Salvador Dali

insulin coma

Broadcasting over the radio, to her,
Alone in a crowd, portraying the human
She used to have been, tranquil, emotionally
Adhered to supporting the War, reasoning
The walk in the dark, stepping on dried
Leaves crumpling inside her brain,
She takes a walk, for the earth is shaking,
And she wakes up in a shaking panic,
She can not feel,
Senses only pain, but acutely aware
Of her senses, twisting the objectivity
In the science of mental illness:
A function of the state, driven by affectations,
And rage,
She can feel her bubble poked,
The reason why she’s hiding from the
Piercing stingers, claws and beaks,
Seeking to devour her liver, Prometheus,
And the god’s singing in mercurial relevancy,
Pushing the boundaries, disguised and thrown
To the filthy green sea, where there are no birds,
Only aquatic sadness, and lonely dreams
To come, when she finds herself alone,
Listening to the radio talking directly to her,
Referential ideas, rockets of professional
Doubt, screaming across the maddening sky

each with a specific desire

The play with time was so uncanny…an alien time seemed to dawn.
--schizophrenic patient



Throughout the ward, patients, each with a specific desire, talked incessantly of freedom; some from the physical constraints of their captivity, some merely from the shackles of thought. Suffering, yes, of course, but madness itself is an escape, and if not a dismissal from their institutionalization, then at least the satirical fantasies of the morbid dream bends the world, shaking away the empty cobwebs so adherent to the passersby, worshiping their logic, denying the pain of understanding those hidden from the world inside box cars racing through tunnels, discovering that there is more to this existence than the pounding pressures of modernity.
These men and women speak in foreign tongues now, disguised in atypical methods of dissembling the puzzle pieces, breaking the picture, holding the gold; they wait, in verbose chatter while the nurse makes her rounds, delivering the chemicals to straighten them out, to put the world back in perspective, to see the falsehood transparency overlying the truth of insanity.
Psychosis, a dream in which they could not wake up, and feel the cycling of the sun piercing the sounds of lucidity, an insomnia of the soul. The plague of consciousness pulling downward on their brains, wanting so badly to reach out and place God in light of their suffering, but they simply laughed in hysteria at the distortions of their senses.

Paranoia

Together we swarm the bee hive,

Poised to sting, to puncture the

Thin skin of the collective consciousness,

Where all lies dormant, needing not

Pinning one’s blight upon the

Mosaic of veracity’s pompous virtue,

To befriend the loneliest shades of grey,

And fall into another gyre, twisting and

Rapidly firing neuron after lugubrious neuron,

Into the brain of the communal whole,

Catching insanity as if a bee keeper,

Selling us as if we were commodity,

Bartering for a beseeched request to leave,

Depart from the under-current, and live

Forever above the languidly rotating wheel,

All while the eye watches us, seeing

Emptiness of these times as though

It were a comedic affluence,

All and all, all for Them.

The Madhouse at Saragossa

Fransisco Goya "Corral De Locos"

psychosis is a puzzle

The fact of the psychosis is a puzzle to us. They are the unsolved problem of human life as such. The fact that they exist is a concern of everyone. That they are there and that the world and human life is such as to make them possible and inevitable not only gives us pause but makes us shudder.
----Karl Jaspers
General Psychopathology

ergot

Shimmering lights reflected

On a sheet of anguish, delight,

And emptiness distract the soul’s

Vision of a new tomorrow, one

Absorbed in hue of a warm red and gold

Sunset overlooking a placid stream of thought,

Only to be shattered once again by the annoyance

Of the cerebral vacuum held inside the candle’s

Spherical glow, attracting insects to feed on

The brain’s cavity, chewing on synaptic clefts as if

The strands of dendrites were leaves of grass,

Green with nutrients, only now, brittle and cold

As the dawn of the new era of modernity

Takes hold of the fear of nothingness: and the

Prismatic rays are now beams through a window

Of a vacant building, swarming with ghosts hidden

For all time behind the glass of a padded room.

Mental Asylum

Adolf Wolfi "Mental Asylum"

The growing consciousness is a danger and a disease
---Friedrich Nietzsche

Strewn Vertigo

Mary Capan

substance becomes spirit

Another night, another dream, waking up

Remains the hardest thing, remembering

The embraces felt by ghosts, of the past

Crushing memories, fading times awake,

Joyful and with insatiate affections

For the breathing earth, mortified by

The sordid longings of the present,

And mixed slowly with hindrances

Found in slowly discovering the

Sun’s beaming substance becoming spirit,

Creasing reality like felt to a pauper’s order

For a dying king, all alone in his room

Where his soul is left to commune

With its self alone, seen in lucid

Reminiscence of a dying dream.

Feline Fragmentation

Departure

Walking unfruitful distances between one

Corner of the human mind to the other,

To experience the wasted markings and the

Ill-fated trees pass by, remains empty travel,

For nothing is green inside those helpless minds,

Rolling along in mercurial vessels, past affections

To rid another of disease, to help another

Walk more freely down these sidewalks of our

Waking lives, only to find, we are colored silhouettes

Of a gentle past, one that used to hold passions and

Desires close, nearer, but now to reach this vantage point to which

We must travel, is so far away.

When the mind is left to commune with itself and no longer has come to terms with objects, it is in a sense reduced to imitating itself as object.
----Claude Levi-Strauss

Schizophrenic Patient

The poet disappears (this is absolutely the discovery of our time)
---Stephane Mallarme

Edvard Munch

Painting by schizophrenic patient:

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Pounding Hearts of Change

Walking through the mounds of morbidity, sifting through the dead elms,
Portrays not a lack of wealth, but a fruitful range of perceptions, as
The aching limbs and the dead bodies of modernism sway in the cold wind,
The meaning of hardship, of toil and pain, will radiate a fury of meaning,
A light upon its own; a gentle disease flowing through our veins, as the
Era closes and the morbid dreamer is awakened.

Pounding hearts anticipating the end, sweaty palms ready for the closure
Of time and space, carries not the signs of nervousness, but the open
Arms of welcome, for change is what we all should believe in.

A Race to Fall

The race of inveterate longings for habitual behavior,
Leaves questions along the sidewalk like dead leaves,
Ready, poised for the next foot step to slip and fall
To the ground, the filthy mud of the Earth; and when
All is said and done, the answers are high in the trees,
Unreachable by human hands, but the birds, singing
Freely, land and mingle upon the branches of lucidity,
A cloudless night, a vision of clarity, but now,
We feel nothing at all but the speeding to the finish line,
To cross, to fall down again, for the last time.

The Beaker and the Sun

Holding the beaker filled with humanity’s only hope: reason and logic
Portrays the sun in a different light, a hopeless radiance beaming rays
Upon the shifting sands below the vantage point high above the river’s
Banks, a cliff to climb, a mountain to conquer, but even though these
Challenges point to the only thing to be true: love, the logicality of
The ascension leaves nothing behind but the sparse role of dignity,
The histrionic show, the pantomime to be set free against the raging
Wind, and the experiment is under way, the beaker holds the chemicals
To maintain cerebral equilibrium—catch it if it falls from the table, hold it
Nearer to the flame, scorch the elixirs, stir the medicine, remember the
Times spent in seclusion, without watered lies, diluted ineptitudes of
A racy race, speeding along through the times, casting the net to catch
Us if we fall.

Death: Sister of Sleep

Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ages of desire for reaching the beyond capture a picturesque photograph of
Man’s longing for truth, his natural inquiry as to the reality of death,
Something uncertain for sure, but not out of reach, for the sister of sleep
Churns like butter beneath his bed sheets, waiting for the magical time
To pounce upon the living, breathing, knowing passions concealed
Now in a veil, hidden from Time’s great breakers, the oceanic landscape
Of mortality where the ships sail this way and that, away from the coming storm
Of loss, of mourning, of hopeless understanding, as a solipsism of existence
Where nothing but the black void swallowing the sardonic comedy of this life
Portrays the disease of vitality, ramblings of virtue, and the humor of defiance:
To stand forever on this Earth, only to wave the flag of surrender.