Weighted Disposition

I asked AI to generate a picture of a woman in psychosis and this is what I received: darkness, contorted features, fractures glass in the background. And while that is true, to an extent, of my experience, I think about artist’s representations of psychosis and how you can play with form and structure to bend someone’s mind, like mine was inevitably bent.

Because it is more than straight, this experience, and words on a page or images on a screen only begin to depict the layering that occurs: the narration from voices, the hidden messages, the narratives and continuous real-world clues that validate your new reality.

One minute – darkness and torture.

The next – light and frantic laughter.

One minute – your tattoo represents an ancient Japanese tribe.

The next – no. It’s a symbol of Nazis and you were tricked into marking your skin permanently with a lasting evil ink.

And together how these narratives weave through you, pulsating your mind or mindlessness – like fragments, across a page, beautiful butterflies in full flights or terrified moths panicking for the last of the light.

Either way; the moth or the butterfly flutters. Its movements fast, furious, flapping into open space. And I begin to think that could be a perfect analogy for what occurred – but butterflies and moths are not profound story-tellers. They do not narrate to you your deepest fears, turn your closest friend’s story-lines into comfort one minute and distress the next.

Here is a story that looks like psychosis.

There’s a beginning, and an alternate beginning, a girl walking down the street, it’s you, you’re walking, but you’re also 12 years old again, and the young you is talking to the older you, and you’re wading through fog, all of a sudden, yes, there’s mist in the air, but the mist is growing with intensity, and you thought you could see through it but it comes for you, this mist or fog or evaporated liquid in whatever form. You think about how the mist got there, and it is a presence from a spiritual being, like the one watching over you, but you don’t believe in that, so is it a prop, a training mechanism, for your greater purpose, the one where you conquer the world, in a way that’s equitable, an equitable conquering of sorts – but you don’t believe in that either – so instead now you’re 12 again, and you’ve just been shamed for occupying too much space for a 12 year old.

That was a bad story – you may say. There was a beginning but where was the middle and how can I decipher an ending?

Here we are. Breaking the rules of the narrative; for art to replicate life.

And why would I want to share my inner-most secrets with you, anyway, you will only drop them into the ocean like skimming stones – fleeting acts of entertainment and then a sudden sinking feeling and then gone, forever, hitting the ocean floor.

The AI generator is not art.

It cannot depict psychosis.

But neither can I, really, through the raw vanity of my words. Although I try, for you, reader. In order to make sense of past experiences there’s an indulgence in dragging you into it, as well. You are new eyes and ears to the ground. If I can drag you into my past; will it somehow heal my present. Lofty ambitions and a neon blue butterfly flutters its wings and exists stage left.