CRAZY, BUT ONLY A LITTLE BIT

I’m a little bit crazy.  I’ll pause until the scurry of little feet running for the exits dies down.

No one diagnosed me except that I’m classified by some as tilted towards Personality Boundary Disorder, which is pretty much a junk category, one of those terms that official people think up when they don’t have a good command of metaphor.  My supervisor in my ministry internship, who was quite literary (a cousin of Julian Jaynes who wrote about the bicameral mind) suggested I might be a “stormy petrel.”  It turns out to be a mixed metaphor in terms of implications.  Like being a little crazy.

The name "petrel" is a diminutive form of "Peter", a reference to Saint Peter, it was given to these birds because they sometimes appear to walk across the water's surface. The more specific 'storm petrel' is a reference to their habit of hiding in the lee of ships during storms. Early sailors named these birds ”Mother Carey’s Chickens" because they were thought to warn of oncoming storms; this name is based on a corrupted form of Mater Cara, a name for the Blessed Virgin Mary  . . .

Breton folklore holds that storm petrels are the spirits of sea-captains who mistreated their crew, doomed to spend eternity flying over the sea, and they are also held to be the souls of drowned sailors. A sailing superstition holds that the appearance of a storm petrel foretells bad weather. Sinister names from Britain and France include Waterwitch, satanite, satanique and oiseau du diable. . . 

The motif of the Stormy Petrel has a long association with revolutionary anarchism. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyiZfzbgaW4#t=89    “Up/Down” Bipolar Disorder Documentary (2011)  This movie is a good overview of the organically based problem of a brain/body that is constantly turning the energy level on high, then on really low.  Everyone cycles up and down a little bit, but these people are at the extreme.  It’s not exactly crazy, but it could make you crazy as well as people around you.  It’s common enough that I have friends and relatives who deal with it.  And I’m conscious enough of it in myself to fly facing the wind.  Some would say that was crazy.  But you get a lot of lift from it.

The reasons I’m not more crazy is that I’ve got a pretty dependable (not very glamorous) body, my family was teetotalling in reaction to alcoholic family members in the past, I’ve never smoked (why burn up money when you could buy a book), never taken drugs (that includes antibiotics), and have eaten relatively healthily.  It’s not a big deal.  I’ve never made a lot of money, never had a lot of responsibility, never held a management position.  Mostly I watch and think.  But I always have that born-in-a-storm, red-headed, counter-phobic, oppositional-defiance sort of edge that keeps me from being stupid or dissociated.   Also, I have a peculiar sense of humor (I have to watch to keep it from hurting people) but I AM funny and I’ve got a certain kind of education.  Of course, I went after that and it’s been useful to others as well.

Early in life I found theatre and also discovered that I could attach to admired and powerful people as a sidekick rather than a lover, but I didn’t want anyone attaching to me: not children, not other women -- maybe pets.  

I don’t want to found a movement or become famous.  I don’t want interference from other people’s agendas.  Partly because I’m aware that society as a whole is constantly drawing lines between those who are “normal” and those who are “different” and different often means targeted for abuse: stigmatized.  You lose jobs, scholarships, invitations, privileges, and -- in the worst case in this society -- become criminalized.  You also may attract violence.  This is quite apart from putting oneself in danger for bad reasons. 

Last night I watched a different kind of documentary: “Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe” (2007) (Streams on Netflix.)  Here were two “stormy petrels” who made a mutual attachment that gave each what he needed and luckily happened in a time/place and with economic resources that protected them both -- made them famous as huge cultural successes in certain circles.  Also, they had a kind of steadying pontoon or flying buttress in the form of Patti Smith, who is also in the movie.  Under slightly different circumstances all three could have been defined as “crazy” and forced into treatment at the least and incarceration at most.  Patti says Sam was scary when he got drunk, but there are no accounts of violence, just photos of him being ugly.  They achieved everything that conventional people think a person would want: success, fame, art shows, books, and so on.

Photo by Sam Wagstaff

Wagstaff was an imposing figure, like a movie hero, and Mapplethorpe was as pretty and grungy as Caravaggio’s boy.  The two went waaaaaay over the edge from the point of view of polite society, into stigmatized extreme sexuality -- not the kind of crimes that involve stealing or killing people -- unless you count HIV-AIDS which killed them both.  So they were explorers and whether Wagstaff was the enabler and Mapplethorpe was the tempter, those of us who watch are held captive -- of course, exempt from consequences.  

There are two other ways (at least) one can survive outside the social boundaries.  One is by being secret, or underground, which can be pretty difficult in a small town but very easy in places where people are in denial, which can be any place.  The other is by choosing a place that is chaotic and tolerant, like an Indian reservation or some artists’ enclaves or a ghetto.  Once such a place is established, those who are stormy petrels will fly there, in hopes that it is a ship where one can shelter from the storm.  Of course, the revolutionary anarchist doesn’t need a shelter, right?  (Wrong, though staying on the wing is one solution.)  

Being a little crazy is good for being a writer.  Knowing a community with a lot of people who are truly, organically crazy as well as wildly outside the coloring book lines, can give rise to good stories.  But I don’t want to just tell a lot of outrageous and colorful tales, like “Stay Away, Joe” or John Tatsey’s accounts of Heart Butte.  Nor do I want to go on about superhero noblemen who single-handedly change everything, though that comes close to being a fair description of Wagstaff.  I do have a sea captain in my genealogy charts, but I don’t know how he treated his crew.  Nor do I feel like a drowned sailor or someone’s chickens.  (I’d have to leave town if I were a chicken.  There’s an ordinance.)  I accept not being extraordinary and having tired wings sometimes.  I don’t even have red hair anymore.

I do seem a little delusional.  I sit here at my keyboard while the wide sky fills and empties overhead in the most extraordinary ways. I see Sam’s late-life silver collection, which some thought was a sign of madness, now rendered cumulus and glowing: luxuries and fantasies beyond imagination. 

I also see his 19^th century sepia glass-negative photos of worlds cruel and desperate, just yesterday.  Sometimes I wish I were a little crazier, a little more willing to risk.  I would not give up the peaks and abysses of my early years here.  No regrets.  But the yearning remains.  The outstretched hand.