photo
text
new
home
cul-de-sac
They create a machine for vanishing
in the little room he tries to keep tidy
on the side of the house that doesn’t face the morning,
and so his speech grows quiet.
“No one” he says
but the rest is muffled
“no one”—
while outside there is so much city noise,
and by the way what are these distant engines thundering overhead,
are spy-planes flying sorties in a war?
Their monotone holds too long
doesn’t just die out
it’s a passage in the phase of what was hidden becoming visible
it’s a signal,
and it’s no use asking when it started,
was it always emerging?
The task is to recognise the violence in the air.
Back inside, silence is coming
and I wish I knew whether the timeline truly was theirs to control
or if instead it carried on
against their will,
but more than anything I hope that in the silence
someone was waiting
maybe it has to be said by somebody else or it has to be said in a way that can’t be heard or understood
Something can happen to a person, and maybe it happens a lot, and maybe it happens in ways that aren’t at all obvious — something can happen where a person gets cut off and they can’t communicate or they can’t be communicated with at a certain kind of level, and it would be an act of great importance, great moral and spiritual significance, to be able to cross that barrier,
not simply to stand on the other side of this cut-offness,
but I’m not even saying it’s possible.
It can’t happen in real time, in real life, in the actual encounter between two people because if it could there wouldn’t be such a thing as loneliness. For loneliness to exist, of the kind I’m talking about, it must be impossible to be communicated like that.
It’s about finding or stumbling upon mysterious articulations on behalf of someone else, in some unreal space and time. Perhaps in such a way one person can remember and make sense of the unsayable loneliness and sadness of someone else.
And it’s too late
but still it’s something.
...this beautiful sunset, or I don’t know what it is, not even sunset
this darkening outside the windows
in the little room he tries to keep tidy
on the side of the house that doesn’t face the morning,
and so his speech grows quiet.
“No one” he says
but the rest is muffled
“no one”—
while outside there is so much city noise,
and by the way what are these distant engines thundering overhead,
are spy-planes flying sorties in a war?
Their monotone holds too long
doesn’t just die out
it’s a passage in the phase of what was hidden becoming visible
it’s a signal,
and it’s no use asking when it started,
was it always emerging?
The task is to recognise the violence in the air.
Back inside, silence is coming
and I wish I knew whether the timeline truly was theirs to control
or if instead it carried on
against their will,
but more than anything I hope that in the silence
someone was waiting
SOMETHING
Letting loneliness speak doesn’t just come like someone speaking something in an ordinary waymaybe it has to be said by somebody else or it has to be said in a way that can’t be heard or understood
Something can happen to a person, and maybe it happens a lot, and maybe it happens in ways that aren’t at all obvious — something can happen where a person gets cut off and they can’t communicate or they can’t be communicated with at a certain kind of level, and it would be an act of great importance, great moral and spiritual significance, to be able to cross that barrier,
not simply to stand on the other side of this cut-offness,
but I’m not even saying it’s possible.
It can’t happen in real time, in real life, in the actual encounter between two people because if it could there wouldn’t be such a thing as loneliness. For loneliness to exist, of the kind I’m talking about, it must be impossible to be communicated like that.
It’s about finding or stumbling upon mysterious articulations on behalf of someone else, in some unreal space and time. Perhaps in such a way one person can remember and make sense of the unsayable loneliness and sadness of someone else.
And it’s too late
but still it’s something.
...this beautiful sunset, or I don’t know what it is, not even sunset
this darkening outside the windows
ASYLUM POLITICS
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest depicts the act of escape as paradoxical and even a mystery. The rowdy Randle McMurphy is in truth only half-hearted about running away. The hospital irritates and fascinates him equally: for all his defiance, he is more ensnared by the institution than at first appears. He is captivated. And this is the iron law of asylum politics: the environment is always more powerful than it seems. It calls the tune. The seeming Pied Piper and Lord of Misrule isn’t so much a liberator as a puppet in a perverse institutional drama of brinkmanship and collusion. Chief Bromden (the novel’s narrator) alone perceives that McMurphy is the least autonomous of all the patients, a follower used by the group not its leader: We couldn’t stop him because we were the ones making him do it. It wasn’t the nurse that was forcing him, it was our need that was making him push himself slowly up from sitting, his big hands driving down on the leather chair arms, pushing him up, rising and standing like one of those moving-picture zombies, obeying orders beamed at him from forty masters. It was us that had been making him go on for weeks, keeping him standing long after his feet and legs had given out, weeks of making him wink and grin and laugh and go on with his act long after his humor had been parched dry between two electrodes.*
The ward is a performance space, theatre of projection and gladiatorial arena. McMurphy’s combat with Nurse Ratched is a lethal game of provocation and retaliation which shows the assembled spectators that full-scale revolt isn’t worth the trouble. In effect McMurphy is not a threat to the hospital regime: he serves rather to steady the system by bringing its iron law to light. His sacrificial fate unmasks the violence of asylum power sufficiently to convince everyone to stay within the limits of safe disobedience.
Everyone, that is, except Chief. Considered a hopeless, mindless case, he is the only one who eventually breaks the institutional grip. In the novel, he is also unusually sensitive to oppression of an overwhelming kind. When he was a boy he watched crooked businessmen cheat his tribe. Ever since then he has built upon the faith foundation of his ancestral traditions an esoteric theory of the world, incorporating what psychiatric jargon labels ideas of reference, which makes him both cautious and insightful. He believes that the hospital is just one branch of a mysterious conglomerate: “it’s not just the Big Nurse by herself, but it’s the whole Combine, the nation-wide Combine that’s the really big force, and the nurse is just a high-ranking official for them.”** The character of Chief suggests that contained in “mental illness” — even in the alarming, alien subjectivity termed schizophrenia — is the potential for true resistance wherever the background iron law applies.
A deep spiritual strength lies under Chief’s muscular strength and it is the combination which enables him to get out. Throwing the supposedly unliftable tub-room control panel through the ward’s reinforced window is only the fruition of his escape, not its entire expression. Without the years of waiting and silence which he calls being cagey, his pronounced and humble feeling of his own smallness, his love for McMurphy and understanding that his friend’s downfall has ended any hope of companionship in resistance, his capacity ultimately to act without succumbing to the groupthink of masochistic ambivalence — to act in earnest, in full noncooperation with institutional power — without all of these elements and more, Chief’s getaway would have been impossible. It might be said that it took him his whole life and all his strange thinking to be able to do what he did when the time came. And it is only by understanding how much else went into Chief’s flight apart from muscular strength that any real lesson can be learned from Ken Kesey’s great novel about what resistance and escape might mean in a world where the architecture of capture is no longer clearly visible.
Everyone, that is, except Chief. Considered a hopeless, mindless case, he is the only one who eventually breaks the institutional grip. In the novel, he is also unusually sensitive to oppression of an overwhelming kind. When he was a boy he watched crooked businessmen cheat his tribe. Ever since then he has built upon the faith foundation of his ancestral traditions an esoteric theory of the world, incorporating what psychiatric jargon labels ideas of reference, which makes him both cautious and insightful. He believes that the hospital is just one branch of a mysterious conglomerate: “it’s not just the Big Nurse by herself, but it’s the whole Combine, the nation-wide Combine that’s the really big force, and the nurse is just a high-ranking official for them.”** The character of Chief suggests that contained in “mental illness” — even in the alarming, alien subjectivity termed schizophrenia — is the potential for true resistance wherever the background iron law applies.
A deep spiritual strength lies under Chief’s muscular strength and it is the combination which enables him to get out. Throwing the supposedly unliftable tub-room control panel through the ward’s reinforced window is only the fruition of his escape, not its entire expression. Without the years of waiting and silence which he calls being cagey, his pronounced and humble feeling of his own smallness, his love for McMurphy and understanding that his friend’s downfall has ended any hope of companionship in resistance, his capacity ultimately to act without succumbing to the groupthink of masochistic ambivalence — to act in earnest, in full noncooperation with institutional power — without all of these elements and more, Chief’s getaway would have been impossible. It might be said that it took him his whole life and all his strange thinking to be able to do what he did when the time came. And it is only by understanding how much else went into Chief’s flight apart from muscular strength that any real lesson can be learned from Ken Kesey’s great novel about what resistance and escape might mean in a world where the architecture of capture is no longer clearly visible.
* Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962; London: Penguin Classics, 2005), pp. 274–5.
** Ibid., p. 164.