THE PAPER ROBOTS

therapy sessions with Dr Blurryfingers, PhD

I riffle the pages of my novel I See Prism Threads looking for a sensation of hope. A feeling of relief. Trying to summon it up from inside myself using the physical instantiation, the residue of my writing—the manuscript on my fingertips giving relief to me. It’s within me and should be considered as originating there even if all my manuscripts were burnt up. If all my belongings were gone, I would—should—still seek for comfort within myself. The physical world, even including my artwork, is a trap for my body to twist in agony within. A spider’s web or poisonous array of anemone tentacles, and environment of pain and predation.

But still I must write and make art. There has to be some future endpoint when I “have expressed myself,” some satisfaction.

Letter to the Mormon missionaries who came to my house once: “Go on, leave me behind, save yourselves.” They left their book behind, with me, unread. I wrote a blasphemous poem once. Whenever I came to a fork in the road where a declaration of Christ could have been made, I blurted out a wicked poem, a naughty expression. I thought I was doing something morally valid, “according to my own understanding.” Decadence on my own terms, that was still founded in some Christianity I can’t explain. The Christian made some artwork that wasn’t Christian. It was all for a larger pattern I have trouble explaining to the likes of you, Tony Larry.

I petted a dog yesterday, for hours. As a series of actions, it had value. But I don’t know what it meant, besides me just trying to calm down a dog until his owner came home. Killing time. Not pets from the heart. Not completely. Purify your motives, I say to myself.

Dr Blurryfingers told me at our last therapy session, “Here’s a motive that is not pure: telling your family via text that you’re worried about suicide. It’s emotionally abusive and you should keep it to yourself. Telling people about your suicidal thoughts and routines—what you fear may precipitate an episode of suicidal depression, you should know by now what to call them—is a way of manipulating them. You learned this with your ex-wife. You played that card too often and too heavily. It’s a get out of jail free card sometimes with you.”

I said, “My memories of the incident, although I was sitting in exactly the same chair in the exact same physical location, the memories are from a different angle. Almost as if the quality of a memory changes the physical dimensions and layout of the room. Rooms remembered are rooms altered, fundamentally. Architecture warped, walls torqued and flexed when recalled to the mind’s eye from the amygdala or hippocampus or whatever part of the brain manages emotional memory.”

“The anatomy lesson isn’t important,” Blurryfingers said.

“Anyway the angle of viewpoint onto the incident was different from this. A bit like how my memory of the meeting in the room at Bassett Hospital with your colleague Dr Gupta, when I was going to kill myself, seemed to feature a sensation of six or seven people in the room, when it was just me, Dr Gupta, and his assistant who laughed the entire interview.”

“You’re losing insight. You don’t fully know that it’s going.”

I sneered. “It would explain so much if I could look at an Insight Gauge and see that it was running low, like all of these kids with their video games: health bars, inventory windows. Maybe if I had augmented reality glasses I could finally see the contents of my emotional mind…”

Dr Blurryfingers wrote on his pad, his script seemed frustrated with me.

I continued. “I’m tormented by, guess what, by sexual memories, almost to where I (gulp) wish I had never had sex with that person I would have to say goodbye to. To be breached from, for the schism to be this severe and total.”

“You can’t predict breaches that well,” Blurryfingers said. “Although it’s fair to say Natasha gave you plenty of warning, presumably.”

“I didn’t see it fast enough. I remember her face when she was in an audience somewhere, her body language shifting as she was listening to a speaker at a college lecture maybe. Once we went to a NAMI-like peer support meeting in Binghamton where a woman talked about how her kids had been taken away from her due to her bipolar disorder, and Natasha silently gripped my hand so hard, so frightened, ‘What had the lady done to her kids?’ Natasha’s mind reeled. I think this stayed with her a long time, and I want to say it played a role in how she viewed me toward the end. When she was actually listening to people, in her friend group, her therapist, her support network, who were telling her not to let me be alone with our daughter—”

“Leigh,” Blurryfingers said.

“Right, our daughter Leigh, they were telling her that there needed to be a third party, a psychiatrist in the room with us at all times, visitation under surveillance from a medical doctor. That never happened, but I was threatened with it. I know it was talked about. I guess just get over it? I don’t want to remember it all. I react with disgust and incomprehension to myself and my actions, I still haven’t paid down the shame.”

“Shame for what.”

“The suicide talk. The way the diagnosis took over my life and my family.”

“But that was real.”

“Maybe the shame will go when I release my hold on the memories. This implies I have control over that. That it is a matter of conscious will. I think these things, I viist them in my dreams, in my back-mind. This is why I call her my mind-wife. Our bodies are not near each other, never will be again. We are not married anymore. But in my dreams, in the unconscious zones where I helplessly meander, she resurfaces to me sometimes. She crosses my mind, and I’m held responsible for my thoughts, in a way I’d always feared.”

Blurryfingers filled the gap of silence. “Being someone who transcribes their thoughts obsessively, you should be held to account for your thoughts. You mold them and sculpt them. You’re left alone in a room with them for too long. You’re a child stealing cookies out of a jar, the cookie is a painful memory, a spiky thought that hurts, and you swallow it down after chewing and feeling every bite.”

“The memory transforms the setting, the space it occurred in. I have dreams of my wife seen in places that weren’t our house, were more like houses in TV shows, in dramas. Cinematic houses. It’s a thing in tandem with trying to get a hold of my mind. The quality of spatial recall. It proceeds without any owner’s manual giving guidance. No YouTube video to help with the fix it. Actually there are probably thousands of such videos, all kooks and cranks wanting to control your mind. Self help gurus, life coaches. Or religious figures, prophets and cultists.”

///

This book is my flagellation. Of you, surely, but mostly of me. You are not obligated to read it, except with the counselling aid, the proctoring of my ghost. I’ll help you. I’ll write a love poem. You write a love poem, or a book of them. Together we’ll throw them onto the Italian fire.

///

“My first date with Natasha was at a Barnes and Noble in Vestal where we walked among the books. I bought a copy of Erasmus’ Defense of Folly to impress her. It was performative reading back pre-9/11.”

“This is all true, though,” Blurryfingers said. “We’re not interested in truth. We’re interested in inside.”

///

“In my nightmare last night I had collected a lot of smutty books and movies and I was storing them at this woman’s house in Walton, the town I was born in. It was the same town as the Chinese school I’d been auditing in another dream, I’ll tell you that one later. Anyway I was taken into this back room with the matriarch of the family, who was like a religious leader, very disturbed but Christian. And she was showing me all kinds of prayers printed in these pamphlets. Imploring me to give my life to Jesus Christ. I think I just might do that, but in an original way that doesn’t wait to explain itself to other Christians. It is not part of the body of the church in a Pauline way. I want to be more of an esoteric Christian, if that is allowed. First I must read the Bible cover to cover.”

“Don’t you remember what I told you about this God stuff?” Dr Blurryfingers said. “When I was still alive?”

“Yes, that’s why your office is down here, in the shadows of Hell. The therapeutic relationship would seem to be untouched by the disposition of immortal souls. My insurance still covers it, I trust. Anyway, I don’t know about my brand of Christianity, but it’s sort of between me and God, not involving anybody else. Does it need to, is that a prerequisite of religion? I’d rather practice religion in my dreams, in a dream church, or giving money to the poor and saying nothing to them, being a mute Samaritan, a giver of mute disinterested charity.”

///

“I was with a cavewoman. It was a kind of new trend, a new affectation of neurodivergence. Idiot women, like Nell from that movie. My lady was a wild woman in a cave. I was with her. I was doing that too, I was being trendy-dumb. Living a basic life. We were a couple. Cavepeople in love. It was a kind of freedom to be in the same room with her and we protected each other. The mind is a strange old globe with out-of-date borders and maps obsolete, that still shape the present. I’m recalling dream details from years, maybe decades ago. They just bubble up and I recognize them. The memories are fresh. Nothing else from conscious memory is as clear, yet the emotions experienced from the dream-memories are fleeting and trigger skepticism.”

“Skepticism? Explain that.”

“They seem too random to trust. It causes me to disbelieve in anything the mind gives me: thoughts, memories, dreams, emotions.”

“Do you feel that way about your own words? As you speak them, or write them?” Dr Blurryfingers had put his pad and pen down.

“I hate all similes and metaphors for the mind. They all feel inadequate. Like tricks, like a mirror that only reveals one limited angle of an objekt. And the objekt knows your knowledge of it is incomplete, and it’s laughing at you.”

“A mirror is a laughing object?” Blurryfingers mocked.

“Yes, it conspires against you along with some third party, unnamed. That third party knows all. Omnscient God. I know as an atheist you hate that.”

“We’re talking about your problems, not mine.”

“To know the mind in full is to transcend metaphorical knowledge and go to God.”

“If you knew the mind,” Dr Blurryfingers said, “you’d know why the moods happen like they do, what dreams mean, why dream memories manifest like they do, and also how to be happy.”

“The alchemy of happiness, right?”

Two smiling people in a doctor’s office in Hell, neither really meaning it. Dr Blurryfingers blinked first, and said, “You want to tell someone you love them, just to feel it. A foreign, irretrievable feeling that is unreachable. It doesn’t need to be true. Or true in a precedented way, subject to weights and measures you’ve seen before. Dealt with before. Familiar. How could you tell. You’re so dead inside. No remedy, motherfucker.”

///

I had so many dreams last night before opening my eyes to be blasted with the sun shining into my eastern window, at around 9:00 am. I wish I could record my dreams to be replayed later. I was in a warehouse with an army of other people moving pallets of wood to be pulped and turned into paper by massive robots. The paper robots were activated on a set timer and it was the humans’ job to keep the hoppers full of wood while they slept. The countdown timers were blasted through the warehouse, on loudspeakers, and it was like a terrifying suspense movie when they got to the last ten seconds before the robots awakened. People got killed, there were accidents if you weren’t in a safe zone when the robots came. Then, when the robots were awake and working, and we were safe, we had out leisure time. We watched plays and traveled. I was in Japan trying to understand a cartoon in a vacation park, that was fun but under the fun surface it equaled life and death. I visited cities, staggered between churches never fitting in with any particular denomination or god. I was told to leave church because my clothes were wrong, I didn’t know the ritual. Then I went to another church nearby and it was all ecstatic singing and smiles. I was always the last person to join a congregation and therefore the first person to be excommunicated. Every person who came before me could judge me. The politics of the dream cities were hard to figure out, there were never clear enough stats or graphs. It was Easter, and I wandered from church to church, unwelcome, or never feeling welcome. I wanted to sit in the front pew, but my clothes were wrong for that, I was dressed sacrilegiously. A young mother told me I had no right to wear white. I had to leave and find another church. Eventually I was trying to find my way to a noodle store when I trespassed into a caged enclosure where an Easter mass was coming to a conclusion. People were ready to enter the cage in their beautiful clothes, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I ran away.

I’ve dreamt of a hotel, the borders between indoors and outdoors were not clear, the boundaries. Some freedom of the air meant turning a corner and finding myself in a piano room or turret, the randomness of the design that proceeded according to a narrative pulse within the dreamer. I know it was happening, I was not a completely unwitting objekt of the dream, it wasn’t lucid either, some strange complex collaboration that became clear later perhaps. Anyway the peripatetic wandering in dreams through architecture and stage sets felt like it had a point while it was happening. The mind injects emotions into the stories, creates suspense, elicits humor, and values surface in the dreamer seeing phosphenes dissolve and erupt like volcanos of light and take on new mythic proportions. It’s new reality, fresh out of the box, and a fuse is lit, a timer is set, when the ten seconds count down in the warehouse to zero, I’ll awake to something familiar, I’ll return to my body. Hopefully some intrinsic change was introduced into the turbulent pattern of life, a subconscious switchyard where paths were altered for you while you slept, some benevolent guiding hand that could only be a god’s moved me from one side of the yard to the other by strange mechanical tracks. There’s an expertise to the methods of the dream director’s, that I don’t understand, and neither would a psychoanalyst like Dr Blurryfingers in Hell, but in esoteric etheric ways, it affects the waking hours just as deeply and indelibly and secretively as it does the dreaming mind. Angel esotericism, that quality of writing the waking life via dream code: beliefs and values. I pray to some being to shape my mind differently, do it while I’m sleeping. Do it when consciousness is distracted by the bouncing dream ball made of nonsense rubber. Give me sanity, give me happiness. Make the happiness ingots uniform in size and regular in their appearance on the assembly line.

Dr Blurryfingers: “No, not possible, life cannot be predictable and safe for you, you need the insecurity and the threat from within, you need to sleep to learn the fear of life. You need the deep Mariana Trench loneliness and darkness to, I guess, teach you something. It’s a spiritual journey, it’s a wading through a vat of glue, forever. The churches are just temporary oases where you can rest.”

///

They’d lock me up if I published this book, or more likely just ignore it. I’m not a seer unless you want me to be, unless you could go that final crucial step with me, climb that final rung of the ladder and grant me the Celestial Vision. Believe in me.

///

Book review: KILL RUDY JOHNSON, by Rudy Johnson (Pig Roast Publishing, 2025)

I’d like to talk more about this elsewhere (book reviews being like some mobile sci-fi fantasy castle that can teleport but can only appear in a single space at a time a la Krull), but I will say that this was very funny and heartbreaking. Relating to the world through video games and their very erudite and dense lore yields poetry with unmistakable comic potential — and yet the biographical detail of the person in question comes reverberating through. This book is not at all for stuffed shirts who need their poets to observe the obsequies or niceties or even the forms: woke it is not. All kinds of slurs and transgressions occur with the license of a wisenheimer Lenny Bruce, but a Lenny Bruce who seldom leaves the house and relates to the world through multiplayer online role-playing games. It’s a bespoke literary objekt that is designed to make a refined reader laugh and feel terror at its barely-contained irreverent rage. There are, throughout, crude cartoons and images done in what looks like MS Paint, along with an array of QR codes leading to interactive games (haven’t gotten to those yet, a little scared of the worlds they must be portals to). Overall, the book took me into a realm of highly elaborate nerd-dom and magic, where millennial IT literacy is the gnostic Code of Truth, where the conflict, war, pestilence, hostility of our outer non-game world are refracted and viewed in the company of a childhood friend, warmly joking with you over communal junk food. In the midst of this, mental illness, depression, identity crises, the bureaucracy of healthcare are the real horror stories we all would strive to escape with the help of an entertainment console. The pure imagination and scathing humor of this book make it an earnest, funny, pop-culture idiot savant expression of hard-earned joy (and I hate that word, I never want to use it, but it so applies here: games are the source of nearly unending fun. This book is fun for those who can surrender to its weird, frightening territory.)

///

A GREAT soundtrack for meditatively writing:

Coming soon: more noise music reviews, comments on David Kuhnlein’s magnificent collection EZRA’S HEAD from Tragickal Books.