A while ago, I recorded a talk with Dr. Martin Buchhardt.
Martin then submitted the talk to an artificial intelligence program.
The haunting outcome was a series of images depicting and visualizing my mind, one artificial intelligence relating to another.
I'm going to share with you these images coupled with entries from my diary, the journal of a narcissist.
The exact moment I found a description of narcissistic personality disorder is etched in my mind.
I felt engulfed in warm amber, encapsulated and frozen.
It was suddenly very quiet and very still.
I met myself.
I have seen the enemy and it was I.
The article was long winded and full of references to scholars I never heard of before.
Kernberg, Kohut, Klein.
It was a foreign language that resounded like a forgotten childhood memory.
It was I to the last repellent details described in uncanny accuracy.
Grandiose fantasies of brilliance and perfection, a sense of entitlement without commensurate achievements, rage, the exploitation of others, lack of empathy.
I always think of myself as a machine.
I say to myself things like, you have an amazing brain or you're not functioning today. Your efficiency is so low.
I measure things.
I constantly compare performance.
I'm actually aware of time and how it is utilized.
There is a meter in my head.
It ticks and tocks, a metronome of self-reproach and grandiose assertions.
I talk to myself in third person singular.
It lends objectivity to what I think as though it were coming from an external source, from someone else.
That low is my self-esteem that in order to be trusted, I have to disguise myself, to hide myself from myself.
It is a pernicious and all pervasive art of unbeing.
I like to think of myself in terms of automata.
There is something so aesthetically compelling in their precision, in their impartiality, in their harmonious embodiment of the abstract.
Machines are so powerful.
Machines are so emotionless, not prone to be hurting weaklings like me.
Machines don't bleed.
Often I find myself agonizing over the destruction of a laptop in a movie as its owner is blown to smithereens as well.
Machines are my folk and kin.
They're my family.
They allow me the tranquil luxury of unbeing.
I want to tell you now what happens to narcissists when they're deprived of narcissistic supply of any kind, secondary or primary.
Perhaps it will make it easier for you to understand why the narcissist pursues narcissistic supply so fervently, so relentlessly and so ruthlessly.
Without narcissistic supply, the narcissist crumbles.
He disintegrates like the zombies or the vampires in horror movies.
It is terrifying and the narcissist will do anything to avoid it.
Think about the narcissist as a drug addict.
His withdrawal symptoms are identical.
Delusions, physiological effects, irritability, emotional ability.
I'm not envious of people who feel.
I disdain feelings and emotional people because I think that they are weak and vulnerable and I deride human weakness and vulnerabilities.
Such derision makes me feel superior and is probably the ossified remains of a defense mechanism gone berserk.
But there it is.
This is I and there is nothing I can do about it.
If I had to distill my quotidian existence in two pithy sentences, I would say, "I love to be hated and I hate to be loved. Hate is the complement of fear and I like being feared."
To be feared imbues me with an intoxicating sensation of omnipotence, invariably inebriated by the looks of horror or repulsion on people's faces.
They know that I'm capable of anything.
Not like I'm ruthless and devoid of scruples, capricious and unfathomable, emotionless and asexual, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, a plague, a devastation, an inescapable verdict.
I nurture my ill repute, stoking it and fanning the flames of gossip.
It is an enduring asset, this self-inflicted smear campaign.
When I hate routine, when I find myself doing the same things over and over again, I get depressed.
I oversleep, overeat, overdrink and in general engage in addictive, impulsive and compulsive behaviors.
This is my way of reintroducing risk and excitement into what I emotionally perceive to be a barren life.
The problem is that even the most exciting and varied existence becomes routine after a while.
Living in the same country or the same apartment, meeting the same people, doing essentially the same things though with changing content, all qualify as stultifying rot.
I feel entitled to more.
I feel that it is my right, due to my intellectual superiority, to lead a thrilling, rewarding, kaleidoscopic life.
I feel entitled to force life itself or at least people around me to yield to my wishes and needs, supreme among them the need for a stimulating variety.
I have touched the hearts of people. I have made people cry and rage and smile, but I have laid this part of my writing to rest because it does injustice to my grandiose perception of myself.
Anyone can write a short story. Anyone in his dotage can write a poem.
Only the few, the unique, the erudite, the brilliant, can comment on the measurement problem, analyze church-turing machines and use words such as "tribilius, sesquipedalian and apothegm".
I count myself among those few.
By doing so, I betray my inner sanctum, my real potential, my gift.
The gap between what I wanted to become and what has made me bitter and cantankerous, a repulsive, alien oddity, avoided by all but the most persistent friends and acolytes.
I resent being doomed to the quotidian. I rebel against being given to aspirations which have so little in common with my abilities.
It is not that I recognize my limitations.
I don't.
I still wish to believe.
Had I only applied myself, had I only persevered, had I only found the interest, I would have been nothing less of a Mozart or a Einstein or a Freud.
It is a lie, of course, that I tell myself in times of quiet despair when I realize that my age and then compare it to the utter lack of my accomplishments.
I write poetry not because I need to.
I write poetry to gain attention, to secure adulation, to fasten on to the reflection in the eyes of others that passes from my ego.
My words are fireworks, formulas of resonance, the periodic table of healing and abuse.
These are dark poems, a wasted landscape of pain ossified, of scarred remnants of emotions.
There is no horror in abuse. The terror is in the endurance, in the dreamlike detachment from one's own existence that follows.
People around me feel my surrealism. They back away alienated, discomfited by the limpid placenta of my virtual reality.
I've never been a child. I've been a wunderkind.
The answer to my mother's prayers and intellectual frustration. A human computing machine, a walking, talking encyclopedia, a curiosity, a circus freak.
I've been observed by developmental psychologists. I've been interviewed by the media, endured the envy of my peers and their pushy mothers.
I constantly clashed with figures of authority because I felt entitled to special treatment, immune to prosecution and superior.
It was a narcissist's dream. Abundant narcissistic supply, rivers of awe, the aura of glamour, incessant attention, open adulation, countrywide fame.
So I refused to grow up.
In my mind, my tender age was an integral part of the precocious miracle that I've become.
One looks much less phenomenal and one's exploits and achievements are much less awe-inspiring at the age of 60, I thought.
Better stay young forever than thus secure my narcissistic supply.
Plus, my life is my parents' punishment.
Childless and a sad failure, I keep hopingand counterfactually that they care enough to be hurting.
So I wouldn't grow up. I never took out a driver's license. I don't have children. I rarely have sex. I never settle down in one place. I reject intimacy.
In short, I refrain from adulthood and adult chores. I have no adult skills. I assume no adult responsibilities. I expect indulgence from others, impetulet and haughtily spoiled. I'm capricious, infantile and emotionally labile and immature.
In short, I'm a 63-years-old brat.
In women, I induce confusion. They're attracted and then repelled, revolted by some essence that they cannot explain, no name.
They say, "He's so unpleasant." They repeat this hesitantly. "He's so violent and so disagreeable."
My own girlfriends, paramours and wives, struggled with the fitted, repellent emanation. They called me sick and creepy or damaged goods. They meant to say that I'm not a healthy person altogether, not all there.
They invariably ended up with other men, cheating, swinging, desperately trying to recoup their molested self-esteem, feeling rejected and dejected. The animals we are.
Unsense my infirmity. I read somewhere that female birds avoid the sickly males in mating season.
I am one sickly bird and they skirt me with the hurt perplexity of the frustrated.
In this modern world of what you see is what you get, the narcissist is an exception. Just advertising, a diversion, an android of virtual reality with bug-infested programming.