I am in my apartment, crouching, my head feels like the head of the elephant man. It hurts and I gasp for air. I am on the bathroom floor on a pile of towels. My tongue feels heavy in my mouth and I lull like a baby. All that is unsaid and all that is said in vain or pain is attached to this tongue. I crawl to bed panting and breathing heavily. I am in bed and my body is in agony like during child labor. I am giving birth to myself. After many hours the pain subsides and I hear church bells ringing. I have a vision of a white dove in my heart.

That day I severed all ties with reality. This scene with regressions into infantility reminds me of Nietzsche's Thus spoke Zarathustra, the three Metamorphoses: "But tell me, my brothers, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred yes. For the game of creation my brothers, a sacred yes is needed: The spirit now wills his own will; the world's outcast now conquers his own world. Of the three metamorphosis of the spirit I have told you: how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child. Thus spoke Zarathustra. And at that time he stayed in the town which is called the pied cow."

After this initial hallucination everything is different. I am connected to all my real and imaginary friends, John, Isabelle, Paola, Ivana, Malvina, Beate, Juliette, Robert and Xavier, to name only a few. They are all together with me now at my apartment. By some miracle we can communicate and visit one another invisibly. My friends want to talk with me. So I sit at my glass top writing desk. Suddenly the lights are really bright like in a Caravaggio painting with the dark surroundings, and I hear gentle voices. "Yvonne, there is something very special going on here. You are about to become one of the New World People, we can communicate invisibly and together we can do wonderful things. We are artists, poets, architects, doctors, actors, workers, we come from all walks of life and we form a glorious web of love around the world. We are from all continents, all races, creeds, colors and religions." I am very happy to hear this. Another voice says: "Yvonne, this is John, I want to introduce you to someone, this is Robert. He has been in love with you ever since you met for the first time in New York fifteen years ago. It is time that you meet again." Sir George Solti's Beethoven is playing and suddenly I sense a presence in the room. The light by my desk has become brighter. It is Robert who is there and we fall in love again at first sight. Robert is an apparition of pure light. We talk all night, we read books together, hear music, we roam the atlas and the globe. It is like an immersion into a relationship that has always existed. One that knows no beginning and no end. The light in the apartment is like in a Turner painting. The scent of roses abounds the space. We don't talk in normal language. This is all higher mind communication. Music becomes language. Poetry, novels, numbers and slight variations in light become a part of our language. Together we soar the skies and walk the earth on angels´ feet. Our form of communication is pure love. Suddenly everything speaks of Robert to me, the winds, the stars, heaven and earth, and I am everything to Robert. He is my Zebaoth:

God I love you in your dress of Roses When you step out of your gardens, Zebaoth Oh you godly youth You poet I drink lonely from you scents.

My first blossom longed for you So come You sweet God You playmate of God Your gates of gold become liquid at my longing.

The lighting in the apartment becomes a sign, the on and off of the bulbs, the intensity of the light, the changing light of night and day. The lighting in the hallway becomes my firmament. I am wrapped in a black silk cloth. Robert and I are about to be married. We marry in the sky to Beethoven Symphonies. We are in the clouds showering one another with diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires. Everything is set aglow. Robert in white I in black. We are turning pirouettes and spiraling in the heavens. This is more beautiful than any roller coaster ride. It is like flying. This is a hierogamus of the most beautiful order. I am intoxicated and infused with love. The next day the marriage ceremony continues in the Temple of Solomon. I have a model of a golden compound with water in the middle. It is a winged golden building of bright orange color. This building becomes my Temple of Solomon. While I am dusting and brushing the model in my apartment the marriage is taking place on a different plane. I discover I can exist in different dimensions at the same time. Everything is suffused in a golden light. Cassandra Wilson is playing Solomon Times. I am elated. Life suddenly has become expansive and luminous in hitherto unknown degrees. Everything is enchanted as if moving with the angels. I live as much in the skies as on earth. I feel infused with a radiant substance and this substance is also suffusing everything else. It is the 23.February 2003, a late winter day, 4:00 o'clock in the afternoon. The weather is beautiful. That night, instead of going to a wedding party, my friends and I decide to fly to New York. We spread our wings and fly. It is the most beautiful experience, to fly in over this megalopolis, approaching the island from the north, down Broadway and into Tribeca. It is now night and the lights are bristling. The city with its lights forms a weave with the starred skies. The winds, the sense of liberty and freedom is utterly exhilarating.

The next day I am listening to the soundtrack of the film The Hurricane, as I clean my apartment. Suddenly there is an excruciating pain in my head. It is as if sandpaper were being pulled across the surface of my brain. I hear nasty voices: "You little dumb fuck ass punk bitch think you can hang out with your special friends. We are here to teach you otherwise. You New World people we can't stand your guts you're all such a bunch of phonies. We're the white lighting people the Tellurian Hounds and once we're finished with you, you won't recognize the world you live in."

I can't stand these voices, the bemoaning belittling laughs. What is going on? I am devastated. The voices continue: "You think you people are so good. Well let's tell you something, you are all shitheads. John is a white supremacist from the south and your boyfriend Robert, we can't stand his guts, is a Satanist. We're going to do some work on your brain Yvonne. You like the Hurricane huh? We can't stand these good black people. You think you've accomplished something getting white lightning out of your toilet bowl, try getting it out of your head." The most brutish roaring laughter follows. I am distraught. I run up and down the hallway of my apartment. I can't believe what is happening. I pull my hair. It can't be true what these voices are saying. I try to hide my head, between cushions, between objects, tables, chairs, inside a chest of drawers, anywhere, any place in the apartment, to make the voices stop. But they don't.: "Yvonne we are going to shit on your liver," they keep on going "we are going to cause white lightning in your brain until that pretty little head of yours knows nothing of darkness anymore. We are going to send you white lightning flashes until you forget who you are."

Would anyone have said to me "Yvonne you are ill you must see a doctor," I would have thought the person talking to me has gone mad and does not realize the magnitude of what is going on here! Madness never seems like madness to the mad. It is an unshakeable reality or a reality that shakes everything, things become rearranged, they reach a new order or constellation. The music from the Hurricane film is on: "Nobody knows what trouble I've seen.......he had to fight developing his natural right....a freedom bigger than life a freedom with many dimensions........I am the inescapable, the unintelligible, the unnegotiable, the unchallenged.....I AM TIME.... I hold no prejudice......you can't conceal me....cover me run from me ......I AM TIME.....many have wasted me but now you're facing me.......I AM TIME .......I can't even explain the pain.....imagine if your life were like a hurricane."

Right from the beginning my psychosis had a lot to do with Afro-America. While I was reading Richard Wright, delving into the life of Paul Robeson, reading James Baldwin I had the most racist voices in my head. It is the most awful thing I have ever experienced. Part of my world conspiracy theory after all was, that White Supremacists had gotten hold of me, doing black magic on me and trying to infect me with illnesses. The racism I was exposed to in my psychosis was harrowing. I not only had voices in my head that my liver and heart were going to be eaten, destroyed, shat upon, but I also had severe aches around my neck, as if someone was trying to hang me. My neck became inflamed and in my mind it was the Tellurian Hounds trying to do cyberspace warfare on me. This was my explanation and language for what I was experiencing. I was being persecuted by sick white crackers in my worst nightmares. Similarly I had anti-semitic voices in my head again followed with severe physical materialization. Hallucinations of extermination trains and camps hounded me. Lynching scenes, scenes of betrayal and pain and suffering as if slavery had returned. It is as if the entire plight and suffering of the black and Jewish people had suddenly fallen on my shoulders. I read a lot of Else Lasker-Schüler and empathized with particularly one poem I read over and over again during these months of torment.

My People The rock is crumbling From which I arise And sing my songs of God Suddenly I plunge from the path And deep within stream Over wailing stone Alone to the sea.

I have washed sofar From the ferment of my blood And still, within me, echoes the sound When, - shuddering eastward-, The crumbling rock-bones Of my people Cry out to God.

The white supremacist and anti-semitic language running in my brain was excruciatingly painful physically, mentally and emotionally. I come from a liberal household, where anti-semitism and racism are the definite unmistakable enemy. With such people, bad people that is, one resisted, fought, walked away, but never allowed them too close. To suddenly have this awful language inside my body and my psyche was more than I could bear. It was harrowing. I spent night after night crying and wincing with pain, utterly afraid of such horror. I would spend nights on end devising mechanisms to ward off these voices. One of them was listening to music. John Coltrane and Aziza Mustafa Zadeh. Their Jazz played at a frequency which did my tormented head a lot of good. The voices sat at a very precise location in my head. The music I would listen to could penetrate this space of torment actually and physically. I would sit in front of the stereo at full blast, turning and moving my head until these voices would be turned and spiraled out by the music. I imagined a hole in my head from whence the voices could escape with the help of this music.

I also would put on Händel's Messiah, conducted by Sir George Solti, and sent the entire building, myself included, flying off into the universe. This too was done in order to escape the voices. The voices played at a specific frequency it seemed to me. Not audible in all parts of the universe. Setting the building off flying was to escape the frequencies of these voices. This was every time an utter act of faith and a feat. It is not easy taking buildings weighing a few thousands of tons flying off into the heavens. After such miracle masterpieces I would be utterly exhausted. It usually took me all night, moving around the apartment, preparing everything, opening windows, having the water run, lighting candles, putting on the music, taking care of the flowers so that everything was just perfect for taking off and staying afloat for hours on end so that these horrid voices couldn't reach me. The music was in each case a metaphysical bridge clearing the way for me away from these wretched voices. I needed the music like a thirsty person needs water. Without the music my head would surely have burst under the onslaught of the voices.