Schizophrenia Poetic Quotes

Eldridge misunderstood the white radical movement. He exploited their alienation and encouraged young whites to think of themselves as “bad” Blacks, thus driving them ever further away from their own community. At the same time, he seduced young Blacks into picturing themselves as bohemian expatriates from middle-class “Babylon” (as he poetically but mistakenly analogized superindustrial America). So we became temporarily alien to the Black community, while the white radicals were plunged deeper into their peculiar identity crisis. Cleaver’s genius for political and cultural schizophrenia infected us all, Black and white, and the opportunity was missed for youth of both races to express and make concrete their authentic underlying solidarity and love. This still remains to be done.

Schizophrenia’s a reasonable reaction to an unreasonable society.” It’s great on paper. Poetic, noble, etc. But if you happen to be a schizophrenic, it’s got some not-so-cheery implications… One of R.D.’s worst sins is how blithely and misleadingly he glides over the suffering involved… Pulling off a revolution and ushering in a new era in which truth and beauty reign triumphant seems unlikely when you’re having trouble brushing your teeth or even walking.

Now if we turn to the Book of Revelation—which we saw as a cause of offense in its apparent celebration of a God of violence—we have to say in all honesty that it is in fact a nonviolent New Testament writing, and profoundly so. ‘The Lamb’ is the general symbolic name given to Jesus in the book, mentioned 29 times, an image of nonviolence and the book’s undisputed hero. The essence of the Lamb is not to use violence. When we first hear of it is ‘standing as if it had been slaughtered’ (5:6): it does not fight, it is slaughtered, and it continues exactly ‘as if it were something slaughtered (i.e. it does not lose this identity). Furthermore its followers do not fight, they also are killed. We learn that the Lamb holds the key to human history, opening its seals to reveal its purpose and meaning, including its intense inner violence. The Lamb is able to do this because it represents a completely different human / divine way of responding, other than that of violence. At the same time, precisely because of this revelation, all hell (literally) breaks out around the Lamb. The old world system—the Beast—does not remain indifferent to the introduction of a new way and the absolute challenge it makes, but reacts with continually redoubled violence. At the end of the book there is a final battle when the Beast and the kings of the earth with their armies are all slain by a figure called the Word of God, by the sword which comes from his mouth. But directly afterwards the new earth and the city of the Lamb welcome and heal these very kings and nations which have just been slain! The only figures not to be restored are the Beast and its prophet which represent the system of violence, the imperial order with its ideological apparatus of cult and worship. No doubt there is a powerful tonality of anger running through the book, against the oppression and murder that the Christian communities were then experiencing at the hands of the Roman Empire. And there is pretty clearly a sense of emotional release offered by the images of destruction and vengeance unleashed against the forces of oppression. But the final structure of the book is redemptive and life-giving, and that has to be admitted in any honest assessment. The duality then is not between a vengeful God and a gentle Jesus, or an initially gentle Jesus and then a violent one, but between an actual world and culture of violence and a core message of forgiveness and nonviolence. The early Christians were sorely oppressed by the former and seeking desperately to hang on to the latter. If they use language and symbolism derived from the former to restore hope in the substance of the latter then the tension is literary and poetic, rather than two moods or identities of God. The book of Revelation was intended to have a cathartic effect on emotion, in order that the Christians who read or heard it could arrive, in their minds and hearts, at the transformed perspective where they welcomed and blessed their enemies. In other words it was and is intended to be therapeutic.3 In contrast the split between Jesus and a God of punishment—which came to full growth in the Middle Ages—is ontological, and can only lead to a fundamental division in the Christian soul, with eternal love on the one hand, and eternal violence on the other. In other words, a spiritual schizophrenia. This