Plasma Pool

Around 5:00 a.m. on a cold Northern California morning in 2005, Aaron Fielding* of Los Altos, artist, poet, and musician, 27, entered his mother’s bedroom and told her that he may have to castrate himself. Caroline Fielding expressed concern for her son while Aaron lay down beside her on her bed. Aaron saw before him an hourglass full of sand as real as Macbeth’s dagger. He knew that the hourglass was illusory, but he also saw that it was about to run out. Its purpose was to communicate a message from God: You’re running out of time and you’re going to go to Hell if you don’t castrate yourself, Aaron. His body lay on the bed radiating with “burning cold, cold. It was like being on fire,” he tells me as we sit on the floor of his bedroom, drinking O’Doul’s and chain smoking, watching his four white rats as they scurry back and forth over one another in their metal cage. “Not all the way on fire,” Aaron went on, “but definitely burning, but a cold burning? Kind of like—I’m sure other schizophrenics have felt it too?—the burning of Hell.”

Aaron continues. “The sand’s ticking down to where like, I’m going to be fucked if I don’t do this. So I grab the scissors, go into the bathroom, and I cut off about two square inches from the center of my penis. And I held up the skin, the two square inches of skin, and I was like, Is this good enough?” After placing the skin on the sink, Aaron woke up his parents and said “I did it, I cut off some of my penis, you’ve got to take me in!” And they did. Although Aaron’s cuts left his testicles and most of his penis intact, he refers to this incident almost without exception as his “castration.” At the hospital, Aaron says, “They treat me like I’m a rapist. They assumed since I cut off some of my penis that it must be some suppressed guilt from raping somebody. That’s the vibe I got. So, I kinda got some shit in there, and then they just put a bandage around it and sent me into the loony bin.”

II

What would cause a man to cut off part of his penis? This is the most recent iteration of the question Aaron and his parents have been asking since his diagnosis with schizophrenia at 18, in his junior year of high school: Why? Aaron’s parents’ answers to this question are profoundly different from Aaron’s own. Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, in The Politics of Experience, saw schizophrenia as an attempt to deal with ostensibly unchangeable life conditions. “Without exception,” he writes, “the experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.” Aaron sees his condition as just such a product of his surroundings:

I believe that schizophrenia is also more environmental than it is chemical. Not that there can’t be chemical things. But I think they put too much stuff on just saying, It’s in your head, and the chemicals there, and we’ll give you this. I mean sure it can kind of do something with all that, but I think schizophrenia is basically an environmental, cultural disease, rather than a chemical one.

Aaron’s formal diagnosis is not with schizophrenia, but with schizoaffective disorder of the depressive (as opposed to bipolar) type, one of four disorders in the schizophrenic “spectrum” (the others being schizoid personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, and schizophrenia as such). Schizoaffective disorder is marked by traditional first-rank schizophrenic symptoms—delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thought and speech—compounded by an affective (or “mood”) disorder such as depression. Beginning in the latter decades of the past century, there was a blurring of lines between schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder as the latter became more a popular diagnosis and the two were seen to be increasingly clinically similar; the latter, after all, as Aaron points out to me, can be seen as the former made worse by a second disorder. If the patient is a child or adolescent, a phase Aaron was exiting at the time of his diagnosis, deciding between the two diagnoses was especially slippery, to the point that relapses for patients suffering from a first psychotic break classified under either disorder are today studied together, and a patient labeled with one diagnosis has a high chance of later being labeled with the other.

The Fieldings, in practice, call Aaron’s illness schizophrenia, and the family is in many ways exemplary of the ways in which individuals’ respective approaches to a family member’s condition can interact with preexisting biological vulnerability to influence the expression of that condition. In the various cultural invitations related to schizophrenia that they have selectively accepted and rejected, the Fieldings are a living example of the human results of the current bifurcated view of the etiology of schizophrenia, which in aggregate gives roughly equal weight to biological and environmental factors in the development of the disorder. In practice and in appearance, the Fieldings embody a view of the condition that prevailed in the 1950s and ‘60s, one that attributes the child’s ultimate diagnosis to maladroit parenting, usually on the part of the mother. This model of a “schizophrenogenic” family, coming out of the analytically influenced but post-analytic thinking of academic and psychotherapy éminence-grise Elvin Semrad, among others, proposes that the psychosis of schizophrenia is often induced by grave snags in what today is characterized best as the way the child comes to be in the world. The acquisition and expression of a psychiatric illness, that is, is intimately tied up with what and how a child learns; and, in turn, what a person learns is crucial in deciding whether that person will be able to live productively with his illness.

This—and not through the notion of deficient mothering as such—is the way we explain the relevance of the parenting process to the development of mental disorders today. What philosopher Richard Rorty says of Freudian thinking generally in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is also true of Semrad’s post-Freudian thinking on schizophrenia in specific: it allows us to “de-divinize the self by tracking conscience home to its origin in the contingencies of our upbringing.” Such thinking, Rorty continues, has sensitized us to “the sort of thing which goes into the formation of conscience”—“concrete situations and persons” during childhood that in future incarnations and recombinations can “excite unbearable guilt, intense anxiety, or smoldering rage.” We as subjects have little to no control over these early impressions. As psychoanalytic theorist Christopher Bollas puts it in The Shadow of the Object, each of us “arrives on the scene rather late in the day,” by which time we “have already been constituted via the ego’s negotiation with the environment”—that is, by the environment created by our caretakers, by all our metaphorical mothers. Aaron was never able, in Bollas’s idiom, to “transfer […] the maternal care system into the self care system,” and so today the Fieldings thoroughly evince the signs of a family hyperconcerned with the parenting of a “child” in the present, perhaps to compensate for flummoxed parenting or a lack of parenting in the past.

Although trained observers would be hard pressed to privilege biological factors over psychodynamic ones in a causal explanation of Aaron’s existential situation—despite Aaron’s extensive use of LSD and chronic use of marijuana as an adolescent—the Fieldings themselves, as a family unit, do just that, and have been encouraged to do so by all mental illness institutions they’ve encountered. They have readily adopted the biomedical model when it comes to thinking about the illness in its day-to-day manifestations. Significant events throughout Aaron’s life are read by his parents and doctors not as psychodynamically relevant events in a psychological history, but as symptoms of a physiological disease—certainly worth attempting to stop, but not operative in any explanation of what, in reality, is going on with Aaron. In short, although the family explicitly embraces the biomedical model of schizophrenic etiology—and finds real, empirical support for this claim in the subjective formation and nature of Aaron’s psychosis, which Aaron himself classifies as “drug-induced”—Aaron’s history and present context represent his case as one that undoubtedly calls for a psychodynamic reading. The lived interaction of these interpretations—the way, for instance, Aaron’s mother’s conception of his disease prevents her from communicating with him effectively—creates the Fieldings’ experience of the illness called “schizophrenia.”

Fascinatingly, it is in the process of formulating explanations for his psychotic behavior that Aaron encounters schizophrenia’s chief symptom, hearing and interaction with internal voices. In the very process of formulating a “truth” of his disease, an explanation to guide current and future living, Aaron encounters his demon. This same demon, Aaron says, helps him create art. Aaron’s moments of creation occur during dissociative states—whether the creation of a work of art or the creation, via explanations of his illness, of himself. The extreme existential instability of schizophrenia has led Aaron to art—which he sees as one of many hobbies—a sphere in which the infinite idiosyncrasies of a moment of experience are constitutive to the product; a sphere in which highly elaborated distinction constitutes a singular, unreplicable creation like Aaron himself, and like every other human being. (Humanistic psychotherapist Rollo May asserts in Love and Will that “Schizophrenia and the creative act go hand in hand”; philosopher Giles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari note in Anti-Oedipus that “The schizophrenic is the universal producer.”) It is this human novelty Aaron strives for; art is his way to reach humans. The singularity that allows Aaron to create art exists and is sustained by the same demon that allows Aaron to explain his own singular existence to himself. But this singularity of creation is also, for Aaron today, inspired and sustained by other human people.

Many elements point toward a biomedical explanation for Aaron’s condition. But Aaron is sure, at least in the abstract, that his situation is largely environmentally influenced. His greatest travails have coincided with psychosocial disruption. First, repeated “pseudo-molestation” by an older neighbor boy from ages six to nine, in the early ‘80s. Then, in 1997, the arduous seven-years-coming death, from alcoholism and generalized spitefulness, of Nick Lawrence, Aaron’s senior best friend and a pivotal father figure who taught Aaron the crucial lessons of how to love and how to be an alcoholic; and most recently, in 2004, a quasi-girlfriend’s ambivalently regretted abortion. Aaron’s early interactions with his parents seem to support a reading of the situation that emphasizes the psychosocial over the biological, or at least one that situates any biological causal factors firmly within the contingent reach of the parenting process. That is, it is clear that parenting Aaron differently would have produced a profoundly different individual who may not have been diagnosed with schizophrenia.  Aaron’s sense of himself as a being in relation to other men and to women—as derived initially from his uncircumcised penis—furthermore, points decidedly to a psychodynamic and psychosocial explanation and calls for interpretation centered on Aaron’s evolved, aesthetic mode of loving.

III

When asked about his childhood, Aaron downplays the roles of his parents. Mostly he talks about neighbor boys he spent his days with—older boys who gave Aaron the deep and then unknown pleasure of being paid attention to—and about the many drugs he consumed with these boys. “I don’t know,” Aaron says when asked about early experiences with his parents. “I remember playing Memory where you had the cards there and you flip one over, and remember which one it is. So I did a little bit of that with the parents.” But “my earliest memory,” he volunteers, is howling a cry of mourning:

I open the sliding glass door and go into the back yard and I see a dead bird, and I just start screaming bloody murder! Seeing this dead bird. Perhaps it was because I’d seen him flying and somehow just knew it was dead. So that was, like, my first real memory of anything, was screaming at a dead bird.

As Aaron mimes himself “screaming bloody murder,” he protrudes his eyes from his shaking head and affects the halting, maniacal intonation of a Hollywood mental patient.

What happened after that? I asked him. “Well,” he replied, “then I started to experience people other than my parents.” Laing, in The Divided Self, describes such a process of stepping outside the crucial and ideally comfortable stage in which the family constitutes the world into the wider world as such as threatening the subject with an “engulfment” that is driven by an anxiety about the ability to love and be loved. This is particularly true for a developing psychotic:

A firm sense of one’s own autonomous identity is required in order that one may be related as one human being to another. Otherwise, any and every relationship threatens the individual with loss of identity. One form this takes can be called engulfment. In this the individual dreads relatedness as such, with anyone or anything, indeed, even with himself, because his uncertainty about the stability of his own autonomy lays him open to dread lest in any relationship he will lose his autonomy and identity. Engulfment is not merely envisaged as something that is liable to happen willy-nilly despite the individual’s most active efforts to avoid it. The individual experiences himself as a man who is only saving himself from drowning by the most constant, strenuous, desperate activity. Engulfment is felt as a risk in being understood (and thus grasped, comprehended), in being loved, or even simply in being seen. To be hated may be feared for other reasons, but to be hated as such is often less disturbing than to be destroyed, as it is felt, through being engulfed by love.

The first extra-familial intimate experience Aaron cites is the introductory installment of a series of quick sexual encounters with an older neighbor named Chris in which Aaron was schooled in fellatio. “The fella wasn’t much older than me, but he made me do things to him and whatnot. And it didn’t really scar me. I just found it weird, and I kind of laughed it off pretty quickly.” Aaron was in first grade, “probably six”; Chris, “probably about nine or ten.” “So”—Aaron hastens to assure me—“it wasn’t like, uncle or anything.” How did Aaron understand this experience?

When it happened? I wasn’t into it! I was just like, This is weird. If I even knew what the word “weird” meant, at that time. But I was just like, OK, you’re having me do this. It was pretty abrupt. I didn’t know what a blowjob was or anything. There was just penis in my mouth. And the thing is is that he was my next-door neighbor up until I was about twenty.

This happened a handful of times over the next few years, in Aaron’s room, on Aaron’s bed.  When Aaron was ten or eleven, Chris introduced him to marijuana, though Aaron didn’t have the giggly pleasure of getting stoned till about thirteen. He remained there, smoking pot repeatedly with Chris, without getting high, for company. A few years later, Chris became the first of two important men in Aaron’s early life to ask him, as a student at Cupertino High School, to help them tap the student pot market with the assistance of a purple faux-velvet Crown Royal bag Aaron kept tightly-cinched and hidden in his crotch. “There was my neighbor,” Aaron says, when asked about good friendships in childhood, referring to Chris. “Blew him. He kicked my teeth out. He used to make me toss bags of shit with him. Ziploc bags. He was older than me so usually the bag would open on me. So that was like, my first experience with having a friend.”

“If a man hates himself,” Laing says, “he may wish to lose himself in the other: then being engulfed by the other is an escape from himself.” “The main manoeuvre used to preserve identity under pressure from the dread of engulfment,” Laing continues, “is isolation.” The social group that eventually sprung up around Chris and Aaron provided Aaron with a unique opportunity to lose himself in others and yet remain quite separate in his isolation. Aaron didn’t say much in this context of substance-augmented fraternal bonding. “I just smoked my cigarettes, said something from time to time. It may be less dramatic than that—maybe I did have a little bit more to say—but I swear I didn’t really start opening my mouth until I was 26.” This group of boys in which Aaron was largely silent also introduced him to acid, or LSD, which he used, he says, “twenty times between the ages of thirteen and sixteen.” During that period and in over the next two years following it, Aaron was identified by his art teacher, Mr. Norway, as a relative artistic prodigy. In Aaron’s mind, at least, this potentially positive identification is linked to early concerns on the part of his mother about his mental state and prognosis for living life as a fully functioning person. I ask him when he was formally diagnosed. “My junior year?” he answers, and nods to confirm it. “My mom probably started to suspect something sophomore year, and then junior year. Because my drawings shown it—again, with Mr. Norway saying I’m his favorite artist that ever came through that school.” Coexisting with Aaron’s awareness of the relationship between his condition and his art today—unlike when Aaron was a teenager—is an awareness of the ways in which his frequent drug use throughout adolescence is likely to have caused his schizophrenia. Aaron, immediately after giving me the details on his LSD use, says, “So I kind of have I think a drug-induced schizophrenia, rather than a natural one. I think I changed the chemicals in my brain through that.” Once Aaron began to get high, he upped his pot smoking to twenty or more bowls daily (“all kinds of bowls”), early on of low-potency brown weed, but later, as his sales skills and social stability improved, his own weed was increasingly, and eventually entirely, of the higher-quality green variety.

Early use of both cannabis and LSD has been convincingly correlated with the early-onset psychotic symptoms that characterize the schizophrenic spectrum disorders. “The nature of the relationship between psychosis and cannabis use is by no means simple,” write John McGrath and colleagues in a 2010 study of sibling pairs published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, but they nonetheless find “an association between duration since first cannabis use and psychosis-related outcomes,” concluding that “early cannabis use is a risk-modifying factor for psychosis-related outcomes in young adults.” LSD has so long been associated with psychosis that in 1983, when Aaron was still a child, research psychiatrists Michael M. Vardy and Stanley R. Kay set out to determine whether there was a significant difference between schizophrenia and a posited, standalone “LSD psychosis” disorder. It had already been suggested in 1974, by William R. Breakey and colleagues, that “the taking of drugs…might play some role in the onset of schizophrenia, bringing this disorder on more quickly.” Vardy and Kay concluded that in all measured respects, the two groups were comparable. Consonantly with Aaron’s case, they found that while LSD use may be a contributing factor, factors “associated with predrug personality and family loading” are more likely to be predictive of psychosis. They also found, however, a greater prevalence of schizoaffective disorder among LSD-using psychotics, particularly those who, like Aaron, also suffer from depression. This picture has been confirmed repeatedly in the interim. LSD-induced psychosis, the evidence shows, resembles schizoaffective disorders. This is the case to the extent that as a matter of U.S. law, the government cannot—as it attempted to in 2003 in American Legion v. Department of Veterans Affairs—discriminate against a psychotic servicemember claiming impairment by schizoaffective disorder simply because LSD use may have been a factor contributing to his psychosis, largely because there’s good evidence that LSD use can also be seen as an attempted palliative symptom of the psychosis itself.

Aaron’s use, however, was in his eyes more likely a precipitant than a symptom. “Basically what happened,” Aaron says, is that he was using LSD “at the same time [as] I couldn’t handle pot, I was becoming depressed, schizophrenic, I was the best artist according to Mr. Norway. So it was pretty far out.” The language Aaron uses to talk about the symptoms of his disorder, though certainly metaphorical and thus idiosyncratically informing the way Aaron experiences it, is often underpinned by an appeal to biology. After invoking the “burning cold burning feeling” of Hell that overtook him on his mother’s bed prior to his castration, for instance, Aaron supplements his characterization of the sensation by assuring me that the Dantean burning he felt was, without doubt, a real, bodily burning. “I could feel it in my body and it was getting worse and worse, and this is like psychosomatic, and I’m really feeling pain, from a psychosomatic thing.” Aaron’s parents’ views of his schizophrenia seem to incentivize his talking about his experience in somatic terms. Aaron’s father today appears to take a distant, bemused view of his savant son. “My dad,” he says, “just gives me my twenty bucks and cigarettes and hopes I don’t get belligerently drunk around him.” This detached mode of care is common for the Fieldings. Near the end of our afternoon together, a pack of cigarettes came flying through the open door of the room Aaron keeps behind his parents’ house in Los Altos. His father had thrown them, exceedingly poorly, and Aaron, lunging to make a valiant attempt to catch them, missed. “There goes your national baseball contract!” Aaron’s father cackled, before turning around and walking away. Aaron turned to me. “Yeah. We didn’t play catch enough.”

Aaron’s mother is more inclined to ask about his day, but no more inclined to genuinely connect. “When I say I’m not feeling well she tries to momma me, but she never understands.” When I ask, with unintentional insensitivity, how Aaron thinks Caroline “sees the ‘illness,’” he answers quickly and unequivocally: “She thinks it’s too much of an illness and not a benefit. I don’t even know if it is mental illness anymore.” His mother’s approach to his situation is “kind of bewildering to me,” he says.

It’s more of a day-to-day thing. And she always wants to be the advisor, rather than the listener, so. She retorts too much, so she’s not hearing me, because she’s too busy retorting. With a deep concern, but it’s still kind of invalid, because she can’t—. My logic and her logic…we should just stick to the mashed potatoes and steak.

Aaron’s mother is heavily involved in the National Association on Mental Illness (NAMI), an advocacy group with a staunchly biomedical orientation. NAMI has gained a reputation, psychiatric anthropologist Tanya Lurhmann tells us, as a “parents’ organization,” one more sensitive to the needs of those around the afflicted than the needs of the afflicted themselves, even perhaps one “committed to erasing parents’ guilt.” Aaron seems to concur, at least with respect to his mother:

Even though she teaches at NAMI and all that, I think she’s got kind of a warped view on it. I think me having the actual experience, and she’s just dealing with what she’s seen of it. I think she’s very helpful to the community, with the people she reaches out to. But when it comes to her helping me, I think just her support in loving me is basically enough, and that there’s not much else she could do.

Her attempts to help are often disconnected from Aaron’s life entirely, rooted more in the nebulous world of countering abstract discrimination against the generically mentally ill. For example, in May of 2009, Caroline chose to protest the existence of Psycho Donuts, in Campbell, California, on the grounds that the store’s names for many of its donuts—like Suicide Squeeze, Cereal Killer, Nutella the Hun, Headbanger, Psycho Panda, Crazy Face, Michael Jackson, and Manic Malt—were offensive to and discriminatory towards persons who carry diagnoses of mental illnesses or have suffered serious brain injuries. Prior to that successful protest by Aaron’s mother and others, Psycho Donuts also carried donuts with names like “Bipolar” and “Massive Brain Trauma” that have since been cut from the menu.

IV

Caroline’s present-day activities with respect to Aaron’s condition have more to do with her own understanding of Aaron as having a “brain disease” than with Aaron himself, as a person, whether in the past or the present. This view has only been reinforced by Aaron’s two chief encounters with the Bay Area’s mental health system, after his castration attempt, in 2005; and in 1997, after Aaron attempted to sacrifice himself by driving a knife through his chest at the behest of voices. Aaron, though, explains each of these major events in terms of the mystical or demonic—the extra-real voices and personae he senses within and around himself—and in psychosocial terms, in terms of the ways his interaction with others constitutes him. Aaron’s ultimate view of his condition is fundamentally psychodynamic—he recognizes and can talk about how his history informs his present—but his explanation of his thinking during his two chief psychotic breaks is metaphorical. When undergoing the experiences themselves, Aaron, heeding the demands of his demons (and later a single demon), gave what he now acknowledges as metaphorical the weight of the real, a cognitive move requiring the finesse and fluidity with possibility that is required also of artists—and often indicative of psychosis.

Aaron’s attempt to sacrifice himself, which he avoids describing as an attempted suicide, came in May of 1997, approximately six months after his diagnosis with schizoaffective disorder. He had begun to hear voices, “many a time, usually when I was trying to go to bed. I’d be laying down. I used to have a lot of nightmares, too. But I’d be laying down and I’d hear the voices. They weren’t talking to me; I could just hear them. Sometimes I could make out words.” He had also been experiencing ornate hallucinations interwoven with an anxious paranoia:

I did a lot of driving around the Valley, out of anxiety, just like I don’t know what to do and I’m driving around and I could actually hallucinate like some sort—I had like an upper visual. I could see through my eyes and from above. I don’t know how to explain the hallucination but it somehow gets to all that. In a way. Not clearly but in some sort of, blurry third eye sort of sense. But I felt like I was seeing for more. Even about a year before this I remember looking in the mirror just so upset and I thought like thousands of beings were looking through my eyes.

Aaron continues, “I put a knife through my chest because throughout a period of two years of thought broadcasting I kept thinking that I was a bad person, and that bad things were going to happen if I would continue to stay alive.” He was listening to Bob Marley and Bob Dylan, both of whom talked to him individually in addition to singing. He often combined the latter’s Blonde on Blonde with the Bible; “I’d read Revelations over and over again,” he says, “and I thought I was supposed to be like some lamb or sacrifice.” He didn’t make the attempt for a good six or seven months after the hallucinations began. “And it wasn’t suicide,” he reminds me; “it was sacrifice. I thought I was being told to do this by many…many different versions told me to do this. It happened throughout years. I got to a point were I couldn’t draw anymore. I thought my drawings were evil, and they were letting out bad spirits.” “It came from so many different directions in languages I don’t understand. Thought broadcasting languages I don’t understand.” Even “my dog and my cat,” he says, knew that sacrifice was necessary and imperative. So at 4:00 a.m,

I open the sliding glass door, and the dog’s laying there, and she’s like, I understand, do what you got to do, Aaron! And the cat looks at me, Do what you got to do, Aaron! So I get in the car and go up to Stevens Creek Canyon Road, and I’m like holding the knife there after I listen to my Bob Dylan on the way up there, looking at the pine trees and stuff, and I just chuck the knife and I go back home. Grab the Bible, start reading it some more. Don’t have my shoes on for some reason. And pick out a kitchen knife like this, this long, and it’s like I have to do this. I have to do this. Walked down to the creek to the stubs, which is one of my favorite places. And just kind of stood there with the knife in me, or in my hand, and just started putting it in. It touched the back of my lung, missed my heart. Laid down, pulled the knife out, started breathing. None of this hurt—it just felt cold. I was so psyched up for it that I didn’t feel pain at this time, it was just kind of a unique experience. I just laid there for a half an hour breathing. I could feel the air going in and out of my chest, and the blood spurting out.

“I thought I’d die immediately,” he says. “I thought things would go silent, and Heaven. Shit like that.” But no such luck. “Wake up my parents at about five, five-thirty in the morning by now. My mom turns ghost white, they call the ambulance. “The ambulance,” he repeats ominously. “The paramedics throw me in like I’m a suicide case, even though it was sacrifice to me. They were treating me like, Oh, this person did something bad. It was stigmatized. So they were really rough with me. It wasn’t gentle. It really felt like they tossed me into the thing.”

I get in there, to the hospital, and they couldn’t put me under because my lung had filled up with blood. And I guess it was getting to a boiling point, where it was, you know, risky putting me under or anything. My mom says, I think, that they didn’t give me anything. But they drilled a hole through my rib, put a tube in there, drained all of the blood. That hurt like fucking hell! I was prepared for what I was doing to myself, but once it’s coming from a different direction, where it’s being inflicted on me, it was just—I guess that’s the most extreme pain I’ve been through. I was hallucinating the whole time—I was just out of it. I remember I woke up, and the TV set was on, and it was The Simpsons on, and it was “Homer in Hell,” was the episode.

What, I asked him, was the significance of waking up to find Homer in Hell? What, I asked, did that say to him? “That I failed,” he replied. “And that I was going to be cursed even further. By demons.” After this sacrifice attempt in 1997, Aaron was on a psych ward for three weeks.

Demonic explanations are also operative for Aaron in thinking through his second chief break, that of his attempted castration, after which he was kept under care in Stanford’s inpatient psychiatry ward and then at a psychiatric institution in Santa Cruz (“a prison for retards, with a few more privileges”) for a total of more than four months. Although Aaron presumed that the staff on the ward saw his actions as the result of repressed guilt from an abortion a year earlier—a sort of popularized, vulgarized psychoanalytic reading—Aaron himself saw the process of coming to this realization, the process of outwardly accepting this explanation, as a process of interacting with the demonic, and in particular his own personal demon, whom Aaron neutered and rechristened “Serendipity” once he began to tame it.

Prior to Aaron’s visits by demonic forces, his closest human connections drove him to create. In fourth grade he met Jack Locke, “who was my first, I’d say, real friend at that time, where I just had this thing for him. He was just a miracle at that age. He was a ruffian. He was the first person to show me his knives. We’d like toss lemons up in the air and throw knives at them.” What was miraculous about Jack, I ask. “His creativity. He started making me think mystically in a way. Somehow he got—he said had this key, and maybe we could find the right fence to unlock the fence and go into this checkered world or something like that.” When Aaron’s demonic connections began to be felt, before his sacrifice, his demon became “the main creature in my life,” and had “more of a masculine sort of feel to it” initially, “even though Serendipity’s a female, or asexual.” “Serendipity,” Aaron continues, is a “sort of a more-or-less not alive or alive entity that’s rather fond of me, so she has always helped guide me into mysticism in a sense to where she’d always put museful things in my path.” Today “it’s really protective and fond of me, and it honestly likes me. And it doesn’t really wish harm on me.” “Traditionally,” asserts May, “the way man has overcome the daimonic is by naming it. In this way, the human being forms personal meaning out of what was previously a merely threatening impersonal chaos.” “Happiness,” he continues, “is living in harmony with one’s daimon.”  Aaron has made his hallucinated demon into a productive part of his self-system. Prior to his collection of various demonic forces into Serendipity, Aaron says he “had many sort of encounters, with things that I almost block out now because I can’t really make sense of them, but at the same time” they were “making me create.” Laing writes in The Politics of Experience: “If there are no meanings, no values, no source of sustenance or help, then man, as creator, must invent, conjure up meanings and values, sustenance and succor out of nothing. He is a magician.” Aaron is just such a magician.

In the psych ward, too, the demonic drove Aaron to creation—to authorship of an explanation of his predicament. Serendipity was organized, was born, as a process of explanation. The story of his castration begins a year earlier, when a friend of Aaron’s

introduced me to this girl of his. And we ended up dating for—not dating but, she tried to move in here and it lasted about three weeks. Supposedly I got her pregnant, my mom paid for her abortion. And that just didn’t end well. I think she still has—thinks about me probably not too disgustingly. But she was a tweaker, she came from a really tweaky background. She already had a kid. So I guess she had this abortion. She laid on my couch while she got a home abortion where they do something and it kills the baby. And then she got out of my life.

“And”—Aaron indicates himself—“back to drinking. And about a year later, I think I had this sub…—the way I, whatever the word for it is, deal with it now is, I think I had some suppressed, subconscious guilt about the abortion per se. And the thought broadcasting brought me to cut off some of my penis. The thought broadcasting was going again and I started dabbling with the Bible, you know, reading how things should be circumcised and whatnot.” After the act, while Aaron was institutionalized,

I talked myself into thinking, well maybe it was that abortion thing, subconsciously, and I had some repressed guilt and it was just trying to, you know, make up for the loss, or whatever. When I was in there I was trying to get out as soon as possible and stay on the fast track so I kind of said, Well I think I have some suppressed guilt about an abortion. So I started making that up in my own head, and then it started to seem real and kinda relevant.

“So this,” I ask him, “was the operative explanation of what had happened when you were there? That there was some repressed guilt coming out of the abortion? That that’s what had driven it?” “I was trying to persuade them to let me out earlier by coming up with that,” he replies, “which could have been partially the truth.” “And what,” I asked, “was the truth for you then, at that point?” “That I, uh…” he trails off, then comes back with force: “That’s when I first saw my demon.” “It had the power to do what it willed with me and made me feel powerless, in a way, over my fate,” he says, but it soon became friendly, and he changed its name to Serendipity “after I started getting happier.” Aaron had, in psychiatrist Ian Leudar’s terms, transformed his demon into just one more productive “genus of inner speech.”

V

Coexisting with Aaron’s demonic and vaguely psychoanalytic reading of his predicament is a more traditionally psychosocial and psychodynamic one centered on Aaron’s evolved mode of loving, which is an ultimately aesthetic mode. To understand it, we must begin how Aaron began our interview: by talking about his uncircumcised penis. This is a characteristic Aaron shared with Chris, the older boy who put his penis in six-year-old Aaron’s mouth. Because Aaron “was always very self-conscious” about his foreskin—even at age six—this common feature bound them together. Why, I ask, was he so sensitive about having foreskin?

Something went kinda wrong, and I guess it wasn’t cleaned, and my parents didn’t clean it or anything. They used to make me take Epsom salt baths. And I don’t even know what that really does. But for like a year I went through a lot of pain trying to peel back the foreskin. The foreskin was all grown so there was just a little hole there and some flubbly skin there, and throughout a period of a year I’d always stretch it back and back and there’d always be this white gunk coming out, and I’d complain to my mom and she’d just stick me in a bath of Epsom salt. So once that was over—eventually, after like a year, of seven years of it being that way—I got the skin all the way back, and then I was able to take a different approach. I was definitely ashamed of how I was born, and how my mom kept me. I just didn’t have as much confidence because I was uncircumcised. So I figured that girls would find that strange and stuff.

For Aaron, the aversion others supposedly feel toward him is symbolized in the intertwining realms of sex and smell:

Pardon my stink, by the way. I’m a filthy beast. I have pheromones from all over the galaxy that make no sense. I’m serious with my pheromones. I think it drives women away and they’re not even conscious of it. Overall I just stink from every direction. I haven’t worn deodorant in over two years. I call it buffalo fish face. I’m oily and splotchy and stinky in all directions. I call myself the flatulent mammoth.

Aaron’s early trials with his penis led him to believe that intimate interaction with unlike others of both sexes was destined to fail. Who would want a man whose penis excreted calcified smegma? Aaron came to believe early that others could not love him wholly, and so he has taken and takes today a detached approach to intimacy that emphasizes his own fantasy life and capacities for creativity and deemphasizes the response or reaction of the other. “Everybody’s out of my league,” he insists. In the face of this perceived reality, the mode of interacting and loving Aaron has developed is an aesthetic one. Love, for Aaron, means sharing aesthetic experience; interacting, for Aaron, means attempting to inspire a shared aesthetic experience.

The detachedness and particulars of this approach were likely engendered by his interactions with early potential partners in connection, particularly boys and men. This is the mode of the love that Aaron has been shown: passive, detached, and with a hint of violence. Though heterosexual, Aaron feels a deeper affinity with men than women, to the point that he routinely envies female friends their mutual male friends’ attention. Twice during our time together he said that “girls steal” “all my guy friends” away from him. Attention was no more forthcoming from Aaron’s father in childhood than it is in Aaron’s adulthood. Aaron’s father’s own childhood seems to have been characterized by a worldly independence Aaron never exhibited. One of his father’s proudest moments as boy, Aaron says—a moment he’s depicted as proud to Aaron—“was shooting a gopher from the farmhouse window from like 200 feet away.” Later, while in the Navy, his father was prevented by the chain of command from confronting a senior officer about a difference of opinion.

He had some captain in the Navy that was like a shithead to him, and he took off the—he went into the captain’s room and took off the light switch, and put a piece of chicken in there, and put it back, and it just reeked of rot for months. So he has a sense of humor. And does a little revenge if he needs to.

Aaron’s father here models for Aaron a way of evading an intimate encounter as a mode of stabbing at intimacy. He cannot confront his captain, so he must circumvent him by detaching himself from any immediate encounter to attain the desired emotional result in the other. This looks very much like a sinister, inverted version of Aaron’s mode of loving.

Other intimates also modeled love as a site of detachment and violence. His elementary school friend Chris had kicked him in the face, had by some accounts raped him, and had frequently encouraged him to toss bags of human excrement that would literally explode in his face; and he and his friend Jack, from the same period, bonded over throwing knives up in the air. The same dynamic is present in Aaron’s later, more explicitly foundational relationships. In Aaron’s adolescence, Nick Lawrence was one of three brothers who hung out by a local creek presenting adventure and problematics of aggression and love. “So that,” Aaron says, “was the mysticism of my upbringing.”

First I was BMX biking there for a while, and then I started to meet the older cats, the bums and the alcoholics. I always knew about them, all through elementary school. There was this mystic group of brothers that grew up, and I always knew who they were, they were the Lawrences. I was like spooked out by them. I’m like, wow, the fucking Lawrences, man! The old guys. They were in their like, twenties. But there was a culture down there.

“I met him when he was 27, I was 13, and he literally fell in love with me,” Aaron continues.

Not sexually, but I was his best friend the last seven years of his life. Even though I didn’t have to talk, I’d sit there and blow bubbles off my tongue. He basically sat in the creek all day and drank. Smoked pot, smoked his Marlboro Lights, listened to music and I’d always give him cassette tapes. I loved him so much. Because he admired me and I was just this little runt. And like when we first all started going down there, all the stoners of my peer group—again, I wasn’t very talkative—but he called me the leader. And so all my peers kinda turned on me: He’s not the leader! So they kind of admired the older guys too, but the older guys, all of them, took towards me more so than any of them, out of probably like 100 different guys I went down there with. Especially Nick Lawrence.

Nick and he, for all the love between them, were frequently in conflict due to Nick’s drug habits, which were slowly killing him. This was especially true in “the last year and a half of his life,” when “he’d go into seizures and I’d just hold him. He’d go through them a lot. He had an abscessed tooth. He couldn’t sober up. He just couldn’t.”

When I first met him we’d just drink beer. Over the last five years of his life, though, he started drinking a big bottle of vodka a day, sometimes two. So it was basically alcoholism that took him. He knew he was dying.

“You know,” Aaron says, “we had had a fight like a month before” he died—three weeks before Aaron’s 21^st birthday—“and I stopped hanging out with him, which would happen a couple times a year.” But Nick and Aaron, the latter tells me, “didn’t leave on a bad note.” The last time Aaron saw Nick, Aaron was sitting in front of City Espresso, an extinct coffee shop near the creek. City Espresso was one of Aaron’s sole regular haunts, but only “very rarely” would Nick join Aaron there. “Sometimes he’d sit out there with me for a little bit,” Aaron continues, but “people would look at him funny. He didn’t look like he fit in there, because he was drunk.” At this juncture, Aaron and Nick were in conflict. “He had just said nasty things to me too many times.” “He’d kinda poke fun at me,” Aaron says.

You stuck a knife in yourself! You tried to commit suicide! And I’d always tell him it was a sacrifice but it never made sense to him. So that was nineteen; I was almost twenty-one…it took like two years of him just misunderstanding what had happened to me. And so I had taken like a month off. He was being an asshole so I stopped hanging out with him.

“Not that he wasn’t a great-hearted person,” Aaron assures me, “and he sincerely loved me. But at some point I took a break from him. I’d had enough.” Yet the note they concluded on was positive and endearing.

I was sitting up at the coffee shop and he walked by, and he said—he got like thirty feet past me and he turned around—“I know whose birthday’s coming up!” And that was my birthday. And that’s the last words I ever heard of him.

For Aaron, love from men is typically delivered with a patina of vitriol and indifference; love as a concept was preloaded with detachment and aversion.

Whether as an extension of this or as a counter to it, from the outset for Aaron love has also been connected to art. Love began with art. “Second grade is when I had my first experience with art,” he tells me.

You know Garbage Pail Kids? I was out there on the playground, and somebody put this card in my hand. And I’m pretty sure it was Cactus Carol—second series of Garbage Pail Kids, so that had to be about 1986. And it was this cactus with this face on it and it just looked pretty and nice and weird and great so I got obsessed with those things real quick and I started trying to collect them and whatnot, and that was like the most surreal art moment that, you know, actually had an effect on me.

When he got his first actionable crush, also in second grade, the way to express his affection was initially unclear. “I didn’t hang out with girls at all. I’d like pass them and stuff. I just didn’t know how to talk to them.” “All through school,” he laments, “every girl I got a crush on didn’t pay much mind to me”—the reason, he says, that he’s “not a very touchy person.” He could not simply talk to the girl, named Jessica, so in lieu of a conventional, conversational approach he would invite her into his aesthetic world, with added monetary incentive. “I remember trying…” he breaks off and resumes: “In second grade I gave this girl twenty bucks I stole from my mom and a bunch of Garbage Pail Kids.” “I gave her a bunch of Garbage Pail Kids and she never fucked me,” he continues, “Imagine that!” (“I was definitely sexually attracted to her,” he adds; “I just didn’t know I was being sexual.”) And he “got grounded for a month and a half.” Aaron’s clumsy attempt at connecting with his second-grade crush Jessica took the form of attempting to share an artistic experience.

His second major crush, on one Kelly Clark, in the summer after eighth grade, was also intermingled with and dependent on art; it was birthed in a movie theater and in a sense remained there, trapped in fictive fantasy. Aaron accompanied Kelly and Kelly’s date, Aaron’s good friend Hal Hudson, to a first-run showing of Jurassic Park.

I just grew obsessed over this girl for some absurd reason. I don’t know. She lived down the street. It was like, Finally, the girl next door! And she’d be kissing…she was pretty promiscuous in a way. Not in a slutty way, just promiscuous with her tongue, and flirty, and loved fucking with guys and whatnot. But I thought we were meant to be, and that I could move a mountain to be with her. And I thought I was getting to the point where she—she went off to Santa Barbara for college or something—and I thought she could hear me, you know, talking to her through the radio and things like that. And I thought I was doing magic spells and whatnot to make her understand that she was mine. Nowadays I was like, What the hell was I thinking?! But I spent about ten years obsessed with this girl.

Although she’d gone to the movie as Hal’s date, “during Jurassic Park in the movie theater she put her hand on me,” Aaron says with a new light in his eyes, “and we held hands the whole time and that’s when I…”—and he here makes pleasurable popping explosion gestures and noises, like so many ecstatic fireworks—“it set me off! I was in love for the rest of my life. Which apparently,” he ads ruefully, “I was wrong about.” Kelly did not return Aaron’s love; he never outright proclaimed it. Instead he gave her some of his artwork and, when he’d go to the movies, “I’d project me and her on, like, every movie I saw. I’d always find something about the characters in the movie, and I thought that she could see the same thing. Not as well as me, but I thought she at least knew.” She didn’t. Kelly promised to return some of Aaron’s art to him when he turned thirty; that was two and one-half years ago.

A third woman with whom Aaron was infatuated is Danielle, the daughter of his former neighbors and past and present artistic patrons. This infatuation persists, and is to some degree returned. Aaron sees her as a soul mate, but one who is forever distant, one from whom he remains in perpetuity detached:

There’s this girl Danielle, she’s about what—22, I think she is now—I graduated in ’96, she probably graduated in about 2007. She picked me up as I was walking down the street once. She was with a friend and she rolled down the window and she was like “Hey you need a ride?” And I’m like “Yeah!” These two pretty girls offering me a ride! I was already like 24 or whatever, and she was like 16 and her friend that was 17. We were born in our houses, right down the street from each other. I actually cleaned her mom’s carpets when she was like twelve. So anyway they collect my art, and she lives in India now, she’s studying to be a doctor, she hangs out with corpses. I adore her. She’s like some sort of weird soul mate for me. I need her to be OK so I can be OK. But she never has to tell me she’s OK. We don’t have to talk. Just as long as she’s OK, I’m like, psychically, even better, just because she’s doing well.

Shortly after their first encounter, Danielle asked Aaron which high school he’d gone to, and when he answered “Cupertino,” he found that “she knew about my art. They have my art all over their house, her mom and dad’s house.” Danielle, in other words, had—simply by going about her daily life in a home full of Aaron’s art, her own home—shared in Aaron’s aesthetic world in the way he had hoped in vain that Kelly Clark could. (“The work of art,” say Deleuze and Guattari, “is itself a desiring machine.”) She had experienced Aaron intimately, through his artwork, but from a safe distance. How could Danielle not be, for Aaron, a kind of soul mate?

VI

Aaron has consistently sought to replicate this experience of sharing an aesthetic world in all his daily interactions with the world, exchanges which are for him motivated by an essential love of human beings. His chief tactic is to share his art and CD mashups with strangers whom he thinks he might like to know. He has built a world for himself “gradually, one by one, throughout years of handing out art and CDs and whatnot.” “I’ll meet you for thirty seconds and you’ll have a CD in your hand.” “My approach is getting a little bit better,” he says. “Most of the girls are spooked by it. Guys usually can take it a little bit better, but even then sometimes they’ll maybe think I’m gay or that I’m hitting on them. But that’s the thing, people aren’t used to just a stranger giving you a CD.” He is also exceedingly polite as a matter of course, “holding the door open for people, and saying ‘Pardon me’”—“I love saying ‘Pardon me.’” he adds.

I’ve always been into being polite, when I go to McDonald’s or something, so that they don’t spit in my food. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes I get spit in my food. But I really respect the retail worker, because they deal with people. Sometimes they’ll give me a lot of rude shit, and I’m very good at brushing it off and cheering them up for even a third of a second. That, like, makes their day that much better. And I do that so they don’t spit in my underwear when I buy socks. When I buy cigarettes they won’t put anthrax in it.

Aaron here gives us an account of his doing a truly benevolent thing, an act of agape—attempting to cheer up in particular those who are unaccountably rude to him—but in recounting it, Aaron undercuts his own good deeds by claiming to have defensive reasons for doing them: to avoid other people’s saliva and anthrax. His own act of love is here made out as his way of avoiding a cruel, unhygienic trick (spitting) and a violent threat (anthrax). But in reality, Aaron generally needn’t fear McDonald’s workers’ saliva or anthrax-laced cigarettes. Aaron thus fantasies imaginatively violent ways to make himself seem a less goodhearted person than his actions of love plainly show him to be, undercutting love with indifference, as he has been taught—by family and friends—it must be undercut.

If love is a process of aesthetic creation, and if Aaron has harnessed art in the service of love, as he has, then we can say that persons today, just as much as Aaron’s demons in the past and Serendipity today, are “making [him] create.” By seeing each interaction as a site of creation, Aaron has made art a mode of love, and made loving a process of art. Before finding this outlet, he was unable to communicate. “It seemed like everybody was doing action, making action happen, when I was making nothing happen,” he says. Before becoming artistically and musically inclined, “I was just really quiet, and I felt really different from anybody.” Aaron downs the dregs of his fifth O’Doul’s and glances across the room at his rats. “I didn’t have any—I didn’t understand future at all. I didn’t see what was coming in any way.” Now that he has art as a medium of interaction, he knows prognostication is no substitute for improvisational creativity, for individual imagination, in the face of a reality that threatens engulfment.

I’m diagnosed and all of that, but who knows what reality is, and we’re each experiencing different things, and all of us are perceiving differently. There is some common ground, but to each their own in a sense. One has to think it through for themselves, and experiences are going to keep coming, whichever ones they may be, whether they’re ghetto drive-bys or a nice mansion and a home theater and a ten dogs—pit bulls—and…veganism.

“But I’m still, at the end of the day,” Aaron says, “sort of blank. I’m kind of a blank person. Like, in deep thought, but without any thoughts, and the thoughts I do have are more playful tools to amuse myself. But at my most basic self, I think I’m a rather blank, and just kind of deep. Deeply blank.”

***

*All names that appear in this essay are pseudonyms.