If we have a car and drive it every day we do not assume that we could drive it onto a beach and on into the sea. Cars are not designed to do this. Human beings have their design limits too but unlike cars the limits are rather vague and at their outermost are overwritten by ideological forces that have no mutuality with human physical limits.

While most humans may, if they have the opportunity and the inclination, elect to train their bodies so that unusual feats are possible, they will eventually reach a limit that lies well beyond everyday limitation yet represents an absolute terminus point. To push beyond that limit or to be pushed beyond it is to court trauma, probably in the form, at least, of physical damage of some sort.

Where elite athletes experience the swings and roundabouts that are seen as integral to their profession and, as a result, have a rational context for their disappointments in a structured environment, any mental health issues that arise will mostly be transitory. The focus of this essay, however, is on the far greater constituencies of those who have been pushed to their limits by adverse and chaotic circumstances beyond their control.

It is generally the case that all physical trauma will have an attendant and adverse psychological dimension, even if this does not arise contemporaneously. Proportionality is often erratic insofar as a brief, mildly injurious event may provoke either a modest reaction or an enduring and substantial disturbance.

At this point in the 21st century there may be a greater proportion of people in the global population suffering from severe distress than at any time. This supposition, in turn, conjures a vision of a future in which there are more people with untreated or unacknowledged stress disorder than there are those without it.

Clearly the most readily diagnosed stress disorders are those endured by Holocaust and genocide survivors and battlefield veterans. In the case of the latter, diagnosis of stress disorders has developed alongside the reluctant and therefore gradual acceptance by military doctors of the fact that ordinary people can be disordered by stress. The disorders were originally seen in military circles as regrettable evidence that some soldiers are more cowardly than others. The nomenclature of disorder reflects the attitudinal shifts: we have grown accustomed to the emergence of ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers from the wastes of World Wars I and II, then the ‘battle fatigue’ endured by British and American servicemen in World War II followed by the catch-all ‘combat stress reaction’ (CSR), a term that encouraged the development of a more detailed military medicine taxonomy eventually leading, in the wake of the Vietnam War but not until 1980, to the most severe and disabling condition being designated Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as distinct from the transient CSR.

Veterans increasingly feature in documentaries which, probably quite accurately, characterise them as suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) then substantiate this by constructing one-to-one interviews that culminate in the subject succumbing to grief and incoherence. The incoherence, it should be noted, is entirely articulate in its expression of the collapse of resistance in individuals pushed beyond the design limits of any human being.

This emerging sub-genre of confessional war documentaries commonly features a highly trained and hardened professional member of the military who is asked to describe a terrifying battle experience or campaign and, more often than not, can do so haltingly but grippingly. The interviewer affects to be winding up the interview but not before asking the interviewee how they feel now about episodes that may have taken place decades earlier. Held in close shot, the veteran pauses, his eyes well up and he begins to talk about the death of close friends and platoon members who were killed in combat, often a few feet away from him. He may also refer to the children and families whose members he and his comrades executed in the course of operations. The spectacle of strong, grown men undone is invariably upsetting, not only because of empathy with their grief, bereavement and guilt but also, from the viewer’s point of view, the undermining of assumptions about the essential characteristics of maleness.

The interviewed veterans may be recalling events that took place two years or fifty years ago – the traumas cannot be shaken off. At best, it seems, they can be ‘pushed to the back of the mind’ but not expelled from it.

The veteran’s traumatising memories are almost unspeakable but the succumbing to grief, the unleashed flashbacks, the invasive and distressing thoughts can all be seen as components of an effective attack on a lifelong training designed for the maintenance of composure. Such a training is not restricted to veterans, of course, it is initiated for us all shortly after birth.

An indirect result of the TV documentary viewers’ exposure to such material derives from the submerged but logical suggestion that if these tough guys can get fucked up then so can we. Maybe, albeit in less violent and terrifying circumstances, we can all succumb to oppressive experiences by not only sustaining physical damage but being marked by related stress for disproportionately extended periods.

The ultimate objective of the foundational processes of civilisation and socialisation in relation to the individual is to eliminate the risk of such an egregious disassembly. The constituents of our minds are not naturally harmonious and might not be suited to an overall integration but the prospect of our being reduced to a discordant array i.e. a condition known as ‘madness’, is sufficiently horrifying to encourage the construction of an identity – an arrangement that is seen as stable, unique and acts as a bulwark against social contagion and personal dissolution. To lack an identity or a sense of identity is to be wretched.

Those manifesting disorders that cannot be readily linked to distressing and, ideally, recent experiences are often offered reinforcement to the cause of identity maintenance in the form of derisive advice to ‘Suck it up’ or ‘Get over it.’ This school of luxurious thought may stem from the possibility that while symptoms describing PTSD are found in extreme cases, such as those arising from combat, bereavement, assault or accidents, the bar for the diagnosis of ‘lesser’ stress disorders is set too high. It may be that levels of stress associated with everyday life significantly and routinely overlap with those related to terrifying and shattering experiences. In other words we are generous with labels for conditions generated in the most dramatic circumstances but far less so with those that proceed from what appear to be mundane situations.

It is perhaps easier to admire those whose disorders have some heroic dimension, as in the cases of those returning from the battlefield: their distinction has been earned and the disorders are not neurotic or self-indulgent. The wives, mothers, daughters and relatives who were not called to battle but generally consigned to spectatorship at home did not qualify for psychiatric categorisation because it is not possible, in this view, to experience significant stress in the home. This is one of those covert compacts that entail a conspiratorial disavowal of shared anxieties in the name of maintaining esprit de corps. It is not disputed that those at home have endured protracted disquiet but it is assumed that once they are reunited with their returning family members their distress will be alleviated. Their anxiety is normal. Their stress is manageable.

As noted above, diagnostic terms exist for a range of stress disorders, including those featuring the above mentioned ‘significant stress’, but within military and military medical circles their relatively low profile stems from an initial suspicion that those presenting with classic ‘shell-shock’ symptoms were malingerers swinging the lead. This irritable reaction to soldiers who dared to be unmanly persisted throughout World War I and their summary execution by firing squad was gradually and reluctantly administered with the provision of psychiatric units and dramatic interventions such as anaesthesia and cold baths. Notoriously, in 1943, General Patton, confronted by two battle fatigued soldiers, accused them of cowardice and slapped them round the face. By this time, however, it had become difficult to ignore the increasing numbers of post- battlefield soldiers who were not merely moody but chronically damaged.

It appears that rather than risk an epidemic of medicalisation wherein disabilities are endorsed and multiplied at the expense of social coherence and self-sufficiency, the milder classes of disorder have their diagnosis withheld, not by the medical establish­ment but those who feel that anything that is ‘all in your mind’ marks the entrance to a slippery slope.

Framed in this way, ‘all in your mind’ describes the purely imaginary, a condition with no physical substance, evidence of nothing more than chicanery. It indicates the lowly status of mental phenomena in a globally diffused anti-psychological culture. More inconveniently  the term also denotes a destabilised condition that may in many cases endure well beyond the period of the healing or stabilisation of physical damage.

In 1940 the possibility of the invasion of the UK seemed increasingly likely after the fall of France to the Nazis. This situation induced widespread chronic anxiety in those remaining at home and the condition could be said to be covered by the term ‘generalised anxiety disorder’. It manifested in excessive worrying (a term used in symptom lists) and similar terms can also be applied today to the experiences of burgeoning numbers of individuals not employed in traditionally harrowing occupations. When the relatively mild term ‘worrying’ is introduced as having diagnostic significance then the possibility arises that worrying is so widespread that to diagnose it is unnecessary and threatens to trivialise the criteria. Those who worry about worriers are worried that the worriers may infect them and give the game away. The game being the maintenance of the idea that most people are not worried. At the moment most people are worried. It might even be useful to develop diagnostic criteria for those who are not worried.

A less prominent but statistically extensive diagnosis is the condition known as ‘acute stress reaction’, sharing an almost identical range of symptoms with PTSD but generally seen to recede within 48 hours to a few days of a traumatic event. When the symptoms persist for up to a month an ‘acute stress disorder’ is diagnosed and when they persist for longer still then PTSD is diagnosed.

The transfer of individuals from the social to the medical field is often an invalidating operation insofar as it produces invalids. The process leads citizens to believe that their infirmities are an individual problem rather than a shaping effect of the state or ‘the state of the world’. They may receive treatment but this tends to be suppressive given that a thorough remediation would necessitate factoring in the collapse adjacent nature of the contemporary global experience.

What may be more to the point is that public awareness has been diverted to the most dramatic disorders in part as a hedge against the emergence of the notion that stress is pandemic and attendant disorders are the new normal.

This distracting operation has reached its limits, however. A tendency to withhold diagnosis has been gradually diluted and the proposition that ‘It’s all in the mind’ has been replaced by an awareness that ‘It looks as though physical trauma is invariably accompanied by mental trauma of some sort’, to coin a phrase.

Some physical traumas may heal satisfactorily but can leave persistent mental scars in addition to the traces left on the body. Furthermore, the bar is being set, in a good way, lower and lower as those suffering from ‘everyday life in the 21st Century’ feel empowered to affirm their disempowerment.

The current concern about ‘over-diagnosis’ is simultaneously progressive and restrictive. How can it be wrong to enable those who are stressed and disordered to receive medical treatment? How can it be right to muffle and deflect inevitable reactions to the maddening dysfunctions of the world?

It wouldn’t be wrong to facilitate medical treatment if the administering of medicines was not so thoroughly medicinal – that is to say lacking a significant psychotherapeutic dimension. The solution is obvious: every town and city in the country should have a team of fully trained therapists who give free, regular counselling to citizens initially on a drop-in basis then, on the basis of a referral, weekly or bi-weekly 50 minute sessions. It will never happen.

Overdiagnosis is said to prevail when the symptoms subject to diagnosis are unlikely to cause future harm to the patient who is, nevertheless, labelled and in some cases, given treatment. The further argument for minimising diagnosis in order to avoid stigmatising swathes of the population is persuasive, especially if it were the case that stress disorders could be readily remedied. This latter, however, is not the case. While many stress disorders are susceptible to therapeutic intervention, the accessibility and availability of appropriate remedial responses is severely limited. The alternative is psychotropic medication in which contact with physicians is largely restricted to the monitoring of dosage and assessing the desirability of changing or combining medications. Given the difficulty of accessing any form of treatment, the aspiring patient may derive modest comfort from being awarded a label.

The third season of ‘Educating Yorkshire’ (Channel 4, UK) is fascinating, inspiring and moving. Since the initial two series in 2013, covid has ravaged school attendances and levels of anxiety in school children have risen considerably.  Some of the Year 8 kids in Thornhill Community Academy, Dewsbury are presenting quite florid symptoms of distress, such as Tourette’s and chronic ADHD. Their teachers are patient, firm and unfailingly supportive. It becomes apparent, however, that while it could not be described as a skill, the kids are not only enduring chronic stress but osmotically absorbing the sense of generalised anxiety that pervades the home, the school, the leisure time, the streets that lead to these sites and the social media that hystericise them. This enveloping mode of unease would consist of an array of destabilising inputs that equal, if not outweigh the manageable or mostly manageable so-called everyday stresses that we are encouraged to take in our stride.

The key question is ‘Does it really matter if lots and lots of people are suffering from conditions that are all in the mind?’ Let’s say that some people are hypochondriacs. The luxurious school of thought would entail ignoring these people. Another approach might conclude that hypochondria is a mental health issue. There could be a middle way wherein you say ‘The ailments of which this hypochondriac complains are imaginary but the hypochondriasis (illness anxiety disorder) is susceptible to some form of treatment’. We don’t, of course, have the human or financial resources to cater to this 1-2% of the population or, indeed, the 5-10% of individuals who worry excessively about their health but don’t meet the full criteria for a diagnosis (Criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)).

The gradual multiplication of ‘new’ classes of stress disorder could be taken as an indication that such disorders are proliferating rather than their being inconsequential or even nonexistent. The notion that this needlessly creates populations of invalids must be carefully qualified: since the characterisation of PTSD as an extreme response to extreme experience has achieved wide circulation it has become possible to consider less dramatic models of the condition. While PTSD features unthinkable or unspeakable or uncontrollable contents and behaviour, it is clear that many individuals are and have been reporting levels of chronic anxiety, uneasiness or worry which, in turn, are reported to doctors and eventually arranged in terms of their severity as subsets of stress disorder.

There were, of course, widespread disorders in existence before the terms were formalised but their status as being ‘all in the mind’ in the most negative sense precluded their being taken seriously with the implication that all the subject had to do was ‘change your mind’. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), in fact, rose to this challenge splendidly, plundering then jettisoning Freudian ideas in order to construct a behavioral management technology based on the idea that is possible to ignore, suppress or sideline invasive thoughts in order to make room for more agreeable mental events.

What is needed is considerably more diagnosis, but this suggests that there is something profoundly dysfunctional at the heart of society. The runaway figures for stress diagnosis  do not indicate that doctors are credulous or that patients are snowflakes. Both factions know something is up but articulation of this insight is a threat to national security. There is something profoundly dysfunctional at the heart of society.

In general the tendency to ignore or at best under-diagnose those who present with signs of anguish is not a sign of compassion so much as a reflexive attempt to dismiss any possibility of the spread of contagious weakness. The most catastrophic outcome of such an outbreak would feature a despicable idea bubbling to the surface: that we are all, without exception, much weaker than we think we are. In turn, it is not that we really believe we are stronger than we are but it is imperative that this idea should prevail in order to preserve public order. Less stringent turns of thought will be suppressed.

The anger of those who deride the ‘over-diagnosed’ is largely fuelled by envy. In a culture of vigilant individualism the only solidarity resides in the sharing of the experience of not being able to share experience. Such is the value attributed to self-sufficiency that to dilute the supportive criteria for the condition is regarded as tantamount to “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria” (Ghostbusters, dir. Reitman, I. 1984). Yet here are the diagnosed weaklings in their droves, surrendering to the sickness that threatens to return bodies to slime and getting all the attention for giving up!

Not only is chronic self-sufficiency a fortification against the admission of weakness, its relinquishment would, it is feared, not just expose the inner weakling but actually liquefy the subject beyond the reach of any reconstitution.

The generously termed ‘over-diagnosis debate’ is a Victorian notion that, at a point when the world seems about to ignite, serves to smother a body of feeling that demonstrates a widespread ability to appraise a network of threats with considerable accuracy. The act of diagnosis, while conferring, as noted above, the questionable benefits of categorisation on the patient, is an endorsement of the existence of disorder on a grand scale, such that the individual is drawn into a pool rather than being an anomaly at its periphery.

Nevertheless, the extent and persistence of disorder, expressed in a variety of ways, continues to be under-diagnosed.

Human beings are not designed to withstand as much stress as we are encouraged to believe. We are not nearly as strong or as resilient we feel we should be. The ones that actually are strong and resilient have exceeded their natural capacity. It is, of course, possible to be strong and resilient both within and beyond one’s natural capacity but  resilience does not necessarily stretch to an ability to move beyond the limits of one’s resilience. That would be resilient to a fault.

To live beyond one’s capacity is damaging. It is, of course, very well regarded, widely admired and seen as the fount of our best endeavours. In many circles it is considered to be the seal on a pedigree that indicates the fullest realisation of human potential.

The admiration of such an achievement goes some way to assuage damage that will never be erased. If no admiration or endorsement is forthcoming then the damage will persist uncomfortably beneath the level of consciousness.

The current population of Gaza is approximately 2.1 million. It is evident that the entire population is experiencing extreme stress. If the situation is ever resolved then the managers of that population will be responsible for applying therapeutic support. This will not happen. There are too many people.

At least 17,000 children in Gaza are unaccompanied or separated from their families. Many of these will have also sustained life-changing injuries. It is likely that, in terms of mental health issues, initially acute and then chronic disorders will affect the majority of this group, possibly for the duration of their lives.

Studies of the lives of post-Holocaust survivors have shown that symptoms of PTSD will be prominent for at least 50 years after the Holocaust. During this period typical symptoms include recurrent distressing memories; repetitive dreams (night terrors in children); flashbacks, or intense psychological or physiological distress when reminded of the event; inability to experience positive emotions like happiness, success, or love; feeling detached from oneself and emotions, or experiencing dissociative amnesia not related to intoxication or traumatic brain injury; avoiding thoughts, memories, or feelings related to the traumatic event, as well as external reminders (like people or places); sleep problems (difficulty initiating/maintaining sleep); irritability and rage attacks; abnormal alertness, distractibility, or an unusually strong reflexive reaction to sudden environmental events; reliving the traumatic event as if it is happening again, which can include physical symptoms like a racing heart or sweating. (DSM-5)

There are indeed therapies that can alleviate or diminish these symptoms. Among the more successful approaches are those that involve the revisiting and reprocessing of traumatic memories in order to reduce their power to overwhelm. As noted above, the point is it’s very difficult to get the appropriate treatment.

If the statistics from Gaza are extrapolated to a consideration of the global distribution of comparable fields of conflict and catastrophe, including not just wars and genocides but famines, climate change events, bereavements, accidents and assaults but also the less dramatic so-called ‘ordinary’ stress-inducing events and situations that blight the experiences of those in work, out of work, out of love, out of home, out of country, in debt, wanting to get on, wanting to get off, wanting to get out, listening to the news, not listening to the news, sleeping poorly, eating badly, barely eating, enduring invasive thoughts, worrying, not getting over things, being sad, being flat, being not quite there then there will come a time, if it has not already come, when stress-induced premature cognitive decline will reach globally pandemic levels and change will be arrested.

At some point in the course of this panpsychogenic development the various modes of decline will inevitably affect behaviour to such an extent that when children currently blighted grow up and have their own children the latter will be fortunate not to inherit intergenerational trauma, in which the trauma of one generation is passed on to the next generation. As many as two or even three generations may succumb to this mode of transport. Studies of Holocaust survivors’ offspring show increased symptoms of PTSD, greater anxiety risk, and altered stress hormone levels. Similar patterns are found in the offspring of parents who have had experiences including famine, war, terrorism or sexual abuse. Epigenetic studies show, furthermore, that the genes of traumatised individuals may undergo modifications that are passed down to descendants in the form of  conditions that reflect in some way the post-traumatic experiences of the parent generation.

It is not medical diagnosis that is problematic but the concomitant assumption that what is revealed by the procedure, in the cases of those presenting with anxiety, is primarily biological in nature rather than sociopsychological. If treatment follows such a diagnosis it will leave much to be desired insofar as symptoms will not be traced to personal experience and/or social conditions but will be chemically suppressed or rebalanced, leaving root causes unexamined. A further concern relates to the great difficulty of securing timely appointments within the health system. In relation to this complication there is a view that simple diagnosis is better than nothing at all: it situates the patient who may feel that to be shaped by a situation is preferable to navigation without a compass, even if you never get anywhere. This fairly romantic view is given the lie by the subsequent experience of the  ‘diagnosed invalid’ wherein anxiety continues to prevail but is compounded by uneasiness about the likelihood of receiving timely treatment.

The process of reporting symptoms to a doctor is not in itself problematic, the pseudonymised data generated will be submitted to national databases in order to identify tendencies and patterns in public health. At this point in the mid 2020s the statistical value of such data is that they suggest epidemic and possibly pandemic levels of mental health disorder. The scale of such a situation makes it unmanageable yet it must somehow be managed. Despite the limitations of the medical model it is more likely than not, as emphasised above, that patients will receive medication rather than psychotherapeutic intervention. Referrals to mental health services are, of course, routinely made but can take four months or more to materialise due to the uneven distribution of psychiatrists across the country and the current national backlog of 6.25 million post-referral pre-treatment cases, a figure that includes referrals to mental health services.

If the psychiatric path will, in most cases, lead to the administering of psychotropic medications and these, in turn, will defer rather than facilitate recovery then instead of applying ‘diagnosis’, which carries inescapable medical associations, it might be more fruitful to simply to ’describe’ an individual’s experience in a framework that encompasses a social dimension.

Much of the above has been ruefully acknowledged throughout the current century. The paradoxes of over-diagnosis seem far from resolution and will remain so until a progressive biopsychosocial model is implemented. The problem is, of course, that such a model will raise a volume of mental health disorder reports on a global scale that cannot possibly be processed.

It can be argued that socialisation itself has become pathogenic inasmuch as the norm has been elasticated in order to admit contents that can, in theory, be neutralised by admitting them. The logic would seem to be ‘We cannot possibly cater to pandemic mental health disorder so we must adjust the boundaries of the norm in order to include and thereby disarm contents that had previously caused those boundaries to be constructed.’

An assertion in a Guardian article from 2020 that ‘we are all facing entirely normal fear, anxiety, despair and confusion’ (Johnstone, L.) will give the norm a bad name unless, as she goes on to make clear in her qualifying statement, it is conceded that ‘[we are all facing]… a truly terrifying situation that challenges our whole way of life.’ This significant elastication of the norm recasts the norm as a non-safe or only marginally safe place rather than a dependable territory which routinely features manageable difficulty. The elastication preempts a crisis by discouraging those who would press for a greatly expanded social analysis that, if practically implemented, would gravely challenge resources.

Anxiety casts its shadow across populations that feel increasingly rootless and unshielded and many will feel that this is not normal. Some will seek diagnosis, some will not subsequently receive treatment, of these some will feel that at least with diagnosis that does not lead to treatment because of the logjammed system there is a small amount of relief because you have a name for what you feel, some will receive treatment in the form of medication,  some will feel less upset because of the medication, some will feel less upset because of the medication but also sense that the original problem was not a product of what they are like but because of the environment in which they have spent their lives in the process of becoming what they are like. The treatment leaves much to be desired. The idea that the complaints, or ‘symptoms’ are all in the mind is both naïve and absolutely spot on.

In addition to stigmatising those who are diagnosed and medicalising those for whom psychotherapeutic treatment is more appropriate, over-diagnosis will continue nevertheless to provide an indicator of the extent to which even ‘normal’ anxiety is steadily increasing in volume and may lead to a fundamental modification of the capacity of the norm to normalise. In such a case the centre may not hold, it may become fissile.

Daley, P. We face a pandemic of mental health disorders. Those who do it hardest need our support. The Guardian 24/03/2020

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/25/we-face-a-pandemic-of-mental-health-disorders-those-who-do-it-hardest-need-our-support

Devlin, H. Does the UK have a mental health overdiagnosis problem?  The Guardian 05/04/2025

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/05/does-the-uk-have-a-mental-health-overdiagnosis-problem-welfare-wes-streeting

Johnstone, L. Why it’s healthy to be afraid in a crisis. The Guardian 25/03/2020 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/25/why-its-healthy-to-be-afraid-in-a-crisis (referring to Daley, P. (above))

O’Sullivan, S. The number of people with chronic conditions is soaring. Are we less healthy than we used to be – or overdiagnosing illness? The Guardian 01/03/2025 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/01/the-number-of-people-with-chronic-conditions-is-soaring-are-we-less-healthy-than-we-used-to-be-or-overdiagnosing-illness

Weale. S. Overdiagnosis of children overlooks that growing up is ‘messy and uneven’, says Jeremy Hunt. The Guardian 27/08/2025 https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/aug/27/overdiagnosis-of-children-overlooks-that-growing-up-is-messy-and-uneven-says-jeremy-hunt

Yehuda R, Lehrner A. Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: putative role of epigenetic mechanisms. World Psychiatry. 2018 Oct;17(3):243-257. doi: 10.1002/wps.20568. PMID: 30192087; PMCID: PMC6127768. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6127768/

Mulligan, C.J., Quinn, E.B., Hamadmad, D. et al. Epigenetic signatures of intergenerational exposure to violence in three generations of Syrian refugees. Sci Rep 15, 5945 (2025).                                                                     https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-89818-z

quote from Mulligan et al.:

One recent paper called for a stronger evidence base for humanitarian action and proposed that “epigenetic research can be potentially beneficial to address some of the issues associated with refugees and asylum seekers”. We propose that a better understanding of the nature and long-term effects of intergenerational trauma may encourage policymakers and humanitarian agencies to provide targeted resources to vulnerable populations, including healthcare access, special lodging, sanitation, and nutrition. We note the scale of the global refugee crisis: by the end of 2022, there were 108.4 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, including 62.5 million internally displaced people, 35.3 million refugees, and 5.4 million asylum seekers. Our results also have clear relevance for societies such as the U.S. given high levels of interpersonal violence, particularly against women. The presence of a heritable epigenetic signature of violence has important implications for addressing some of society’s most vexing problems, including multigenerational cycles of violence, abuse, and poverty. Specifically, the possibility that the impacts of these traumas may be mediated by epigenetic mechanisms and passed on to future generations may change the scope of prevention efforts, discourage “victim-blaming” in instances of intergenerational trauma, and spur policymakers to dedicate more resources to programs to alleviate violence, abuse, and poverty.

Finally, we recognize the resilience of traumatized and marginalized populations around the world who have survived and flourished in the face of adversity The role of epigenetics in explaining individual differences in psychosocial resilience has been under-studied. A better understanding of epigenetic mechanisms, with data from hard-to-reach groups in cross-cultural contexts, would enrich empirical knowledge and theoretical understanding of human development. We propose that future research adopt a positive framework to investigate epigenetic signatures of adaptive mechanisms that underly the tenacity and successful expansion of human populations throughout evolution.

This essay is the third in a series comprising Rolodex Dreams; How They Arise; Headful and Life with the Snippets

In the Strength Weekly essay How They Arise  a species of elusive mental event is referred to on a number of occasions. Such events are frequent, brief, fleeting, barely perceptible, partially formed, wispy and indistinct – they are not quite ‘full’ thoughts but take up at least as much time and space as thoughts that are deemed useful or important. They are routinely and necessarily suppressed, overlooked or ignored and widely viewed as irrelevant and dispensable by-products or waste products of an otherwise fundamental and essential streaming process.

It could be said, however, that by designating these products as dispensable their suppression is more readily achieved. This observation would only have value if the elusive moments could be shown to have some meaning or significance. The essay referred to above expands upon this notion.

It has occurred to me since writing the essay that while the delivery mechanisms of thought are not well understood, the apparent lack of significance of some mental contents may obstruct an analysis of another influential set of phenomena.

Freud did not believe in ghosts but, in a consideration of the processes of repression, wrote ‘a thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken’ (‘Analysis of a Phobia in Five-Year-Old Boy’, (1909). Also known as the ‘Little Hans’ case). Ten years later, in ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) he proposed that ghosts – the ones that people see – are manifestations of unresolved psychological issues.

In the Freudian account unresolved issues can be personified (or ‘ghostified’) but in addition it may be the case that it is not just the content of these issues that animates the ghostly apparitions but the manner of their entry into consciousness.

Elsewhere Freud wrote that ‘The human mind, while guided by reason, is also an abode for intangible yearnings, much like the way ghosts linger in the periphery of our consciousness.’ There is a distinction be made here between ‘intangible yearnings’ and ghosts that ‘linger’. The former are invisible but the latter have a lingering presence that can be seen. At some point a threshold is crossed and the intangible is transformed into the visible.

Everyday mental life features, in addition to coherent chains of thought, countless partially formed elements of mental process – snatches of conversation, passages of nonsensical words, floating faces, unsourced images, not to mention a confetti of fragments from films, TV and newspapers, splinters and slivers in transit from the high and low points of encounters, conversations, greetings and farewells, snippets and traces that appear and rapidly disappear, registering as unidentifiable glimpses that are experienced as disturbances at the very periphery of consciousness.

That these bits and pieces and scraps and sherds are generally considered to be worthless may not only reflect the view that consciousness must be constantly decluttered if it is to operate efficiently but also that the very elusiveness of the particles of clutter marks them as untrustworthy. It is possible that although a thought may be suppressed or extinguished within moments of its arrival, the thinker may experience a fleeting sense that it was not trivial, that it may have been disquieting. This may induce uneasiness and anxiety or, for some individuals, indicate the intrusion of mischievous or malicious supernatural entities. It seems likely therefore that while some ghosts are all mouth and no trousers others may carry concealed weapons.

In this reading, ordinary mental life is a minefield of potential mishap to be stewarded in time-honoured fashion by processes of repression and suppression. These operations are largely second nature and mostly efficient. The risk, as ever, is that the baby is suppressed along with the bathwater. The disposable is consigned to oblivion but the baby must find ways of getting back into circulation. This may entail subterfuge and an eventual role as a bit part consigned to the edge of the stage where the disenfranchised and the homeless hang out. They can walk through you if they feel like it but you can walk through them if it helps.

25/03/2025

Related Essay:

Life with the Snippets

This essay is the second in a series comprising Rolodex Dreams; How They Arise; Headful and Life with the Snippets

It’s got to the point now where just about everything I think reminds me of something else.

But that’s what thinking is. An unbroken stream the successive components of which are invariably linked to each other in some way.

While the stream is ‘unbroken’ insofar as thinking is incessant it will, of course, be constantly interrupted by events in the world. The stream will register events, which give rise to associations, some of which are ignored (not without being registered however fleetingly) and some of which are awarded status. Events will reroute any apparent direction being taken by the thought stream prior to their impingement. The continuous flow of thought is, nevertheless, maintained.

So the phrase ‘reminds me’ in my opening sentence is intended to distinguish between an everyday flow of thoughts enhanced by an apparent sense of connection and the same thing comprised of apparently disjointed fragments. The former would be based on sequences of memories in which one thought brings to mind another thought that has characteristics or qualities in common with its precursor. The connected thoughts have the distinction of remaining ’on topic’ for a period of time while those that do not readily reveal their connections may be seen as in some sense homeless.

The idea of sequenced thoughts having something ‘in common’ suggests a connection that is readily recognised. It may also be that apparently random thoughts are, at times, actually connected to their precursors but these connections are not recognised. When this happens the subject may assume that there are no connections to be found and this, in turn, encourages the ‘randomist’ school of thought, which is essentially anti-psychological and consistent with dominant cultural tendencies.

It would be wrong to imagine that ‘in common’ can only refer to similarities that fall within the classes of topics presented by the thought that appeared to initiate inspection. If I find myself thinking about butterflies I may well be reminded about other butterflycentric events or observations but I may equally entertain thoughts that have scarcely any explicit butterfly content. The original thought, which is only ‘original’ for the sake of this argument, also has its predecessors, none of which may have had butterfly content but did contain elements that provoked the subsequent emergence of the butterfly topic.

It may be, for example, that the brief sight of a receding number 43 bus makes one think about butterflies. If a granular inspection of links between the bus and the butterfly were carried out (How would you even begin?) it is conceivable that microlinks could become apparent. Or not.

My opening statement suggests that there is something noteworthy in thinking things then finding that these thoughts conjure further thoughts.  This may simply be a description of all thinking processes. The reason such a bald assertion is resisted may be because when we think ‘What on earth is the connection between what I thought two moments ago and the thought I had one moment ago?’ we assume that the apparent absence of connection means there is no connection – ‘That’s the way the mind is, it just throws up thoughts at random.’

Much of the above implies that thoughts can be seen as discrete events that have a beginning and an end. It is likely that if it were possible to replay a ‘thought’ in slow motion it would be seen to contain a number of associated elements, each of which also deserves to be designated as a thought.

It would be a mistake to muse overlong on perceived similarities between files stored on a computer hard disk and memories stored in some way in the mind. Digital files are inert. Memories/thoughts/experiences stored in the mind carry a charge. That is why they are stored. Perhaps only 1% of them are ever called forward. Perhaps every single one of them exerts an influence. Perhaps they are never ‘turned off’ and therefore always inform the subject’s mental life, if imperceptibly.

On the other hand if the borders of each thought were barely distinguishable then perhaps all mental activity during waking hours should be seen as one continuous thought that is suspended during sleeping hours and resumed the following day. Topics may change but they’re all part of one thought.

Then again such a sweeping declaration is of little use. It would not be possible to get a reliable answer to the enquiry ‘What are you thinking about?’ without the thinker making a rapid edit of a passage of thinking that involved nominating a beginning, an end and some contents.  Which is generally what happens anyway when such a question is posed.

There is at large a disquieting eagerness to regard the various activities of the mind as a poorly curated collection of the random, the disposable, the irrational and the useful. It is convenient to suppose that the latter is the dominant mode and the rest are what you have to put up with. Indeed why, one might ask, are they there at all if they do not have a purpose? What’s the point of them?

A more fruitful assessment finds that an apparently trivial or dispensable thought, if not dismissed or allowed to disappear, comes briefly into consciousness for a reason: it was related in some way to its precursor. As was the latter’s precursor. This approaches a condition in which all thoughts have precursors but it does not follow that all thoughts are therefore important. The delivery process, in fact, may be more interesting than many of its products.

The question of importance deserves attention. Is it only important thoughts that are the products of a chain? Were this the case then would thoughts deemed unimportant not arise at all? That is, would they be held back or extinguished before entering consciousness? This is clearly not what is happening – when the mind is not task-focused it is generally delivering an unbroken stream of thoughts most of which are not important. But who or what imposes these evaluations?

While not all but possibly most thoughts are felt to be unimportant this view does not lead to the conclusion that they are electrical misfires – an inevitable side effect of a complex and largely unfathomable system of brain activity.

It may also be the case that there are thoughts of little importance that simply fail to rise into consciousness. Like the denizens of a low sperm count, they fall back before achieving what could be registered as a presence. Obviously this is speculative – if some thoughts ‘fail’ for some reason, how do we know they ever existed in the first place?

So is there such a thing as a chain-free thought? That is, something pops up, it is not noteworthy, it disappears, it appears to have no precedents that might have generated its brief appearance. One would have to be singularly alert in order to register mental events that evaporate so rapidly.

The procedure of ignoring mental events is, however, worthy of consideration. At some point the sheer and unceasing volume of unimportant thoughts that enter into consciousness must be dealt with. Thoughts that provoke a certain degree of discomfort are subject to repression but plenty of lightweight material gets through and their provenance is not deemed worthy of investigation. Something pops up, it is of no interest, I shall ignore it. And I shall ignore the fact that I have ignored it because life is too short to waste on waste. This is not repression, it can be compared to the serving of an NDA where the issuer serves it upon themselves. It’s an ergonomic supplement.

We have little evidence to encourage the view that any thought that ‘comes to mind’ is the product of a virgin birth compared to a thought that is generated by memory, external events or interaction between these. To insist upon the possibility of a mental event devoid of provenance tends to a magical position in which the mind is a fount of ceaseless invention.

The mind is, however, also a fount of ceaseless invention. New ideas, for example, in the most general sense, did not exist before they came to mind but if it is the case that nothing is ever forgotten then their antecedents may be innumerable.

The notion that nothing is ever forgotten is outrageous – where is all this stuff stored? Given that nobody knows (yet), it is equally outrageous to assume that if something cannot be recalled in memory it has left the building.

If all novel ideas or thoughts have their antecedents then these components should, in theory, be quantifiable. Some of the components may well be identifiable but it is likely that some will not be in evidence. It will not be possible to look for them given that their absence is not detectable. The need to regard ideas and thoughts as having a recipe is understandable but recipes of this order may turn out to have been lacking a complete list of ingredients. Not that you’d know.

It may be the case that some elements of a recipe will be both essential to the recipe and will never ever come into consciousness. Which doesn’t mean that they are not there.

It is unlikely that an attempt at establishing lineage will progress beyond the identification of a very small number of ancestral elements. While it may be possible to tell oneself “I was thinking about horsehair and this made me think about Luxembourg” this is merely a recollection and may consist only of highlights in a stream of consciousness. We may never know whether or not there were interstitial elements in the transition from horsehair to Luxembourg.

Perhaps there are drugs which will enable the subject to examine horsehair with the aim of uncovering its link to Luxembourg and beyond. It’s interesting to note that, to my knowledge, in none of the journalism or literature on powerful psychoactive or hallucinogenic drugs is the capacity to reverse engineer thought to a granular degree mentioned. Profound and possibly life-changing insights are among those revelations routinely scrutinised but this should not be confused with the etiological project to illuminate and examine the components of serial thinking.

Extraordinary triumphs of invention and innovation are achieved every day by exercises in thinking unenhanced by central nervous system stimulants and unsupported by a detailed understanding or knowledge of where the fundaments of thought originate or how they might be recognised.

That said, the primary focus of this essay is on the mental conditions in which everyday thinking, regardless of content, takes place.

In 2021 the field of machine learning underwent a step change when OpenAI launched DALL-E, a text-to-image model that could generate digital images from natural language descriptions known as ‘prompts’. (DALL-E. (2024, Nov 14). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/DALL-E)

Large Language Model AIs are activated with instructions or prompts but their instructors do not know what results to expect. The gap is closing insofar as there is emerging a connoisseurship of the language of the prompt that enables assessments of what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘successful’ prompt.

Alongside the image generators DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are text generators, such as Chat-GPT, driven by LLMs. Both types of generator draw on huge collections of text and images taken from the Internet. Both are said to generate new and original content – content that has not been thought or seen before.

The generative technologies purportedly feature a break with modelling based on either structures of consciousness or what are imagined to be structures of consciousness. The excitement in some quarters suggests that technologies which collect then reformulate/reassemble/recombine or, in some sense, quote from or ‘render in the style of…’, are seen as halfway to some kind of intelligence, be it human-like or machinic.

The generative models certainly overrode one of the obstacles to AI design, namely a predisposition to anthropomorphism that has limited the scope of emerging systems by restricting them to a superficial and mechanistic analysis of the operations of the mind. The vast amounts of ‘scraped’ data will inevitably include a quantity of useless information that has been sucked up in the megascrape. Given that one person’s ‘useless’ is another’s essential component and that neither of these persons can be aware of all the information upon which they depend, the presence of the kitchen sink in a data set casually regarded as containing ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ can only be encouraging given our tendency to ignore or discount many categories of mental events in the interests of mental hygiene.

It would be uncontroversial to note that both our own minds and the data bases exploited by AI contain vast amounts of information and that the purpose of these accumulations is to synthesise novel forms of information. It is probably the case that most people do not know how AI text or image generators work or how information that we humans absorb is memorised, reproduced or becomes part of a synthesized event such as a thought.

Experts assure us that the assertions of technophiles regarding the inevitable rise and rise of AI platforms up to and then beyond the capacities of the human mind are fanciful.  some of the quite recent convulsions in AI engineering give pause to such blithe dismissal. It is conceivable, for example, that while the collectors, or plunderers, of  data will be constrained by their humanness in terms of what they are able to envisage, there may arise, quite separately, breakthroughs in neuroscience that not only constitute step changes in the understanding of mental processes but uncover related structures that are initially manipulated by humans but then prove susceptible to extension to posthuman levels.

Returning to the notion of useless or unimportant thoughts, if an individual suffers from anxiety, as increasingly many do, then unimportant thoughts may acquire adhesive qualities out of proportion to their importance. Anxiety has no axe to grind – it will adhere to anything in its path. It resides as a potential in all minds, a dark lake tending to overflow. It is a mistake to assume that only events or issues that would be expected to make the subject anxious will make the subject anxious. Anything can make the subject anxious. Which is where strength of mind comes in. The application of such a strength can hold these tiresome irrelevances at bay. This is not an athletic achievement – most people just learn how to do it. It involves an ability to evaluate a constant stream of mental events in order summarily to dismiss most of them. Clearly this is an imprecise art but it is a skill, exercised throughout our waking hours. The skill is embedded, it will function efficiently despite being barely perceptible. It lies somewhere between suppression and ignoring.

In relation to personal thought control there is strong cultural support for the no-nonsense school of conscious, willed suppression – criteria for the exclusion of, say, irrational, accidental, disgusting, guilt inducing and gender threatening thoughts, are easy to come by and widely discussed. These anti-psychological remedies can be summarised as either ‘Don’t think about it’ or ‘You probably need to be busier’.

The situation at Berghain, the exclusive Berlin nightclub founded in 2004, widely regarded as ‘the most famous nightclub in the world’, is instructive in this respect:

The difficulty of getting into Berghain is almost as legendary as, or more legendary than, the club itself. (How To Get Into Berghain and Why Not To – Joseph Pearson. The Needle https://needleberlin.com/2015/01/12/how-to-get-into-berghain-and-why-not-to/ )

Visitors to the club must join a queue that is always very long; waiting times range from two to six hours and permission to enter is denied to 50% of petitioners. Aspirants have no idea of the criteria exercised by the door staff. After 30 years no one has any idea. Sven Marquardt, chief bouncer, has been interviewed on a number of occasions and has never spilled the beans.

All would-be Berghain patrons feel they should have a plan. Plans are discussed not just in the queue but in the days before travelling to the club. It may be that the door staff have seen it all (they have) and many people in the queue expect this to be the case. Perhaps, then, the best plan is to have no plan. Just be what you are. Wear what you want. You can’t read their minds. But it’s still worth considering what not having a plan might be like. It shouldn’t, in fact, be hard to act as if you don’t have a plan. You could work on a look, a manner, then act as if this wasn’t a plan.

The door staff are endeavouring to weed out those who attempt to fool the door by portraying themselves as worldly in all worlds. Given the high levels of rejection, the staff have claimed for themselves an uber-worldliness that compels aspirants to examine themselves at every level, including style, comportment, demeanour, degree of self-possession, absence of obsequiousness and lack of eagerness. Berghain is a gay club yet does not discriminate between gays and straights. That said, it has otherwise succeeded in distilling then inoculating its supplicants with their most destabilising preoccupations, delivering to many of the more suggestible ones a withering and disdainful rebuff.

Sure, not every rejected clubber will traipse mournfully away from the grey slab of Berghain consumed by the worms of self-abnegation. But as a working model of a courtly style of imposing abjection it has a violent purity.

Berghain disdain only works because it homes in on our latent sense of unworthiness. Not only that but something Berghain-like seems to be going on in our minds anyway, something that has only a tenuous connection with nightclub protocols. We are, as Berghain bouncers, policing a constantly incoming flow, dispensing entrance and its refusal according to mysterious criteria that none are able to describe. In addition, we are prey to a nagging identification with those who are not worthy, those who may test the borders again another night and keep on trying.

We have ourselves and we have a constant flow of thoughts. Which of these is us? There is me and there’s what goes through my mind. Are these things supposed to define me?  It doesn’t seem fair. Half the time I realise I’ve been thinking and I’ve completely forgotten what it was about. Then there’s all the stuff that’s so random and irrelevant to anything that it vaporises in the blink of an eye. But then there’s the stuff that should be instantly disowned but not because it’s trivial. It’s simply offensive. It’s shameful. It drifts in on the tail of a harmless whatever but it’s not you. Okay, it came up out of the back of your head but what can you do about that? It’s a terrible thing to think. But it didn’t stay long but now it’s gone. I should think so too. Certainly not the sort of thing I want in my mind, so fuck off out.

This is the Berghain model in action but transposed to the realm of interior hygiene: I’m rejecting any thoughts that I consider disreputable yet my mind is blithely delivering stuff that I find shameful and would make me an outcast were it disclosed. This state of affairs is intensified by the withholding from me of any information as to the nature of the boundaries I may have crossed.

If there were anything of value in mental events coloured by anxiety then it would lie in their potential to encourage an engagement with the world rather than the psyche. The world would be tested to determine if the anxiety were justified.

If an unticketed, substandard thought could somehow be captured and subjected to reverse engineering designed to reveal its lineage, would it lead back to a thought or a memory that was important in some way? Possibly. But this assumes that only important thoughts generate a cascading effect. What if all thoughts generated this effect?

The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas observed that

During the day, we have hundreds of psychically intense  experiences when we conjure ideas from an inner medley of body experience, unconscious memories, and instinctual response. Each experience is fragmented by the associations it brings up: we bring together many factors only to find that whatever lucid ideas we have are broken up in the process. Psychic life during an ordinary day, then, is an endless sequence of psychic intensities and their subsequent fragmentations.

Bollas. C. Cracking Up – The Work of Unconscious Experience, 1995. p4

The mind, were it not significantly regulated, could allow into consciousness all the streams at once. This would not create a meaningful experience so much as an immersion so overwhelming that the subject would beg for the off switch.

You can argue that the ‘disjointed flow of fragments’ is also powered by memory – it’s just that we don’t recognize any links between the fragments.

I‘m not referring to the ordinary thinking mode where you have a thought and it makes you think of something else. Where one thought follows another and much of the time it’s because you want it to. Where there’s a connection between the thoughts and it’s a simple, straightforward one. Without such effortless connectivity thinking would be exhausting. In fact it’s hard to imagine how it would be if, like the telephone engineers who kneel before dark green junction boxes in the street, we were routinely obliged to test countless connections before finding one that seamlessly unfolded from its precursor. (The engineer, of course, is looking for the one that doesn’t work, not the myriad that require no attention).

There’s a temptation here to imagine that that’s the way cavemen thought: laboriously moving from one dead end to the next with no idea of how to move in a useful direction.  It can’t have been like that. Suppose the next thought never came – the caveman would waste away like an apple on the ground.

Take two lines on the London underground system. The Northern Line and the Victoria Line, for example.  Much of the time you can’t see any connection but if you get out at Euston on the Bank branch of the Northern Line you can see the entrance to the Victoria Line a few meters away. You can stand on one platform and see the trains pulling in or out on the other platform. You can go down into the Northern Line and come up out of the Victoria Line. Nobody is concerned to find out how you made the connection. The connection, nevertheless, is the Tube system.

I’d prefer to believe that the thought and the memory were joined because if they weren’t then your brain is just firing off for no particular reason. Does that seem likely? What function would it serve? Is it not equally likely that conscious mental contents that appear to have no purpose are actually coming from somewhere? That they have departed from somewhere? And therefore that stored memories and thoughts enjoy a dynamic potential which will result in every stored component being in some way incomplete and therefore never having the capacity to arise as a sole mental event? Which would mean that there is no such thing as a sole, unitary mental event.

Or maybe you had the thought because the memory prompted it. The memory, just before it becomes conscious, generates a precursor in the form of a thought. Which sort of suggests that the memory wants to get out. Do they want to get out? Are they not content with just being recalled? Perhaps if they are not recalled they want to get out. Which suggests a certain urgency: queues of memories jostling for some fresh air. But that would mean that there resides, within us all, myriad snips, clips, shorts, maybe even features (probably not) that are waiting for their moment in the sun. They’re not just stacked in the vague labyrinths, cupboards and libraries, they’re waiting for their chance.

I think the reason I’ve got to the point where every thought prompts a memory is that I like the idea of it. I like the idea of long timelines feeding into the hub of present perceptions so that every instant of now is orchestrally enhanced at no extra cost. Allowing such an array to be apparent takes an effort, although there are those for whom such an unchecked abundance is an affliction.  You can read, for example, about people with strong synesthesia who find all this chronic and exotic connectivity exhausting, as in that documentary where the woman found Piccadilly Circus overwhelming because everything bright or moving or noisy set off colours and sounds and tastes and she just wanted to get out of there back to the countryside to which she had, some time ago, retired in order to get some peace and quiet, some tastelessness.

There are those people, who are generally foolish, who think that dreams are the product of the brain randomly flipping through the day’s contents, cleaning up or decluttering after a day out. These people should, if they can’t actually work it out for themselves, read some books. Not that they would because clearly they don’t give a fuck. I have no time for them, actually. They are living a life of luxury. Insofar as it is luxurious to disconnect and thereby considerably simplify your days and nights.

However, one should not discount the possibility that you can drift into a random firing state. Maybe when looking out of bus windows. This could be dismissed, in the usual way, by the foolish, as typical default activity, as in “Yeah, when you stop thinking that’s what happens.” Like you could ever stop thinking. Like they think that when you’re not thinking in a big ticket in the window way then there is no thought. When frankly if you could stop thinking then what happens would be completely fascinating. Not just some raggle taggle parade of whatever pops up, that has no value – it would be like a holiday. What do they (the foolish) think happens up there? I say ‘up’ because I can’t be bothered to get into where thinking is. I could but I don’t want to. The thing is, in a bus, you should treasure this so-called random stuff. Sure, it might be trivial but that is very much an Idea Under Capitalism where if you can’t use it then it’s useless. It’s a whole way of thinking: the Waste Disposal model. Shit out these worthless and possibly contagious extrusions (or intrusions depending on how you’re feeling at the time)! The mind – we are assured – needs to declutter, to dispense with the countless stored moments that accrue in the course of a day. But why just a day? Surely the mind needs to dispense with all the intolerable crowding lest it create a sediment that will creep upwards to capture the adventitious roots of new arrivals and confuse the process of taking root. Shit out these seething minds!

If the logic of such a position were rigorously pursued, the mind would simply be an intriguing but inconvenient way station through which information in transit passes before deteriorating into meaningless and vaporous particles. In such a model – the intestinal model perhaps – the mind retains a capacity to absorb informational nutrient as a means of securing its continuation but is not significantly changed by the information passing through it.

The extraordinary aspect of all this is that we are all, including the foolish, operating in the dark. Probably ‘with the dark’ is a more upbeat way of putting it. We are surrounded on all sides by continents of dynamic information whose structures, content, meaning, function, consistency, contradictions and accessibility are at best hard to grasp, often difficult to understand, contradictory and unreasonable. I’m referring to the world at large and the worlds within us, the latter characterised, in psychoanalytic circles, as the ‘unconscious’ (plus, of course, what we can readily summon from our store of memories).

The world at large is, in some respects, easier to analyse – much of it being susceptible to inspection because it’s out there and out there is the favoured locus of attention in most cultures. The unconscious is so elusive that it’s easier not to  inspect it at all. But it runs the show insofar as what is perceptible out there is filtered and shaped by it. It also shapes our endeavours and their fruits, the nature of our customs, manners, values, our sense of identity, and the ways in which we develop relationships, ideologies and economic structures.

It was ever thus. But it’s an annoying proposition. Is there any proof at all that these imperceptible forces even exist? A close look at what comes to mind might reveal traces of unlicensed activity. If a licence was not issued then from where does this activity spring?

01/2025

Related Essays:

Headful

Life with the Snippets

This essay is the first in a series comprising Rolodex Dreams;  How They Arise; Headful and Life with the Snippets

The old-school Rolodex, invented in 1956, carried a maximum of 400 file cards. Current models have kept to this limit. All the cards are mounted on a wheel. If the wheel were somehow set to rotate steadily without human intervention then its cards would rise alphabetically into view one by one.

The rotary desk-top device was designed as a data store and memory surrogate but in its capacity as a provider of discrete, framed packets of information it can be seen as a crude thinking machine – the slow-witted nephew of, for example, the punch card data sorting system, introduced by IBM in 1928, that would evolve, under the auspices of Bletchley Park, into decryption machines. The much earlier Jacquard loom, patented in 1804, had seen the punch card used to accelerate the production of complex fabric patterns.

The Rolodex accessed by human intervention i.e. its normal use, delivers something that superficially resembles planned, deliberate, focused, step-by-step thought. Such a thing probably doesn’t exist but an enormous amount of effort to produce it is continuously applied to such a project by our species.

Our experience of thought is generally of a streaming process in which the separation of the stream into component units is not deemed essential unless, for example, it is considered that a problem might be solved by selecting and rearranging some of these units into a plan, an explanation, a theory etc. By clustering one specialised array of units – contact details – into an outsourced collection, the Rolodex eases a small part of the sorting process. It’s a list on a wheel. It does not think, it serves the thinker.

Of the many mental activities not taken into account by sophisticated computing devices, let alone rudimentary mechanical memory aids, is the business of sorting the material that, in human thought, is suppressed in order to achieve momentary focus. A significant category of mental activity is simply missing from the picture. Coders and their programmes cannot take into consideration more than a tiny fraction of factors that seem, like junk DNA, to have no functional significance. That, indeed, is the point of these single-minded devices.

In the case of the Rolodex it’s taken for granted that the other 399 available sets on the rotary wheel will not crowd in on the card you’re reading or that rogue cards will simply appear for a moment then vaporise.

In our everyday minds arise myriad mental effects, some of them thoughts, others thought-like, others mere wisps that vanish within moments of their arrival, routinely passing through consciousness and out the other side. These are routinely ignored. They must be ignored. We all learn how to do this.  Some can do it better than others. The Rolodex, in its modest way, does it for you. The device does not hold a vast number of filecards that might attempt to emulate the capacity of the mind. It would be at least as big as a small county if it did. The desk would have to be situated inside it somehow. It would be widely regarded as a storehouse of utterly useless information.

In the case of the Rolodex you fill the filecards one by one and clip them onto the wheel. It becomes a citadel of unlikely purity. It cannot dealphabetise itself and it will not generate novelty. It has, therefore, a comforting quality if comfort is to be found in packets of data that arise in single file. It was not, of course, designed to do any more than augment memory and organise data sets.

Staying with it for a little longer, however, imagining a modestly enormous device – a London Eye of a filing system, loaded with numberless bits of information and monitored by a human observer – then, over time, as its great wheel rotated, what appeared at first to be a succession of discrete, unrelated cards would appear intermittently to form classes, clusters and themes. Obviously this would only occur if the human observer were to attribute significance to any combinations and sequences that might crop up. Even if a pattern could be discerned it would probably be construed as unworthy of remark; in the genetic sense, a ‘sport’ but not one with desirable characteristics.

On the other hand, the observer need not find any significances at all, they might simply regard links as inevitable and unimportant.

It’s tempting to compare these discounted instances to the contents of daydreaming – a state of mind in which thinking has no apparent purpose, it just ticks along. It feels like it could go anywhere. (If the thinker has this thought during a daydream the daydream will abruptly terminate.) The daydreamer may not even know they are daydreaming. So little value is conferred that the paying of attention itself is suspended. You could almost claim that most daydreaming is lost as soon as it is found insofar as awareness of the activity is largely retrospective – you realise you’ve been doing it and within moments all that was air is vacuum.

Daydreams often strike us – if we can manage to assess them at all – as random successions of thoughts having no connection to each other. We tell ourselves, perhaps, that this is what unfocused thinking is. It may be the case, however, that the reduced attention paid to daydreams facilitates the emergence of another class of thought, one that is as worthy of consideration as the purposeful organising that shapes much conventionally motivated thinking.

With daydreaming you are off-piste. One moment you’re pursuing a thought and the next moment there is no pursuit. One thing has led to another. But you didn’t particularly notice. You wouldn’t be able to retrace your steps.

Daydreaming is always off-piste. It cannot be initiated and it is not possible to detect the moment at which the conscious pursuit of a thought is suspended, either at the moment when this occurs or in retrospect. The moments that ensue cannot usually be counted, even if they were separable into countable units, which they may not be. It is conceivable that they could go on for hours. But they don’t. Something breaks the flow and the piste is restored within a split second. You may be able to remember where you were before the interruption – gazing out of a bus window, maybe, thinking about something more or less purposefully. But it is, alas, impossible to recall what you were thinking just a split second before going off-piste. If it were possible then you could examine this pre-off-piste thought in order to see the extent to which it might have either enabled or fallen foul of the daydreamed thought that followed it.

If you could do this then you could identify the characteristics of an off-piste enabling thought and deliberately shape other thoughts in such a way that within moments of thinking them you were off-piste. Such a proposal only makes sense if one subscribes to the notion that going off-piste is worth it even if you can’t remember what you were daydreaming about.

The goal is to become capable of lucid off-piste daydreaming. It is not the case that everyone needs to do this. Some will find it useful however.

The tissue is thin. Think of those times when you’re reading drowsily. Someone has been trying to get three lengths of wood to fit in the side of a wall. This really needs to be done. A group of people is still waiting for the arrangements to be concluded. They are standing near the wood.

Excuse me for a moment, I nodded off.

In so doing I dropped into an ongoing situation featuring wood lengths. But now I’m back, drowsily reading whatever I was reading before I dropped off. I can just about make out the tail feathers of the last moments spent within the daydream before I snapped out of it. Something to do with wood. The tissue is so thin. Within a second the sentences printed on the page had disappeared and were replaced with something that apparently had nothing whatsoever to do with what I was reading. The absence of conventional sense in the thoughts and images that ensue is spellbinding. It feels like they could stream indefinitely. There appear to be no constraints other than impending sleep or someone dropping a cooking implement next door.

It’s remarkable how thin the tissue is. We sometimes speak of our dreams with awe, as if we were honoured to be visited by these compressed, elusive packages of bad grammar. And even if we don’t improve the grammar thereby knocking some sense into the irruptions, they often tend to be memorable, if we remember them, despite their lack of legibility. Almost as if there were something irresistible about illegibility. And the thing is, these tricky items don’t actually require a tired or drowsy subject – they find the latter convenient certainly but it’s not as if you daydream only when you’re gazing out of the bus window or similar, you can be wide awake firing on all cylinders and all it takes, in this case, is the fact that there’s nothing much to do until you get to your destination. And next thing you know…

11/2024

‘Rolodex Dreams’ begins to develop ideas that are extended in subsequent Strength Weekly essays:

How They Arise

Headful

Life with the Snippets

Around here real and imaginary characters are shockingly always crossing paths.

Diane Williams – ‘How Much Did You Ever Think the World of Me? (2019)

The mammals of the Oligocene are often described as though they were halfway creatures, semi-formed prototypes: dog-bears (bear relatives that looked like dogs), bear-dogs (dog relatives that looked like bears), large cat-like sabre-toothed hunters that were not true cats, and the most charismatic members of the Oligocene bestiary, the entelodonts, or ‘hell pigs’: each as big as a cow and equipped with huge crocodile-like jaws, a sort of ‘gigantic, hyper-carnivorous warthog’. Not actually pigs at all, they were more closely related to whales.

Francis Gooding – ‘Hell Pigs’, a review of Tim Flannery – ‘Europe: the First One Hundred Million Years’, London Review of Books vol 42, #1. (2020)

Among the many inhibitions that beset my writing for performance there is, in addition to a number of quite severe constraints that I apply voluntarily, one that never relaxes its grip and must be regularly challenged. It has an almost irresistible force and settles on me like a slothful powdery moth coiling and uncoiling its proboscis, injecting a nectar that tames unruliness and blankets the mind with logic. Narrative has a uniquely sedative gravitational pull that, I find, scuppers the poetic pleasures of disconnection and incongruity. Write half a page and groan, even as you strike the keys, as beginnings sprout middles and middles taper to their ends.

It’s hardly a novel thought (it’s hardly a novel) but if you don’t want theatre to tell stories then there are countless alternatives to narrative structure. The first performance script I wrote was ‘Jack, the Flames!’ (1972) and it was significantly lacking in throughlines, coherent structure and character depth. Which is what I wanted. I was in the habit of writing down my dreams back then so I transcribed some of them then imitated them to generate more text. The script was all over the place but Hilary knocked it into shape. For the next few years, however, with subsequent shows, I was bothered by the feeling that maybe I should pay more attention to this structure thing. I tried to put endings on the scripts that felt like endings but they were the weakest part of these works. I was very taken with The People Show back then and they never had endings. Or proper beginnings really. But when I picked up my pen (there were no PCs then) I couldn’t stop drifting into narrative. I’d go for a few pages without it and the next thing I knew I was connecting up the scenes as if they were going somewhere. I just couldn’t stop it.

I found myself doing something I didn’t believe in but it would creep up on me. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a proper playwright, I’d never wanted that. I liked other people’s stories in films and books, no problem there, but I didn’t find their various structures appropriate for theatre. I didn’t actually find theatre’s own structures appropriate, come to that. But when I was about 18 I read Ulysses in my bedroom one summer and that did it. A little while later I read Naked Lunch. After those two books there was no going back. I mean, do you want to live forever in your home town? Between about 1962 and 1972 I was gratifyingly overwhelmed by a barrage of experimental films, novels, poetry and Happenings and moved in circles increasingly populated by adventurers presenting a variety of pathological behaviours. All this was both formative and obliterative. I had so decisively crossed the channel that I couldn’t have gone back if I’d wanted to. To aspire to narrative would have been a betrayal of all that magnificent reading and viewing and hanging out.

But although I felt I had placed myself beyond the allure of the conventional play form, I hadn’t reckoned with the after effects of the 18 years of exposure to narrative that had preceded the meltdown. My parents were not connoisseurs of the arts but in their bookshelves I had discovered and devoured Steinbeck, James Jones, Salinger and Huxley. Throughout my boyhood I had returned time and time again to my father’s collection of Richmal Crompton’s William books and loved every single page of the witty, eventful, stories and their variously naughty, irascible, pompous and vain characters. In all this pre-adult reading I was gripped by the expressive elements on display, including the construction of narratives. But a few years later, the early 60s tsunami kicked in, I read Artaud at university (as distinct from the Eng Lit for which I had enrolled) and thought that I was ready to dance my own steps.

I saw four or five films a week at Uni, in the local cinemas, the local art-house cinema and the Uni film societies. After Uni I went to film school. I had already seen Breathless (1960), Zazie dans le Metro (1960) and Jules et Jim (1962) in my home town and along with my fellow RCA students I then revelled in a three year binge during which it seemed that a new Nouvelle Vague film, or something European with a similar spirit, was being released every week.

It was the thing in my home town to shout out in the cinema. Wags of all classes would bellow witty, indignant, inspired, vocal graffiti at the screen, usually to roars of approval and, in the case of those cinemas with raked floors, the rolling of empty bottles downhill towards the screen. There are many such outgusts that I cherish to this day, among them ‘Shag’er while she’s still warm, mate!’ addressed to the monster hovering above the body of the scantily clad young woman he had just killed; also ‘What about the woodpeckers?’, a riposte to Rod Taylor, in ‘The Birds’ (1963), who has just frantically nailed boards across all the windows and doors in the house under attack by angry birds in order to save Tippi Hedren and himself and then mops his brow and says to Tippi ‘We should be all right now.’

Quite why Roger Dibbs undertook to come to a showing of Alain Resnais’ ‘Last Year in Marienbad’ (1961) I’ll never know. One of the artiest art-house films in the world at that time, it had done well at the Venice International Film festival but had, as they say, divided the critics. On one side of the critical chasm were those found it hopelessly obscure, painfully slow, devoid of meaning, little more than a form of torture. Others considered it to be a thing of great beauty, a masterpiece, ‘one of the most influential movies ever made (as well as one of the most reviled), Marienbad is both utterly lucid and provocatively opaque’ (J. Hoberman, Village Voice, 2008).

Roger Dibbs was a very cool dancer who was into jazz rather than The Beatles. He was well groomed in a tasteful European jacket and tie style, something of the lounge lizard about him, and his skills included the throwing of window boxes full of soil and flowers through the plate glass windows of the Lending Library, setting fire to a great pile of old newspapers in my friend’s mother’s hallway and tipping a huge ornamental urn from a pub balustrade onto a white Triumph TR4 sports car parked ten feet below. The police hurried to the last scene and captured half a dozen of us. Dibbs vanished but we resolved the issue by saying to the main policeman ‘Roger Dibbs did it and this is his address.’ He was a vandal, but so well dressed. I call his vandalisms skills because he practised them often, usually at the weekends, and they acquired greater and greater polish as he moved with charm and reserve through the leisure circles of that town in a flat area of the country.

Anyway, after about 25 minutes of vitalisingly melancholy monotone French voiceover as the camera tracked ‘once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure of another century, this enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel, where corridors succeed endless corridors – silent deserted corridors overloaded with a dim, cold ornamentation of woodwork, stucco, moldings, marble, black mirrors, dark paintings, columns, heavy hangings, sculptured door frames, series of doorways, galleries, transverse corridors that open in turn on empty salons, rooms overloaded with an ornamentation from another century, silent halls … ‘ there erupted across what, up to that point, had been a poised, unbreathing silence a stentorian interruption from the cheap seats. Dibbs – ‘It’s a load of bollocks, isn’t it, Dave?’

Delighted as I was with his uncouth observation, I didn’t actually agree with Dibbs. I felt his pain but also my own shocked enchantment. I have held Marienbad in my top three for some considerable time and while my own shows are considerably faster paced and regularly feature spasmic, homicidal and tourettish outblasts, the languid, plotless, frozen, dreamy world conjured by Resnais and his screenwriter Robbe-Grillet, with its barely mobile, stately and expressionless actors speaking without emotion or facial nuance is just what the doctor ordered insofar as I find it unfailingly restorative and just plain exciting. Lynch produces similar effects but they, like Fukunaga and Pizzolatto’s ‘True Detective’ (2014) and Refn’s ‘Too Old to Die Young’ (2019), are enhanced by explosive scenes of violence and episodes of manic pace. Refn actually out-slows Resnais – his 13 hour, 10 episode TV show glaciates exquisitely, pushing the envelope off the edge of the escritoire with the ‘Is there something wrong with my TV?’ majesty of the dialogue scenes – every single one of the dialogue scenes – in which characters routinely pause for between three and five seconds between exchanges – to call it a tic makes it sound screwball, it’s a cavernous tock – without ever acknowledging any situational reason for this extreme stylisation. The effect, in all three cases, is to bathe the most routine scenes in unremitting dread.

It helped that I didn’t like theatre itself very much. It was basically very strange but everyone behaved as though it were perfectly normal to carry on like that. The utter oddness of dressing up, learning lines, pretending to be someone else and inhabiting a space bounded by flats, drapes and lights was rarely acknowledged. This awkward other-worldliness was compounded by, in this country at least, the deployment of a range of hystericised (but not invigorating) speaking styles which, at their particular times, were held to be in some way reflective of the way people spoke and thought in the nearby everyday life.

Theatre was clearly stuck and it annoyed me. When I went to see it by accident it made me bad-tempered. But there was so much to be taken from films and books.

Or just today, a bespectacled red-faced man walks past the window. He has a monstrous extra face beneath his chin. It ripples down to his top shirt button. Well, for a second perhaps. The kind of thing that happens when you’re wearing your reading glasses rather than your street glasses. It’s just a glasses thing. Gone with the wind. No big deal. But in that second what a show! A flesh riot in the high street!

Where do these snippettes come from? Do we make them up on the hoof, effortlessly, like nonchalant poets? Are our skills in this regard so fluent that at the least suggestion of an interruption to the flow we activate an elusive but super-efficient mechanism that seals all gaps? Which in turn suggests a certain urgency. What’s the rush? What could go wrong?

It would be a mechanism that works on an anything-is-better-than-nothing principle: if we didn’t fill those gaps, who knows what would press forth? But in the case of the extra face, monstrosity emerged anyway. And isn’t that something we’d rather not know about? So maybe ‘making them up on the hoof’ isn’t the way to look at it.

In fact it’s as if ‘we’ have very little to do with it. We just provide a platform. The images pop up in one piece, ready to go. A bit like an encounter with the Australian stonefish which delivers an incapacitating sting when accidentally stepped upon in shallow seas. We just do the treading – we didn’t ask for the fish.

It is unlikely that there is within us a repository in which resides, say, an image of a monstrous extra face suitable for insertion beneath a passerby’s chin. There is, however, the silent continent, the inland empire, the unconscious which is by its very nature restlessly protean. So utterly efficient is the messaging connectivity that, in terms of filling the gaps, it’s like lying in a tent in the rain – an incessant drumming against a membrane that keeps us dry but if you poke at it the water gets through. Is it conceivable that the rain is always raining? And the only reason we are not constantly drowned by intrusions is because we keep busy?

Were there such a repository then this is how its contents might be stored

The other weekend The Guardian had a story about Haribo suing some Spanish bar owners who were selling jelly bears containing alcohol. The Spaniards, the report said, ‘planned to carry on selling their products in Spain – and to their customers in France and the UK – to show that their bears would not be cowed.’ This raises the question of whether Haribo has a position on cows that will not be borne.

I realise this is not top notch wordplay but it had to be done. Ideally the past participle of ‘bear’ will not be ‘borne’, it will be ‘beared’. This would then deliver the much desired ‘cows that would not be beared’. This, in turn, suggests that the cow will resist transformation into a feared rather than domestic creature.

On the other hand, in the statement ‘Peter and Susan were cowed by dogs’, we will find, lightly concealed, the possibility that ‘Peter and Susan were dogged by cows.’ So much better. It suggests that, under certain conditions, the placid cow will be caninised.

It may seem odd, decadent even, to dwell on such fleeting flukes. To treat them as if they had something to say. It must be said, however, that, in their way, they do approach the Oligocene. (See quote at top of post.) In the Oligocene (I keep writing it ‘Oligoscene’ so I looked up ‘oligo’ just now and what do you know: just a few or scanty. From the Greek ‘oligos‘ (as in oligarchy but I was slow to make the connection) (palaeontologically speaking it must refer to an era of which little is known) (despite the profusion of creatures for which it is known) it is clear that things were coming and going, crossing paths, colliding, blending, unblending, indecisive, changeable, making up their minds, haven’t quite got this but we’re getting there, this will never work, it could go either way, yeah but give it a chance

I was driving along the M4 out of town one time and had to slow down because of a collision up ahead. As we crawled past the police cars a bizarre sight slowly came into view. On the other side of the buckled crash barrier two trucks had clipped each other with such force that their rear doors had burst and their contents were strewn across all six lanes of the motorway. The drivers were talking to the police on the hard shoulder. One truck had been full of furniture – sofas, armchairs and tables. These were lying randomly around on the tarmac. The other truck was a baker’s truck and had been full of loaves, buns, tarts, doughnuts, battenberg slices, cupcakes and bags of flour. The bags had exploded and created a Christmas scene across ground zero. A heavily powdered sofa bore several dainties in odd clusters and ragged stacks, as if impulsively abandoned by two untidy people. Slices of white bread festooned an inverted reclining chair. Jam doughnuts littered the scene like beached anemones. And so on.

As well as resembling a respectable site specific installation piece, the spectacle was a fine snapshot of the poetic process which went some way beyond ‘the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella’ (The Songs of Maldoror, Comte de Lautréamont) to a higher hybridism wherein the battenberg on the scatter cushion was not on it but of it. A creature of a drained undersea world.

the possibility of recognising nature, even distorted nature, which is, after all, a kind of struggle between my interior life and the external world as it exists for most people

Picasso in ‘Life with Picasso’, Francoise Gilot (1964)

Freud, of course, gave us the Slip (in ‘The Psychopathologies of Everyday Life’ (1901)), something of an ur-text here insofar as it introduces the notion of the unbidden utterance – an involuntary speech event featuring the partial expression of unsettling memories and ideas in words which resemble and replace those that would have been spoken as part of an uncorrupted original remark. A similar but visually based principle animates what we could call the space-filler, wherein an often minor, often everyday, occurrence seems to elude comprehension yet is nevertheless, with the speed of thought, framed within an interpretation. The malfunctioning aspect of this operation – the absence of an initially acceptable understanding – features the barely conscious acknowledgement of a gap, a black hole, in the generally unstanchable stream of consciousness. Nature adores such a vacuum. Ever loaded, always cocked, it will spritz the narrative with alternatives drawn from what is probably a vast but uncatalogued collection of all that is inconvenient. A malcontent is undulating a tree. Public order is breaking down. A public good is being trashed.

(An earlier version of the paragraph above referred to ‘unnatural alternatives’ ( 2 lines from end of para) – this is careless. It suggests that the natural is limited to what we know. ) (Picasso saw it otherwise: “…I don’t want there to be three or four or a thousand possibilities of interpreting my canvas. I want there to be only one and in that one, to some extent, the possiblity of recognising nature, even distorted nature, which is, after all, a kind of struggle between my interior life and the external world as it exists for most people….I don’t try to express nature; rather, as the Chinese put it, to work like nature.”)

Reading an article on ‘Little Women’ (2019) in Sight & Sound (January 2020) I glanced at one of the accompanying photos and was surprised to note that Emma Watson had folded her right leg across Greta Gerwig’s lap as she studied the script with the director and cast members Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh. Watson is slight of build yet her bent leg looks quite heavy. Her posture also looks quite uncomfortable.

But, of course, Watson is doing none of this. The ‘knee’ that is seen is formed by the lid of Gerwig’s laptop and her ‘calf’ is Gerwig’s lower leg. The photo is sufficiently dark to allow the casual glancer to fuse the two dark objects into one encircling limb. If the exposure and contrast are tweaked with photo editing tools the actuality of the arrangement becomes crystal clear:

In such a situation if one would be asked ‘Are you seeing things?’ then the answer must be ‘Yes, I am.’ And supposing it were then asked ‘These things that you see – are they worthy of remark?’ then the response should be frank: ‘They are largely useless. Most would be wise to ignore them. There may be those who have some use for them, however.’

It took several minutes to write the three preceding paragraphs and less than one half of one second to misread the seating arrangements in the photograph. Correction of that misreading took perhaps three or four seconds. The economics of this are sufficient to dispel any ideas of the value of the mistake that can never be made again. But I dwell on such phenomena in part because they are so hastily discharged.

These corrections and realignments probably happen throughout everyone’s day every day on the planet all the time. They probably start when everyone is very young, when a mixture of misreading and intermittent realignment is all we have. A little later realignment becomes a more conscious operation as our confidence feeds off a steadily expanding bank of successful adjustments. And of course, as we get older it is as if the need for realignments is greatly reduced, our skills in this field are consolidated and the incidents, if they are noticed at all, have no more importance than an itchy nose. It may be, however, that it’s not so much a matter of skill as we simply learn to ignore events that have no apparent meaning or value.

The crucial achievement of one who has deliberately and perhaps ‘methodically’ developed a paranoid frame of mind is to find, with considerable rapidity, connections and associations between objects and ideas that have no association or affinity. This destabilised mode of seeing lends itself equally successfully to the production of the double image, defined by Dali as ‘a representation of an object that is also, without the slightest physical or anatomical change, the representation of another entirely different object, the second representation being equally devoid of any deformation or abnormality betraying arrangement.’

Ernst, in a lecture delivered in 1935, described the objectives of systematic derangement variously: the exploitation of the fortuitous meeting of two distant realities on an inappropriate plane; (a) means of bewitching reason, taste, and conscious will; the cultivation of the effects of a systematic bewildering; based on nothing other than the intensification of the irritability of the faculties of the mind .

The paranoid state was held to have artistic value (in addition to its capacity for enabling misery and terror) insofar as it, apparently effortlessly, remodelled the exterior in the terms of some of the more volatile or inconstant currents of the unconscious.

When we did peripheral vision in A level Biology we learned some things that were useful. The usefulness of some of these things was immediately apparent and I have valued them ever since. There are various types of gaze. The dominant one is characterised by visual fixation and refers to the field of vision within the point of fixation – the centre of the gaze. Vision beyond the bounds of the point of fixation is deemed peripheral vision and takes up the larger part of the visual field.

One thing in the diagram that fixates attention is the unusual scope of far peripheral vision. You can see behind you. If you look at the side of someone’s head you’ll notice that the eye curves round the front of the head. Without actually turning the head at all you can exceed what might be assumed to be the outer limits of peripheral vision. There is a visible ground between 90° (approximately the mid-line of either shoulder) and 110° (beyond your shoulder), where straight ahead fixity is 0°: the far peripheral. Out of the corner of your eye.

They told us at school that the far peripheral enabled creatures to move around without turning their heads unduly, to avoid bumping into things and to become aware of threats before they get too close. It is inevitable that things seen out of the corner of one’s eye will often carry a certain weight of menace, usually mild to the point of becoming barely perceptible.

On the other hand, our tendency to misread peripheral information can be regarded as having a survival value comparable to the indisputable advantages of a built-in optical early warning system. It could almost be argued that if peripheral vision generally delivers insufficient detail this actually enhances the survival project insofar as one is compelled to double check just in case one has overlooked a ravening nearby bear, dog or highwayman.

We’re not talking ayahuasca here. This is the straight street, not even the high street. But if the structure of the eye is such that it facilitates both detection and misinterpretation then it is tempting to imagine the capacities of the corner of the eye being extended right across the visual field so that the peripheral eclipses the fixated.

But I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking ‘That’s all very well but how are you going to get to the shops/the cinema/the other side of the room?’ To which I would riposte ‘Yes but is it not conceivable in this case that what would then be seen would be not the consensual external but a marvellous mélange not dissimilar to the dogbear (or beardog)?’

It might be that you would then feel obliged to observe that ‘I am an airline pilot/driving instructor/ person. The only way that would work would be sitting down. And not in an aeroplane. Kindly remove your sewing-machine from the dissecting table.’

The information delivered by peripheral vision is, of course, invaluable but it is also imprecise. If it seems ominous, however, it is not always the case that one need be dogged or cowed by it. You have the option of immediately turning your head and instantly resolving the matter. If you choose not to turn your head then the misinterpretation may linger, which introduces the possibility of savouring the distorted elements connoisseurially: where you do not discard but retain, perhaps in the belief that while it might be distorted it can also be regarded as a free offer.

Saccades: A saccade (from Fr: jerk) is a quick, simultaneous movement of both eyes between two or more phases of fixation in the same direction. Humans and many animals do not look at a scene in fixed steadiness; instead, the eyes move around, locating interesting parts of the scene and building up a mental, three-dimensional ‘map’ corresponding to the scene. (Saccades: Wikipedia) In this example the viewer’s eyes will saccade as they track the movements of the saccading eye.

It’s misleading to conclude that visual distortions of this kind are damaged goods. Along with misheard speech and misread texts they constitute a constant but elusive source of inspiration for artists who are keen to examine the sources of inspiration. All that glimmers is not gold, needless to say. A lot of this stuff is off-cuts. But they who denied it supplied it and should not disdain authorship.

Authors are free to develop their material. Many of them would see such development as a seamless extension of techniques or anti-techniques that they employ as a matter of routine. When paying attention to the suburbs of attention is successful, the event may be called ‘a good idea’ or ‘a brainwave’, something that ‘popped up’ etc.

In the well-known but only moderately amusing joke about drunks, “Is this Wembley? No, it’s Thursday. So am I. Let’s have a drink.” the rewards of mishearing are made clear. The peripheral becomes the contaminant that enters the mainstream and determines its course.

The dominant contaminant is probably not misperceived so much as overlooked. Everyday thought teems with mental events and is accordingly filtered in order to maintain fixation. The thoughts that don’t fit fall away into the wings. We learned how to ignore them years ago. If we were to unlearn those lessons then the beardogbears could lollop out of the woods and display themselves and if we didn’t like them we could send them packing. It’s like going to the gym (I imagine) – the more you do an exercise the easier it gets.

On the foreshore of the Oxfam Book Shop a mint copy of ‘London in Fragments – a Mudlark’s Treasures’ by Ted Sandling. It’s about the people who dig antique fragments out of the mud when the Thames is at low tide. On Sandling’s first ever visit to the shore he spots a fragment of an old clay pipe and initially dismisses it as being simply too ordinary, as mudfinds go. On closer inspection he is excited to find that the bowl of the pipe is moulded to resemble ‘a perfect horse’s hoof, complete with a fetlock and a fine coat of hair.’ The muddy old pipe stem had been misperceived, its distortion overlooked. A thing of the interior was rejected in favour of the mundane. An inverted surrealisation has taken place: the hunter has construed something as unworthy of remark but upon taking it in hand he sees the commonplace morph into a dream object before his eyes. pipehorsepipe.