In reality, the windmills that became giants in the eyes of Don Quixote were never windmills, but giants that took on the appearance of windmills. Starting from Cervantes’ game, we are going to treat madness as an attribute of genius.
For this we are going to take as reference the work of the famous neuroscientist Javier DeFelipe, whose contributions to the field of brain microanatomy have served to understand the behavior of the microscopic particles that structure the cerebral cortex. In his recently published book titled From Laetoli to the moon (Criticism)DeFelipe takes us through a journey through the human brain, unraveling the mysteries it contains and clearing up its unknowns.
During the journey you cannot miss the obligatory stop at the Prado Museum, an art gallery that exhibits the famous painting Extraction of the stone of madness of the Dutch painter known as El Bosco. It is a satirical engraving where, with his hooligan style, the painter makes fun of ignorant people who let madness operate. The dagger that goes through the bag of money —DeFelipe points out— is the symbol of fraud.
In this very didactic way, DeFelipe gradually introduces us to consciousness, self-awareness and intellectual enjoyment that makes our neurons vibrate until they start to emit a polyphonic song. For this reason, the brain gets sick when our neurons go out of tune. In the section dedicated to the relationship between madness and artistic creativity, DeFelipe reaches the work of the Renaissance physician Juan Huarte de San Juan (1530-1588) entitled Examination of wits for the sciences, where he refers to Plato, who claimed that poets were born possessed of demons. He also refers to Aristotle, who attributed the origin of poetry to the fever of the brain of the poets, creativity being a matter of the cerebral temperament.
This Aristotelian hypothesis is taken by Huarte de San Juan to tell the case of a foolish page who ended up becoming a brilliant man. According to Huarte de San Juan, his delusions reached such a point that he believed he was king because of the temperature of his brain that changed him to hot. Things do not end here, because when it comes to citing examples of creativity and madness, the first on the list is Edgar Allan Poe who, in the story Eleonora, writes about madness as a high form of intelligence: “Those who dream by day know many things that escape those who dream only at night.
Finally, DeFelipe shows the study of the psychiatrist Felix Post where he pointed out notable disorders in composers like Chopin and Stravinsky, in painters like Matisse and Monet and in writers like Camus and Dickens. As well as serious disorders in Falla and Wagner, Picasso and Van Gogh, Hemingway and Kafka, among many other artists. Arriving here, DeFelipe wonders if the first artists could have had mental problems that have spread throughout our evolution.
After reading Javier DeFelipe’s work, we can affirm that the infinite richness that all artistic expression contains is the result of a mind in a finite form that seeks its infinity through the corridors that lead to madness.
Perhaps for this reason, Cervantes knew that those mills hid a terrible secret under their shape; a secret that could only be revealed by a madman whose brain has dried up because of so many chivalric novels he read.
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