Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness

Crazy

Crazy To be human is to be part God, part sickness Always wondering which is which. SUZANNE PAOLA I love the word but I fear it. Ofcourse, I can't say it without hearing Patsy Cline or Willie Nelson singing so melodiously about something so dissonant. I suppose when Willie wrote the song, he didn't aim for verisimilitude. If he had, he might have brought in a little of Stravinsky's Rite ofSpring, which isn't crazy in itself, but caused riots when it debuted in Paris, and would definitely sound crazy ifplayed in tandem with "Crazy." I know there's good crazy and bad crazy and what makes us insane at any given time can change, and what the culture defines as crazy can change, too. When AlfredJarry's play Ubu Roi opened in Paris in the late nineteenth century, the main character Pere Ubu, a grotesque figure with a bull's-eye painted on his fat stomach, uttered the word "merdre,"a nonsense word that sounds like "merde," but isn't, and sparked another riot. Those are the only two instances I know of works ofart inciting riots, making people crazy, and really, the emotions they felt as they shouted and bashed each other with their concert programs or let chairs fly (as I imagine, like a barroom brawl in a Western) were real. I'm sure they weren't thinking, How ironic of us-although some of them might have thought this, the ones who fled across the street and watched from a safe distance. Perhaps they thought, How bizarre, how ironic. In the moment ofacting crazy, one does not reflect. That extreme lack ofself-consciousness would not have afflicted any passersby. They would have seen themselves in relief against the riot-they would have wondered, been in awe, but not part ofthat spectacle. I know from Jarry's example that a word can be a trigger, and I suppose I don't really mind being driven crazy, ifit's only for a little while, if! can eventually find my way back, if, like the audience, I can clean I30 Nola 131 up, comb my hair, straighten my tie, and hurry offbefore I'm detained and held responsible for some ofthe damage. We're all constantly being transformed, and our perceptions of others are just as inaccurate as our perceptions of ourselves. The less we know of another person, the more apt we are to consider their unexplained actions crazy. I remember the story ofa woman who lived in a small town and who walked the streets talking to herself The townspeople all thought she was nuts until they discovered that she was an author, well-known outside oftheir town, who figured out the plots and characters of her stories as she walked, and said her characters' words aloud to make sure they sounded plausible. Not crazy but secretive, unconcerned by appearances. In the same way, perhaps my sister was fashioning stories, too, rehearsing the afterlife, and to say she was crazy, simply is to say that we are observing her from across the street, that we are not a part of her life, that beyond our borders what she does makes perfect sense. In the spring Of1970, Nola returned home for Passover break from Brandeis, and said to my mother, "I have something serious to tell you." "What is it?" my mother asked. "I'm very sick," Nola said. From that point on, Nola was changed, different, for the three years until her death. Years after her death, I had succeeded in almost forgetting that I had such a sister, had come to believe that all was sickness , that her life had ended badly, that there was nothing ofvalue I could glean. Now, I sometimes have to make a conscious effort to remember her in any other way than this. I was going through my own problems at the time, and perhaps didn't notice at first the change in my sister's personality. We were living in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, where my mother found her first teaching job after my father's death. Part of that year, I spent in Hollywood, Florida, with my grandmother, and that's when Nola made her announcement to my mother, so that's why I don't remember any ofthis. I was away. Ofcourse, I was only eleven, and no one would have confided to me that my sister had gone through a fundamental [18.118.12.222...