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« on: November 02, 2014, 04:56:49 am »
Paranoid psychosis is the technical term most often applied to the condition, but you know the type: a person with a complex and intimately interconnected set of beliefs about the world which, to him, look like TroofTM, as in God's honest, the real deal, everything worth knowing about the world, including what to do about it, while to you, they look like a convoluted, jumbled bag of phantasmagoria with an at bets tenuous, but often totally non-existent connection to the world as it really is.
My dad, for instance. Long story follows.
TLDR: holist's dad is a mad old git. He's been experimenting with being with him in a way that's helpful when he is preoccupied by his paranoid ideation and pretty hyper (i.e. manic episodes) for 30 years or so, with some success, but he would appreciate input.
Dad first went bonkers in 1969, at the age of 30, on the 3rd anniversary of his mother's death. By all accounts she was a truly loving mum and both her sons were deeply shaken by her untimely death. It also happened to be the first anniversary of his firstborn son's birth (that's me!) and his hasty and unpremeditated assumption of the responsibilities of marriage and a child. It was also one year after he, outraged by the events in Czech, publicly renounced his party membership and thereby, in an act of foolish and kitschy, and childish defiance, destroyed the only career he had before him, a promising if unpalatable one at that. His experiences in the holocaust (inclusive of being lost at age 5 in the Budapest ghetto for 5 days in the winter of 1944 and being pulled off a train of displaced children bound for Auswitz at the last minute by an aunt who happened to pass by) also came into it in a big way. I have spent some time and effort reconstructing the events of that fateful night and day. Short version: he ended up nacked, battling demons and attempting to derail a tram by hand in a public square, paranoid to the eyeballs, out of touch with reality. He was sedated and hospitalised for a couple of weeks, and this was repeated every few years while he was still in Hungary, pursuing a line as a member of the "democratic opposition" - a bunch of (old-sense) liberal individuals who got together to scheme a lot and did rather little, but made a big deal out of it, while doing little marginalised intellectual odd-jobs (translation, editing, etc.) to eke out a rather impoverished living.
He left Hungary in 1980. He had had a "western passport" for only a few years then: his making a public fuss about the invasion of Czechoslovakia had cost him that back in '69 - and when the Poles introduced a state of military emergency due to the Solidarity Riots, he got scared that he would be locked inside Hungary again, and, on a whim, bolted to Vienna. His family followed him in a few months, but I did not, though I had been living with him and new wife and kids for 6 years, because at that time I considered him so unreliable I had no doubts about going to live with my mum rather than going with dad along the path of uncertainty that is being a dissident and starting all over in a new place, with an intermittently raving lunatic parent). After a spell in a Vienna refugee camp where he waited for his family to catch up, and a couple of years in Germany, he ended up in Reading, UK, as well-regarded political dissidents were always welcome at the BBC's listening service in Caversham. The Monitoring Service in Caversham was one weird place during the 80's, very Orwellian, Brasilesque: hundreds of people sitting in tiny open-plan cubicles with headphones on, listening to state radio piped in from everywhere around the world, using antiquated recording devices that actually recorded audio magnetically on metal wire and were foot-switch operated (!!), and then using typewriters to type out summaries or, in the case of more important broadcasts, verbatim English translations for British intelligence.
He was in pretty good nick when he arrived. The reason he flipped his lid again was that he had expected a bit of a hero's welcome, and got a truly shoddy deal instead. The job was terrible. 12-hour and 16-hour shifts, ugly, uncomfy headphones on all the time, irregular sleeping hours and hard, hard work for not very much: I think his fate was sealed when he unadvisedly let on that he was good at Russian, too. He was, but not quite native-language good: he could do the same work in the Russian section, where he was frequently placed to fill in, but it was four times more arduous and didn't pay more. He started missing shifts, then acting strange, sleeping on the job, summarising an important speech by Kádár when he should have translated it verbatim: the British bureucracy swung into action (it's funny that the Monitoring Service was actually a part of the BBC), and they fired him in a cold and cruel fashion, I have the correspondence to prove it.
Thus began a career as the scary foreign lunatic in a parochial county town not, at the time, known for its understanding of outsiders, especially mad ones that struggled to keep their clothes on when things went wrong and who could escalate with the best of them.
Through an amazing plethora of any-and-all jobs, he struggled to keep providing for his family for years as barman, night petrol station attendant, hotel cleaner, deafness-awareness raiser, delivery man, milkman, advertising leaflet distributor, paperboy, car-park attendant, cook... and every now and then, when he couldn't handle the stress, he threw a wobbly, ended up sedated and in a warm place with soup. Kinda worked for him. The first few times, he fought like mad for his rights, even acquired a loyal solicitor who believed in him to an extent of taking him on pro bono for years, later on he just accepted that this happened occasionally and learnt to be let out as soon as possible through docility and eager rule-following.
I arrived in Reading six years after him, in 1986, and for years I tried to do the right thing and failed in several ways. My initial fear (he was right scary when he was up to his antics when I was a kid) flipped to anger and the realisation that I am now stronger than he is in every way, and eventually I found that if I have the time and the inclination to be with him 24/7 when he is raving, I can largely steer him out of trouble gently. But he's old and broken now, and doesn't seem to do it anymore... which, in a horrormirthy way, is kinda sad. I'd like to have a go at it with him one last time, to see if I could last the course through a fully fledged psychotic episode. In a childhood totally devoid of role models (and filled with various flavors of broken alcoholics and emotional cul-de-sacs), he was the closest thing. He was mad, at times disgusting, at times truly scary (as manic people skirting the border of psychosis can be), at times unbelievably sad, but he never sold out. Taking on 6 police in riot gear and giving them a run for their money... way to go, dad. Now he's mellowed into an incontinent and fadey old dwarf who spends his time in the valley of the darkness of death, with regular sparkles of surprising wisdom. Took me a long time, but I do appreciate him now. My holocaust syndrome could have been a lot worse, had he acted some other, more conformist way.
At his most sane, holist Snr could present a better-than-passable impression of being a terribly urbane man with both a twinkle and a good humoured insight of what it was to be human. Today, he is certainly not urbane (a fucked up old weirdo is more like it), but the twinkle and the insight has matured and can be elicited on good days. However, at his least, he was everything you don't want from the mad foreigner down the road who will not go away and has seen right through the worst that can be done to him to try to make him different.
The institution that played a sizeable part in destroying his life (for it is largely a train-wreck with a few silver linings, mostly in the shape of offspring who are all faring reasonably) was not a mental one: it was just the system of Communism-Socialism that operated in Eastern Europe from 1946 until the "Change of Regime" in the 1990's. He could have been smarter, a select few have, but I can't really bring myself to blame him for failing... he gave it all he had, which was not all that much, and came out less than a winner. Bless him.
***
Of course, with dad being the way he is, the maniacs and the delusionals have found me regularly ever since. I think I tolerate that flavour of madness much better than most anyone I know (and the exceptions are nutters themselves! and so am I), but the best approach is to treat them as an unreliable, fucked-up child: hang around, show some interest gently, be available, prevent minor and major disasters as they turn up. What do you think?
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