PRESENTS
SCHIZOPHRENIA: MIND OR BODY?
’ and had had to lie there, moist and paralyzed, curled fetal on his own sweat-shadow, and watch on the viewer a pale young
guy about Hal’s age, with copper stubble and a red cowlick and flat blank affectless black doll’s eyes, stare into space stage-left
while a brisk Albertan voiceover explained that Fenton here was a dyed-in-the-wool paranoid schizophrenic who believed that
radioactive fluids were invading his skull and that hugely complex high-tech-type machines had been specially designed and
programmed to pursue him without cease until they caught him and made brutal sport of him and buried him alive. It was an
old late-millennial CBC public-interest Canadian news documentary, digitally sharpened and redisseminated under the Inter-Lace
imprimatur — InterLace could get kind of seedy and low-rent during early-morning off-hours, in terms of Spontaneous Disseminations.
And so but since the old CBC documentary’s thesis was turning out pretty clearly to be
SCHIZOPHRENIA: BODY,
the voiceover evinced great clipped good cheer as it explained that well, yes, poor old Fenton here was more or less hopeless
as an extra-institutional functioning unit, but that, on the up-side, science could at least give his existence some sort
of meaning by studying him very carefully to help learn how schizophrenia manifested itself in the human body’s brain… that,
in other words, with the aid of cutting-edge Positron-Emission Topography or ‘P.E.T.’ technology (since supplanted wholly
by Invasive Digitals, Orin hears the developmental psychology graduate student mutter to herself, watching rapt over her cup,
unaware that Orin’s paralytically awake), they could scan and study how different parts of poor old Fenton’s dysfunctional
brain emitted positrons in a whole different topography than your average hale and hearty nondelusional God-fearing Albertan’s
brain, advancing science by injecting test-subject Fenton here with a special blood-brain-barrier-penetrating radioactive
dye and then sticking him in the rotating body-sized receptacle of a P.E.T. Scanner — on the viewer, it’s an enormous gray-metal
machine that looks like something co-designed by James Cameron and Fritz Lang, and now have a look at this Fenton fellow’s
eyes as he starts to get the gist of what the voiceover’s saying — and in a terse old Public-TV cut they now showed subject
Fenton in five-point canvas restraints whipping his copper-haired head from side to side as guys in mint-green surgical masks
and caps inject him with radioactive fluids through a turkey-baster-sized syringe, then good old Fenton’s eyes bugging out
in total foreseen horror as he’s rolled toward the huge gray P.E.T. device and slid like an unrisen loaf into the thing’s
open maw until only his decay-colored sneakers are in view, and the body-sized receptacle rotates the test-subject counterclockwise,
with brutal speed, so that the old sneakers point up and then left and then down and then right and then up, faster and faster,
the machine’s blurps and tweets not even coming close to covering Fenton’s entombed howls as his worst delusional fears came
true in digital stereo and you could hear the last surviving bits of his functional dye-permeated mind being screamed out
of him for all time as the viewer digitally superimposed an image of Fenton’s ember-red and neutron-blue brain in the lower-right
corner, where InterLace’s Time/Temp functions usually appear, and the brisk voiceover gave capsule histories of first paranoid
schizophrenia and then P.E.T. With Orin lying there slit-eyed, wet and neuralgic with A.M. dread, wishing the Subject would
put her own clothes and sharp jewelry on and take the rest of her Töblerone out of the freezer and go, so he could go to the
bathroom and get yesterday’s asphyxiated roaches into an E.W.D. dumpster before the dumpsters all filled for
SCHIZOPHRENIA: MIND OR BODY?
’ and had had to lie there, moist and paralyzed, curled fetal on his own sweat-shadow, and watch on the viewer a pale young
guy about Hal’s age, with copper stubble and a red cowlick and flat blank affectless black doll’s eyes, stare into space stage-left
while a brisk Albertan voiceover explained that Fenton here was a dyed-in-the-wool paranoid schizophrenic who believed that
radioactive fluids were invading his skull and that hugely complex high-tech-type machines had been specially designed and
programmed to pursue him without cease until they caught him and made brutal sport of him and buried him alive. It was an
old late-millennial CBC public-interest Canadian news documentary, digitally sharpened and redisseminated under the Inter-Lace
imprimatur — InterLace could get kind of seedy and low-rent during early-morning off-hours, in terms of Spontaneous Disseminations.
And so but since the old CBC documentary’s thesis was turning out pretty clearly to be
SCHIZOPHRENIA: BODY,
the voiceover evinced great clipped good cheer as it explained that well, yes, poor old Fenton here was more or less hopeless
as an extra-institutional functioning unit, but that, on the up-side, science could at least give his existence some sort
of meaning by studying him very carefully to help learn how schizophrenia manifested itself in the human body’s brain… that,
in other words, with the aid of cutting-edge Positron-Emission Topography or ‘P.E.T.’ technology (since supplanted wholly
by Invasive Digitals, Orin hears the developmental psychology graduate student mutter to herself, watching rapt over her cup,
unaware that Orin’s paralytically awake), they could scan and study how different parts of poor old Fenton’s dysfunctional
brain emitted positrons in a whole different topography than your average hale and hearty nondelusional God-fearing Albertan’s
brain, advancing science by injecting test-subject Fenton here with a special blood-brain-barrier-penetrating radioactive
dye and then sticking him in the rotating body-sized receptacle of a P.E.T. Scanner — on the viewer, it’s an enormous gray-metal
machine that looks like something co-designed by James Cameron and Fritz Lang, and now have a look at this Fenton fellow’s
eyes as he starts to get the gist of what the voiceover’s saying — and in a terse old Public-TV cut they now showed subject
Fenton in five-point canvas restraints whipping his copper-haired head from side to side as guys in mint-green surgical masks
and caps inject him with radioactive fluids through a turkey-baster-sized syringe, then good old Fenton’s eyes bugging out
in total foreseen horror as he’s rolled toward the huge gray P.E.T. device and slid like an unrisen loaf into the thing’s
open maw until only his decay-colored sneakers are in view, and the body-sized receptacle rotates the test-subject counterclockwise,
with brutal speed, so that the old sneakers point up and then left and then down and then right and then up, faster and faster,
the machine’s blurps and tweets not even coming close to covering Fenton’s entombed howls as his worst delusional fears came
true in digital stereo and you could hear the last surviving bits of his functional dye-permeated mind being screamed out
of him for all time as the viewer digitally superimposed an image of Fenton’s ember-red and neutron-blue brain in the lower-right
corner, where InterLace’s Time/Temp functions usually appear, and the brisk voiceover gave capsule histories of first paranoid
schizophrenia and then P.E.T. With Orin lying there slit-eyed, wet and neuralgic with A.M. dread, wishing the Subject would
put her own clothes and sharp jewelry on and take the rest of her Töblerone out of the freezer and go, so he could go to the
bathroom and get yesterday’s asphyxiated roaches into an E.W.D. dumpster before the dumpsters all filled for
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