Lacan and Psychoanalysis (Class assignment)

Glimpses into the Real: Spirituality and Psychosis

Deepti Naval

Deepti Naval, the Hindi cinema actress, is little known as an author and poet. For the 1985 movie Ankahee, Naval’s role involved a mental disorder. To prepare for the role, she spent two weeks in a psychiatric ward. Forced to confront mental disorder on an intimate level, the result was a two part volume of poetry titled “Black Wind and Other Poems”

Exploring the outbursts of the Unconscious mind, she finds the unreality of delusions more real than reality.

“She’s mad

If she thinks

She’s sane”

Her characters look into themselves, delving deep into pits there’s no coming out of.

“Endlessly I roam

My inner wilderness.”

In the process of this, they become estranged from “reality.” Their relationships suffer. They are cognizant of this fact - of their gradual distancing, but there’s a twisted joy even in this.

“Elated I sit again

Amidst the debris of another relationship.”

In communication, the individuals themselves are stunned to silence by their own mind.

“Let me sometimes call you

Dial your number

And say nothing…”

Sometimes only the overpowering force of delusion can help them understand themselves. This isolation provokes epiphanies.

“The light has passed through her brain

‘She is illuminated!’ she says”

Jelaluddin Balkhi or Rumi

Jelaluddin Balkhi, popularly known as Rumi, was a Persian poet from the 13th century. Writing in the Sufi tradition, Rumi talks about his love, his desire for God, and the annihilation of the self  at the hands of this desire.

“Last year, I gazed at the fire.

This year I’m burnt kabob.”

But more often than not, he is left wandering, unable to find what he is looking for.

“Don’t ask questions about longing.

Look in my face.

Soul drunk, body ruined, these two

sit helpless in a wrecked wagon.

Neither knows how to fix it.”

Concurrent with the desperate desire to find the beloved is a suspicion of reality -

“Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes?”

Worldly life to him is a “prison for drunks”, at the same time he talks of the many wines given by God and urges the reader to be a connoisseur, to choose well, and drink of the cup that is filled “with the ocean”.

“We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.

That’s fine with us.”

Desire and the Real in Naval and Rumi

On the part of the authors of this article, sheer coincidence led to the reading of the poetry of Naval and Rumi and studying Lacanian theory simultaneously. This led to an introspective discovery for us – If one is running on the treadmill in the gym and turns around to see ten strangers running in perfect synchronization next to them – there is a sudden realization of the immense mundane-ness and monotony of life. The meaningless of the cocoon of daily routine.

“Real value comes with madness.”

The madness of Deepti Naval and Rumi is both liberating and destructive. While the protagonist in Naval’s poem “Lunatic on the Wall Pt 1” is “illuminated”, and a drunk Rumi “glows”, they are strangers to the material world. In Rumi’s words -

“They say there’s no future for us. They’re right.

Which is fine with us.”

Naval’s subjects are tied to asylums, dervishes like Rumi wanders like dandelions in the wind. To us, one is psychotic and the other deeply spiritual. The madness underlying both however, is the same, and that is why a 13th century Sufi saint is similar to a patient in an asylum bound to their bed in the 20th century. The only distinction is the one made by us – people entrenched in the Imaginary. In Lacanian terms, if the Real was a forbidden room then both Rumi and Naval’s subjects have found a slit, thin and sharp as a needle, to look through. The needle makes their eye bleed but they don’t care. Somehow, they have transcended the Symbolic.

“This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.

I don’t plan it.

When I’m outside the saying of it all,

I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.”

Each has their own language, a way for the Real inside them to burst through. Rumi speaks in poetry, Naval’s subjects speak in their perceived “disorder”.

But the Real is unattainable and their desire to achieve it is sharpened by this lack. Once the introduction into the material world is achieved, The part of one that is chaotic, abstract, and made up of biological drives is inaccessible. So the desire to access it is duplicated, replicated and multiplied in the Symbolic order. So, one desires the desire, rather than the object of desire.

“The sun is love. The lover,

A speck circling the love.”

As one realizes the unattainability of the ideal object that one wishes to obtain, that the desire is forever beyond what can be gained, one settles. If the Real is a blue bottle, the desire to quench a thirst leads one to extend one's hand to grab hold of the blue bottle, the hand can only for some reason access a pink bottle, blocking the blue one. So to help satiate one's feeling of lack, one can console oneself, at least both are bottles, the pink bottle is also satisfactory. But is it? Rumi and Naval's subjects will not be satisfied with the Imaginary. It is their desire to access the Real. Even a glimpse of the Real may be tormenting, but the pain is like a drug – addictive.

At first, Naval's subjects try to compensate for this feeling of lack through intimacy. They end up flitting, like butterflies, from relationship to relationship. These relationships do not fill the lack, unconsciously their mind rebels. Sometimes, they are betrayed by their lover, sometimes they betray their lover.

“I look for the

Madness in your eyes

And find

A cold vacant stare”.

The lover no longer finds in her lover’s eyes the look of love she has grown so accustomed to, the warm glance reflected by her eyes is no longer there but is instead replaced by a cold vacant stare. It maybe so that perhaps the lover never had a loving gaze or it may be so that the said lover exhausted their resources to desire not the ideal but the endearing ‘consolation’ qualities.

“Alarmed, yet curious to see

How far I can destroy it, I go on and on

Until the whole thing falls into a

Disassembled heap!

Elated, I sit again

Amongst the debris of another failed relationship.”

This poem is the opposite – At first glance, it feels like a person who fears intimacy and tends to self-sabotage relationships – perhaps in the fear that relationships are temporary and may end up in heartbreak causes the person to act in such a way that it would be easier for them to self-sabotage the relationship instead of having to deal with failure, heartbreak and real intimacy. But such an analysis would be Freudian in nature. Lacan on the other hand talks of jouissance – ont of the extreme ways in which the human mind seeks out the unattainable happiness, the ungraspable bliss, the eternally elusive satisfaction – by punishing and hurting oneself and by hurting others. The pain, the heartache, the destruction of the relationship and the self, could perhaps be in some way pleasurable to the person. But through the process of destroying all and any relationships the person lives a detached, alone life, a life of which the remarkable achievements are the destroyed relationships, the pain, the heartache and the misery – which somehow elate the person and give rise to a feeling of jouissance.

“your absence fans my love.

Don't ask how.”

Rumi's work is dedicated to the different people he maintained a mystical friendship with throughout his life. The most intriguing of these is with a wandering saint named Shams of Tabriz. Shams of Tabriz had wandered around Persia looking for someone who could “bear his company”. This lead him to Jelaluddin Balkhi, then like any other theologian. The meeting between the two changed both their lives. They began to spend all their time in the company of each other, ignoring the world around them and the needs of their own body. In Sufism, the word used to refer to such a union is “fanaa” or, annihilation of the self in the other.

In his poetry there is a constant desire for the attainment of “fanaa”, a constant ambiguity between who “the lover” is and who “the beloved” is. Sometimes, the lover catches a glimpse of the beloved and sometimes the lover is united with the beloved, this Rumi says, is the “true religion” and “all others are thrown away bandages beside it”. But does that mean union is always successful? Such union is fleeting. Even Rumi’s own friendship with Shams was broken when Shams was murdered, out of jealousy by Rumi’s own disciples. Similarly, Rumi pines for his beloved. He longs for it, and in the process, he destroys himself and becomes the beloved.

Rumi looks for the Real in God, Naval's subjects look inside themselves. Rumi's God is, in Lacanian terms, the Mother. He is like an infant who needs only his mother, the Real. But the mother is unattainable, the hindrance being the Father or the Name-of-the-Father. Who is closer to accessing the Real? Rumi or Naval's subjects? Both are bound by the Father in their search for the Mother. Whoever may be closer, we validate one search for the Real and discredit the other. If monks and artists had a realization of the lack after getting a glimpse of the real, why can't we accept that the lost souls who find it difficult to fit into society have also seen and realized the lack and the real?

In “The Lunatic Out On the Wall”, Naval talks of a woman in an asylum- deemed to be mentally unfit to live in the society as she does not fit into the normative way of life, which she calls the “stench of sanity”.

“...Siren for Sanity!

The lunatic will not get off the wall”

“The light has passed through her brain

'She is illuminated!' she says...”

The lunatic refuses to get off the wall – the wall of the real and step back into the coherent, normative, Imaginary floor. The light has passed through her brain she says, as she gains access to the real and this epiphany ‘illuminated’ her. Her refusal to get back on the floor, to get back to the constructed imaginary is seen as rebellious, abnormal behavior. Her refusal to fit into the ordinary and return into the imaginary after accessing the real is seen as unordinary and so she is branded as a lunatic. If the eccentricity of saints like Rumi, their refusal to fit into the society and their odd behavior, is seen as an intellectual or spiritual way of life, why is it so that others who have been exposed to the real- the misfits, the lunatics who have perhaps been traumatized by the chaotic mess of the Real are deemed as something less than human and are subjected to continuous torture until they fit into the box of normality?

"Char them with sanity

Make sure they crack it!”

There is a desperate need of the human mind to fit into the box of the Imaginary world, the need for a coherent, well-structured world and for every person to physically, mentally and emotionally fit into this box. Some people glimpse the Real and go through an agonizing, traumatizing experience. Naval finds her true self, a sense of belongingness and meaning in the Real. Instead of running away and avoiding the chaotic Real – Naval seeks it. She finds it in the asylum that she visits. Among all the crazy chaotic mess that is the mental asylum she gains a small glimpse of truth and holds on to this opening- in the chaos she finds meaning, just as Rumi does in his quest for the divine.

Bibliography

Barks, Coleman. The Essential Rumi: New Expanded Edition. HarperCollins Publishers, 2004.

Naval, Deepti. Black Wind and other poems. Mapin Publishing, 2004.

Homer, Sean. Jacques Lacan. Routledge, 2004.