When madness became a disease, it spread among human beings, and we witnessed the fame of madness, but we could not escape.
The famous French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote his first important treatise, Madness and Civilization, when he was teaching French in Sweden, in which Foucault used an extremely sharp perspective to analyze how the concept of "madness" in history originated.
Foucault began to analyze from the Middle Ages, madness, madness and sickness, at that time did not seem to have anything to do with each other.
Fifteenth-century Europe was a Europe shrouded in the glory of God.
Under god's blessing, madness is closely related to the salvation of mankind, and at one point in the fifteenth century, when death and plague were prevalent, there was a strange custom called the "fool's ship"—the fool's ship was full of crazy people, and those people were locked in the boat, floating on the sea all day, without a destination, without a deadline, just a boat of people floating on the endless sea.
This was the way to deal with madmen at that time, if modern people seem to be extremely cruel, but at that time, such acts were more regarded as the salvation of mankind, the "pilgrimage". People who are crazy and not crazy don't feel that this is pain, but more of a devotion to God.
Then, the image of the madman arrived in the Renaissance, and the madman was more connected to the truth of the world, and when Shakespeare's hands produced legends such as Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, the madness symbolized the recognition of the truth of the world. Find your true self immediately after madness.
So when did the negative image of the madman arise, after the seventeenth century, when the madhouse became popular, the image of the madman finally became the fear in people's hearts. At that time, the madman was called the suppression of human nature and the outbreak of animal nature. Crazy people who became animals were also put in cages.
When madness and civilization form a dualistic structure, modern civilization abandons madness, people regard it as an evil terror, but is madness really "crazy", is madness a disease?
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > the berserk poet of ancient civilizations</h1>
In ancient Greece very early, Plato had put forward the proposition of "fanaticism". Plato believed that whether a poet is wise or not depends on whether the poet creates by inspiration, and the "inspiration" here comes from the possession of the gods but from the memory of the soul. Only when the creator reaches a state of madness to create a work, is a guarantee of the purity and nature of the work, is a good work, such a work is not affected by skill and man-made.
This is not just a proposition, it is not difficult to find examples in history, in the Athens period the famous statesman Solon once created a "mad poet" incident. At that time, the social unrest in Athens seriously hindered the socio-economic development, and there were a number of city-states distributed around Athens, which caught up with and surpassed Athens both economically and militarily, and some gentiles occupied the islands of Athens, and Athens, which lost the islands, was seriously frustrated in maritime trade.
Athens sent troops to fight several times, but all failed. The inhabitants of the city-state were so disgruntled that the government issued a very humiliating decree to suppress the masses: "No one may propose to fight for the island of Salamis, and those who violate it shall be punished by death." Solon vigorously opposed the government's humiliating treaty and wanted to awaken the inhabitants of the city-state, but he wanted to escape the death penalty, and it was at this opportunity that he began to pretend to be insane.
At that time, the "crazy" Solon often appeared in the central square of Athens. Whenever he saw him pale, short of breath, and his hands kept beating his chest, attracting many people to watch. As people gathered, he took the opportunity to read his psalms aloud to the crowd:
"Oh, our Salamis, how beautiful she is, and how nostalgic she is, let us march on Salamis, we will fight to recover this island, we will wash the shame and shame of the Athenians..."
In the amazement and regret of the people who did not know the truth, Solon recited endlessly, and finally, with agitated poems, aroused the patriotic enthusiasm and national dignity of the Athenians.
The so-called "mad poet" does not only exist in Europe, in Chinese history we are very familiar with Li Bai is such a figure, Li Bai is the most outstanding talent in the poetry of the Tang Dynasty in modern times, but he is often linked to "madness", but whenever we read Li Bai's works, we can always read a little madness from it, it is the loneliness after the crazy and heavy drink of "will enter the wine", and it is the ambition after the three cups of "chivalry" toast. Li Bai is such a half-immortal, half-vulgar, half-crazy character,
As Yu Guangzhong said: "The wine enters the intestines, seven points become the moonlight, and three points become the sword qi, and the mouth spits out, which is half a sheng Tang."
When madness and civilization are not defined, madness becomes the guide of civilization, but when we nail madness to the terrible mask, everyone avoids it, but we do not realize that madness is still changing our civilization, and the so-called normal people take prejudice to exclude weirdness, and use irrationality to complete rationality, madness quietly grows.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > the bewildered poet of modern civilization</h1>
The so-called madness people define it as mental illness, which is a mental symptom. Some of them are insane but often made, another spirit. In modern civilization, madness has long been clearly divided in this way, and there have even been special medical research and treatment, but in some periods there is still no shortage of ecstasy poets who use their spirit to rebel against common sense.
We know Gu Cheng, who once wrote, "The night gives me black eyes, but I use it to find the light." This short but brilliant poem "A Generation."
We know Gu Cheng, and because he once killed his wife, he was hacked to death with an axe by extremely cruel means, and then committed suicide.
Gu Cheng is an important poet of the Obscure Poetry School in the history of Chinese literature, comparing him with Shu Ting and Kitajima, who has gained momentum in the process of the new poetry wave, and is an irreplaceable poetic significance in poetry achievement. Gu Cheng creates poetry to feel supreme, uses the soul to feel poetry, and writes with sexual spirits, which has a cross-era connection with the "fanaticism" advocated by plato in ancient Greece, Gu Cheng may be a genius or madman who is difficult to determine in the current era, if Gu Cheng was born in ancient Greece, or he could live like a saint.
In 1993, Gu Cheng clashed with his wife Xie Ye over a divorce on New Zealand's Riptide Island, he slashed his wife with an axe, Gu Cheng left four suicide notes in the collapse and committed suicide, and his wife eventually died. This is undoubtedly a tragedy, we cannot deny Gu Cheng's cruelty in human nature, but if it is so simple and pure to judge Gu Cheng as a madman who kills people, it seems too one-sided, madness and civilization always complement each other in this way.
In the social sense, Gu Cheng's death should be called a sin deserved, but gu Cheng's death in literary history is always such a heart disease. With his childlike poetic art, Gu Cheng has created for us a heavenly kingdom that has never existed in the history of human civilization, and he transcends the world and leads us to a new height.
After saying Gu Cheng, can you think of another famous poet, who is still crazy but he has not been crazy. That's Haizi.
The phrase "facing the sea and warm flowers bloom in spring" is used by many literary and artistic youths. Haizi's poetry is also a symbol of his spirit, and Haizi once said, "Lyricism is blood." All of his works are red, soaked in blood, and produced after being burned." He is an uncompromising lyric poet, he is a madman-like prophet, a divine enlightenment, he also wrote his poems with the spirit of transcending this world, so in 1989 Haizi committed suicide on the tracks of Shanhaiguan, he was earlier than Gu Cheng, and both of them said goodnight to the world in the form of tragedy.
Highly nervous spirit and psychic writing, it seems to be the norm of a group of crazy poets, and they often end their journey in this world with tragedy, this is the repulsion between madness and civilization, the world has set a border on madness, stepping out of the boundaries of civilization is madness, but madness often wraps around civilization, wraps civilization forward, in the beginning we do not see madness as madness, there are probably not many tragedies, the direction of history is heavy step by step, more definitions will drag civilization into heavier shackles, In fact, when madness and civilization were not opposed, it happened to be the period of the rapidest progress of human civilization. Human life should not be given a definition, nor should the spirit be given a definition.
"Madness is not a natural phenomenon, but a product of civilization. There can be no history of madness without the history of cultures that describe this phenomenon as madness and persecute it". - Foucault