A touch of madness

Sem a loucura que é o homem
mais que a besta sadia,
cadáver adiado que procria?

Fernando Pessoa

(attempt at translation:
Without madness what is man
but the healthy beast,
adjourned corpse that breeds?)

This is a beautiful sentence from one of our greatest poets; never mind the king he was talking about was a dimwit that verged on the moronic that led the country to lose its independence. But when he talks about madness, he means the unconventionality, the thinking outside the box, the grain of genius that makes people stand out against the dreary, common thinking. That kind of madness is good, it can be the sign of genius (again, not in the case of king Sebastião, but that's another question).

But then there is clinical madness, the kind that makes you lose touch with reality, the kind that makes you suffer. And there's nothing romantic or visionary about that. Madness is not Sylvie de Nogaret playing solitaire and chatting with her dead brother in Durrell's Monsieur (even if I like Durrell immensely); it's Virginia Woolf drowning herself because "the voices were coming back and this time they weren't going away", or a girl shivering in panic in a hospital room in a foreign town listening to the staff planning unspeakably horrible pranks to humiliate her.

Fortunately, I never experienced true madness. Anxiety, depression, panic, irritability, bad temper with loss of control, all that I've known, but never lost the sense of reality, never found myself in an alien world whose rules I could not understand or felt my sense of self shattered to smithereens. I watched it happen, and few things have scared me as much.

So, I guess a touch of madness is alright, even desirable, and I've known the liberating feeling of not caring at all about what other people think, but one must always be able to stop and not to lose control. And true madness, the psychotic kind, is never good, it always means too much suffering and can be literally fatal.

Family love

Every now and then I find myself questioning the causes and essence of family love. Mostly when I'm feeling unhappy about my family, and yet knowing I love them (thinking about my children). Family love is usually considered so obvious that most people find it shocking it be even questioned. How could you not unconditionally love your children, you're probably asking right now? What kind of monster, unnatural father could ever question his love for his children? OK, don't worry, I do love them. But I keep questioning nevertheless, because that's in my nature, and I really think one should try to understand our feelings, and not just take traditional "wisdom" for granted. And I think there's actually a lot to question about family love.

I always tended to believe what defines family relationships / feelings is inevitability. We don't choose our family (with the notable exception of our spouse, but more about that later). We start by not choosing our parents and siblings (and the extended family of grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins); it's our family and we grow among them, so they come to define what we consider normal (family relationships) from an early age. We usually don't question them much until adolescence, when we start thinking by ourselves and when the desire for emancipation makes us usually go through a phase of opposition to their values - but nevertheless those values are deeply embedded inside us and they tend to stay with us through our adult lives in some more or less perceptible way. We love our parents first because they are what we know, the persons who protect us and love us, who teach us everything, who are our role models - and even if we later disapprove of them, their values etc, they always leave some indelible impression on us, because we're "imprinted" by them since birth. But what about love? We need to love, and so we love them, they're there. I guess starting to notice their flaws is what makes adolescence such a troubled time.

In my case, I guess I was born in a pretty average family. I was loved by my parents and loved them back. Adolescence was a typically troubled time... Caught in a war between extremely intelligent, ambitious and strong willed parents, that was my notion of what was normal, I went through pretty intense feeling against one or the other, defining myself against a passionate and possessive mother and an accomplished and frequently absent father, both demanding and expecting what they considered the best from their children. Love didn't feel unconditional, my sisters and I felt pressured for accomplishment and excellence, and that was our normality, it shaped us that way. I hold no grudges against them, they were tough, but so were we. It was as it was, I can hardly imagine it differently - that's the inevitability of families.


Now I have my own family, as a parent. I didn't choose my children. They happened to be the way they are. They are very different from me, and I love them. I recently read a phrase that I most identified with: "as anyone who has had kids will tell you, love and complete exasperation are pretty much the defining emotions of parenthood.", by Alexis Petridis in The Guardian.

But, as Tina Turner would say, "what love has to do with it"? Why love? Why do I love these unbearable, annoying kids?

The first thing that comes into my mind to explain family love - love comes from habit, from shared experiences. We live together, we go through so much together, with our parents, our grandparents, our siblings, our children. Lots of small and great things. We were protected and cared for by our parents, we protect and care for our children. We're indelibly "imprinted" with the unequally incredible feelings aroused by taking care of our children, how could we not be overwhelmed by the incredible sensation of meaning so much to them when they're these tiny and vulnerable beings? Maybe it's then we build a truly inexhaustible capital of love to them. Whatever comes later, however big the exasperation Petridis talks about - and it can be really big - we never forget that feeling. And then there are all those countless private jokes, familiar reasonings, other's phrases we can finish ourselves.

So is this the reason for family love? Is this why we keep putting exasperation aside? Is it normal? Is it sane? Is it worthwhile? I don't know. We're social animals, the family unit evolved as a protection mechanism for the young, and when our biological family doesn't suit us we tend to create a family of our choice, out of friends, neighbours, or even the recent entity of social networks.

So I keep my definition of family relationships, if not family love - the inevitable, unchosen relationships. We can terminate them, but we don't choose them in the first place. Because there is also the love that's freely chosen, the one that usually happens between a couple. And I consider myself fortunate to have experienced that, to have once had someone who loved me just because of who I was and in spite of knowing me better than anyone else has before or since. And even if its loss caused me so much pain, I wouldn't trade those years for anything, unless for having being better than I was then, and I wish everybody can live through such an experience.

[sic], by Joshua Cody

Being a doctor, which makes me deal with chronic illness and death all too often, and having lost someone close after a battle with chronic illness, makes me interested in other people's experiences with disease and the prospect of death from illness. As a young and romantically naif adolescent, I used to think of these extreme experiences as enriching and "interesting", until I stumbled on a passage in Thomas Mann's wonderful Magic Mountain, where Setttembrini says to Hans Castorp there's nothing "romantic" or "spiritual" about illness, and then my own experience - quite extended by now - has always confirmed his wise words.

But of course illness and the prospect of imminent death are a kind of cathartics, catalysts, that bring out the best and the worst in us, as other extreme experiences / ordeals. And that's why I always find it fascinating to know how intelligent people live through it, and tell their experiences.

I first heard of [sic] through a review in The Guardian, it caught my attention and I ordered it from Amazon. It's a very good book. Joshua Cody is sometimes too wordy, expatiating too much on not that relevant cultural details, often bordering on pretentiousness, trying to put too much in his narrative; one sometimes feel there are lots of thing that could have been left out, that are unduly cluttering the story. But still it's a powerful and moving memoir, of someone who survived an extremely dire situation, and one can read that very excess of details as the need to express "everything", because he was on the verge of death and managed somehow to survive and tell the tale.

The writing is mostly very good, and he is very insightful and observant. And his frequent cultural asides à la Chatwin, even if somewhat overused, are a joy to read to a pretentious dilletante like myself. All in all, I liked it, and I leave a few excerpts that struck me the most. Anyway, the book speaks for itself.

What do I mean by "happiness"? I don't mean exultant, radiant, manic joy - although there's nothing wrong with that. And I knew I would have those moments again. If I made it out of all this alive, for example. That would be exciting, ecstatic even. What I had the sense I would miss, forever - and I think I may even have been right - are those sudden, uncued moments of inexplicable, profound, unexcited contentment.

The guilt of the ill - especially the guilt of those who have done nothing to help create their state - is a theme on which we've touched, and on which we're sure to touch again, but for now consider the interesting notion that if a person finds himself or herself in a situation for no reason, he or she will go to quite extraordinary lengths to create a reason. [...] I am not responsible for my illness, nor was I ever responsible; rape victims are not responsible for being raped; civilians whoa are captured and tortured by despots as a show of power are not responsible for being captured and tortured; we should have learned this by now.

The crystalline clarity of this morphine delusion proves, perhaps, the Nietzschean maxim that "some situations are so bad that to remain sane is insane".

And here this text was intended as a riposte to the literature of disease, so many of those books I read at the beginning of the whole thing and none of them any help, pure dreck, pale pastel book after book, each one the same, the three-act structure of (I) diagnosis, and (II) the discovery of how beautiful life actually is and how there's more to it than my hedge fund job ever told me it was and look at how lovely this flower is and this butterfly and this herbal tea, and (III) recovery and a book deal and getting a little place in Vermont maybe. If there are some who require disease to teach them such things then fine, but I am not, was not, one of those, thank you very much. I loved life and found beauty and sources of pleasure in things on the outside and on the inside, and illness was not an opportunity for existential awakenings, it was the very opposite of beauty or grace, it was a harrowing, a descensus: and then went down. The principle emotions were terror and above all rage.

So yes there is a rebirth and I'm not saying the whole thing was worth it, but of course, to be alive again, to at least not be probably dying in this present moment for two years, to have reacquired the resources of the senses and just the pleasures provided by perception, all of this regained: of course there is some sort of renewal.

The Torch in My Ear, by Elias Canetti

The second volume of Elias Canetti's autobiography, after The Tongue Set Free. I liked it very much, more than the first. The author writes extremely well, and we can understand his intellectual growth as a man and a writer. The depiction of the Vienna and Berlin of the 20s is excellent, seen through his keen sense of observation, and I find extremely interesting the way in which he describes the genesis of his book.

Pietá

She doesn’t look like a Mater Dolorosa, and certainly not like a Michelangelo Pietá. She’s a short and plump woman in her sixties, with a wart on her chin and a slight limp. And yet, every time I meet her at a coffee stall at the boat terminal, I see motherly love, and pain. She always greets me warmly, sends her regards to all the hospital staff, and shrugs with a short sentence, like “It’s been over a year already!” or “I remember him every day!”.

I first met her son, let’s call him Oscar, when he walked into my office with his fiancée, a twenty-something type 1 diabetic clerk, average looking, with the usual vascular and renal complications of his disease. In spite of good compliance with his therapy, his disease progressed rapidly and in a few months he was on dialysis. I only saw him again about 2 years later, when serious complications got him into the hospital ward. He looked much older then, and that’s when I met his mother. He had already lost his job and his fiancée. And from that time on, he embarked on an all too familiar downward spiral, that we see so many times, just not usually on such young people. He suffered infection after infection, gangrene, amputation, bowel ischemia… He spent weeks in the hospital, that turned into months. In spite of all the medication, surgery, etc, he got steadily worse. When I watched him by the time he was on parenteral nutrition, I was really impressed, he looked like an old man, or a victim of progeria. And he was a really kind and stoic patient through it all, it made us all in his care heartbroken to look at him. We knew he would die soon, and there was not much we could do to ease his suffering.

And through all those months, this little woman was there beside him. She became a familiar figure at the ward, we all knew her, and felt guilty for not being able to help her son more. There came a time when we were all – including her – wishing he would die quickly to put an end to his sufferings, but his body was young and he put a lot of a fight. Eventually, he died.

I know she has another son, a healthy man with children. But I know that Oscar was unique to her, and she couldn’t have been more supportive. We witnessed her suffering, and I still feel uneasy every time I meet her – couldn’t we have done more for Oscar? Probably not. He was one of those cases in which everything goes wrong. But I can’t help to admire his endurance, and his mother’s love and courage, through all his pains.

3 Poems

There are three poems that seem to define my moods through life, words that I hear in my head so often I know them by heart. The first, by Susan Coolidge, expresses what I feel in the morning, be it a real or a symbolic one, when I get up to face life again and again, the color of my incurable and returning optimism and endurance:

New Every Morning

Every day is a fresh beginning,
Listen my soul to the glad refrain.
And, spite of old sorrows
And older sinning,
Troubles forecasted
And possible pain,
Take heart with the day and begin again.

Then there is the moments of giving up, when I'm tired, exhausted, drained, and all I feel like is closing my eyes in the dark and fall into oblivion, forever. Then it's the second poem, the melancholic words by Christina Rossetti:

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

And then there is the in between, the poem that expresses my stupid self ever since I first read it at 15, and that is still as true now as then, so like me that I was amazed Fernando Pessoa should have described me so accurately (but later I understood that is the gift of truly great writers and poets):

Tudo que faço ou medito
Fica sempre na metade
Querendo, quero o infinito.
Fazendo, nada é verdade.

Que nojo de mim me fica
Ao olhar para o que faço!
Minha alma é lúdica e rica,
E eu sou um mar de sargaço —

Um mar onde bóiam lentos
Fragmentos de um mar de além...
Vontades ou pensamentos?
Não o sei e sei-o bem.

And then, there a 4th poem, one that I always associate to one person, to something I once had but seems now so far away that it looks like it was another life, or a dream, that I feel I'm not worthy to remember since I blew it so utterly and miserably. And yet... there was a time the words of Emily Dickinson evoke, sometimes painfully but always with a nostalgic sweetness that makes me think maybe I wasn't that worthless all the time:

Is it too late to touch you, Dear?
We this moment knew —
Love Marine and Love terrene —
Love celestial too —

Room, de Emma Donoghue

Uma boa surpresa - Room é um livro excelente, em que a autora consegue criar um narrador de 5 anos credível (mesmo que por vezes o vocabulário e a articulação das ideias pareça demasiado elaborado, apesar do uso de erros gramaticais propositados para aumentar a credibilidade). O Jack de Emma Donoghue não fica atrás de exemplos de outros narradores infantis ou mentalmente perturbados, como a criança com Asperger de Mark Haddon em O Estranho Caso do Cão Morto, o Benji de Faulkner em O Som e a Fúria ou a Antoinette de Jean Rhys em Vasto Mar de Sargaços. O contraste entre o tom infantil, simultaneament ingénuo e perspicaz, com o horror da situação na primeira parte, passada no quarto do título, e a crítica divertida ao mundo moderno da segunda parte, está extremamente bem conseguido e é a base do interesse do livro, que se lê sem parar; a parte da fuga é emocionante. Sem dúvida uma escritora a seguir.

The Discovery of Heaven, de Harry Mulisch

Este é o último livro de autores holandeses que comprei em Amesterdão. Nunca tinha ouvido falar de Harry Mulisch, que morrera dias antes, motivo pelo qual os seus livros estavam expostos por todo o lado; comprei este aconselhado pelo empregado da Waterstone's ("This is his masterpiece"), cujos conselhos aliás foram muito bons, pois gostei dos livros todos que me indicou.

The Discovery of Heaven é de facto muito bom, um tour-de-force em forma de fábula mitológica, ao longo do qual se abordam variados temas, desde a amizade, o acaso, a política, ciência, a 2ª Guerra, etc, etc. Muito bem escrito, repassado de espírito, humor e cultura, de leitura sempre agradável, embora a meu ver a primeira e a última parte sejam de longe as melhores e as intermédias demasiado prolongadas sem grande necessidade. A primeira parte, focada na amizade das duas personagens principais, é excelente, e a última, uma espécie de aventura arqueológica que deixa O Código Da Vinci num chinelo, lê-se de um fôlego. E a parte passada em Roma recordou-me tão vivamente esta cidade - o Panteão, o Campo di Fiori, o Castelo de Sant'Angelo, San Giovanni in Laterano - que fiquei cheio de vontade de voltar, o que espero fazer em Abril.