By Eric Le Roy
I can’t decide whether the human mind is an ingeniously crafted, highly resilient aircraft, purposeful in its mission, and headed somewhere as it navigates the turbulence of the skies – or is it (the human mind) nothing but turbulence itself – often of the open air?
Insanity is a universal and timeless issue. No culture has ever been without it, and the methods of dealing with it have fluctuated between brutal and benevolent. A long time ago, people with mental illness were executed as witches or locked away in austere cells that were the same as dungeons. Names such as ‘bedlam’ described the prisons that were set aside for those who were adjudged ‘crazy’, and it reveals a curious, unsavory truth about human nature that crowds of ‘normal’ people once flocked to these institutions, the same as if they were going to the opera or an art museum. The idea was to laugh at the antics of the insane.
Think about it. In literature and film, the subject has been treated in various ways, and what interests me especially is not the behavior of those who are ‘nuts’ but that of the ‘sane’ spectators and wardens who mock them and keep them under lock and key. Franz Kafka’s short story, “A Hunger Artist,” is as much about the people who come to watch as it is about the threadbare fasting wretch himself. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Catch-22” are classics, and it fascinates me to no end that the real crazies are not the inmates but the jailers themselves, literally and figuratively. Another splendid film of the past, “Cool Hand Luke,” also deals with the severe alienation that can occur when a rebellious member of society is conveniently put away and shackled by those in absolute authority. Finally, “A Beautiful Mind” is a masterpiece, depicting the triumph of mental clarity amid the shifting Hell of schizophrenia.
The Soviet Union (oh, aren’t those pesky Russians full of tricks?) had its own ideas about insanity, especially as a way of dealing with dissidents. Classify them as insane and put them in asylums. Gulags and prisons, in plain language. The Americans liked the idea of ‘shock treatments’, which, as in ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’, amounted to a frontal lobotomy that turned a squirming malcontent into a passive, blank-faced robot.
I even saw a film about the French sculptor Camille Claudel, who was a precocious student, then colleague, and lover of yet another famous artiste-narcissist, Auguste Rodin, and who was put away in an asylum from which she was never released. In that documentary, her ‘insanity’ was debatable. With modern-style help, she might well have recovered, or at least avoided the cold-blooded stupidity of her time.
Conversely, there is the other side of the ledger, wherein ‘madness’ is romanticized and glamorized. We’ve all heard about ‘the thin line between genius and insanity’. Does it exist? Many take a sharp position on one side or the other. Vincent Van Gogh is the cover boy for the madness-genius concept, and the rest of the cast includes people like Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath, and even Beethoven (often depicted as stone deaf and wildly waving his arms as he creates the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’).
My own view in this regard is that creative people of the highest rank are by definition out-of-step with the plodders in their wake. (This does not include the phonies whose way of showing their ‘creativity’ is making nuisances and asses out of themselves while ‘creating’ nothing.) The metaphor (now, unfortunately, a cliche) that describes creativity as ‘thinking out of the box’ is spot on. A good description.
But most of life’s great masterpieces have been born of a collective. A whole bunch of people thinking out of the box. One guy gets the trophy; many contributed. Nevertheless, while creative achievement is usually the crowning moment of a group effort, an official coronation set upon a throne built by many, there is still often the solitary genius who sees magic in the moment, and recognises what is more than a sum of parts.
Creativity is a two-way street: a joint effort and a sudden, inspired breakthrough, often by someone previously regarded as a freak. Rarely does it happen in total isolation, as much as romantics like to think so. The frothing madman in the bare loft or the gifted urchin wandering through the rain, scribbling damp lyrics on cafe napkins, is mostly mythology – although it is certainly true that multitudes of artists have been poor. Even Rimbaud ended up running guns in Africa. A mad poet only for a little while.
In other words, you can be as flaky as a head full of dandruff, and mean as hell to boot, in every other aspect of your life: unemployable, un-spouse-able, unmanageable in all areas. You can be a drunkard or a doper like Quincy (Confessions of an Opium Eater), but great art is created by the acutely SANE – at least at the time of making the art. There is simply no other way to do it. (Of course, physical exhaustion and lack of nutrition may arguably contribute to artistic vision. Maybe the ‘visions’ of the old prophets were the product of wandering around in the desert, thirsty and starving.) But, in short, no falling-down drunk, and this includes Irishmen clinging to blades of grass, has ever written a decent poem or painted a picture worth looking at. Many have tried.
This is also true of so-called Bipolar Disorder. The manic phase may give rise to incredibly heightened awareness and the ability to work for days on end without rest (Jack Kerouac on amphetamines would qualify), but the product itself was not an off-the-wall abstraction. The work made sense. Again, it comes down to the artist’s way of seeing. His or her vision. And if that work of art endures, you can be damned sure that, no matter how wacky the conjurer, the art itself is lucid.
I concluded a long time ago that creativity in all fields is not a matter of invention but rather perception. The surpassing artist, the great scientist, engineer, architect, and entrepreneur sees the same world as everybody else. They just see it differently.
Which brings us back to the question of insanity. For isn’t what we call insanity – even if it has nothing to do with art – also a way of seeing things differently? The problem with such people is, of course, the matter of degree. Psychosis has nothing to do with art and science. Such people are incapable of sustained coherence as they revolve from episode to episode. They are sick, period, end of story. They need help.
But other ‘modern’ mental pathologies didn’t use to have names. And, unlike today, there wasn’t a horde of mental health practitioners to think up labels for them. Some of these, such as Clinical Depression, seem very real. These are the people who are desperately unhappy for no discernible reason. These are the suicides.
Many think of these forms of very real mental illness as being the product of the profoundly alienating features of urban civilization – the great sprawl of asphalt-tramping humanity that cannot connect with other equally bereft specimens of… humanity. Surrounded by millions of people on all sides, one is wrenchingly lonely. Lonely by oneself. But especially lonely in the midst of others.
Loneliness, the modern disease.
Of course, there is also no shortage of idiotic diagnoses by either half-witted ‘therapists’ who think that shy people are in fact suffering from ‘behavioral inhibition’. Or bullshit maladies that are conjured up by opportunists trying to scare up more business. Indeed, if ever there was a field (and it’s a growing field) more chock full of crackpots and hustlers than modern psychology, no one has informed me.
Moreover, it can be as counterproductive as shock treatment. Taking a restless kid who is bored shitless by his teacher and an avalanche of brain-deadening homework assignments, labeling him as afflicted with ‘attention deficit disorder’ and dosing him up with enough Ritalin to make a zombie seem like an exotic dancer, is not therapy. It’s abuse.
But, alas, we live in the Age of Psychiatric Diagnosis – whether it is being carried out by ‘professionals’ of dubious quality and even legitimacy, or presumptuous and often vindictive goofballs of the thoroughfares with their pop culture arsenal of inanities, including ‘toxic’, ‘paranoid’, ‘manic’, ‘triggered’, ‘chemical imbalance’, and ‘addicted’ – to describe anything that pisses them off or challenges their non-existent ‘authority’.
So, to sum this up, modern psychology is like the internet and potentially like AI: something great and full of innovation and brilliant discovery (unlocking the human mind, what could be more enriching?), and turning it into a bloated fiasco. Psychology as Social Media.
As for me? I sometimes question my sanity – in earnest – because I am so angry all the time. And, on top of that, most of it has no direct effect on me whatsoever. I live ‘good’. I am in a mid-range-to-small city in a middling country. Varna/Bulgaria. No throngs of demanding immigrants. No mosques, jihadists, or terrorists. No sex change clinics. Just the mountains and the sea. Tourists in the summer and a local population that does not challenge or offend. I have a great dog, three good cats, and a wife who hasn’t yet tried to poison me or club me over the head while I’m sleeping. I am working on the last revision stages of a novel I believe in, and I will soon have my 5th book out on Amazon.
I am getting old, but I seem healthy. There is a lot of food in the fridge, and cold beer is waiting down at the shops. I should be happy. Right?
The fact is that every time I spend more than five minutes watching the news, I start having fantasies of mass murder and gore-drenched executions for those who deserve it. Which means large segments of the human race. Of course, I’m harmless. If I were going to wreak havoc or mayhem, I’d have done it by now.
But the sickness is in how I feel. The unspeakable hatred that I feel for what the homo sapien has done – and continues to do – to every other living thing it has ever encountered, save a few house pets. I boil with animosity and bloodlust.
I think that serial rapists should be castrated, that torture should be used to extract information from terrorists, that street thugs should be publicly pilloried and whipped within an inch of their lives. I think that, in trials for serial killers whose guilt is beyond question, there should be an electric chair standing at the ready right at the edge of the jury box. The murderers should be strapped in and lit up right there in the courtroom in front of the judge, jury, and spectators. Fry them until their eyes pop out and smoke flows out of their ears.
Moreover, instead of Dumb Bunny at the Super Bowl Halftime Show, there should be mass executions. Miscreants should be catapulted into spiked walls. An enormous bowl of scalding, bubbling soup should be there with a crane to hook the criminals to. Then dip them in and out of the soup until their flesh starts to sink from their bodies.
Yes. That’s what I think about after 76 years on this earth.
Am I crazy? I honestly do not think so. I think that my conclusions and suggestions are perfectly sane. I think I live in a crazy world. I believe that if I ruled the planet by myself, it would be a better world than what we have. I honestly believe that. What is more, I could have done better than God at creating this odiferous dungheap that we have now. No mosquitoes. No viruses. No plane crashes. No pedophiles. Lots of flowers and love. Loving conversations and embraces among snakes and eagles and lions and sea cows and human children.
But as for the violent retribution aspect, many other people believe that too. Many feel the same way I do. They just won’t admit it or write it up in a blog. But everywhere I look, I sense more hate than love.
So, I repeat the question. Am I crazy? Or just accurate in my perception of humanity?
Am I sane or insane? I, who would never hurt a fly.
Often, I feel guilty about these interludes of rage. And then, guess what? I wrote poetry. Or their prose equivalents. And when I do so, I truly feel that the old Eric has come back, the one who used to believe that it would all come good in the end. That goodness and decency and mercy and LOVE would win at last.
I no longer believe that any more than I believe in Heaven. I think that everlasting nothingness will begin the instant I die, and that, among some thoughts of love – if there is time – I will take my last breath convulsed with hatred.
FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!! ALL OF YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Is this normal? Is this sane or insane? I have thought about it with the seriousness of water and stone. Have you?
In fact, given the circumstances, I am as sane as a banana daiquiri.
