Two Hemispheres

Reviewed by Lorette C. Luzajic (LiteraryAddict.wordpress.com - June 17, 2008)

There's nothing more fascinating than madness. Once, I wondered how a mind could come unhinged: now, with a bit of firsthand experience and a few decades' observations, I know everybody's crazy.

Nadine McInnis shares this fascination, and reveals her own melancholic illness in Two Hemispheres, an exquisite collection of poems from Brick Books.

That artists write poetry about their depression is nothing new: the hurt heart is all of literature. But the elegant and insightful way the poet weaves her own experience of despair into deeply intuitive conjecture of others' madness is nothing short of brilliant.

Irrevocably moved by mid-1800s portraits of madwomen of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, but left with meagre or nonexistent accounts of their cases, McInnis delves into the recesses of her own imagination to respond to the photographs. Reprinted here, the sepia images and accompanying imagination of their conditions resurrect from erasure these asylum ghosts.

The poet eloquently fuses her journey with the forgotten ones, showing the mind's depth and vigor as equal to its fragility. The dusty halls of history come alive: be transported from the threshold of your own insanity into another era, one where lunatics wander asylum gardens. Recognize your own circle within these madhouse walls- one woman fancies herself royalty, with blood "cool/ and untroubled and blue, blue as heaven." Another is terrified of damnation; one refuses to eat; another thinks they're trying to poison her. These patients, "rescued from indigence," mirror something of my day-to-day life, despite the Victorian dresses.

There's nothing clear in our still-relevant muddle to understand the human mind and its connection to reality, whatever that is. Ages of pharmacology, of religious charity, of the sex-obsessed dream analysis of cocaine-addled Dr. Freud; the shamanistic mythologies of primeval and remote peoples, the terrifying devices and restraints, the hazy restful dreams of convalescence or abusive therapists, the deciphering of the voices of angels, the casting out of demons; the equally persuasive evidences that addiction is organic and spiritual in nature- and still we have nothing but a few helpless maps of dendrites and synapses, as if this could help us connect the dots between the two hemispheres of the brain.

Miasma, mania, catalepsy, electrodes- McInnis peers for us through the disconcerting lens of mental illness's language, and languishes there, finding a place for herself and her Victorian lunatic friends that does not cover nor cower. We glimpse revelations of her own struggle through darkness, and into dawn.

Way back when the Titanic stormed back into popularity, the supremely saccharine qualities of the film were redeemed when Rose muttered dramatically this truth: "a woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets."

Perhaps mysteries are not always meant to be solved - but instead to be revealed in small increments worthy of contemplation. These crazy ladies seem to revel in their brief moment of sepia stardom: their eyes, at turns hopeless, at turns defiant, at turns feisty or ribald, challenge the absence of factual case histories or dry statistics. Something of their deep ocean is revealed here. McInnis's uncanny ability to disappear and let these other voices through is, ironically, what makes her own stories more compelling. Whether the secrets imagined are true or not is irrelevant- Salmond Rushdie recently said that what sets humans apart from other animals is our curious habit of telling stories to make meaning out of our lives.

Crazy people make stuff up, but isn't mythology all about the universality of mystery? "True or false" may have no more merit than those ubiquitous but inanimate statistics we sadly live by. Thankfully, McInnis masterfully shows us that the meaning of life just might be the flickering dark/light interior of our imagination. That very same place inside may be the source of our disconnection and our illness, but it is also the source of our healing and recovery.