R. P. McMurphy walks through the mental hospital for the first time smiling ecstatically. He has, in fact, like Hamlet, faked madness to get out of the prison, and now his joy upon his admission to the new Eden that his cunning has made possible is straight-ahead wacko. He warbles like a bird-man of some new American race and crows like an Indian on the warpath. His words are as jaunty as his steps. He quickly turns the inmates of the ward where he is assigned—those who have ears to hear— into his apostles. He uses the ordinary language of typical American games—poker, monopoly, basketball, baseball—as the wine of new prophecy. Such games are only water outside the hospital because, although they get close to life, they never get beyond an imitation of life. Inside the hospital, where men are cut off from the miracles of fresh real possibilities, they strike a note of reality. Games produce a more robust flavor in the brain than the mellow tantalization of pills and indoctrination. The language of games is essential to McMurphy because he does not know any path to a New Jerusalem that can be walked without trying to create a direct personal contact with every fellow he meets along his way. He needs his disciples as much as they need him. They don’t speak any language that knows the words of a real communion, but they do turn on to the arguments of games. R.P. McMurphy tries to absolve them from the useless search for a soul already lost by preaching the gospel of leaving themselves to go in a direction that seems farther away from themselves, to first base, to second base, to third base, and then farther away still towards the only really sane self for postmodern man, the one always ready to be born anew by a perpetual innocent search played out independently of the rules of ordinary behavior. He tries to put them on a new schedule of sleeping only to wake up fresh every morning for the start of a new ball game. He preaches that salvation is possible if they but dare to begin to play the game that the rules of the mental hospital, a tightly knit mini-copy of the rigged life outside, do not allow.
The war between McMurphy’s apostles and the enemy team breaks out at the group therapy meetings ruled by Nurse Ratched, the queen of the ward. Outside, during exercise breaks on the basketball court, McMurphy teaches his team with a basketball how to penetrate to the heart of the real experience offered by the game by daring to throw the ball in a basket. Free from the eye of Nurse Ratched, playing basketball or not, he teaches them how to catch the ball of life. But here, sitting in a circle with his team dazed by Ratched’s presence, he can only watch with gaping eyes while she cuts them up with the knife of analysis. The therapy meeting is like a board meeting of a corporation whose members have all lost their souls. Board members of business corporations meet to decide how to use a power that is absent from the meeting but is real because the reality of human work, of goods and services produced, lies behind the accounting figures of their discussions and decisions. The members of Nurse Ratched’s board meet to analyze publicly how to use a power that is simply non-existing. She wants the human beings of her circle to mark the debits and credits of an absent balance sheet. Psychology calls this absent government in the human soul that has life-like fantasies but no real business the unconscious. Nurse Ratched wants her executives, whose egos are half-dead and near burial, to become conscious of something unconscious, to analyze an absent business, to hold the mirror of rational logic before their lost souls.
For example, at the first board meeting that McMurphy attends, Nurse Ratched wants one member, Harding, who has admitted at previous meetings that he suspects his wife is cheating on him, to tell why he suspects her. Harding says that he can only “speculate as to the reasons why”. Ratched asks if he has ever “speculated” that perhaps he is “impatient” with his wife because she does not meet his “mental requirements”. Her measured, calculating words are alive with sexual innuendo. He answers that the only thing he can truly speculate about is the very existence of his life, with or without his wife. But he is unable to keep the focus of the group away from his relations with his wife because others interrupt with snickers expressing more sexual innuendo. Harding himself suddenly uses the word “peculiar” and the word flies wildly among fellow members of the cuckoo board, causing alarm. He bravely insists that being “peculiar” is not the problem: “I’m not just talking about my wife. I’m talking about my life. I can’t seem to get that through to you. I’m not just talking about one person. I’m talking about everybody. I’m talking about form, I’m talking about content, I’m talking about interrelationships. I’m talking about God, the devil, hell, heaven. Do you understand finally?” But under the stare of Ratched and with the hubbub of the cuckoo group, without the bounce of action and reaction to add rhyme to their reasoning, his words float by without effect. The truth risks becoming a feather unless it becomes a man. Harding’s mental health requires the courage of his accepting his being’s uniqueness, whatever it may be, as a vital and necessary element of his personality that need not be subject to anyone’s analysis. By putting himself in the position of being judged “peculiar” by a group, he turns himself into a defenseless object out of touch with a wholesome inner experience of his uniqueness. Ratched’s weapon against the mental health of being unique is the fist of two plus two equals four. She urges them to speak freely because getting talk of peculiarities out in the open under the gun of rationality produces the fission between mind and soul that reveals the world of guilt. The innocence of our experience is routinely destroyed when the mind, detached, dictates that every experience is necessarily good or evil. Ratched wants her patients to analyze what they are rather than be who they are. Being unique, from the point of view of rational knowledge, can only be a fault that must be corrected for if it is a genuine element of being then it means anything may be, no one’s peculiarity should be ruled out because it does not fit some abstract rational standard. Ratched wants them to do the rational tail chasing of all losers. She wants them to confess in public the sin of not being just like everyone else.
Click on the URL to read all of "Perpetual Baseball" Part 4 of the book about baseball, "The Theater of the Impossible": www.usoftheworld.com/culture
