Derek's inner "Third Voice"


People cannot engage in authentic change, cannot achieve higher levels of emotional and intellectual function because they cannot dissociate from what it is they take themselves to be. Their feelings, their thoughts, their automatisms are what they are: them. Literature and cinema abet this degradation of the spirit, this psychic debilitation. You know fiction and concrete subjective cinerama fetishizes consciousness, yet you do not act adequately from this knowing! The time-bound mind, the mind compulsive on tension and its release is so easily bored: it insists on being manipulated by cadence. Detail easily overwhelms its capacity for pattern recognition. Debussy exploded linear time a hundred years ago and still composers and writers insist on development. How small the mind! How utterly incapacitated the sensibility! Detail, detail, detail! we say. Exhaust the habituation response; turn stimulus fatigue into an ally. Protraction has its role in psychic liberation no less than in guerrilla war and sex. Clarity, brevity, intensity, lack of repetition, two-valued logical accommodation in presentation of material, cute turns of phrase, visual evocation; if the verbal scalpel cuts through the brain like soft butter, the writer deserves a Nobel Prize, people believe: the more the writer cultivates identification in the reader, the larger his talent. What is the alternative? The writer must help the reader discover what voluntary dissociation is; he must disrupt the normal modes of thought, feeling, and visualization. The reader must be made to hate the writer for drawing him into a state of contention with his internal complacency. The writer must set identification beside detachment in order to present the reader with a choice between the heavy oppression of interior attachment and the lilting joy of defetishized awareness. Perhaps the reader will see his self-identification for what it is: the functional equivalent of a fixation on soiled panties and sweat-saturated spike heels.