Imagine a homeless person who's clearly not all there, sitting muttering on the sidewalk in the middle of what looks like a loose pile of trash and possessions -- soiled clothes and rags, half-empty fast food and snack wrappers. All strewn about by a toppled shopping cart.
...

What adjectives and nouns, literal, metaphoric, or allegorical, would you use to describe this scene? If it were a photograph, what would you caption it?

(I've been seeing such scenes increasingly frequently in my neighborhood, and more generally over the last decade, everywhere I've lived... at one point, I thought I'd found the perfect verbal description, but then I forgot it and have never found it again)

The essence of such... tableaux?.... is that not only is it a homeless person at the center, but there is "nobody home". The sight lacks the coherence that functional minds tend to impose on their immediate surroundings. Consciousness as an ordering force is in retreat.

Such scenes were very rare for me growing up in India. Even though there was a lot of visible poverty and blight, and people living in poverty on sidewalks, they were "all there" in a sense, imposing some order on their little patch of sidewalk. That's the exception in the US.

Somebody who is in a state of high-functioning homeless poverty (to the extent you can be mentally healthy at all in such a state) tends to have a personal space boundary defined by a strong trash/not-trash filter for what level they have.

I'm not trying to make a moral point here, though obviously I have views on such matters. I'm kinda groping verbally around the sensory subject to find words for the phenomenology here. It's literally hard to describe such a scene with words.

You end up using too many words, and none are quite right. It's like being unable to stare directly at the sun or the void, where "stare" = apprehend with words. The verbal mind kinda slides off the scene, and you're left with just the sensory imprint of a consciousness corpse.

James Carse had a great bit in Finite and Infinite Games talking about how there's no trash in nature. It takes the ordering effects of the civilized, self-possessed mind to create a trash/not-trash boundary in the environment. And human bodies can cross that boundary.

Once as a teen, I saw such a person (un-person?) sitting in the middle of a busy street with honking traffic going around him, drivers yelling at him. I thought he'd fallen, so I dodged traffic to go into the street to try and help him up. He screamed at me and refused to get up.

That 1-minute incident made a pretty powerful impression on me and has stayed with me since. I can now tell when somebody is merely in a bad condition, versus kinda not there at all, having dissociated out of the situation entirely, letting their personal space unravel.

It was also a very powerful early lesson (I think I was 14 maybe) in the limits on one person being able to help another person, who's been mentally destroyed to the extent of not being a person at all in any normal sense. They are beyond help because they don't exist in a way.

I used to be a bit of a bleeding heart liberal kid before that incident, but I think that turned me very cautious about trying to help people. That sense that you can only help someone when they are "there" to be helped... you see it in weaker forms in less extreme situations.

A bit of shorthand/heuristic for this is via Maslow's pyramid. In order for one person to help another at level n, the latter must *exist* at level n+1.

You can't help with physiological needs if they're not "there" at safety. You can't help with safety if they're not there at "belonging". You can't help at "belonging" if they're not "there" at esteem. You cannot help with esteem if they're not "there" at self-actualization.

And you cannot help anyone with self-actualization at all, except by accident, because there isn't a higher locus to "stand" at to pull them up. Integrity of the self is a bootstrapped thing. You can only help up to the level the person has already bootstrapped enough to exist.

I should qualify this with -- *I* am limited in my ability to help others in this progressively constrained way. Others with more natural talent at helping may be able to help others who seem too far gone to me. I don't know.

To bring this around to those of us living in the conceit of imagining we're "all there" ... to somebody who's bootstrapped to a level beyond what you have, you will appear "homeless" and "nobody at home" and beyond help.

Incidentally, this isn't limited to humans. You can see animals on this spectrum too, from integrated self that is present at the maximum level that bodily design allows (insects, lizards, cats all have different scopes of self) to various stages of unravelled being.

An animal that has fallen apart within its envelope of self is a piteous sight in exactly the same way. Even if it's only a bug that will instinctively eat its own severed leg.

I sometimes wonder... to advanced hyperdimensional aliens, looking down at me, would I appear to be homeless-and-not-at-home, sitting around in a pile of trash-and-not-trash on an 11-dimensional sidewalk?

"Consciousness-raising" (pilling in modern parlance) is the most cruel myth humans believe in. There's no such thing. There's only false consciousness raising.

Anyhoo... my caption for the word-portrait/photo would be "Re-enchant this!"

Wonder if there is a way to measure this. To me, it's the strongest sign of American collapse -- people who have crumpled and failed to maintain the integrity of the boundary of self we expect in their life station. People who are homeless-and-not-at-home at any level.

Most societies expect all members to be "at home" at the belonging level of Maslow to count as human (esteem level requires in-app purchases). Anybody who falls below is problem to be solved. Anyone who is not being actively "solved" has been abandoned and left behind.

The US is fairly unique in setting very high standards for acceptable "belonging" (at one point it was "home ownership") AND accepting a high rate of abandonment for those who fall. Poor countries tend to lower the threshold. Rich countries tend to lower the abandonment rate.