How to look at a cat

I stumbled across a youtube video during a Google search this morning. This so rarely happens, and the content seemed so interesting, that I decided to watch it.

I recommend you do the same: It's a video on the mental degradation of Louis Wains, a late nineteenth-century man who drew and painted cats over the course of much of his life. He was diagnosed, perhaps posthumously, with late-onset schizophrenia, at 57, but he continued to draw and paint cats until his death. The images became increasingly abstract and geometric and, one might argue, paranoid. (I don't think I would agree, though. Some of his cats-as-people paintings freaked me out more than their fractal-ish later cousins.)

The video is alright -- a little too heavy on the narration for my tastes, but at the end it shows the progression of paintings without commentary -- but it was the comments that most struck me.

The most recent comment as of this blog posting was written by someone ("PigLover69") who claims to be on medication for schizophrenia; others reveal that they have done mind-altering drugs (like "shrooms" or acid -- one commenter writes, simply, "pot turns you into a genius!"), or that they believe Wains was an artistic genius rather than the victim of a mental illness.

One commenter agrees with a previous statement that schizophrenics have a "heightened third eye...but cannot tame it...this man however obviously did in his art." ("Shroctopus")

Some express sympathy for Wains. Some people just react to the video, or the paintings, saying they get chills from watching it, or found it funny, or beautiful.

Nobody I've read so far takes an absolutely "objective" diagnostic view of the video, the patient, or the evidence of his (proposed) mental illness; nobody suggests that, had he lived today, he would have had access to medications that would have corrected his view of reality to correlate to "actual reality." (I haven't read all 276 comments, though -- yet.)

I have worked, obviously, with people who have mental illnesses, or who have been diagnosed with them, at least, and I'm torn on these issues. They raise more questions than answers.

Like, what's the difference between the paranoia of drawing a group of cats sitting at a card table, laughing at the apparent joke just told by one of them -- see this in the video -- and drawing a cat as fractals?

What's the difference now, and what would have been the difference at the turn from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries -- when cubism was just coming in to vogue? When psychoanalysis was? (Could Wains just have been "of the times"? Could he have actually been schizophrenic longer than people thought -- or not at all?)

Is the video implying that eastern deities, or their images, were originally likely created by schizophrenic individuals?

What effect would this have on your or my or our views of eastern, or any, religion?

What do the commenters mean by a "third eye"?

And why do I feel like I know exactly what they mean without being able to explain it directly in words?

Why do we so often attribute paranormal abilities to people we also diagnose with a mental disorder?

What does this say about the practical (diagnostic) tools we employ to understand mental illness? What do we really believe about mental disorders?

Why is it so tempting to categorize people -- as ill or healthy, as positive or negative -- and should we stop, or is it helpful?

What do cats look like?