Interview with Ishmael Gradsdovic

Q: Is your writing autobiographical in any way?
A: Most of my writing is autobiographical in every way. The only person I both know well enough to write about, and have enough disdain for to write about truthfully is myself. However, a much smaller percentage of my published writing is autobiographical, for the simple reason that I don't expect that the autobiographical nature of much of my unpublished writing is well hidden, and I'm not one for deliberately erecting a sordid reputation in the place of my more respectable false one.
Q: So is your public persona, the one in this interview, not really you?
A: It is and it isn't. It's one of the voices in my head; one of my personalities. And, frankly, I am kind of reckless in interviews. From what I've read, it seems like you can say whatever you want in an interview and nobody takes it the least bit seriously.
Q: When you say "voices in my head," you aren't talking about the same voices heard by the mentally ill, are you?
A: The only difference between the normal person and the schizophrenic is that the normal person is suffering from the delusion that he is at the helm and the voices are under his control. But for the most part, this "healthy" subjective impression is a fraud, and the mentally ill are just less well-equipped to keep up the charade.
Q: So these voices tell you what to do?
A: No! Well, yes -- someone has to. But mostly they argue amongst themselves. One will say, "Why don't you make a move on that beautiful woman standing alone at the newsstand," then another will say, "Don't do that, she'll think you're some sort of criminal. Besides, she's ugly." Then the other will defend the woman's beauty and create a sophisticated seduction fantasy, ending in great happiness. The other voice will then create an equally sophisticated counter-fantasy in which I end up in traction after her husband slugs me. Another voice will chime in, saying that it's hungry and cold and wants to go home.

If I'm feeling especially insecure about my mental health, I will in retrospect try to unify these voices under a single ego, rationalizing their arguments away as the creative deliberation of a single flexable mind. But in more honest moments, I know that I'm fooling myself. My personalities are myriad, often paranoid, never trustable, and rarely around for more than a few moments at a time.

Classic multiple personality syndrome isn't so much the creation of multiple personalities, but the ability of the personalities that already exist to defend themselves against the influence and encroachment of the other personalities for long periods of time.

Q: I still think most people will read this and think that you're a few bricks short of a load.
A: If that concerned me, I probably wouldn't have told you.
Q: The poem you wrote about a man's sexual relationship with his girlfriend's dog, was that fictional or was it one of your personalities?
A: Both. It was fictional in the sense that I have never had a sexual relationship with my girlfriend's dog, or any other dog for that matter. But one of my personalities strongly fantasizes about such things.
Q: And some of your personalities don't?
A: Of course -- what about you? Don't you have parts that want to fuck a dog?
Q: No, I can't say that I do.
A: Yes you do. You're playing rational interviewer interviewing a pervert and you don't want to let down your hair.
Q: I'll admit that the thought has occurred to me, but I haven't dwelt on it.
A: I'll bet you have dwelt on it quite a lot. Or one of your personalities has -- not the one I'm talking to. Just goes to show that you are perfectly capable of having contradictory and antagonistic beings co-residing in the same head. The Christian idea of a single soul which encompasses all of these personalities is either a ludicrous pipe dream or the real meaning of redemption -- in which case it seems unlikely and absurd, but maybe just over my head.
Q: What are your religious beliefs?
A: I don't have any.
Q: Do you have...
A: I believe in sixteen year old girls falling in love for the first time -- it never happens again in a lifetime, and they don't know it until much later. This is how you measure time and mortality when you are my age. I also believe in the red sky of a sunset after a forest fire, which is bigger than all of the syllables in Carl Sagan's language, thank you.
Q: So...
A: And thunderstorms, while we're on the subject. I passionately believe in thunderstorms. I stopped believing in religion in kindergarten, and then again shortly after college. I stopped believing in politics at about the same time I stopped believing in religion for the second time. I stopped believing in orgasms somewhere in my mid-twenties, which is fairly young, although I continued to practice without true belief for some time afterwards. Women, I don't believe in as a matter of principle; similarly drugs, although I may very well be wrong on both counts.
Q: Do you believe in poetry?
A: Fuck no! Well, you're asking the wrong guy. The poet personality doesn't do interviews, he just writes poetry. If he tried to give an interview, he couldn't do his poetry. Just as if I tried to write poetry without him, it would frankly suck.
Q: Earlier you differentiated your subjective perception of multiple personalities from the classical multiple personality syndrome, but they're starting to sound like the same thing to me.
A: As I said before, we've ALL got 'em. It's just that most of us are devoting some ungodly percentage of our grey matter to convincing ourselves that there's a captain of the ship. Fact is that it's a ship of fools. Schizophrenics just have an underdeveloped mental propagandist and have given themselves over to chaotic infighting.

Another alternative is to slowly atrophy the propagandist and try to become comfortable with the idea of multiple souls "multitasking" the same brain -- this is a concept which isn't that easy to grasp in the abstract, but it can really provoke paranoia when you try to apply it to your own head.

Paranoia is a part of the propagandist that leaches into the personalities, and not a property of the personalities themselves. The propagandist, to keep its position strong, tries to create a shadow of a uberpersonality by patching together consensus positions of the other extant personalities. This in a similar way to the way in which a political party tries to create a strong candidate while at the same time not creating a candidate who has positions that are so strong that they alienate a significant portion of the electorate.

Perhaps classic multiple personality syndrome is when two or more propagandists have equally palatable candidates -- when the many sub personalities cannot reach consensus on a dictator.

But anyway, the paranoia is caused by the fact that a person at any given time is being posessed and controlled by a single personality, while that personality is being indoctrinated with the idea that it is only an arm of the uberpersonality. So in those areas where the true personality clashes with the crazy-quilt uberpersonality, there are going to be urges which seem to stem from "outside" and which are contrary to the uberpersonality which them must react strongly against them in order to press its superiority.

The more the uberpersonality is threatened, the more this paranoia increases, unless you are very conscious of trying to limit or eventually expel it.

Q: If it's just a shadow, why can't you just ignore it?
A: "Just a shadow" can be quite a lot inside your head. Most of our mental constructs are made of just as flimsy stuff. There are whole religions based on the idea that everything is a flimsy mental construct, but even the practitioners who have faith have a hard time shaking it.
Q: But it sounds like you've just reduced one illusionary ego into several.
A: As I said before, I'm not religious.
Q: So is your paranoia gone now?
A: Well, no, not really. There are other feelings. Paranoia, I'm defining as a defensive reaction by the uberpersonality against evidence of its own unreality -- or maybe more accurately as the apprehensions of the real personalities to the imagined repercussions of not conforming to the uberpersonality. There is also the baby paranoia caused by infighting between the individual personalities. For instance, if I were sexually attracted to you, which is to say if my sexual wolf personality were to want to possess you, then the personality giving this interview would be paranoid that the wolf would encroach on its dominion and try to use this interview to seduce you.

The personalities are not neatly packaged, and often have conflicts. The initial creation of the uberpersonality is probably the work of some weak personality who is taking on the role of the good daughter in a family of alcoholics who tries to hold things together. For most of us, this is probably a good thing, although it inevitably leads to trouble.

If psychotherapy weren't in such a morass of unbelievable theories and new age trends, it might try to come up with methods for ordinary people to get rid of this uberpersonality crutch.

But without an uberpersonality to get upset, I just let my individual personalities fight it out in a sort of mental "state of nature." Who does it hurt? Each of my personalities has an interest in both itself and the body which carries it around (I recognize that for some people this is not the case), and an antagonism toward other personalities that are competing with it for access to the body. But it's really not anyone's concern as to who wins, since there is nobody in my head above any one of the personalities to serve as arbiter, moralist or deity.

Of course, society may have its own judgment. It certainly doesn't like the wolf, or the dog-lover, or probably the poet. It probably won't like me, either, if this interview is published.



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