Appendix VI
Many schizophrenics pass most of their time neither on earth, nor in heaven, nor even in hell, but in a grey, shadowy world of phantoms and unrealities. What is true of these psychotics is true, to a lesser extent, of certain neurotics afflicted by a milder form of mental illness. Recently it has been found possible to induce this state of ghostly existence by administering a small quantity of one of the derivatives of adrenalin. For the living, the doors of heaven, hell and limbo are opened, not by ‘massy keys of metals twain,’ but by the presence in the blood of one set of chemical compounds and the absence of another set.
The shadow-world inhabited by some schizophrenics and neurotics closely resembles the world of the dead, as described in some of the earlier religious traditions. Like the wraiths in Sheol and in Homer’s Hades, these mentally disturbed persons have lost touch with matter, language and their fellow beings. They have no purchase on life and are condemned to ineffectiveness, solitude and a silence broken only by the senseless squeak and gibber of ghosts.
The history of eschatological ideas marks a genuine progress—a progress which can be described in theological terms as the passage from Hades to Heaven, in chemical terms as the substitution of mescalin and lysergic acid for adrenolutin, and in psychological terms as the advance from catatonia and feelings of unreality to a sense of heightened reality in vision and, finally, in mystical experience.
Appendix VII
Géricault was a negative visionary; for though his art was almost obsessively true to nature, it was true to a nature that had been magically transfigured, in his perceiving and rendering of it, for the worse. ‘I start to paint a woman,’ he once said, ‘but it always ends up as a lion.’ More often, indeed, it ended up as something a good deal less amiable than a lion—as a corpse, for example, or as a demon. His masterpiece, the prodigious ‘Raft of the Medusa,’ was painted not from life but from dissolution and decay—from bits of cadavers supplied by medical students, from the emaciated torso and jaundiced face of a friend who was suffering from a disease of the liver. Even the waves on which the raft is floating, even the overarching sky are corpse-coloured. It is as though the entire universe had become a dissecting room.
And then there are his demonic pictures. ‘The Derby,’ it is obvious, is being run in hell, against a background fairly blazing with darkness visible. ‘The Horse startled by Lightning,’ in the National Gallery, is the revelation, in a single frozen instant, of the strangeness, the sinister and even infernal otherness that hides in familiar things. In the Metropolitan Museum there is a portrait of a child. And what a child! In his luridly brilliant jacket the little darling is what Baudelaire liked to call ‘a budding Satan,’ un Satan en herbe. And the study of a naked man, also in the Metropolitan, is none other than the budding Satan grown up.
From the accounts which his friends have left of him it is evident that Géricault habitually saw the world about him as a succession of visionary apocalypses. The prancing horse of his early Officier de Chasseurs was seen one morning, on the road to Saint-Cloud, in a dusty glare of summer sunshine, rearing and plunging between the shafts of an omnibus. The personages in the ‘Raft of the Medusa’ were painted in finished detail, one by one, on the virgin canvas. There was no outline drawing of the whole composition, no gradual building up of an over-all harmony of tones and hues. Each particular revelation—of a body in decay, of a sick man in the ghastly extremity of hepatitis—was fully rendered as it was seen and artistically realized. By a miracle of genius, every successive apocalypse was made to fit, prophetically, into a harmonious composition which existed, when the first of the appalling visions was transferred to canvas, only in the artist’s imagination.
Appendix VIII
In Sartor Resartus Carlyle has left what (in Mr Carlyle, my Patient) his psycho-somatic biographer, Dr James Halliday, calls ‘an amazing description of a psychotic state of mind, largely depressive, but partly schizophrenic.’
‘The men and women around me,’ writes Carlyle, ‘even speaking with me, were but Figures; I had practically forgotten that they were alive, that they were not merely automata. Friendship was but an incredible tradition. In the midst of their crowded streets and assemblages I walked solitary; and (except that it was my own heart, not another’s, that I kept devouring) savage also as the tiger in the jungle. . . . To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead immeasurable steam-engine, rolling on in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. . . . Having no hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it of Man or of Devil.
And yet, strangely enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear, tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what; it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath, would hurt me; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but the boundless jaws of a devouring Monster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured.’ Renée and the idolater of heroes are evidently describing the same experience. Infinity is apprehended by both, but in the form of ‘the System,’ the ‘immeasurable Steam-Engine.’ To both, again, all is significant, but negatively significant, so that every event is utterly pointless, every object intensely unreal, every self-styled human being a clockwork dummy, grotesquely going through the motions of work and play, of loving, hating, thinking, of being eloquent, heroic, saintly, what you will—the robots are nothing if not versatile.
The end.
