The first event of Alytus psychic strike biennial (peregrination issue) was appointed to happen in Săpoca as Psychic Workers‘ 3SF World Cup on August 10th, 12PC (vulg. 2019). But incidentally it got extended up to August 18th.
Psychiatric Hospital and Safety Measures Săpoca is a hospital in Buzău County. It was founded in 1960 on the site of a school of crafts. Spitalul Săpoca is the largest of its kind in the country. The area around Săpoca was and still is inhabited by working class people – miners among them. It’s worth to keep in mind that the location is not far away from famous Transylvanian area famous of proletarian self-organization. There were the miners of Jiu Valley and workers of Brasov who did the largest strikes since 70-ies. Also the most of criminals during the communist regime in Romania were the workers from the region. Seems that there was not enough to have crafts school as a tool for suppression of working class youth. Instead the psychiatric hospital was designed to host working class people – the fact breaks the famous Eastern European stereotype of intellectuals being held in psychiatric hospitals to break the resistance. In reality psychiatric hospital was a tool for communist regimes to break worker’s movements while internationally were escalated just single cases of intelligentsia.
Psychic workers (DAMTP) from FIASCO, SOF and ABRACADABRA-C choose the place also because their comrade Kęstutis Šapoka recognized his own name in the location’s and also because of his interests (including doctoral thesis on art activities of mentally ill people) correspondence to the location mood. Psychic workers decided to do a tribute to Kęstutis psychic presence and stopped at Spitalul Săpoca although he eventually did not join the peregrination physically. Occasionally there, in the closed hospital yard, is located a stone sculpture of a person resembling Kęstutis – according to the first law of paraidolia to recognize a letter of your own dream.
DAMTP at this moment were not self-organized enough to play a match of 3SF as intended, but the game eventually played them: in a week, on Sunday morning, August 18, a 38-year old patient at the Săpoca psychiatric hospital attacked the other patients with an infusion stand. He used a tool in a similar way the psychic workers would use it for extraction of Orgon by applying Wilhelm Reich Cloudbustering technique. Instead he killed five people and injured eight others. Health minister of Romania said that the incident was the result of “a long string of human errors” and that it could have been avoided. She said that the infuse stand shouldn’t have been left in a ward with mental patients and that the hospital personnel placed “another alcoholic” in the same bed with the attacker on Sunday night, although the hospital had free beds. Moreover, the attacker had been prescribed sedatives on Saturday, but the nurse didn’t mention that she administered the treatment to him in his medical record, although she claims to have done it.
Coming back to sharing space and beds, Alytus [Psychic Strike] Peregrination Biennial of 12PC was exceptional because the workers always were about to squeeze into the limited space of the car or living room, and sometimes to share one bad for 2. Comrades from Non-Males Association (NoMA) at DAMTP announced memorandum not to sleep in the same room with males – the rule was respected during all the peregrination time.
Increasingly, various bodies on the landscape have been made to absorb the voice of commercial interests. Imported terms - accountability, audit, consumer choice, quality control – have had a consequential effect on the ways language is refracted through the body. Along with sedatives any of the new terms have become ideological weapons to shore-up the standing of a given body whatever it would be a patient, or a murder, or an alcoholic, or a psychic worker, or an infusion stand.
Into „the string of human errors” of the Care Chronotope should be included also the DAMTP visit and lettrist work of improving the orthography of the name Săpoca into Šăpoca, which were definitely monitored by the hospital employees, but none of them appeared pretending that anyone alive is around.
The enfleshed nature of the Care Chronotope extends into all the spaces that the social body occupies. The stairways, the offices, the walls all make their contribution to the embodied imagery of a living landscape. Bakhtin wrote of the “castle chronotope” as a timespace “saturated through and through” with all the historical traces of earlier dynasties, furnishings and traditions. Such traces or ghosts “animate every corner of the castle“ and act as reminders of past events. The same relationship exists in Săpoca landscape – no any living being around. For a short period of time the 38-year old patient of working class origin (or “a murder“ as the Care Chronotope is used to call him) succeed to escape from the asylum, but soon was detained by police, which occasionally came to bring a new patient to the hospital.
The First Psychic Workers 3SF World Cup was the first 3SF World Cup ever to happen without management from the side of any kind Care Chronotope (also the longest one – it took 10 days) and ended up in disbanding of the old Care Chronotope of Spitatul Săpoca, founding the new one instead, and requalifying (reproletarianizing) the 1 patient into a destructive worker, 5 patients into dead workers, and refurnishing the Patient Chronotope with the new patients (i.e. bourgeoisified workers). Counting and summing-up the goals conceded there could be declared a temporary proletarian victory.
