Bulgarian crowd theorist Elias Canetti also writes about Judge Schreber in 'Crowds and Power,' so I thought I would share a little for those who were tantalized by the sunbeam-ass segment in D+G:

BwO: 'A lung worm was sent into his lungs. His ribs were temporarily smashed. In place of his healthy natural stomach the Viennese nerve specialist mentioned above inserted a very inferior "Jew's stomach". Altogether the vicissitudes of his stomach were amazing. Frequently he had to exist without one and would tell the attendant that he could not eat because he had no stomach. If he ate in spite of this the food simply poured into the abdominal cavity and thence into the thighs. He became used to this state of affairs, however, and continued to eat unperturbed without a stomach.' (460-2)

'"Little men" were planted in his feet to pump out his spinal cord; when he walked in the garden it issued from his mouth as little clouds.' (461)

'Schreber's arch-enemy, the psychiatrist Flechsig, had a particularly treacherous and dangerous habit of forming //celestial// packs to attack him. This was done by a process which Shcreber called the //partition of souls//...Most of these "tested soul-parts" eventually became a nuisance even to God's Omnipotence. One day...God's Omnipotence staged a raid on them and destroyed them all.' (457)

'God also had a weakness for the language of the Germans. "While undergoing purification souls learnt the so-called 'basic language' spoken by God himself, a somewhat archaic but powerful German...' (445)

'Schreber at night was beset by bears...his bedclothes became "white bears." (457)

'He describes how an attempt was actually made on a distant star to create a new human world out of "the Schreber spirit". These new human beings were of much smaller stature than earthly men. He was told that they had achieved a fairly high level of culture and kept small cattle proportionate to their own size.' (460)

'God //must// not come too near men, for the nerves of living human beings have such a power of attraction for him that he would not be able to free himself from them again and so would endanger his own existence..."Regular contact between God and human souls took place only after death. There was no danger for God in approaching //corpses//...' (436) --> 'The idea of his transformation into a woman occupied [Schreber] continually during the years of his illness. He felt female nerves being sent into his body as rays and gradually gaining the upper hand...But his despair about his proposed transformation into a woman did not last indefinitely...If he were a woman he would be able to bring forth a new generation. The only possible father for his children was God, so he must win his love. To be united with God was a high honour; to change more and more into a woman for his sake, to dress up so as to attract him and to lure him with feminine wiles no longer seemed a disgrace and degradation to this bearded man, once chief judge of a court of appeal...God's favour would be won; more and more strongly attracted by the beautiful woman Schreber, the Almighty would come to depend on him...though it was not without resistance that the latter surrendered to this somewhat ignominious fate. Time and again God withdrew from Schreber, and he doubtless wanted to free himself completely. But Schreber's attraction had grown too strong.' (449) --> 'The idea [of radical immobility] was induced by the voices which spoke to him. Over and over again they repeated "Not the slightest movement!" Schreber explained this demand by the fact that God did not know how to treat a living man, being accustomed to dealing only with corpses - hence the monstrous demand that Shcreber should behave continuously as though he himself were a corpse.' (459)

Besides all the awesome stuff going on above, I'm also interested in Schreber as a possible model for the rhizomic consciousness I posted on earlier: often he describes great packs of celestial souls 'dripping' into his mind, sometimes thousands in a single night, coalescing there, puddling, forming mental rivulets of whispers and commands and pleas; his mental life, he says, is 'tumultuous,' and his actions and decisions stem largely from this tumult rather than any kind of central Schreber agency. Earlier, in a segment on 'invisible crowds,' Canetti writes about the invisible spirits of devils, which theologians believed numbered in the, well, innumerable, and millions of which could crowd a single body to control it or mass in a single room to disrupt activity there. If there's a legitimate link between the invisible crowd of Schreber's schizo-multiplicity and the invisible crowd of multi-demonic possession, then we could call Legion the first schizophrenic, and maybe go further in calling him the first rhizome - 'My name is Legion, for we are many,' says Legion, who operates as a multiplicity, as a rhizomic consciousness. (N.B. Legion qualifies as a rhizome not only because he possesses a rhizomic consciousness but also because when that consciousness ['the host of demons'] is expelled, it reterritorializes a nearby herd of pigs - together Legion and the pigs form a Legion-pigs rhizome analogous to the orchid-wasp one.)

D+G probably aren't - in (I think) oh brother's words - 'glamorizing mental illness,' but I still wonder how much of Schreber or Legion's condition they find productive, especially in those moments when they enjoin their readers to 'be multiplicities' or 'become rhizomes.' Are they in fact enlisting us as Legionnaires? To operate as multiplicities and rhizomic consciousnesses? And, apropos my rhizomic consciousness post, do we even know what that would look like or entail?

--Guattari Hero