Relating To The Unframed Mind

               Family get-togethers are always interesting, aren’t they? They’re especially interesting when that slightly kooky member shows up and mixes things up a bit. I remember one Thanksgiving that our “special member,” who actually isn’t a part of the family but a close family friend, came a little late with a bottle of wine. He has a couple mental disabilities, schizophrenia being just one of them, and no family in the area and we give him a place to come for the holidays. Well this night he had a little to drink and started talking about several medical conditions he swore he was suffering from, including an organism he can crawling around his head, but most of his words were incoherent. The thing I remember the most about that night is the feeling of being completely separated from the man sitting on the opposite side of the table from me. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t somewhat uncomfortable  but I’ve known him for most of my life so this was nothing new; I understood he had no control of his situation and he wasn’t a dangerous person at all. But the feeling of separation was from something a little more intangible than that and a little more complicated for someone who was just 12 years old.

Thinking about it now, things seem a little clearer. I had a hard time following his conversation and lack of progression of the ideas he was forming while continuing to speak. He would jump from topic to topic and never really tie them together. The level of enthusiasm would rise and sink without any emphasis needed in the subject matter. If what he was saying was an accurate extension of his thought process, I can only imagine the confusion of his conscious thought.

                The complexity of thought brought me to Bessie Head’s novel, A Question of Power, with only the first 34 pages in mind. While it is narrated in the third person, it gives the impression that it is a close following of the consciousness of the main character, Elizabeth. She’s described as having a “pain-torn consciousness” (13) and this idea is reflected in Head’s style of writing which, in turn, reflects Elizabeth’s jumpy thought process.  For example, on page 14 a paragraph begins with “The nightmare was over. Dan was not over. He had not yet told the whole of mankind about his ambitions, like Hitler and Napoleon, to rule the world.” The rest of the paragraph doesn’t complete this thought as any reader would expect it too, but instead jumps to different subjects without any transition or apparent reason. This seems to be a representation of that family friend at Thanksgiving; if his thought process was just as jumpy, no wonder I felt so separated from him since there was no structure to his thinking.

                The nature of thought structure is explained in Rob Burton’s book, Artists of a Floating World, in the section about Bessie Head. Burton states that “many of us grow up without realizing (or without being given a chance to realize) that the frames we were born into are, in fact, ideological constructions” (62). I found the terming thought structure as a “frame” that is individualistic to everyone to be very interesting and suggestive. A frame suggests a permanent structure crafted to fit a perception within its outline. This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes (and I can’t remember it exactly or who said it, which, yes, I know is a crime) that says something along the line that the biggest mistake you can make is to assume that anyone else perceives the world as you do.  Now, combining these two ideas, what everyone shares is a frame of perception but the frame that each person constructs throughout their life is different from everyone else’s, hence differences of people’s perceptions.

               Perhaps it could be said that someone like Head’s character Elizabeth or the friend of my family could possibly have a loose or no frame of perception at all. This would further explain that separation I felt even more. Here’s one way to look at this idea: think about taking a book, cutting up all the sentences into separate pieces, putting the pieces into a box, and then shaking it up. I’d imagine that pulling each sentence out without looking and then trying to make sense of it would be much like living life without that “frame.”  A little chilling isn’t it?