When he did his yoga stretches, he’d extend a leg, and then wait for this – energy, he called it – to tell him how to move.
It felt right, and he began to feel that it should happen again. He felt – he struggled for words here – as if he were in a dark room and reached out, and his hand fit into a glove. He began to think of the thoughts that came to his mind as things that come and go, as if they weren’t part of him, even though he knew of course that they were.ĤOne day, he felt a slight shift upwards, as if steam were rising, a small seismic shift in the substance of the air. He could spend the entire day meditating, walking through the hills and canyons, attending to his breath. He got a job at an organic pizza place but mostly he meditated. He was just beginning to explore his own sexuality, but he never found a steady partner. At one point, he hitchhiked to San Diego and landed in Hillcrest, the center of gay politics in the city.
Then he went in turn to a mountain sanctuary in Tennessee, a Zen Buddhist retreat in Florida, and a Jewish Kabbalah Ayurveda place in Arizona. He became an intern at Bread and Puppet in Vermont to learn their blend of political theatre. He was a junior at an elite liberal arts school out west when he took a year off to explore how the world could be better. The signs vibrate with meaning, and then they demand.ģAlan was 21 when things began to go sideways. But for people with madness, the glory often soon comes with dread. People sense wild swans, floating angels, shimmering sparks of light in the air. I reflect on the strangeness of these experiences, and then point to the features of voice-hearing which I take to be of central importance: not-me-ness, a different realness, and presence.ĢWhen it begins, madness can feel like grace, or art. I offer here a case study of psychotic voices in which neither words nor voice proper figures prominently. 1The phenomenology of psychosis is notoriously difficult to grasp.
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