The Invalid Mind
Masson, Thomas L.
436 THE INVALID MIND By THOMAS L. MASSON AS THE mind is one of those elastic abstractions assumed to be like some sort of vapor, which "floats about in the interstices of the nervous system, we...
...These it loves to change, so that one day it will be labeled psychology, another music, another art, etc...
...for his devastations are too evident...
...Or even if you could send for an ambulance and have him carted off to the hospital I No matter where you go, there he is, inside of you, sitting up in bed calling for entertainment or adulterated foods (tabloids...
...For the philosophers have also taught us that when we are trying to describe an invisible thing we can take as many liberties as we like, and use any material object to convey our meaning...
...You cannot even trust him when you are asleep, for at any moment he may wake up and tell you what a dream he has had...
...It is proper now for me to observe, and to impress upon everyone, that just because a thing is invisible, doesn't mean that it is any less real...
...Its success was tried out in factory and laboratory before it got it...
...When you see anything, it isn't there...
...It adores cosmetics, make-up preparations, the latest odors—and is particularly fond of wearing masks...
...It thinks it thinks...
...There is no use telling him what a nuisance he is...
...If you request one of them to show you the way to go anywhere, he will sink back in his pillows and tell you to consult a guidebook...
...We may not be able to do anything more than fancy it as a kind of personal cloud that contracts and expands inside of us—makes our heart beat faster, catches ideas as they float by, and makes us believe we see and hear things...
...and likewise it has a kind of method of being occasionally joyful...
...Reason, which at one time was supposed to sit on a throne in the mind, long ago abdicated in favor of a republic of anodynes...
...How can you tell an invalid mind...
...Yet I timidly suggest that the mind may not be any such thing as all this...
...He must, however, be asleep more than half the time, judging by the wild things that creep in and raise hob...
...Yet the best way to know it, or to think we do, is, after all, the way of all invalids—by symptoms...
...How many times do you wish you could sound the fire alarm and put him out...
...Not only have they a wholesome, natural curiosity about everything, but they love to exert themselves, just for the joy of exercise and life, for the growing feeling of self-reliance and service...
...Poets who have passed more than eight hours a day in consorting with their minds have exclaimed, "My mind to me a kingdom is...
...As for any invalid, the worst of it is (especially if he is a blood relation like one's mind) you cannot get rid of him...
...Behind the mask, the invalid mind takes catnaps and eats nut sundaes...
...Even an invalid, however, can be tolerated and enjoyed and kept in his place—disciplined to depend upon his own interior resources...
...Also, it may be, I trust, tactfully observed that an invalid mind which floats about inside of an imposing personality, may be cunning enough in its invalidism to use that personality as a kind of screen to mask its own inferiority...
...it is, apparently, the only thing which is there...
...And so we can picture the mind as anything we want to, so long as we can come thus to feel what it is...
...Not so the mind, He depends upon outsiders for all supplies, and pays only with renewed demands...
...It lies peevishly upon this Procrustean bed of misinformation and varies its cries from anodyne to anodyne...
...Dear me, on the contrary...
...When you don't see it, its reality is proved...
...a keeper of sorts, dwelling intermittently in an improvised porter's lodge...
...The curious part is that the mind does not seem to know this...
...If you ask it to dress itself in simple clothing, it will lie back and pant at the idea...
...The body, after all, is merely an assembled mass of stage properties which go to make up the outward personality...
...The philosophers have set us right in that respect...
...436 THE INVALID MIND By THOMAS L. MASSON AS THE mind is one of those elastic abstractions assumed to be like some sort of vapor, which "floats about in the interstices of the nervous system, we are, perhaps, too likely to think of it as without any identity...
...Here again, however, I must do some more explaining...
...We may not be able to define the mind, but what of that...
...It grows more restless by what it is fed upon, and if you quiet it with a divorce-court proceeding, immediately demands another...
...It has to be fed with pap and gruel, and petted and cajoled and doped...
...And as weak and miserable and restless and peevish as he may be, it is your job to keep him bolstered up in bed, and personally and constantly dance attendance upon him...
...In various ways...
...One way is that it succeeds at everything...
...and there are best-seller sprays—art and music sprays—sprays for each and every cult...
...who sleep away the days without annoyance to others, unfortunately the mind—which is ready to imitate almost anything—refuses to follow this example...
...A beginning mind, say two or three years of age, will actually cut up a sawdust doll to find out at first hand what is inside...
...The rule is simple—never be in any doubt about anything you cannot see...
...As this is a painful subject, however, I shall pursue it no further...
...And when your mind is tired and sick and worn out, then you must realize that you have an invalid on your hands...
...Having been brought up from infancy on text-books, canned music, chromo-art, tabloid news, and police reports, it reflects every symptom of the universal malady called civilization...
...That our minds of today are all chronic invalids must be evident to anyone...
...That only serves to make him worse...
...and have used similar expressions to show that the mind may be a domain in which one can wander about and pick daisies and sunflowers...
...It must not be thought that the metaphor I have used for convenience, of the mind lolling in bed, etc., is literally true...
...That proves that it is one...
...Any course of instruction or recreation which the mind wishes to know about, is thus injected into it by a specialist...
...The curious thing is that all minds, when they start out in life, have no intention of becoming invalids...
...And I suppose that the ego, as we have come to term it, is the sole proprietary inhabitant of the mind...
...Thus a mean little under-nourished mind, incapable of taking words of more than one syllable, may be skulking inside of a sky-scraping body...
...Whatever it was in times past, when everybody had to work for a living, the mind is now but little better than an invalid...
...If these invalid minds of ours indeed wish to be informed about anything, they ring for the nurse, who may be an ego dolled up for the service, and ask to have it sprayed into them...
...It is also a matter of common evidence that the more robust the body that holds it, the greater may be the invalid inside...
...We know it can suffer, or at least we take an ostentatious pride in believing that it can...
...or say an authors' reading...
...Begin with a murder trial a week, and it demands one every day...
...Not only is this true, but they scorn help...
...Predigested culture is the order of the day and night...
...It is not unusual, for instance, for an entire audience of invalid minds to be gathered together under one roof, as at a movie performance...
...He is the one insistent bore from whom there is no escape at any time of the day or night...
...But a mind of, say eight or nine, just starting out to feel the first febrile flush of adolescent invalidism, will always accept the doll at its face value, as a standardized type of manufactured sentimentality...
...And if, in practical life, there are invalids who are quiet, docile...
Vol. 5 • February 1927 • No. 16
