Bedlam: A fresh look at an old horror

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I am interested in how openly we share intimate stories of cancer, lupus, stroke, heart attack, and other physical maladies, but we are still fenced in about mental illness. Even Alzheimer’s is all right to discuss: it is a physical disease. But when it comes to mental disease, we hesitate to talk about disorders within our families, let alone personal struggles, feeling stigmatized by the mere association.

The days are still too close when people paid money to see the freak show: not bearded ladies, giants, Siamese twins or Elephant Men, but the insane. The wards of the infamous Bedlam asylum were salons for gawking, where fine ladies came to be entertained by raving lunatics.

Tom Rakewell ends up in Bedlam after a profligate life;

one painting in a series of paintings and engravings 
by William Hogarth called "The Rake's Progress"

Bedlam, now Bethlem Royal Hospital, is known as the oldest institution for mental patients (1247) and is notorious for its tortuous and dastardly treatment of patients. Remarkably, now it is a major center for research that promotes the best and most humane psychiatric practice and care. (See the history of Bedlam here.) But the word bedlam will always mean the uproar and chaos exemplified in that madhouse.

Eerily and perfectly timed for the end of Halloween week, two friends of mine have just opened an art exhibit of their Bedlam project. Robert Turney is an art photographer in the media of gelatin silver prints and wet-plate tintypes. (He happens also to be married to my professor, mentor and friend, Diane Wakoski.) Stephen Rachman is an American Studies scholar and chair of graduate studies in my department.

I really love Robert's photographs. Here is a sampling of his previous work, in gelatin silver prints.

Robert's gelatin silver prints

Rio Chama, New Mexico

Shack and Seatless Chair

Goldfield, Nevada

 New York #5

New York #9

New York #10

Robert's wet plate tintypes

And here is a sampling of Robert's more recent work, wet plate tintypes. To watch a stop motion video of Robert developing wet-plate collodian tintypes, twenty minutes shortened to two minutes, go here.

 

You know I love these two still lifes:

Moonflowers

Previously Robert and Steve collaborated on a subject happier than Bedlam: moonflowers. Robert created 10 x 10 inch gelatin silver photographs, shooting the moonflowers he grew potted in his wonderful town garden, at night. (Robert's garden is famous for certain rows of basil that went into Diane's legendary pesto with twenty-five, yes 25, cloves of garlic, that I ate with abandon, and after which Don would not sleep in the same room with me.)  Of course Robert photographed them at night, when they open. Robert's evening dance in his driveway with lights, medium format camera and moonflowers is enough to send a poet off for a week's contemplation, but combine it with Steve's gorgeous essay "Evening Glories," published with images of Robert's gelatin silver prints in the Red Cedar Review, and I am truly inspired. Below are a couple of Robert's gelatin silver moonflowers and excerpts from Steve's essay; see the twelve piece portfolio here. Read Steve's essay about Robert's moonflowers called "Evening Glories: Robert Turney's Moonflower Photographs" here:

"From 1999-2001, in this seasonal way, Turney pursued the flowers, under clouds, under stars, under the glowing coal of his cigarette. . . . It would be easy to misconstrue Turney’s moonflowers as conventionally romantic. . . . If they are romantic at all then they refer to the romance of ordinary beauty, sensuality, and sex. . . . "

~ excerpt from Steve Rachman's essay "Evening Glories"

Two of Robert Turney's gelatin silver prints of moonflowers:

"One secret of the moonflower photos lies in that Turney has photographed flowers as if they were movie stars from the 1930s and 40s. Think of Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Martha Graham rendered by Edward Steichen . . ."    ~ Stephen Rachman, from "Evening Glories"

Bedlam

So what led these two to another textual and photographic partnership, this time about the insane asylum? Robert got to talking about the tintype self portraits he was developing, and Steve began to imagine a fiction about a psychiatrist and a patient, with tintype photography as therapy! The gallery show has single rows of tintype portraits of the patient (Robert himself, acting as G.G.), separated by text written by Steve: imagined journal entries by the psychiatric doctor about his patient G.G. He brings the patient into his studio, observes him under the lens, and sees an improvement in his demeanor. As you progress around the room, the patient in the portraits evolves from a state of violent agitation to calm melancholy.

A sampling of Robert's self portraits, as asylum patient G.G., with some of Steve's journal text,
progressing from extreme agitation to almost beatific calm:

"G.G. converses rationally on most subjects often with amiable feeling and charming manners; and yet he is incapable of going among people without severe mental agitation and reflection. G. G. exhibits great terror and excitement at the prospect of crowds."

". . . And this, it occurred to me, might in the end be what the camera reveals: I have always been struck by this phenomenon in cases of insanity. The insane pose for the sane in postures of madness—or feigned sanity—much as we pose for the camera."

(This one, above, is my favorite of Robert's tintypes;

it moves me in ways I cannot describe.)

Here are two fascinating pages of Stephen's text, which are especially interesting to me, in light of our discussions about translation and poetry at the Rilke blog. I hope you can read my images of them:

I asked Robert if he found himself in any emotional distress while photographing himself as Bedlam patient G.G. "No," he said. "I just made faces." And he asked if I knew the work of Sally Mann, who photographed her children, at home, in intimate poses, sometimes naked. Yes, I did. He said, "She is the only one who could take those photographs, they are her children, in her rural home." He said that these self portraits are like that. He was not exploiting a patient in a mental hospital. He was imagining himself as one, yet thankfully (?) with emotional distance.

For me, through Robert's faces I felt the pain of mental disease, and the terrible history of ostracism and stigma surrounding it. Yet I did not feel disturbed the way I anticipated feeling at Robert and Stephen's exhibit, linking to the ghosts in my own family's history, like that shadowy hand mysteriously moving between candlesticks in Robert's tintype, above. These were after all imagined portraits and journal entries. (Before attending the show, I thought Stephen had discovered real Bedlam documents.) There was jaunty jazz playing in the background. Stephen's fictional journal entries reflected sometimes humorous aspects of the patient's world, stepping over the sacred line of treating mental illness in only morose and somber terms. This kind of open exploration and artistic imagining can help us bust down fences about the ways we may feel threatened by the topic of mental disabilities.

But no matter how painful the topic—and reality—remains, we will still have the tender melancholy of moonflowers for comfort. In the end, perhaps it is only a full frontal look at ourselves, that includes our dark shadow side, that will heal us and make us whole.

"There is one that Turney doesn’t particularly care for (because the blossom appears more like a pansy than a moonflower) but might just as easily serve as an emblem of the study. It consists of a full frontal blossom. It is the moon almost full but for a petal edge bending into a deep shadow, the moon become a flower, a flower become the moon."    ~ Stephen Rachman, from "Morning Glories"

Robert Turney and Stephen Rachman,

Bedlam art exhibit at Scene Metrospace in East Lansing, Michigan

The show opened Friday and will run until December 11.

I hope you'll forgive me for going on a little longer in an already too-long post for a blog. While I stood before one journal entry at the exhibit, in dialog with my friend Reade about my findings in the bits of research I'd done on Bedlam and how people paid money to see patients writhe in torment, I told her about William Hogarth's painting "A Rake's Progress" at the top of the post. She then told me about the opera by Igor Stravinsky (libretto by lifelong friends and collaborators, the poets W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman) of the same name, based loosely on Hogarth's paintings and engravings of Tom Rakewell whose dissolute life led to the poorhouse, and then to Bedlam. Here is another imagined Bedlam story, in which Tom cavorts in London with a bad sort of fellow, Nick Shadow, who turns out to be the Devil. It is a moralistic tale, and Rakewell ends up in Bedlam, affirming the belief held by some that "For idle hearts and hands and minds the Devil finds a work to do." Dawn Upshaw sings a lullaby, "Gently, Little Boat" as Anne Trulove, Tom's betrothed, in this touching scene toward the end of the opera.

I'm grateful that psychiatrists like James Hillman, who continued the work of Carl Jung, have encouraged us to stop moralizing about our dark side, denying or rejecting our shadow selves. I want to keep that open and eager spirit alive and working, to gently love the shadows in myself and in others, or as Hillman puts it, to see generously:

Shadow is the very stuff of the soul, the interior darkness that pulls downward out of life and keeps one in relentless connection with the underworld. . . . the shadow may be reconceived. (James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld)


. . . you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” (James Hillman, The Soul’s Code)

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