We are the psycho-ceramics;
the cracked pots of mankind.
"You use this tabloid-sounding term far too often as a lazy, rhetorical dismissal of people you don't sympathise with and whose views you frequently fail to understand. And, ultimately, isn't everyone's pot a bit damaged in some manner?"
To be fair, he might have a point; maybe I do use this term too often and maybe we do all have idiosyncrasies and mental health issues to deal with.
However, I borrowed the word crackpot from an Adam Ant song rather than the popular press, and I like to think it functions within my text as a specific critical and clinical term to refer to individuals who have an abnormal understanding of what constitutes factual evidence and thus enter into anomalous and sometimes sinister relationships with reality and what is generally accepted as the truth (e.g. the earth is a spherical object that orbits the sun).
Such individuals - often known as cranks as well as crackpots - are invariably people of faith; that is to say, they hold firm and fixed beliefs rather than ideas that are open to interrogation, thus rendering rational discourse impossible. Once they make their minds up on any given subject they cannot be persuaded otherwise. Thus the crazy often resemble broken records as well as cracked pots; endlessly repeating the same thing over and over, forever stuck in a groove.
In 1992, American mathematical physicist John Baez came up with an amusing checklist, known as the Crackpot Index, that was designed to help identify cranky individuals and the way their minds (mal)function and I would encourage readers to check it out by clicking here.
Baez, like others who are interested in this condition, demonstrates that all crackpots share certain traits, characteristics, and obsessions. Perhaps the key feature is overestimating their own knowledge and ability, whilst underestimating (or dismissing entirely) that of leading experts.
Prone to paranoia as well as megalomania, crackpots also invariably subscribe to conspiracy theories and claim that their unorthodox views and revolutionary discoveries are being suppressed by mainstream science, big business, the government - or sometimes all three under the control of alien overlords. Or the Jews.
And so, whilst I'm grateful to my friend for taking time to write, I think he should allow me my continued usage of the term crackpot and, further, I would suggest he investigates the work of Josiah S. Carberry, the leading authority in the field of psychoceramics.
For whilst I agree that it's pleasant and proper to be foolish once in a while, insanity marks a loss of conscious integrity and the point at which creativity terminates. And so, whilst a work of art or theory can reveal the presence of unreason, there are, technically, no mad scientists or mad poets.
Note: the image above is of Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (dir. Miloš Forman, 1975); a film based on a novel of the same title by Ken Kesey (1962). The paraphrased line is from Pt. III, Ch. 2.
ReplyDelete'People lie people hurt, like to read their Sunday dirt/
So every Jekyll needs a Hyde to blame the business on/
Crackpot history and the right to lie'
(Adam Ant,'Crackpot History and the Right To Lie')
The irony in this context, of course, is that Adam's own struggles with mental health problems are well-documented - once waving a fake pistol, if memory serves, in a Kentish Town pub, which led to a quick abduction under the guardianship of state psychocops to his local A & E. The above lyric, if anything, seems to affirm the cultural-historical value of such a 'crackpot' counter-history. The 'right to lie', of course, is inseparable from the product of making art, but just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
Thank the gods for those poets, artists, visionaries and creatives with an 'abnormal' view of history - which is, very arguably, precisely the force that moves it and us. (As Geroge Bernard Shaw put it, 'The reasonable man adapts himself to history; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.') And as for the cult of facticity - fairly obviously, one man's meat is another man's poison! (There's nothing more tedious and self-serving than those 'down to earth' individuals who are constantly urging 'let's face facts'.)
It's arch-rationalists/scientists like Dawkins, Hitchens and others who are, I'd argue, as much a problem as Islamic fundamentalists - indeed, they're essentially fundamentalists/literalists (of 'ratio' or scientific reason) in secular reverse, records as broken as any others in their cult of science and joyless, superior and chauvinsitic crusades against irrationality, mysticism and spiritual experience. As James Hillman's crucial work attests, 'psychopatholgy' (lit. the language of the suffering soul) constitutes much more the shape of how we'speak' in the deepest and most naked chambers of the human. If anyone doubts this, go and see a Beckett play, and come away convinced!
The essential thing about crackpots (in the best eccentric sense of the term), is, like Blake and Copernicus, like Lovelock and van Gogh, like Trakl and Nietzsche, they're all individuals, resisting and resetting the culture in the name of posthumously recognised vision. Much as I might worry about his own self-criticality, I'd rather listen to David Icke than Richard Dawkins, or at least not suffer Dawkins at the expense of Icke. In Jungian terms, they balance each other.
There's no essential reason, either, why insanity should mark the end or limit condition of art - as the case of Artaud, for one, thrillingly and dangerously illustrates.
As R D Laing recognised, it's mostly society - or 'reality' - that makes us mad. Those who 'adapt' to it are the ones we should worry about most.
I don't think Adam is affirming the value of an alternative cultural history, or defending his right to lie as an artist; alas, you do him too much credit I fear. Rather, he sees himself as the victim of public misperception and tabloid dishonesty. It's journalists who feel they have the right to lie and make up false stories. He is the one who speaks the truth.
DeleteAs a Situationist, I don't regard a demand for the impossible as unreasonable. But I don't like those who think the entire world should conform to their private fantasies.