It was an immediate and electrifying success. In a moment when Marie Curie produced the first evidence of radioactive elements in uranium ore, when Anton Chekhov’s masterpiece The Cherry Orchard was first produced in Moscow—and when Claude Monet began his exploration of the water lily—Robert Daniel Parsons’s plea for “the freedom of madness” outbid them all for the attention of the cognoscenti.
The doors were opened—and the mad spilled into the streets.
It was, of course, a disaster. No precautions had been taken. No accommodations had been provided. No guides had been appointed. The fashion in which it all happened had nothing to do with Parsons’s intentions. His advocacy had been for what were later called minders and halfway houses, and for financial security provided by government. None of these things had been set in place or motion and the fires that followed were amongst the saddest horrors of their time.
When Eunice Parsons introduced her brother’s manifesto to European publishers, none of the effects of its American publication had been sufficiently publicized to deter them from seizing on In Defense of Dementia as an “intellectual bauble” to float on the current tide of public interest in things Freudian—things libidinous—things dangerous.
The word dangerous was everywhere. Literature was intended to be dangerous—art was meant to be dangerous—ideas were nothing if they were not dangerous. André Gide, Pablo Picasso and Isadora Duncan were dangerous. On top of all this, the public was presented with In Defense of Dementia.
Jung thought it was a valuable contribution to the literature of our field. Freud concurred—but they were alone. Janet, Bleuler, Krafft-Ebbing and other leaders in the field turned their backs.
Nonetheless, Robert Daniel “Rad” Parsons came out of exile into Paris, where the doors had been forced, the gates thrown wide and the mad unleashed.
Using the monies accrued through the sale of his book and with Eunice beside him, Parsons opened a Hospice des aliénés at number 37, rue de Fleurus, in the shadow of the Luxembourg Palace. Partway down that tiny street, Gertrude Stein had recently been joined in her atelier by Alice B. Toklas. Every day in the autumn of 1904, Miss Stein and Miss Toklas walked with their dog to the Luxembourg Gardens, waving a cheery hand at the residents of number 37, many of them sitting naked in the courtyard beyond its wrought-iron gates and amongst its fading geraniums. In her journal entry of October 14th, 1904, Miss Toklas notes: they were there again this morning, the Parsonite Peculiars, seated on tiny Moroccan carpets, all quite splendid in their unabashed nudity, tatting curtains made of string. G.S. remarked that if one chooses to sit upon the ground, there can be no finer ground than a Moroccan carpet. The colours, she said, are so receptive of human flesh. I must think about this—and will.
Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas aside, little attention was paid to the Parsonites. That is to say, little official attention. The police passed by and looked the other way, so long as the gates remained closed. Citizens of high standing—high, in their own opinion—avoided the rue de Fleurus entirely. Children and dogs were hurried on to the Gardens. No one complained.
And then it happened.
Amongst the patients “rescued” from the Salpêtrière was a man by the name of Jean-Claude Vainqueur, who believed he had come to earth from another place—never named—in order to pursue and kill the Antichrist and all who believed in him.
He had first come to official notice thirty-five years before his rescue from the asylum, when—near Marseilles—he had been washed ashore in his dead mother’s arms. They had been amongst two hundred passengers on an overcrowded sloop that had foundered at sea between Algiers and the French coast. All had perished. A paper was found in the pocket of the unidentified woman’s apron—a paper on which the name Jean-Claude Vainqueur had been pencilled, doubtless the name of a man she had intended to contact after landing on French soil.
The boy had been, at most, four years old—possibly less. He had no language known to anyone who had encountered him—and no identifiable origin. He was placed in one orphanage after another—each time provoking his own rejection by lighting fires and screaming invective at the authorities who came to put them out.
In the final stages of his life as an orphan-ward of the state, a language had been devised by a patient, almost saintlike Jesuit who had decided, quite properly, that one of the child’s greatest frustrations was his inability to communicate. What emerged was a mix of basic French, even more basic Latin and an agreed upon lexicon of grunts, murmurs and sighs. God was Deo-Dieu, Christ was Corpus and the Antichrist was Diabolo.
Ultimately, the priest’s body was discovered—piece by piece. It had been dismembered and scattered. His head was never found. Jean-Claude Vainqueur was incarcerated, supposedly for life, in a prison for the criminally insane at L’avoir Paix on the outskirts of Paris. One month prior to Parsons’s return from exile, Vainqueur was brought to Salpêtrière as a study case in the language of the mad.
And then The Mad began to be released.
Jean-Claude Vainqueur ended up in the Hospice des aliénés on rue de Fleurus. There, acting on some vicious logic of his own, he came to the conclusion that Parsons, himself, was the Devil incarnate—possibly based on something as simple as the fact that Parsons had chosen to sit at the head of the communal table. Vainqueur and his disciples consequently dragged Parsons from his bed, stripped him and nailed him to a cross. The cross was then suspended upside down over a bonfire in the locked courtyard at number 37, rue de Fleurus. Before her expulsion from the Hospice, Eunice Parsons was forced to witness the agony of her brother’s death.
These events occurred on the night of October 16th/17th, 1904—a Sunday and a Monday. On the Monday, the militia was called in to storm the gates and imprison the fifteen Parsonites who were then in residence, together with Jean-Claude Vainqueur.
Alice Toklas noted in her journal that fires and human cries of anguish had occurred in the night. Many dogs were set to barking and G.S., on being wakened, said to me: do not light the lamp but only candles. For all we know, since so many Russians now reside in Paris, we may be in the midst of a pogrom and do not want to draw attention to ourselves. I duly lighted one candle only and set it in the middle of the room, where it could not be seen through any window.
As for the press, it responded with the usual sensational headlines: PARSONITE EXPERIMENT ENDS IN FIRE! PARSONISM DIES ON THE CROSS! Et cetera. The reaction worldwide was immediate. This was when the Parsons family in Wyoming and elsewhere went into hiding, changed their names to various others and disappeared altogether from further notoriety. For two years, Eunice attempted to publish her own work, failed—and committed suicide. In Toronto, Ernest Jones, a Freudian disciple, delivered a lecture on the dangers of flirting with Parsonism in any experimentations in the field of psychopathology. In Paris and Zürich, Janet and Bleuler crowed their triumph over the demise of The Madmen’s Madman and in Vienna, Freud burned his copy of In Defense of Dementia.
Not so in Küsnacht. Jung took the precaution of wrapping his own copy of Parsons’s book in butcher’s waxed brown paper, tying it with string and locking it inside a cabinet otherwise reserved for private journals, letters and a spare bottle of cognac.
Early in the pre-dawn light following his “bathroom epiphany,” Jung put on his robe, shuffled into his slippers and went downstairs.
In his office, he opened the windows and the shutters, went to the locked cabinet, inserted the key, pulled the door towards his knees, reached inside and drew forth the string-tied brown-paper package containing In Defense of Dementia.
Pilgrim, he was thinking. Blavinskeya. Haeckel. And in this cave where I am sitting.
He undid the string and set it aside on his desk. He unfolded and smoothed the butcher’s waxed brown paper—laying it, too, where he could see it from the corner of his eye. The little book itself—no more than fifty pages long—had the look of something newly purchased, its blue-grey covers unsoiled, its black lettering unfaded. Jung l
aid his right-hand palm down on its face, as if to say: pace, pace.
There was a martyr here. He recognized that without question. Appallingly wrong—yet undeniably right.
Another Luther. Another Rousseau. Another da Vinci. Another monster hiding inside another saint—another saint inside another monster.
And if you free the saint, you also free the monster.
A voice in the whirlwind, he read, to which, if only we would listen, they would direct our attention…
Pilgrim. Blavinskeya. Emma’s little fish—our child.
And he wrote:
Between his exposure to Leonardo’s eye and his exposure to mine, there is no time and space in Pilgrim’s mind. Nor between her life on the Moon, for Blavinskeya, and her residence here. Nor between the ocean of Emma’s womb and the shore on which our little fish shall one day be angled.
All one.
That’s right.
All one place and all one time.
That’s right.
It is how we see—that’s all that matters.
And what we remember.
Yes. And feel.
And tell.
Embrace it all. It is all one.
Jung sat forward.
The pen wavered and then he wrote:
All time—all space—is mine. The collective memory of the whole human race is beside me, sitting in this cave—my brain. And if I join the mad in claiming this, so be it. I am mad.
14
Hôtel Baur au Lac
Zürich
14th May, 1912
And so my dearest friend, I address you for the last time. To my sorrow, I must do so through the medium of this letter, though I would have preferred that we take leave of one another in our usual fashion, with a clasping of human hands and a kiss.
As you will guess, I am—of course—afraid. After so much life—my death. How certain we were that it would never come! And think how often we wished that it could, while knowing that what mortals call “death” was not, for us, even a remote possibility. The gods would not sanction it. They would not permit it. They would not so much as countenance the thought of it—and yet, here it is.
The Envoys, two of them, arrived in Zürich even as you and I did. You will remember we arrived in the midst of a blizzard—and it seems that same blizzard was their means of transport. Their name is Messager. Messenger. They masquerade at being French, speak that language perfectly, but otherwise have no human dimensions. I recognized them instantly, though I did not at first foresee their portent. I assumed that perhaps there was to be a meeting in the Grove—and of course, my heart leapt up because I assumed such a congress might have to do with your release from present conditions. Such was not the case.
It may amuse Doctor Jung to know—should you ever be inclined to tell him of these events—that he himself took note of my visitors’ presence, since both Messagers, posing as man and newly wedded wife, were in the dining-room on the morning of our first extended encounter. He was, I could not fail to see, more than somewhat impressed with their ethereal beauty.
This is quite the right phrase. They were clearly not of this world—though how would any mortal know this? What a great pity, for all our sakes, the gods and their minions do not appear more often.
Though my “life” has not by any means approached the extent of your own, you will recognize, I am sure, the mixture of joy and trepidation with which I allowed them to approach me. As you know too well, this is the accepted protocol: one does not go to them—they come to you. I did, however, make myself amply available, taking up a prominent place in the hotel lobby and making sure that I was paged by name.
I cannot tell how soon it was that I realized they had come to “call me home.” In the past, as I assume has been the case in your own experience, there was never any doubt one’s stay was to be extended. My own stay has not, as you know, been overly long. I have, so it now seems, been granted the average years of one human life—no more. I had a job to do—and it seems that job has come to an end. As I sit here now, I shrug at the thought of this—for how is one to know what it means? I suspect I shall never know—and must accept that.
You spoke to me once in the greatest confidence about these matters—and believe me, my dear, it remains a confidence never breached—saying that your encounters with the Others always took place in what you taught me to call the Grove. This was an honour accorded only once to me—and not, by any means, an honour I expected. But I will confess to you now that it was an honour I had hoped would be repeated many times, so long as you were in the world to be there with me. In your bitterness, however, you explained that honour, once, as being the honour of being dishonoured.
That you have suffered, I can bear witness. And to know that your suffering must continue is the greatest cause of my sorrow in being called away. But called I am.
That their name is Messager is almost amusing, they have so little tact in this. But they have been courteous otherwise and have treated me with complete respect. I was given a bouquet of freesia by Monsieur and a curtsey by Madame. Think of it! In that moment, I was royalty to them! They have that look, which you would recognize, of pristine champions—of athletes newly crowned with laurels—of youth as youth so rarely is, without the stamp of mortality—all breath and skin and clear-eyed wonder.
Dear one—to live—to die. What do we know? Nothing. Or perhaps, one thing. To live is worse than to die.
To be rid—to be shed—to be done with life. Not to have to. Never again to have to get up at dawning—be—take responsibility—see what we see—know sadness—miss the presence of loved ones—touch and minister to dead infants, animals, strangers—never again to have to say I can’t, but I will try. I cannot, but I shall. To know what is expected of one, because one has eyes, ears and nerve ends—but never again to be placed in a position of having to say I recognize—I see, I hear, I feel. All these “human” qualities are about to pass from me, and while I rejoice in being able to shed them, I cannot bear the knowledge that in shedding them I must be also shed of you.
Now, there is nothing I can do for you. Nothing.
Oh, God. Oh, gods. Oh, everyone.
To be thus helpless is already less than to be alive.
Our usefulness to one another has come, for whatever reason, to an end. And in this end, I recognize the need for my own demise.
My demise. Yes. We must learn to practise the words for death. Extinction. Quietude. Passing. Gone. Over. Final. Nothingness.
It is all so trite. So meaningless. I hope you are laughing. I am. Don’t you think it’s funny?
Je suis passée, monsieur. Life itself is passé.
Laugh, Pilgrim, laugh. One of us has made it to the end. I did it all. I loved a mortal—gave birth to mortal children—suffered mortality in all its far-too-many manifestations. I listed myself amongst the most privileged of my time and place. I saw wrongs—and corrected them. I also failed to do so. I have been very—utterly—human. But still…
We all forgive ourselves, don’t we. We all forgive ourselves and blame some other—someone anonymous, but seen with such convenience from the corner of our eye. Always, when we need them, there is someone there to blame. But never self. Never, never self.
As death approaches me, I regret this most, Pilgrim—aside from my loss of you. I regret that I blamed, so often, others—for faults and problems of my own making. And, if not of my own making, certainly of my own tolerance. That men could not love men—or women, women—that poverty was the fault and responsibility of the poverty-stricken (how can I have thought so!)—and that “good” was something that could be decreed by governments, as if by creating laws we could establish the boundaries of someone else’s needs and joys and confidence. How dare we decree what is “good” for others when for us it has been a gift!
I learned all this—so little!—in the moment I knew I was to be recalled. I learned that—aside from my experience of you, dear friend—I have barely lived at all. My
love of Harry and of all my children—even my darkest love of David, whose predictable future is so ruinous to all my beliefs—was “merely human.” I had money, place and station. All the privileges, and took no advantage—except where you were concerned. Isn’t it odd—or is it, one wonders—that I should have missed so much within such a wide spectrum?
I think of so many—even of my own blessed children—of how often I failed to see them. Did not—could not—would not see them, while claiming to love them.
It is over. All of life. All of my opportunity. Once given, once missed—forever deprived. So wide a sweep. So narrow an experience. To have lived. To have been alive.
I am to be led into some valley, so I understand. A motor car will be involved. There will be snow. I know nothing else. And care not.
This one last thing remains to be said—and I have said it also to Doctor Jung in my final letter to him: In the wilderness, I found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD…And I have made my sacrifice accordingly.
I know you will understand this, though Doctor Jung may not.
And now, I must say to you what you can never say to me.
Goodbye.
My love to you, dare I say always…
Sybil.
Jung, having read, folded the letter back into its envelope and, without remorse at having read it, placed it again in Anna’s music bag.
He sighed and sank farther back in his chair. Did all this signify that he was dealing not with one mental patient, but with two? And one of them, now dead.
The moment, of course, would come when he must show the letter to Pilgrim—but before that moment came, Jung knew, he would have to come to terms with the thought—if only the thought—that what he had just finished reading had been addressed to an immortal.