What is a mild genetic version of schizophrenia? … There was something a little bit strange about family members of schizophrenics. … At a higher-than-expected rate, there was a weird sort-of quirky personality that went with family members of schizophrenics. … And this version … is now called schizotypal personality. … Schizotypalism is a mild genetic version of schizophrenia. What does schizotypalism look like? First off, people have somewhat loose associations … In addition … social withdrawal … someone who gravitates towards fairly solitary occupations. … This is the lighthouse keeper. This is the fire tower watcher. 1 … This is the person sitting alone in the projection room of the movie theatre. … The most striking feature is what is termed meta magical thinking. … Someone who kind of believes in strange things… Someone who’s really, really into science fiction and fantasy … who’s into New Age stuff in a really frenzied sort of way … mental telepathy … UFOs … Someone who - if they have a religious structure of belief - has an extremely concrete level of interpretation … fundamentalist concrete interpretations of religious events. … Where does this come from? … What does schizotypalism look like in traditionalised non-Western societies? … In traditional human societies there is a category of people there who count as … ‘half crazy’. Who are the ‘half crazies’ in traditional human societies? The Shamans. … members of society who make a living being meta-magical. … In the right setting, what would be an absolutely peripheralising set of traits, instead … makes you a very powerful, very sanctioned member of society. … “We are so lucky to have a shaman like this … Thank God we don’t have two of them though.”
Diversity in Neurodiversity
I’ve discussed the profound contribution of the neurodiverse, to literature and broader society, at least a couple of times before: In my post on Andy Weir’s Eng-Fi; and in discussing the gifted strangeness of Barack Obama’s recent ancestry, in particular his grandfather. Arguably the dark myth of The Revenger, described in my post on The Beekeeper, suggests there’s a widespread hankering (and so ‘sanctioning’) of another kind of neurodiverse personality type: call it something like The Altruistic Psychopath. In each case, the neurodiverse personality profile is very different, as is the specific type of societal niche they are sanctioned to occupy. But what each type of strange person has in common is that, from the perspective of the neurotypical, they really are genuinely strange. And that, like the closing line in Sapolsky’s quotation, one (or a few) of them is great; but two (or many) of them would be terrible.
Which brings me to David Lynch.
Modern Day Shamanism
David Lynch is a modern day, all-American shaman. Someone whose mind finds profound meaning, and magic, in the everyday. Someone who appears to live both here, and there, and for whom there is always here, if you care to look, to follow the connections, to join the dots. A transcendental meditator, Lynch is attuned to the symbolic associations that sounds and sights hold, and the deeper meaning they can reveal. In Lynch’s films and television, scenes often appear slow, with few or no cuts from the start to the end of an action. The sounds of nature, of traffic, the hums of air conditioners, the buzzes of electrical devices, the wheezes of purifiers, the incidental rhythms and repetitions of the world, are all presented without cuts. For Lynch appears to find the everyday, even the interstitial moments between events, enchanted and purposeful, magical. Because for Lynch there appear to be no events-between-events: everything is eventful, if one cares to understand.
And Lynch’s shamanism perhaps finds no purer expression than in Gotta Light?: Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, one of the strangest and most beautiful pieces of cinematic art ever to have been broadcast on television. Gotta Light? appears to be a complete Shamanic Myth, told almost entirely through visual symbolism, about the origins of evil in the world. In particular - continuing a lifelong preoccupation Lynch seems to have - about the origins of male violence towards women. 2 Descriptively, the Myth of Gotta Light? appears something as follows:
The people had scientists. And the scientists did something terrible. They took a sacred power from the gods, from Nature, and that was the power of Nuclear Fission. And in taking this power, and bringing it to their world, they created a Primordial Evil, who did appear as a black sphere that came through a tear in reality made by the scientists’ evil magic. And this Primordial Evil is called BOB. And BOB did come down to the Earth to find its place in Man’s hearts. And with BOB emerged his demonic servants, The Woodsmen. And the Woodsmen came from the shadows, and were as shadows, and came into the world of Men, and did break men, and speak to men in their hypnotic tongue, and through this sought to find a place for BOB to crawl into the head and heart of weak men, to hide as man, to lie dormant. For BOB and The Woodsmen knew that, amongst the gods, the lady who listened to the phonograph had felt the disruption to the cosmic order the scientists had made, and the evil they had conjoured, and so told The Fireman of this evil, and of this disorder. And The Fireman, seeing how the cosmos had become unbalanced, did tear from himself an essence of pure Good, which rose as a white sphere from him, and sent it down to the world of the people. And so the gods made the world balanced again - white balancing black; good balancing evil; purity balancing dirt.
This myth is thematically manichean, focused on the ideas of there being pure evil and pure good, black and white, and the conflict between these two forces. By extension, the myth is also somewhat Christian, with BOB functioning somewhat as Satan, and the White-Sphere-that-becomes-Laura-Palmer as Jesus. However Lynch’s Myth appears his own design, his own vision, sharing a family resemblance with Christianity rather than being inspired by it. Instead, it appears Gotta Light? is an expression of something magical that, for Lynch, was somewhat concrete and ‘true’.
The Societal Benefits of Shamanic Personalities
As the extended quote from Sapolsky indicates, there’s probably something societally advantagous about having some people (but not too many people) who think like Lynch. How so? Well, we can get a sense of how such myths might (pre)historically have been valuable, even necessary, by considering the broader canon of Twin Peaks and its primary inciting incident: The Death of Laura Palmer. Laura, a young woman, full of potential and hope, had her life cut tragically short, brutally murdered, wrapped in plastic and dumped in the river. Later it emerged that in the months before her death she was abused and brutalised, apparently by those whom she should most have been able to trust to care for her. Why did this happen? How can such things… be allowed to happen?
In real life, someone asking such questions won’t tend to want ‘real’ answers. But they will want some answers, that speak somehow to a higher reality. If someone neurotypical were asked to explain why such kinds of tragedy were allowed to occur, they would likely offer brief, kindly, platitudinal obfuscation: life’s a mystery; they’re in a better place now. And if someone neurodiverse but leaning towards the logical mechanistic thinking of classical autism 3 were asked such a question they would probably seek to provide a complete and coherent mechanical explanation: given the wound marks identified on the body, what is the most probable sequence in which the wounds were inflicted? What type of implement was used, and which of these wounds would likely have been fatal? Neither of these types of response is likely to console the close family and friends of an innocent victim.
But if a shaman were asked, they might be able to say something, like the above, that provides a much deeper sense of consolation, meaning and comfort than either the neurotypical or mechanically provided could offer. Someone inclined towards meta-magical thinking could connect the plain, tragic facts of the matter into a constellation of cosmic wonder, testify to the meaning and impact that the deceased had in life, and continues to have in death, and besides, death, over there, is still life, and everyone you have ever known and loved is still alive, just over there, not over here.
And the person seeking consolation would find the shaman’s explanation to be believable, unlike the platitudes of the neurotypical, because the shaman’s half-crazy enough to believe what they’re saying too, with utter, concrete, certainty and conviction. What the shaman says isn’t just true, it’s truth.
Stuff-of-wonder, and nonsense
In a different time and place, people like David Lynch would have founded the myths that bound tribes and nations together. 4 Right now, many modern day shamen likely listen to, and even appear on, ponderous podcasts, talking with wide eyes about aliens, conspiracies, sunlight and nutrition, perhaps expressing vaccine skepticism, even buoying ethnonationalist fearmongering. Rather than being seen simply as geysers of misinformation, however, spouting untruth and nonsense, these half-crazy people also need to be recognised as conduits to spiritual connectedness and cosmic togetherness. And sometimes this stuff of wonder is something that keeps society functioning.
And David Lynch? When he’s allowed to, he still makes television and film. But even when he’s not, he still can’t help but make art.
Footnotes
For followers of Twin Peaks: The Return, this reference appears especially fitting, as one of the main mystic characters encountered is called The Fireman, and literally lives in a cosmic lighthouse.↩︎
Twin Peaks: The Return also features the apparently senseless death of a young boy in a hit-and-run↩︎
The tendencies towards solitary activity, and difficulty with many common activities involving others, may lead to those with Schizotypalism to be diagnosed with autism at a higher-than-chance rate. Indeed, autism was originally believed to be a type of schizophrenia. However, whereas classical autism involves difficulties with most social relationships arising from having a way of thinking that’s much more categorical, organised and ordered than most neurotypicals; schizotypalism involves difficulties with most social relationships arising from having a way of thinking that’s much more cosmic, nebulous, and disordered than most neurotypicals. At this level of abstraction, autism and schizotypalism appear almost as neurological opposites of each other. To see either as variations of the other appears, to me, as perverse as categorising both someone who’s drowned, and someone who’s died of dehydration, as both having died of ‘Water Abnormality Syndrome’.↩︎
Paradoxically, they also likely suffered under theocracies based on such myths, because theocracy tends to weigh down dreams into dogma, turn spiritualism into an institution, and so brand shamen as heretics. Shamen are creators; priests are bureacrats.↩︎