On That Part of Your Terra Cotta Boilerplate That Always Manages to Eat Away at Whatever You Call a Nervous Humdrummery
When a man says, ‘I have never solved a puzzle in my life,’ it is difficult to know exactly what he means, for every intelligent individual is doing it every day. The unfortunate inmates of our lunatic asylums are sent there expressly because they cannot solve puzzles—because they have lost their powers of reason. If there were no puzzles to solve, there would be no questions to ask; and if there were no questions to be asked, what a world it would be! We should all be equally omniscient, and conversation would be useless and idle.
There is a power to reason; but that power is exponentially self-effacing in a manner: the greater the capacity for reason, the greater the understanding that there is so much more against which to apply such reason, so that a man decides that he is fundamentally incapable of following his path to reason without the compulsion to excise his brain. In another conversation, someone pointed me to a text the second chapter of which holds oddly and simultaneously similar and dissimilar remarks.
[Note: This is a long passage.]
Let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey. Now, if we are to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake. There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man’s mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it. Facts and history utterly contradict this view. Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like; and if Shakespeare ever really held horses, it was because he was much the safest man to hold them. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
Two diametric positions on what constitutes the price of admission to a mad house. I’m moved to believe a mixture of each. There isn’t evidence of the consistent brand of reason we think healthy among most asylumites, prone as they are to fissures in their mental landscape. But, to Chesterton’s point, it seems just as likely that those fissures arise from stresses from classes of reason which tax—through either scale or complexity, or both—the machine of reason itself. It can’t easily be said that the schizophrenic is without a system of reason; but it might be said without much fault that her system generates a reason perpendicular to most. If I drive against the flow of traffic all the time, I’m systematic, but systematically perilous.
So, if it were put to you to choose between the possibility of insanity by reason of logic, or sanity by way of surrender to an apparition of poetry, which would you choose? Oh, yeah: it’s put to you every day.
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