Excerpts from the Archives of the Narcissism List Part 38

Sam: All geniuses are madmen, in the sense that both deconstruct reality.

Both are unable to assimilate conventional modes of interaction: "seeing", ":feeling", or "thinking". To both the genius and the madman, the world is a kaleidoscopic whirlwind of potentials and shattered actualities, a monstrously colourful place, replete with delectable secrets and penumbral threats. Still, there is a difference. We revere genius and recoil from insanity. Why is that? It is because the genius is adept at finding new organizing principles underlying the chaos. To the madman, the world dissolves into an incomprehensible and ominously unpredictable barrage of stimuli. In his efforts to re-impose order on his disintegrating psyche, the madman resorts to paranoia or delusions.

The genius faces the same emotional needs but instead of succumbing to the irrational, he invents science and music - new patterns which infuse his no less capricious universe with patterns and beauty.

Q: You write passionately about narcissism. Could you give us the definitive definition of narcissism?

Sam: My favourite is this one:

"A pattern of traits and behaviours which signify infatuation and obsession with one's self to the exclusion of all others and the egotistic and ruthless pursuit of one's gratification, dominance and ambition."

But I should hasten to add that I write passionately about PATHOLOGICAL narcissism. Narcissism is healthy. Self-love enables us to love others, to achieve, to strive, to dream, to heal, to have children. It is only when it is pathologized that it becomes a menace to oneself and to others.

Q: You've written about a hellish childhood, especially the treatment received at your parents hands. Please elaborate.

Sam: I am much more forgiving now, at the age of 41. I understand them better. They were young, they were poor, they were scared, they were over-worked, trying to make ends meet, they were uneducated. And here I was, a freak of nature, a local sensation, an insufferably haughty and spoiled brat, a challenge to their parental authority in a very conservative society. They freaked out. They communicated with me through physical violence and verbal abuse because that is how they were treated by their own parents and because abuse was common where and when I grew up.

But they gave me my life, and my love of reading, and the memories from which I mold my poetry and short fiction. These are great gifts. I can never repay them enough.

Q: If you were chosen as "Ambassador for the Earth" and had to describe what a "human being" was to an alien from Planet 2537X, what would you tell them?

Sam: I must be careful to use only terms which are likely to be universally recognized and applicable. Exobiology and exo- communication are in their infancy.

This is what I would say, progressing from the more general to the more unique:

Self-correcting, self-motivated, networking, Carbon-based entity endowed with a central data processing unit (product specs provided). Multiplies through sexual reproduction (mathematical explanation of sexual reproduction follows). Communicates with other entities and with things produced by other entities by exchanging patterns of energy. Conserves information both internally and externally. Has the property of constructing self-recursive, hierarchical, models of the world in which it is included (known in humanspeak as "introspection"). Responds to organizing principles by connecting with other entities on a permanent or temporary basis in fostering coherent cross-entity modes of behaviour.

Q: If women as a whole were a glass of wine, and you drank from this collective glass, what would you taste?

Sam: Resentment, pain, fear, disdain, envy, humiliation. I would have felt these if I were a woman - having been suppressed for millennia by others (males), whose only advantage is their brawn.

Q: Tell us about your tale of riches to rags to prison and back.

Sam: I was born in a slum. I read. I burnt the midnight oil. I bluffed.