Article - Laura Knight-Jadczyk
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Article - Laura Knight-Jadczyk
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Chapter 36 On New Year's Eve of 1958, at a party, John Nash was, apparently, his slightly weird, slightly off-center from normal self, known and accepted by his family and friends as just who he was. Many allowances were made for his behavior because he was so brilliant. However, by the last day of February of 1959, John Nash had undergone a terrifying and bizarre change. Just prior to his complete breakdown, was the fact that Nash appeared at the New Year's party dressed in a diaper as the "infant New Year." Well, maybe that's not so weird. But what made it even stranger was the fact that Nash spent most of the evening curled up in his wife's lap. This WAS very disturbing to the other guests who later commented on the discomfort that this behavior evoked in them. The sensation of being "ill at ease" in the presence of certain people is often just swept under the rug, explained away, or ignored by most of us. But in this case, it was most definitely a sign that something was wrong - seriously wrong - with John Nash. Those who have looked at it in retrospect suggest that long before the New Year's party, Nash had "crossed some sort of threshold. However, the deterioration of his mental state was disregarded because he was a known eccentric to begin with. According to those who knew him, his social discourse had always been odd because he never seemed to know when to speak out or stay quiet. He seemed to be unable to participate in an ordinary give and take conversation. He was prone to telling lengthy stories with cryptic or off-center endings. In the months before the party, Nash had been teaching a course in Game Theory. His students noted that he paced a great deal and fell into trance-like states in the middle of lecturing or answering a question. Just before Thanksgiving that year, Nash confided to his assistant and a student that there were "threats to world peace" and "calls for a world government." He hinted that he was to play a significant role in some upcoming drama. It was after classes resumed following New Year's that Nash asked his assistant to teach a couple of his classes because he needed to go away. Then, he disappeared. As it happened, Paul Cohen, the mathematician who had become famous for solving a logical puzzle posed by Godel, also disappeared at the same time. After a few days, people began to notice the absence of both of them, though Cohen was found to be visiting his sister. Nash had "driven south," ultimately ending up in Roanoke at his mother's house, but no one knows any other details. It is thought that he may also have gone to Washington, DC A couple of weeks later, Nash, holding a copy of the New York Times in his hand, walked up to a group in the common room and pointed to a story in the paper saying that "abstract powers from outer space, or perhaps it was foreign governments," were communicating with him through the paper. He claimed that the messages were meant only for him and were encrypted. Only he could decode them and he was being allowed to share the information with the world. Nash began to say that radio stations were sending messages to him. He gave one of his students his expired driver's license, telling him that it was an "intergalactic driver's license." He told the student that he was a member of a committee and that he would put the student in charge of Asia. Nash recalls that period as one of mental exhaustion accompanied by a growing series of images and sense of revelation regarding a secret world that others around him were not privy to. He started noticing men in red ties and thought that this was a signal to him. He thought it had something to do with the communist party, or so he claimed in 1996. At this point in time, Nash was still working on the Riemann hypothesis. He became paranoid and thought that other people were conspiring against him or stealing stuff from his trashcan. In France, mathematician Claude Berge received a letter from Nash, written in four colors, complaining that his career was being ruined by aliens from outer space.
Nash began writing strange letters. They were addressed to ambassadors of various countries and Nash attempted to mail them via interdepartmental mail. The department secretary put them aside to show to the department head, Ted Martin. Martin panicked and tried to retrieve the letters, not all of which were addressed, most of which were not stamped, that had been dropped in mailboxes all around the campus. Now, we really need to stop for a moment and consider this situation. Here we have a guy who thinks that aliens from outer space are ruining his career, he obviously had severe problems, and all anybody can think about doing is trying to cover it up. The department head, in all his three-piece-suit administrative glory, is out there frantically pawing through mailboxes to find letters posted by Nash in order to prevent others from knowing that the guy is going over the edge. One would think that, for at least medical reasons, these letters would have been preserved for psychiatric review. However, Sylvia Nasar tells us that none of them have survived. I find that to be astonishing. Just what the heck did those letters say? Some of the people interviewed by Nasar reported that Martin told them that Nash was writing that he was put in charge of "forming a world government." At another point, Nash wrote in a letter to Adrian Albert, chairman of the math department at the University of Chicago, that he was unable to accept a position there because he was "scheduled to become the Emperor of Antarctica." The deterioration was swift following the New Year's party. On February 28, John Nash stood before 250 mathematicians to give a lecture. At first it seemed like just a series of cryptic, half-formed mathematical remarks which was not too unusual for Nash. But, halfway through the lecture something happened:
The audience, according to another witness, "heaped scorn" on Nash and he was "laughed out of the auditorium." In his private life, Nash was complaining to his wife that he was "bugged" that something was going on. He stayed up most nights writing his endless letters to heads of state. One night, he painted black spots all over their bedroom walls. The details of Nash's first involuntary commitment are vague. Nasar and others conjecture that the president of MIT intervened in some way and Nash was "picked up." After his admission to the psychiatric unit at McLean Hospital, an injection of thorazine calmed him down, but did not stop the flow of ideas that were coming into his head. He told Arthur Mattuck that he believed that there was "a conspiracy among military leaders to take over the world, and that he was in charge of the takeover." The bizarre and elaborate nature of Nash's psychosis, his beliefs that were simultaneously grandiose and persecutory, and other symptoms, all resulted in a diagnosis of schizophrenia. In the hospital, Nash quickly learned to stop acting crazy. He wanted out of there, and so he applied himself to learning the rules of the game. Even though he reported that his symptoms had disappeared, his psychiatrists agreed that he was very likely just concealing them. Nash told whoever would listen that he was a "political prisoner." After much to-do, Nash fled to Europe. In Paris, he was frequently visited by Alexander Grothendieck who, ten years or so later, founded a survivalist organization, dropped out of academia, and disappeared into the Pyrenees. Another interesting item from that time consists of the fact that Nash apparently told mathematician Shiing-she Chern that "four cities in Europe constituted the vertices of a square." Which cities they were, and what the implications of this fact are, was apparently not recorded. Through it all, Nash was talking about numerology, dates, world affairs, something going on in the Gaza strip. He believed that there were magic numbers, dangerous numbers, and that it was his job to save the world. He lived in constant fear of annihilation: Armageddon, the Day of Judgment, etc. The date May 29 was ominous to him. Eventually, he was hospitalized again and subjected to "insulin therapy." As Nasar reports, "good first-hand accounts of this therapy are difficult to obtain because it destroys large blocks of recent memory." Why are we not surprised? Nash shuffled in and out of hospitals, back and forth across the Atlantic, fluctuating between various degrees of madness for years. Overall, his condition and symptoms certainly fit his diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia. And, as is usual with schizophrenics, the delusions are disconnected bits and pieces of the individual's actual reality. My question is: knowing the "brute force" of Nash's mind, did he actually DO what he claimed he wanted to do? To "find a different and more satisfying under-picture of a non-observable reality?" Did he penetrate the veil, and did he, in the act, encounter something so dark, so dreadful, that it overloaded his all-too human circuits and triggered his descent into schizophrenia?
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