Always, Often, Sometimes, Rarely, Never: Disordered Narratives & Quantum Process

First presented in shorter form at the
Image & Media Encounters Symposium
2nd September 2022
Kingston School of Art & Institute of Contemporary Arts

INTRODUCTION

An exploration of the use of neoliberal use of metrics in public mental health assessment processes, by way of disordered poetics, visual text and the power of The Little Prince.

My PhD research is part life-writing and part literary criticism, within a historical materialist critical framework.  It’s asking questions about the social basis of post-traumatic narratives in fiction and life-writing and calls for the development of a Marxist approach, through critical analysis and poetics, to family trauma as an endemic social experience in capitalist society.

The focal artwork of this project, below, is made by hand in graphite and watercolour and the original fills an A2-sized sheet of heavyweight cartridge paper. 

My methodology creates autoethnographic pieces combining visuals and text, through what I define as quantum process: elemental, experimental, scientific, disordered, neurodivergent and politically resistant.  These perspectives are intertwining as I begin the second year of my part-time PhD research. Here are some examples of my drawings and visual-text journal entries:

METRICS AND BEING LOST IN A DESERT

As an A-level student in the 1970s I studied The Little Prince, a picture-story book by the French writer, illustrator and aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, published in America in 1943 during the author’s exile from Vichy France after being labelled a ‘defender of Jews’.  It’s a satirical fable about grief, loss and loneliness, narrated by a pilot who is desperately trying to repair his plane after crashing in the Sahara. 

The pilot meets the Little Prince, a visitor from Asteroid B-612 seeking a cure for loneliness.  The Little Prince relates his journey of encounters on different planets with a series of characters – including a businessman, a geographer, a rail worker, an alcoholic, a king – whose rationalised calculations and power-seeking strategies are exposed as self-defeating.   On Earth, he befriends a fox who reveals:

‘Here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’ 

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Katherine Woods, The Little Prince, 2017. P72

The Little Prince admonishes the interplanetary characters, and the narrator, to look beneath the surface of things, as children do, and this is the central theme of the book.    

One passage resonated strongly with my teenage self and has stayed with me over the decades since I first read it.   The pilot explains his own frustration with ‘the grown-ups and their ways’:

‘Grown-ups love figures. When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, “What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?” Instead, they demand: “How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?” Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.’

METRICS AND OBJECTIFICATION

Why were these words so powerful for me?   

First, I felt relentlessly judged on my vital statistics.  Dress size, bra size, trouser size, shoe size, ring size.  Weight, height, waist, bust, hips, shoe.   The smaller was the better.  My mother had trained in hairdressing and beauty culture and thereby had authority to explain how the dimensions and curvatures of eyes, eyebrows, chins, noses, cheeks, foreheads, earlobes, feet, hands, nails, knees and thighs were factorised into a grand system of ‘signs of beauty’.  Length and shape of hair were supported or undermined by quality, grooming, cleanliness, shine and thickness. 

All body-shaming values and observations were backed up by teen comics, and women’s magazines, fashion advertising, department stores, television dramas and boutique windows.  My parents communicated with each other and their friends through sums of money, house prices, room sizes, garden dimensions, numbers of bedrooms, numbers of car doors, engine sizes, and portion sizes.  Telephone numbers were stated slowly and proprietorially when anyone called.  Eventually each aspect of this differentiated system of personal expression, social value and self identification began to enrage me.  I became angry, disenfranchised, unloved and isolated.  I am not in a position  to quantify these emotions but I seem to be able to enumerate them.      

Secondly, I often miscalculated.  I said the wrong thing, did the wrong thing, put things in the wrong places, broke toys, cups and plates.  I was sleepless, forgetful, impatient, frustrated, unhappy, angry and violent.  I wanted connection, but it eluded me.  People felt sorry for my parents for having me.

Nobody had heard of complex trauma, ADHD or dypraxia in those days.

The physicist Carol Rovelli in his book Reality is not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity writes:

---

NEURODIVERGENCE: AT THE NEXUS OF POETRY AND SCIENCE

In their essay The Little Prince: a glimpse into the world of autism?, Jean-Francois Lemay, Genevieve Eastabrook, and Heather Mackenzie raise the question of neurodivergence as a central theme and a driver of the narrative modes of the book.  They cite three central characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) which they see represented in the character of the Little Prince:

1. Deficits in reciprocity, communication and social skills
2. Restricted and repetitive behaviours
3. Anxiety and depression

The article authors suggest that The Little Prince is potentially Saint-Exupéry’s self-portrait and a plea for understanding of the social awkwardness, moodiness difference and childlike naivety he experienced and revealed in his own autobiographical sketches.  The early definition of ASD – Asperger’s Syndrome – was just coming to social and scientific attention. They highlight the Little Prince’s ‘egocentrism’ in interaction as comparable to those of people with ASD who have ‘an inability to understand … tacit, constantly changing rules governing social behaviour’:

‘The Little Prince does not appear to understand social distance and authority when relating to others. Rarely does he feel compelled to use social niceties. Typically, he just begins talking to those he encounters and is described on several occasions as going away puzzled mid-conversation, often talking to himself. The Little Princess is bewildered by social roles. He is confused when the King refers to him as “a subject”.  He wonders aloud, “How could he recognise me as a subject when he had never seen me before?”… Throughout the story, he blurts out orders to the pilot. Even [when they first meet] when the pilot is attempting to repair his airplane, the Little Prince repeatedly asks him to draw a picture of sheep. When the pilot complies, the Little Prince tells him to redraw it because it appears “very sickly” and “too old”, seeming to be oblivious to the pilot’s increasing frustration.’

Here are the drawings the Little Prince rejects for being ‘sickly’, too ram-like and ‘too old’:

I take these issues up as a touchstone for the poetic expression of neurodivergence.  The experience of being constantly not understood, and deemed ‘weird’, ‘rude’ and ‘not normal’ was an everyday part of my own childhood.  However, the effort of living with that lostness and wounding, crying out for fairness, fighting in my rage and frustration – and the relentless pressure to conform and mask, ensured that the character of the Little Prince spoke to me only limply as a simpleton who would never pass exams or earn money.  And that way lay a kind of living decomposition.  There was no room in my home, my school or in any other part of my life, for being different.  I agreed with his reasoning, but my conformity, and need to try to get love, filtered my response so I looked down on his naivety, much as my own was despised by others.  By the time I read The Little Prince I was fully focussed on compensating for impulsivity through dogged academic progress and unpaid social justice activism. Which came first – the trauma or the neurodivergence?

I am not equating ASD with (my) ADHD, but I am drawing an autoethnographical connection between my visceral identification with the story of The Little Prince through the question of neurodivergent approaches to social and personal relationships. Through my research I am uncovering indications that trauma effects in the body, through neurodivergence, undercut the hegemonic norms of social interaction which require working-class people to observe social inequality as an objective truth and natural environmental condition.  We learn to be afraid of authority, to defer and hold back.  We are conditioned to live within normalised unequal social relationships. Neurodivergent people frequently cannot understand these nuanced behaviours that have become ‘second nature’ to others.  Are we therefore a kind of anti-capitalist, or resistant social element, people who can point to more authentic forms of interaction?

FUNCTION AND FEELING

METRICS, MEANING AND IDEOLOGY

Here is the reason I made Always Often Sometimes Rarely Never:

In 2017, I was diagnosed complex PTSD resulting from developmental experiences.  In 2019, I was required to complete this form at the beginning and end of specialised trauma therapy.  It is very widely used.  It’s called: Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation – Outcome Measure, or  CORE OM.

Along the top there are measures of repetition and frequency – temporality choices:

Not at all

Only occasionally

Sometimes

Often

Most or all of the time

Down the left-hand side are 34 ‘feeling statements’.  They include:

There is a forced framing in this system.  Emotions must be expressed by or translated into the given language.  You can’t express your own feeling but you have to spot the similarity between your inner life and the words that have come from an anonymous clinical source, and most likely on a hard copy that has been photocopied badly.

People with PTSD and undiagnosed neurodivergence won’t be spotted or included by this screening mechanism.  PTSD is characterised by dissociation – involuntary zoning out, numbing and distracting. Giving a snap answer, or any answer can be impossible.  

For me, drawing or acting a feeling is far more expressive.  I’ve produced a couple of quick sketches for this project, shown below.

The first is: ‘I am dragged down by a soaking wet woollen cloak’

This feeling could possibly translate into:
Question 5:   ‘I have felt totally lacking energy and enthusiasm’

The second sketch is ‘I have been covered in acid’

This one might have to be covered by: 
Question 33: ‘I have felt humiliated or shamed by other people’

It’s an opportunity to reflect on the role of the drawings.  Would the sense and sensation of the statements be equally expressive without the drawings?  Could the drawings still express without the words? Perhaps there would be sense and sensation, but perhaps the drawings add something else.  For me, the spiky, spidery way I draw fast and shape the faces and bodies is a visceral message from my embodied emotion which I think uses no analytical thought or planning.  The drawings are like the gestures I use in conversation, melodramatic perhaps, but to be understood by those who can. Some rear back, frown and seem repulsed by the unskilful raw expression.  Others chuckle and nod.

Drawings are similarly intrinsic and pivotal to the language of The Little Prince.  The first chapter uses illustration to articulate the pilot-narrator’s own difficulties with being understood, and demonstrates the impossibility of ‘grown-ups’ ability to see ‘what is invisible to the eye’.  He shows a drawing he made, aged six,  ‘a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant’ (below)  and asked them whether the drawing frightened them’:

‘But they answered: “Frighten?  Why should anyone be frightened of a hat?”’ 
Note the eye on the snake! So he draws a cross-section  ‘so the grown-ups could see it clearly’:

Notice again the eye.  However, the grown-ups tell the boy pilot-narrator to set aside drawing and concentrate on formal education.  He reflects that geography has been useful for flying planes, but says:

‘In the course of this life I have had a great many encounters with a great many people who have been concerned with matters of consequence.  I have lived a great deal among grown-ups.  I have seen them intimately, close at hand.  And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.  Whenever I met one who seemed to me at all clear-sighted, I tried the experiment of showing him my Drawing Number one, which I have always kept…. But, whoever it was, he, or she, would always say: “That is a hat.”’

I read this opening chapter as a powerful affective statement of alienation, of isolation and the impossibility of being understood, and the resignation in the child and the adult-child, to never being fully seen or recognised.  In their article on autism in The Little Prince, Lemay et al translate this sadness into impairment of the neurodivergent’s capacity to interact.  They say:

‘This impairment in two-way interaction is one of the obvious and most debilitationg characteristics of autism.  Lack of social reciprocity is not due to a desire to withdraw from social contact.’

This provokes difficult personal memories for me of being criticised as abnormal and of ‘setting myself apart’ for spending time alone in my room in the days before personal computers, mobile phones and the internet.  I needed to be alone to be the person who could read and write what I wanted to read and write.  If I had had a social environment where what I wanted to read and write was welcomed and recognised, and where welcoming silence was possible, rather than the din of what was regarded as normal family life, perhaps I would not have set myself apart, then or now.

In Chapter 2, having crashed in the Sahara, the pilot is stranded with only enough drinking water for a week.  He ‘was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft… Thus you can imagine my amazement, at sunrise, when I was awakened by an odd little voice.  It said: “If you please – draw me a sheep!”’ 

We saw above the three drawings of a sheep which the pilot dashed off, which did not satisfy the Little Prince.  The picture below shows the final drawing he scrawls:

  It’s a sheep in a box, and the Little Prince is delighted with it.  In that simple, imaginative representation, the two characters are united as kindred spirits, and their affective relationship, which not to say it is without conflict, begins.

People who have been wounded by traumatic events are also characterised by compulsive hypervigilance, and rigid self-reliance – which are not present on the form but widely experienced.   So, we don’t even have a trauma-informed mental health diagnostic assessment system, let alone a trauma-informed society.

On the CORE OM form, the respondent is advised to answer quickly without thinking much, so there is a sense of chucking anything down just to finish it – and the therapist did instruct me to do this.  But I can’t express that visceral sensation through the format of the grid.  The technicality immediately sends me into attempts to calculate, and to check my calculations to make sure they are right.

On the surface of this, it may seem that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and I as his reader, and as a practice-based researcher, may reject figures and metrics altogether.  Saint-Exupéry resists the language-world of ‘grown-ups’ with its evaluations, lack of attunement and imagination.  I resist the social systems of capitalist society: they crush human potential and creativity – and I am critiquing marketised metrics as a tool in these systems.   However, as Rovelli has asserted, we need both science and poetry – beauty and measurement are intertwined in understanding inner life in our society.

Numbers in themselves are not ‘bad’.  It is how they are collected and used that matters.  If they are used as a tool to straiten, distort, narrow, fog, normalise and homogenise, that is problematic.  If they illuminate, reveal and get to the heart of the matter, show ‘what is invisible to the eye’, they can be part of authenticising, of liberating truth from ideological obfuscation.

Saint-Exupéry’s pilot-narrator identifies the little prince’s home planet as Asteroid-B612, discovered by a Turkish astronomer in 1909 but only verified in 1920 when the astronomer wore European clothing, as illustrated:

This quantitative detail, the narrator asserts, ‘is on no account of the grown up as and their ways’.

So, in scattering facts and figures by inserting feeling and poetry, to what purpose are numbers rearranged?  The narrator believes that grown-ups won’t be interested in the Little Prince’s charm, his laughter, or his wish for a sheep.  They will be interested in the fact that he came from Asteroid B-612, a ‘fact’ and a ‘figure’ which obscures what is important.  For this reader, the importance of the naming of the asteroid in The Little Prince is how this ‘fact’ and ‘figure’ are  used to expose racism in science, and the colonisation of Eastern discoveries in astronomy by Western systems of provenance. 

THEIR FIGURES – AND OURS

We certainly need to make use of metrics as a tool for seeing ‘what is essential’ and what is ‘ invisible to the eye’. Since 2010 there has been a devastating reduction in mental health services, especially for children and young people.  The number of acute beds has reduced by a third.  In completing the CORE OPM form, there could therefore be a temptation to exaggerate in order to try and get help – because very many referrals are rejected. 

Alternatively, such is the stigma of ‘mental illness’, there could be a temptation to downplay problems.  Or in people who have lived a long time with mental distress in their lives, so that discomfort, panic and fear are normalised, there can be in denial.  In my family of origin, being unhappy is normal in my family for instance.  Coping is compulsory.

So, having made these observations, and been through the experience of the questionnaire, I felt the need to critique, politicise and poeticise.   

My art piece takes the spacetime of the metrical questionnaire and inserts different matter, different material.  It’s addressing function and feeling.  But it is reflecting my own experience in my own terms: imagery, concept, metaphors, temporality.  The language of affect and disorder.

ALWAYS OFTEN SOMETIMES RARELY NEVER: PRODUCING AND PROCESSING

Along the top the temporalities are redefined as:

• Unexpectedly
• Relentlessly
• These days
• Once a week
• During or after contact with family members

Down the side are a series of list of ‘feeling statements’:

• I wake in nameless dread
• Cooking seems impossible
• I can’t find my keys
• The empty sky helps me feel safe
• I forget the names of plants
• I forget the namnes of people
• Supermarkets drown my thoughts
• Beautiful faces appear in the street
• I can’t write
• I can’t draw
• I can’t cry
• I find someone to play with
• I can’t speak
• Everyone wishes I would go away
• My help is no help
• My heart heats up with love
• I can’t bear to go out
• I don’t want to go home
• I fear being alone
• I avoid other people
• Everything I say is meaningless
• I can’t stop making jokes
• Cooking seems impossible
• I interrupt others to shout ‘LOOK!’
• I can’t get an appointment with the doctor
• My sorrow and anger are entirely appropriate
• I know that I am not to blame.

This is the physical process of making:

 I have a lifelong difficulty with measuring.  I get the distances and numbers muddled, the lines slant, the marks go wrong.  The above list of statements has a repeated line.  The grid is not regular but, like me, is good enough. 

PTSD can generate multiplying details with the power of quicksand.  I frequently drown in my details, my unmanageable ideas, and have to go to bed.  It takes me weeks to formulate even a short presentation like this. 

My research into the poetics of trauma and identification with non-linear narrative, draws on Meg Jensen’s chapter Surviving the Wreck in the 2016 book Bodies in Transition and the Point of Autobiographical Fiction .  She writes:
‘Traumatic experience disrupts normal memory processes … narrative incoherence is itself an emblematic symptom … chronologically arranged narratives and trauma are at cross purposes.’

 She outlines characteristics of post-traumatic narrative:

Inconsistency occurs because many people with trauma never tell their story the same way twice. Many trauma victims are disbelieved or disregarded because their ‘story’ does not ‘add up’.  

---

SAND IN OUR EYES

Metrics are widely used in mental health sectors to identify and measure inner life experience – panic, sadness, loneliness, fear and so on – in clinical rather than social terms.  They are a discourse of denial, denial of family trauma, workplace stress, racism, homophobia, transphobia, disablism, poor housing, lack of childcare, poverty, escalating living costs. They are therefore part of the creation and development of languages and concepts which can adapt or co-opt human experience into marketised healthcare and working environments, turning the complexities of psychological and material truths into the building blocks of a well-being agenda that puts the responsibility for workplace stress onto individual workers.  Metrics can either tell a truthful story about the social experience of trauma and distress, or strip the scene of its social and political context. In our higher education sector, metrics are used in a material and ideological way.  They define what constitute progress and outcomes.  They are used to shape policy and generalise measurable frameworks.  They are used to wipe out the crises of our current experiences: overwork and illness, inequality, low pay, casualisation, pension attacks. 

However, our reality can be supported by statistics on these questions.  For instance, the pay freeze for teaching staff since 2009 amounts to a 20% pay cut.  The pitiful 3% pay increase can be compared with the latest RPI inflation rate of 12.3%.  The vice chancellor of Kingston University was paid £352k in 2021 – risen from £190k in 2016. These are the kind of facts and figures that can inspire the action that can bring about change.

CORE OM: A WARNING FROM OUR HISTORY

Kitty McCrea managed the student counselling service at De Montfort University, Leicester. When Kitty first suggested using CORE in 2002, the counselling team were opposed, to the extent of threatening industrial action. Kitty explains ‘I decided to implement CORE not because we were under pressure to demonstrate outcomes, but to get a grip on what was happening in the service’, says Kitty. ‘I saw it as an opportunity to revise everything we did…. Unfortunately I was then faced with a collective grievance, which meant that I was unable to fully introduce CORE for a further 12 months.’ 

So university support staff, qualified counsellors, also disagreed with this form, but were railroaded into accepting it, as was I.

CONCLUSION

As an early career researcher and socialist, I am determined that my multidisciplinary methods should be put to radical political uses in advocating for trauma-informed services at all levels of society, but also in calling for the kind of revolutionary social change that can put people’s needs before profit.

And as an artist I want to continue to ask about the dialectical, quantum relationships between the structures of capitalist society, and the fragmentary discourses of inner life because this tells us the story that needs to be changed. 

---