Читать книгу Hearing Voices - Brendan Kelly - Страница 9

PROLOGUE

In 1905, a brother-in-law of Irish writer, Sean O’Casey, was committed to the Richmond District Lunatic Asylum at Grangegorman in Dublin, part of the vast network of mental hospitals that sprawled across Ireland for much of the 1800s and 1900s. ‘Benson’ (not his real name) suffered from general paralysis of the insane (GPI), a neuropsychiatric disorder caused by late-stage syphilis which often presented with psychiatric symptoms. Commonly fatal, GPI was a substantial problem in asylums in Ireland1 and elsewhere.2

‘Benson’ died in Grangegorman two years later, leaving a widow and five young children.3 In his autobiography, Drums Under the Window, O’Casey described ‘Benson’s’ initial arrival at Grangegorman in vivid, affecting terms:4

Between the keepers, with Sean opposite to see him safe home, Benson, grinning helplessly, was driven to the house of strident shadows, to dress in the rough grey tweed of the loony pauper, to wear the red woollen neckerchief so tied that when one became restless, a keeper could seize it, pull, and choke all movement, quench all fire out of the gurgling, foam-lipped madman; to where he would be dust to dust and ashes to ashes before he was dead, withered grass that hadn’t yet been cast into the oven, to Grangegorman. Wide gates of heavy, dull, heartless lead opened to let them in, and the black cab rolled silently along the drive, drawn by a horse with a sly and regular trot as if he felt and feared anything else might entitle him for companionship with the dread life of the still-twitching dead. Dotted here and there in the grounds were the dismal brothers of disorders grey, their red mufflers making them look as if their tormented heads had been cut off, and pushed crookedly back on to their necks again. The cab stopped slowly before the building, wide and long, built like a bully that had suddenly died shrugging his shoulders. Long rows of lifeless windows mirrored long rows of lifeless faces, their silence hymning a fading resurrection of Velazquez’s idiots5, a whole stonily-grinning gallery of God’s images turned to dull grey clay, the emptiness of a future age in every face. Now and again, some of them would vent a laugh that rippled a shudder along the walls of the asylum. The grass everywhere grew brown and long, and fell to dust whenever it was touched; the trees twisted their branches like limbs in pain, and grew grey leaves that never seemed to move, a cold immortal grey, as if under the blight of the fig tree Christ had cursed. Flowers that tried to grow beneath the windows were slimy stalks, crawling along the grey ground like slugs tantalizing the rim of a festering lily, lost amid the quiet storm of lunacy distilling a sour air everywhere. In a corner a chestnut tree dropped worm-worn fruit like leaden balls, and riven church bells rang out a raucous angelus three times a day, carolling rakishly mid the mindless chatter and the rasping laugh. Only ghosts of things and men were here …