of life. By the time I left for Switzerland I considered my condition a puzzle I had not been able to solve but managed to keep under control. Almost.
Yet after a couple of days in the Swiss village guesthouse of Riehen, near the German border, I woke up from my own rustling. I touched myself and found I had been transformed into paper. I got out of bed, picked up the Max Frisch novel I’d read before going to sleep and on the way to the bathroom stared at my image in an old-fashioned gilded mirror hanging in the corridor. What I saw completed my panic. I looked at a tiny human body trying to hide behind a large book. Whether by grotesque distortion of the mirror or my own deformed perception, the book and I merged into one. As I continued to stare at what was no longer myself, I began to recite entire passages of Frisch’s novel. The words poured out of me as if they’d been imprinted in my brain. The recitation continued for several pages until I screamed and ran away from the mirror. Under the shower I did my best to calm down and concentrate on the seminar I was expected to conduct later in the morning. Lathering my face, I found temporary relief in a curious discovery: at least parts of the body seemed to be recovering normal skin. It took me a very long time to pick up enough courage to leave my room and join the other guests for breakfast.
At my arrival no one raised a head. It seemed nothing extraordinary had happened. I dared not look at the large ornamental mirror between the two windows looking out on the sunlit road leading from Basle to the border. Summer was over. The new semester was about to start. If I didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself, I had better pull myself together.
Early in the new millennium an Australian visiting professor at the University of Basle had to be forcibly removed from a doctoral seminar he conducted on literary fiction. As the subject of the discussion class was of little interest to the majority of citizens, the Basler Zeitung confined the incident to a couple of paragraphs in the local news section, reporting it as an unfortunate work-related accident. The real reason for the uncharacteristic restraint of the press was the Rector’s request for confidentiality. In particular there would be no need to reveal the identity of the visitor from Down Under. As he had been awarded a Swiss Confederacy fellowship some years ago his reputation deserved to be protected by government, universities and the media.
Much remained unknown about the occurrence. Students who witnessed the event merely confirmed they had at one point walked out of the seminar, more in sadness than in anger, because they didn’t know what else to do. Had something similar occurred in the science faculty, it would have reached the heights of academic controversy. Different interpretations or new discoveries concerning time and space, energy and light, gravitation and motion would have made headlines comparable to political scandals or sensational sporting achievements. Literary fiction, by definition unrealistic if not unreal, was hardly in that category. Campus gossip confined itself to whether the guest lecturer had to be carried off on a stretcher or voluntarily sought counsel from senior members of the university’s psychiatry department. Nobody seemed to know where he’d been taken. He disappeared between one day and the next, his lectures and seminars cancelled or taken over by local staff. Only members of the doctoral seminar were immediately affected by the disturbance. A delegation approached the Head of Department and the Dean, urgently asking what had happened to their professor, who was acting supervisor of their dissertations. They were advised that due to unforeseen circumstances the Australian professor would not return.
Apparently he had suffered a major nervous breakdown. It was whispered the man from Down Under had literally lost his identity. No one knew exactly what that meant. Members of the university’s Department of Psychiatry rumoured the visiting colleague had turned into a megalomaniac screaming at no one in particular that he was the world! Adding something about ‘unified sensibility’, ‘no more separation of idea and being’, ‘a world made up of monadic fictional I’s’. For professional reasons they didn’t make fun of his dementia but thought it legitimate to relate his collapse not merely to overwork (did a visiting professor really have to work that hard?), but also, perhaps more importantly, to the subject of his research seminar and the unscientific discourse of his discipline. In the Arts Faculty things like that were bound to happen from time to time. During early diagnostic interviews the Australian visiting professor spoke of a colleague in the Philosophy Department of his own university, who after a few years of teaching and research had decided ‘to change his name by deed poll from Peter Wertheim to Who. At the same time his loyal wife wanted to be known as What.’ The Swiss academics didn’t know what to make of that. It became increasingly difficult to decide how far their colleague’s psychological disorder had progressed. In many ways a psychosis could be likened to cancer. In cases of early diagnosis it might be nipped in the bud. Could they believe what he told them, or was what he was saying a made-up story, the delusions of an incurable schizophrenic? As academic and clinical psychiatrists they were of course fundamentally predisposed towards sympathetic deconstructions of mental breakdowns. What had happened to the Australian they’d met at morning tea was a tragedy. He’d seemed a nice enough fellow.
I can’t do this. What they’re asking me to do is impossible. I feel like a child again, learning how to write, rehearsing curves and lines that somehow, magically, convey meaning to someone else. As soon as I drew particular lines I recognised in them something outside the classroom and the exercise book. The J became a tree, the P a mushroom or an umbrella (depending on how I felt), the F a crane. That part of writing I liked. But my teacher back at primary school kept shaking his head. He called my efforts wilfully messy. If it was so, my later life followed the same pattern. Who, I wondered, had written its script?
There was of course no script. Things just happen and form their own wilful pattern. Now the shrinks are trying to force me into their design, ordering me to ‘just write down whatever I can remember’. What kind of direction is that! I know of course what they’re after. Psychiatry is the art of making the thickest fog transparent. I say ‘art’ because psychoanalysis or therapy surely is not a science, as their practitioners insist. From the first interview at Humanitas I not only saw through their questions, I anticipated them. Each time I was right in predicting the next, I triumphantly burst out laughing. Only that made the interrogation bearable. I guess my response didn’t endear me to my inquisitors. Following the subtleties of their discipline they would have taken it as further sign of my mental instability. How laughable my whole situation has become!
I’m told I’ve had a breakdown. Expert Swiss medical opinion has it I’ve been working too hard. As if I needed to be taken to this obscenely comfortable sanatorium to know that. Humanitas! Was its name an admission that, one way or another, all of us are nuts? Humanity residing in an escape-proof mental home? And people say the Swiss haven’t got a sense of humour! (Or was it the Germans? I’ve forgotten. Perhaps I’m ‘in denial’. One thing I will admit is that because I am, thanks to my mother, half-German, I’ve suppressed that part of my lineage. My mother, who died some years ago, was my nemesis. But isn’t it supposed to be the father who causes sons all kinds of psychological problems later in life? So much for the expertise of those who are in charge of an institute called ‘Humanitas‘!)
I know from experience that everything derived from universities relating to humanity is at best a profound misunderstanding. It’s as if social man had devised a thought factory to process the functioning of his own body and mind. It’s a university that has referred me to Humanitas on the assumption I am a sufferer from schizophrenia or a psychosis. I wonder whether the resident shrinks realise these mental conditions are not illnesses of an individual but generic to mankind. They are an inseparable part in the evolution of language acquisition. Swiss psychiatrists must be aware recent research into physical changes in the brains of psychotics has revealed they all relate exclusively to the area of language skills and acquisition. So schizophrenia and other related mental illnesses are conditions shared by all mankind. I don’t mind if the shrinks insist on turning the condition
