The Whisper of the Abyss
The Madness Beckons
Some years ago the legendary Rodney Dangerfield talked about the “heaviness” that greeted him every morning, sometimes accompanied by a “You’ll be drinking early today.” This little analogy has been on my mind a fair amount recently, in part because I’ve managed to lose about 10 pounds and the relief is palpable,1 but I also, of course, have my own happiness. Sometimes its the specter of depression, sometimes that addictive yearning I have dubbed “the hunger that would devour the world.” And sometimes, interestingly enough, it feels like nothing so much as a desire to give up sanity itself. The Abyss calmly extends its hand and makes an offer: “Give it up. Watch your mind burn and the world with it. F*ck all of it.”
The offer entails a nihilistic freedom, a volunteer descent - no, a dive - into Dionysian excess. No more restraint. No more caring. Just letting the waters of madness carry me under. And with it relief - no more existential dread, no more ennui, no more depression. An end to self-consciousness, an end to that painful, dreadful sense of self. No more fear of finitude and limitation. No more seemingly futile struggle for meaning and purpose. Deliverance from freedom and responsibility. Deliverance from navigating the razor’s edge between the misery of isolation and the seeming impossibility of true relationship.2
Of course, the offer is Mephistophelean. Psychosis may be a deliverance from the burdens of sanity, but its still psychosis in the end, meaning it is a rejection of reality, whether voluntary, involuntary, or some unseemly combination thereof. I am dreadfully afraid of not having control - whether over the economic, political, and cultural milieu in which I live; my own body (I have nightmares of being rendered unable to move or care for myself and becoming utterly dependent on others); or - worst of all - losing control of my own mind, my own grip on reality itself. What could possibly be worse?
The best answer to that comes from Laura Dern in Jurassic Park, when she snaps at Richard Attenborough (of blessed memory) “You never had control! THAT’s the illusion!” And so it is, all the way down. Of course, I have no control over the economic, political, and cultural milieu in which I live.3 I have relative bodily autonomy at the moment due to relative good health, but the dependence of a paralyzed person on others is an apotheosis of physical dependence (we are ALL dependent on other humans and our physical environment to live).
And so it is with the mind. As someone who has struggled on the road of recovery and practices zazen, I know all too well I have no control over my own mind. Obsessions and compulsions, unwanted thoughts and desires, arise unbidden from who knows where. Part of the reason I fear losing my mind is I have at times before. Not for extended periods, but I know what it is like to lose my grip on reality. That’s what addiction (which I think of as a more of a verb than a noun) ultimately amounts to. It simply is madness by another name.
Mental health has been much in the news recently, especially here in NY. While I’m hesitant to weigh in too strongly on the question facing our legislature this session (to extend involuntary commitment), my husband and I had a front row just prior to our move. Our then-neighbor has bipolar, and over the course of a few months stopped taking his medication and began drinking heavily. His decompensation and manic behaviors became harder to avoid - whether he was slamming doors and waking us up at 3 AM or the increasingly unhinged conversations. Eventually it culminated in him setting fireworks off at 3 AM (5 feet from our row of townhouses), followed by hurling watermelons and yelling racist expletives, and tearing his screen door and beating it a ball with a hammer.
Our neighbor was mental hygiene arrested, released too soon (shocking), and promptly re-mental hygiene arrested a few days later. During this second period of confinement we moved. I can’t stress enough that I hold no animosity toward him - his spiral had been precipitated by being attacked by a homeless man and witnessing a local mass shooting,4 and I overhead enough (we overhead a lot) to know that he drank to escape the nightmare in his head, something I can’t imagine. Still, we were sleeping with a baseball bat next to our bed at night, and I still sometimes find myself unable to sleep in the middle of the night.
Whether we were in danger or not is impossible to say - he didn’t have a known history of violence but then again his behaviors were increasingly threatening (he screamed threats at passing cars and one point circled the units holding a metal flagpole). The scariest part was how apparent it was that he was not in full possession of his faculties. I can’t say whether or not he was “himself” (cutesy Zen moment: do we even have a self?) but he was certainly not fully present in reality, and for that reason alone, all bets were off.
After this experience, I will confess, it is a struggle to maintain compassion for the mentally ill. In years past I dated someone who, though without a formal diagnosis, nailed the DSM criteria for BPD, and a friend from college has been suffering on and off from paranoia, likely induced by cannabis. Part of me desperately wants to throw up my hands and opt-out, to take the Abyss upon its offer of the ever-versatile “F*ck it” approach to life. The seething Republican in me would love to see folks like my neighbor bound in chains, while lithium is forced down their throats.5
Of course, these are feelings that I have - flares of the fear my cells haven’t let go of6 and the protective emotions my neurochemistry generates in response.7 This harshness is a grasping for control in one of its ugly manifestations - and the manifestations usually are ugly. To see the humanity of those who suffer from mental illness, to feel empathy, and the practice compassion by grappling with the seemingly intractable public policy problems of balancing public safety and civil rights, and addressing mental illness in the broader political/economic milieu in which we live, is far more difficult than letting out an outburst of anger and fantasizing about what I could do if only my compatriots had the wisdom to anoint me as Supreme Leader.
If I may be permitted a brief excursus, I have become increasingly fed-up with today’s trends of seeing mental illness as nothing more than a cute personality trait, delightful and utterly harmless quirks that masquerade as identities.8 Real mental illness can be frightening as hell. I’m also exasperated by the circumlocutions and pontifications of those who point out that the boundaries between mental health and mental illness are fuzzy, and perhaps the standards we draw are no more than power dynamics. Granting that Foucault undoubtedly had a point, recognizing genuine mental illness really isn’t as hard as the obfuscators would have us think. Sometimes “I know it when I see it" suffices.9 In any case, social constructionism should contribute to this conversation, not end it.10
I’m also deeply uneasy by those who suggest that perhaps the insane are really the sane ones, for they have seen the “truth” of how things are. In an an insane world, would not the sane seem to be the crazy ones? Notwithstanding that there is some logic to that, it should be a red flag when someone retreats to this defense. In the words of the comedian Jim Jefferies, the problem with crazy people is they won’t know what’s crazy - that’s what makes them crazy.11
Nor does invoking spirituality offer an out. True, many contemplative practices - and the spiritual use of some substances - can cause peak experiences that break down the doors of perception. Still, in Sufi terms, one must come down return from drunk ecstasy to sobriety, the mountaintop is a place to visit but not to live. And across traditions, we hear warnings about the dangers of pushing perception beyond its normal limits - a particular danger with entheogens. I can’t help but note that while some schools Zen certainly see value in breakthrough experiences they aren’t usually front and central.12 Zen is not a matter of esoteric knowledge or spiritual rapture, it is a means of seeing the beautiful in this world, emptiness as form and form as emptiness.
True spirituality has a bite to it. The spirituality of recovery, whether in its Twelve Step, SMART, or Buddhist forms, requires the conscious acceptance of pain as a necessary condition of recovery (“raw dogging reality” as the kids say). I’m currently working my way through Chögyam Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, and while I know Trungpa was a troubled figure, his writings positively exude wisdom on this front. The hunger for escape, for Dionysian spiritual rushes, is not genuine spirituality.
There is, of course, a sense in which madness is almost ubiquitous in our time, even approaching normalcy. A commentator on my last post wrote of
the very open and obvious efforts of our algorithmic corporate media machines hell-bent on addicting every human being to their own emotional intoxication in order to sap every ounce of the personal vitality necessary to actually take personal responsibility for one's own being.
And this is all in the name of the insane economic growth on steroids of our neoliberal economic system. It's pretty tough to break free from this as the dismal rates of recovery from substance and process addictions show. As you point out, our modern world is a wonder of progress and should be appreciated. But the twisted nature of the attention economy cannot be overlooked.
Then again, it's the recovering addict who is presented with the strange opportunity to make her way through the nihilistic despair of addiction toward some sense of spiritual awakening and personal construction of meaning that is necessary to live on after being gripped by such a demon as addiction.
Perhaps we are exactly where we need to be. Sometimes it's darkest before the dawn.
In one sense to say we are “all addicts” or “all mentally ill” is to say nothing, and in another sense, they are so profoundly true it hurts. This is in part because health and illness are not hermetically sealed compartments, like yin and yang they exist within each other, and are together enmeshed in our society. Continuum vs. discrete natural kinds and all that. But more: the same paradox lives in my own internal dance between terror at losing my mind in some moments and the temptation to do so at others. It is to look at the face of a neighbor in the midst of a psychotic break and along with the terror still manage to see myself staring back.
I’ve written before and will reiterate that it feels like the world has gone made, that Jung was more than a little prescient when he wrote about mass psychosis.13 It is tempting to see oneself as the sole bastion of sanity - I do, frequently. Or to find it in a guru, an ideology, a conspiracy theory, a cult, literally anywhere. In that spirit, and in the theme of this post, I offer in closing the wise words of Dante, only slightly taken out of their original context, as a reminder that there is a wiser approach:
If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.
Nothing messes up my sense of proprioception like excess weight.
You may notice that this is a reference to the four existential givens in Irv Yalom’s legendary Existential Psychotherapy.
I contribute to it, of course, but what I’m calling out here is the delusionary thinking aptly captured by image the below:
Probably not selling you on our hometown.
The “Republican” bit is a cheap shot, since it was actually Carter (of blessed memory) who began the deinstitutionalization train.
Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score has received much deserve criticism for the author’s tendency to push claims far beyond the bounds of what science supports, but in a broad sense he seems to be right that the body “remembers” things the conscious mind doesn’t.
While I don’t subscribe to the view that that human psychological health entails using reason to “subdue” or “reign in” our emotions, reason certainly has a role to play in ‘pruning’ our emotional experience.
Hat tip to Justice Potter Stewart - I couldn’t function without this phrase. If you insist on examples, I think hearing voices and throwing one’s own feces are pretty clear indications something has gone very wrong somewhere.
For some philosophically literate and valuable reflections on psychiatry I recommend the following Substacks (listed in no particular order): The Frontier Psychiatrists, Psychiatry at the Margins, Rational Psychiatry, and The Psychiatry Letter.
The technical term for this is anosognosia.
The qualifier is that while practitioners in Rinzai Zen and other teachers, such as Philip Kapleau, place a premium on sudden awakening and powerful experiences of kensho and satori, Soto Zen hardly places any emphasis on them at all.
The linked article aligns with my sense that our present mass psychosis is most clearly embodied in those who are practically taking a bath in conspiracy theories. Here too some mercy is called for - as I wrote previously, we are pattern seeking animals and our need to find meaning, in the sense of agential intent, in the world is practically neurologically hardwired into us. Still, as John Gray put it, to surrender to this particular instinct leaves us “locked in a paranoid universe and possessed by demons.” C.f. The Wise Wolf of Wall Street.