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Chiapas ’07 trip the Zapatista encuentro — Proyecto Icarus presente! w/slideshow… and official soundtrack…

Meeting the dreambody on a hike in Easthampton and at a conference at the University of London.

I’m hiking with my buddies Mollie and Keely on Mt. Tom, urban almost-wilderness in Easthampton MA. Keely is having a hard time; she says she’s upset and anxious today, that hiking is difficult and maybe we should just go without her. She struggles on the trail and walks slowly, so we put her at the head of our line to set the pace. Starting almost to cry, slowing down, dropping her head, and she’s at the point of a panic attack, she says.

“Keely’s emotions” or “Keely’s anxiety” or “Keely’s feeling” are ways we think about this kind of situation. What can we do to help her? What does she need? How might we be contributing to her problem? Which are all good questions to ask, and is what Mollie and I were asking Keely and asking ourselves on the trail. The problem was that after talking for a while, nothing was seeming to help.

Listening to Keely talk about being afraid and panicky, and seeing her so slowed down and burdened by her fear, I decided to use some of my skills developed from studying Process-Oriented Psychology, or process work. More on process work theory in a moment, but in the forest it seemed to me that Keely’s distress in a sense wasn’t really hers. That is, the three of us were intertwined, our little hiking trip as a whole was affected by what she was going through, and maybe the three of us were more part of a single experience than seeing emotions as “hers” would suggest.

Keely felt to me like she was on the receiving end of an oppressive force. Her description fit someone under some kind of attack, victimized by an absent aggressor only she could feel. What if the way out of her state was to meet this aggressor directly? And if the obstacle to this wasn’t something inside her, but in the unwillingness of the people around her to also meet this aggressor?

The awareness of this possibility, which makes sense from a theoretical point of view in Process Work psychology, came to me as an intuition or felt body sense of the situation. It was as if Keely’s oppressed state was the visible expression of something between the three of us, and the absent aggressor was an invisible part that I could feel.

So following this intuitive impulse, I picked up a large stick and started smashing it against a tree. Over and over again, swinging big thick tree branches as hard as I could and slamming them into pieces. Each time there was a loud satisfying crash, and the shattered pieces of branch flew twenty, thirty, forty feet or more into the forest, and we cheered. Keely and Mollie were having a lot more fun than trying to talk Keely out of her state. I had brought the missing aggressor force into expression between us.

(Note to readers sensitive to earth spirits: I asked permission of the woods and trees before I started smashing things around.)

Keely’s mood changed immediately. She came out of her panic attack and continued with us up the mountain, feeling much much better. Something shifted when her own oppressed, frightened feelings encountered an aggressor, attacking force. It was as if the three of us were sharing an experience of panic that remained stuck until we also shared a completing experience of attack. When those two things could meet each other, we moved through it and had a great day.

What’s interesting about this is that Keely herself didn’t herself have to express any intense emotion, like punching pillows or smashing sticks. It was instead the shared experience between us that needed something to complete itself and move forward. Mollie, or even a stranger, maybe could have played the aggressive role that Keely’s collapsed and panicked state was somehow needing.

Process work, an awareness practice and psychological system developed by Arnold Mindell out of Jungian and Gestalt ideas, describes this whole experience in terms of fields and dreaming. Between and through people exists a shared, unified field with its own meaning and purpose, which dreams our experiences into being and seeks awareness to move and grow. The field expresses itself like a realm of potential, a single process or energy that is moving towards unfolding itself, gets stuck, and needs awareness to find its missing parts to move forward. Up on the mountain that day we needed to have an encounter with the aggressor side, and Keely’s mood, and my tree branch smashing, allowed that to happen. When it did, energy that felt stuck began to move more freely.

What the hell are you talking about Will?

Well the language is tricky. In my mind it feels clear, but that doesn’t really mean much if I can’t communicate it well. Part of my learning in the coming years is going to be about how to express ‘spiritual’ truths in meaningful and useful ways, to convey useful practical tools to engage with mystical realities.

“The world is alive, a vast intelligent being we can communicate and interact with.” That’s my inspiring friend Seven from Portland on Madness Radio talking about the connection between mysticism and so-called psychosis. It’s an experience that runs through the wild extreme states of consciousness many of us go through, whether we’re labeled schizo, bipolar, or whatever the doctors came up with. ‘Psychosis’ for us was waking up inside the dream. Contacting reality as a living being. Peering into a mirror on the outside of what is inside us. And it felt like a tremendously important revelation about the deepest truth.

Coming out of these states, we often repudiate any possibility there was some truth there. Psychiatry teaches us that these were delusions, misinterpretations of reality, symptoms of a broken brain, and dangerous unless we resist them. For some of us that works: we come back to ‘normal’ reality and get on with fitting in. Others, it seems like a rare few, embrace the mystical side of their experience and find a balance with living in ordinary reality. And many of us try to fit in to normal reality by pushing away the mystical, it feels too risky and caught up in crisis and dysfunction to treat as real — and then we find we can’t push it away. Living in material reality, focusing on our wellness and functioning, getting a normal life — we try to do this, but it’s like the spiritual truths we encountered in our madness are demanding we take them seriously, and they’re not going to let us survive until we do. We’re caught between believing in our madness and falling apart, or not believing in our madness and falling apart. Or so it seems.

Which brings me to process work in London, at an international conference where I was invited to speak on a panel on extreme states. Joining me were 6 professionals — psychiatrists from Ireland and Poland and clinicians from Japan, Croatia, England, and the US. Our work is varied – from locked inpatient settings to a school for kids with learning disability labels to a support group for people living in a homeless shelter to my work with Icarus and Freedom Center. My talk focused on group organizing with labeled people and the crucial importance of not re-creating exclusion — they way I work hard to bring people on meds and not on meds together, and stand against any system that would interpret people or define them rather than allowing them to define and determine who they are for themselves.

What we all shared in our presentations was a curiosity about the deep mystery of states of madness or emotional distress and a deep appreciation for the unique and unknown nature of the individual. Maybe what seems ‘negative’ has something positive to offer, and we won’t find out if we don’t explore. Process work is committed to a phenomenological approach, which means you leave your interpretations aside and stick to what is immediately observable, both in your own mind and in whatever is happening for the other. Discovering and following states means trusting there is meaning somewhere, that all ‘symptoms’ have a purpose. Icarus members are often guided to spiritual and creative passions by our dysfunction and crisis; withdrawal and isolation may be understandable ways to cope with trauma, voices might be about communicating with spirits, paranoia might be sensitivity to political realities.

To this exploration process work brings psychodrama and role playing, bodywork, meditation techniques, and a whole range of tools, all used at different times depending on how the person or situations’ dreaming process appears. Voices might mean role playing different characters; body sensations might lead to movement and dance; preoccupation with others might lead to conflict resolution methods. Each kind of work relies, like shamanism, on altered states of consciousness. Meditative awareness on the problem or disturbing experience slips us out of our ordinary way of being and into non-ordinary realms. (That’s a photo of Arnold Mindell at the conference.)

For my talk I described some of my earliest experiences with process work in Portland, almost a decade ago. I went to see Amy Mindell, Arnold Mindells’ colleague and wife, as a client, suffering from strong suicidal feelings and an overpowering sense of despair. Other clinicians might have interviewed me for the signs of mental illness and risk factors, ready to take me to a hospital – or call the police if I didn’t want to go. Amy didn’t do that. Instead, she said, “Let’s try dying.”

The invitation was startling. She was saying that the experience I was calling ‘suicidal feelings’ might have something unexpected in it, if I approached it with curiosity and openness and was willing to explore it further. So we role-played me dying in her office, and I lay down on the floor and imagined myself dead. At first I was very frightened and upset to be doing this, but then it put me in a very powerful altered state of consciousness. I felt a deep relaxation, and a sense not of indifference to life, but of very complete acceptance. Everything felt like it was out of my control, and it was therefore OK.

Inside my suicidality was a spiritual experience of acceptance and letting go. Pushing the experience away, by pathologizing and labeling it, medicating it, or even using holistic health, meant I didn’t discover the gift within it.

That moment with Amy helped sustain me and move me forward in my life. At my darkest moments I don’t necessarily remember my session with her, but I do often reach a point of letting go into a death-like altered state where a new sense of acceptance emerges. In fact it seems sometimes that when I go into my ‘depression’ states, I need to actually go even deeper into them to get to this point. If I’m willing to die, then life’s problems must be pretty insignificant. Many spiritual traditions teach some variation on this: that death is an ally, that if we die to each moment and let go of what we think we want, we can awaken more powerfully to what is actually happening. I learned this lesson not by reading it, listening to a lecture, or meditating, but from exploring the inside of my own suicidal feelings.

My panel talk at the conference was a resounding success, with many people approaching me with words of support. It was wonderful hanging around with unusual and intriguing conference goers from as far as New Zealand and Japan, as was scheming possible collaborations in London, Croatia, and elsewhere. Talks and workshops were awesome — 28 events were offered by 51 presenters from 16 different countries. Check out the program here.

Some topics: Organizational Change and Conflict in Bolivia; A Process Work Map of the Cold War; Coma Work, Altered States, and Illness; Shamanic Healing In Brazil; Reaching New Highs: Working with Heroin Addicts: Process-Oriented Yoga; Ethics in Palliative Care; Killing Others in the Name of God; Perspectives on Rank and Power; Post-War Reconciliation in Bolivia, and more. And the venue — the University of London — was showing a very meaningful film for me, KES. (If you haven’t seen it…).

Which didn’t leave much time for anything else, but I did manage to hang out with some of the local radical activist crowd at the squat where I was staying across from the British Museum, take a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride across London by bicycle, listen to live music at the Victoria and Albert Museum, browse the London Review of Books shop, get lost in the tube, eat Pakistani food, talk with Max about nearly being shipwrecked, mysteriously injure my toe, learn about cooking with coconut oil from Eliza, sleep at every opportunity I got, and visit the old apartment in Ashley Gardens, near Buckingham Palace, where my family lived in 1976 (!).

I can’t emphasize too strongly how much we have to learn from the movement in England and Europe. Meeting psychiatrists and former psych patients and activists and writers and advocates really helps me to not feel like an unreasonable radical or an impractical dreamer in my work. Connecting with the process work community means feeling like it’s been worth it all these years to hold on to the truth I know lies at the heart of my madness.

The values that we stand for as a psych survivor movement are simple: stop using force on people, be honest about what mental illness is and what the risks of drugs and other treatments are, and provide people with real choices and options for how to heal, including not taking medication, and to be open to the mystery of these experiences, that they can even be positive. That’s a vision that is blasphemy for many in the US and banned from much of the media here, but it is slowly growing and making headway, and across the Atlantic there is already much more openness to it. I’m always urging people to read this document from the British Psychological Society – it shows how our vision of the future is already starting to arrive today.

You can learn more about Process Work in the Articles section of the Icarus site, or better yet, just notice something happening right now at the edge of your awareness that you’d otherwise push away, and let yourself feel into it and see where it leads you…

I’m at the Best Western in Northampton watching the Food Channel with my dear friend, happy she’s not dead. Because she might have been, and I might be writing a eulogy and preparing a memorial instead of this blog post. She started taking the bipolar drug Lamictal, and it almost killed her.

When I got back into town last week I was excited to return to my friend who took care of my apartment, sorting through my kitchen and taking care of my mail. We’re settling in to our close friendship, watching bad movies and catching up on the last two months, and its great. Except two days after I’m back she’s sick, staying in bed and complaining of a lot of pain. On Tuesday she was sleeping all day, nauseous and in pain. I gave her acupuncture and tried to soother her as best I could, not sure what was going on.

I kept having these flashes of fear, images that she was dead, and anxious that her still sleeping body wasn’t alive. I put these flashes out of my head. Today I’m reminding myself to take my intuition more seriously.

On Wednesday morning I was up early, slammed with a writing deadline and under a lot of stress. My friend woke and told me she was in intense pain, worse than anything she had ever felt before. I did some energy work on her, which relieved her pain a bit, but something a lot more serious was going on. I drew her a bath to try to ease the pain in her joints, and I had another intuition.

I knew she was taking Lamictal, an anti-seizure or anti-convulsant medication prescribed as a mood stabilizer for bipolar disorder. She didn’t have a bipolar disorder diagnosis. Her prescription was technically not approved by the FDA, but her doctor had her on it anyway, because doctors have the authority to give patients drugs for ‘off-label’ uses. I knew that Lamictal, like other psych drugs, is dangerous, and can cause serious illness. Could it be the Lamictal that was causing her pain?

105 degree fever, close brush with death, and weeklong hospital ordeal with four days in critical care — directly the result from off-label prescription for the so-called “mood stabilizer” Lamictal.

Starting to panic, I called someone I knew who had a terrible reaction to Lamictal a year before, and asked them what they knew about it. The situation didn’t sound to them like it was the Lamictal, but now it was beside the point: my suffering friend lying in pain in the bath wanted to go to the emergency room.

A few minutes later she was in the critical care wing of Cooley Dickinson Hospital. That night she had a 105 degree fever and was rushed onto an iced bed to get her temperature down. The doctors told her that a fever that high was life threatening. And the doctor asked her about a rash he saw on her face that she hadn’t noticed before.

Finally, 5 days after going to the emergency room her fever is down, she’s no longer in pain, and she’s alive, hanging out with me at a little Best Western sanctuary (motels can be a good place to recover from close calls and brushes with death). What happened?

The Lamictal almost killed her. Her symptoms went away by themselves when they took her off it.

Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, toxic epidermal necrolysis… basically the drug is toxic and almost killed my close friend. I’ve seen this happen so many times since starting the Freedom Center 6 years ago, in one form or another: psych drugs injuring people, endangering lives, making emotional and psychological problems worse — all without people realizing the drug is responsible. Still, when it happens so close it’s a shock. I’m just glad my friend is here now, not dead, and I’m making jokes about the Barefoot Contessa and television culture instead of reading an obituary in the newspaper.

The Brooklyn Court has ruled that the gag order on Will Hall and other advocates who received copies of leaked documents is lifted! Advocates who did not return the documents had their injunctions made permanent, however, and the ruling has put attorney Jim Gottstein, who subpoenaed the files and gave them to the New York Times, in very hot water.

Zyprexa Memo Court Ruling:
Lilly Goes After Gottstein

Posted on Feb 15, 07

The court in NYC just released its ruling on the Zyprexa documents leak scandal.

While the ruling allows for websites to distribute the previously-secret memos, which is a victory, it makes permanent the injunction against distributing for several of the original advocates who received the documents from Jim — those who did not return the documents. Will Hall, who did return the documents as the court requested, is not named in the permanent injunction. The ruling also encourages congress to subpoena the documents in pursuit of hearings against Lilly, as the New York Times has urged.

Lilly has 10 days to appeal this ruling, after which it appears Freedom Center can freely distribute the documents!

However, what is most troubling is that the Judge came down hard on Jim Gottstein, calling what happened a conspiracy and that Lilly’s secrecy rights were violated. This sets the stage for Lilly to come after Gottstein and the doctor who he subpoenaed to get the files, Egilman.

Jim’s work could be very seriously damaged by Lilly’s attack.

We are asking people to come to Jim Gottstein’s aid!

You can find out about the legal defense fund at http://icspp.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=163&Itemid=70

Below is the press release from Jim’s organizaton, PsychRights:
================================

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE< February 13, 2007 Contact: Bruce Whittington 778-862-8847 Bruce.Whittington@PsychRights.org

Judge Issues Permanent Injunction in Eli Lilly Drug Case
Congress Encouraged to Subpoena Zyprexa Papers

U.S. District Court Judge Jack B. Weinstein issued a permanent injunction today, barring mental health rights advocate and attorney Jim Gottstein, and expert witness Dr. David Egilman, from further distributing internal Eli Lilly documents concerning the drug Zyprexa. The documents were recently reported in the New York Times to contain evidence that Lilly downplayed the risks of Zyprexa, its best-selling drug, and trained its sales force to encourage doctors to prescribe the drug for non-FDA approved uses.

Last December, Gottstein, who is President and CEO of The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights, Inc. (PsychRights) subpoenaed internal Eli Lilly documents for a case involving forced drugging of a client. The documents were under a protective order as part of a massive products liability case, but the protective order also provided the steps by which the documents might be subpoenaed. Believing he had obtained the documents legally, and because of the importance of the information to patients, doctors, and the general public, Gottstein released the documents to the New York Times and others.

Zyprexa is big business for Lilly: last year’s sales of the drug amounted to $4.4 billion. Lilly sought and obtained an injunction against Gottstein and others to whom he had sent the documents–which Lilly claims contain “trade secrets”– prohibiting them from disseminating the internal company files. By that time, however, the New York Times had begun publishing stories on the files. Soon thereafter, various versions of the files appeared on the Internet.

“This was not a conspiracy to harm Eli Lilly.” says Gottstein. “The Court’s order sealing the documents provided for release of the documents in circumstances like these, and I made a concerted good faith effort to follow those provisions to the letter. If anyone truly intended to violate the sealing order, there would have been no reason to even subpoena the documents.”

Judge Weinstein saw it differently, outlining other means in the sealing order by which the documents might have been obtained and choosing to continue the injunction against Gottstein. While the injunction also covers others who received the documents directly from Gottstein, but still have not returned them, Judge Weinstein refused to honor Lilly’s request to continue the injunction against various websites that had posted the documents, nor were the New York Times, or other news organizations who have the documents, named in the injunction.

In fact, as Judge Weinstein pointed out in today’s order, “There has already been sufficient revelation in the New York Times so that if Congress, the Food and Drug Administration, or the Federal Trade Commission wish to investigate or act they have grounds for doing so, subpoenaing protected documents as necessary for their purposes.”

The most important issue, says Gottstein, is the right of patients and the public to know the truth about Zyprexa. “Zyprexa has killed and permanently sickened thousands of people who have taken it. The files show that the manufacturer hid vital information about the drug’s safety not only from patients, but also from doctors. The bottom line is patient safety.” He continued, “Did I want to get this information in front of the public and the medical profession? Of course. Additional lives may well have been saved.”

Today’s order releasing several people and websites from the temporary injunction does not take effect for 10 days, to allow time for Eli Lilly to file an appeal to try and keep them enjoined. Gottstein plans to continue to use mechanisms suggested in the order to obtain access to the documents for his clients. “My continued efforts to obtain the information legally are a testament to my respect for our legal system.”

Judge Weinstein’s decision, the New York Times articles, and other background information on the case is available on the PsychRights website at http://psychrights.org.

The Hampshire Daily Gazette just published front-page story, with a photo, about Will Hall receiving an Eli-Lilly gag order after documents about blockbuster schizophrenia drug Zyprexa were leaked anonymously to the internet. The documents are a smoking gun of criminal fraud and illegal marketing.

The Hampshire Daily Gazette just published front-page story, with a photo, about Will Hall receiving an Eli-Lilly gag order after documents about blockbuster schizophrenia drug Zyprexa were leaked anonymously to the internet. The documents are a smoking gun of criminal fraud and illegal marketing.

http://www.freedom-center.org/pdf/1-16-07ActivistGaggedLillyWillHallGazetteSCANNED.pdf

http://snipurl.com/Gazette1_16_07

Contact the Gazette thanking them for covering this issue and asking that the local angle — including forced drugging and resulting diabetes of Northampton residents — be examined.

_________________________________________________________________________
Activist gagged for drug fact leak in Lilly case
BY KIMBERLY ASHTON STAFF WRITER

NORTHAMPTON – A city man who co-founded a mental health advocacy group is among those drug giant Eli Lilly has sought to silence regarding documents leaked about Zyprexa, its bestselling drug for schizophrenia.

Will Hall, a member of the Freedom Center in Northampton – a group often critical of the pharmaceutical industry and that also offers support and holistic alternatives for people with mental illness – is one of 13 people named in a gag order pursued by Lilly.

The order was granted in a federal court in New York Dec. 29 and renewed on Jan. 4. It forbids Hall and others from disseminating or facilitating the dissemination of internal Lilly documents Hall and others say prove that the corporation suppressed information about the side effects of Zyprexa and promoted so-called ‘off-label’ use.

The documents were originally obtained via subpoena by Jim Gottstein, an Alaskan lawyer, as part of a lawsuit involving Zyprexa. Lilly alleges that Gottstein then disseminated the documents to a dozen mental-health activists who are critical of the drug industry, including Hall.

Hall, reached in Portland, Ore., Thursday, where he is working with another mental health advocacy group, said he has seen the documents, and they show that Lilly knew Zyprexa could cause diabetes and that the company pushed the use of the drug for dementia, although it is not approved for such use. Such marketing is illegal.

Lilly strongly denies the accusations. A spokeswoman for the company said questions about Zyprexa are answered at www.zyprexafacts.com. A Lilly press release on the site says media reports have omitted several facts about the drug.

‘From the day that Zyprexa was approved, the labeling provided to physicians identified the potentially clinically significant weight gain that was observed in more than half of all patients treated long-term with Zyprexa, as well as the diabetes-related adverse events observed in clinical trials,’ an online Lilly response states.

In an email response, the Lilly spokeswoman, Carole Puls, wrote, ‘The leaked documents – only a few hundred of the 11 million pages, so far as we can determine – have been carefully selected by the ‘leakers’ to tell a story that the ‘leakers’ want them to tell. These documents do not in any way represent an accurate view of Lilly company strategy or activities. What these individuals are not likely to show you is the millions of other pages of documents demonstrating how Lilly and its employees have worked to improve the lives of people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.’

As to the confidentiality of the documents, she wrote, ‘The United States Supreme Court has held that there is no First Amendment right of access to confidential documents subject to a protective order in discovery.’

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, is now representing the anonymous person who posted the documents online. The current gag order expires Jan. 16.

‘This is a real free speech issue,’ Hall said. ‘It’s this chilling effect of trying to intimidate people from (getting this information).’ He said he is concerned that local mental health professionals are using the drugs without accurate information about it.

A spokeswoman at the American Psychiatric Association said Friday that the group does not comment on specific drugs.

Hall, 40, moved to Northampton in 2000 after periods of hospitalization in New Hampshire and California for what was diagnosed as schizophrenia. He said he was coerced into taking psychiatric drugs and that these drugs didn’t help him. He said he rejects the label of ‘schizophrenic,’ has been drug-free since 1992 and believes that alternative therapies, such as meditation, yoga, acupuncture and a better diet have helped him control what he calls his ‘extreme states of consciousness.’

The Freedom Center, he said, is pro-choice on the issue of whether to take psychiatric drugs. Some of the members feel the drugs have helped them, while others choose not to take drugs, he said.

The results of clinical trials for Lilly products can be found on the company’s online registry at www.lillytrials.com

Icarus staff Will Hall is on a gag order list filed in court by pharmaceutical giant Eli-Lilly, in an effort to stop the spread of leaked documents showing criminal fraud in marketing its blockbuster schizophrenia drug Zyprexa. Read the New York Times story about the growing free speech issue, and also the local Northampton, MA front-page story.

Read a local front page news story in the Hampshire Gazette here: http://www.freedom-center.org/pdf/1-16-07ActivistGaggedLillyWillHallGazetteSCANNED.pdf

It’s day three of this forty year visit with my family in western South Carolina, and I’ve moved on from the carrion-shredded-by-demons stage of my extreme state of consciousness. I’m now in the depersonalized- long-distance-puppet-recieving- command-hallucinations-from-the- end-of-a-tunnel stage. A relative relief. This state I can manage. I might make it to the end of this.

We set off to hike on our family land, my brother our old childhood friend and me. I’m ready to go with the same clothes I wore to dinner the night before, but they’re rummaging around in closets and car trunks to emerge with all kinds of Gear: heavy boots, flannel shirts, a machete, eye protectors, camoflauge utility belt, and a .40 Glock semi-automatic pistol. Where the hell are we going?

I thought we were on a stroll out beyond the back yard, but apparently we are penetrating enemy territory. Red clay, pine trees, kudzu vines. A number of deer blinds, unsure which side of the property line they’re on, this is very important, where the property lines extend and don’t extend and which side you’re on. One of the neighbor kids climbs out of a stand toting a high-powered rifle under his arm, and tells us about killng and eating wild pigs. His truck is enormous. Good for tracking, this clay, mostly deer prints and some rabbit, and what about these, are they wild pig? The brambles are a dire threat, met with machete slices. I’m plowing through these perils, heedless. I start telling them some of my Hawaii stories, volcano climbing and schools of sharks and wild boar scat, trying to get some proportion here, but they’re deliberating about how soon the sun will set and we’d better turn back now, the air is getting colder. We’re half a mile from the interstate and it’s 52 degrees.

Every time I visit South Carolina I feel drafted into a Flannery O’Connor short story, one of the more obscure ones that doesn’t quite hold together but is centered around senseless violence. And inevitably there will be the James Dickey references, the banjo riff from Deliverance. They tell me we are stranded in a sea of lawless macho Confederate illiteracy, threatened with sodomy by faceless deranged rednecks who might have crossed the property line. Am I naive for dismissing their wilderness terror / hillbilly horror as classist media fantasy, and treating things instead like an herb walk? Are we going to make it back home?

Fortunately my biggest fear doesn’t materialize: the glock automatic pistol doesn’t go off accidentally.

Discussion turns to how much security planting a stand of bamboo along the driveway road would offer: more, because you can’t see the house from a passing car? Or less, because, well, you can’t see the house from a passing car? A sick sour smell signals the remains of a deer or other animal left for some reason, and soon we’re staring at a pile of half decayed rib bones a few hundred yards from the house.

Across a gulley and to the wellhouse and when we get back to the yard the wolves and dogs and are yowling and pacing the pen, unaccustomed to people walking the woods on this side. They’re stir crazy from being confined, running back and forth, jumping around to lick our hands, coming close then darting away.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Blair Witch and Deliverance and Red Sammy’s Barbecue: these aren’t the horrors preoccupying me. There are real horrors. Lobo died. Shadow died. Mozart died. Tanza died. They’re slowly dying, the wolves and half wolves and dogs. Two were poisoned by a man who worked on house renovations and was caught stealing. My dad turned him in and he decided to take out his revenge by lacing rat poison on a shank of rotten beef and tossing it over the fence one night. Not a horror monster, just a thief caught and turned vengeful. He and his accomplice girlfriend are doing 5-8 years now. The animals still alive are desperate to escape their tiny pen.

The whole culture surrounding my South Carolina childhood is permeated with death these days. At lunch we meet one of my father’s friends, a photographer who takes a shot of us in front of the christmas tree. A journalist for the local newspaper who covers the crime beat, he’s on his way to photograph a double murder suspect. “A black guy,” he says. The prosecutor will probably seek the death penalty, he says. He and my dad debate the technical definition of serial killer, as opposed to mass murderer: the FBI says it has to be three or more murders over an extended period of time, or else they just qualify as a mass murderer or spree killer. My dad knows these things. He writes about serial killers. If they do seek the death penalty, the photographer says, he will be there to witness it. The problem is you don’t know the exact moment they die. With this lethal injection they just put you to sleep and you can’t tell. I want to be able to see when it happens.

That night we’re off to meet more childhood friends, one of whom just returned from a year and a half rotation in Iraq. He’s an Apache helicopter pilot. (Why do they like to name their weapons after conquered Indian nations?) It’s an old model aircraft, he says, but with modern weapon systems plugged in like computer peripherals. My brother and he start discussing night vision equipment and hi-g turns. Dissociated paralysis is whispering in my ear, so to keep up my end of the conversation I’m trying to turn it into guy geek technology banter. Any TOW missiles, I ask, remembering my wargaming days as a teenager. No, Hellfires. Oh right, no need for wires when you’ve got laser guided. What’s it like when it hits something? It is devastating, just devastating. Big smiles all around. Other weapons? A 30mm Boeing M230 automatic chain gun that fires 625 times a minute. Only carries 1200 rounds, so it runs out of ammunition quickly. A note of disappointment.

I know this is complicated, I say to myself. He also flies medevac ambulance helicopters when he’s back in the US in his civilian job, rushing people to emergency surgeries and delivering transplanted organs. I’m listening and observing, wondering what the human mind like in this role, who are these soldiers who fly multi-million dollar tank killing weapons platforms with such enjoyment and enthusiasm on the other side of the world and then come home to shuttle people across the state for life-saving operations? I’m curious. He describes the display on his helmet that projects onto his face screen, and how he sets the chain gun to match where his head is looking, so he can aim just by looking in the direction of his target. Then my curiousity stops cold: he uses that word, terrifying brew of moral license, hatred, and mind control: insurgents. They know our tactics, he says. They’ll attack ground units and by the time the air support comes in they’ve pulled back and the insurgents are dressed like sheep herders.

It’s christmas and we’re in a remodeled kitchen in western South Carolina talking about killing people.

Saturday finally comes around and yes, my ticket does say today is my flight back north, about sixty million miles across four oceans, over five mountain ranges and across six time zones. My mom, brother and I make it out of the house, out of the driveway, out of the state and into Atlanta to visit another old family friend, a housekeeper who lived with us and helped raise me. Not far enough though: my cell phone rings and it’s dad. Angry. What the hell did you do to the TV? He can’t get the remote to work. The TV remote. i want to attribute this to old age, senility, alzheimers, something, except he’s always been like this, worse actually. The pills he’s always taken don’t help, but the problem is really with him, or who he is. Or who he became, after all he’s been through: child of my grandfather, locked up in the psych system, shooting and being shot in Korea, incarcerated in prisons in different countries. He’s been through a lot. Yes, I can go to that place of understanding and forgiveness, he is after all a survivor of trauma, and I know something, a little, of how trauma can twist even the most sincere love into cruelty and I have empathy. I can go there too easily, so I’m not going to. You need to speak to me respectfully, I say firmly. He hangs up.

And that’s the last I heard from my father, yelling insults at me on the phone during christmas vacation because he can’t get the TV remote to work and he wants to watch the Saddam Hussein execution.

So where does the mullein come in? On our walk through the woods I could find nothing I recognized as medicinal, not a scrap of dandelion or hint of burdock, just red clay and winter brown brush. Then we crossed back up a rise, quickening the pace as if the coming sunset was a strict deadline. Down the other side and stop, there it is, a patch of ten, fifteen, twenty mullein plants, hugging the ground in clumps, still green and fuzzy that way mullein is, despite the occasional frost of South Carolina December. More in one place than I’ve ever seen. I start tearing the choicest leaves for a nice strong tea. My friend is very interested in what I’m up to, asks me what mullein is for, what you do with it, what other herbs he might find around here if he starts looking. I’m going to buy him a medicinal plant guide to the Southeast. Wolf pens and serial killers and apaches and hellfires and tv remotes and all, this is still my home.

After Alaska Attorney Jim Gottstein leaked Eli-Lilly documents about Zyprexa, proving a coverup of illegal practices and drug risks, to the New York Times, Eli-Lilly’s legal hit squad has ben working overtime… Check out zyprexakills.us

Freedom Center organizer Will Hall just received a court order signed by US District Court Judge Hon Brian M. Corgan regarding the Eli-Lilly documents Alaska Attorney Jim Gottstein leaked to the New York Times. The order, dated Dec. 29th, says that the “following individuals who have received documents… are hereby enjoined from further disseminating these documents… injunction requires removal of any such documents posted at any website, and communication of this Order to anyone to whom these documents have already been disseminated…”

You can read the injunction here: http://www.freedom-center.org/pdf/LillyDocsInjunctionOrder12-29-06.pdf

Will Hall is not at liberty to comment on the injunction, but issued the following statement:

“This is the tip of the iceberg; the story here isn’t Eli-Lilly’s medical fraud, which we’ve known about for decades, but that they got caught red handed breaking the law. With its corrupt and criminal behavior Eli-Lilly long ago forfeited any claim to ethical integrity or medical legitimacy. I don’t think the New York Times call for congressional hearings in this scandal goes far enough. We need to realize that it’s a disaster to entrust our health and wellbeing to private corporations, who at the end of the day can only care about stockholder profit. Whether it’s health care scandals, the greenhouse effect, the arms industry, or child poverty, corporate capitalism has proved itself again and again to be at odds with human needs and common sense.

“Whenever we try to get behind the headlines and look at this big picture, we’re told we have to make an either/or choice, between letting corporations like Eli-Lilly totally run amok, or tightening up a little so they get slapped on the wrist every now and then when they get caught. I think the people of the US are smarter than that. It’s time we wake up and connect the dots: health care and the whole US economy are built on a rotten foundation with corporate capitalism. We can address this problem at its roots if we want to. I say we put the executives of Eli-Lilly and the rest of the pharmaceutical mafia in jail where they belong, and get to work building a better economic system.”

To find out more about the growing internet campaign around these documents, go to zyprexakills.us

(do a websearch for zyprexakills — one word, no space — to see how the campaign is spreading)

You can read the background on Lilly’s campaign to use the courts to suppress the Zyprexa documents here:

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec06/Pringle25.htm

Federal express me benzodiazepines.

The entire trip from 7am in Northampton to 5:45pm in Atlanta Georgia crept along grey and shrouded in fog. The brief moment of sunlight at several thousand feet was best wishes from a kind angel soon very very far away.

Two hours in the car wandering up and down Peachtree street: There, there, that was open. No it wasn’t. Let’s turn around. Ok so keep going. Should we go back? I think the Denny’s was open. Look there is Benihana. What about the chinese place. Closed. Ok keep going there’s got to be something in Lennox. I manage to text my queer monk friend Callan in eastern Nevada (she’s doing a retreat with Mormons, but that’s a different story) that reads TRAPPED IN PSYCHOTIC FAMILY VORTEX. DRIVING EMPTY STREETS LOOKING FOR PLACE TO EAT. This is christmas. My amused detachment fades as eight hours without food becomes nine then ten. I start losing it.

By the time we are at a Chinese food-by-the-pound buffet for our christmas dinner I’m in one of my familiar dissociated paralysis states being yelled at by different voices in my head. This time it is all about inhabiting the pauses between sentences, and drowning in the conversation topic, pride of a cousin’s career successes, battering my own pathetic failure of a life. Distant but listening too closely to every spoken detail, which is obviously directed at me and obviously calculated to annihilate me.

It is ridiculous, which is all the more humiliating because I only have myself to blame for my susceptibility to blame, regression of guilt and being guilty at being guilty. It makes no sense why this should be getting to me. No sense why I’m becoming suicidal. No sense why my own values, friends, life, work, interests, ideas have all evaporated and my body has shrunk and I’m Gregor Samsa and maybe I can steal a crumb or two, because I don’t deserve anything.

It occurs to me how rude it is for my dad to invite the three of us to visit, pick us up at the airport, and have no idea or plan about what to do for dinner. Not rude, a trap, a clever passive deniable trap. Have I spotted the first of a whole strategy, and is my silence and freezing the way to escape? Or is this humiliation, of not speaking of not responding, of not being normal, is that the trap too?

A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state. That’s the whole point, Captain.

Back in the car and all I can do is smell everyone around me. I’m beginning to gag. My coping mechanism is the very weird thing that everyone reacts to which then proves that I am indeed this person I am becoming, this familiar mental patient lost soul, stigma ostracized outsider who has lost it. I am not responding to my family’s craziness. I am crazy and my family is responding to me. Did I get that right? My father is now copying my text messaging and sending secret codes out to his backup posse to further prove my own irrelevance, divorce means no longer the real family real kids, a life somewhere else. We are discussing his intellectual property rights infringement lawsuits, and how he cleverly fabricated one of the quotes he attributed to his serial killer biography subject and how it trapped the defendants in his suit. Apparently the mass murderer on the South Carolina death row didn’t quote Friedrich Nietzsche after all, and by claiming he did the screenwriters for CHAOS or WORLDS WORST SERIAL KILLERS or whatever it is are now a slam-dunk plagiarism case taken on contingency.

Janet Leigh is being stalked by a Mexican marijuana and speed gang. Charlton Heston is spelunking the Hall of Records.

I’m not going to make it and on the drive back I just try to render myself unconscious. They are asking me questions from very far away and I am not in control of my own body mind or voice when I don’t answer. I try to call one, two, three, four friends but can’t reach any of them. I’m convinced that anyone else I try to call will try to hurt me. I tell myself if tomorrow things aren’t better I will hitchhike to a hotel and hide out until the plane ride back. The plan is comforting. I collapse onto an old 28 year old mattress in the back bedroom, and as the wolves and dogs locked up for years in the yard pen howl at the crescent moon, I pass out and dream about facillitating a support group and my friend announcing she has kicked heroin.

The next day I manage to eat a bowl of fruit and then spend hours trying to be in whichever one of the rooms in the house that no one else is in, like those numbered tile puzzles where you can only move one tile at a time into the empty space to try to free it so the sequence makes sense. They talk with me but I can’t say anything or make eye contact. I want to eat more but the stench of cat litter is overpowering so I spend the morning cleaning out their boxes which haven’t been emptied in a month. My dad has invited over some people to work in the kitchen so we can’t cook. My brother sleeps until one; I’m jealous.

Dennis Weaver is scaring me.

I manage to kill more time on the internet playing a video game and helping get the word out to the press about leaked Eli-Lilly documents. Still not able to reach any of my friends, or at least the ones I don’t think are trying to hurt me. Or did I try? Then I take a nap. There is no cooking oil that is not rancid so I head to the gas station for Wesson for my falafels. I am using a boxed mix that says it expired in 1999. In the kitchen there are more rounds of terrifying mixed message intrusive boundary family dis-communication. My coping strategies seem more and more like self-immolation.

I’m getting desperate emails and voicemails from up north about various political activist scene crises, and they seem more catastrophic and apocalyptic than they really are. At this point my body is something owned by something else. The schizophrenia factory; that’s why all the research into family communication interpersonal dynamics that excited RD Laing and others got defunded and marginalized in the 1980s: it actually identifies real changeable realities in the world, tries to adjust the world to your madness not your madness to the world. My mind is spread on a cross between invisibility and explosion. I get out to make it to the car to make a phone call on the pretext of finding good cell reception. On the other end one of my poor friend’s voice mail is subjected to a resentful spite-filled paranoid outburst about how because no one cares about me I need to start hiring my friends to comply with my advance directive. I hang up and immediately regret having left this message. My coping strategy for my coping strategy is now compounding guilt upon my guilt. Action creates my inaction; all exits are marked FUTILE.

Charlton Heston is white passing for Latino trying to pass for white.

And then just as Police Captain Hank Quinlan is inevitably going to die in this shadow and evil infested maze of dusty streets and corrupt lawmakers, someone picks up on the other end of the phone. It feels to me like a destructive act, reaching out to my friends who care about me. That is how far my prison has confined my capacity to understand allegiance and love. And I don’t know what to say, but the dark clammy grey mist starts to burn off in the sunlight and warmth of that voice, that face and eyes and humanity from my other life, my real life, my chosen family. I’m not crying or raging or shuddering with any of the emotion numb and buried in me, but some kind of line has been sent down into the well and there is a tug at the other end. Simple words: talk to an ally, take a risk, there is someone there with you. And remember. And accept that it’s ok if this is what happens when you go into this situation. It’s ok.

Back inside a spontaneous gesture of affection manages to come out of me. Then there is a moment so well known from many many many times of collapse before. This time is different, though — I instead snap back and defend myself when disrespected, I demand a different tone of voice than the one I have just been subjected to, so degrading and belittling and familiar, tearing at an old and never healed wound. I snap back instead of collapse. Some kind of thaw? Life animating this corpse? We’ll see. I’m eating junk food, pecan pie, which has put my danger alert on flashing orange, there are men with knives circling all around and I’ve left my clever feints and hand-made armor far away, but the film is starting to be kind of fun, the director’s cut is even better than the other version I have seen, there are more lines and angles and depths and brilliance shining through. That night I dream I am having a hard time walking, stooped over like my father, and there is a flap of unhealed flesh from a scar hanging from my right side, as fragile and easily torn as paper, and it is not bloody and gaping but dry, like molting skin. I think I might survive christmas 2006 after all.

OK so I’m in the land of John Waters, who created the “Come To Baltimore and Be Shocked” bumpersticker as a joke — and the City Council made it the official city motto. Waters is the only public figure I would elect as president with complete confidence, and his Female Trouble taught me everything I needed to know about politics that I didn’t learn listening to Pink Floyd The Wall with headphones over and over again. (Maybe I’m exagerrating — but not by much.) So I feel at home here.

Except that when the subversives find their way into the inner circle, something is up, and when the Outsider Artists (itself a troubling label) get their own museum, you can bet there is a catch somewhere. Like Water’s camp motto that becomes something different when it goes official, Visionary Art strayed from itself when it arrived in a museum.

That’s right, the US has an official national mental patient art museum in Baltimore, sort of: The American Visionary Art Museum — a collection of Outsider or un-trained folk art. Outsider Art got on the art world radar when Jean Dubuffet championed what he called Art Brut after getting turned on to Prinzhorn’s collection and other insane asylum inmate artworks, seeing them as a pure inspired authentic challenge to the assimilated, coopted works of artists following the leads and influences of the art world and economy. And here is where the trouble begins.

No doubt this is a beautiful collection of amazing obsessive, inspired, haunting, whimsical, energetically charged and emotionally compelling art that, at moments, blew my mind. The first moment was dazzling: stepping into the museum to see a giant Icarus statue (!) with mirrored wings, on a nonstop slow twirling descent in the gallery’s main staircase, suspended from a motorized winch down to a jeweled ocean and back again, silently bobbing up and down over and over, while we ambled around the galleries. Nice welcome.

It was, overall, way cool. This art is getting seen; I get to see it; this is good. My thanks to the people who made this place possible, because we’re all enriched by seeing these works. Scrap heap welders, addicts, prophets, mad scientists, claymation maniacs, psych inmates painting on paper plates, the barely/non/super-literate, religious zealots, hermits, obsessives, whirligig cobblers, the brain injured, backyard emperors — all with their obsessions on display, professional art gallery style (though the gallery lighting was crap and much of this should properly be seen in sunlight). This place is fun! Presiding over them all is the ubiquitous Rev. Howard Finster, his enamel paint on woodscrap childlike angel greeting you right before you discover Icarus. (Finster’s work was immortalized as a Talking Heads album cover and he is sort of the patron saint of American outsider artists, deservedly so if you saw, as I was blessed to see, his overwhelming one-man museum show or visited his alternate reality Paradise Garden in Georgia or even just watched his trickster TV appearance with Johnny Carson).

Again and again, as you check out the matchstick furniture and the distorted perspective watercolor paintings and the welded silverware and the rest of the chaotic whatever-is-near-at-hand-is-art relentlessness of it all, you get the feeling of, Hey, I can make this! Which you probably can’t, or maybe you can and will someday, but that is a really good, and rare, message for people to get from an art museum — Maybe I can be an artist too. They even have a whole studio for the public where they offer artmaking workshops — free (though I think it is a mistake that belies their priorities that the museum website has almost zero images of the art). So overall, way cool.

But there is still this weird feeling that Something Is Up with this whole Outsider Artist thing. The museum uses the term ‘visionary artist,’ which is presumably an update of Outsider Artist term to clarify what it is, and is not. Calling it folk art would be close – except that these works don’t come out of any tradition (maybe Independent Folk Art would be more accurate.) The artists are self-taught and free of art school / art market guidance (which was what drew Dubuffet to them and is stil the defining characteristic). A lot of them were told by God to make robots or paint doors or construct dioramas or whatever — hence Visionary Artist. Many of them offer no explanation of why they make what they make (didactic panels by the works give biographies, usually establishing some True Outsider cred — such as the painter who lost almost all their work because of the psych ward where they lived had policies to destroy everything).

Even grooving on all the funny, freaky, spooky, gorgeous and mysterious stuff in the museum, I was still acutely aware of the way in which this is less a collection of art on its merits and more about what is on the minds of art collectors and critics. Like the Noble Savage of new age religions, Outsider Art is defined and then celebrated for supposedly being the idealized opposite of what the Insider Art world wants to escape — itself. Being at this museum is ultimately just what I find disturbing about all art museums — an expression of the (elite-club dominated) art marketplace talking with itself about itself and holding it all up as some kind of natural, apolitical definition of Art. And if we disagree or feel strange, well, obviously we just don’t understand.

Someday someone will write a real history of these artists and discover that many actually did have some art training, did actually care about what other people thought about their work, were trying to convey something intentional (not just pure spontaneity), did have doubts and self-criticism amidst their inspiration, did have aesthetic values, did have artistic influences and models, were ambitious — that they were, actually, a lot like the Insider Artists that they are supposedly so different from. And being an Insider Artist will also someday be recognized as sharing a lot more of the madness, inspiration, blind spontaneity and raw playful childlike innocence supposedly the property of the Outsiders. The distinction between Insider and Outsider artists, or Trained and Untrained, or whatever opposition you want to make, will look a lot less self-evident. The distinction between Insider and Outsider Artists themselves will be seen for what it is — an expression of decisions made by art critics, museums, and collectors to promote one artist over another, to value one and ignore another, to deem one as having ‘authenticity’ and the other not. (I am thinking about an artist friend who has been multiply hospitalized for intense mad breakdowns, but couldn’t get an Outsider Art program to help her with her work because she has been to art school and has had her work shown in galleries already.) Once we get honest about this and include it front and center and not hide it behind trustee meetings and curator planning sessions, we can get on with the real issue, which is discovering and celebrating art on its merits and spirit, not on some kind of Outsider Art credentials of authenticity. After all, isn’t it an insult to tell a novelist they wrote a great Black novel or Women’s novel — trapping them in a subcategory that keeps them down just as it claims to lift them up?

It is the mystery of the commodity, of class, of sovereignty and status that gives one object what Walter Benjamin called an “aura” and doesn’t give it to another. Many of us might pass any of these artworks on a sidewalk and not see their beauty and amazingness. Put it into a museum context, surrounded with the ritual and furnishings of Art, and it becomes something different. For Outsider or Visionary Arts, part of that aura is the biography behind the artists’ otherness, bestowed with added value through meaning. Once we learn the artist is a ‘schizophrenic’ we see the art differently. Once it is in a museum and given Real Art status, we see it differently. Why, exactly? Who decides? And doesn’t it become patronizing to have one class of art judged on its merits and another class judged on the exotic biography of the artist? (Hey, maybe I should market myself as a schizophrenic writer! Oh wait…)

Because that is the problem here: emphasizing the artist’s behind-the-work weirdness, even in a positive romanticixing way, can easily become just another form of stigma. The typical photo of an Outsider Artist conveys some bent, low-class, disturbed, challenged or deranged stereotype, a twisted face in front of a trailer park or matted hair and smeared shirts with an I’m Different posture and expression. The museum website just wouldn’t fly as an Outsider Artist website if the artist photo looked, well, normal (same for images of the ‘mentally ill’ in pop culture — no relation to reality, just stereotypes). It has to look Exotic, because, well, we know Those People are different, right? Just like you don’t see sunglasses and walkmans in the photos of the True Indigenous People, you don’t see what these artists really look like unless they fit the Authentic criteria — criteria which really exist nowhere but in the minds and expectations of the critics/curators/dealers and the consumer museumgoers they train.

Ultimately judging that someone is a True Outsider Artist means a whole set of stereotypes come out of the mind of the art critic or curator who is doing the judging. And since those minds are full of all kinds of prejudice and misinformation (mental illness being a disease is a big one, or that people who have psychotic experiences are totally different than you or I and only found in hospitals or homeless shelters rather than, well, on the editorial boards of art journals and sitting on curatorial committees), this Other-ing of these artists reinforces stigma. It turns our identities as people who go through madness, visions, or whatever into rigid identities defined by other people, by people with the power to influence us, rather than letting our identies be more messy and ambiguous, constantly surprising and confounding expectations. Who an artist is, or who a mad person is or who a woman is or who a black person is, defies expectations and is ultimately individual and unique, not reflecting some stereotype. Yes there are commonalities and oppressions shared by groups, yes there is institutonal and historical treatment of groups, but when you meet an individual you’d better not let your understanding of those commonalities get in the way of the individual before you — or you are being oppressive.

What I would like to see is openness and transparency about these discussions and debates and all the art journal, critic, and dealer politics they imply about deciding who’s a Visionary Artist: Who Gets In and Who Gets Ignored (and there are tons and tons of brilliant artists every bit as amazing as the ones in this museum who never make it into official art world attention). Because isn’t being a Visionary Artist about marketing and what sells, and what sells is weird exotic stereotyped Others, and shouldn’t we be questioning this?

In general the museum has good politics — one of the shows was all about animals, including good info on animal rights and why eating meat is a bad idea. But the artist descriptions keep telling us this or that artist has “Bipolar Disease” or “Schizophrenia Disease,” reinforcing the whole These Are People Totally Unlike Us Normal People. Yes it’s great to see the positive side of the downtrodden and the suffering and to acknowledge that creativity sometimes goes along with madness, but you are still creating a freak show with the distinctions between normal and diseased people. It’s like the Special Olympics for mad and illiterate artists – yes let’s give people left out access to the center stage, but let’s not let it be an exercise in pity, paternalism, and sentimentality for the freaks. Poverty,madness, isolation — the museum’s fascination in this risks turning the whole experience into a carnival attraction — a polite, upper class, academic, educated circus.

And what more proof could you need than this: they actually have chimpanzee art up alongside the rest of the ‘outsider art,’ on the same walls as mental patient painters and backyard junk-pile illiterate sculptors . That’s right, paintings made by chimps in captivity. Beautiful abstract finger paintings that are a marvel to look at, for sure. And by all means, it’s a great idea, and let’s get animals, bacteria, plants, insects, and everything else making and displaying art. But think about that: Isn’t that the ultmate Outside Artist: in their own world, unreachable, can’t speak, totally not like us — an object to be presented and bought and sold, a pet in captivity, not a subject to be met and discussed with and encountered as an equal, someone who fundamentally shares our humanity and is not Other? Isn’t that the ultimate message here: Outside Artists aren’t really — human? Aren’t painting chimps and obsessive hermit mental patients the same from this view: innocent, pure, exotic, unlike Us — everything those Insider Artists aren’t and secretly romantically long to be? And aren’t chimpanzees and mental patients and illiterate backyard junk pile sculptors as a result free to be used like mute commodities, any way the Insiders please?

Yes there is a true and inspired artistic impulse. Yes it is beyond art school, art markets, or folk art traditions, yes anyone can do it and yes madness and religious inspiration can drive it and yes it is great to get unschooled inspired artists up on display for the world to see and so they can even earn some money from their art. But somehow all that becomes something different when the Insider Artists and curators and museum directors try to fit it into a traditional museum. The museum, with its power, marketing, money, control, and elitism, is the very art world Outsder Art was trying to leave behind.