Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 12 Number 1, April 2011

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WÖLFLI’S ASYLUM

 

Is that Doufi, the child of poor and depraved parents,

riding the dark horses? Or, is it St Adolf the Second?

But there, surely, that’s Wölfli peaking up from below the fire!

 

When the whirling pictures simply won't stop there's nothing left

but to reach for the golden promises that lie whispering,

“Listen up, for I am guiding you through the darkness.

Orpheus has been waiting for you since your earliest breath.”

Yet, we never get there because of the spurs stabbing

ever deeper into the soul's ribcage urging, urging

on the horses of schizophrenia and depression.

 


 

There’ll be no redemption, what's done is done

and it will haunt you till you own it freely

with yes, yes I did that, the terrible deed was mine.

No amount of crowding out the canvas with figures

and words can hide the terror of a blank piece of paper.

It is not what you did that made you unreal, unfree, Wölfli.

It was your escape into Waldau Clinic. Yes, yes, yes!

Your art was good. But the struggle, the struggle simply is

not about them against us and it cannot be settled

by galloping into fantasy.

 

Let’s share instead

a steaming bowl of Campbell's Tomato Soup and contemplate

the pitch of the Asylum Band, or the General View of the Island

of Neveranger with its criss-crossing snakes and ladders.

The faces and the scattered eyes and the goat's head

you put there to warn us that living like Janus is both dangerous

and necessary.  We must, you say, both see the mutilated child

and hear the music of the spheres, without creating contempt

for the world, or sending out a posse of personalities

in search of Messiahs.

 

And, so, it is now proclaimed that Doufi the child

and St Adolf the Second - and the horses

are all one and the same; that we each carry our freedom within

and yet we do not.

 

- P.K. Brask