Split II

And now I see, as if with blinding sight, what this poem really means. It must be about schizophrenia.

When I quote Dylan, last bard of Wales, these days, everyone thinks I mean Bob Dylan.

But death shall have no dominion.

An old classmate of mine died yesterday. At such times, we remember everything.

Split

Today's local newspapers declared that 1 out of every 100 young people suffered from schizophrenia (from Greek schizo, 'I divide'; and phrenos, 'mind') - a 'shattered mind'. I am now driven by my inner workings to look around the place I work and try to identify the 30 or so people who (statistically speaking) must be schizophrenics (or should that be schizophrenes?)

Schizophrenia is an interesting condition. I am not so sure it is an illness, although it is certainly considered to be a bad thing in the world we live in. It is commonly defined as debilitating, with onset during adolescence and resulting in bad misperceptions of reality and of human social interaction. Some say it is an emotional disorder; most consider it a psychotic condition. Some of it seems treatable with drugs or surgery – there is certainly some physiological basis for it.

The reason it is interesting to me is that this is a condition which, as described, seems present in many who are otherwise considered intellectually or spiritually enlightened. They see things differently from other people, and are strongly fixed in their views. They are often amenable to listening to reason, but reason seldom shifts their deeply-engrained positions. People have theorised that schizophrenia accounts for hallucinations of the divine, and that many of the world's religious people who claim to hear God speaking to them are actually schizophrenic.

At 1 in every 100, this seems plausible. That's not to say that God can't speak to you, or that schizophrenia is a gift designed to make it easier for Him. Either position seems dangerous, limited, or... well, schizophrenic. But really, I don't see the fuss. It would make sense that if you want to be able to communicate with the world beyond, you'd want to install a broadband connection in your house. In the era that most people were using telephone modems at 56 kbps, broadband connections were considered a luxury; before that, when the maximum speed was about 14400 bps, broadband users were thought to be insane.

I need to think more about this. It's always good to see more than one side to a problem. Hrrrrm.