To Be Mad Poem by gershon hepner

I am not here to write, but to be mad,
wrote Robert Walser, lost in Herisau;
successful writers have to be a tad
insane, unless they’re merely middlebrow.
The madhouse, monastery of modern time,
ideal for one whose counter-intuition
leads him to be in prose, free verse or rhyme
regarded as a mad metaphysician.


Michael André Bernstein, who teaches at UC Bernstein, writes about Robert Walser and his book “The Assistant” in TNR, June 12,2008 (“The Man Without Categories”) . Walser, whose work in many ways parallels that of Kaffka, died of a heart attack taking a solitary walk near the asylum where he had been a patient for more than twenty-three years. Elias Canetti, one of his most fervent admirers, wrote of him that his struggle for existence took him “into the only sphere where the struggle for existence no longer exists: the madhouse, the monastery of modern time.” When asked why he no longer wrote after moving from Waldau, near Bern, to an asylum in Herisau, Walser said: “I am not here to write, but to be mad.”


5/31/08