Roger Caillois on Schizophrenia

Mimicry and Legendary Psycasthenia (1935):

I will [...] briefly describe some personal experiences, but which are wholly in accord with observations published in the medical literature, for example with the invariable response of schizophrenics to the question: where are you? I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I'm at the spot where I find myself. To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession." All these expressions shed light on a single process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e., what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species.

Gémino H Abad's Native Clearing

As Imagined, As Lived: Sense for Language, Sense of Country (2008) by Gémino H Abad:

If we ask why the system of education in any country includes its literature as a required subject, the answer is pretty obvious: because a country's literature is its own image, that is to say, its imagination of how its people think and feel about their world and so, justify the way they live. In short, its literature is its lived ideology. In that light, our country's literature is 'our native clearing' within the language that has been forged and adopted for the artistic mimesis. Now, one's country is basically how one imagines her. Note the poetical gender: Inang Bayan. For one's sense of country is essentially a poetic sense: an imaginative perception of our day-to-day living in the very element of our history and culture.