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What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
One of God’s greatest mercies is that he keeps us perpetually occluded.
God mercifully occludes us to the past as well as the future.
As she talked she began to disappear. He watched her go; it was amazing. Gloria, in her measured way, talked herself out of existence word by word. It was rationality at the service of—well, he thought, at the service of nonbeing. Her mind had become one great, expert eraser. All that really remained now was her husk; which is to say, her uninhabited corpse.
We do not serve up people to ourselves; the universe does. The universe makes certain decisions and on the basis of these decisions some people live and some people die. This is a harsh law. But every creature yields to it out of necessity.
The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.
Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that—as if that weren’t enough—but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not
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God never harms anyone. Illness, pain and undeserved suffering arise not from God but from elsewhere, to which I say, How did this elsewhere arise? Are there two gods? Or is part of the universe out from under God’s control?
In Plato’s cosmology, noös or Mind is persuading ananke or blind necessity—or blind chance, according to some experts—into submission. Noös happened to come along and to its surprise discovered blind chance: chaos, in other words, onto which noös imposes order (although how this “persuading” is done Plato nowhere says). According to Fat, my friend’s cancer consisted of disorder not yet persuaded into sentient shape. Noös or God had not yet gotten around to her, to which I said, “Well, when he did get around to her it was too late.”
God is either powerless, stupid or he doesn’t give a shit. Or all three. He’s evil, dumb, and weak.
Caught in his own maze, like Daedalus, who built the labyrinth for King Minos of Crete and then fell into it and couldn’t get out. Presumably Daedalus is still there, and so are we.
There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.
PARSIFAL: I move only a little, yet already I seem to have gone far. GURNEMANZ: You see, my son, here time turns into space.
Fat knew that if he said anything, anything at all, they would hold him the ninety days. So he said nothing. When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.
The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.
This is a mournful discovery. 1) Those who agree with you are insane. 2) Those who do not agree with you are in power.
They—note the “they”—paid Dr. Stone to figure out what had destroyed the patient entering the ward. In each case a bullet had been fired at him, somewhere, at some time, in his life. The bullet entered him and the pain began to spread out. Insidiously, the pain filled him up until he split in half, right down the middle. The task of the staff, and even of the other patients, was to put the person back together but this could not be done so long as the bullet remained. All that lesser therapists did was note the person split into two pieces and begin the job of patching him back into a unity;
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I’ve always told people that for each person there is a sentence—a series of words—which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you’re lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works. On their own, without training, individuals know how to deal out the lethal sentence, but training is required to deal out the second.
“Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.”
In his study of the form that masochism takes in modern man, Theodor Reik puts forth an interesting view. Masochism is more widespread than we realize because it takes an attenuated form. The basic dynamism is as follows: a human being sees something bad which is coming as inevitable. There is no way he can halt the process; he is helpless. This sense of helplessness generates a need to gain some control over the impending pain—any kind of control will do. This makes sense; the subjective feeling of helplessness is more painful than the impending misery. So the person seizes control over the
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Isn’t it an oxymoron to say, I am not myself? Isn’t this a verbal contradiction, a statement semantically meaningless?
“That’s not a bad theological idea,” I said. “You find yourself facing yourself.
An ancient argument for immortality goes like this: if every creature really dies—as it appears to—then life continually passes out of the universe, passes out of being; and so eventually all life will have passed out of being, since there are no known exceptions to this. Ergo, despite what we see, life somehow must not turn to death.
Too much medication, I said to myself, remembering Paracelsus, is a poison. This man has been healed to death.
“Look where you least expect to find it,” Kevin had told Fat one time. How do you do that? It’s a contradiction.
It was evident to Elias Tate that this was the government. First they shake hands with you, he thought, and then they murder you.
He thought, You are going to die. He knew it and she knew it. They did not have to talk about it. The complicity of silence was there, the agreement. A dying girl wants to cook me a dinner, he thought. A dinner I don’t want to eat. I’ve got to say no to her. I’ve got to keep her out of my dome. The insistence of the weak, he thought; their dreadful power. It is so much easier to throw a body block against the strong!
“Who can say? I can’t reconstruct my earlier thinking, now, at this point in my life.
“This illness that I have,” Rybys said, “is something that made me wonder about—” She paused. “You have to experience everything in terms of the ultimate picture. As of itself my illness would seem to be evil, but it serves a higher purpose we can’t see. Or can’t see yet, anyhow.”
Hesitating, Rybys said slowly, “He permitted it. But I believe he’s healing me. There’s something I have to learn and this way I’ll learn it.”
“I am Scientific Legate. The Party. You understand? That’s my decision; that’s the side I found. Pain and illness are something to be eradicated, not understood. There is no afterlife and there is no God,
The voice said, “It is Ehyeh.” “Well,” Herb Asher said, amazed. It was the deity of the mountain, speaking to him openly, without an electronic interface. A strange sense of his own worthlessness overcame Herb Asher, and he kept his face covered. “What do you want?” he said. “I mean, it’s late. This is my sleep cycle.”
Yah has plans for me, he thought. And he felt fear, realizing this. He can make me do anything.
“Then I will be the cat,” Zina said, “and it will not die because I am not like you.” She bent down, her hands on her knees, to address the cat. Emmanuel watched, and presently the cat came to him and asked to speak to him. He lifted it up and held it in his arms and the cat placed its paw against his face. With its paw it told him that mice were annoying and a bother and yet the cat did not wish to see an end of mice because, as annoying as they were, still there was something about them that was fascinating, more fascinating than annoying; and so the cat sought out mice, although the cat did
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But he forgot again. By the time he and the girl had gone outside into the yard he no longer knew. And yet—strange!—he knew that he had known, known and forgotten again almost at once. As if, he thought, I have two minds inside me, one on the surface and the other in the depths. The surface one has been injured but the deep one has not. And yet the deep one can’t speak; it is closed up. Forever?
“‘Felix culpa,’” Rybys said. “Yes,” Elias agreed. To Herb Asher he explained, “It means ‘happy fault,’ referring to the fall, the original fall. Had there been no fall perhaps there would have been no Incarnation. No birth of Christ.”
“When Masada fell,” Elias said, “all was lost. God did not enter history in the first century C.E.; he left history. Christ’s mission was a failure.”
“As God foresaw the original fall,” Elias said, “he also foresaw that Jesus would not be acceptable. It was known to God before it happened.”
“But I’m a Jew. I would be a Jew; that’s what got me into this. If I was a Gentile Yah wouldn’t have picked me. If I’d ever been laid I’d—” She broke off. “The Divine Machinery has a peculiar brutality to it,” she finished. “It isn’t romantic. It’s cruel; it really is.”
“Yes,” she said, “I guess it is. But it’s brutal. What’s happening to me is brutal. And there’s more ahead. I want out and I can’t get out. Nobody asked me originally. Nobody is asking me now. Yah foresees what lies ahead but I don’t, except that there’s more cruelty and pain and throwing up. Serving God seems to mean throwing up and shooting yourself with a needle every day. I am a diseased rat in a kind of cage. That’s what he’s made me into. I have no faith and no hope and he has no love, only power. God is a symptom of power, nothing else. The hell with it. I give up. I don’t care. I’ll do
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If the ailment doesn’t kill you the therapy will.
And then he thought, It is tricking me. It dances along the path like a bobbing light, leading me and leading me, away, further, further, into the darkness. And then when the darkness is everywhere the bobbing light will wink out. I know you, he thought at the slate. I know how you work. I will not follow; you must come to me.
The color symbolism was not arbitrary but extended back in time to the early medieval Romanesque paintings. Red always represented the Father. Blue the color of the Son. And gold, of course, that of the Holy Spirit. Green stood for the new life of the elect; violet the color of mourning; brown the color of endurance and suffering; white, the color of light; and, finally, black, the color of the Powers of Darkness, of death and sin.
“Only man has language,” Elias explained. “Only man can give birth to language. Also—” He eyed the boy. “When man gave names to creatures he established his dominion over them.”
What you name you control, Emmanuel realized. Hence no one is to speak my name because no one is to have—or can have—control over me. “God played a game with Adam, then,” he said. “He wanted to see if the man knew their correct names. He was testing the man. God enjoys games.”
“These subtleties mean nothing to me,” the dog told him. “I kill to kill; I die because I must. It is necessity, the rule that is the final rule. Don’t you live and kill and die by that rule? Surely you do. You are a creature, too.”
“I feel sorry for her,” Bulkowsky said. How must it feel, he asked himself, not to exist? That’s a contradiction. To feel is to exist. Then, he thought, probably she does not feel. Because it is a fact that she does not exist, not really. We ought to know. We were the first to imagine her.
He heard nothing in response. It did not surprise him. Pious people spoke to God, and crazy people imagined that God spoke back. His answers had to come from within himself, from his own heart. But, of course, the Spirit guided him.
“A strange idea,” Herb Asher said. “I wonder what the authorities would think if their intelligence-gathering circuitry picked up the thoughts of God.”
“I will tell you something more,” Elias said. “A man came to the great Rabbi Hillel—he lived in the first century, C.E.—and said, ‘I will become a proselyte on the condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I stand on one foot.’ Hillel said, ‘Whatever is hateful to you, do not do it to your neighbor. That is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary; go and learn it.’”
