The volume of short pieces called Asylum Poems was prompted by my experience working in a state psychiatric hospital (as an intern in clinical social work). The topic of the hospital and of psychosis itself is used as a metaphor for a range of conditions, situations, realities.
Among other things, I was impressed by what interesting people the patients often were. Not always, of course: there is a limit to how "interesting" a paranoid schizophrenic with an IQ of 75 can actually be. But some patients were intelligent, capable, even talented people in
their other, as it were, "surface" life, that is, their life apart from this the submerged one: and it was as if, given proper care and treatment, they rose to the top of their condition and remained there, on the surface, reasonably functional, though yet they were always
eventually pulled down again to this region beneath the visible and active world -- the hospital. But most of them would always surface again, and continue, continue their voyage. And every person does have their own voyage which, in a sense, cannot be compared to any other.
"Strictly speaking, works of art are not comparable," Suzanne Langer says, in Feeling and Form. If this is true of works of art, then how much more true of lives themselves, the things, the regions, that works of art come out of, and which are, in a way, works of art
themselves, of a different kind, made of other and different materials, and created by a process "loftier and more secluded," the nature of which eludes even the individuals themselves, to say nothing of the others, the onlookers. Is a person a work of art fundamentally?
It is a question which come up repeatedly in the mind of the therapist, since what you are trying to do with the patient, after all, is interpret them -- their demeanor on a given day, their repeated behavior, their typical symptoms; and one cannot but have the impression,
at times, that they are a kind of artifact. But not in such a way as to make them less human -- rather the opposite, more human in a way, if by human one means significant, meaningful, and, in fact, creative. I came to the conclusion that human beings are, in a sense,
works of art, made of biological materials to be sure, but essentially -- essentially -- works of art nonetheless, and in such a way that they create quite spontaneously further works of art around themselves, and indeed of themselves. The poems are in a sense indicators of
the ways this process becomes distorted, rendered grotesque, is driven under -- submerged -- into a region of unmeaning and mere, and as it were, blind desperate assertion -- which yet is a perseverance.
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