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.