Language and Madness

Language is a living being. I think that language came before humans, not the other way around. The cells of language hovered above earth looking for a host body. It tried to take over dinosaurs and fishes, but that didn’t work, they were stupid or the muscles in their speech organs were not developed enough. Then came a human. The invisible, potential words attacked her, like mosquitoes that know that they need blood and have waited for thousands of years for the first human to evolve.

It might not have been a particularly logical language; more likely, it was paradisiacal and timeless, a kind of happy babbling for the sake of babbling, a kind of music. But with time it became more descriptive instead of creative. It was instrumentalized. It began to strive toward developing the future instead of standing with both feet in the joy (or angst) of the fact that the now can be expressed and come into existence through words. For some reason, language became both more stupid than it really is and more self-conscious and anticipatory than was good for it. I don’t think the whole of humanity was to blame for this development, but rather a very specific segment of humanity, those who benefitted most from the patriarchy—that is to say, men. Since the patriarchy is all about power, those who took control over language made language a means to maintain power. That’s how the first war came to be and the first colonies, chronology and narrative structure, the social order we still have today.

But it’s not my intention to paint a binary of evil and good here. Perhaps language needed to be tamed in order for us to become more than mayflies. It’s too bad language had to be transformed into a market-economy power apparatus for pleasure-opposed morons.

This isn’t biological essentialism. There is no natural femininity that inhabits the lovely right half of the brain. But for those who don’t want to carry on with patriarchal activities for days on end (usually women, since they don’t earn as much for their patriarchal activities as men and have to fight much harder to reach the same goals), for those who don’t want to devote themselves to work and money, only one task remains, whether they like it or not: to take care of and communicate with children. Or to take care of their own childishness through playing, puttering, and creating things that are not considered important. The playground is the garbage heap of the patriarchy.

What, then, is the relationship between madness and games? Is language a game?

Language contains madness. But one has to be careful not to romanticize psychotic language. One wants to be on the side of madness when one plays with these kinds of thoughts, one wants to be more or less surrealistic. The chronological and rational is boring and uncreative. But at the same time: who wants to be uncontrollably insane? How awesome is that? Sure, we love the mad, but only if we ourselves get to decide the conditions for what the madness will look like.

Children are mad in a fun way, because they are pretty modest in their madness: they play around with their food and scream guttural and enchanting oddities, they have no concept of time and say “hello, ax-handle” without any care. But they do have some sort of control. They do not walk around free on the streets practicing their freaked-out version of reality. Somebody always keeps an eye on them so they don’t kill themselves or others. Children are ultimately not good at heart but just physically inferior, which makes it easy to make decisions for them without having to employ four strong men to put them in straightjackets.

But a screaming, real-life-size psycho who scarfs down feces and foams at the mouth and stabs wildly around him with a knife? In that case, society says, we don’t want to be like that. We don’t want people like that around. When people speak out in favor of a life of madness, they mean the cute, nice madness, not the disgusting or dangerous kind. The disgusting and dangerous kind is prioritized in language but not in life

In literature, the depressing, dark, and suffering have higher status than the nutty, pathetic, bizarreness of everyday life. Great men write great tragedies or long descriptive epics out of their great universal, psychological suffering. Great women write great tragedies or long descriptive epics out of universal, psychological suffering.

Then there are some ridiculous women who write about their ridiculous babies, about their small duties here and there, but there are only a few of those. Books based on great existential madness are a kind of norm. When, in more recent years, books about motherhood have been published in Sweden, the critics have shoved them into a special little section and said yes, yes we have seen this now, motherhood has become a trend and it’s been done. Why? It’s a subject matter that is worth just as much space and treatment as the great existential questions and the inferno crises of all kinds of old windbags. Motherhood is one of the most overlooked subjects of modern literature: that cute, paradisiacal madness. The mother’s relationship to the baby is the root of language, madness, and complexity. None of the great serious works would have seen the light of day without the tracks that were inscribed in the earliest mother-and-child relationships. Life is based on the irrational and noisy language of this crazy little symbiosis.

This symbiosis is a positive psychosis between the mother and child (or father and child in the few instances where the dads dare to take time off to raise the kids). It’s a lesson in love. The world is no longer simply a singular, devouring infant, but an infant that grows through interactions. In order for love to develop, there has to be distance. To feel love is only possible if one realizes that symbiosis consists of two people. Love is an automatic split into you and me. You + me = we. If one is involved in the traditional, patriarchal psychosis there is no we. Instead, I am the world. In the great, self-righteous male despair there is no we, just one bloated I that swallows everything that moves.

When interacting with the mother, the child’s madness becomes a democratic madness, in difference to the male, ego-trip inferno crisis.

And who is going to depict this small, spaced-out joy? Who has the language to express it?

It can be found in language of the lowest literary status, in the child’s first words, in everyday chores, in banalities and in private life, a subject matter that is ridiculed in serious literature.

The paradisiacal is neither good nor evil, but it is an overlooked path of insurgency for language. I think that this joyful, worthless madness is the next big literary and human revolution. And it’s free.

 

—Translated by Johannes Göransson & Joyelle McSweeney