one hour to madness and joy
Yesterday I was writing about madness and pain; today I will write about madness and joy. One mustn't think that madness always contains distress and anger. Some mad experiences are full to the brim with elation and merriment. Yet they are just as likely to be shut down.
I remember sitting at a table in the psychiatric hospital in Amsterdam, the subject of a sort of tribunal between the staff and my family, who had come to retrieve me. One of the staff members recounted a friendly conversation I'd had with her, in which I had mentioned that this had been the best visit I'd ever had to the city: evidence, she declared, that I was in a bipolar manic episode. But it was the best visit I'd ever had to Amsterdam! That was no exaggeration, or embellishment.
I won't recount all the details of my days wandering around; suffice to say that I'd been in a state of bliss, and count it among the most significant experiences of my life. I know, I know: it wasn't that simple. My state of mind didn't fit in with Real Life, and so I must be pulled back down to the ground, to rejoin humanity in its trudge through the mud. There is something deeply unsettling about the effort that the psychiatric system makes to colonise a person's interior landscape. It's like being invaded, violated, and stifled. If it's against a person's will then it most surely counts as violence.
But back to the bliss. This experience contained unbridled joy and a heady dose of humour; I beheld the world and declared it good. And I've never since let go of that understanding: surely the trip was worthwhile for that outcome alone? What can be learned from the mad experience when it carries one into ecstasy? What is it about mad joy that the world finds so frightening, that it must be contained and eradicated?
I'm reminded of the madness that takes over one's mind and heart when one falls in love. Perhaps we should be looking to the Romantic poets for direction, when we encounter the blissful psychotic?
ONE HOUR TO MADNESS AND JOY.
By Walt Whitman
ONE hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my
children,
I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)
O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to
me in defiance of the world!
O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of
a determin'd man.
O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all
untied and illumin'd!
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
To be absolv'd from previous ties and conventions, I from mine
and you from yours!
To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!