The importance of being Insane

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;

I lift my lids and all is born again.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

(Sylvia Plath)

It's all in our head. The world arises and so does collapses and again araises. Pleasure is mental phenomenon as much as ideals, ethics, lust, love and purpose. Even physical pain is a mental phenomenon partly. If everything's within than any curious mind would ask why people are in rat race for attainments of outside world. Are they mad or Am I? One of the most troubling questions that again & again have come across me are: What's sanity? When does a person turn insane? Do people "turn" insane or the society percieves or classifies certain people as insane? And many such. Normally, I always brush these questions neatly under the carpet lest I should be accused of turning insane, of being "abnormal", of not being normal person in a normal society. But sometimes the judge sitting in corner of your skull seems to override the considerations of self professed judges outside keen on deciding who's normal and who's not.

To begin with the Oxford Dictionary meaning of Insane has been given as ​"(formal or old-fashioned) seriously mentally ill and unable to live in normal society". Whereas the first clause of this line deals with a medical condition that can be safely said to based on some objective criteria like presence of pschycological disorders, absence of nervous aids resulting from unfortunate accident of birth or other later impairments. Though, what catches my eye is  the second part "unable to live in normal Society". The "State of Normality" has been so taken for granted that people forget how abstract and vague term it is, and how a person's perceptions let alone his social conditioning shapes his idea of what constitutes being normal. On a cursory glance we may tend to dismiss it as reading to much into a casual line. But the more we dwell upon it the more it dawns how much hazy is the boundary between Normal & Abnormal, Reality & Illusion and ofcourse Sanity and Insanity. One dose of prejudice, one push of socially inherited notions, one twitch of internal chemistry is enough to push one person to another side of border or even worse a group of people to castigate one as "of being not normal" hence insane.

Here, I take liberty to quote George Orwell at length, 

"Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong."

But despite his chilling brilliance and clarity, Orwell proceeds to give a circular arguement that,

"There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

But what if in a Post-Truth world, the very objectivity of truth is called into question and the basic facts, the solid road of our thought process suddenly starts feeling wobbly. What if truth is being dictated, consciously altered, or what is considered truth is not infact truth at all. And if there's a society divided on two mutually opposite versions of truth, doesn't it raises a important hypothesis that isn't truth at end nothing but a fiction of conviction? Since ages it has been belived the worst punishment that can be given to heretic, a non conformist is not burning him at stake but to socially ostracise him, to declare him unfit to live in a sane and civilized society, hence to be declared mad. Celebration of uniqueness is something that's as new and as unbelievable as quantum physics. Even today every human being, no matter how progressive or liberal he may claim himself deep down harbours a suspicion of other point of view. And this mute suspicion of a liberal in case of fanatic turns into zeal of terming the unique "mad" or "gripped with disease". If you don't belive, face the fact that for a good long period of time and even now people have believed and continually belive homosexuality is a diaease and unnatural. The idea of sanity cannot be allowed to be held hostage by social bullies, insecure of their own scars and complexes banding togethers to punch the weak or the freak or the queer who doesn't fit to their concieved social norm which in turn is nothing but an exercise in satisfaction of collective ego.

Michael Focualt in his ground breaking work, Madness and Civilization has noted that -

"...madness is the false punishment of a false solution, but by its own virtue it brings to light the real problem, which can then be truly resolved."

At a time when we all are aware of issues of mental health, one thing that needs to be talked about it is how our perceptions of outer world and of our own identity and our sense of association with fellow mates deeply effects and impacts our idea of sanity, our own sense of being sane. As an individual, we forge our own identities sub consciously in association with things or people close to us. Each person attatches a certain degree of belongingness to people close to them, and the process through which a person becomes close or interactions among them, in turn nurture their personality. And when this person discovers that whom he made the rock bottom of his own identity slipping away suddenly or gradually, he stares into utter blackness. That's the beginning of identity crisis. The more rooted a person in another, the more emotionally attached, the more disoriented he becomes, the world starts swiveling around his head without making sense.

And here's when he's firmly need to be held and said, it's all in your head.

"I fancied you'd return the way you said,

But I grow old and I forget your name.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

(Mad girl's love song, Sylvia Plath)

- Bhuvan Krishna

   06.07.2021