Killing Time: from a writer's journal: commentary on the human condition`

By Winston Delano Cabrall

Killing Time is a collection of largely humorous critical commentary and discussion on everything from politics to insanity and religion. The segments, taken from the author's daily journal covering the period late 2012 to early 2014, were intended to 'kill some time' while resting from the demands of comple

• Language: English
• Publisher: Winston D. Cabrall
• Release date: Oct 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9780994472007

Winston Delano Cabrall

Attended the Whitney Institute and Mount Saint Agnes Academy, Bermuda. Emigrated to Australia as a young man, worked in the building trades, raised a family, and continued the study of classical, contemporary, traditional and archaic/esoteric psychology, philosophy, sociology, and neurology. Essentially self-taught, but earned two or three units of philosophy at the University of New England (Australia) at age 52, and unable to afford continuing. Life-long, passionate, and compulsive journal-writer.

Book preview

Killing time

It’s Monday morning, 6 August 2012, and here I am, just like you, marking the moment, hour, day, month, year, decade, century, epoch, era and millennium, pretending that I factually know that the time is ten past midnight. It sounds ridiculous really, announcing the date as declared by some uppity first-ever summer bloom of algae on earth. ‘Ten minutes past midnight,’ you say? Don’t make me laugh, you poisonous miscreants of a just paradise— it’s later than you think!

At the sound of the bell the time will be...Dooms-day (if not the deadline for paying your outrageous, lying, electricity bill). ‘Due’ date is at us on every front, on every bank-statement, bill, birthday, wrist, tower, wall, radio, TV, telephone, body-clock and ‘religious’ prophesy. Clock-on and clock-off mother-earth-fuckers, you’ve been running scared ever since the Beatniks began predicting the end of heaven and earth in the 1950’s. Ask yourselves, how well have we spent our time since becoming undeniable fuehrer over every square foot of earth, animal, bird, insect, microbe and virus on Earth?

At the time when the Pacific Garbage Patch was only as big as the continent of...We will commence operations at exactly thirteen hundred and...In the year 1939 the Founder of Psychoanalysis Dr Sigmund Freud...Do you remember the time when we had all-the-time-in-the-world to...In 1893 the first electric car was...In 1888 Vincent Van Gogh picked up a straight-razor and...In the year 1884 Greenwich Mean Time was accepted as...In the year 1880 Ned Kelly was sentenced to...The very first time that you thought that you were going totally insane was when...There are twenty-four hours in every...The time and the tide wait for no...I’ll be back when its springtime in the...Do you remember the time that you decided to...Isn’t it high time that you thought about all the...In 1644 the first UFO was sighted by...The American pilgrims have been seeing things aloft from about the time they first acquired a land mass from which the stars were clearly...You’re never on fucking time...When I find the time to...Time and time again I’ve asked you to consider that...Six thousand years before the birth of...During the Neolithic period the animal life was...In time the amoeba in the shallower areas of the waters began to...At the time when the earth was still in the throes of its...How much time do you need to wrap your brain around the fact that...I’ll give you up to the count of three...If you try counting to ten...If you make time every morning you’ll find that...According to the secret teachings of the Waikas Indians of the Orinoco head-waters in Amazonian Brazil you can kill time by snuffing the powdered leaves of... You know, there was a time when time had not been reinvented—Any way that we look at it though, that time is never very far away.

***

Ring...ring...

Centre of the Universe, Winston speaking.

Why should I be convinced of that?

Hello, darling girl. You would have received my affidavit yesterday and are phoning to confirm that I am me and not just somebody’s brain-in-a-vat, yes?

No, I meant your ‘centre of the universe’ assertion.

True?

Well, what else would I be referring to?

"I thought that you might not be convinced that I hadn’t sold out to their lawyers. You know I couldn’t have given more in the affidavit. I mean I wished that I could have said that she discussed making the will with me."

No, that’s all good...

It really annoys me that once one is declared ‘mentally ill’ not a single normal, rational wish, thought or action is considered useful and relevant.

Are you on a new case?

Yeah, mine...

"What, you cracking up?"

"After failing to persuade the Coroner to inquire into her medical treatment in the lead-up to her suicide, I put my energy into finishing The Insanity Myth."

You filled out the appropriate paperwork—for the Coroner?

Yes—all that.

"Dare you publish anything about her treatment?"

"It gets a bare mention among other cases, all under false names; the book’s more about mental illnesses than personal stories."

I wish you luck.

Thanks—and you?

Pussy’s not well. I’ve been home all day...

"What’s happened there?"

Her bell jammed, I think she ate a lizard. But she’ll be alright.

Oh, thank God. For a moment I thought I’d better fly down there tonight!

***

Well, that snatched an hour and a half from my novel-writing time. Leanne is still caught up in her attempt to see justice done to Dahlia’s last request; that now seems to be as much a threat to her oppressors as she had been when alive. It doesn’t bother me as such, this struggle Leanne is caught up in. It’s just the winding-up of another stereotypical evil plot that had grown out of seemingly perfectly ordinary events. A wealthy girl, in this instance, is driven to suicide and leaves her property to an un-wealthy girl-friend of many years—but the Will is contested by the dead girl’s uncle and guardian, the most evil psychiatrist on earth.

Leanne told me that her lawyers want fifty grand to read Dahlia’s medical history that, I gathered, they already believe represents an Everest of evidence that she was incapable of rational thought of any kind at the time of her making the Will! While I knew it would be easy to cross-examine that argument from her psychiatric tormentors, Leanne’s fancy lawyers, Mac-Murdor and Scythe, all had relatives (rumour has it) they were keeping in ‘nut-houses’ somewhere. Apparently they had no great interest in the humane aspects of the matter— and I guess the fifty grand mentioned as costs was like shock-treatment to get her to give up her claim on Dahlia’s property, i.e., there would be no money in it for them.

Mentally, a big part of me was still back there, sickened by what Dahlia had suffered:

She had tried to shake off the feeling that they would be coming that day. Like Christ, she had sought a period of reflection, alone in her garden courtyard. There, stripped of all personal protection, she knelt beside the Jasmine flowers in the still dark hours of the morning. Almost silently, she whispered, lest an informer were to hear her words as heresy, ‘Oh, holy Mother,’ she said as the light of a falling moon touched her lips, ‘am I not yours and yours alone, stripped and submitted as I am, that no mortal pike could possibly pass through your protection?’

Was it perhaps that the moon had passed too quickly, that she had started too late with her prayer? We do know that she was still at prayer when they came upon her, on her knees, exposed by the early rays of sunlight.

‘Dahlia?’ they called ahead as their feet rumbled out of the kitchen’s back door to confront her, ‘Are you alright?’ The words hit her as if obscene, like the taunt of a demented killer as his knife-hilt slams against your chest. At this she sat bolt upright. ‘I don’t know why you have come here,’ she challenged, ‘I’ve just sent a new letter of appeal to Mr Nutmascher, the Minister for Health, and others....I’d like you to wait for his response.’ ‘I’m sorry Dahlia, but Dr Eastmann has not informed us of any change to your medication.’

‘Will you just go away please...you are on private property...this is my garden...’ She slumped again, in dreaded anticipation.

‘Now, Dahlia...’ they insisted, while kneeling on either side to hold her frail shoulders from moving away. The psych-nurse prepared the syringe, carefully, considerately, so as not to get it wrong.

Taming a pussycat

The electricity went off around two p.m., so I went into the studio and crashed face-down for an hour. When I woke up the power was on again. I went up to the house to make a cup of tea.

As I approached the kitchen I saw water pouring out from under the bathroom door. I could hear the sink tap running and knew in a flash what this was all about. It was a simple case of sink-plug in and the tap left open when no water came out during the power-outage.

Mmm, I thought, this is the work of a miacat—I’d glimpsed her down near the pump-house on my way in. She was repacking her caravan with the ten-thousand things and would not have heard the pump running continuously when the electricity came on again— because she had Phillip’s repeat of Late Night Live blaring from the truck’s radio! At this, I mused, there no harm done, the bathroom will dry out—but what if she’s at the kitchen sink for some reason and the power goes off again? I had a flash vision of my Fender amplifiers floating around in the living-room where the water would run. Now, I thought, this calls for the right plan of action, and immediately I began making two delicious mugs of tea.

Halloo, I called ahead cheerfully at about the ten-metre mark, "a nice mug of tea. I chuckled, giving her salivary glands plenty of time to anticipate the reward. My darling," she purred appreciatively, as if a tender tweety-bird had come tantalizingly within range.

Your cup, I giggled, as I held out her favourite mug.

Yummy! she exclaimed, slipping between both cups of tea and rubbing her fur on my thigh. She licked my neck. I stepped back, spilling a little of the tea.

Now-now, my dear, I admonished softly, as she pounced from side-to-side on the ground around me.

"And where have you been?" she suddenly demanded, following me upright as I walked over to the caravan to put our cups down.

Well, now... I began in a tone of voice as promising as that of a greatest-ever orator of historical fame, when the electricity went off I had to retire to the studio to have a short nap.

"A nap!?" she retorted, raking me with her sea-blue eyes.

"No, no really, I had to soak my dermatitis-infected finger...then..." I rotated as she began to pounce around me again, her blond pony-tail flicking like cat-and-mouse.

Ha! she exclaimed teasingly, "just like a man—when things get difficult they just wimp out! That’s a lovely cup of tea," she purred, as we sat on her biggest box under the mango tree.

I suppose, I began, you thought I was up in the house having an hour-long shower?

Oh, she replied, why should I think that? Ah...nothing, I chortled, unless you’d heard the pump going continually.

No, I never heard it, she replied sincerely.

Yeah, it’s a good thing that I woke up when I did. Another half hour and we would have had to swim back from here.

Winnie? she asked in her sweetest tone of voice. If I get up there on the caravan roof will you pass up those tent poles and the other stuff from that long box?

Sure, I replied, as she sprang to the roof of the caravan in three deft leaps.

***

Mia left on the following Monday after getting me acquainted with the laptop. We never said goodbye, as such. We had talked enthusiastically about our next self-selected assignments; I to produce a new draft of The Insanity Myth, while she made a beeline for Canberra, intending to paint the town every colour she had in her paint-box that might describe it as the socio-political face of the nation. I gathered she’d had enough of Cook Town’s outdated developmental policy—under a ‘despotic regime’ that seemingly could not consider all its citizens a resource, rather than a threat to their ‘jobs’. Not to mention the Queensland State government that was about to drift further to the right than Anna had—i.e., backwards.

Alone again, I threw myself into The Insanity Myth, finishing the new draft in six weeks. By then I was thoroughly addicted to the laptop’s writing programme, and I wrote on...

Watering poppies

Well, here I am again, late at night and alive. I’ve come to rest on a root-note, so-to-speak. And since all the year-end recipients of my written correspondence have my balls in their courts—Well, strike me pink, greenish, left, literal, sharp, worldly and a battler for humanism—I opened my folder and there it was: I’ve only got Phillip Adams to write to this week.

Why Phillip? Simply put, I was ‘reaching out.’ As I said to Leanne, (a) having failed to save Dahlia from the ‘mental health’ authorities, and (b) having failed to secure a Coronial Inquest into her treatment by psychiatrists (that had clearly led to her suicide), I wanted to mitigate those failures by finishing The Insanity Myth—the culmination of many years of study and advocating for victims of social injustice, including those unfortunate enough to get caught up in the ‘mental health system’. Knowing I’d need a well-known and respected ‘humanitarian’ and writer to trash if not introduce the book to a publisher, Phillip was my first choice (i.e., I have no ‘credentials’ with which to attract a publisher to that kind of work). Below, I draw from that letter, marking time, telling the story, as I go from one contingency to the next looking for a reader (peer reviewer), if not a publisher for The Insanity Myth.

About six months ago I was given this laptop to write with. In a sense, I feared getting a new word-processor; I had burned out two or three computers, and a few of my nine lives, writing The Insanity Myth, that I then filed for five years. It wasn’t just that I had all but ‘hit the wall’ trying to complete the project, but I needed to write therapeutically and read further into neurology and medicine at my leisure, planning to return to the project when I got a new machine. As it turned out, three of those years I spent appealing on behalf of three victims of the ‘mental health system’, during which I used computers belonging to friends. I had to finish the book after that because I knew that all those letters of appeal I’d written were destined to end up as mulch on some politician’s promising ‘Rose Garden’.

It has taken over six months to review, expand and improve The Insanity Myth and proof-read it ten times. I am satisfied, but not resistant to advice and have been told that I should look for some peer review.

What exactly is The Insanity Myth? It is eighteen independent but related segments about ‘psychosomatic’ affects and other altered states of consciousness of the benign sort; my categorization of everything from schizophrenia to samadhi, science-based and uniquely expressed. My sources on the psych side are Jung, Maslow, indirectly Freud, Janov and others, but these are drawn from minimally (except that from Jung’s Commentary on Chinese Buddhism in Richard Wilhelm’s Secret of the Golden Flower), to esoteric and ‘primitive’, mystical or religious rituals of the ‘mushroom’-eating Indians of the Mexican deserts; and some interesting clinical trial reports on the LSD experiments held at the American Sandoz laboratories in the 1960s.

On the science side (also used to support my views) I have drawn from Nathan, Damasio, Lance, Sacks, Upfal’s The Australian Drug Guide, and many others, again minimally (except for neurologist Peter Nathan whom I lean upon considerably).

The style is no dry academic work. The attitude could be described variously as (a) the ‘argument’ between science and the esoteric and esoteric social sciences (e.g., psychoanalysis); (b) contentious, but not neuro-tically angry, e.g., a ‘lance’ into psychiatry, yes (a reply from psychiatry? no, they, that ‘culture’, would be happy that they did not have to respond to me); (c) a ‘real-life’ book of human-interest, colourful anecdotes, occasional dialogue, case investigations, psychotherapy—and it cuts through the arcane and qualifies the ‘body/mind split’. In my opinion, it is concise and not too-heavy a read; it would provoke humour as well as denial, and be informative for many about the psyche.

Why ask Phillip to review it? Because: he’d be able to judge it as a literary work and, at worst, as credible science and psychology. He might want to pen a line saying that he found the book of interest (decades of Late Night Live and a couple of his books indicate that he might review/read for me). Personally, I know perhaps six people who would want to read that subject and give feedback on it—I am working my way through them.

With The Insanity Myth on hold, I continued to kill time in my journal, taking events as they came. As an avid student of insanity I find nothing is more representative of madness than politics.

Newman comes to power

The decline of the Queensland Labour Party in our recent (2012) State election had been significant by numbers, hugely so. I watched the early results on ABC television, and though the panel’s jousting at political know-it-all was entertaining, I left them to it when the numbers reached about 60 to 20 in favour of the LNP. I’d had a good chuckle at Bob Katter, who all but physically attacked both Lawrence Springborg and Laurie Oaks, as his dream of a One Nation repeat-of-sorts woke to the reality of facing defeat. But I felt sorry for him—because I don’t like to see an honest man lose and lose as badly as he had. I didn’t want to see more of his comical anger because I knew it was covering bitter disappointment.

I fled to my office desk and worked-over the Preface in The Insanity Myth. Interestingly, this final edit-come-proof-reading of it has benefitted greatly from the very thought that Phillip might consent to review it. It is one thing to work alone in the comfort of one’s thoughts, and another thing to work with a virtual hallucination of ‘Phillip Adams’ looming over one’s punctuations, so-to-speak.

Yes, the Queensland election outcome was a predictable result. I’d had a wonderful time at the local voting station at the State School. As usual I began with a stop-and-chat at each Party’s attended brochures stand, coming in with a big, genuine smile and handshakes all round, while declaring that I never take ‘how-to-vote-cards’ at polling-stations. We then had a nice chat, How’s the campaign going boys and girls, etc. and I wished them all well.

Down among the crowd forming a line to the polling booths, I bought a P&C raffle ticket, a sausage-sanger, flirted with some ladies and openly asked friends and acquaintances in the outgoing stream how they’d voted. I mean, I fixed them eye-to-eye and suddenly ‘popped’ this almost sacred no-no question, as if entirely naive of the protocol that guards the secret ballot! Personally, I answer that question from anyone without a moment’s hesitation; but I lie, selectively.

I am equally glad that the LNP got a ‘huge mandate’, because there can be no excuse when they, too, fail to better govern from the ‘right’ side of the fence, e.g., ‘high prices and red-tape’ will remain high and worsen for the ‘ordinary citizen’. Besides, under Campbell Newman we’ve got the makings for the liveliest political cartooning since the Peterson days.

Really, we were sick of Anna’s Botox and plucked eyebrows, and we were worn to the bare bones-of-aghast at the leadership bickering on the floor of the ‘House’. Of course, I voted Green, but only because there was not a darker-green party in the running. The truth is, I was hoping for an extremely frustrated fractional result, the sort of interlocked, win-win, no-win, name-calling, bill-blocking kind of governance that would lead to actual fisticuffs on the floor of the Parliament—something so entertaining and disgraceful that the whole of the voting public might wake up (political parties enjoy kicking us voters back and forth, like a football).

Chances are that by the end of one term Premier Newman will have become an unintentionally comical stereotype of the hot-dog-go-getter, foot-in-mouth, cheap shyster, cut-me in for a share boys, egg-sucking, lying weasel that is written all over his face (just joking). But seriously, the Australian psyche is so culturally unsettled over a multitude of issues that the bygone bogey-man of ‘Reds under our beds’ is like a tiny bit of insanity compared to the paranoid ‘schizophrenia’ of today.

Fear is everywhere now. Fear of more rules and regulations, of hormones in meat, mobile phone tumours, global warming, GM corn, porn, fluoride, cyanide, drinking water, nano-particles, death, interest rates, computer-hackers, pesticides, cancer, boat people, Fukushima, the Sun, the ozone hole, germs, sick fish in Gladstone, terrorists, tanning machines, paedophiles, drugs, medicines, supplements, night-club bouncers, purse-snatchers, rapists, floods, fires, bearded men, Facebook bullies, World Heritage, foreign dictatorships, the World Health Organisation, rising prices, mental illness, memory loss, SIDS, the ALP, LNP, KAP, PUP, ABC, 2UE, BBC, NBC, DPA, NBN, EPA, ADHD, ADD, OCD, IED’s, STD’s, depression, childbirth, hoons, muggers, TV towers, guns, wind generators, financial planners, smoking, the end of oil, coal dust, Tony Abbott, ‘Julia’s lies’, insurance companies, the banks, the police, the neighbours from hell, the ‘budget black hole,’ greenies, Kevin Rudd, the Chinese, Mitt Romney, fruit-bats, mosquitoes, starfish, crocodiles, cyclones, sharks, falling space junk, wayward asteroids, Alien space travellers, the Dalai Lama, Blacks in White House, hospital germs, vaccines, priests, Indonesia, teachers, students, computer games, drones, North Korea, Vladimir Putin, Somali pirates, earthquakes suicide, mass-killers, and much-much more.

Hmm, what an awesome growth of insanity since I received that first shock realization that my island paradise was being stolen from under my feet! I have managed to survive that great leap of progress, though it has marked me, shaped me, broken my idealism, caused scepticism, and forced the growth of knowledge to understand it, to find comedy in it, and to laugh at myself.

Even though my time has been up to the choking-point, as the Diaspora clambers back over itself everywhere, I can but only have compassion for my children and grandchildren, for the next generation that will be taking on that extraordinary leap in time, as the time-driven factory leaps onward, exponentially.

Stressing the nervous system

It has rained, drizzled mostly, all night and now all morning. It’s a welcome relief from the recent pall of humidity here that had been early and so remarkable to everyone. But we are fortunate, though few realize it, that Cook Town is geographically positioned to have the best weather in the whole of Australia—from Indian Head, across the wide mouth of the Endeavour River, to about the Daintree River just north of Mossman proper. We have no great fear of fires, floods or cyclones; the latter either cross above us and often into the Gulf of Carpentaria, or angle past us and grind into the coast anywhere from Cairns to Mackay (much further south). Here, the occasional direct monsoonal drenching in summer is not a problem—we don’t have lots of low, lying, ‘housing developments’—yet.

After a week of steady light rain I awoke this morning convinced that it will ease for a few days. We need that now, lest the dampness, the mould, overtake us entirely, like some prototypic carpet of green algae that I imagine begot the organic chain of begetting all the way to this pencil sticking out of my tired hand this morning.

Again, I couldn’t get out of The Insanity Myth till one a.m. but for a most satisfying proof-n-edit of the final Segment. I will review that work today some time, just to make sure that I haven’t missed a further opportunity in comparing Nathan’s and Maslow’s wind-up chapters in their books in summing up in my own.

I find it humorous that my Nervous System and Psychology of Being don’t feel all that great this morning; that my Descartes-ean proof of existence had again pushed its vital nervous system well beyond the midnight hour. Indeed, at one point I glared back at my arrogant desk clock when noticing the son-of-a-bitch had jumped from nine p.m. to a quarter to twelve in five minutes! For a few seconds I felt...well, a mild attack of conscience, guilt, or ‘caught-out’—that I had again let the ‘pool of instinctual and emotive urges’ drive the neocortex to push the ‘pool of instinctual and emotive urges’ toward exhaustion, stroke, if not heart attack! Then it hit me that my stupid little desk clock knows fuck-all; that it cannot tell me the correct time because it is a ridiculous man-made device of convenience, a wicked master of schedule, dictating everything from when to feed the baby to when to go to sleep! I turned the clock, like a cheeky student, face to the cornered walls.

Over the next 48 hours I returned to review Segment 10 of The Insanity Myth (the thesis on migraine), stopping only to get a few letters off to my remaining siblings between bouts of Sacks on Sacks and everybody from Abercrombie to Wolff in his book, Migraine, Revised and Expanded. Thankfully, I know something about language terms because Sacks carries on with that pompous over-worded, old-fashioned professional neural-jargon of yesteryear—though occasionally the waffle is the most amusing autocratic filler. (The book is, though, a wonderfully informative and thorough history of the symptom migraine, and briefly the neuron-arterial parts involved ‘as understood today’.)

However, at one point—probably when Sacks had come to read what he had written late the previous night, while fighting to keep cake-crumbs out of his laptop, I imagine—he was seemingly seized by writer’s dilemma. In this case, to either delete what, I say, was an unnecessary attack on psychology, or write on in an attempt to stand by it. He chose the latter; but then, almost apologetically qualifies himself (by inference), claiming to have made the remark on behalf of The School of Neurology, that sets its principles higher than Freud. How strong is that? Well, it is ridiculous because he does not avoid the double standard that he has caught himself in (I will quote the piece ahead).

But why does Sacks bother to attack Freud (and most neuroscientists do)? Because, (a) he, as is common amongst ‘neurologists’ apparently, is attacking his understanding of Freud, that is to say, any esoteric or esoteric social sciences explanation of human behaviours. I say that he would oppose any ‘psychoanalyst’ who may claim, for example, to have ‘cured’ a patient of migraine unless they can offer ‘scientific proof’. (In my view, there can only be psychological and psychophysical evidence as to the cause and cure of an individual’s migraine; that is, it is constipation of the emotions and/or instincts), (b) Freud made the word nervous a household term along with a lot of other terms for psychosomatic affects. Orthodox neurologists felt upstaged, i.e., that Freud’s psycho-logical causes of ‘nervous’ disorders, ‘split personalities’ or somnambulant states were ‘all-the-rage’, in books and films, when in fact, Sacks indicates the basis of these sorts of symptoms is a patient’s mysteriously sensitive or faulty nervous system malfunctioning when under stress.

Today, some sixty years past the advent of psychoanalysis, neurologists such as Sacks are still compelled to diminish if not attack Freud; as if he were the devil in their religion!

Voodoo Freud:

‘Mrs James...Mrs James…are you there?’

‘Yes, yes I’m here, Mr Sacks. Can I get you another cup of coffee?’

‘Oh yes, yes indeed, Mrs James—your coffee was so wonderful this morning. But I wonder if you could just pop into that hallway closet on your way back...ah, you know the one I mean...I’ve got the key here...ah...’

‘Yes, Mr Sacks...yes, I take it you mean the one you keep Mr Freud’s...ah...his...um...’

‘Yes, that’s right, Mrs James. In medical terms we say, ‘corpse’, corpse, that’s all.’

‘Ah...it will be alright...again now will it?’

‘Oh, yes, yes. Just drag him in here on your way back please...I’m at a most important point in my new manuscript...I must think this through now...’

‘But, Mr Sacks, the last time I helped drag him in here I was afraid...afraid his arm would tear out of his body!’

‘No, no, my dear—we men of Science have preserved Mr Freud’s body so well that it is like tough, flexible leather, that... Well, come now, we’ll drag him in together…’

‘Just a bit further, Mrs James, so we can prop him up against the grey file cabinet.’

‘Oh, he’s so heavy, Mr Sacks.’

‘There now, I’ll pull his legs around while you pull his left arm...yes, that’s it. Now up...and back...there, that’s perfect. Now, I’ll get seated at the keyboard, and if you’ll just angle his head so that I can look across at him eye-to-eye whenever I...ah, he deserves to be confronted...’

‘Oh, Mr Sacks, his eyes look so real. I wonder how you can work with his gaze upon you...so...ah...’

‘Not at all, not at all, Mrs James—the eyes are glass, perfect replicas, I might add. My colleagues at The Royal College of Neurology have done a remarkable job of creating an exact likeness. It had been so important, so important...’

‘I don’t quite understand, Mr Sacks. Why he is so important and why do you get to keep his...ah, body, here?’

‘Oh, of course, of course…you see, we neurologists apply to have him present whenever one of us is producing a new book, and then he is sent on to the next applicant and so on.’

‘And the importance—surely you have his books?’

‘The importance, Mrs James, is that we never forget what an absolute nonsense and distraction from neurology Freud’s theories were. It became paramount that all neurologists of high standing could look him in the eye as they wrote their refutations of the...well, distraction from the science of neurology that he had caused.’

***

‘Your coffee, Mr Sacks…Ah, if you’ll just give me a few seconds, I’ll dust those cake crumbs out of your keyboard...’

‘Oh, no, no bother, Mrs James…I must concentrate now that I am at this critical point in the manuscript. Will you close the door as you leave? Thank you very much. Now let me see...(slurp). That’s such a good cup of coffee... Where was I..? Ah...Yes:’

We have presented our data, and we must advance now into the very centre of the problem, and inquire how an emotion or a repressed emotional posture can be productive of a migraine. This is a special case of the eternal problem which Freud once designated the mysterious leap from mind to body, and as such it is as dangerous as it is fascinating, for the discussion of mind:body relationships easily and insidiously decays into nonsense... (p. 217).

Probably this is what Oliver wrote late the previous night when he got cake crumbs in his keyboard. I will guess that this bothered him in the morning, when he came into his office, eye-balled Freud, and fired-up his laptop.

Now, it would seem he had a choice: he could have finished the paragraph with some insightful titbit from psychoanalysis about the meaning of a particular patient’s emotion or repressed emotional posture— however, the statement also implies that he had not read or valued the discussions of mind/body relationships of any notable psychologist or psycho-analyst, e.g., from Freud’s conversion symptoms to Maslow to Janov’s clear explanation, i.e., there was no need to conjure up the inferred sorts of people whose conversations about mind/body relationships easily and insidiously, etc... The problem here is that he has raised the wrong question. It’s not, we must advance now...and enquire how an emotion or a repressed emotional posture can be productive of a migraine, but one of enquiring about the meaning of a particular autonomous movement, feeling or vision as prelude to or associated with their migraine headaches. But of course Mr Sacks is a sworn-in neurologist who believes that someone’s repressed emotional posture is the way their faulty or overly sensitive nervous system malfunctions under ‘stress’; that is, he is not looking at psychosomatic states as the body’s attempt to necessarily repeat an estranged emotion or series of movements (instinctual centre) that yearn to be fully expressed, but at what the nerves and hormones are doing when resisting (i.e., suffering) such affects (as opposed to allowing them to be registered in the conscious mind).

I have guessed that he felt the weakness of