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A man, his head thrown back, a scalpel plunged into his skull to extract a stone: the stone of madness.
As he stretches his neck to glimpse the doctor behind him, the unfortunate man’s eyes roll in their sockets, more and more, until only the white sclera remains, and with his mouth wide open he shouts: Watch out! Be careful! God sees you!
Next to him, standing, is a friar with a clerical collar; he wears a black velvet robe and holds a metal pitcher in his left hand, while his right hovers beside the patient’s head, as if blessing him. Behind the friar, a nun leans forward, resting her elbows on an elegant stone-carved table, looking bored—or perhaps weary of life, as if she could no longer bear the utter senselessness of earthly existence—and fixes her gaze on the man undergoing the macabre trepanation. Her cheek rests on her palm, and atop her head, covered by a long white veil framing her sallow face and reaching her waist, she precariously balances a large leather-bound book.
The nun seems entirely indifferent to the grisly incision made by the surgeon on the patient’s skull—but isn’t the growth emerging from the wound a tulip?



The unfortunate man subjected to this absurd medieval custom wears a doublet with puffed sleeves and scarlet tights. He sits in the middle of a field on what appears to be a bench or a confessional cut in half, clutching one of the armrests with his fingers, while the doctor—though it would be more appropriate to call him a torturer or executioner—responsible for the trepanation carries a wooden or terracotta pitcher, suspended from a black leather strap, and wears on his head not a hat, but a large metal funnel pointing straight toward heaven.
The four figures appear in a tiny painting, displayed at the Museo del Prado next to The Garden of Earthly Delights—the much better-known triptych by the same master, the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch—which is largely overlooked by most visitors. The three large panels depicting the lysergic scenes of Earth, Paradise, and Hell make The Garden of Earthly Delights an invaluable treasure of medieval art, which as such overshadows nearly every other work not only in the room or floor where it is located, but perhaps in the entire museum.
Of Bosch’s two works, the smaller one is indeed modest in size—its height is only forty-eight centimeters—but not in theme: known by two titles, The Cure of Folly or The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, it portrays an ancient medieval superstition, namely the idea that madness and stupidity were caused by a small stone that could be implanted or grow spontaneously inside the skull.
La piedra de la locura, Benjamín Labatut, Editorial Anagrama S.A., Barcellona, 2021

“I believe that we tend to look to the past to seek answers. I see now, for example, a strong tendency to redeem indigenous knowledge and a deep wisdom that comes from the Neolithic and has persisted until now. But I believe that the form reality is taking at this moment—or at least when I look at my experience—the vertigo one feels just being alive today, makes me think that if there is a way forward, it is by moving ahead, not backward. That’s why I write about Philip K. Dick; he is a kind of prophet, and prophets must be listened to. You shouldn’t overvalue them, but something must be heard.
Why is Dick important? Because humans cannot inhabit a future they have not first imagined. We are talking about projecting forms from the past onto the present and the future, but that alone doesn’t give us momentum. We are going through a crisis that surely has something in common with our past, but what is interesting is the novelty embedded in this new crisis.
We are living through unprecedented things. There is a problem we face—not just here in Chile, but globally—and it is the crisis of imagination: at this moment, we are incapable of seeing beyond; it is not possible to imagine the future as we once could. Before, it was incredibly easy; any fool could do futurism. Today, no one has that courage because the present is changing so rapidly that we are seized by vertigo, and when we are seized by vertigo, we get a headache, it’s almost nauseating, and we close our eyes for the world to stop spinning.
The form each of us experiences—the fact that suddenly what we do no longer makes sense—the form each of us lives is the answer, a personal answer to the question. But it is absurd to believe we will solve this crisis with the tools of the distant or recent past. This is a storm that requires, as in situations of deep crisis, a leap of imagination.
I am not interested in madness in its pure state, nor am I interested in reason without any shadow; what interests me is the delirium of reason, projects where our irrationality, where our Promethean nature, collides with our Luciferian impulse, with an atrocious wickedness. Pure madness is terrible and inspires nothing, but delirium is something else—it is a suspension, a moment that can be felt in the air, and from it many things can be redeemed.
If we were only chaotic, mad, and violent, this would not be interesting. The hard thing to accept is that even the most evil person, who knows depravity, total darkness, someone almost outside the scale of humanity, can love their animals as if they were their children. The pandemic is only another signal of the difficulty of accepting this dual nature that we all have.
In some way, the delirium of the woman who haunted me, whom I write about in my book, tells us something about a delirium we are experiencing on a large scale, where people are trapped in a worldview increasingly detached from reality. I am talking about her madness to speak of a madness that is becoming much more common, where people live consumed by their own delirium, where no evidence the world presents matters, but they remain attached to their own folly.
In her pages, she wrote a sentence that was the reason I decided to write about her. She said that she began to pay attention to unusual similarities and use them to create hypotheses about how ideas propagate through people.
We are at a moment in which a biological being is spreading through people, and without a doubt, we have seen how many delirious ideas today travel from one mind to another at a pace we were not used to and for which we have no defense. Moreover, I was very interested in the fact that she is a person of science; she was a physicist.
Because, of course, what interests me is when the methods of science are used to support delirium, to prop up a non-rational vision of things. Because this coexistence between reason and irrationality, between belief and evidence, is something that not only she but many of us are beginning to experience.”
Radio interview with Benjamin Labatut, 2022