Plague Journal, Beginning With Cathedrals
When modes of expression are worn out
art tends toward non-sense,
toward a private and incommunicable universe.
An intelligible shudder,
whether in painting, in music, or in poetry,
strikes us, and rightly, as vulgar or out-of-date.
The public will soon disappear;
art will follow shortly.
A civilization which began with the cathedrals
has to end
with the hermeticism of schizophrenia.
Excerpt, All Gall Is Divided by Emil Cioran (The Aphorisms of A Legendary Iconoclast) Pub. 1952
My sister suffered from schizophrenia. The disordered state of mind was episodic, coming and going. She struggled to make sense of the world, to determine the real, from the voices, the visions that came unaccountably. She was also paranoid. She expressed inner anxiety, pervasive fear by fixation on mystical, voices of god or of angels or of demons…
My sister lived her entire life heavily medicated. Treatment fell short, was never enough. Yet the alternative, in a counterfactual universe: confinement by abject madness.
Everything has an expiration date. Mercifully the date remains concealed in unknowing, until the moment of unveiling. Treatment is a tactical retreat under fire. Inevitably ammunition runs low…
Beginning with cathedrals, now ending…
