Showing posts with label mental health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mental health. Show all posts

18.9.17

to sadoo

in july i began wandering central mumbai like this – 












theory, as kandinsky and others say, follows practice. or rather each follows and leads (dao de jing ii – before and after follow each other). too much theory without practice (the bulk and worst of the academy) irritates as much as too much practice without theory (the bulk and worst of spheres of action).

i was compelled to wander perhaps to ask why i am compelled to wander.

after having sadooed (i verb the practice) almost 20 times – i mostly wander in the area bounded by nana chowk, jeejabai bhosle marg, dalal street, and colaba causeway: my practice so far has been silently walking solo (but responding briefly, quietly, rationally if spoken to non-threateningly) – threads emerge.

one of these is the weave of sanity – those often assumed configurations of reason and unreason,
conformity and non-conformity that imbue education and culture. it’s one thing to sadoo anonymously (responses range from indifference, fear, curiosity, camaraderie, laughter, ridicule, …), it’s another to be faced (befaced?) like this in my housing co-op (frequently with the politics of a small village) where i am somewhat known. a neighbor-friend is asked routinely if i’ve gone crazy. (but surely this
question/judgment has been around for years.) i'm asked directly if i'm ok. i hear someone whispering to a friend as i approach don't say anything.

i call it sanity currency. i experience it as a necessary parallel currency to money. as humans scrimmage for economic currency to survive and accumulate artifacts, prestige, power, so we scrimmage for psychic currency: a decent amount of human language is devoted to explicitly and implicitly sorting out hierarchies of what's 'normal'.

in my co-op it used to anger-annoy me when others – particularly those in leadership positions – would easily label others as insane or sane, when the epistemological bases for their perspectives seemed dubious, as open for critique as their critique of others. such labelling still bothers me but has more grown into curiosity about the assumptions we make about mental health, how not infrequently our working definitions about psychic-emotional-mental wellness serve particular interests of our own rather than broader pluralities or the humans we're judging (or perhaps ostensibly trying to 'help'.) 

(a lot has been written about this of course. i’m more inclined to the thoughtful experienced expressions outside of or on the margins of institutionalized psychology [psychiatry, therapy, wellness, …] than ‘mainstream’ orientations.)

i sadoo, perhaps, in part, to continue to question, in a more embodied way, our cultural biases and hierarchies about how to live well, circumscriptions and possibilities in and around this ‘how’ – to further feel, see, know, doubt what it means for me to explore humanness in a pyretically technological environment that's endemically obsessed with hierarchies.

29.2.16

death vi


have i not zealously sought constructive vitalized non-existence for the attendant wound – a wound without which life is not life, this home and womb of words?

to be declared mentally unhealthy in the present age is analogous to being declared a heretic during the inquisition:  the standards experts move in, enforcing what and how the brain can think.   to calmly claim one’s own standards, rooted in one’s flesh rather than institutional-cultural-economic mass and privilege is a death – like all deaths, permanent, silent, solitary, operating with configurations of weakness and strength unfound in the lives of standards

not unrelated to the death of sanity is the death of class – this path of removing oneself from class and the corollary struggles.  unwilling to assume the pecuniary and productive values of the middle class, unwilling and unable to assume the privilege and sanctimoniousness of the upper, unable to assume the envy and jokes of the lower, it – regardless of how it is viewed by those in class, regardless of the degree to which it lacks the prosthetics (money, possessions, name, reputation, comfort, security) desired and sometimes possessed to some extent by those in class – experiences itself as outside of class:  at least these classes defined by currency.  it seeks in death (where else?) the manual for living in this outside

the madness with which i write and live is the madness that is more or less present in each one of us and not only the madness that gets the psychiatric baptism by diagnosis of some label invented by the specialized psycho-police agents of final phase capitalist society. so when i use the word mad here i'm not referring to a special race of people, but the mad in me addressing the mad in you in the hope that the former mad speaks clearly or loudly enough for the latter to hear.  so too with death

to live in what might be called dreams and to die in what might be called reality in a society given to the latter is to live a life of death and die a death of life.  and if you find my nomenclature strange – if you say, well reality is all there is – … ?  doesn’t what i call the modern secular mystic aesthetic (from pessoa to woolf, from dickinson to genet) carry a culture of dreams from the slaughter of certain people of these and other lands, from old men who dreamed visions and old women who dreamed dreams, who walked with spirits and knew waking life had no superiority, carry this culture in the emptiness of their hearts through a metallic desolation, dogmatic in its faith in things and facts.  no – despite the institutionalized cries of the light and newly voiced, of the heavy established names, that they have justice, truth, power – i rest in crypts of gaseous doubt, the incessant blurring of ideas and species, of all singularities.  the world, existence, is for me and those rough ones of my tribe – spread across death like fog – hardly solid, hardly true … a question among infinite questions, a dream among infinite dreams

why would i be interested in writing in the common tongue, in writing about the tedious topics of money, sex, society – whatever arbitrary concerns and styles the day ejects and the gouged desperados conform to as if they have objective value?  the overwhelmingly vast portion of the universe is radically inhuman and at the center and margins of the human – there too the inhuman, masked and hardly masked.  so i seek languages, forms, syntaxes, dictions, that reflect the energies that dominate and circumscribe the universe and, inescapably, often surreptitiously, the human; the tools i use for such seeking i have found far more readily in death than life, in the apophatic rather than the analytic, silence rather than what we call communication.  i hardly aim for lucidity or that most puerile of objectives – to be understood.  in art – as in love – we must remember to leave any humanity we might have behind

bricks move and sing.  bricks are made of language.  we do not hear them less because they lack mouths, more because our ears are unschooled and the words in a single brick so vast as to rival a dictionary, syntactically arranged unexpectedly for our brains so trained to certain orders.  would we hear bricks with the same ease we hear humans, would our identities not be spontaneously reconfigured, the human voice returned to its place among places, the grammars of things vast and diverse, our brains as empty and fluid as clouds?

to abdicate using others’ illusions for what may be one’s own is to find oneself in force or – more rarely – energy:  each an intimacy with death, the difference being its primordial orientation to diffusion