Because.
Does it make sense, after Hölderlin, Novalis, Lira, and Ángel Escobar, to insist on separating poets from patients and/or prisoners from wards? Are they not one and the same, the foreign and the familiar? Doesn’t the pathological in a creator constitute another facet—subterranean in the passive, caustic in crises—and nourishment for an identical fiction: their production of art? (1)
Are poetry, mystical trance, and pathology not altered states of consciousness? Do they not require and increase the cognitive flexibility that is produced in the brain when translating the subjective, the unreal? In the face of the erosion of the world, are artistic expression, mystical catharsis, and schizophrenic dialogue autonomous exercises or are they interconnected?
And (in contrast):
Isn’t it society (the mirror and matrix of a culture) that decides what is called “art,” what is called “revelation,” and what is called “psychopathology”? Aren’t art, madness, and mystical vision areas of the same movement, one that nullifies established territories of identity?
If, as in post-Romantic literature, the “I” of madness is spurious, an invention, a falsification, is it not essentially performative? And if imagination is a rigorous—albeit unconscious—form of knowledge, isn’t madness its non plus ultra, its higher stage, fertile (also) in its implementation of evil, in the damage it causes to the body and the subject?
A thought by Foucault, formulated on the basis of reason, could be applied to art and its ineffable procedures, based on a late, though no less useful, paraphrase. To madness, then, “where to place it, indeed, if not in poetry itself, as one of its forms and perhaps one of its resources?” Hence, the former “is a difficult but essential moment in the work of” the latter. “Through the former, and even in its apparent victories, poetry manifests itself and triumphs. Madness was, for poetry, only its living and secret force.” (2)
There is undoubtedly a basic creativity, sinisterly poetic in its performance. Because of the way (and harmful, even fatal, result) it unfolds, positioning itself in the subject. It refers to, or would imitate in some way (from its antipode: that happy amazement that gives rise to the productivity of the text) the movement, the locations of language within the page. Although both originate in what the “I” (erroneously) calls consciousness, do both (Poetry and Madness) have a place in the same part of the brain? Or perhaps in that crevice, that border space where the neural interactions between the thalamus and the cortex occur?
I would venture another question: Would the fixity of Madness and Poetry appear, settle in the brain, even if not their causes?
I certainly wouldn’t know how to answer; I’m just taking shots in the dark at a piñata full of wasps.
Illness as literature and as a path to art is a much-referenced topic, old water under the bridge. Despite everything, another (also historical) truth cannot be overemphasized: the psychiatric wards of the world are full of madmen. But none of those madmen are (were) Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Rodrigo Lira, Jaco Pastorius, or Ángel Escobar. Creators of an art more lucid than themselves. An art that dismantles and, in a way, defines the dark century in which they lived. Virtuosos who, fighting a fierce and monumental battle against the springs and pincers of bipolarity or schizophrenia, were able to show us the world without makeup. With aesthetic excellence and mastery of that (always) malleable and difficult material that is composition, the production of art.
That warhead, the place of (mental) illness, arrives. It settles—unfortunately—in the subject. There it grows stronger. It creates, it settles a pain that screams without being heard, that festers and collapses. It erases the place that-was-before, and establishes itself. This trench, or path, is always indescribable: it leaves us speechless. However, in the great virtuosos, that place (of other-thought, of the triumph of No) “emits” a sequel, a transcendent mark, a babbling that never ends. It suffices to read a paragraph by Virginia Woolf, Abuso de confianza by Ángel Escobar; or to stand before the demons of Mikhail Vrubel.
That flash, that destruction that saves (3), can also be felt when reading the best texts by Juan Carlos Flores.
(…)
A schizophrenic writer/ with suicidal tendencies/ unable to bear the simulacrum of life/ that she has been forced to endure/ locked inside a black box/ day after day she writes/ if what she has written seems bad to her/ bad merchandise/ she smokes/ she lies down/ she becomes depressed/ she stares at the ceiling—
Apolitical, she says, but she pays her dues
(sometimes I am César Vallejo, the mutilated man of all wars, who visits her at home. Other times, I am an ordinary stone that she uses as a paperweight) (4)
Notes
(1) During his distressing visit to the Hospital of Santa Ana, where his protégé Tasso was confined by order of Duke Alfonso, and after contemplating the hallucinatory state of the great poet, Montaigne—commented on by Foucault—exclaims: “Who does not know how imperceptible is the proximity between madness and the gallant elevations of a free spirit, and the effects of a supreme and extraordinary virtue?” But there is an object of paradoxical admiration there (explains Foucault). One sign is that, from this same madness, reason obtained its strangest resources.
If Tasso, “one of the most judicious, ingenious, and open-air poets of this pure and ancient poetry that ever lived,” now finds himself in “such a lamentable state, surviving himself,” is it not due to “this murderous vivacity of his, this clarity that has blinded him”? The poet owes his writing and his madness to an “exact and tender apprehension” of things. And this is the exact word I have been looking for since the beginning of this miniature. As a “pre-existing condition” (sic) in the sentient being. So where I said Madness, it should have been preceded by that “exact apprehension” of all reality, that of the text itself. // See Michel Foucault, History of Madness in the Classical Age.
(2) For a complete capture of the original text, see Michel Foucault, opus cit., chapter I “Stultifera Navis”.
(3) That of Art through Madness.
(4) “Portrait of a (Other) Lady,” Juan Carlos Flores, Distintos modos de cavar un túnel, Ediciones Unión, 2003. Quoted from Un hombre de la clase muerta, Antología poética (1986-2006), Torre de Letras, Havana, Cuba, 2007, p. 71.
Image (cover): Orbitoclast (the “ice pick”) tool designed in 1948 by Walter Freeman for transorbital lobotomy.
In his own words, patients entered “a state of surgically induced childhood.”
Procedure: The “ice pick” was inserted through the eye socket and struck with a hammer until it pierced the orbital bone. Finally, it was moved inside the brain to sever frontal connections. The practices of the notorious psychiatrist, known as the “butcher” of Philadelphia, were suspended after the death by perforation of Helen Mortensen, one of his patients. In 1960, his surgical privileges were revoked. Freeman performed more than 35,000 lobotomies (1930-1960). Most of his victims were women.
