STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> Then, I would turn on some music,
usually Schoenberg,

which played while I lay out a range of the
crayons. This part was very important; I

had noticed early on that
most of these patients, suffering from a very specific

combination
of psychological catatonia?s in which I had come to

specialize,
responded very sensitively to ritual. Slowly, like a tortoise,

they
would pop their heads out, their hands grip the crayon I placed
there, and

they would begin to draw.

While drawing, their

personality would
change. I cant really describe it, words frequently fail

to
communicate such an abstract quantity as a ?personality change?,
but I will try.

Once the element of time was removed, it was as if
they began to merge into a single

class, a unit separated only by
space. The drawings, the ways in which they all drew

similar themes
in similar ways, their expressions, movements, and

formal
characteristics, all combined into an uncanny resemblance of
something which

could almost be grasped, but hung out just outside of
vision. After they finished the

drawings, they would go into small
convulsions, as if the journey back to catatonia

was a violent
compression of time and distance.

Returning home late as usual from my
office, I locked the new drawings in the large

metal box I kept under
my bed. After a small dinner, spent gazing out the window at

the gray
midtown buildings which composed the sky of the city, I would be
drawn to

open the box and once again gaze at the range of drawings,
trying to detect the common

thread, trying to place together the
pieces of a logical puzzle from the scattered

fractions of irrational
impulse. I had no end of troubled, exhausted nights, staring,

moving
two drawings together then apart again, combining and recombining
them into

their specialized combinatorics, using only the laws of
psychological inquiry and

sustained hypothesis as my guide.
Eventually, I would collapse into bed, falling into

a troubled sleep
of dreams and confusion.

It must have been the dreams that led
me to find the order. True, at first I thought

I was a little
overboard; I could laugh at myself. But it was laughter tinged

with
desperation; since my first publication in a prestigious psychology
journal,

the rest of the world had dropped away, taking my childhood
with it. I recognized the

symptomatic tunnel vision of career
specialization, but the tunnel had suggested a

journey, something at
the end of it which had a stronger gravity than the desire to

see
around me.

It started with two specific

drawings.
Jeff, a middle age man, no known occupation, who hadn’t spoken in
years,

had done the first one. A half oval, with intricate designs
comprising its interior,

lay bisected by the page. Outside the oval,
dark, childlike scrawls swarmed, while

inside, light pink smooth
shapes lay as if protected inside the half egg. The other

drawing
was by Jane Doe #4, an unknown woman in her seventies. This drawing
showed

a typical childish composition… a crude house with curly
smoke coming from the

chimney, green grass, and a tree. Inside the
house a bulbous dark shape lurked behind

a crude curtain, almost as
if it was a smudge upon the drawing sheet. But above the

door to the
house she had drawn a full oval, similar in design to that of

Jeff?s
drawing. With the aid of a magnifying glass, I was able to examine
the

oval’s detail, and it was astounding. I still am unable to
understand how a crayon

could physically create a microcosm of such
intricacy, but I am much closer to

accepting it now. I have no
choice.

The

oval’s similarity drew me
immediately to John Doe #7, whom I had taken to calling

?Ted?.
Ted did drawings of only one object, over and over, in different
scales,

colors, and a varying technical ability; a tall candle
supported by a distorted candle

holder of ornate decoration, an
extended circle with a point through the

middle.

A couple of weeks after I had lain

out
all the drawing with circles in them on my bed, my patients began to
refuse all

crayons except red and black, and only rarely, green.
Their images very definitely

began to degenerate, become more
childlike and rough. I made the mistake of asking

some colleagues of
mine about this, but they would attribute it to nothing more than

an
environmental factor, if not pure coincidence. I do not know if it
was they who

began to shun my persistent nagging questions, or if I
grew more and more hostile to

their dismissals, which seemed to me
highly unprofessional. Whichever it was, I grew

hesitant, I extended
publishing deadlines, missed meetings and forwent the writing

of
grant proposals. I survived off of my private practice only, scraping
by,

digging into my savings more and more.

Eventually, even through the
disintegration, I could see images of a more simplistic,

unified
formalism arise. Like puzzle pieces, I could find lines that
continued off

of one page and onto another. I stopped paying
attention to whose drawings were whose,

I did not gather time, dates,
environmental data, psychological observations or names

on the
individual drawings. By ignoring the separation thus, the patterns
began to

become more clear. One drawing had been ripped in such a way
that it seemed to fit

exactly the tear of another. Images, lines,
shapes fractured and came together only

when two or three sheets were
joined. I noticed that viewing the drawings by the light

of a single
candle somehow made the images clearer. The flickering light,
suspended

in the center of the drawing, created a sense of liveliness
and suggestion that

pierced the film of separation I felt from the
drawing as a mere drawing, and hinted

at an organic pattern of
indefinable permutations. I moved my bed out into the kitchen

and
turned the bedroom into a huge mosaic, closing and double-locking the
door

whenever I was out.

At work, I noticed the

people whom I
normally met throughout the day looked at me a little strangely.

It
was true, I hadn’t washed my suit or clothes in a while, though I
washed

infrequently in the kitchen sink. I started to become afraid
they were going to bring

about a halt to my work, that my days of
collecting drawings were perhaps numbered,

and this increased my
involvement. I would search through hospital records for those

who
had similar psychological histories to those I had studied, and rush
through

the paperwork, sometimes filling in lies, making up reasons
and references, just to

get access under the guise of therapy to more
scribbles. I collected them in furtive

five minute ?interviews?
conducted in hospital rooms, beds, wheelchairs. Carrying a

sketchpad
and wearing a white doctor lab coat, I drove to a local sanitarium
and

snuck into the exercise yard. Pretending to be a staff member,
giving the few

patients whose symptoms I recognized crayons and
paper, receiving quick sketches, I

would rush back home and resume
taping and shuffling, sometimes completing a section,

sometimes
feeling something was missing and rushing out again.