Pilgrim (35 page)
Eunice Parsons was, at this point, probably the only friend her brother had. She was seventeen years old and on her way to becoming a passably good writer of what she called “journalistic fictions.” It was the time of Stephen Crane and Jack London, a time when Mark Twain was the American god of gods—a time when, perhaps uniquely, American writers were creating a new form of fiction whose impetus came from the journalistic careers of its practitioners. All this would ultimately peak in the writing of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.
What Robert Daniel Parsons achieved in his two-year “sabbatical” at Rossinière was a manifesto, written in behalf of the insane. He called it
In Defense of
Dementia
and it can still be found in various university libraries, the Smithsonian Institute and in the archives of the Jung Institute at Zürich. Its epigraph was taken from the work of Christopher Smart, some of whose writing had been scratched on the walls of an eighteenth-century asylum. Parsons had been caught by a phrase from Smart’s religious testament:
A Song of David:
Where ask is have, where seek is find,
Where knock is open wide.
Parsons’s manifesto was a sensation. To begin with, it took Janet, Bleuler and Freud to task for having commandeered the lives of what he called
a mass already deprived of the rights to their own integrity
. The word
mass
seemed to appeal to Parsons, who used it often in his descriptions of the inhabitants of his chosen constituency,
The Mad
.
Because of her faith in Robert Daniel, whom she called “Rad,” Eunice Parsons pursued publication of her brother’s manuscript with the zeal of John the Baptist proclaiming the coming of Jesus Christ. She abased herself to the degree that she gave up all hope of achieving her own academic goals, leaving her college to speak out in Rad’s behalf and to find a publisher of stature who would risk placing her brother’s radical beliefs before the public. This way,
In Defense of Dementia
was published in America by Pitt, Horner and Platt in September of 1904.
It was an immediate and electrifying success. In a moment when Marie Curie produced the first evidence of radioactive elements in uranium ore, when
Anton Chekhov’s masterpiece
The Cherry Orchard
was first produced in Moscow—and when Claude Monet began his exploration of the water lily—Robert Daniel Parsons’s plea for “the freedom of madness” outbid them all for the attention of the
cognoscenti.
The doors were opened—and the mad spilled into the streets.
It was, of course, a disaster. No precautions had been taken. No accommodations had been provided. No guides had been appointed. The fashion in which it all happened had nothing to do with Parsons’s intentions. His advocacy had been for what were later called
minders
and
halfway houses,
and for financial security provided by government. None of these things had been set in place or motion and the fires that followed were amongst the saddest horrors of their time.
When Eunice Parsons introduced her brother’s manifesto to European publishers, none of the effects of its American publication had been sufficiently publicized to deter them from seizing on
In Defense of Dementia
as an “intellectual bauble” to float on the current tide of public interest in
things Freudian
—
things libidinous
—
things dangerous.
The word
dangerous
was everywhere. Literature was intended to be
dangerous
—art was meant to be
dangerous
—ideas were nothing if they were not
dangerous
. André Gide, Pablo Picasso and Isadora Duncan were
dangerous
. On top of all this, the public was presented with
In Defense of Dementia
.
Jung thought it was a
valuable contribution to the
literature of our field.
Freud concurred—but they were alone. Janet, Bleuler, Krafft-Ebbing and other leaders in the field turned their backs.
Nonetheless, Robert Daniel “Rad” Parsons came out of exile into Paris, where the doors had been forced, the gates thrown wide and the mad unleashed.
Using the monies accrued through the sale of his book and with Eunice beside him, Parsons opened a
Hospice des aliénés
at number 37, rue de Fleurus, in the shadow of the Luxembourg Palace. Partway down that tiny street, Gertrude Stein had recently been joined in her atelier by Alice B. Toklas. Every day in the autumn of 1904, Miss Stein and Miss Toklas walked with their dog to the Luxembourg Gardens, waving a cheery hand at the residents of number 37, many of them sitting naked in the courtyard beyond its wrought-iron gates and amongst its fading geraniums. In her journal entry of October 14th, 1904, Miss Toklas notes:
they were there again this morning, the
Parsonite Peculiars,
seated on tiny Moroccan carpets, all quite splendid in their unabashed nudity, tatting curtains made of string. G.S. remarked that
if one chooses to sit upon the ground, there can be no finer ground than a Moroccan carpet. The colours,
she said
, are so receptive of human flesh.
I must think about this
—
and will.
Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas aside, little attention was paid to the Parsonites. That is to say, little official attention. The police passed by and looked the other way, so long as the gates remained closed. Citizens of high standing—high, in their own opinion—avoided the rue de Fleurus entirely. Children
and dogs were hurried on to the Gardens. No one complained.
And then it happened.
Amongst the patients “rescued” from the Salpêtrière was a man by the name of Jean-Claude Vainqueur, who believed he had come to earth from
another place
—never named—in order to pursue and kill the Antichrist and all who believed in him.
He had first come to official notice thirty-five years before his rescue from the asylum, when—near Marseilles—he had been washed ashore in his dead mother’s arms. They had been amongst two hundred passengers on an overcrowded sloop that had foundered at sea between Algiers and the French coast. All had perished. A paper was found in the pocket of the unidentified woman’s apron—a paper on which the name Jean-Claude Vainqueur had been pencilled, doubtless the name of a man she had intended to contact after landing on French soil.
The boy had been, at most, four years old—possibly less. He had no language known to anyone who had encountered him—and no identifiable origin. He was placed in one orphanage after another—each time provoking his own rejection by lighting fires and screaming invective at the authorities who came to put them out.
In the final stages of his life as an orphan-ward of the state, a language had been devised by a patient, almost saintlike Jesuit who had decided, quite properly, that one of the child’s greatest frustrations was his inability to communicate. What emerged was a
mix of basic French, even more basic Latin and an agreed upon lexicon of grunts, murmurs and sighs. God was
Deo-Dieu
, Christ was
Corpus
and the Antichrist was
Diabolo.
Ultimately, the priest’s body was discovered—piece by piece. It had been dismembered and scattered. His head was never found. Jean-Claude Vainqueur was incarcerated, supposedly for life, in a prison for the criminally insane at
L’avoir Paix
on the outskirts of Paris. One month prior to Parsons’s return from exile, Vainqueur was brought to Salpêtrière as a study case in the language of the mad.
And then
The Mad
began to be released.
Jean-Claude Vainqueur ended up in the
Hospice des aliénés
on rue de Fleurus. There, acting on some vicious logic of his own, he came to the conclusion that Parsons, himself, was the Devil incarnate—possibly based on something as simple as the fact that Parsons had chosen to sit at the head of the communal table. Vainqueur and his disciples consequently dragged Parsons from his bed, stripped him and nailed him to a cross. The cross was then suspended upside down over a bonfire in the locked courtyard at number 37, rue de Fleurus. Before her expulsion from the
Hospice,
Eunice Parsons was forced to witness the agony of her brother’s death.
These events occurred on the night of October 16th/17th, 1904—a Sunday and a Monday. On the Monday, the militia was called in to storm the gates and imprison the fifteen Parsonites who were then in residence, together with Jean-Claude Vainqueur.
Alice Toklas noted in her journal that
fires and human cries of anguish
had occurred in the night.
Many dogs were set to barking and G.S., on being wakened, said to me:
do not light the lamp but only candles. For all we know, since so many Russians now reside in Paris, we may be in the midst of a pogrom and do not want to draw attention to ourselves.
I duly lighted one candle only and set it in the middle of the room, where it could not be seen through any window.
As for the press, it responded with the usual sensational headlines:
PARSONITE EXPERIMENT ENDS IN FIRE! PARSONISM DIES ON THE CROSS!
Et cetera. The reaction worldwide was immediate. This was when the Parsons family in Wyoming and elsewhere went into hiding, changed their names to various others and disappeared altogether from further notoriety. For two years, Eunice attempted to publish her own work, failed—and committed suicide. In Toronto, Ernest Jones, a Freudian disciple, delivered a lecture on the dangers of
flirting with Parsonism
in any experimentations in the field of psychopathology. In Paris and Zürich, Janet and Bleuler crowed their triumph over the demise of
The Madmen’s Madman
and in Vienna, Freud burned his copy of
In Defense of Dementia
.
Not so in Küsnacht. Jung took the precaution of wrapping his own copy of Parsons’s book in butcher’s waxed brown paper, tying it with string and locking it inside a cabinet otherwise reserved for private journals, letters and a spare bottle of cognac.
Early in the pre-dawn light following his “bathroom epiphany,” Jung put on his robe, shuffled into his slippers and went downstairs.
In his office, he opened the windows and the shutters, went to the locked cabinet, inserted the key, pulled the door towards his knees, reached inside and drew forth the string-tied brown-paper package containing
In Defense of Dementia
.
Pilgrim
, he was thinking.
Blavinskeya. Haeckel
. And
in this cave where I am sitting.
He undid the string and set it aside on his desk. He unfolded and smoothed the butcher’s waxed brown paper—laying it, too, where he could see it from the corner of his eye. The little book itself—no more than fifty pages long—had the look of something newly purchased, its blue-grey covers unsoiled, its black lettering unfaded. Jung laid his right-hand palm down on its face, as if to say:
pace, pace.
There was a martyr here. He recognized that without question.
Appallingly wrong
—
yet undeniably right.
Another Luther. Another Rousseau. Another da Vinci. Another monster hiding inside another saint—another saint inside another monster.
And if you free the saint, you also free the monster.
A voice in the whirlwind,
he read,
to which, if only we would listen, they would direct our attention…
Pilgrim. Blavinskeya. Emma’s little fish
—
our child.
And he wrote:
Between his exposure to Leonardo’s eye and his exposure to mine, there is no time and space in Pilgrim’s
mind. Nor between her life on the Moon, for Blavinskeya, and her residence here. Nor between the ocean of Emma’s womb and the shore on which our little fish shall one day be angled.
All one.
That’s right.
All one place and all one time.
That’s right.
It is how we see—that’s all that matters.
And what we remember.
Yes. And feel.
And tell.
Embrace it all. It is all one.
Jung sat forward.
The pen wavered and then he wrote:
All time
—
all space
—
is mine. The collective memory of the whole human race is beside me, sitting in this cave
—
my brain. And if I join the mad in claiming this, so be it. I am mad.
Hôtel Baur au Lac
Zürich
14th May, 1912
And so my dearest friend, I address you for the last time. To my sorrow, I must do so through the medium
of this letter, though I would have preferred that we take leave of one another in our usual fashion, with a clasping of human hands and a kiss.
As you will guess, I am—of course—afraid. After so much life—my death. How certain we were that it would never come! And think how often we wished that it could, while knowing that what mortals call “death” was not, for us, even a remote possibility. The gods would not sanction it. They would not permit it. They would not so much as countenance the thought of it—and yet, here it is.
The
Envoys
, two of them, arrived in Zürich even as you and I did. You will remember we arrived in the midst of a blizzard—and it seems that same blizzard was their means of transport. Their name is Messager.
Messenger.
They masquerade at being French, speak that language perfectly, but otherwise have no human dimensions. I recognized them instantly, though I did not at first foresee their portent. I assumed that perhaps there was to be a meeting in the Grove—and of course, my heart leapt up because I assumed such a congress might have to do with your release from present conditions. Such was not the case.
