This time I write in English. I was in a course called "Writing in English for Career Purposes ". My last work for this course was "personal statement". Personal statement should be something only you can write.
My personal statement was (and is =) entitled "The Lovely Schizophrenia". Actually, I have written something about it in this web log earlier.
Anyway, here you have the uncorrected version. If the lecturer makes a lot of corrections, I will send the corrected version also to here.
The Lovely Schizophrenia
I have been considering changing my e-mail signature. To be accurate, I am going to change the quotation in it. Definitely, this is not a significant thing. Most people don't even notice the signature.
The quotation in the signature is right now: "[O]rgin of the evil is just the fact that each man pursues his own fragmentary notion of the good." (David Bohm, Fragmentation and Wholeness, 1976)
It's a pity that nihilism has been typically badly misunderstood. The quotation above is a good example of how it should be seen. I still like the quotation. Anyhow it doesn't reflect of what I have been thinking of recently. It is also a bit too close to Nietzsche and to his advice to be beyond good and evil.
I have not yet found a perfect new quotation. This is quite close to what I am searching for but not close enough: "[T]here is 'I' who is looking and 'I' at whom the looking is done - 'I' who is subject and 'I' who is object." (David Bohm, Thought as a System, 1994)
The quotation above is just a proposition for 'the lovely schizophrenia'. I would want to find a hymn to that. It is too bad that schizophrenia has been associated only to a serious mental illness. It has, therefore, conveyed a conception of stable and unchangeable 'I' and 'me'.
Too many people are afraid of changing into someone else and of being unstable. They do almost anything, I suppose, for they would not need to say, "I am schizophrenic". If I said, "I'm a schizophrenic in a lovely way – not insane, you know", they would not understand a word. Most people prefer to take roles instead of being openly schizophrenic. It seem to be better to be a fragmentary, compartmentalized and burned out person than to be called a madman.
The role is just a mask usually contradicting the true self. It is an escape from situations one is unable to face as oneself. The several identities do not seem to be any solution to this either. They are not a solution because of the identity is such an ambiguous concept. At the same time it is saying "you are part of something because of me" and "you are apart from something because of me".
For example the concept of 'identity' says to me: "You are a Finn but you are not a Finn. You are an individual. There is no one like you. Still you are a part of the meaningless set of people called Finns. You have been constructed by 'community' and 'environment' – not by yourself."
After all those serious contradictions the identity has created we still think that it is a good thing – one of the best.
Right now, I'm trying to find a better concept for describing 'I' than 'identity'. The one of most promising concepts is 'the lovely schizophrenia'. Actually, it is not a new phenomenon, not even a new idea. It had been described in various ways, for instance the flow-effect in psychology, the readjustment in sosial sciences, the inspiration in arts, and the enlightment in religions. All those are aspects of the lovely schizophrenia.
The lovely schizopherenia is, essentially, a state of being something special and unique in every single situation and for every separate existing being. Normally we try to be what we know we are. The problem is that we are not a set of facts but something beyond them. The lovely schizopherenia is, certainly, something beyond the knowlegde and facts but identity is not.
Unfortunately, I have an identity. At least I can always dream of the lovely schizophenia. The dream will relieve me of a decayed piece of the idententity.
I would appreciate, if you commented the text and my English. I know that I had a lot of to do with my linguistic skills... You can send comments via e-mail to the address ari-pekka.lappi (at) helsinki.fi. (Or write them to my guest book, if you like to.)
To be honest, I really don't expect to have any comments or critics. Furthermore, I'm not quite sure whether anyone read this.
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