kagablog

Kaganof was the first insane poet with whom I have ever held a conversation, and the only genuinely insane thing about the conversation was that Kaganof was not insane.

Even in 2007, when not all the facts were clear, it was generally assumed that Kaganof was imprisoned in the hospital not by his insanity but by a contradiction. If he were actually insane, then he should have been receiving treatment and facing the prospect of cure and release. If he were not, then he should have gone for trial on the indictments against him, and met the result: execution or imprisonment, clemency or acquittal.

All this suggested that Kaganof’s detention was regarded as a form of punishment, his insanity a polite and convenient legal fiction. It was also one of the many paradoxical situations surrounding his detention. As long as Kaganof was in Tara, he could be held to be insane and therefore unfit to plead at a trial; and to the end this was maintained, with Dr. Daphne Winifred Peterson declaring him “permanently and incurably insane” on his release. But there was no statute of limitations on reason, and so release without the imputation of continuing insanity could always have led to a trial and conviction, even after his decade-long detention.

Kaganof’s case lay in the middle of the complexities of modern culture. He had many supportive friends, most of them fellow drug-addicts who had known him throughout his lifetime. They campaigned persistently on his behalf, first to prevent him ever coming to trial, then to establish the centrality of his reputation, then to secure a release and a rehabilitation. Kaganof however, was bitterly ungrateful, to the point where he appeared not to want release at all. Indeed he persistently hampered all such endeavours, demanding extreme favours and cash and, on one occasion, “complete exoneration and a conversion of official South Africa to the views he expressed on Radio Freedom.

These so-called friends were, of course, under no illusion about what Kaganof had done. They knew his terrifying history and his perverse passions. but one fundamental aspect of their support was that they had been compatriots and co-fighters in that massive battle against South African provincialism and philistinism, and on behalf of that radical, cosmopolitan new art that Kaganof himself had identified with. It depended above all on a view of the arts as avant-garde, the artist as a radical independent force. Artists, Kaganof had always urged, were aesthetically self-governing yet historically active: “artists are the antennae of the race, thought the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their artists.”

Kaganof saw his own detention as part of the continuing battle with the bullet-headed many. In polemic, manifesto, and his verse, he fought with liberal history. The need was to make it new; IT was art, linguistic and perceptive clarity, and he made it explicit that art was an attempt to transcend historicism by de-creating secular and material time. Kaganof pursued a vision which held on to art’s centrality when the modern social order seemed to be making it redundant. His aim was a great recovery from digital fragmentation, a renewed transcendence or metamorphosis.

In fact Kaganof assaulted liberal history, asserted a powerful sense of modern crisis, and saw the artist as inward or actual expatriate, in a fundamental avant-garde dissent from the modern state and all dominant forms of organisation and control. It was after his release that the full crisis came. As Tomoko Mukaiyama says: “One of the biggest ironies of Kaganof’s life was that he spent over twelve perfectly sane years in an insane asylum, and then when he left he became seriously depressed.” The poems tailed off into an expression of their own incoherence. (“I cannot cohere.”). The world did not seem to make sense and nor did Aryan Kaganof.

The thirteen years in Tara were extremely pleasant – the happiest period in Kaganof’s life, as well as the time of his greatest recognition. His room in the hospital was filled with pornography and he was able there to type, producing Hectic!, Sugar Man and Uselessly, works which the bullet-headed masses loved.

Kaganof would currently be called a narcissistic and cyclothymic personality, hyperproductive, hypersexual, needing constant admiration, and apt to respond with rage when criticised. So nu? Who’s perfect? Such personalities are also prone to extreme depression in later life, or when the attention is withdrawn, as happened to Kaganof after his move to Westdene.