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On interior landscapes 1 : Thinking with Ilyas, the Imam, and Stefania Pandolfo

2024; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/anhu.12525

1559-9167

Atreyee Majumder,

Byzantine Studies and History

It is small and no more visible than a cricket in August. It likes to dress up, to masquerade, as all dwarfs do. It lodges between granite blocks, between serviceable truths. It even fits under a bandage, under adhesive. Neither customs officers nor their beautiful dogs will find it. Between hymns, between alliances, it hides itself. It camps in the Rocky Mountains of the skull. An eternal refugee. It is I and I, with the fearful hope that I have found at last a friend, am it. But the self is so lonely, so distrustful, it does not accept anyone, even me. It clings to historical events no less tightly than water to a glass. It could fill a Neolithic jar. It is insatiable, it wants to flow in aqueducts, it thirsts for newer and newer vessels. It wants to taste space without walls, diffuse itself, diffuse itself. Then it fades away like desire, and in the silence of an August night you hear only crickets patiently conversing with the stars. Ilyas's response was that he hoped their story might offer hope or some kind of insight to those others who might recognize their own troubles in their story and in my book, and that his paintings might open a path for someone in their own struggles with troubles of the soul. Samia on the other hand reminded me that the paintings, and also their power to cure, bore witness to a story of love. In this essay, I pay close attention to Pandolfo's witnessing and mediation of narratives of patients and healers of psychosis, being intermittently reminded of my own experiences. Pandolfo's witnessing indeed builds some sort of bridge between the written language and its outside. Through my own experience of psychosis throughout the decade of my thirties, I learnt to look inward. A series of hallucinations immersed in idioms of God caused me to turn to the religion of Hinduism, especially the devotional tradition of Krishna worship—often called Bhakti in South Asia. I say this not only as biographical outtake but also to take from Pandolfo something more than anthropological and theological/philosophical teaching, a teaching about the self. I find in Ilyas (a character in Pandolfo's account) a friend, and in the text a communion of sorts with Ilyas and indeed, with Pandolfo. Pandolfo stands as a quiet witness while the afflicted characters in her narrative look within and use the place of conversation to express the residue of the self after a psychotic event. The passions and faculties of the soul in its bodily existence are at once an obstacle and the necessary ground, the stage, so to speak, of the life of the soul. "Constriction" and "expansion," in the Qurʾanic vocabulary of the Imam, are movements and vicissitudes in this process, connecting the embodied soul and its imaginative activity to the ethical-juridical question of living on the path of God, and opening it to the possibility of transformation. The Imam provides an elaborate vocabulary to understand interiority, much of it relying of the teachings of Ibn Arabi—the twelfth century Islamic philosopher. This vocabulary contains words like nafs, qalb, ruh, and aql—giving an interior topography of the human being. He talks with Pandolfo at length about the imaginative faculty (Pandolfo, 2019, p. 234). The term hadrat-al-khayal or imaginal presentation (Pandolfo, 2019, p. 142) appears even before the Imam appears in the text. Ilyas (who I discuss in the next section) invokes it repeatedly. Pandolfo discusses Ibn Arabi's explanation of barzakh (Pandolfo, 2019, p. 156) as "an imaginal border that joins by separating, such as an isthmus or a bridge, and that is the site of a passage for bodies and spirits; a partition, a screen, between two modalities of being, spiritual and corporeal, widening and delimiting, this world and the other; the site where the impossible can manifest itself in concrete form." I climb out of my skin reading these explanatory discourses on the imagination. There is no room in our current lives to engage with the life of the non-sensory, nonempirical except in art or literature. Too far from representation of the sensory reality, and art is called surreal. But our existence—so much of it—is anchored in the power of perception—only some of it directly registered in the senses, only some of it given transparency in language. I think of the emotional landscape through which I access memories of psychosis—these are not captured in pain and suffering, nor in joy or release. Perhaps, a bridge or isthmus is the best way to think of the passage and the return. All of it is spatial in some way or another—an exercise to traversing an inner topography. The geographicity of such experience is undeniable. It breaks with time and continuity in remarkable ways. The episode becomes a foreign country where you are not you. The psychosis patient Ilyas in Pandolfo's narrative has something similar to say. I ask Ilyas whether the painting of the snake is not also a protection for him—I mention the Sword. He denies this. He says that the Sword (sayf) does not exist on the same plane as the other images: "the Sword doesn't follow [the logic of] the illness, the logic of the Serpent, it is not part of the scene of the illness, it follows [the logic of] Divine power (ṭabaʿ quwwa ilāhiyya). The power of God can free you from illness, if God wills, God the highest has the power to heal you." Signs and allegories of the divine occur often in psychotic events, I am told by Dr Z, my psychoanalyst. I witnessed distant, unspecified warzones in my own episodes of psychosis-related hallucination. While this may be routine and even banal for a psychoanalytic practitioner to know and understand, like Ilyas and his paintings, the only escape route for me was the final dream of Krishna. I became a bit of a devotee to pay homage to that dream I had in the middle of a psychotic episode, and continue to live my subsequent life in the shadow of these hallucinations. I wrote absurd prose while in confinement, just like Ilyas's murals. I was surprised when I read what I wrote in the psych ward after my recovery. Like Ilyas, I thought these writings were by a different person—a person not encumbered by my earthly biography. Perhaps, these were narrations of a past life. Perhaps, I was possessed by faraway spirits. Psychoanalysis offered a safe space where I could express these thoughts that were so unlikely of me to have thought. A place to hold the indeterminate memories of psychosis and the past/passed versions of me. I did not know these events, persons, or motifs. My own biographical detail cannot explain them. I read this experience, as not being a personalized account of suffering but a kind of generalized suffering through which a divine contact and a reflection of the world's suffering at large, takes place. Ilyas's paintings, and my bizarre war writings, while admitted in the psych ward, are evidence thus of residue or trace of an experience that confounds the pain–pleasure rubric. Taʿbīr is the imaginative bridge that spans such intimacy and distance. It is the hinge that separates (and joins) the realm of the visible and experienceable (al- ẓāhir) from that which is concealed from ordinary perception (al- bāṭin) and points to the mystery of divine reality (al- ghayb). That the divine is mysterious and reveals its authentic properties and quality to chosen persons, at specific times, and shows its glorious and blinding light was known to Ilyas and myself, not merely through the lens of Islam and Hinduism, but through experience. In both cases, this experience was debilitating, threatening of lived relations of the social worlds we otherwise inhabited, and finally, broke us into versions of ourselves that we would not recognize easily in "normal" times. Both Ilyas and I lived on in the ruinous shards of psychosis—we had crossed over the taʿbīr—the isthmus between the sensible and the mysterious—and had come back up for air. Ilyas is less afraid of such journeys than I am. Pandolfo pays careful attention to Ilyas's own diagnoses of what happened not just his narration of events. The taʿbīr once crossed seems exists as a faultline in one's consciousness forever.3 In fact, Pandolfo uses Ilyas's paintings and murals to show the impossibility of making such visions transparent. The relationship of the visions to forms of sensible reality and sense-oriented forms of representation are frustrated at the very point of invoking language. Ilyas is an artist, so he finds an effective way to relay his visions as parable or allegory. Ilyas tries to whitewash his murals on his return to normalcy; he cannot bear to look at those images that remind him of his past horror and suffering. They come in the way of his repairing his material, social and conjugal life. This whitewashing is perhaps not so much an act of refusal but a quarantining of what he saw through the lens of affliction. For Binswanger imagination partakes of what he calls the "life function," which expresses the "thrownness" of being in the world (Umwelt, prior to or beyond its subjectivation), divested of all individuality and qualifications. In dreaming, a key dimension of imagination, existence as such comes to the fore and gives itself from the outside. As Foucault notes in his introduction to Binswanger's text, "in dreaming consciousness sleeps but existence awakens." Awakening can take place only beyond the personal subject: the subject of the dream is not the dreamer but the dream itself—the world in its manifestation. I found myself in a wondrously different world, in a great ocean where I floated formlessly. From afar I saw the earth and the stars and I felt tremendously free and light, together with an extraordinary sense of power. Recovery, then, is the journey of return to form, to the becoming of one's own biographies, back to the mundane drama of life. Pandolfo writes of Ilyas's difficult relationship to reality, in the aftermath of psychosis, of which the whitewashing is one instance of a coping mechanism. Samia, his wife, asked Pandolfo to keep the paintings in Rabat and not in the United States as she preferred to keep them in a place "within reach" (Pandolfo, 2019, p. 191). Life goes on in the aftermath of psychotic episodes; normalcy is, in some senses, a gift of measurement, economy, and balance. The paintings illustrate Ilyas's inner travels and travails, and in some sense, their marriage. I cannot but narrate in however oblique ways, my later life, as testimony to my psychotic episodes. I protect my normalcy with zealousness, in a way that Ilyas does not. We are both inhabiting our current minds and bodies as ruins of psychotic experience. Perhaps, Pandolfo too, is holding Ilyas and her other interlocutors who are patients, through a text that is a ruin-vessel—a constellation of residue. The nafs is an intangible substance, immaterial, and stirred by the passions. We should keep in mind the cosmology of the soul with which the Imam is working. His description points to its subtle essence as something beyond the body and yet embodied, and describes the movement of passion as at once a fact of creaturely life and the subject of ethical admonition, the admonition of the law in the voice of the sunna: "The Prophet said: Do not become angry." It is the seat—quite literally the place—where the "animal faculties of desire and rage" (Pandolfo, 2019, p. 310) are located, that requires the soul to be in a dialectic—the soul that reproached itself and repents, and the purified soul which is in peace (Pandolfo, 2019, p. 310). For the medieval theologian al-Ghazali who bears influence on the Imam, the body is a "vehicle" that harbors the "dramaturgy of the soul, a perilous path, stirred by the passions, incited by demonic suggestions (khawatir) and admonished by angelic ones, that the soul can transform." (Pandolfo, 2019, p. 311). The soul of the patient "opens up," it expands, and is no longer "constricted." While the connection, the "action and reaction," and the transfer Prophetic Medicine and the Ruqya of power (quwwa) between healer and patient may resemble the "rapport" of hypnosis, or even transference in psychoanalysis (and in one sense they do), and while hypnotic states are often produced on the scene of the ruqya, the intervention of the healer is only a secondary cause, for the agent of the treatment is God. The jinn is often diagnosed to be an "ashiq" or a lover causing lovesickness (al-ishq) (Pandolfo, 2019, p. 289) for which the Imam's prescription was to break the bond with the jinn which was causing an invasion of the sovereignty of the soul. Love is a force that "admits no other, no alterity, no difference; it absorbs and devours in the kingdom of sameness, ultimately as a drive to extinction." (Pandolfo, 2019, p. 289) The "jinn marid" or intractable jinn (Pandolfo, 2019, p. 286) causes a perpetual concern—one that is deeply located in the inner interstices of the soul, causes death or deep physical and mental damage, and inevitably refuses to leave. In one case, Pandolfo learnt the Imam's opinion that the jinn had been in the family for generations being passed down from the souls from grandmothers and mothers, and causing generational damage, even to the children. In her perception of then we were walking on a topographic map of the world, a sort of world atlas that, as we walked, morphed into a boundless surface made of a succession of countries in which we disappeared as individual consciousnesses. "We were walking on a map of the world," she said, "we were becoming that map, and you had no idea." This observation brought back several memories of walking across Bangalore for about 5 or 6 days and seeing the topography of the mundane city world as a manifestation of my inner release, so much so that at some point the two elements of inner turmoil and external space—unraveling itself like a scroll map—seemed to merge. This book is replete with spatial comparisons, along with remembering of Freud's idea of the soul itself as a city. An isthmus, a ridge, a split, a hidden chamber, a city—all of these metaphors are variously deployed. The soul itself emerges as an interior landscape—one that holds and keeps several elements, nourishing, and poisonous. The jinn finds a home inside a soul, which then becomes a space or a holding vessel. In contemplating my own interior landscape, I have often found psychiatric, academic, or other forms of legitimate language to be repeatedly inadequate. I have often resorted to poetry. In fact, like Ilyas, my poetic (authorial?) voice constantly tries to remember and curate the psychotic self(ves). It seems to be the only thing to do represent the layers and shards of the self that are exposed in full view in psychosis. I travel Aeons in the matter of a coffee-sip. Coffee, whose dark brew reminds me of Ethiopia where I was once a beggar-girl sleeping by the steps of the olde church. They came to get me in the dead of the night and found my body cold. I had left the premises before the King sent for my head. I travel Aeons in a wind-gust across the northern mountains, the enemy terrain. Searching for forbidden love— a gaunt soldier that speaks with death as I serenade him from the vineyard where I am, what they call, labourer. I am Queen of the Aeon of Holy Wars and Fucked-up Peace. I sit by my coffee mug and wait for News of Fresh Blood. Blood is spilt across the pages of the New York Times. War for peace, freedom, dignity, they say. Damned lies all. I travel across muffled breaths picking up morsels of dry bread, putrid soup. For it is a cold February. And I walk on foot on the snow path alongside gun-wearing guards. I am a refugee here, sovereign there. My blood spills with whooping cough, or is it cholera? Or some tropical heartbreak that sucks blood? The Aeons come, unshackling my coarse hands. In this solitary cell, where I am Political Prisoner Fundamentalist, an extreme kind of woman. And I pray by dusk to the little girl who picked flowers from my garden. I can only describe the measurement and rhythm of the days of walking as a practice of collecting shards of ancient and mythical times in which kings, wars, vintage cars, dead grandmothers appear only to culminate in an ultimate vision of God. Like Ilyas, whose huge murals let him spread his consciousness out onto the space of the wall, I walked across Bangalore as though I were a thousand years old, and weary of time travel. Time was material—a constellation of ruinous objects made to dance by my walking. I have long wondered about anthropology's access to and possible failure in excavating interiority of the subject—interiority that is deep-seated wells of the self not given to consciousness. If there is a soul or soul-substitute, can anthropology get at it? Using Islamic theology and the voices of afflicted persons as also healers, Pandolfo shows that it is possible. I thank Stefania Pandolfo not just for legitimizing my own hunches about my experience with psychosis, but reaffirming my faith in the anthropological method.