Kenosha Kid sequence as an onomatopoeia of schizophrenia

Glenn Scheper scheper at antelecom.net
Wed Feb 19 23:04:31 CST 2003


While my dentist was grinding on a tooth, he said his first
degree was in English. I jumped up, waved my arms, mumbling,
"Mhy mave ve bven mtalkin about enyting else?" and told him
I'm reading GR. When I came back to get that crown cemented,
he said he had started reading GR afresh-"What do you think
of the 'white visitation',"-but I was still only on page 28.
 
Now though, I have the Kenosha Kid sequence under my belt.
Lolling through the KK repetitions, lacking meaty meaning,
I thought of how often I had had similar thought patterns.
 
My most poignant anecdote (from the standpoint of a sufferer
of schizophrenia who was only wishing to a find a life-ring,
a belay, a terminal referent, so he might "snap out of it")
was when my parents had taken me to a healing church service,
and both minister and a crowd of laity laid hands on me and
prayed that I should have a "sound mind". In a heart-beat I
perverted the meaning of that prayer to be, roughly, a mind
skilled in mining hidden meanings from the way things sound.
 
One does it just the way the Kenosha Kid sequence is produced:
Words having lost affective somatic valuations, one endlessly
ratiocinates to discover potential alternate meanings using
every available misprison: inappropriate punning, homophones,
misparsing sentence and word boundaries, rabid selection of
antecedants, misfunctioning parts of speech (E.g., indexical
'here' bound to mean one's mouth, and 'this' to mean what's
in it.-Eschew the self-affirming non-greeting "Hi, there."),
projection on other persons of tacitly shared secret meanings,
and all manner of loose associations and ideas of reference.
 
I often had trouble with driving. Once, I began to read the
continual "No Right Turn" signs as imputing my personal sin
without any remedy (having broken the law so that to me the
law commanded jouissance) which turned to existential dread.
By the end of the evening, I didn't know where I was, but it
was the top of a suburban hill gained by so many forced left
turns. I asked some residents to help me, to call the police
because I had been smoking some pot and couldn't find my way
home. As I peered into their home window, I invented a scene
of flagrant intrafamilial perversities resembling Guernica.
 
Another time, as my bipolar phase was turning down to Hell,
I came into a little community church, abject for anathema,
and sat in the back row. Someone offered me (stop me if you
heard this story) a seat by them in the front row, and gave
me one Lifesaver candy, by which eucharist I could tolerate
being so close, ahead so many rows of pews, layers of veils,
to hear the mysteries directly. The evangelist, a pied-piper
skilled in drawing forth declared, "The word of God is Come!"
and when he told the familiar tale, how that all men should
be seaman until the sea shall free them, I unavoidably heard
semen, and by using the semen:egg::corpse:earth resemblance,
I felt I was indicted, and set out yet again to kill myself.
In less than a day, I was hurtling off the freeway in inept
suicide while trying to gouge out my right eye with my thumb.
 
Hey, I've got a lot more anecdotes. Anytime-just call my name.
Like when the admiting physician asked me what does "A rolling
stone gathers no moss" mean. Or when a Tiresian transformation
in a vehicle soon caused me a vision of ingesting that vehicle,
like a Klein bottle turning through itself; Or when the three
dogs visited me while I was out all night sitting in the park;
They communicated in mime with me, and made a marijuana sprig
grow up at once; Or the casting out of the giant red entity...
 
Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
scheper at antelecom.net
http://www.antelecom.net/~scheper/
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.
 
ps: dictionary.com: onomatopoeia, gk onomatopoios, coiner of names:
The formation or use of words such as buzz or murmur that imitate
the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.

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