On the Maniacal Virtues
“Oh, I love her,” I say of some woman on TV. “Of course you do,” my partner tells me, “she’s manic.”
Manic, yes – the triumph of energy, that continuous buzzing in the blood. The Greeks still say έχω μανία, I have mania, to mean that they are obsessed by something, mad about it. This mania, this passionate energy, carries one out and into the world, without objective reason. Energy somehow justifies itself, legitimacy established in the doing, in action: no dithering or rumination, just a ceaseless march toward some private horizon, proceeding from conquest to conquest.
This applies equally to men, yet I am invariably drawn to manic women. One of the great mysteries of male homosexuality is this feminine identification that stops somewhere short of completion. Always, in any case, with exceptional women, diva-worship being the typical mode.
But I am not drawn to the diva as such. I’m drawn, instead, to energy, manic energy, seeking an outlet, a force that strains against all strictures. The maniac glances with disdain at the traditional traps and trappings of femininity, rears back, and takes a gallant leap. She appears to exist without even the pain of self-consciousness, the troubling gap between private “I” and public “self.” It’s an illusion, of course, but a compelling one. From our perspective, she simply is; and she is_insofar as she _acts, self-possessed and racing toward some goal or ideal inscrutable to mortals.
Almost mythic figures, we can only dream of being so vital. But it is beyond the nature of most. Nothing I have tried, physical or mental, seems to produce more energy: exercise, sunlight, veganism, faking it. It seems that I am incurably languid, a matter of biology or, in any case, a disposition set long ago. I am resigned to this fact – languor may well possess virtues of its own – but my reverence for energy remains. I cannot but marvel at maniacs, longing to share in their gusto and verve.
My pantheon of maniacs includes such obvious figures as Katharine Hepburn, Susan Sontag, and Camille Paglia – so much thunder, sometimes terror. But also Nancy Silverton, whose episode of Chef’s Table is startling: “Oh, I love Persian mulberries,” she declares, feverishly reaching out for a taste. And Lucinda Lambton, breathless presenter of numerous BBC programs: here, racing through a castle; now, filing an elderly duchess’s fingernail unasked.
To describe these women adequately, one must invoke forces of nature: rushing rivers, whirlwinds, and tidal waves, unstoppable forces, which one both fears and admires. But don’t let the metaphors fool you. These are not Romantic figures driven to self-destruction by monomaniacal pursuits. Nothing decadent about these women, alas, nothing even bohemian. These are hard women, formidable, both exhilarating and unnerving.
There is something distinctively classical in their mania, marked by the heroic self-propulsion that defines the Homeric world. Brilliant Achilles fated to a glorious death at the height of his powers, his vigor, his warrior virtue, struck down in action by an opposing force as the gods looked on. Nothing fetid here, nothing pathetic. It’s pure power and drive, an onward rush until one’s fated end – a fate diametrically at odds with the wearied decline of the Romantic who spends himself obscurely, to the point of exhaustion.
Consider Simone Weil, willful, divine, self-possessed, sure – but certainly no maniac. Rather, she marries the Romantic with the saintly, saintly in Barthes’s sense when he wrote that “the saint is above all a being without formal context.” Weil was wildly out of place, without context, ungrounded. Despite her admirable efforts to act in the world – part of her pursuit of alterity, the unknowable, in the mystical beyond and the concrete here – these ventures were precisely effortful, short-lived, grueling experiences for which her frail constitution was decidedly unsuited. Stoically inching toward the edge of suffering, seeking insight at the zero-point of self, Weil shares more in the mystical, not the heroic.
Maniacs are true heroines: they don’t want to suffer, they want to conquer! And it is this militant ethos – not the self-abnegation of the saint, but a will to power or, rather, the will to cultivate and exercise their powers – that makes them personally difficult. They are notoriously stubborn, intractable, always thwarting others’ designs with plans of their own. The will triumphant – that is the Nietzschean ideal that unites them, practically if not consciously.
It is this ethos that drives them to reject sentimentality in all its forms, the worst being self-pity. There’s nothing more fatal to the energetic spirit than a stooping turn inward to mull over oneself. Such narcissism is the pathology of the weak ego, a weakness that underlies and motivates self-obsession, an ego that needs tending to. The maniac’s ego requires no supervision, preoccupied as it is with a project, a goal, a purpose that extends far beyond the self. “The self,” Hepburn pronounces, “is a dead end.”
Maniacal self-assertion overtakes narcissistic self-soothing: no confession, no contrition, just a continuous movement forward. The maniac gathers up her powers and puts them to good use, which, by definition, is her own use, suited to her own ends. At one with the force of her will, she constantly imposes upon others, audacity-armed. And this presumptuousness is inseparable from her charm, her peculiar nobility.
It is also just cause for others’ displeasure. But she does not aim to please. She does not posture and pose, does not dream of being seen – or does not seem to, anyway. On the contrary: to look upon a maniac is to find her staring back; or, worse, to find her sights set elsewhere, uncaring of your gaze.
The maniac models a mode of being as living at its vital extreme, culled of the quieter virtues. It is an immoderate ideal, far from the golden mean. But it is an ideal nonetheless, which even exemplars of the maniacal virtues can never fully attain. They are always privately reaching, always struggling within themselves, straining toward the limit. It is a noble effort; but something human pulls us back, lashing us to the real. Neither machines nor gods, our self-alienated condition makes other virtues necessary. Without them, we risk going too far, brushing the ideal too closely. The maniac contains both heroic and monstrous potentials, which are always unevenly realized.
But the maniacal virtues are out of fashion, in tension with the times. Malaise has set in and, with it, new ideals: congeniality, pliancy, agnosticism. In the absence of a horizon, people monitor each other’s faces, searching for cues and hints. They suffer from a very ambivalent will to attention. They communicate through an unstable argot of bland affirmation and neurotic self-confession. Everyone plays the ally, ancillary by nature, paralyzed by anxious solidarities and the danger of ill repute. No time left between repentant gestures to develop an idea of one’s own, a conviction, a point of view, a set of values, worked through, hard-won, ready to advance and defend. Instead, suspicion and surveillance, circumscribing one’s plot and smiling at the fences.
What is this timid kindergarten, this circle of nodding heads? Just think how glorious it would be instead to swim, to gallop, to soar!