & mindfuck antics of his druggie friends. Because he doesn’t pine for “human warmth” he doesn’t dabble in psychology. Perowne’s more interested in the flow of systems. Trepanning, as pioneered in London by Bart Hughes and Amanda Fielding, entails the drilling of a hole inside the skull. Bleeding from the wound expands the capillaries around the trepan-subject’s pituitary gland. The Third Eye opens. I don’t know how they figure out the spot or the exact depth of the incision, but Amanda Fielding made a movie where she does it to herself in a kitchen. And in the play, when finally Perowne trepans himself, his speech explodes. He rants, he sings in hieroglyphics.
6. Félix Guattari, co-author with Gilles Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus —Capitalism and Schizophrenia, objected to Arieti’s use of the word “paleologic” in describing schizophrenia. “Paleologic,” Félix said once, “implies returning to a vague primeval state. But on the contrary—schizophrenia is highly organized.” Félix of course was expanding on his analogy between capitalism and schizophrenia. Both are complex systems based on paradox in which disconnected parts operate according to hidden laws. Both rationalize fragmentation. Capitalism’s ethics are completely schizophrenic; i.e., they’re contradictory and duplicitous. Buy Cheap, Sell Dear. Psychiatry tries its hardest to conceal this, tracing all disturbances back to the Holy Triangle of Mommy-Daddy-Me. “The unconscious needs to be created,” Félix wrote in Mary Barnes’ Trip. A brilliant model.
Still, Perowne’s gentleness reminded me of Ruffo’s.
7. Schizophrenia consists of placing the word “therefore” between two non-sequiturs. Driving up to Bishop last week I had two beliefs: I wouldn’t get a speeding ticket; I will die within the next five years. I didn’t get a speeding ticket, therefore—
(When your head’s exploding with ideas you have to find a reason. Therefore, scholarship and research are forms of schizophrenia. If reality’s unbearable and you don’t want to give up you have to understand the patterns. “Schizophrenia,” Géza Róheim wrote, “is the magical psychosis.” A search for proof. An orgy of coincidences.)
Two hours ago I took a break from writing this to take a walk before the sun went down. I had an urge to play Willie Nelson’s “Crazy” on the Red Hot Country CD before going out, but didn’t. When I turned the bend on 49th Terrace, my usual walk, Crazy sung by Patsy Cline was pouring, I mean POURING, out the windows of a house. I leaned back against a fence across the street and watched the house lift off. An operatic, cinematic moment, everything locked into a single frame that gets you high. Oh Dick, I want to be an intellectual like you.
8. Do you remember that night in February at your house while you were making dinner, I told you how I’d become a vegetarian? I was at a dinner at Félix’s loft with Sylvère. The Berlin Wall had just come down. He, Félix and Tony Negri and François, a younger follower of Félix’s in French broadcasting, were planning a TV panel show about the “future of the left.” Sylvère would moderate a live discussion between Félix and Tony and the German playwright Heiner Müller. They needed one more speaker. It seemed strange that people would be interested in any conversation between such a homogenous crew: four straight white European men in their 50s, all divorced and now with childless younger women in their early 30s. Sometimes coincidence is just depressingly inevitable. No matter what these four men say, it’s like they’ve already said it. In Félix’s book Chaosophy there’s a great discussion on schizophrenia between him, Deleuze, and eight of France’s leading intellectuals. All of them are men. If we want reality to change then why not change it? Oh Dick, deep down I feel that you’re utopian too.
“What about Christa Woolf?” I asked. (At that moment she was founding a neo-socialist party in Germany.) And all Félix’s guests—the culturally important jowelly men, their Parisianally-groomed, mute younger wives just sat and stared. Finally the communist philosopher Negri graciously replied, “Christa Wolf is not an intellectual.” I suddenly became aware of dinner: a bleeding roast, prepared that afternoon by the bonne femme, floating at the center of the table.