Going Too Far (41 page)

But the person paralyzed in the grip of a negative schizophrenic hallucination (whether drug-induced or other) or reeling through the baroque architecture of a paranoid perception has seen madness not as a liberating state but rather one from which to be liberated with all due possible speed and by any means necessary. Such means include any help available, even those unimaginative, metallic, authoritarian doctors whose medical and psychiatric Big Business is justly feared and detested. And it is usually, and tragically, they who are available, since the industry of mental health is not coincidentally under their control. Real alternatives to this cartel are only beginning to function; feminist therapy, as an example, is in the process of defining itself.
¹
For the moment, then, one's choice lies between the devil and the deep blue he. There is the pompous ass who aims to “normalize” his (
sic
) patient—to make the housewife more content with her namelessness, to bring the homosexual to an aversion of her or his own sexuality, to patronize the child, to cool out the adolescent, to tranquilize the rebel, to induce drug comas in the bothersome elderly—and to write books and papers, appear on talk shows, and keep his own malpractice rates low. The other choice lies with the self-styled radical shrink, who is also usually male (surprise!); he sports a dirty ponytail instead of a bald fringe, speaks in language that unwittingly parodies himself as a Jules Feiffer character, and chuckles at his patient disapprovingly if she confesses to a bad trip. “You didn't let yourself
go,
” he lectures her, one of his hairy hands gumming its way up her thigh as he oozles.
Is
it greediness to feel that such choices are insufficient?

I discovered my own “madness” during the sixties, via
hallucinogenic soft drugs such as acid (LSD), mescaline, and peyote, as well as the stand-by of my generation—grass. I never took hard drugs, both from great fear of them and even greater respect for my own body. Nor did I ever take drugs lightly. They were, for me, tickets to a psychic and religious space. Of the multitudinous experiences I encountered during this period, while tripping and sober (silly word) I've written elsewhere,
²
and without doubt shall do so again. Many of these experiences were ecstatic, lyrical, hilarious, peaceful, and wholly good. Quite frankly, though, I have had just as ecstatic, lyrical, etc. experiences with no drug inducing them—unless one considers a country dawn or childbirth or Elizabethan lute music or an act of love-making drugs. So more from a sense of, I hope, investigation than from a preoccupation with the grim, I include here some writings on the negative side of that experience. For it was without question hallucinogenic drugs which first introduced me to the real state of paranoia. I don't mean paranoia as a cocktail-party phrase, or in a clinical sense, or in any other loose parlance. I mean paranoia as a system of perception in which everything in the entire universe seems intricately—and horribly—enclosed.

The following piece is about that system. The first part is based on a series of notes I rapidly made while “in” the state itself (a writer is a writer is a writer after all). These notes expanded, as an exorcise-exercise over subsequent months, especially as I compared experiences with other women and found that for many of us, the Stoned Sixties were less than groovy. Many men, for instance, simply substituted drugs for alcohol and proceeded to use this substance the way their square fathers had: to pressure and seduce (read: rape) women. If the women freaked out about this, you guessed it—we were hung up. For every woman who has recognized the religious and philosophical ecstasy shyly articulated in poems of mine like “Revolucinations” or “Credo,”
five
women have apparently identified with the “bad trip” revolving around sex and powerlessness depicted in my longer poem “War Games.” It was a not-uncommon experience, and the misuse of drugs by men against women for sexual purposes continues, viciously, to this day.

I set the task for myself of, as I saw it, “wooing” my madness and putting it to use. Awful as it was and loath as I am ever to return to it, I nevertheless would not have missed it for anything—and I somehow had the sense to know that at the time, even when I desperately wanted Out. I was fortunate;
when I refer to my “madness” (and I shall now drop the coy quotation marks), I'm referring always to temporary states (drug-induced or spontaneous) never longer than twelve hours and often of only a moment's duration, never more frequent than perhaps fifty times in all, over a period of almost ten years. These states occurred in the company of loving family or friends (even if I didn't see them that way at the time), and I was never tranquilized (other than vitamin C or a Valium, self-requested, at home; never hospitalized or institutionalized). Very fortunate, much more so than others of my generation. “She calls this her madness?” you sneer?
'Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve
.

Wooing and using it, yes.
Understanding
it, again. Surely no artist would ignore it, or fail to try and document such colors, shapes, constructs—such a hypnotically alien cosmos. Surely no radical could dismiss the buried messages therein. Not I, at any rate. I refused to be ashamed of my hallucinatory journeys, even after they ceased being chemically induced (these “ticketless trips” were, in fact, the most vivid and fascinating of all). And while I found Laing and gang rather sophomoric, I also tried to remain on guard against the tempting cliché of the Mad Artist (Van Gogh, Smart, Schumann, Poe, Woolf, Sexton, and Plath, here we come). Yet I still intended to find out for myself as much as I could what these archeological digs in my own brain were unearthing. I could not have foreseen or said that any usefulness to feminists would lie in this search—although clearly none of the boys, from Fanon to Szasz to Laing to Cooper were much help, since none had seriously considered what Marxists so touchingly termed The Woman Problem. On the contrary, their male-supremacist assumptions were obnoxiously omnipresent. None of them appeared particularly interested in a political analysis of
female
paranoia. I—permanently a female and at least temporarily a paranoid—cared.

If, consequently, the political explorations made in the first part of this essay are consciousness-raising to other women, I am grateful. I must confess though that they were done not for this reason, but rather to discover for myself, my own personal Everywoman,
what my pain meant
. For me, the access to that discovery lay through the page; this essay is part of the result.

The Paradigm is a charting, a translation, of the state of paranoia itself. This is the section based on jottings made during the experience. I've never read or heard anything like it, including anyone else's version of paranoia—yet when I've shared this version with others I have been met with an unsettlingly intense recognition, as if I had encountered another traveler who had also once happened on that rarely frequented
tourist spot known only to a few of us. The political probing of the Paradigm, as I have said, came later, evolving slowly but with at least as much startling impact as the discovery of the state itself.

The Parable is an account of a dream I had during my courtship of these states, although I was under no chemical's influence while dreaming it. The dream-parable does use imagery from a movie which had been influential on both Kenneth and me, and I include a poem of his to further demonstrate the connection. Relating dreams can be the dreariest of genres, but I think it worth hazarding when the dream works solidly on the mytho-poetic level one demands of one's waking creations, and when it resonates on a political level as well. Furthermore, if the Paradigm is an explanation of the experience and the political analysis is a meditation on the Paradigm, then the Parable is a confirmation of the political analysis. The dream is therefore essentially the metaphor for the experience itself.

The point to keep in mind is that this is real. One does not
believe
in the hallucinations—one
knows
. Even as the culture which created the reasons for such horror is real. As the insights are real. As the symbolism of dreams is real, as it can make the heart pound and the skin sweat and the muscles jerk. As the choice facing every woman who has ever loved a man in the patriarchal world is agonizingly, frighteningly, recurringly
real
.

I: THE PARADIGM

T
HE FEAR OF FEAR
—that is the only valid terror. Surely a wise mind allows itself that one cautionary alarm.

But to admit even one fear is to admit the possibility of them all—to admit the potential for hostility, enmity, in everyone, everything, an expanding universe of They and Them against me.

Once “within” the mature flowering of the paranoid state this reasonless fear is so encompassing that it
must
be explained. Yet all explanations reduce to two alternatives, each with a subdivision; only two possibilities from which to choose:

1

2

These states (1 and 2) alternate in one's consciousness, each having a subdivision of reassurance and terror. It is between these subdivisions that the tension is stretched, and between the states themselves that the balance of continuity is maintained, for the subdivisions trigger each other off to begin the cycle of alternation again. Thus one has the choice of being sane at the expense of others (1), or mad at the expense of oneself (2). Is the first state an expression of a supreme sadism, the second a comparable expression of an ultimate masochism? Or is the first a demonstration of individual self-determination, the second a demonstration of collective co-influence?
Or
is the first state mere selfishness, the second pure altruism?

Inevitably, when one is thoroughly “in” state 1, the other state does not exist; it cannot. The reverse is true. There is
no coexistence
in consciousness of the two states, only a ceding of place, one to the other, in turn. Indeed, when “in” one state, the captive seeks the reassurance of the other as a means of escape from the panic of the present state-only to find that the flight entails encountering “those evils that we know not of” as much or more than it does reaching a momentary breathing space. The rodent in Kafka's trenchant story “The Burrow.”

It's revealing that the linkage of subdivision 1A with subdivision 2A equals what could be called “health.”

Furthermore, the linkage of 1B with 2B also equals “health” (a normal response to a threatening situation
is
fear).

Unfortunately, those subdivisions do not cross-relate this way in the process described here. If they did, we would have no problem.

Interesting too, that one cannot cross-link 1A with 2B, or 1B with 2A—because that would be a linkage of direct opposites which would then each cancel the other out. Such a strategy is very Buddhist, but regrettably it does not appear available to the captive paranoid:

However, in
reverse
order, 2A and 1B
can
relate:

And 2B and 1A can relate in a parallel reversed order:

This
combination of subdivisions seems at first to break up the components more clearly. We get a less alloyed essence here: 2A and 1B combine to create a state of
pure
paranoia, unadulterated by
thoughts about
madness. But 2B and 1A seem to describe pure health, self-contained, even self-preoccupied, uncontaminated with threatening thoughts about “Them.” At least this is relative health, in that 1A
accepts
2B (just as, above, 1B takes 2A into consideration), and
by so doing seems to break the cycle
.

Is such a cross-linkage of subdivisions the solution, then? In an obvious way, of course: one walks that line between health and madness all the time. Everyone does this, in fact, but only the intelligent realize it. Yet it hardly seems right that the only way to stay relatively sane is to live in terror of one's madness. A peculiar sanity, that. The pat answer
would be that one must stay
aware
of it, but not fear it—a smug, non-experiential logic. Go tell it to Kafka.