Ode to Madness

By Giovanna D. Preda Robertti

I fell asleep reading Bluets by Maggie Nelson. Not because the book was boring, just because I was tired. Sometimes I wish all feelings were this simple. But of course, they are not. And most times I am glad this is the case.

I dreamt of great, valiant prose. No words, just the feeling of a well-written narrative. Paragraphs flying around, too fast to read them. I am terrified of this feeling, terrified it is eating away at my dreams, eating away at the scientist in me. Lately I have been seeing myself consumed by this. I call it the sense of prose. I once thought it something as fundamental as smelling, touching, seeing, feeling. A sense, like that of beauty, a universality of the human condition. Now I know not everyone has it. I don’t know if everyone has a sense of beauty either, just that I have never talked with someone who didn’t.

I don’t know how the most ethereal senses work. That sense of prose seems to only be present in writers. Or avid readers. Or madmen. I also have a sense of number, which only seems present on people dubbed annoying nerds in high school. Or scientists. Or both. Or neither. I think their coexistence in my mind signals something deeper, a flaw within me. An error in heaven, or the un-divine being that made me. I think their coexistence a fluke.

I have periods where one dominates over the other, and I get scared. Like I’m losing a part of myself. I haven’t seen my sense of number in a long time, I think I might be losing it. A friend of mine lost his smell after COVID and never got it back. Can such an affliction of the soul affect our most ethereal senses? Are they recoverable, or am I doomed to forget the fun, the beauty, the symphony of patterns hiding behind a good equation or a physics problem? I don’t know. I’m scared the eternal battle between my sense of prose and my sense of number has already been settled. I’m scared I will never be the physicist I have once wanted and now see myself drifting farther and farther away from. Oh, to burn myself in the name of science. Oh, to drown my sorrows in haunting words. Oh, to go slowly, beautifully, insane.

Insane. I think about this while I cut half an onion for my soup. I don’t want to be locked away in my own mind, the person I once was completely forgotten. But there is a certain seductiveness in madness; a certain seductiveness in the clarity one only achieves through insurmountable pain. My feelings are sometimes painful, but instead of showing me a secret truth they only eat away at any clarity I thought I had. My feelings are sometimes painful, they’re always inexorably intense, but I don’t think they will ever drive me mad. I cut my finger while chopping the onion, blood stains my vegetables. I keep on cooking.

The sting on my finger is not seductive. The blood on my vegetables is not enviable. At least in my kitchen, away from bright reflectors and expensive camera equipment, it isn’t. Here, pain is just pain, because it is devoid of meaning. If one were to record it, with dramatic music and this letter to the air as a background monologue, it would be. A young woman in a blue dress. I have been wearing a lot of blue recently. A wooden chopping board stained with turmeric. I season everything with turmeric lately, neglecting my herbs. A sharp knife, agile against the onion. Cutting onions has never made me tear up. A slight, imperceptible cut on her ring finger. I am wearing the ring I bought at the airport before leaving. Blood. A single drop. My onions are ruined. I keep on cooking, there is nothing else I can do. With the right lighting, the right music, the right knife, the right woman, this would be considered art. “A testament to the tremendous impact mundane actions impart upon us” some critic would say. A girl would buy the same clothes the actress is wearing in the sequence and recreate it because she relates to her, to whatever internal battle she is perceived to be fighting. She would wear a band-aid for the rest of the week. Pain with meaning, people would gasp. Of course, this is not a movie, just my everyday life. My pain does not have meaning.

This is not pain, but the depiction of it. As much as one can watch a sequence of a woman slicing her finger open, as much as one can read fatalistic verses and see themselves wanting, yearning for the experiences that induced such a state of mind on the narrator, as much as one can place themselves in a character or author’s shoes, one is not experiencing pain just because one is experiencing its depiction. Pain may have meaning, but it is far removed from that imparted by its observers, by the art it creates. The meaning of pain comes from its potential as a catalyst for creation, not from the creation itself.

Sir Isaac Newton poked at his eyes with sharp objects to generate colors and uncover the spectrum of visible light. I find this poetic; inflicting pain onto yourself, potentially maiming yourself, in the name of science. Once upon a time I wanted nothing more than to be like this, to live and breathe physics. Now I am not so sure.

One can know, rationally, that pain is just pain. But there is something mystical about enduring enormous levels of suffering for the sake of your craft. Sir Isaac Newton created a whole new mathematical framework to interpret data from the orbit of the moon—of course, there are some that say it was Leibniz who created calculus; I am not here to debate that, but one must admit that Newton as a quasi-myth is much more appealing to general masses than Leibniz and almost any other physicist or mathematician since—and risked going blind in the name of physics. Sir Isaac Newton carved his name in the annals of human history, he rewrote the history of science as a lone genius. I wonder if he also had a sense of number; he most certainly had one, right? I wonder if his sense of number was more attuned than mine has ever been; it most certainly was, right? I wonder if Newton also stared at the void and felt himself seduced by the song of madness. I wonder if he also yearned to be insane. Sir Isaac Newton did all of this while in isolation, during one of the last waves of plague in Britain. Isolation tends to drive people insane; he surely must have contemplated it. But he did not go mad. Or maybe he did, and decided to hide it.

When I was in isolation because of a plague of our own, I did not create a whole new mathematical framework. I read and watched TV shows and went slightly mad for a while, but returned to sanity eventually. One might say I did not create a whole new way of seeing the world because I was only 14, and one might be right. But I am slightly disappointed my chance at going insane while carving my name into history happened at such an early age. This means I was never meant to be Newton—although, of course, only Newton was ever meant to be Newton; I was meant to be Preda. During my quarantine-induced madness, I engaged with a lot of media, a lot of stories, but I’d always return to two main ones: The Queen’s Gambit starring Anya Taylor-Joy, and The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. They are both, at their core, stories about female madness, and this was terribly appealing to my developing psyche.

“Creativity and psychosis often go hand in hand. Or, for that matter, genius and madness.” The first time I watched The Queen’s Gambit, I binged it in a night. This phrase stuck with me. I was in a particularly vulnerable period of my life—which 15-year-old isn’t? —and found refuge in the narrative I had been told since kindergarten; Giovanna Preda is, over everything else, an exceptionally smart human being. I have since uncovered the full identity of Giovanna Preda, and I can say that she is not, over everything else, smart. She is kind, reflective, curious, a bit intense. Smart is never the first word I use to describe myself, although it would be fake humbleness to say I don’t consider myself smart at all. At that time, when I did not know who I was beyond the abstract shape of my pain and the myth of my intellect, this phrase felt prophetic. I felt I was both blessed with greatness and doomed with madness, and I leaned towards insanity for a while as best as a young teenager could. I have since learned not to romanticize pain, intellectual or otherwise, but I was still a bit disappointed when I read the book and did not find this phrase on its pages.

I am not the first to point out that The Queen’s Gambit, the TV show, perilously portrays mental illness as admirable, an object of desire. Greatness, at the cost of substance abuse and a sexy descent into madness. This is in part due to the impossibility of making Anya Taylor-Joy look bad on-screen, but also a choice made by its director, one that takes away from the point Walter Tevis makes in his book. Tevis portrayed, in visceral prose, the ways in which psychological pain can be used as a catalyst for something else, in which we can give meaning to something inherently meaningless. Beth’s pain is a motor: at the beginning to play chess, then to develop an addiction, and, at the end, for greatness. It is the entire point of the book, its main character. In the TV show, Beth’s madness is not so much a center point as it is a narrative instrument to make her seem profoundly misunderstood without completely showing us the ways in which she gives meaning to this. The scene where she’s smoking inside with cans of beer tumbled over on every surface available in her house is not the same when we see her sexily dancing around to Venus by Shocking Blue with shaven legs and perfectly upkept hair, as much as the director insists it is. Her pain, in the TV show, is aestheticized, it mythologizes her. In the book, Beth’s pain is what makes her human. Beth Harmon—and most of the characters I have related to throughout my life, fictional or otherwise—also has a sense of number.

The House of the Spirits deals with madness in a widely different framework; it deals with madness as an accumulative force, entirely dependent on the society it exists within. “No. Here the madness was divided up equally, and there was nothing left over for us to have our own lunatic.” Said Clara to her granddaughter after she enquired about other families having a family lunatic. Madness, as portrayed by Allende, is only a symptom of a conformist society; anyone who does not fit into it completely is regarded as slightly insane. This is what Clara tried to explain to young Alba with that phrase; their family was so odd, so far removed from everything Latin American societies valued at the time, that everyone was regarded as slightly mad in the grand scheme of things. But this is, paradoxically, also the reason why they don’t have one big family lunatic; oddness was so celebrated within the Trueba Del Valle household, that no one ever felt the need to perform it beyond their own inherent madness. It suggests that madness in other families is a form of rebellion, a way of subverting oneself from the conformist reality of most Latin American households. It suggests that oddness is on itself subtly mad, and that lunacy is just one’s own oddness dramatized. Under Allende’s definition of madness, I am irrevocably mad, and have always been so.

Isabel Allende also suggests that pain is not a prerequisite for madness, but every single character in The House of the Spirits has suffered tremendous amounts of pain directly because of their oddities. Maybe because they were not complete lunatics, and thus still cared, on some level, about the societal values of their unnamed Latin American country. This means, counterintuitively, that the only way to liberate oneself from pain in its entirety is to become completely insane. To be odd, or slightly mad, or even very much insane but not-yet-a-lunatic, would be to still find yourself subjected to pain-inducing societal conventions. However, as much as the Trueba Del Valle family suffers for their madness, they also find personal liberation within it. This liberation is not possible when one devolves into lunacy, as complete detachment from societal norms also makes one lose any notion of them. Being slightly on the margins of society, through madness that is not-yet-lunacy, seems to be both the most painful and most rewarding state of social existence.

Alba Trueba, very much like Tevis’ Beth Harmon and possibly not unlike Sir Isaac Newton, assigns meaning to her inherently meaningless pain through creation. Alba’s pain, both the psychological pain of being regarded as mad and the physical pain of torture and rape, becomes the main catalyst for her later epiphany and political activism. Alba’s pain also transforms her grandfather, Esteban Trueba, who despite living the longest of any character in the novel had also experienced the least amount of suffering through his life. This suggests that witnessing pain can also translate into experiencing it, through love. Maybe the girl watching a scene of a young woman cutting her finger while cooking cannot experience the pain she is in, but my friends, my loved ones, and, above everyone else, my mother, who has experienced truly herculean suffering in her life and loves me unconditionally, can experience my pain through storytelling, through the description of it. I know I can. I know I have suffered vicariously through retellings of pain by my best friends, I know I have suffered tremendously while witnessing my mother, the strongest person I know, being unable to get out of bed while grieving her brother. I know that, even writing about it six years later, leads me to the verge of tears. But then again, who am I to prescribe pain? Who am I to dictate whether the girl at the cinema is suffering or not? “Suffering is not relative; it is absolute,” writes Zadie Smith on Intimations, an anthology of essays written during the pandemic, “Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual—it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like ‘privilege’. If it could, the CEO’s daughter would never starve herself, nor the movie idol ever put a bullet in his own brain.” Suffering, as an absolute force of nature, is not a prerequisite of madness, but an inherent characteristic of the human condition, one that afflicts all of us in catastrophic proportions at some point in our lives.

So, I continue to live in madness, I continue to live in the pain of losing my sense of number. But even as I write this, I know that is not true; my sense of number is merely transforming, uniting with my sense of prose. Maybe I don’t feel as excited solving an equation anymore, but the exhilaration of writing, of verbally explaining physical concepts in what I call “spoken prose” is only intensifying. It is, on itself, a form of insanity, of rebellion; of making both the mad scientist and the tortured poet breathe on the same line. What was Newton if not a madman, one that refused all scientific conventions in order to create something new, to start a revolution? What was Allende if not tortured by the state of her country, by her familiar background, by her humanity? I see the words leap out of the page; I see individual photons making their way to my retina from the faint lightbulb in my living room. They have come to take me. Oh, haunting prose, oh burning science, lift me up and bathe me in madness.