Scared and scary animals

Robert Crumb, documentary, 1994

Thought I knew about psychiatric disorders. Unexpectedly I learned something new from the movie, which was either not explicitly described in textbooks or I had missed completely by ignorance, which is that afflicted individuals also have very dysfunctional sexuality. Shouldn't have been a surprise; I just didn't think about it.

It takes someone like R Crumb, with a rare combination of acute personal experiences, a daring (and barely functional) personality and amazing artistic skills, to illustrate and bring this dark side to light. And he brought along his even sicker brothers (his two sisters refused the interview). Their lives are simply tragic, trapped in their scared but also scary animalistic shells. That R Crumb has "survived" and his art recognized is no less than a miracle.

What do I have to say? That life is simple complex? that life is not always beautiful? That there is so much more to life than one is willing to explore, even at the individual level? Well, feel like adding a couple of feathers to a heavy dying bird.

(I had been puzzled by Kafka's Metamorphosis until I watched Crumb. Kafka's Samsa turned out to be a "milder" case of the same impairing disorder).