Wanted by Chris Hoke

Author:Chris Hoke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

HEARTS LIKE RADIOS

FOR SOME TIME I’VE IMAGINED ALL OF US HAVING a fragile nerve inside of us, like a spiritual antenna deep within our core. Some people, I’ve thought, simply have an abnormally large antenna inside—poets, prophets, psychopaths, your slightly crazy aunt who’s drawn to the paranormal, who some days is more compassionate than anyone you know and other days is aggressive and convinced everyone including the government is conspiring against her. In my work both behind jail bars and the years I continued with homeless youth on the streets of downtown Seattle, I’ve met a number of young people with schizophrenia. I’ve wondered, when talking with them about some of the abuse and trauma they’ve survived, whether the internal antenna-nerves of some people are damaged. Maybe they could be exposed, jutting out like a bone from a broken arm, picking up way too much of the otherwise faint spiritual frequencies coursing through this world—from “beyond,” as well as from the person across the room. I’ve wondered whether some of these people slam heroin or meth or any street medicine they can find as a way of jamming cotton into their spiritual ears.

It’s not a real theory; just how I’ve pictured that part inside us all.

But there are days I see this radio-antenna metaphor as somewhat compatible with the psychological definition of schizophrenia. Rachel was in grad school studying to be a therapist the same years I was encountering people with these symptoms, and every so often I still pick up her Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV and textbooks that sit open around the house: due to trauma or defect, part of a person’s psyche or mind is split (the root schizo-) off from the rest of the mind, and its thoughts are then “heard” as an externalized set of messages, or hallucinations. But I wonder, if all our “minds” are not purely cognitive organs, the gray matter of brains, but also internal spiritual mysteries (as all religious traditions have maintained, and even contemporary science is rediscovering), then this “splitting off” of the mind—and psyche is translated from the Greek often as soul—is for me a fine description of the broken and exposed spiritual antenna that I’ve imagined.

This is what drew me even closer to the men and women with schizophrenic symptoms: what they reported the voices to be saying never sounded very strange to me. These troubled folks usually seemed surprised that I even ask about the content of their “auditory hallucinations”; they are used to people leaning back, politely, when they mention the voices. Either their friends (what few they have kept) are weirded out by the whole phenomenon, or the mental health professionals have as little interest in what the voices say as a TV technician would with the “content” of the fuzzy static blaring through a busted device. But I recognize the content. Most of the time the “voices” whisper constant, taunting criticism—intelligent accusations that seem to know all their worst deeds, access to a criminal record more complete than any county’s register.

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