Five days without REM sleep is all it takes to enter a state of psychosis.

Delusions of reference

the metaphoricity of the world—

all elements talking to each other.

Isn’t that the paranoid state of the poet? 

I ask Sherah if she thinks limerence is on the neurosis or psychosis side of the spectrum of psychopathology—she says “psychosis.”

I remember Dr L describing my thoughts of constellated signs (“the universe is speaking to me”) as “psychotic.”

See Denis Johnson’s poem “The Song.”

There’s a paranoid logic at work in the poem, when the poet hears the hum of the refrigerator as the beseeching of the stars.

Jorie Graham once said she co-taught a class on Walt Whitman with Johnson, but instead of teaching, he just read passages aloud from Leaves of Grass and wept. She described him as “constantly in need of salvation” (the kind of people I tend to like…).

What binds The Thing to its analogical double? The poet. The poet-as-bridge. Poetry, with its excess of signification, is close to psychosis, delusion (is it a coincidence that many of my favorite poets—Pizarnik, Rosselli—were diagnosed with schizophrenia?). 

Poetry traffics in association rather than causality. It is closer to dream than reality in the way it gets at some psychic or spiritual “truth” at an angle, through displacement. 

Plato rejected poetry on the grounds it resonated with sensibility, not truth. Yet truth is made of language, and language is always a lie. 

Poetry is not merely language that utilizes metaphor—it points toward the metaphoricity of language itself, the chasm between The Thing and its signifier-double. If we follow Nietzsche’s claim in his 1873 essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” truth is merely stale metaphors, metaphors that have become so naturalized they masquerade as truth:

“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”

“He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves.”

Thus, we arrive at the truth-effect: the mistaking of the analogical double for The Thing itself.