Somebody said.. that it couldn't be done, "at least it has never been done". This is a line from a poem.

When I was 16 years old  (1948) our teacher told us she would require everyone to memorize a poem every week from our textbook then  recite it to the class.  While she was talking I browsed through our literature book and spotted a poem, which I read through once and then twice. I held up my hand and asked to recite my poem now. She laughed as she told me there was no hurry, but I told her I already knew my poem and wanted to recite it so she gave her permission.

I recited  the poem I'd read only twice but I recited it perfectly and quite easily. The name of the poem is: Somebody Said That It Couldn't be Done by Edgar Guest. This was not typical for me, it was in fact quite an unusual event except for the impulse that caused me to 'act impulsively' and do without hesitation what the impulse contained.  In this case it was an impulse to recite a poem  I'd read only twice and risk being laughed at.

A few weeks or even days  later I probably could not have remembered the entire poem.

I thought nothing about it later, in fact I forgot that incident completely. But during  the years between 1984 and 1989  one line from the poem emerged occasionally into my thought: "..at least no one has ever done it.." Every time I experienced these re-generated words, "..at least no one has ever done it." I remembered how unusual it had been to memorize the poem so easily.

After a time some other words  that I'd read in a book  (1982) came into my mind almost simultaneously  with those words from the poem. I made no connection between the two retrieved memories for a long time. The  other words were in a small booklet I'd bought and took a long time to read because it was so strange,  in general they were 'when everything was easy, I was with you." This fragment was in a small booklet I'd bought  a couple of years prior to 1984, about which I will have to write more in detail in another link. The name of that booklet was The Impersonal Life, my copy was the 10th printing 1895 by the Sun Publishing Co. It cost   25 cents.

At the time  the fragment of poetry returned into my mind occasionally I  was having a very difficult time in my life, due to  real world changes that I had to cope with and I believed I'd had a head injury which explained to me changes in my mind and body.

I was trying to  do ordinary tasks and found it impossible or extremely difficult to do them. Activities that I'd always done without effort were no longer easy to do. (That's about the time I read the words 'when everything was easy, I was with you) but they were just words on a page then although I noticed afterwards that a faint wisp of memories from my past occurred behind the words.  They were specific, memories from when I was about 9 years old when an impulse had caused me to do certain activities.) At times I felt 'dizzy', literally.

But something else, quite intangible, just subtly discernible,  was attracting my attention and holding it captive. There was a subtle difference in what was outside my eyes, but when I looked carefully I couldn't see any difference. Yet something new was overlaying what was outside of my eyes, between me and everything but  this 'new thing' was beginning to be obviously in my head. It altered every aspect of whatever happened and was visible outside of my body, without changing any thing at all really. Occasionally at first I experienced an ordinary situation that seemed related to thoughts I'd had just before the event, and a few events happened that seemed impossible because of the timing and something I said or had thought.

As time passed and events happened at home and in other places, I realized I was having a shared mindset with my husband . There was a change between us that was never talked about although I tried to talk about it.  I  saw that there had been a literal, not symbolic exchange of some kind of  material that I didn't suspect as to its content until some time passed and I noticed small details and changes in my mind.  The sense of 'doubleness of verbal content' began to  emerge between us occasionally and I was puzzled but silent about those  events, literally speechless for a reason I couldn't have suspected.

I'd felt a real drive that caused me to do things differently, i.e., not rest when I was tired, read non-fictions rather than fictions, be very curious about things I saw and a sense of urgency began to literally 'drive' me.

Somehow I saw what had happened  to cause the changes in my thought and mentioned it one day to a psychiatrist I'd begun to see in 1985-6 . This happened exactly this way:  During the sessions it became obvious he was not paying attention to what I was  saying, not being able to sleep was the biggest problem I talked about. It took some time  for me to realize a head injury wasn't what he thought was wrong. He asked pointed questions about my husband  in several sessions before I began to realize that, he seemed to be  hinting about something, asking questions  such as "How is JXX? Is he still so hard?" I'd not thought of JXX as 'hard', so that kind of question puzzled me several times when he mentioned my husband.  JXX had been present for a few sessions, and he seemed genuinely wanting to know what was causing me so much distress then. He asked questions about what I'd done the last evening, if I'd seen JXX.

I heard myself suddenly blurt out something I'd not thought about or intended to say: "You know it seems like I'm seeing the world through JXX's eyes. Its like his viewpoint is sitting on top of mine and I'm looking up through it, out at the world. I feel like I'm seeing the world through JXX's eyes."  Then the phone rang, he excused himself to answer it and as I waited I browsed through a book laying on his desk near me. I read  anything  handy when I'm waiting. This was some kind of dictionary but not Webster's. I noticed one item, read the definition and wondered what it meant: folie aux duex, the same disease shared by two people.   When he he returned to me I asked what it meant. He read the item, then laughed and slapped his knee as he said: "Say, I'll bet that's what you and JXX have." 

I didn't ask what that meant, I don't remember that he said more about what I'd said. He didn't give me any further information and I must not have asked for any. But what I'd read lodged in my mind and never has left and my activities after that were somehow directly linked to 'the same disease shared by two people'. I knew nothing about diseases other than measles, etc.  It didn't occur to me that I'd said something so strange and that I'd not thought about it as being unusual  for some time.  I was beginning to have memories of a few similar (as I noticed later) incidents that had happened  in the few years after 1982 enter into my mind somewhat frequently. Eventually I wondered why I'd said what I'd said in those incidents, words had just come out of my mouth spontaneously. The 'strangeness'  arose from every day situations and it emerged slowly.

I was having a very difficult time then,  urgently trying to talk to my husband about problems  I was having,  how I felt and some things he'd done that made it hard for me to pay our bills. We paid cash for everything and were always cash poor. In addition he'd stopped giving me his paycheck and the income from the  few rentals we'd acquired wasn't enough to cover living expenses and utilities.

I was finding out that I got sidetracked always when I tried to ask why he'd opened a checking account without my name on it and that I couldn't manage on the  small amount of money coming in. Usually I was left weeping and alone. There wasn't any physical violence from him a all, except that at times I picked up things and threw them after trying to talk to him somehow caused me to 'boil'.  That was somewhat common and I felt terrible when I cleaned up things that often were dear to me.   He literally laughed once and said I was 'stewing in my own juices' but he's  made that kind of remark  in the past at times too.  (They were actually important descriptions of what he saw happening between us,  symbolically speaking.) At that point in time, every day was like that but we went out  often to square dances and after we left the car he was friendly, and pleasant to me. On the trip to the dance he would ask questions about the movement's we'd learned the last week . When I  tried to describe the sequence it was obvious he'd not thought about them or tried to remember them and that trip turned into the same kind of situation I was having at home.                                                           

It was about 1983 that I began to have a powerful and  urgent need to get him to say something different, so I could say something different. That need was extremely anguishing and urgent but I could never initiate and maintain  what I intended to talk about  anything . No matter what I said or did to try to get along the result was always the same.  He had changed radically and I felt the change in my body and tried to talk about it using my very unscholarly language.   "You've taken my job away." He told me I was imagining things.

Then one day he came home and as usual stopped to take the garbage from the closet to put in the stove on his way to the bedroom.  A minute later I heard him shout: "Gxx Damn it, Betty, get in here."  and some clattering . I rushed in from the kitchen to see the sack had split and things were on the tile floor. He was calmly  picking things up and as he looked up he said: "The sack split." I said "I see that." and turned back to the kitchen. Suddenly I returned to the living room and asked him why he'd shouted at me that way. His face looked puzzled and he asked what I was talking about.

I repeated what I'd heard  him shout exactly as I'd heard it:  "Gxx Damn it, Betty, get in here." His response was an impatient "Why would I do that? You are imagining things." and he got up to leave the room. Let me mention that he had never said those two words together, he didn't use curse words like that ordinarily.

Two or three years later  we were in Indiana visiting his only brother and family. His wife told me they were having a terrible time, he drank and was very strict with their children, discouraging friendships and keeping them at home. One day she mentioned that  her biggest problem was that her husband said things to her and did things that later he denied having said or done. That was a day when I began to realize I wasn't imagining things in my home either.

It was about that time that I went to a showing of The Wisdom of the Dream about C. G. Jung (whom I knew nothing about, but JXX and I had been watching Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell together, which was a big change because I'd never liked that kind of show.) and bought a book, Narcissism, Character Disorders and Transformation by   Nathan Salant Schwartz and  another book The Scapegoat Complex by Silvia Perrera Brinton. They are Jungian authors published by Inner City Books.

I had never read such a book or come in contact with the version of Narcissus that was in the book. A lonely female Echo was added to the Roman version. She watched and mourned the loss of a mate while Narcissus gazed on his reflection but didn't recognize it as his own. She repeated the last words he said and I noticed then that  for some time I'd been   repeating the last things  JXX said. Usually somewhat jeeringly, sarcastically  because what he said was somehow already in my thought. It was as though he was saying something I already knew. Often I used a different response: "Tell me all about it."  because what he had just said seemed already there in my thought. I remember that  it didn't occur to me to think this 'looked like' mind reading' on his part or mine, it was such a new strange kind of incident. 

But the literal  relationship of  the myth to my life at that point, of Narcissus who didn't recognize his own reflection and Echo who repeated the last words he said to his own reflection seeped into my mind. The fact that 'thought' is described by the word 'reflection' occurred to me then. That got my attention on 'literalness'. I had by then been told by a psychiatrist that had been recommended to me that my husband 'means exactly what he says.' He  told me in private that he sensed I was confused, wanting and needing validation and he could help me with that.  He told me that whatever problems I might have they were not as significant or extensive as my husbands.

That psychiatrist had been recommended because 'he and JXX have the same personality so perhaps  JXX will be able to relate to him.?  !!??  This psychiatrist was Oriental, rather short and if the other psychiatrist had been there to see the difference in the way JXX  was with him, his attitude was extremely authoritative where it had been respectful  to the  talle I noticed that he did every thing himself, there wasn't a receptionist, he did the billing, made appointments, kept notes, etc.

                

that had been  projected onto me in our marriage, it was literally rejected material, literally ejected into me.  The result of this exchange/role reversal  was simple but more complicated than I can describe except that 'mountains became molehills' in his mind but that didn't change anything in how he related to me.  From being a 'worried mind' he became 'care free' and I my 'empty head' was 'full of thought'. Literally. From being so filled with negative reasonings that it was almost impossible to make a decision, it was not necessary to do anything, everything was perfect, everything was as it should be. Once he made a decision it was unchangeable.

 He switched almost over night from being focused on small details, noticing everything, being 'worried', concerned with all possibilities, all kinds of reasoning and arguments it was nearly impossible to get a vacuum cleaner, and every penny was pinched, which I didn't really complain about, I'd never had much money.

As time passed I noticed several details that eventually couldn't be ignored: My thought was 'colored' with his mothers characteristics, tonalities, habitual content.  I noticed my self do things I'd seen him do that had puzzled me and this was a kind of perception of what I was doing, but not of my body. I couldn't have named it 'self observation' even by 1990.  Then a kind of information about why he did those things emerged  in my mind, not quite as thought words, it seemed he was a small boy doing those things to help his mother, so she'd have time to be with him partly but because he wanted to help. He was had 5 sisters older than he, this was in Amsterdam and the Germans were threatening.  Their money was devalued and as he told me at times a person couldn't buy a loaf of bread with a wheel barrow of Dutch money.

Other incidents that he'd mentioned had happened in his family that had an influence on him afterwards were 'explained'. He'd never wanted insurance for instance and this resistance had it's origin after his father died, there had been family quarrels over the insurance, and he'd decided that wouldn't happen to him. His resistance to acquiring anything was 'explained' in the same way with the words the family had quarreled over the

 

My 'normal' activities  had been reduced to  second place by this 'other influence'. I remembered how easily I had done what was now very difficult and I kept trying to regain what I'd lost, trying to keep everyday activities up however was impossible. At about t his point in time I had begun to believe  my body was being controlled by my mind/brain which was forcing me to do what would repair itself and restore what I'd lost. That made sense to me in the context that  I believed I'd had brain damage in an accident. My car had been totaled out and my head had been slammed up onto the roof of my car. I had read that the brain can repair itself, so the sense of having lost all control of my body, the sense of being controlled from afar linked up to that information.

The new 'flow' of circumstances was noticeable because I felt very different at times, very uncomfortable because of some effect that caused me to literally feel dizzy.  but the thing was invisible itself. Eventually there was a dim sense of  an emerging reference to certain memories in my past, only a few of them but they had re-occurred into my thought after the actual event had happened. I wondered about these recurring memories to myself, but never said anything about them specifically to anyone until I was well into my fifties. Most of these events happened before I was 13 years old. There were 'strange attractors' that caught my attention.

The drawing of a moebius band on the cover of The Anatomy of Reality by Jonas Salk was enough to cause me to buy the book, but it was some other 'drive' that caused me to read a book that I would not ordinarily have chosen at all to read.

A thought came into my mind as I read the book and I recognized that I had read the words in that thought in an article in a woman's magazine when I was much younger. The words were: "Schizophrenics and mentally ill people quite often become compelled to read books that are far above their education and social level." 

The sentence recurred to me again when I went to hear Paul Davies and Roger Penrose  lecture at Kane Hall. The room was crowded with individuals and many of them  who looked like they had not finished high school; older men, ragged young males sometimes carrying packs that indicated they lived on the streets which was by then becoming common. A woman sitting next to me remarked that it was odd to see  uneducated people attend a lecture that would interest only a very few students and professionals.  I told her that I'd read every book Paul Davies had written after reading Other Worlds.

 The word 'it' being as it is, non-specific, the task that 'no one ever  has done it..' can be any task. Yet the words are the most restrictive, the most confining words. There are no more specific words than: "At least no one has ever done it."

The abstracted fragment  seemed to speak to me, the way a person would speak and this was very strange then. I was trying to understand what the new 'influence' was.  I was watching as it produced activities in me that were quite different than 'normal', at least for me to do. There was a new kind of 'event' happening and I saw my body do things as though I were detached from my own will and intents. Along with the new activities a distinct change in my passivities was clearly evident. Their content not necessarily the habit itself basically reversed, exactly into their opposite. I had not read non-fiction books with any interest, but now the habit of reading almost constantly remained unchanged but the content of the habit reversed so that I could not choose to read anything fictional very often. I had no problem taking medication but suddenly I could not take any medication, even when it was prescribed. These changes are quite easy to detect in myself, but I noticed also this same 'reversal of polarity'  between activities and passivities in another person what was very, very close to me.

In Jonas Salk's book, The Anatomy of Reality I read words that I'd not thought about before and they were not difficult to understand. He wrote that nothing happens except in a binary interaction, there is nothing that occurs except through 'two'.

That a binary unit is 2 = 1 seems very easy to grasp.  

In a squaredance set, the unit (1) = 8  people but the 'unit' is  another way of looking at the set which has 8 individuals in it,  They operate as 2 units of 4 individuals in addition to being a single unit of 8. There are 4 binary units  or 2 individuals that remain intact throughout the dance as to their original position at the beginning of the set. However every step in the dance forms new binary relationship that are always changing. The dance is a combination of stability and instability, constant change itself is evident in the form of a square-dance set.