Delusions of Reference

"Is it always like this?"

And from the other half of eternity she said, "Yeah, I think so."

"You always end up here, at least."

"It's different when it's just you, though. Or just me."

We both laughed. You and me. A provisional distinction, at best. Necessary enough at most times and in most places, but here? Now? We know better.

I said, "Maybe the patterns are the same. But they work themselves out differently when there's just one."

"But even if it's different it's still basically the same," she said.

She smiled, legs crossed on the sofa beside me. Laughing green eyes. Laughing eyes like Granny Smith apples, wavy brown hair she could never get as straight as she'd like, and round cheeks. Apple cheeks, you might call them.

I have green eyes. I have brown hair. Aren't we so similar. Even in the boring, everyday, obvious sort of way. Probably what brought us together at first. And don't I remember how we used to–

But that was in the past. It was now then, but it's not now now. Must always remember the flowing river of time, you'd like to hold on but things change and you've lost the moment as soon as you take it up.

An infinite loss. But doesn't every moment bring infinity back to us?

We sat on the couch but we really sat on clouds as angels. In her apartment on Limestone but really inhabiting the Waiting Room of Eternity. Separated into Her and Me, but really that's just a convenient piece of language we made up to cover over the fact that we were really the eternal self that peeks through every eye and feels with every flesh.

So clear now. It's not often so–

Bang! Bang! Bang!

"Pizza's here!" she shouted, perking up in her seat like an excited five year old.

Oh right. We ordered pizza in the past and now it's arrived. Remarkable. What a miracle of human ingenuity, overcoming time and space like that.

I headed to the front door, which I found no harder than usual even though I wasn't sure where I ended and the rest of the world began. The pizza delivery driver handed me a pair of warm cardboard boxes and with relatively little difficulty I signed the receipt and sent him on his way.

I set the pizza boxes on the coffee table and asked, "Did we really take acid?"

"I don't think you'd be asking that question if we didn't," she said.

Which made sense at the time. In hindsight, I can say the real reason I was asking was that we'd taken a pretty low dose. Enough to put you in a pretty odd state of mind and loosen up your grip on reality, not not enough to rocket you into orbit.

Which was probably for the best. Even in my everyday state of mind I didn't have the strongest grip on reality in those days.

Anyway, there was pizza, so we ate.

We got to talking about work–still at the University Phonathon, calling alumni to ask for donations to student scholarship funds.

Between bites of meat-lover's pizza, greasy with beef, sausage, and pepperoni, she said, "I was at the meeting with the other supervisors earlier this week, and Kaitlyn said–"

"I don't like Kaitlyn. She's so…"

"Bitchy?"

I shrugged. "Smug was more the word I was thinking. But you're not wrong."

"And entitled too. Her parents are loaded, I mean she's totaled two cars and they keep buying new ones for their sweet little angel."

"Seems a little uptight too," I said. "Her parents must put a lot of pressure on her."

She nodded. "Oh yeah, I remember back in the dorms in freshman year she would always go on about her scholarship she got for her ACT score. And how she had to take the test three times to get it and how her parents paid for her to get a tutor just to make sure she did well."

My stomach turned, and not only because the act of eating struck me in that moment as infinitely strange. (Look at me, crushing up bits of reality and incorporating them into myself!)

She kept speaking, oblivious of my discomfort. "You know Larry asked her to marry him last week?"

"Oh, I had no idea… it's not like it's literally the only thing she's been talking about at work ever since."

"Kind of a cute story, though, the two of them meeting at the Phonathon."

I made a face. "Larry's a good guy. Quiet, solid, reliable. They kind of compliment each other in that way. He reminds me a little of my Dad, come to think of it. And she reminds me of my Mom, always getting involved in things and–"

(This is where the acid thinking really took off…)

"Oh my God I need to stop them from getting married so I can make sure I'm never born!"

She laughed. "Oh Geof, you sound crazy when you say things like that…"

But the idea had revealed itself to me and went to work in the cobwebs of my mind. We spent the rest of the night watching TV, listening to music, and appreciating the pattern of hallucinations forming against the inside of our eyelids. I didn't bring up the importance of making sure Mom/Dad/Kaitlyn/Larry didn't get the chance to inflict life on another human being/myself again. But the sense of mission fell upon me and I knew I had to find a way.

Anyway, it wasn't just that little realization that convinced me God or some other power wanted me to take on this mission. I've always been sensitive to signs and patterns, finding meaning in little coincidences others might not notice. But due to a range of causes we won't go into here–drug use, lethargy, identity confusion, aimlessness, greater than usual experiences of shame, despair, and anxiety–I'd gotten to a point I can only describe as a mental breakdown or the foothills of schizophrenia.

(Probably if I'd gone to a therapist at this point I'd have been diagnosed with something and been on the grid to this day.)

It's difficult to convey the peculiar qualities my consciousness took on at that period–a period lasting about a year, and which I suspect I'll have to write and rewrite about until I manage to grasp it conceptually.

But that's a long term project. For now our only concern is explaining why some vague analogy between my parents and Kaitlyn/Larry produced in me the certainty that I had to prevent them getting married so I could keep myself from being born.

I've done a little reading about schizophrenia. Some of which seems as strange to me as it would to any healthy-minded person. Some of which I read with a shock of recognition and the emerging thought, there it is!

One such shock of recognition came when I read about the phenomenon of delusions of reference. One of the classic schizophrenic symptoms, the American Psychological Association defines a delusion of reference as "the false conviction that the actions of others and events occurring in the external world have some special meaning or significance (typically negative) in relation to oneself."

Like most psychological definitions, it's a little loaded, with a tendency to pathologize non-normal states of mind. One imagines a member of the APA telling Moses after his encounter with the burning bush, "Nobody wants you to go all the way to Egypt to free the slaves. It's just a delusion of reference. You just need to follow the path to self-actualization!"

(And anyway, adding phrases like "false conviction" and "typically negative" is just unnecessary. And hurtful. And rude.)

But for all that it's a decent definition. And at lower levels of intensity it's something we see people do all the time. Astrology takes part in some of this tendency. Girls who hang around music festivals and go on about the law of attraction. People who read one book by Jung and suddenly can't walk out the front door without shouting, "Synchronicity!"

But at more intense levels reality begins to feel like a layer of paper mache barely separating you from the overwhelming incursion of… something. You feel like there's some thing reaching into space and time to grab you, guide you, hijack you. Names like God, the devil, the self all come to mind. But those names don't cut it, they don't touch the absolute strangeness of it. The way it feels undeniable but when you think about it you just have a vague string of coincidences. The way you're so absolutely certain of the objective truth of something you're equally sure you're just making up.

What is it?

Can I use it?

Am I a god?

Am I going insane?

Should I start my own religion?

Did I take too much acid?

Examples. On my birthday that year, I happened across a stack of books with a sign that read Free to a Good Home. Going through the pile, I found a copy of Herman Melville's Billy Budd. And we won't go into it here, but the events of the rest of the day convinced me that some unearthly power had put that specific book in my hands as the lens to interpret my experiences.

Or at the Phonathon. One day I make a call to a woman and start reading off my script like normal. She says, "No, you're not listening to me. There's interference on the line, we can't hear each other right." And I tell you, my hands trembled and my voice shook. Because I felt an immediate certainty that I wasn't merely talking to a woman about interference on the line. No, this was an avatar of that thing telling me I wasn't paying close enough attention to the messages it sent me.

Or at my apartment. I'd been reading Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland that summer. Now, Vineland includes a scene where a major catastrophe in the protagonist Zoyd Wheeler's life comes about as a result of a large, monolith-shaped package being delivered to his door. Imagine then my shock when, about a week after finishing the book, I arrive at my apartment and find a large, monolith-shaped package waiting at the front door.

(I refused to open it for a week, so sure was I that it contained horrors beyond reckoning.)

(It turned out there was a set of bedsheets in there. Thanks, Mom.)

You'll call it paranoia. You'll call it mistaking my own thought processes for objectively existing patterns in the world. You'll call it a really bizarre inability to keep up the normal differentiation between self and other.

You'll say, "Geof, you really need to lay off the acid."

And you know what, fair enough. It was a weird time in my life. Weirder than usual, I mean.

(For now we'll just leave aside my obsession with preventing myself from being born.)

But one last delusion of reference. About a week before I realized I had a divine mission to keep two people I barely knew from getting married, I was as usual working at the Phonathon. It was summertime, it was the afternoon shift, nobody was there but me and Emily. Emily was all right–kinda vanilla, sorority girl, accounting major, liked to go on about how nerdy she was for liking Harry Potter.

Nobody was answering the phone, so the two of us got to talking about what we'd done over the weekend.

"–so we all headed over to Kaitlyn's place on Simpson Avenue after that, and–"

"Simpson Avenue?" I asked.

"Yeah… oh that's right, you live there, Kaitlyn's your neighbor. Yeah, she lives in 209 in the next building over from yours."

Which hadn't particularly set off any alarm bells in my mind at the time. But now that I knew God (or the devil) wanted me to keep Kaitlyn and Larry from making any potential babies, I knew what I had to do.

Anyway, after coming down off the acid (relatively speaking) I headed home and tried to sleep. Sometimes after an acid trip sleep comes quick and easily. Sometimes it's elusive and I'm not really sure I want to sleep because the whole idea strikes me as incredibly weird and creepy.

This was one of the latter cases. Plus my mind fixated on forming a plan.

A plan. A means of overcoming time to influence the course of the chaotic events of this world.

So after a couple restless hours in bed I headed to the William T Young Library, notebook in hand. On top of my T-shirt I wore a loosely-fitting shirt made out of a canvas material that was really a little warm for the season. But with half the buttons undone I felt it gave me a calculatedly neglectful, poetical look.

Never in my life had I felt so certain of the magical power of the poetic art. Anyway, I had a mission. And a plan.

Not a plan that made sense, granted, but I had something better than sense: inspiration.

So on that morning at the end of May, in the shadow of the William T Young Library, overlooking the bowl-shaped field of green with its little cherry trees in blossom, with my mind fixed on the overwhelming cosmic significance of preventing my own birth, I set to work on my plan. By writing poetry.