A couple of years ago I saw a guy on the Tube who was obsessively scribbling gibberish into a notepad. I thought it was pretty strange.
Then again today I saw the same thing, but more specific. There were two guys, both were pretty unkempt… Scruffy, poorly dressed, overweight, messy hair, stubbly faces… Generally looking like people who don’t really have it together.
They were sitting opposite one another, obviously together, and each had a notepad and pen in hand. It looked like both pads were full of four digit combinations/numbers, although one guy was exceptionally messy about his penmanship (very, very cramped style, lots of crossing things out), so I might be wrong about him. The other guy’s work I could see clearly. It was definitely the numbers.
I might be overanalysing this. It’s possible they were actually working on some legitimate, perfectly sane endeavour, although I can’t imagine what. But everything about them, from their mannerisms to the strangeness of their writing, suggested something was mentally amiss.
So what was going on? Is this sort of thing a well understood habit, or complusion? Perhaps a form of OCD?
OTTOMH Compulsive writing of nonsense is called graphomania. If you watch the documentary Crumb, one brother is noted to have suffered from graphomania for several years. He filled many notebooks with odd wavy lines, with breaks as if to denote words, sentences and paragraphs.
Ahhhh, yeah… I have seen it, I forgot about that. That was the brother who would write comics that were 95% speech bubbles with tiny little token effort characters drawn at the bottom, if I remember properly.
So what drives that kind of behaviour? Is there some kind of reasoning by the graphomaniac?*
I seem to recall reading in Jameson’s Touched with Fire that bipolar mania can cause a state like this, for example in artists who normally write a lot even when they aren’t manic. IIRC the manic person may believe that they are writing something profound, and struggle to get it all down, but when the writing is reviewed later in a non-manic state it may not make much sense.
