Schreber

227. First thoughts on Schreber
It is strange to travel from a no-nonsense world in a sense very different from the idea of ‘non-nonsense’ back in a far more populated and ‘modern’ town. The 'sensible' concerns in [this town] seem nothing more than rabid, phantom-like cancers of the spirit. Once a man has experienced the possibilities of great freedom in the wilderness of Alaska (or the wilderness of Argentina or Chile), he cannot but dive into what many would call a world of fantasy—but here is the rub for those of this developed, modern matrix: the world of fantasy your wild man seeks as his escape, is not a world of delusion, but a real place, a real environment in which he once lived. His insanity, as you call it, his delusion, his paranoia, is that his earth, and the men and women who once populated it, have died, have all died in the worst of holocausts. He screams back to a world that is alive and well, yet his screams fall to the ears of prisoners, of a type of man beaten, abused, manufactured, neutered, castrated of spirit, heart, soul, feeling, freedom, love, village, and autonomy. These western cities are a nightmare for such a man—yet when will the sun rise to make this bad vision end? This is all he is asking--but the walking dead can do nothing but ascribe insanity to such a man.

The shock of his transfer to the environment is so intense, bewildering, disorienting, and confusing—he sees this 'very normal,' operating reality as his worst nightmare, as the apocalypse of man.

Everything worked out fine in his previous life. He walked out to the lake with K and the family and they threw stones. They drank beer and they shot guns in the woods. They chopped wood and fried fish late into the nights and slept until noon. K would speak for hours about land, about how to build a home and stay warm, about working hard and getting a man’s roots planted. He knew these things because he had done it himself, was living in the very home he built, had lived on his land for 19 years.“These hills,” he told me, “are my last but they are mine. They will be were I am buried.”

Yet I read about the “delusions” that Schreber had and that are apparently characteristic of schizophrenia and it is clear to me that these so-called mental illnesses are products of the human spirit’s resistance against high-modernist schema—we lose the exploration, we lose our freedom, we lose the thrill of escape and wander, we lose our experience of the lake, the stars, the sky, the snow, the great mystery of our ascending and descending the mountains, of our deep and ecstatic love of others, of the real risk of our death or what we might better describe as our becoming one with a great and vast and eternal nature, a great and final release that may well be just the beginning. Indeed, our primitive past was a utopia, plain and simple, but what cruelty have been these modern times: for not only do these times seek to annihilate a past which was man’s great freedom and paradise, but it has attempted to cauterize man’s very spiritual tie to this past in such a way that a man must have a complete rebirth to enter into, once again, such a mystic, such a limitless, such a free world.

No-nonsense, back in the woods, in Alaska, meant none of the bullshit of the city and any of its mental illness. Yet everything we do here outside of your matrix, our values, our lives, our pursuits, our desire for privacy and seclusion, our desire to be left alone from the machine that eats both the wilderness and the free spirit of man—everything we do away from you people and your nightmare of a civilization has no value because it has no place in your scheme of legibility, coersion, and control, because it is a sphere of freedom that will never willingly be relinquished, because men of death and darkness burn in the presence of light, burn in the energy of free men, are deafened by the laughter of wind.