No One Cares About Crazy People

by Ron Powers

  7

  “When They Were Young”

  In his conclusion to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain wrote: “It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man.”1

  Not many people—not Mark Twain himself—ever claimed to have witnessed the moment when a boyhood ended and the boy entered a new stage of life. I have witnessed such a moment. The boy was Dean, nearing his eleventh birthday then; and the “moment” was a balmy, sunlit Sunday afternoon, August 23, 1992; and the setting was a sublimely cockeyed old amusement park in the Lake George region of New York called the Great Escape.

  Our family had made a ritual of visiting the Great Escape every year on the Sunday that marked the closing of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Dean and Kevin had grown more attached to Bread Loaf with each passing summer. I had come to love the conference as much through their eyes and imaginations as through my own. None of us had ever quite overcome the rustic spell cast by the nineteenth-century campus with its right-angled yellow wood-framed Inn and dormitory buildings, all clustered in a mountain meadow and cordoned off from the world by pine forests and the Green Mountains rising behind them. But to the boys, their twelve days and nights there had almost become their normative lives, with the other fifty weeks of the year a prolonged hiatus. Thus the Great Escape, sixty-five miles southwest of Middlebury on the eastern border of the vast Adirondack Park, was an ideal midway point in our transition from an even greater escape back to our daily lives.

  The park was and is a small nonesuch—as much amusement-park museum as amusement park. A little “graveyard” on the grounds is festooned with markers commemorating attractions that have passed on: Jungleland, Danny the Dragon, the Nightmare at Crack Axle Canyon.2 It dates to 1954, when it opened as an attraction for small children under the name Storytown USA. The name change occurred in 1983. The Great Escape grew over the years, and thrill rides went up and then gave way to even more thrilling rides. Yet the Escape never seemed to lose touch with its own childhood. Artifacts of its early era lay scattered on the grounds. Amid the flashy Steamin’ Demon roller coaster and the Rotor and the Spider, one could find remnants of its rustic origins like fossils in geologic strata: chipping wrought-iron playing cards from the old Alice in Wonderland walk-through; the petting zoo; the western-themed Ghost Town with its blacksmith shop and saloon and daily quick-draw shoot-outs on Main Street.

  It seemed to us that all visitors checked their habitual American edginess at the ticket window in favor of a smoothie and wandered around in caloric bliss. I once looked up to see, striding directly at me, a heavily muscled bald guy with a cage fighter’s mustache, wearing a skintight EVERLAST T-shirt and laced-up boxing gloves. He was throwing shadow punches as he bowled along. But he politely stepped around me at the last moment.

  On this Sunday afternoon in orange-tinted early fall, Dean and Kevin grabbed their tickets at the booth and exploded into the park ahead of us. They knew the layout by heart. (Kevin had just turned nine.) They scampered side by side, brothers and pals, waiting up for us every time they reached a ride that interested them: the bumper cars. The pendulum-swinging Sea Dragon. The ninety-foot-high Ferris wheel. The Raging River waterslide. And as a capstone to the day, a gut-wrenching turn on the massive throwback wooden roller coaster, the Comet.

  We stayed the whole afternoon at the Great Escape on that Sunday. The sun descended, and it silhouetted our boys, and fired their bouncing hair—Kevin’s gold, Dean’s auburn. I had left my camera at home, but I made mental snapshots of them as they larked and ran, and with each one, I silently repeated a mantra that had come into my head once, as if to freeze the image in time: Dean and Kevin. When they were young.

  A few days later, Dean entered middle school, his boyhood behind him, frozen in my incantation. Within five years all vestiges of his forever-young days would be forever gone.

  Dean’s behavioral shift toward truculence slowly continued, and by his mid-adolescence it was impossible to ignore. Honoree and I still attributed it to “phases,” to “hormones,” to “parental rebellion” triggered by the normal psychological need to “separate” from the parents. We assumed that if we rode it out and kept confrontation with him to a minimum, it would “go away.”

  It did not “go away.” Not for a long time. Then it came back again. By the time it went away for the last time, or so we have hoped, things had happened that were terrible beyond our imaginations.

  Dean’s rebellion was not total. He asked us whether he could take guitar lessons, and we enrolled him with Kevin’s teacher. He learned quickly. His guitar tastes ran to folk and rock. He played saxophone in the middle school’s jazz band.

  I could still take Dean to the field beside the grade school and fungo fly balls to him. We still shot buckets in the college field house, and we played catch in the backyard. The yard canted upward near the woods’ tree line, and Dean liked me to throw him football passes just beyond his fingertips (not an easy task, though certain pro quarterbacks on teams that I follow seem to have mastered it) so that he could dive dramatically and land softly on the bank, whether he caught or missed the ball.

  In the August before his sophomore year of high school, Dean flabbergasted all of us by going out for football. Granted that his shoulders were developing, he was still a five-foot-ten kid who weighed about 145 pounds. He played halfback on offense and defensive end—second and third teams. He took his shots from the big beefy linemen and runners. Once he was hit so hard that he rolled backward several times like a runaway Hula-hoop. But he got up again. And he had his moments. One of them involved the first time his number, 36, was called to join the varsity huddle on the field. I don’t think he ever forgot, and I know I haven’t. I asked him what it felt like later, as we all sat eating hot dogs at the A&W. His emotional chilliness thawed for a moment.

  “It was beautiful. I couldn’t hear a sound. I just felt myself running. I’ve never run so fast in my life as I did running out there to the huddle.”

  The following season, Dean took a handoff, made a sharp pivot to the right, and burst forty-five yards up the middle for a touchdown. The head coach, who was standing near the end zone when my son crossed the goal line, told me later that Dean was grinning all the way.

  His creative life expanded: He played the role of Peter, Anne Frank’s doomed sweetheart, in the high school production of The Diary of Anne Frank. He joined Kevin for two weeklong sessions of the National Guitar Summer Workshop in Connecticut.

  Yet Dean did not like being asked questions, especially about his life outside the house, or about his friends. Honoree and I made it clear to him, and to Kevin, that we expected them not to drink, not even beer, and to stay utterly away from cigarettes and drugs. This was conceivably not the first time that parents have issued such directives to their teenage children. Our ground rules brought nods of assent from the boys, while they were within our sight. And then a car would appear in the driveway, and the driver would honk his pipes of Pan, and our sons would go trotting off into the night and the mercies of an unmerciful world. We watched them leave with a sense of helplessness. There was nothing we could do, short of imprisoning them in the house. (We were soon to learn the horrors of house imprisonment.) We hoped each night that—well, we hoped. Each night.

  One of my most bittersweet memories from those years is of the Ping-Pong table that dear Honoree bought for our basement. She thought that Ping-Pong would be a fun thing for the kids and their friends to do, and something that would keep them safe. The fragility of this hope still makes my throat tighten. The Ping-Pong table went unused. The night was far more interesting.

  In the fall of 1997, when Kevin was freshly fourteen, his guitar mentor suggested that we enter him in some competitions, just so he could get used to that world. Application forms for DownBeat magazine’s annual student music awards were due before the end of the year. Eighty categories were available. Kevin recorded
three tunes in each of two genres, jazz and rock. His choices were challenging and sophisticated. In the jazz category he tackled “Blue Monk” by Thelonius Monk, “Ain’t Misbehavin’” by Fats Waller, and “Satin Doll” by Billy Strayhorn. In blues, he submitted “Stormy Monday” by T-Bone Walker, “The Thrill Is Gone” by B. B. King, and “Tore Down” by Sonny Thompson. The submissions were multitrack dubs, in which Kevin performed lead, rhythm, and, on some of the tunes, harmony and a bass line off his electric guitar.

  We sent the submissions in, and then we began to worry that we had asked too much from our young adolescent son.

  The following June, DownBeat announced its winners. Kevin had won for his age-group in both his categories.

  We made a big deal of it, naturally—in retrospect, probably a bigger deal than we should have. We made sure the town biweekly knew about the dual awards, and the editor published a photograph of Kevin with his teacher. And we spread the word to friends and relatives.

  Our euphoria was not destined to last. Within a few days of the announcement, the “Before” in the Powers family saga ended with a crash, and the “After” began.

  8

  Madness and Genius

  Among the many mysteries that enshroud the nature of schizophrenia is that of whether it is causally linked to artistic genius and to extraordinary cognitive levels in general. These questions are of more than academic interest to me, of course, and to Honoree as well.

  Creativity and mental illness have been conjoined in cultural myth beyond the point of stereotype. A great deal of received opinion has it that one cannot be creative, or extremely bright, without being at least a little insane.

  The mad scientist of the movies has done his test-tube-tipping best to reinforce and exploit this supposition. Though a subset of the larger horror-movie genre, mad-science films are distinctive in that they express primal human anxieties toward, say, man’s tampering with the will of the gods, or God. (You’d have to be crazy to try anything like that, they seem to be screaming to their doomed wild-eyed protagonists.) They offer lurid morality plays on the evils wrought by eugenics, lobotomy, the transplantation of limbs and organs, robotics, weaponry and man-made pestilences, and the quest for eternal life. And, of course, they invoke the invisible but always-proximate border, which, overstepped by the genius, lands her or him in the lair of lunacy.

  Current-day loathing of scientists is fed by the great tides of anti-intellectual sentiment in general and, in particular, by blindered resistance to such ideas as global warming, abortion and sex education, and certain bedrock economic realities. The resistance, a staple of news headlines and Internet memes, is absolutist, and it is fed by a variety of converging sources: from evangelical Christians citing biblical absolutism; from political candidates who believe these citations or claim to, and thus scorn the “reality-based” community as laughably naive; from great systems of commerce and education that do not see compatibility with their self-interests, and a populace trained to suspect madness as a by-product of hyperrational thought.

  Yet just beneath the surface of these topical rationalizations lies strong evidence of a far more ancient, and more pervasive, source of the skepticism directed toward science and scientists, and toward intellectualism in general—to say nothing of the mentally ill. This source is the Other, a spectral figure that generates fear and loathing, and that will reappear in these pages.

  The scientist bears oppressive historical baggage. The calling has evolved from deep roots in alchemy and even sorcery. The annals of fable are saturated with tales of the sorcerer who misuses his arcane insights for evil, or who corrupts himself in pursuit of transcendent knowledge. It is a testimony to the grip that these myths exert upon the imagination that the masterwork of German literature, Goethe’s tragic play Faust, portrays the fate of a doctor who sells his soul to an agent of the devil, Mephistopheles (or Mephistophilis), who promises Faust, in return, the knowledge of “what holds the world together in its innermost self.”*

  The Faust/Mephistopheles theme (which in fact predates Goethe) spilled over from the dramatic stage and into opera, ballet, novels, and, inevitably, the movies with their keen attention to the temper of the times—the zeitgeist. The Faust-like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster first appeared on-screen in a silent sixteen-minute film in 1910, made at Edison Studios and possibly directed by Thomas Edison. From there, indirect cinematic treatment flourished: In the silent 1920 film Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet, made in post–World War I Germany, the evil doctor stood in for a mesmerizing yet warmongering national government. In 1933, during the dawn of eugenics as a perverse Nazi experiment in racial purification, Paramount released The Island of Lost Souls. Along with two its remakes as The Island of Dr. Moreau,* this movie features a deranged scientist who has developed an operation that turns human beings into feral animals. In 1927, liberal Germanic fears of a demonic, science-engineered future emerged again, this time with breathtaking sets and towering iconic images. Fritz Lang’s phantasmagoric Metropolis, the progenitor of modern dystopian science-fiction films (Blade Runner prominently among them), delivers a barrage of murky allegorical foreboding. It hints at Christian ideals in retreat before columns of poor, subjugated workers under the thumb of a cynical elite, whose leader commands a bug-eyed scientist, Rotwang, to build a destructive robot. The robot breaks free from all control and destroys the city.

  Following World War II and its hellscape of technology-driven destruction, the movie mad scientist began to share thematic billing with mad science itself, a force of apocalyptic intent spawned by a collective mad world. (It was only some fifteen years later that the former British army psychiatrist, the Scottish R. D. Laing, began to popularize his belief that the world was in fact mad, and that those who bore the label “schizophrenic” were its sane exceptions. People in the distant future—if there is one—Laing wrote, “will see that what we call ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.”)1

  A rational question far more central to the mysteries of the brain, and far more pertinent to both my sons’ vulnerability to madness, is one both ancient and current: Do neural links exist between creativity and mental illness? Or, to put it in a couple of other ways: Did Kevin’s and Dean’s artistic gifts put them on the path to schizophrenia? Or, perhaps, vice versa?

  Archetype in many lands tends toward the affirmative. The intuitive-affirmative might be more accurate. The crazy artist, along with his relatives the mad scientist, the nutty professor, and the pointy-headed intellectual—all these are enduring staples of biography, entertainment, even political scorn. And of course admiration: Plato, anticipating R. D. Laing, implied that insanity was one with artistic achievement: “There is a… kind of madness which is possession by the Muses… the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.”2 Among artists, it has been the musician, the writer, and the painter who have been most susceptible: Beethoven, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Charlie Parker, William Styron, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, not to mention the famous clinical depressive Sigmund Freud—the list is at once familiar and seemingly inexhaustible.

  In this instance, modern neuroscience tends to agree with ageless archetype, though only tentatively—the tentative-affirmative, you might say—with many caveats in the way of a definitive link.

  One obstacle lies in pinning down exactly what creativity is. Its neurological origins and processes are as amorphous as those of chronic madness itself. Where does creativity come from? What are its functions? Why would anyone even think to link it with mental illness?

  At the level of everyday conversation, creativity is almost self-defining. It involves “novel approaches requiring cognitive processes that are different from prevailing modes of thought or expression.” It is “the ability to produce something that is novel or original and useful or adaptive.” Creative people “are better
at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things that others cannot see.”3

  Educational psychologists and others have taken the question to higher ground, proposing that creativity is an essential tool for human development and survival. Among them is Sandra Bruno, a researcher and associate professor at the University of Paris. Bruno has argued that creativity at its origins in the human child is not creation, in the sense of creating something entirely new, but rather an act of imitation: the infant experiences reflexes—instinctual responses to activity in the world. The first creative leap occurs when the child begins to adapt these reflexes into a scheme, one that is useful to new situations. This process is, among other things, the route to language acquisition. “Habits, imitation, language acquisition may seem in opposition to creativity,” Bruno writes, “but they are actually rooted in [the impulse] to go beyond the present set of competencies. The issue is, for the child, to find equilibrium between repetition, stereotypy, and norm on the one side (which avoids creativity) and uniqueness on the other side.” She concludes her paper by noting provocatively, “In a pragmatic consideration, these two extremes may lead to various types of neurosis.”4

  Which leads us to the threshold of creativity and madness.

  As with most of the secrets still locked away in the labyrinths of mental illness, the question of this relationship yields no settled answers. Under study for more than half a century, it ranks as a top-tier enigma for neuroscientists, and among the most acute thinkers on this subject is Gordon Claridge, emeritus professor of abnormal psychology at Oxford University.

  In 1997 Claridge introduced the concept of “schizotypy,” which argued—controversially, as Claridge himself acknowledged—that personality traits lie along a spectrum, inherited yet different in each individual, that range from “normal” and temporary dissociative states (nonconformity, superstition, occasional disorganized thoughts, a withdrawal from the pleasures of life) to full-blown psychotic disorders. Every brain contains a measure of schizotypy. Not every brain degenerates into madness.