*Sometimes people wonder: are science fiction writers crazy? Well, there's a scale of eccentricity, and then there is severe mental illness, which is like the difference between skipping along as you walk, and breaking your leg and having your thighbone come out.
*Occasionally one runs into a mad person who is also very into science fiction.
This guy was one. He was not using science fiction to navigate into unexplored conceptual
spaces (because he had lost that ability) – He was trying to use the discipline of technical
drawing to paste his broken head back together.
*It's art, but it's "outsider art."
*Assuming that his diagnosis of "chronic paranoid schizophrenia" is correct,
this guy really lived a long time and showed a lot of organized capacity for
a paranoid schizophrenic. Fantastic art has therapeutic value. It can't fly
you to Venus, but it can get you to fly.
*Nobody writes heroic fantasies about struggling with psychotic fantasies,
but this was a heroic struggle.
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2009/10/outer-space.html
"Karl Hans Janke (1909-1988) graduated from high school and attended a technical college for a couple of years and studied dentistry although he didn't complete the course. He was drafted into the German army in 1940 where he was hospitalised on a number of occasions because of behavioural problems and was eventually discharged from the service on medical grounds in 1943.
"By the late 1940s Janke was found to be malnourished and exhibiting increasingly eccentric behaviour and, after a short prison sentence and hospital assessment, he was committed to a psychiatric institution in Wermsdorf, Saxony in 1950 with a diagnosis of chronic paranoid schizophrenia. He remained at this facility for the rest of his life.
"The institutional staff either encouraged or tolerated the passion Janke showed for sketching technical designs: he had his own "office" in the hospital in which he produced four thousand drawings and constructed hundreds of models of his "inventions". Apparently the boxes containing his works were stowed away at the hospital and forgotten after his death and weren't rediscovered until 2000 when the imaginative artistry and sheer enormity of his output was finally appreciated. (((As an imaginative artist, you get into the "sheer enormity" catastrophe when a mental thermostat breaks, and you lose the ability to make any critical distinctions about the merit of your own work.)))
"Janke was, in his own mind at least, a serious engineer, intent on helping mankind by devising all manner of rocket ship (especially), space vehicle, ferry, bike, propulsion mechanism and associated transport system. His drawings range from simple prototype sketches to incredibly detailed schematics reminiscent of technical manual designs. He was was an energetic correspondent with the patent office and various technological and aerospace type agencies and departments, endeavouring - without much luck - to share his inventions with his scientific "peers". Fearing theft of his intellectual property however, Janke was also assiduous in dating and signing his works with an accompanying statement declaring himself as the author and originator of each idea depicted.
"It's an astonishing collection and, on casual perusal, might simply be regarded as an interesting and artistic obsession (like blogging?) (((a nice wisecrack, but no, not really. I've never come across a paranoid schizophrenic blog yet, but I'm pretty sure I'd be able to tell: there would be 800 posts a day, they would all be foggily grandiose in topic, they'd be aimed at no audience in particular and they'd be sprinkled with dire warnings of total catastrophe if people didn't listen. Even religious extremist and political extremist blogs don't have that tragically-broken quality; cult leaders are saner than their followers, they're exploitative and they're on the make)))) albeit at the extreme end of the continuum.
"But the delusional nature of Janke's illness becomes readily apparent from closer inspection (and reading around). His elaborate and grandiose ideas about harnessing stellar atomic energy meld with naive conceptual visions for its applications and connections to nature and other lifeforms. He skips from a vague - to put it mildly - comprehension of the atom to designing end-point technical gizmos and transporters that will rely on his illusory power source. There is also a whole series of watercolour sketches outlining the origin of the world (including as a hatching egg), for instance, that hints at the breadth of eccentricity within Janke's deranged belief system.
"I'm sure some people will consider Janke's thoughts and designs about futuristic transport to alien planets and odd energy sources to be visionary genius or prescient, with parallels in the modern world say, but they really are the product of deluded fantasies, no doubt helped along by photographs and schematics he saw in newspapers over decades that documented the evolution of rockets and satellites.
"This was a fellow who built a totally psychotic world in his own head - and he had no insight that it was from an illness - with only tenuous connections to reality; whose extraordinary artistic output wasn't so much a symptom as it was a documentary record of the nature and extent of his distorted thought patterns. That's not to say that his portfolio isn't brilliant in an 'outsider art' way. It is, of course. But any deeper meanings relate to aesthetic qualities or psychiatric disturbance and not to technological virtuosity...."
