The language is metaphorical

22 4 2010

This is purely a train of thought but it's almost impossible to say things in so many plain words, or put things literally, without a metaphorical superstructure that is inherent in the way we use language to put things, you can't combine a verb and a noun without a dramatic nuance and tone of voice beginning to make itself manifest. Like the over used - in cookery programmes certainly - word literally, it conveys a dramatic and metaphorical flavour because of its having been used and how often and how affectedly, it's been dramatically coloured by its use and come to be understood in such and such a way. I think we perceive words in terms of picture, texture and flavour in the act of reading a sentence or line of poetry, we sympathetically appreciate good and pictorial use of words, and use of the textures and flavours of words through tricks like assonance, alliteration and rhyme and half rhyme, all the rhythmic echoes in repeated consonants and vowels. There's a playfulness and delight in the way a child will try out new words and spot familiarities in similar sounding words that is the essence of appreciation and humour, adults play too you only have to tune in to pub conversations among the regulars to be listening to word play and humour.

The experience of hearing Voices is of course hearing verbal taunts, always on the rawest of raw spots because you yourself know your rawest spots, hearing Voices is involuntary and deeply distressing, a refinement of self loathing and torture as a way of rationalising, pitifully, dreadful things that have happened. The sanest among us can't help trying to rationalise irrational things we do love to make sense, we humans, and will search and search for a way of making intelligible things or people beyond our control so we can settle our minds satisfactorily. Blaming ourselves is one short cut to making sense and how the brain craves for sense! Look at one's own experience of unhappy love affairs, it ends in tears and we want to talk and talk to make sense of why everything went pear shaped when we had the best intentions, to excuse ourselves whilst desperately trying to make it not have happened, to make things come right in the way we desperately dream of as ideal. Show me a psychiatric patient and I'll show you someone who's had a terrible time, trying to make sense and the sense making process getting out of hand, I call it total internal introspection, you end up swallowed into yourself at which point you need help in your deep and inescapable distress before you damage yourself in sheer effing despair because alone you can't make things come right and yourself better. Psychiatric patients in a safe place like a hospital enjoy jokes and word plays in a small community where they're encouraged to chat to each other and the nurses and it's the small community that begins the healing process with the verbal interplay. As humans we're designed to be sociable and work things out among ourselves, psychiatric patients are no different.

The absurdities in common verbal usage are a rich source of humour for people like the late Spike Milligan - the curtains were drawn but the rest of the room was real - we used to roll in the aisles when Milligan's programmes came on the ward TV and lots of our humour was sub Milligan. The day Peter who was confined to hospital dressing gown and pyjamas escaped and went for a long walk produced lots of humour, his wry admission that he'd got as far as Snaresbrook made the place name ineffably funny, the more so because Peter rarely spoke, Peter sat there with a little smile on his face because he was the hero of the ward that night. Same as living in a small village, anything out of the ordinary makes the gossip grape vine. I've gone from the language being inherently metaphorical to psychiatry as usual, my intention was to indicate the similarities not sensationalise the differences. Today my husband gave help to a traffic victim, she'd been riding on her bike past the 6th Form |College where he works and a driver had cut her up and knocked her over. She'd yelled abuse after the car he was in so he stopped, got out, picked her up by the throat and hurled her into the open road. Now that driver was sane, he saw that as a legitimate reaction to a mouthy cyclist, you tell me if the mad are the biggest threat to your wellbeing?

Best wishes I'm too cross to speak any more, Anne Rees