From the French window I walked out under a kind of pergola covered in part by a climbing rose
tree, in part by laths, one inch wide with half an inch of space be tween them. The sun was shining and
the shadows of the laths made a zebra-like pattern on the ground and across the seat and back of a
garden chair, which was standing at this end of the pergola. That chair -shall I ever forget it? Where the
shadows fell on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep but glowing indigo alternated with stripes of an
incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that they could be made of anything but
blue fire. For what seemed an immensely long time I gazed without knowing, even without wishing to
know, what it was that confronted me. At any other time I would have seen a chair barred with alternate
light and shade. Today the percept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely absorbed in
looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else. Garden
furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow - these were no more than names and notions, mere verbalizations, for
utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event. The event was this succession of azure furnace doors
separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point,
almost, of being terrifying. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.
Schizophrenia has its heavens as well as its hells and purgatories. I remember what an old friend, dead
these many years, told me about his mad wife. One day in the early stages of the disease, when she still
had her lucid intervals he had gone to talk to her about their children. She listened for a time, then cut
him short. How could he bear to waste his time on a couple of absent children, when all that really
mattered, here and now, was the unspeakable beauty of the patterns he made, in this brown tweed
jacket, every time he moved his arms? Alas, this Paradise of cleansed perception, of pure one-sided
contemplation, was not to endure. The blissful intermissions became rarer, became briefer, until finally
there were no more of them; there was only horror.
Most takers of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of schizophrenia. The drug brings hell
and purgatory only to those who have had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from periodical
depressions or a chronic anxiety. If, like the other drugs of remotely comparable power, mescalin were
notoriously toxic, the taking of it would be enough, of itself, to cause anxiety. But the reasonably healthy
person knows in advance that, so far as he is concerned, mescalin is completely innocuous, that its
effects will pass off after eight or ten hours, leaving no hangover and consequently no craving for a
renewal of the dose. Fortified by this knowledge, he embarks upon the experiment without fear - in
other words, without any disposition to convert an unprecedentedly strange and other than human
experience into something appalling, something actually diabolical.
Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgment - or, to be more accurate, by a Last
Judgment which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair - I found
myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the
going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being
overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living
most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear. The literature of religious experience
abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face
to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to
the in- compatibility between man's egotism and the divine purity, between man's self-aggravated
separateness and the infinity of God. Following Boehme and William Law, we may say that, by
unregenerate souls, the divine Light at its full blaze can be apprehended only as a burning, purgatorial
fire. An almost identical doctrine is to be found in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed
soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Pure Light of the Void, and even from the lesser,
tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human
being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning
brightness of unmitigated Reality - anything!
The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but desperately sick into the bargain. His
sickness consists in the inability to take refuge from inner and outer reality (as the sane person habitually
does) in the homemade universe of common sense - the strictly human world of useful notions, shared
symbols and socially acceptable conventions. The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the
influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy
enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts, and
which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into
interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of
human or even cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate countermeasures, from murderous
violence at one end of the scale to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other. And once embarked
upon the downward, the infernal road, one would never be able to stop. That, now, was only too
obvious.
"If you started in the wrong way," I said in answer to the investigator's questions, "everything that
happened would be a proof of the conspiracy against you. It would all be self-validating, You couldn't
draw a breath without knowing it was part of the plot." "So you think you know where madness lies?"
My answer was a convinced and heartfelt, "Yes."
