(Janet Frame 1924-2004) from my home country,
New Zealand.
She underwent the whole psychiatric hospital
nightmare of the 1950s, including many, many
enforced electric shock treatments.
Why? Well because she wrote paragraphs like this:
Is this not what happens to the natural state?When he was born they named him Alan,
meaning that in the future the area of himself
would be known as Alan. The area of oneself is
like a drop of ink absorbed by blotting paper,
gradually spreading, blurring at the edges
receiving upon it other blots in different shapes
and colours until finally the original is dim.
indistinguishable, while the saturated sheet of
humanity upon which it lies is cast as worthless
into the wastebasket, and another sheet,
a clean sheet provided by the advertisers,
is placed upon the desk.
Is it not overlain with thought, conditioning, morality and
all the appurtenances of a lonely ego struggling
for self-importance in its false and self induced separation?
