Tao revised

René Magritte, La Clairvoyance, 1936

The witch, the sapta, the mystic, the schizophrenic, the fool, the prophet, the trickster, and the poet are all variants of the bus. (The witch traditionally has freedom in three dimensions. He or she is perhaps best symbolized by some flying, lurching, and dizzy vehicle such as a helicopter.) They all share a partial freedom that sets them at odds with the conventional world.

Long ago, in 1949, when psychiatrists still believed in lobotomy, I was a new member of the staff of the Veterans Administration Mental Hospital in Palo Alto. One day one of the residents called me aside to see the blackboard in our largest classroom. A lobotomy meeting had been held there that afternoon and the board was still unerased.

This was thirty years ago, of course, and nothing of the sort could happen today, but in those days lobotomy meetings were great social occasions. Everybody who had had anything to do with the case turned up – doctors, nurses, social workers, psychologists, and so on. Perhaps thirty or forty people were there, including the five-man Lobotomy Committee, under the chairmanship of an outside examiner, a distinguished psychiatrist from another hospital.

When all the tests and reports had been presented, the patient was brought in to be interviewed by the outside examiner.

The examiner gave the patient a piece of chalk and told him, “Draw the figure of a man.” The patient went obediently to the blackboard and wrote: DRAW THE FIGURE OF A MAN

The examiner said, “Don‘t write it. Draw it.” And again the patient wrote: Don‘t write it draw it The examiner said, “Oh, I give up.” This time the patient revised the definition of the context, which he had already used to assert a kind of freedom, and wrote in large capital letters all across the blackboard:

VICTORY

Innocence and Experience