Ethics and Madness in Beowulf

Okay, interesting fact time!.

One of the problematic aspects of translating Beowulf is the use of ambiguous words whose clear definition is not known. One of these words is 'æglæca', a noun which has connotations of monstrousness, vileness, or hostility. This, however, is complicated by the fact that it is used at various points to describe not only every one of the monsters Beowulf fights, but Beowulf himself. Repeatedly. Indeed, at one point Beowulf and the dragon he is fighting are described together using the plural form 'æglæcean'.

That the authoritative translation of Beowulf (by Frederick Klaeber) makes the interesting choice of translating the word differently depending on to whom it is applied - 'warrior'/'hero' for Beowulf, 'monster'/'demon'/'fiend' for Grendel or Grendel's mother, 'wretch'/'monstrous woman' for æglæcwif (a feminine form used for Grendel's mother) - does not simplify matters.

Now, this is already interesting in the implication of considerably more moral awareness and complexity to the Anglo-Saxons than is normally attributed, but I find Doreen Gillam's analysis particularly thought-provoking. She argues that the term is used to imply "supernatural," "unnatural" or even "inhuman" characteristics, as well as hostility towards other creatures: "Beowulf, the champion of men against monsters, is almost inhuman himself. [Aglæca/æglæca] epitomises, in one word, the altogether exceptional nature of the dragon fight. Beowulf, the champion of good, the 'monster' amongst men, challenges the traditional incarnation of evil, the Dragon: æglæca meets æglæcan."

In other words, it's possible that what we have is a legitimate Anglo-Saxon word that translates with the vernacular meaning of 'psycho'! :D

Balance Slays the Demon - Poets of the Fall

Deep in the ocean of darkness, in the mirror of light, balance becomes a stranger... and in your fantasies, he rides a storm on your peace. Beyond the shadows he settled for more. There is a miracle illuminated.

Deep in the ocean of darkness, in the mirror of light, balance becomes a stranger
And in your fantasies, he rides a storm on your peace - wake up and smell the danger

Ever the light casts a shadow, ever the night springs from the light

In the end, it's never just the light you need,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
In the end, it's never just the dark you seek,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
Find the peace

Beyond the lake he called home, lies a deeper darker ocean green.

Like an evil twin, feel it scratching within,
Like an insane sovereign ranger,
And his beautiful face with his leathery lace,
So can't you see the play he's staging?

Ever the light casts a shadow, ever the night springs from the light

In the end, it's never just the light you need,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
In the end, it's never just the dark you seek,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
Find the peace

yranidrO dellac ,nwot rehtona ni ,niaga neppah lliw tI

In the end, it's never just the light you need,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
In the end, it's never just the dark you seek,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
Find the peace

Screaming, new darkness descends on this frail frame, I drown in fathomless black space. Will I never scratch the depths of this domain? I see not, yet nothing could be worse then the shades my mind calls herein, alone, in my own Wake the unravelling of reasons schemed.

Sleep - Poets of the Fall

Hear your heartbeat
Beat a frantic pace
And it's not even 7 AM

You're feeling the rush
Of anguish settling
You cannot help showing them in.

Hurry up then,
Or you'll fall behind and
They will take control of you

And you need to heal
The hurt behind your eyes
Fickle words crowding your mind

So...
Sleep, sugar, let your dreams flood in,
Like waves of sweet fire, you're safe within
Sleep, sweetie, let your floods come rushing in,
And carry you over to a new morning
Try as you might
You try to give it up
Seems to be holding on fast

Its hand in your hand,
A shadow over you,
A beggar for soul in your face

Still it don't matter
If you won't listen,
If you won't let them follow you

You just need to heal,
Make good all your lies -
Move on and don't look behind

Day after day
Fickle visions
Messing with your head
Fickle visions
Sleeping in your bed,
Messing with your head
Fickle visions
Fickle visions

What Good This Deafness? - Trans-Siberian Orchestra

It's a pretty pathetic state of affairs when I can't even be bothered to post a song to think about in a week.



[From the shadows a beautiful spirit, Fate, and her deformed dwarf son, Twist, emerge to inform Beethoven of what he has already deeply suspected, that this is to be his last night on earth. They are accompanied by numerous spirits and ghosts from his past.]

[With each successive crack of lightning the spirits move closer and eventually Beethoven finds their distraction unbearable.]

Beethoven:
What good this deafness, when my whole life I have dread?
What good this deafness, with these voices in my head?
What good this deafness, when this prattle I must hear?
If I were blind, I'm sure they wouldn't disappear!

Twist:
Do you really want to believe what you're saying?
Do you really want to be here alone?
Have I interrupted a moment of praying?
While your life's decaying -
Your sins, are they weighing?
While you've been carving your stone...
All on your own?

Do you really want to sit here in silence?
Could it be that brooding is... part of your art?
Is it an extension of artistic license?
A moving defiance,
Of all of life's tyrants!
While you've been searching your heart...
...Alone? :)
...With us. :D
...In the dark! 8D

[Beethoven implores the spirits to leave him alone, but Twist tells him that as shadows they only exist by the light that Beethoven's life has cast and as that light is fading, it is only natural that they should cling to its last moments of illumination. As the clock strikes midnight their conversation is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of Mephistopheles. His presence causes all the other spirits to shrink silently back to the corners of the room...]

Versus Society

I'm sorry, I've had very little time to continue my posts lately and this may continue into next week. In lieu of a proper post, I'd like to leave you with some examples of what I mentioned briefly last time.
Here are some historical instances when a behaviour was diagnosed as a psychiatric disorder based principally on the Deviance criteria, of whether an individual behaves in accordance with their society. Most of these have either been formally overturned by the DSM or ICD or both, or are controversial while they remain documented.

• Hysteria
• Drapetomania and Dysaethesia Aethiopica
  
• Sluggish Schizophrenia, which I learned of recently in The Secret History of Moscow, a fascinating urban fantasy by Ekaterina Sedia. (Also refer to Punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union.)
• Hospitalism, in which the deaths of infants due to the failures of hospital care were essentially attributed to suicidal depression in the infant
• Imbecility
  
• General Paresis
  
• Homosexuality
  
• Excited Delirium
• Neurasthenia
  

And yes, it is possible that such disorders continue to exist as defined by modern psychiatry as well. It's worth thinking about the various personality disorders, which are essentially various personality types which the patient extends to the point of disorder; or Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which if it were regularly diagnosed in adults and not just children could easily be abused for political purposes. It's also worth considering whether this may be the case for many other more stereotypical and more 'obvious' mental ailments for which deviance is the most prominent diagnostic criterion.

The Psychology of the Mundane

Congratulations. You are, most likely, not crazy.

The reason I feel comfortable stating this is simple. Insanity is, ultimately, a (non-quantitative) measure of normalcy based around how well a person is able to interact with other people around them. It can have a variety of causes, ranging from the individual's genetic heritage to chemical imbalances derived from their environment, to how they understand and behave toward their own personal history. Psychopathologists and abnormal psychologists have developed a variety of approaches to studying, explaining, and treating such problems, appropriate to the individual problems as they are discovered and recognized, but because of the diversity of the field and the nature of the problem it's difficult to speak of as a whole. How do you distinguish someone with actual mental problems from someone who's just rather strange?

To address this issue, four basic questions are used to determine whether a person is insane:

• Deviance: Are the person's thoughts, emotions, or behavior typical of their culture? (Note the specificity of 'their' culture. This is not used to condemn an entire culture or subculture that deviates from the rest of society; it's been a huge problem historically, as I'm sure you can imagine.)
• Distress: Is the person troubled or deeply emotionally affected by the way they think and act? Do they feel in control of themselves?
• Dysfunction: Is the person impaired in their ability to survive? Can they get by in life on a day-to-day basis?
• Danger: Is the person prone to violent or injurious behavior, to themselves or to others?

The vast majority of humanity is self-organized into social groups that promote their own utility and well-being, and most of those people who aren't have physical conditions or circumstances that prevent them from doing so. Therefore, most human beings are, by definition, not crazy. That probably includes you, no matter how really angry or lonely or loopy or rebellious or unsympathetic you've felt recently - if the biggest obstacle to obtaining everything you want in life is the unfair perversity of the cosmos, you're not insane.

So, if you're one of those people, congratulations. You're adapted to society. You're normal enough to get by. You're not less special. You're better off.

Okay. Now flip the coin over and stare at the other side.

If insanity doesn't mean a lot of things you thought it did, the same is true of sanity. Sanity doesn't mean you know what you're doing. Sanity doesn't mean your beliefs and thought processes are true to reality. Sanity doesn't mean you're rational. Sanity doesn't mean you understand. Sanity means you're adapted to society and you're normal enough to get by.

Society is a vast and amorphous beast, a picture puzzle where the pieces are constantly moving and being joined to other pieces and all kinds of different pictures can be created from largely the same pieces... a piece that is considered insane in one particular subset of society may be perfectly well-adjusted to another. And then we could consider phenomena like hallucinations in the sane which 10% of healthy, sane individuals will experience at least once in their lifetimes, despite being almost universally associate with insanity in the popular mindset.

But more importantly than any of that, as far as I'm concerned, is the sticky ethical morass of whether being well-adjusted to human society is in itself a good thing. There is a long, long list of psychological observations demonstrating that human beings do not think clearly or reasonably, do not understand the world around them, do not understand each other, and even do not understand themselves... when you think you have a pretty good understanding of it all, and so does everyone else. It's called cognitive bias.

The Colour of Insanity

Two excellent writers I follow have been independently writing on the same subject: Kyle (A Deeper, Darker Ocean Green), in Psychopath, and Nixie (Musings from the Well), in an entire series (!) called Disturbing the Disturbed. Both would like you to know that you are not a psychologist, you don't actually know what the signs of mental illness are because everything you've heard about them is the second-hand grossly-oversimplified theme park version, and, basically, you just don't know enough facts yet for your self-diagnosis to be worth sixpence.

Go on, go and read. They are fascinating. Detailed. And right.

Don't fret, though. You're not less special because you're not crazy. In fact, you already have enough of your own psychological problems to get in the way of accurately understanding yourself and the world around you without having to claim psychological and emotional disorders as well!

So, next week, we get to talk about normal psychology and cognitive biases.