I’m a human being. . . I’m an artist, bro . . .
—@kanyewest, February 13, 2016
Since I wrote about Kanye’s arrogance, based mainly in interviews and lyrics from years ago, and remarked upon what I found to be noteworthy and overlooked insights in his songs and rants, he has said and done much more than I could analyze in a single post-script. I would never assess someone’s mental health from a Twitter feed, Stitcher rants, YouTube clips, and, least of all, song lyrics. But I must say that these days, I’ve grown more concerned for an artist I have long admired, one who has walked and crossed many lines, one who is indispensable one moment and indefensible the next. As complex as the situation may or may not be, my concern is the simplest kind, the concern for the well-being of a fellow human, which has nothing to do with him being one of the most exceptional artists of our time.
Many years ago, I watched my close friend lose his mind. It happened over the course of a night and a morning. Neither of us really slept. We talked, and talked, and talked, and read the Bible, and he asked me questions about God and hell and angels and demons, and I tried my best to answer them. The boundaries of the mind and engines of perception that normally subdivide the world into meaningful segments began to dissolve, waver, flicker. When we opened to the Book of James, he seemed not to have heard the verse I quoted him, about man’s life being a mist that is here for a while and then vanishes. “James. That’s my name. James.” He pointed to the name at the top of the tissue-paper page, then asked, with a seriousness I haven’t seen on a face since, “Is that me?” I asked why he would ask that, when James obviously lived hundreds of years before him. “I don’t know,” he replied, as he did so many times that night. He couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around what was happening in his mind, couldn’t believe his thoughts were his thoughts, as they were so alien to the self he knew.
We talked, and talked, until even the slivers of moonlight cutting between the blinds fell black too, and we were like two disembodied voices, my Marlowe to his Kurtz, my Borges to his Funes, except instead of remembering everything, he remembered nothing. His mind’s activity was dismemberment, pieces of him drifting off in every direction. By the time I began to fall asleep, I was too tired to notice it was happening. When I woke up, he was on the floor, still staring up at the stippled ceiling as though at hieroglyphics that held some secret meaning and promise of relief from the assault on his mind.
I drifted off again, and when I awoke he was no longer on the floor, and I could, in a flash, imagine the way an insignificant detail like the wrinkles left by a body on a bedsheet could haunt someone forever, more than the blood or the sound and sight of gunfire. I found him in the living room, seated on the loveseat, the slow dawn building definition around his shaved head and shoulders. He stared into the space before him. “I tried to baptize myself in the sink. I walked outside, asked God to make the demons go away. I saw one standing on the driveway. God said he would make them go away. That’s in the Bible, right?”
He wanted to go to church, so we went. The closest one to my house was World Harvest. He raised his hands when they told him to, jumped, shouted, while others sprinted up the aisles, stomped in hard shoes on the red carpet, had their foreheads smacked before passing out on the floor, just below the massive marble altar Pastor Rod Parsley had imported from Jerusalem. My friend seemed more hopeful when we left. I took him home and told his dad what had happened. Later that day, he snapped and became violent. They called whomever you call when that happens. Probably 911, but I don’t know who actually came to take him. Probably police. Maybe medics. Maybe both.
The next day, I saw him at Netcare on the west side. I thought it was an episode, that the suspicion of all things he carried in his eyes that afternoon was not forever. The medication made him sleep, which calmed him down, made him hear and see less of the demons of the night before. Every time I saw him after that day, I’d think about how he used to be hilarious, profane, spontaneous, angry, silly, sweaty from a game of basketball or running away from his brother’s revenge, laughing. I’d think about how before we were old enough to drive we’d dress in all black on summer nights and disappear for one another in a game we made up called fugitive, which involved a flashlight, an ancient blue moped, a farmhouse and all its abandoned outbuildings: the swaybacked barn, the old slave quarters, the corn husk silo, that building where we don’t know what happened there. And then there were the trees. You could climb so high you’d look down on the roof of the farmhouse. You’d be hard to find, but if spotted, there’d be no escape.
The above story is not the only one I could use to tell about what it is like to watch a mind unravel in the same room with you. I could tell you about the moment I realized that pupils are black no matter how much they open to the light. Shouldn’t eyes that see, eyes that receive light, be white? Why are the blind ones like cold moons full of hidden sun? I have known men who could not speak, so bright and vivid was their revelation of God’s abode among the stars. I have seen women descend into the invisibilities that animate the inanimate for them, in houses where walls listen, where the people in the TV are a part of a conspiracy that involves everyone, that involves even the dead, that involves you, here on a supposedly innocent visit.
I don’t know what I am seeing right now in the art and commentaries and life of Kanye West. I don’t know who is speaking. I only know that I don’t wish for anyone to enter that protean realm on the other side of irresistible, crystalline visions whose pursuit require that the needs of the body subordinate themselves to one more turn in the labyrinth of the mind. People go there looking for God and find gods instead, all of them that have ever been fabricated or conjured, in all their terrible gravity, and the reality that once presented such a brilliant, unified shimmer gives way to a space without ground, where nothing can be clutched, a dream worse than dream because the only thing you know is that you must be awake. But if you are awake, why does everything shrink away from, or vanish in, your hands?