THESE CHARACTERS ARE MAD

Bruno Madrigal, and the intersection of the "Mad" and the "Prophet"

I am deeply obsessed with the concept of psychotic prophets (prophets who are also psychotic). There's a number of reasons for this, firstly because I have been the prophet and saint and then left bereft in its absence. In fiction, however, it fascinates me because it presents a more-concrete manifestation of the burden of having to differentiate between "the intangible and real" and "the intangible and false" — a quandary I am forced to grapple with quite often. On a more external note, there is a different kind of tension as well: the struggle between the need to be believed (the prophet) and the fact that no one is ever going to trust or believe in you (the psychotic). Bruno, with his visions and compulsions and the persistent way people treat him as if he lacks competence, intrigues me for exactly these reasons.

How do you learn to differentiate between what is "delusion" and what is "prophecy"? What is a "vision" if not a hallucination of a different kind?

Canonically, of course, we are shown that there is a visual component to visions that other people are able to see and interface with. The implications of the "We Don't Talk About Bruno" song, on the other hand, seem to be that there is a level of other people having to take Bruno at his word. Implying, perhaps, the existence of two different manifestations of "vision", not just the example we see. (The scene in which Bruno elaborates on his previous vision for Mirabel seems to support this. As Bruno looks away from the vision that manifests in the sand surrounding him, his gaze remains distant and searching as if he is still seeing and responding to elements of the vision outside of what Mirabel is able to see). Other people are able to perceive one level of prophecy, but rely on Bruno to expound on this, as there is an additional layer of prophecy that they cannot perceive.

Bruno himself, however, is not always able to differentiate between "symptom" and "miracle". We primarily see this manifest in his compulsions — the notion of tangible magic that permits him to see the future seems inherently incompatible with the notion of being able to prevent bad things from happening through the use of inane rituals and superstition, but Bruno continues to engage in both. Knocking on wood, crossing his fingers and holding his breath through thresholds, avoiding stepping on cracks, tossing salt/sugar over his shoulder — these things have no bearing on the outcome of a vision, but Bruno cannot stop himself from trying.

I find it personally compelling that Bruno's rituals are so intrinsically tied into the notion of the future that terrifies him (ie, knocking on wood after you say something hopeful to avoid "jinxing" it) — unable to separate the two and so unable to engage in one without inherently engaging with the other. I believe in G-d, but the themes of religion center heavily in much of my delusional and disorganized thinking; I believe in G-d, but I am largely unable to engage in any religious or theological discussion without engaging with a trigger of psychosis. One begets the other. I see this tension reflected in Bruno. He is afraid of his visions — but even if he avoids having them, his compulsions push him back into the same patterns of these fears; if Bruno tries to avoid engaging with his compulsions, the outside pressure to have visions pushes him right back into the thick of it.

I find an inherent madness to the way that Bruno's own suffering with regards to his visions is completely decentered in favor of prioritizing the suffering of those who react to him and his visions ("inherent" meaning, even though Bruno's visions are canonically "real" and not "symptom", the way other characters respond to him invokes allegorical madness). Bruno's torment over his visions is always displaced in favor of someone else's reaction (or the threat of someone else's reaction). Bruno is never actually given the space or respect for his own emotions about the things he perceives. For example, with Bruno's first vision about Mirabel, the focus is shifted off of his own horror and onto the threat of other people's horror almost immediately — Bruno is given almost no time to react to his own emotional shift before the threat of Reaction overtakes it. Again, when Bruno attempts to re-engage with this vision for Mirabel, Bruno's fear and reluctance to look is dismissed by Mirabel, who pushes for him to have the vision anyway. Then after he has the vision, Bruno's delight at having found a possible solution is displaced by Mirabel's frustration at what he's seen.

Dolores' line in "We Don't Talk About Bruno" highlights this dynamic especially well. Her verse "It's a heavy lift with a gift so humbling; always left Abuela and the family fumbling, grappling with prophecies they couldn't understand" showcases this abrupt shift. The image of Bruno struggling under the weight of bearing the burden of his visions is promptly displaced in favor of the family. His struggle is forgotten, instead we are pulled to the family, who is forced to grapple with understanding him — their struggle to cope and comprehend is centered above Bruno's. Bruno's torment is sidelined, merely alluded to. The mural of the family painted in town depicts everyone smiling, except for Bruno, whose face is illustrated as a fixed mask of dread. His depiction on his door is similarly much more severe than the rest of the family's. Camilo's line in the Spanish version of the song — "No Se Habla de Bruno" — is modified to say "Terror in his face, rats along his back." It is notable, but never centered.

In the book "Are We Not Men?: Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets" by Rhiannon Graybill, there is a section about the prophet Isaiah. As the author states, "[Hashem]'s message depends directly on Isaiah's suffering. And yet this suffering is also denied recognition in the text." We see this manifest in the way people speak about Bruno: he is maligned for his visions of terrible doom, but no one considers the weight of having to bear witness to these terrible situations on a regular basis.

There is a madness in this idea as well. Constantly having to police your own reactions, your own behaviors, your own emotions in order to make yourself acceptable in the eyes of society. Manifested in the ways common "treatments" for psychotic disorders prioritizes minimizing visible symptoms and the effort required to care for and control the patient, not on improving the quality of life of the patients themselves. You cannot feel your fear, because your fear is frightening. A line from the poem Najia Khaled wrote for the Psych Survivors Zine, "Notes from a Sick Room" that sticks with me — "Our bad parts contribute to our ache, says the Analyst, We are wrongly born. The good specific creation of good material excluded us". Or, maybe, the words of in "Why I Will Never Requisition My Medical Records": "Look into their eyes, whoever loves yo best. Look into their eyes + force yourself to form the words clawing inside you. Look into their eyes + watch yourself become insane. Look into their eyes + become silent". You know how it is. Or maybe you don't.

Anyway, above all else, I find the intersection of "prophet" and "psychotic" most intense in regards to the threat of being traumatized by the intangible. Can you prove your trauma if its inception was intangible and incomprehensible, even to yourself? If you are merely a witness of a horrific car accident, you have the same likelihood of being traumatized by it as someone who was directly involved in the wreck, yes? Okay, so if you experience a delusion, and are eventually able to recognize that it wasn't "real", but it has left a mark on your psyche, is that trauma "real"? Or is it just an extension of the delusion? Now, if you witness a vision of a horrifying, grotesque future, and this event does not come to pass, but the vision has left a mark on your psyche, is the trauma real? Or just as illusory as the contents of the vision that was never realized?

Regardless of the answer, are you ever able to truly communicate this trauma to anyone else? If you are the only witness to an event that no one else can understand, can they ever truly understand your trauma? Or will they dismiss it, because it "wasn't real" or it "didn't happen"? How can you be understood if no one else is capable of experiencing or comprehending what you have experienced?

People can witness Bruno having a vision, but can never experience them from his perspective. They can see the external manifestation of the vision, but can they ever grasp the internal torment of it? People can witness you experience a delusion/hallucination, but can never experience that horror alongside you. Bruno's torment and confusion is displaced by his family's torment and confusion. The terror the psychotic person's delusions and hallucinations cause them is displaced by the fear, mocking, or pity felt by an outside bystander. "Look into their eyes + watch yourself become insane. Look into their eyes + become silent"

Bruno's visions are horrifying to him, but more importantly, his appearance while he experiences a vision is horrifying to others.

But, then here's the actual "intersection": Is a delusion More or Less "real" than a vision? Is a vision More or Less "real" than a hallucination? If your experience of reality is fundamentally reliant on and entangled with the intangible, ephemeral, and ambiguous nature of prophecy/vision, then how do you cope with the intangible, ephemeral, and ambiguous nature of psychosis? Even if Bruno's family could understand the traumatic nature of visions, as they are able to bear witness to the external manifestation of the visions in the sand, are they able to extend that same empathy to his compulsions? Or — despite the fact that both are equally intangible and ephemeral — do they still decide that one is "more real" than the other? That one is worth their time and the other is not?

Bruno's visions are "real"; Bruno's delusions are "not". But how does one differentiate between them? What do you do if it's your job to be reliable, but you're unable to trust yourself? If you can't trust your sense of reality, how do you successfully establish the parameters of reality for other people? Can you ever truly let your guard down, if you're constantly struggling to differentiate between what threats are "real" and which are "delusion"?

The problem is this: Bruno's status as "Prophet" puts him in a position of authority. Bruno's status as "mad" robs him of that authority in the eyes of others, and leaves him "unable" to be considered competent or the expert on what is happening to or around him.

We see this manifest in the vacillation between people taking Bruno too seriously, while simultaneously not taking him seriously at all. Bruno makes a joke that is instead interpreted as a terrible vision. Bruno warns that his vision might not be helpful or what they want to hear, only for his warnings to be dismissed, and then blamed when he turns out to be correct.

Bruno, then, is thrust into the uncomfortable paradox of having his competence and his intentions constantly questioned. As Savannah Cahalan puts it in her book "The Great Pretender" — "The messages were worthy, the messenger was not". If Bruno attempted to establish that he had been trying to only make a joke to lighten the mood at the wedding, it's likely no one would believe him. Bruno sees bad things happen --> Bruno makes bad things happen — this is the interpretation that people fall back on, and no amount of protests or clarifications from Bruno will sway them. Despite the fact that Bruno should be considered the final authority on how his gift works, no one believes him, because they presume automatically that they know better than him. Bruno is not considered competent, or trustworthy; a psychiatrist might decide he "lacks insight", simply because the insight Bruno has into his own 'condition' does not match the popular rhetoric of the people around him.

Or, as Margaret Price outlines in the book "Mad At School" — "Those with mental disabilities exist in a "rhetoric black hole". We speak from positions that are assumed to be subhuman, even non-human, and therefore, when we speak, our words go unheeded. In concrete terms, this means that persons with mental disabilities are presumed to be not competent, nor understandable, nor valuable, nor whole."

"The messages were worthy, the messenger was not."

This is, after all, the core of the conflict that drives Bruno into the walls to begin with. Bruno has a vision of Mirabel, and he knows that her future is in flux — she can either destroy or repair the house and the miracle, things are not yet set in stone. It should be Bruno's role as prophet to decipher this vision and impart it to the rest of the family; it should be up to him to be the final arbiter of the vision's meaning.

But, Bruno is Mad, and this fact robs him of the authority he's meant to have. "The messages were worthy, the messenger was not". The family trusts in Bruno's visions, but not in Bruno. If he brought them this vision, they would decide for themselves what this visions "meant" and refuse to allow Bruno to speak the meaning himself. He knows this is what will happen, because that is the pattern he is familiar with. His family's suffering is prioritized over his own, and his family's competence is valued over his own. No matter what Bruno says, no one will believe him, and so the only thing he can think to do is run before anyone can see anything at all. "Look into their eyes + become silent"

The point is this: people fear, dismiss, and condescend Bruno in equal measure, and his status as Mad means it is "his fault" they do so. Because how could he expect them to take him seriously? Bruno behaves strangely — his rituals, compulsions, and fears are bizarre and incomprehensible to outsiders. His erratic behavior is at "fault" for why people are reluctant to take him seriously, and why they find him frightening. Bruno's speech is disorganized and disfluent: "And then — and then, and then...", "I can do this. I can do this, I can do this, I can do this", "Oh sorry — sorry, sorry —,". (Bruno has a specific tendency to repeat words and phrases in patterns of three, which pairs to his tendency to knock in patterns of six. 3 is an interesting number for Bruno specifically for the evocation of "past, present, and future". I also find it noteworthy that the ritual we see Bruno perform for the vision instead relies on a 4-5 number pattern — 4 small fires, 1 large one, 5 total — I wonder if this is a subconsciously intentional? A manifestation of the discomfort Bruno feels when seeking out visions, disrupting the usual pattern and leaving things slightly off-kilter, both to represent something being uncomfortably "off" going in and to blame for the negative outcome in hindsight. 4 instead of 3 to show his discomfort, 5 instead of 6 to blame for the vision being negative instead of positive? But that's neither here nor there.) His speech is also tangential — interrupting himself in the middle of thoughts and sentences to perform his compulsions, or talk to himself, breaking off from engaging with an external person, to speak solely to himself on another train of thought. His unusual speech is at "fault" for why people are reluctant to listen to him when he tries to explain his interpretation of his visions. If he wanted things to change, then the burden of change is Upon Him as the Other. The people around him are 'normal' and Bruno is 'not', and that means their blame lies at His feet no matter what he says or does to try to get them to listen. The catch-22 is, of course, that once you are considered 'Mad', you are forever walled off from being the arbiter of your own truth or decisions. Your words are always held to light against your diagnosis, and you can never shake the shadow off of it off of you, like a stain, like a scar. Whatever authority you had you will never have again.

Ultimately, Bruno is "strange", and therefore it is his fault that other people presume him to be incompetent. He is "Other", so much so that he becomes unrelatable, subhuman.

"Prophecy," Graybill writes, "is an act of survival, and the prophet's body is a site of suffering."

Bruno is simultaneously an imposing, threatening figure and a muted, meek presence. A 7-foot tall harbinger of doom and a shrinking, anxious wreck frightened by his own visions of the future. The uncomfortable cross-section between "terrifying" and "pitiable" that a lot of mad persons occupy. The "crazy" Other to contrast oneself against in a plea to be considered human — the ephemeral third person who is "like that". To quote Graybill again, "The prophet's body emerges all at once pained and glorious, disabled and celebrated, rendered unmasculine and yet all-too-excessive in its vitality".

I'd tell you what it means if only you'd let me. I could explain it all to you if you'd let yourself understand.

But there's something else, in the inverse. In the internal relationship to the self, not in the external relationship to others around you. Anxiety is not the right word; it isn't a Worry. I am not Afraid something is behind me, I know that it is there. Not looking at it will keep it from hurting me, but it will not make it so the thing is not there. It is and I know it is. I saw the future once, too. Angels whispered it in my ear and I knew and it was horrifying, but there is a relief in that kind of certainty. The knowledge that things could be so simple: the thorn-nail-crown in your forehead. The nails-rot-miracle in your wrist. Red-hot and certain; yeah, there's an intoxication in that. "I am mad, and too close to something you cannot see, and always forgetting the words, And alive!" ("Don't let 'em call you out your name" by Kihnindewa) Perhaps you are incomprehensible to others, but why would this matter, when you are able to know yourself so completely? Their incomprehension is an afterthought, or maybe it's the point.

The doubt doesn't come until after. When you're looking back on the ghost of divine madness and wondering "Did that happen? Was that real? Are we remembering it right? Are you sure?" Corruptive and terrible and suffocating. "Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?"

The vision passes, and it's just you left behind, sitting alone in the dirt. You knew just a moment ago, and now you don't. The certainty is gone and you don't know anything at all. Suddenly, you're a different kind of incomprehensible. When the vision has you, you are separate from the world — beyond understanding. And then the sand falls and you stare at the husk of yourself and "Was that right? Is that what I saw? Are we sure?" Incomprehensible to yourself.

And you look to the people around you, and no one can tell you because no one else saw.

You hold the shards of your certainty in your hands and confusedly argue, "But it was just here?"

The shards cut your hands but the blood isn't as red as it used to be. As it was just a moment ago. It doesn't sing like you thought it did. And no one else saw. And it isn't fair.

What is the name for the trauma of that loss? The thing you mourn that everyone else tells you not to, because they know better, and you? You don't know anything at all, remember? "Are you sure?" and you aren't. You never will be again.

The nature of the prophet is to look. "The prophets do not pass through prophecy unaltered."

What is the name of a trauma like that?

....Anyway, Thesis Statement: Saint Bruno Madrigal, Patron Saint of Incomprehensible Traumas, The Angels speak to me too, and I see you.

...go back?