PART 3: THE BLESSINGS OF MADNESS

If science ever finds the gene or gene combination that predisposes an individual to develop schizophrenia, it should pause and consider the consequences before it removes those genes from our gene pool. First of all, such genes do not automatically mean schizophrenia. One identical twin sometimes will be schizophrenic with the same genetic makeup as his brother, who does not have the disease. But his twin will have a much higher statistical likelihood of developing schizophrenia than the general population, so genes are thought to be involved. The question, then, is what other psychological phenomena can those genes bring about? What would it mean for us if we eliminated them? I believe the answer is that these genes are involved not only in schizophrenia, but in many things our culture highly values.

I hope I have shown that becoming subject to delusions is not merely a result of not having the capacity for logical analysis or "stupidity". In fact, very high intelligence and paranoid schizophrenia often go hand-in-hand: a high level of intelligence alone does not seem to make one immune to falling under the sway of delusions and paranoia.

There are many cases of creative geniuses and important intellectual figures who were closely related to schizophrenics: Einstein’s son was schizophrenic; Jean-Michel Basquiat’s mother was schizophrenic; James Joyce’s daughter was schizophrenic. There are many more examples such as these. Anyone who looks into the matter will find a definite connection between people of eminence in the artistic and intellectual communities and a family history of mental illness, usually either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. This, of course, is a generalization that applies to many cases, but the idea is not comprehensive of all people of eminence or all fields of distinction.

Few eminent people themselves have been schizophrenic; it’s usually a parent, sibling, or son or daughter that has the disease. Schizophrenia is a very disabling disorder that makes actual accomplishment extremely difficult, but the genes that cause it, if only some are present or if they do not lead to schizophrenia, seem to be related to traits our culture admires.

Given my previous analysis of what goes on in the schizophrenic mind, how the schizophrenic’s sense of the meaning of things and the world become different from society’s, we can see that this is a creative process that involves cognitive ability. If the schizophrenic’s delusions are very complex and involved, the schizophrenic has thought them out, come up with a completely new "theory" as it were, to explain everything he experiences. These theories are often radically different from what would even occur to a "normal" person, drawing on experiences that would not be noticed and connected together in a "normal" mind.

Often, in the world of science, when there is a particular scientific puzzle, data that needs explanation, a radically different way of looking at things is discovered, drawing on an imaginative analysis that few people would even think to consider. Einstein realized that speed is only the distance crossed by an object during a given time. Since light, coming off the front of an object moving forward, reaches its destination just as quickly as it does when coming off the front of an object moving backward, this is a puzzle. So he modified the concepts of space and time to account for this. Such a reworking of the cultural meaning of "space" and "time" that he conceived, such a shift in the meaning of the concepts and how he had been socialized to think of them, was essentially a schizophrenic move. And the new meaning to the terms "space" and "time" he created came from his own imagination and creativity. The schizophrenic has an altered sense of meaning in many of our socialized concepts, to the degree that his world, though internally consistent, is completely different from that of the society at large. The schizophrenic also replaces socialized meaning with creative new meaning, but does so involuntarily, not in analysis of a problem that no one knows the answer to, but in the meaning of his everyday experiences. But if it weren’t for schizophrenic genes, which many more people have than actually have schizophrenia, we may never be able to "think outside the box", and question all the things our culture takes for granted, all the meaning it has assigned to different concepts. We may never be able to make that "schizophrenic shift in meaning" that characterizes so many of our intellectual advancements. It is a famous quote of Einstein that "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Of course, we ought not to believe this is true merely because of its authority. But it sheds light on Einstein’s own work: he came up with his theories partly due to "imagination", which could be seen as the process of infusing concepts, which we all take for granted to mean what they do within our society, with a creative new meaning, thus creating a revolutionary worldview. The schizophrenic is not the only one capable of this. His mind merely does it to such a degree that it is involuntary and becomes a disorder that impairs his ability to live normally and happily. Schizophrenia, in these terms, is a disorder of imagination.

Creativity, especially creativity that we think of as advancing the arts, brings in nothing absolutely new. It is a progression of tradition that draws on, and alters, that tradition. No one can advance the arts by writing, painting, or sculpting something "in a vacuum", that is, without taking into the mind what will be later expressed by the mind in altered form, according to the psychology of the artist.

There is a type of art that receives praise in the New York art world called "outsider art" that is outsider art merely by virtue of being done by those who have no consciousness of tradition. But if art is only our expression of the world we live in, knowledge of tradition—the expression of the worlds of past generations—is not necessarily needed to express our own. In fact, "outsider art" can often help us break old modes, if our tradition becomes muddled in going over the same forms and styles again and again. At certain times in history, the literary and visual art worlds have become so focused on the expressions of the world by past generations, that accurate expressions of our own are not appreciated, because they are seen through the terms and values of past masters. But it still remains true that consciousness of a variety of means of expression, if applied to our own worlds, can help us get out what we need to express, without running into the problems and difficulties that history, if we are conscious of it, has already solved. As we shall see, the schizophrenic mindset, when given the input of different creative styles, forms, and artistic concepts, is especially suited to drawing connections in them, combining them in novel ways, and coming up with something new and creative.

A novel (unless we are talking about Finnegans Wake) has no words in it that are not already in the dictionary, and a million other books. If a novel is "creative art", all we can say, really, is that it is a creative combination of words, not that the words themselves are new or creative. Of course, the novelist does not sit and try to come up with "a creative combination of words" in precisely those terms, but makes moves with concepts, images, stories, characters, and other things in the mind, and words become the fundamental means to communicate these. But if we view an innovative novel at its most fundamental nature, it is merely an innovative combination of words. The lesson this illustrates is that the novelist does not "create" out of nothing, but will take in the world, with all its ideas, all his experiences, all the styles of past literature, and spit it back out in a new combination. This new combination will have his personal "stamp" on it, which is an expression of the self and psychology that arises out of the world partly as a reflection of that world, and partly as its own agency that interacts with the world in a two-way dialogue. The more diverse and distant the ideas that are brought together in a new combination, and connected in a way that people hadn’t thought to connect them before, the more creative the work is thought to be.

In 2001, I wrote two novels that were not based completely on past literature. I wrote trying to have as little cognitive connection from one sentence to the next, so that the reader would not get any clear concepts out of it, and so that the entire work would appear "random". This sounds like difficult reading, but it is much more difficult to write than to read. What had I experienced that this was an expression of? Many things, but the main inspiration for the form was the paintings of Jackson Pollock. I have a little art book called The 20^th Century Artbook, which contains pictures, and short analyses, of the art of most of the major visual artists of the 20^th century. It describes his work as follows:

Great arcs of paint cover the canvas, apparently at random, to produce an intense and energetic abstract plane. Found objects—cigarettes, nails and buttons—lie purposefully embedded in the richly textured surface. . . .

What I was writing wasn’t actually random. The mind cannot work completely randomly, because thoughts only come by means of association. But the associations I was using appeared, though they weren’t, so disconnected, that no reader could connect them. Each sentence made grammatical sense and asserted something in a clear way. But then another would come and assert something completely different. This was my attempt at abstract fiction. The closest thing to an abstract style of fiction that has been written in the past, that I know of, are certain works by Gertrude Stein. My fiction followed in her tradition, without having clear characters or a defined story. It was when I saw the paintings of Jackson Pollock that I realized randomness could become a means of expressing abstraction. I’m sure his work, though apparently random, was not random to him. When one writes by free association, or paints by instinct, the unconscious mind becomes expressed in the work, rather than the methods of present essay, whose ideas are formed and developed only by the conscious mind.

This view of the possibilities of the novel, though it may have failed in execution (I cannot be the judge of that for myself), is an example of seeing the novel as something other than what we have been socialized to view it as. The idea of connecting seemingly disconnected things, such as the novel and the paintings of Jackson Pollock, was the schizophrenic mind drawing on one experience and connecting it with another, completely "irrelevant" one, that the completely "normal" mind tends to do less of.

James Joyce had such a schizophrenic shift when he wrote Finnegans Wake, which is a sort of anomaly in the world of fiction, viewed as an important work, but not having had much impact on tradition. At the time he wrote it, no one had written anything like it before; and it was so disconnected from tradition that some critics thought it was a hoax. But he was inspired to write it from the concept of the dream. It was his attempt to represent the world of dreams with the art of words. Novels before his had contained dream scenes; but his entire book was as confusing, distorted, and wild as the world of dreams itself. This did not come from nowhere, though there had been no novels like it before. He had taken the idea of dreams, and decided to make it into a novel. He came up with very creative ways to do this, that involved inter-lingual puns that saw a connection between widely separated ideas, thoughts from histories and mythologies, and many other things the discussion of which would be quite a digression. This is the creative process of connecting disconnected ideas and experiences, which the schizophrenic does with his delusions. The schizophrenic is less able to fit his mind into the "patterns" that we have been socialized to think in, and so he is freer to connect what we do not think of as connected. His mind works like all minds, his thoughts occurring by association; but normal minds are socialized, to a degree, only to associate certain ideas with certain others, depending both on personal experience and the larger social context. The schizophrenic, like the creative genius, is liberated from these patterns of association, and is free to connect thing in ways we are socialized to think of as irrational. Schizophrenia, then, is a disorder involving the mindset of the creative artist, taken to an involuntary and disabling degree.

The invention of a fictitious story is a variation on the experience of the writer; the writer could not imagine a fictitious world, and the people in it, if the writer had not the real world to alter. This process of creating a fictitious world depends in part upon being able to imagine "what is not" or, more precisely, what may be an altered version of what is. To do this, to some degree one needs to be able to draw connections between things in new ways; the mind, even the schizophrenic mind, does not draw its ideas from nothing, but works by connecting ideas and experiences in new ways. Some of the things my own delusions have involved are shamanism, telepathy, the Mexican Mafia, the FBI, wiretaps and bugs, hidden cameras, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, Satanic cults, and other concepts that have come from my world. I have never had a delusion about a completely new concept that had nothing to do with anything I had learned of in the past. My mind takes things in the world, things we are all conscious of, and connects them in "creative ways", that is, ways we are not socialized to think of as connected. Society at large connects things together in ways that are just as "irrational", such as the example about Abraham Lincoln having been born in a log cabin, and Abraham Lincoln having been one of our great presidents. There are many other American mythological examples like that that—about humble beginnings and glorious endings—that are infused with, and seem to support, our meaningful concept of the American Dream. There is nothing logical in the connection between these stories of a humble beginning and a glorious finish—there is no causal link, logical progression, or inductive conclusion that can be drawn from it. And yet society associates meaning with it. These are the ways the schizophrenic mind connects the disconnected, sees meaning in the irrelevant. In order for a mind to connect the disconnected in a creative work, it has to have, to some degree, an ability to break the interconnectedness of ideas handed to that individual by society, and create the individual’s own.

When a writer says, "I have an idea for a new novel," it is not really a "new" idea, but a new connection between ideas or concepts that no one has thought to connect in that way before. To do this, one needs to some degree the schizophrenic mindset; if the ideas were obviously connected to one another, such as "Granny Smith" and "apple", the work would not be "new" and "creative", but merely a regurgitation of an old formula or sequence of ideas. The degree to which the ideas involved are not connected "obviously", that is, in ways we have been socialized to connect them, is the degree to which the work is thought of as "creative" and "fresh". It took the creative genius of Edgar Allan Poe (who may have been schizophrenic) to invent the genre of the mystery, but it takes much less talent and creative imagination today to write a mystery.

For hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, schizophrenics have only rarely had children. They have been too often shunned, cast to the homeless fringes of society, or institutionalized. And yet one in a hundred of us ends up becoming schizophrenic, and many times more have either the complete genetic predisposition for schizophrenia, or a partial predisposition. My view is that there have been lucky ones who have had such genes, but were not schizophrenic, and therefore have had a degree of advantage in the creative and intellectual fields. These ones, though there is no reason to believe they actually had more children than others, certainly have had a chance to help our arts and sciences progress; and I’m sure most of them also got a chance to pass the schizophrenic genes on to future generations. Thank these ones for the legacy they have left us—the genes for schizophrenia—and all the benefits these have brought our society, at the unlucky expense of those who actually became sick.