ARE U INSANE ?!
FORREAL : LOCK URSELF UP !
[A: TORRENT OF NUTJOBS]
— 1
WHY IS EVERYONE INSANE BUT ME?
This question’s been whistling in my head like the irremediable shrill of a bem-te-vi1: — . . . I’ve been with my family in Rio. . .
Machado de Assis turns this question into his 1882 story, The Alienist ; — Dr. Simão Bacamarte, a psychiatrist, opens up an asylum in his small town of Itaguaí:
Casa Verde,
“to carry out an in-depth study of madness in its various degrees, classifying each type and finally discovering both the true cause of the phenomenon and its universal remedy.”
But soon Dr. Simão Bacamarte, — a tower of sagacity, patience, diligence, — realizes madness ain’t just an errant rotten fruit dangling off the banana-plant2 of humanity ; , : the whole shebang is lunátick.
The terror starts with Costa; a completely regular, upright, sane dude who inherited an immense fortune from his uncle but dwindled it away lending money (already sus), but the final nail in his crazy-coffin: he forgives all the debts. . .
NOBODY would do that unless they were vesanically vespertilian, — MY BAD! I’m trying to be clearer: I mean BATSHIT.
Costa’s cousin runs to the doctor, pleading with him: it’s not Costa’s fault he lost the fortune!!! A slave cursed their Uncle : his money wouldn’t last seven years and a day!
“Bacamarte fixed the woman with eyes as sharp as daggers. . . and he took her to the Casa Verde and locked her up in the hallucination wing.”
— 2
I WOULD UP LOCK MY MOM & GRANDMA.
Of course the terror in Itaguaí begins over a money-problem. . . ; . . .
Mom & Grandma been fighting on a loop so recursive, it’s like the joke where the guy shows up to prison and everyone knows each other’s jokes so well all they have to do is say a number and everyone laughs. . .
All they gotta say is “three!” and we know to slow-put our hand to our foreheads in exasperated solemnity, sigh as if we’ve been waiting at the bus-stop for hours.
“Three!” is Mom yelling at Grandma to stop sending my 15 year old cousin Stella money. Stella is my dead uncle’s daughter. She lives with her ganacious ungracious malevolently-puppeteering mother3 in Rio das Ostras. . .
Grandma got a little lypemania-induced forgettyness; Stella & her mother have been taking advantage of this. Milking her pretty good, cashcow-wise.
Grandma thought she was paying for Stella’s school for most of the year; turns out, the school don’t really exist. . .
Mom put a note on the fridge : “Do not pay for Stella’s school, it is a FAKE SCHOOL.” I’ve been doing a bit where I walk into the kitchen as Grandma, saying, “I’m going to send Stella money!” I look at the note on the fridge, then walk out with my PIX open.
. . . Stella’s straight up heartbreakingly mean to Grandma. She was supposed to come stay with us December 26; instead she sent Grandma a voice message saying,
“ughhhh vó like you can’t tell me when to come visit. I have plans with my friends, I’ll come whenever I want. You’re so annoying!”
Which Grandma will respond to with gushing endearment and Stella will hit her back with like a thumbs up. . . she didn’t even tell her Merry Christmas. . .
Mom is trying to protect Grandma’s heart, she can’t understand why Grandma keeps letting herself get hurt ; Grandma is desperate to hold on to the last remaining piece of her son, she can’t understand why Mom won’t let her do that. . .
Both look at each other’s REASON like INSANITY.
[B: FLOOD OF PSYCHOS]
—3
WE MUST TAKE DR. SIMÃO BACAMARTE SERIOUSLY.
The Alienist is a funny story, but Bacamarte is a serious figure, and there’s florescence in his research,
“Let’s suppose the human spirit is an enormous seashell. My goal is to see if I can extract from it the pearl of reason. Or, in other words, to delineate definitively the boundaries of reason and insanity. Reason is the perfect equilibrium of all the faculties; beyond that lies madness, madness, and only madness.”
He begins supposing street-screaming gesticulating is madness, but realizes reason is so warped by human subjectivity, everyone is CRAZY.
Dr. Bacamarte our psychiatrist-trufflepig sniffs out humanity’s biggest problem : this “I” I call MYSELF. . . the true cause of madness is personal FREEDOM.
Ethics, or even comprehensible action, requires the solid ground of objectivity, but the SELF is a raging Jovian storm where reason often can’t find footing; — the problem : it appears placid as a ducky lake.
How is anything ever supposed to make sense when I can’t understand why you’re acting the way you do ; yet, it makes perfect sense to you, but you can’t understand why I’m acting the way I do. . . everyone thinks they’re right. . .
Machado de Assis is obsessed with freedom : especially with how most people dig their own graves with their choices; his most comic character Dr. Bacamarte is trying to GOVERN everybody’s freedom : — that’s the cure to INSANITY!
. . . the town finally turns on the Doctor when he locks up his beloved wife. . .
She’s planning to go to the town ball; she asks Bacamarte which necklace she should wear : garnet or sapphire. He says, Up 2 U, baby. She asks him again at lunch : same answer. . . Finally,
“In the middle of the night, sometime around one thirty, I woke up and she wasn’t there. I got out of bed, went to our dressing room, and found her with two necklaces, trying them on in front of the mirror, first one, then the other. She was obviously deranged, so I had her committed at once.”
— 4
NEW YEAR’S DAY, I REALLY WANTED TO LOCK GABY UP.
I was suffering from diarrhea, sun-malaise, reveillonresaca; — pusillanimously tired. Gaby was hungry. I said, I’ll go wherever U wanna go.
She dawdled endlessly. Around 11:30PM, I drew her choice out like sucking poison from a snake bite. . . She wanted a milkshake & fries from Bob’s.
We passed McDonald’s on N. Senhora; she said, “wait. . . should I get McDonald’s or Bob’s?” I said, “up 2 U, baby.”
We went to Bob’s on Figueiredo. . . a hopeless ordeal. . . the workers futz around like Sisyphus, putting plastic cups in the cup stack and taking them out. . . the line grows on the street like an inextinguishable weed. . . we waited for 10 minutes before going to McDonald’s. . .
I should’ve been suspicious McDonald’s was a deeper HELL. . . : it was as crowded with Argentines as a pop-up Messi statue unveiling. . .
Gaby said, “should we just give up?” I said, “Up 2 U, baby.”
She ordered a burger & fries. Order #135. We joined the impatient scattered cattle queue ; — glomming, glooming like a cumulonimbus. . . They called out Order #68.
An angry midnight McDonald’s is a cauldron of subjectivity clash. HOLY MOLY!
The people waiting for the orders are mad at the workers, the workers are mad at the people waiting. Everybody is MAD & hungry & uncomprehending. . .
After an hour they called out Order #78, Gaby was whispering in my ear, “i’m so sorry, this was such a bad call, i’m so sorry. . .”
We waited until about 1:13AM, canceled the order, got out money back, bailed. . . If people are using their free will to purgatory at McDonald’s in the middle of the night, maybe freedom is a SHITHOLE and we all need locked up. . .
[C: SOLITUDE OF SANDICE]
— 5
I HAVE A BOX OF PICTURES FROM MY GREAT AUNT SOLANGE.
She was the last of my grandpa’s siblings to die. . . in October 2025. . . alone, wilted, demented in a nursing home. . . my cousin Marcos brought the pictures over: he was too depressed to look thru it. . .
I knew Solange as a villain; a boisterous gap-toothed drunk always cackling with her sister Neli behind a cloud of cigarette smoke; they were cruel to my grandma, mean to my mother; — once, even, they pulled my sister into a room when she was about eight: told her if she was fat, no man would ever love her. . .
Solange’s life got lonelier with each passing year; her husband Valdir (a hilarious, gargantuan ogre) died when I was a kid : hit by a car running away from a robbery he committed.
I only knew her story from the margins of my life; now I was looking thru her pictures from the perspective of her as an agent, and it was hard to see her as a villain. . .
There were a bunch of pictures of this random, handsome guy in the box. I asked Grandma, “who is this dude?”
Apparently it was Paulo Monte, a Brasilian TV star in the 1970s; he had a show called O Show de Turismo. . .
When he was 45, Paulo fell in love with Solange. She was 16.
Just a poor girl on the Ilha do Governador, her mother encouraged the match. . . he took her all over Europe, the box is filled with postcards of her writing to her sister and her mother; here’s one dated 13/10/73,
“Dear Mommy, after visiting Vienna, I am in Switzerland, in the city of Lucerne, which is marvelous, but I miss you more every passing day. . . The cold here is terrible, but I finally realized my dream, picking up snow with my hands! Tomorrow we go to Frankfurt. With me and Paulo everything is fine. . . I just miss you, that’s all. Many sweet kisses, Solange.
. . . Paulo bought her an apartment in Copacabana, put her up lavishly; . . . but Solange ended up cheating on him and he dumped her. . . Her bitterness grew like a shell, each passing year.
Is what looks like INSANITY in other people, often, just a paucity of knowledge on our part?
— 6
HOW DO YOU THINK IT ENDS FOR DR. SIMÃO BACAMARTE?
Well, he thinks, if everyone is insane, I’m gonna start locking up the people who seem SANE. . . Machado would agree with Bacamarte here: people who use their freedom to become stalwart, proper functioning moral agents are the ones who are truly NUTS.
But nobody can retain the equanimity of their reason for long,
“At the end of five and a half months Casa Verde was empty; everyone was cured! . . . there were no madmen in Itaguaí; the town possessed not one single lunatic. But no sooner had this idea refreshed his soul than another appeared, completely neutralizing the effect of the first: a doubt. What! Not one single well-adjusted brain in the whole of Itaguaí?
There must be someone to lock up. . . he realizes, finally, the truth he’s been digging for the whole time: he is the ONLY sane person in town,
“he possessed wisdom, patience, perseverance, tolerance, truthfulness, moral vigor, and loyalty; in other words, all the qualities that together defined a confirmed lunatic. . . Simão Bacamarte bowed his head, both happy and sad, and yet more happy than sad. Without further ado, he committed himself to the Casa Verde.”
Dr. Simão Bacamarte’s last act is a wise one, but not for the reasons he thinks.
He’s not insane because of his rectitude, he’s INSANE because he thought he was gonna be able to govern anyone else’s FREEDOM. . .
If you can’t accept this world as a bumper car bash of agencies U can’t understand or control, U better lock urself up ASAP. . . because U R gonna be very unhappy. . .
COMMENT IF U ARE NOT INSANE. . .
Horribly Linneaized: Pitangus sulphuratus: when its Portuguese name is perfect: —onomatopoeiazed by the sound it makes. . .
Plz can someone confirm this : Grandma told me this how bananas grow : they come up thru the soil whole-ish, all the way up the tree, into those chandelieric bundles. Is this bullshit?
Once my Uncle, —ohhhh, my uncle, — tapped my dad on the shoulder (on Christmas), leaned in, fraternally, whispered, lasciviously, pointing to his then-wife, “she does everything.” Which has since inspired a cascade of, admittedly untoward, jokes.
100% educated by O alienista over here. And I'm coming guns blazing with my Quincas Borba in a couple of days!!!
Not insane