I’d like to start you out with a poem to put you in the same head-space that I’m in while writing this.
Light bulbs
The moment a person cracks
is visible, if you look close enough
Sometimes it’s an intense flash of light
that emits from the body,
as when a light bulb filament bursts
A surge and a pop
gone, without warning
The insanity lives in this surge
The obsession over the clarity
of thought takes over
Other times it’s a slow lurking grasp,
like ivy spreading over a wall
slowly taking control
of everything in its reach
In both cases the world around goes dark
and the mind illuminates itself
Insanity is a thing of beauty
A recession into one’s self
The brain is so twisted around
a thought or idea, that it becomes un-
hinged
by social constructs
A coping mechanism, mechanism
to make sense of things
We all have light bulbs
and rarely do we know
how to change them
when they
pop
I wrote this poem to explain the human feature of insanity as a phenomenon that can happen to anyone. It isn’t a select group of people who go insane, everyone’s susceptible. I feel that Poe, while this wasn’t always the focus of his stories, was trying to say something similar. Poe tried to humanize the insane in order to counter the idea of self-reliance. How do you follow someone, or even yourself, if everyone is potentially insane? What do you trust? Do you trust your superiors? Peers? Self?
The sheer ordinariness of his stories with the overlay of unmistakable darkness and supernatural happenings make Poe’s writings that much more frightening. He doesn’t place his stories in distant planets or fantastical settings, he situates each right next to you. Not really, but it feels as if it could be, the “simple landscape features of the domain […] the bleak walls […] the vacant eye like windows” of the House of Usher could exist and it wouldn’t be completely out of the ordinary. He says this blatantly at the beginning of The Black Cat through the unnamed narrator’s introduction who states that his “immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without consequences, a series of mere household events.” Poe plants the seeds of doubt, which as they fester become more and more similar with insanity. Too concerned with whom to trust and whether you did the right thing. This preoccupation takes over and becomes the obsessive intrusive thoughts that torment people and so many of Poe’s characters.
Obsession is why I disagree with the notion that pondering your own insanity proves your sanity. This came up in class, and I have heard it before. But what if someone was so preoccupied with their own sanity that they retreat from others and indeed become insane. How do you prove you’re sane? If you say you are, but have proved otherwise, it is just more proof that you are, and if you do say that you are, then they might believe you, but then you’re just confessing as the witches in Salem did just to get it over with, make the inquisition stop.
I’m not really sure where this was supposed to be going. I feel that as a nation we have many skeletons from our past that haunt us. The guilt and shame that come with the things we’ve done to get to where we are can erode our foundation just as it did the House of Usher. People go insane when they can’t let go of things from the past, they obsess about something that is unattainable, such as perfection, and they can’t cope. Everything we’ve read this quarter has fed into this view of insanity as a nation; from the witches to the Native Americans to the Conquistadors to the Cannibalism of the Essex crew. Poe started to reveal everything that had been swept under the rug and had rotted. That rot becomes insanity. And everyone is susceptible.
