What is schizophrenia?

It is like some ancient dream of the Earth, tuning in to extra-terrestrial frequencies; alternatively, it is the Chaosmos at the heart of everything – INFINITY. It is regaining something but it is also a permanent loss.

The content of schizophrenia is ‘characterised by religiosity’. That the spiritual world is real, and this is constantly re-enforced by coincidence, synchronicity even. I began while ‘well’, how well was I? To summon the spirits of the earth. I was becoming stressed, I was worried basically. About the country, about the planet, about my future, the world’s future. It became at the instant that I became mad a panic – the world was going to hell. It was going down the wrong path – towards ecological catastrophe, Fascist government and mass extermination. This was the content of my panic. And my only refuge was in the spiritual – the earth spirits I’d begun to summon.

In 1991 I saw a UFO, but rather than an inter-planetary vehicle I saw it as a message. It indicated to me that reality has holes in it and that they were black and round. This ‘damned thing’ took that form. This sighting sparked an interest in UFOlogy leading me in my reading to the Dog Star, Sirius and how it figured in history. I was particularly intrigued by the idea of a dark companion, invisible to the naked eye, now known to accompany Sirius, also known to an African tribe, the Dogon for hundreds of years apparently. The Dog Star is significant in European Magic and Freemasonry as well. I now see the UFO as a harbinger of mental illness.

Noise is what you experience when you become schizophrenic, not sound, but psychic noise. The kind of noise, which can be converted into all kinds of messages. Noise that participates in the infinite. The mind comes alive, it is over-working. Ideas, concepts from your background, in my case academia, ideas from a kind of mythos that I had created as an artistic project. Also religious ideas, to the schizo religious notions are real; they are alive in every moment in the cascade of all enveloping psychic overload.

1992

In April 1992 I was twenty-five, living in Muswell Hill, North London and attending Middlesex Poly, studying the History of Art, Design and Film (amongst other things). On Election Day I traveled to Southgate to vote.