LISTENING
If a man is mad, he shall not be at large in the city, but his family shall keep him in any way they can.
—PLATO
If you dig even a little into the literature of voice-hearing, you will quickly come across a range of psychological treatments—cognitive therapy, self-monitoring, desensitization, counterstimulation (distracting oneself by humming, gargling, or singing), aversion therapy (administering shocks and other punishments), earplugs, first-person singular therapy (a sort of existential bolstering of responsibility), thought stopping (yelling back at the voices). These treatments have different levels of efficacy depending on the hearer and the type of voice heard, but some have been able not only to mitigate the experience but to suppress it altogether.1
My father sought no treatment. His reaction to the phenomenon was passive: He listened. He asked of his voices, “What shall I do?” and when told, he obeyed. To treat his depression, he did knock on the doors of psychiatry and psychology. He swallowed Prozac and Luvox and Effexor in great, muscular quantities. He saw a psychiatrist to prescribe and monitor his pills and, every so often, to discuss his problems. He even bought a large lamp to simulate the summer sun in the winter months.* But for his voices he did nothing. Under their weight he simply sagged and then fell. It was a defensive response to a brutal assault, a reflex that Philip Roth has described well in reference to a 1959 conference at which he was mercilessly criticized for his representation of Jews in Goodbye, Columbus. Confronted with such a forceful frontal attack, Roth writes, “I had actually to suppress a desire to close my eyes and…drift into unconsciousness.”2 This reactive narcolepsy was in spirit something like my father’s response to his voices.
It was also, it has long seemed to me, an emblematic response. I first learned about my father’s voices when I was sixteen years old. He told me because he feared that I might inherit his affliction. (None of his children did, though a year later my grandfather’s memoirs confirmed that the experience can be inherited.) I was never able to decide, in those early years after I was let in on my father’s secret, whether it was the relentless attack of his voices that had weakened his resolve or whether it was an innately weak resolve that prevented him from seeking treatment. The truth seemed to lie somewhere in between, in an inscrutable symbiosis of stimulus and response. Whatever the proportions, the result was a man who appeared to his youngest son as inert and defeated, a man whose continuing silence loudly broadcast a failure of nerve.
This teenage judgment now embarrasses me, not only because my father was no doubt doing a fine job judging himself, but also because, since that time, I’ve responded to adversity often enough with the same open-armed invitation to defeat: Let me sleep! It embarrasses me also because I don’t have a precise idea of what my father’s response was to. His petty, commanding voices, so resonant as an idea, are, as an experience, as confoundingly mute as he was about them. It’s a problem that time and learning alone are unable to solve.
A few years ago I learned of an organization called the National Empowerment Center, based in northern Massachusetts. The stated mission of the NEC is “to carry a message of recovery, empowerment, hope and healing to people who have been diagnosed with mental illness.” One of the ways it tries to do this is through the Hearing Voices Curriculum, a program that teaches social workers, psychiatric nurses, day care workers, police officers, and other interested parties what it is like to hear voices. The centerpiece of the program is an audiotape titled “Training and Simulated Experience of Hearing Voices That Are Distressing.” I thought that if I could listen to this tape, I might gain a better understanding of what my father faced every day. And so, in the summer of 2002, I called Patricia Deegan, a cofounder of the NEC and the curriculum’s author, and asked her to send me a copy of the tape. I received it in the mail the following week.3
Deegan told me over the phone that if I wanted to get the most out of the tape, I should go out in the world and experience the daily struggles of the voice-hearer. I should try to navigate my way through normal activities while the voices chattered away. I took her advice and chose to listen to the tape on the streets of Manhattan, where I was then living. I chose as my point of departure my brother David’s apartment on West Fourth Street, in Greenwich Village. At noon on a Saturday in late August, I placed the headphones over my ears, said good-bye to my brother, and rode the rickety elevator down to the street. Once outside I pressed play and walked east toward Washington Square Park, where, in the southwest corner, the real voice-hearers often assemble to play chess and argue.
The tape began with Patricia Deegan’s voice. “It is our belief,” she said, “that just as rehabilitation students can gain insight into the experience of physical disability by using wheelchairs, so, too, can mental health professionals and students experience a simulation of some of the challenges facing people with psychiatric disabilities.” Deegan offered disclaimers: “Do not listen to this tape while driving a car, operating machinery, or in a context other than the training experience…. If for any reason this tape causes you distress, feel free to turn the tape off…. Remember, this is not a marathon. Turn the tape off if you feel you want to.”
The beginning of the simulation itself was not unlike the beginning of an avant-garde rock song or the soundtrack of a horror movie. There was static and light murmuring and a slow crescendo of electric noise, and then a heartbeat and what sounded like heavy breathing and demonic mumbling. Also, there was some coughing. Nothing so disturbing or so distressing as to force me to throw off my headphones, but annoying. What was more annoying was that, because of a combination of the cheap Walkman I had bought at an electronics store that morning and the torrents of electromagnetism feeding the innumerable cell phones, radios, and televisions in the neighborhood, a constant white noise masked much of the hallucinatory orchestra on the tape. Sitting in the park, watching two men fight over whether one of them had touched a rook, it became clear that if I was to take the experiment any further, I would have to retreat indoors, away from any interference. I made my way to a twenty-four-hour diner on Waverly and Sixth Avenue.
I felt rude walking into the restaurant with my headphones blaring what could have been, for all the blond, middle-aged waitress standing by the entrance knew, two-chord thrash punk. But the experiment demanded constancy, so I left the headphones on and took a seat at the counter, near the cash register. I ordered a chicken salad sandwich on toasted rye and a Diet Coke with lemon (a meal my father would have ordered). Delivering this simple request to the waiter behind the counter was not so simple; it took persistent effort to peer, as it were, through the curtain of voices and noise that had now begun to assault me with more force. To the staccato pulsing of whispers and grunts had been added a woman’s voice, which soon grew into full counterpoint and then dominant melody. It was a soft voice, gentle but insistent. “It’s you,” the voice said. “You are the one. It’s you. It’s you I came for. It’s you. It’s you. It’s you and you with the way…. You know you have the way. You are the one. It’s you. It’s you who has the way…. You know you are the one. The one with the way. It’s you. It will be okay.” At last, I thought as I waited for my sandwich to arrive. Some content. The quasi-religious nature of the voices was familiar. It was like Joan of Arc’s voices: prophetic, revelatory, annunciating.
Also familiar was the Gertrude Stein–ish nature of the voice: Jumbled repetitive language, often based on random connections, is common of the speech of people with schizophrenia. In 1913, Eugen Bleuler, the Swiss psychiatrist who coined the term schizophrenia, published the following example:
Then, I have always liked geography. My last teacher in the subject was Professor August A. He was a man with black eyes. I also like black eyes. There are also blue and gray eyes and other sorts, too. I have heard it said that snakes have green eyes. All people have eyes. There are some, too, who are blind. These blind people are led by a boy. It must be terrible not to be able to see. There are people who can’t see and, in addition, can’t hear. I know some who hear too much. There are many sick people in Burgholzli; they are called patients.4
Researchers have tried with some success to establish a link between the streaming diction of patients and their hallucinated voices, searching for an umbrella cognitive dysfunction under which to place the variant schizophrenic symptoms.
But my father was not schizophrenic; at least, he did not exhibit what are typically considered the characteristic symptoms of schizophrenia: abnormal and disordered thoughts, a deterioration in social functioning, and bizarre delusions. He experienced only the hallucinations, which were much more mundane than this supplicant chanting in my ears. He was a lawyer from Long Island, not a grandiose madman.
The woman’s supplicating voice soon faded, making way for a more forceful masculine voice. What this voice had to tell me prohibited much musing. “Hey!” the voice shouted. “You smell like shit. You smell. You are disgusting. They’re looking at you and seeing you and they see everything you do and you are dis-gus-ting. Hey, stop it! Stop it, now! Don’t touch that. Don’t touch it…. You smell like shit. You…smell…like…shit. Like swine. Everyone smells you. Shut up!”
This voice I recognized as well. It was the voice of persecution that schizophrenics often hear. I had recently read a memoir by a mental health advocate named Ken Steele that featured such taunting voices. Steele, who died in 2000, had begun to hear horrific suicidal voices when he was fourteen. “You’re worthless, no good,” his voices would yell at him. “Look how ugly you are…. You’re a fucking pig…. Kill yourself…. Set yourself afire.”5 As far as I know, my father’s voices were never persecutory in content, but I was fairly certain that their relentlessness had made my father feel persecuted. So I resolved to get into character as best I could, to imagine myself actually at the mercy of such terrible statements.
My imagination was more or less paralyzed, however, by an image that I could not seem to push out of my head—that of a grown man in a padded recording studio getting paid $15 an hour to set his jaw and say things like “You smell like shit, you’re a pig!” into a microphone. I pictured this man and sat there and ate my sandwich, and the desire for greater empathy lost more ground to an additional problem: The commands narrated by my angry actor were not in synch with reality. Steele’s voices had gained their force by having knowledge of his external reality, by commenting on objective fact. Steele would run into the woods, and his voices would give him specific instructions on which tree to hang himself from. Even my father’s voices, according to his medical records, were responses to external fact. There is by definition a fundamental synchronicity between the two consciousnesses, so to speak, that is the core of voice-hearing. This is what makes voices so convincing. They are possessed with a mystical passkey into both internal and external reality.
I was therefore somewhat dissuaded from becoming one with my taped voice by the fact that his instructions—“Take your hands out of your pockets!” “Go inside!”—were at odds with external fact. My hands were wrapped around a sandwich, not in my pockets. I was already inside. At only one admittedly creepy point did the voice’s directives and external fact coalesce. I was sitting and digesting, trying alternately to attend to and to ignore the voices, when I turned around to look at the other diners. As I turned, I saw a handsome young man with frighteningly bright blue eyes. He was staring at me. Just then the voice said to me, “They’re all watching you. They all see you.”
I came close to shivering. I looked around to see if, in fact, they all were watching me. To my left, sitting alone at the counter, was a fat, balding man wearing a white dress shirt unbuttoned to his stomach, exposing two saucer-size pink nipples. He was reading legal documents intently and eating a cheeseburger. He, at least, wasn’t the slightest bit interested in me. Nor was the waitress passing by or the line cook behind the counter or the kid who came in and ordered a take-out meal, the contents of which I couldn’t hear. (Another problem: The foam and plastic of the headphones muffled all outside noise. A real voice-hearer would have had to contend with his internal voices and external noise; because of my headphones, my reality was skewed toward the voices.)
Exasperated, full, and nearing the end of the tape, I left the diner and went to buy a newspaper. The newsstand on Sixth Avenue was closed, however, and the deli next door didn’t sell papers. Since I was growing tired—not of the voices but of the distractions and inadequacies of the street—I headed back to my brother’s apartment.
My brother was lying on the couch, watching Some Like It Hot on DVD.
“How’s it going?” he asked me.
“A voice is telling me I smell like shit,” I told him.
“You do smell like shit,” he said. On the TV screen, Tony Curtis was wearing a dress and playing the saxophone.
I retreated into my brother’s bedroom, where I found a copy of the New York Times. When I had spoken to Patricia Deegan on the phone, she told me that as part of the experiment I should also try to read or write as I listened to the tape, since that is how I spend most of my time. With the voices still chattering away, I read an article in the Metro section about an ex–New York City cop who was thrown off the force for cocaine use. His wife subsequently threw him out of their apartment for losing his job. The man reacted to his loss of job and family by using his newly rented studio in Queens as a sniper’s nest, shooting at passersby from his window with a rifle in an attempt, I suppose, to expend his rage. He hit an elementary-school-teacher in the shoulder. I got through the article at a slower pace than usual, but I was able to read. Eventually, the tape clicked off.
I was once asked, in the only sociology class I ever took in college, to “experience powerlessness” for a day, to “become” a black man or a woman or a homosexual. It was an assignment that managed both to oversimplify the subtle dynamics of power and to make a mockery of the task of increasing one’s compassion. But I was being graded, so I decided that on a trip home to New York I would “become” homeless for a day. I would put on soiled jeans and my father’s old army jacket and beg for change at the entrance to the 116th Street subway. Once back in New York, however, I became distracted by other matters. There was holiday shopping to be done; my brothers and I went out to dinner; I saw some friends. So on the Sunday night that I returned to school, I sat down at my desk and made the thing up. I wrote about clothes that were too well laundered to pass as the rags of an indigent; of having rich Barnard coeds rebuff my requests for change and of that not mattering anyhow because I had $40 in my pocket and so didn’t need any change; and of the ultimate “lesson”—that “experiencing powerlessness” is a futile exercise, that if one is in a position of power, one can hardly approach the knowledge of powerlessness, let alone experience it.
I got an A. It was my first success as a creative writer. And although in one sense the paper was just a deception driven by anger and laziness, there was an honesty in its theme, which was, to wit, that there is an intractable futility in any attempt to “understand” the experience of any human being other than yourself. That the truth of individual experience is safely guarded behind the wall of the cranium and the knowledge of innumerable facts and feelings that are impossible to share. The eminent neurologist Walter J. Freeman has outlined this infuriating problem, pointing out that what goes on in any individual’s brain depends on past experiences that are too complex to enumerate. “The only knowledge each of us has,” Freeman writes, “is what we have constructed within our own brains.”6
Freeman also makes the point, however, that there is great value in the quixotic attempt to get at that knowledge, no matter how impossible. If one is to live honestly, one must denounce defeatism and take up arms against the impossible. Can I get at the truth of my father’s voices? Probably not. But the search is all I have.