After the Talking Bird, the nice man at the Tavistock Clinic kept asking me why I stole books and birds, though I told him I had only ever stolen one of each.I told him it was about meaning, and he suggested, very politely, that might be a kind of a psychosis.
'You think meaning is psychosis?'
'An obsession with meaning, at the expense of the ordinary shape of life, might be understood as psychosis, yes.'
'I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We all make it ordinary, but it is not.'
He twiddled his pencil. His nails were very clean.
'I am only asking questions.'
'So am I.'
There was a pause.
I said, 'How would you define psychosis?'
He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil: Psychosis, out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find our what reality is, so that I can touch it.
Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping (London: Harper Perennial, 2005) 195-6.
