Of Visionaries and Seers: My Valerie Solanas

This weekend, I saw I Shot Andy Warhol, a biopic about Valerie Solanas, an early feminist and a genius.

I’ve been looking at Google search results for the past hour and a half, trying to find something positive about her from a feminist angle, and all I find are third-wavers finger-wagging about what can go wrong if you don’t “check” feminism. What can go wrong is sitting right here, typing away — I’m an example of unchecked feminism. I still see men as a class some of the time and I’m capable of expressing my hatred of that class, as one that oppresses mine. That shocks some people, which absolutely breaks my heart.

I lie. I did find one positive article from the New Statesman. I’d been thinking of words for what I thought Valerie was – a prophet, a seer. And this article calls her clairvoyant. Indeed she was.

Many call her insane. Some settle for merely disturbed. I don’t know what she was, beyond being smart and insightful as hell – and fully herself.

I have ever been fascinated by mad geniuses, people who are so smart, they complete the circle and the boundaries between the real and the not-real begin to blur. My own family contains various mad geniuses. A couple of them obtained Ph.D.’s in Math and Physics before yielding their sanity. One was a linguistic genius – he knew some 15 languages, despite little formal education. I met him once – homeless and tragic, he told me about his long-standing relationships with various famous international politicians. One Rhodes Scholar is still sane, surprisingly.

My mother would tell me about these mad geniuses in hushed tones, never critical or derisory of them, even though one and all had abandoned Allah somewhere along the way. She saw God in them, as women of a certain spiritual bent are wont to see divinity in insanity. And she imparted that reverence to me.

I felt I would fall short of my wish to be brilliant if I didn’t develop symptoms of insanity. For me, brilliance and insanity were forever linked, not least because there is some truth to that — there is a sort of brilliance that cannot exist in sanity. There are many instances of brilliance that look like insanity only because they are so far ahead of their times. And there is a power in not being bound by reality in the consideration of ideas. After all, it’s only by disregarding what is that we can freely create what could be, what might be, and nobody disregards what is so well as the insane.

So I wished desperately to be insane. I scared my brother by lying about disappearing limbs and sudden hallucinations. In my early teens, I wore black and wrote desperately horrendous poetry. I never developed even depression, and that despite my artistic temperament.

I outgrew all that, thankfully, and no longer wish to actually be mad. It is scary and not half as much fun as it seems to an imaginative and rebellious child. But I still covet its brilliance, that touch of the divine that can be as grotesque as it can be breathtakingly beautiful.

The tragedy of mad genius is so often, the madness overshadows the genius, even if the madness is mild, merely suspected. The flashes of brilliance, the rare insight, that only going around the bend yields, is spurned and lost because it is tainted. Which is too bad, because these sparks of divinity are off-putting, they are wrong, they are strange, they are shocking, and they are spectacularly right.

I am not sure, never sure, of what the taint is, if there even is a taint. I don’t know that I believe in calling these seers and visionaries mad. But I can’t pretend they are ordinary. They are different. Tainted, if you will, but to me, that is only a reason to pay more attention to what they have to say because they will always see what I will not see, blinded by conventions as I am, and they will be themselves more fully than I will ever be, trapped by civilization as I am.

I have never been afraid of the taint… fascinated instead by the bottomless gaze of those who see more, farther, deeper than I’ll ever see, who see through me and tell me, with the cunning of an old woman and the innocence of a child, what they know.

Today, one such stopped telling us what she knows. I will miss her.