Borderland

“If you go on an LSD trip
Remember me
That I never returned from there
I am still there, facing the window
The red guillotine is seen through it
My head is about to be severed
I am still there
Waiting for the next moment
The anxiety of all existence descends on me like a slaughtering knife
The threads of blood still intertwine from the towels to the sink
There is no control over the blood
Just so you know.”

These words above were penned by the legendary Israeli poet Yona Wallach close to her deathbed and published in a collection of her late poems.1 This poem was written about the LSD treatment that Wallach received when she was a mere 21-year-old woman during her hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital. It is one of the few and most poignant poems in the Hebrew language to grapple with the experience of lunacy, narrating it in the first person while using language that is both incredibly colorful and heart-wrenchingly precise in its descriptions of the loneliness and suffering that befall those afflicted with madness.

One cannot help but recall this groundbreaking poem while reading Borderland, the debut book by musician, performer, and multidisciplinary artist Moran Victoria Sabbag. The book, which was published in late 2025 by Shtaim Publishing House and edited by Miri Rozovsky, quite naturally brings Wallach to mind. The comparison between the two is inescapable. One reason for this is that Sabbag willingly evokes it by obviously referring—and even paying tribute—to Wallach throughout the book (for instance, a poem on page 234 has Sabbag announcing that “my consciousness opens, opens and opens, just like a fan”).2

Another reason is that Sabbag’s writing is associative, sensual, and overflowing with horror and sorrow, reminiscent in its candid style of the late great poet. Much like Wallach, Sabbag is possessed of a poetic sensitivity for the musical quality of the Hebrew language, and much like Wallach, Sabbag also writes out of a commitment (not to say urgency) to share with her readers the visual and emotional displays of madness.

Like Wallach, Sabbag insists on emphasizing that the flagellated and divided consciousness of a past self suffering from a psychotic break is not only pained but also receptive to—or even wide open to—take in views of inhuman beauty; views that the author appears to still be missing long after she has presumably healed: “On that day, when the great mirror shattered into shards without any warning, my soul stormed over the treetops at a speed of a hundred kilometers per hour. A wild expanse. Primeval. Primordial. Final… an abundance of magnificent and incomparably turbulent landscapes, illuminated by a blinding, uncompromising light. Animalistic energy. A lust for life. Instincts. Passion. Fireworks of dazzling beauty. All the forces of nature leaped with me toward a new day… On the day the sun crosses this line and splits in the sky, darkness will descend, the earth will rage, my body will be torn to pieces, my teeth and bones will crack and shatter into shards." (Sabbag, pp. 11-14)

Another point of similarity that the two share is biographical and circumstantial; much like Wallach, Sabbag was a young woman (only 19 years old) when she suffered a psychotic break during her mandatory military service. This break led to Sabbag being hospitalized in the psychiatric ward of Haifa’s Rambam Hospital for five months. In Borderland, an artist's book that combines confidential medical documents, correspondence between Sabbag’s family and the IDF, poems penned by her, and monologues that echo streams of consciousness gone awry and broken, Sabbag breaks 24 years of silence. She finally returns to that period that forever altered the trajectory of her life.

“Returns” might not be the most apt verb to describe the linguistic and artistic journey that Sabbag has embarked on by writing this book, because, much like Wallach testified in the poem with which I started this essay: “I never returned / I am still there.” Reading Sabbag’s book brings to mind this sentiment of being trapped in the past, as though the artist were suggesting that at the heart of madness pulse two contradicting urges that fight with one another while also feeding each other.

On the one hand, it seems that she wishes to be saved, to return from her borderland to the “real world,” but on the other hand, it is clear that she fears losing what she discovered there and might even be willing to remain a resident of the land of illusion if it means that she could hold on to what she discovered there.

“I never returned. I am still there,” Sabbag declares as she continues her correspondence with Wallach. “In existential anxiety. Facing the 'Whither?' Still there. Waiting for the next moment – to go to every whither I have not yet been. Not back to the mysterious whither, to the greatest whither of them all." (Sabbag, p. 250)

The archaeology of silence

In 1961, French philosopher Michel Foucault published his book Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. In this monumental tome, Foucault analyzed how modern man came to define and isolate madness as a tool for social control.

The book reveals the mechanisms with which Western society neglected the ancient perception of madness as wild wisdom, turning it instead into a clinical illness in order to establish order and discipline and silence unusual voices. “...the constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence. I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence,” he writes in the preface of the book.3

Sabbag’s book can be read as an attempt that is as visual as it is literary to maintain this dialogue between madness and reason that the psychiatric tradition, according to Foucault, had distorted. The book is divided into two narratives, like a song sung in two voices.

On one side of most double-page spreads, medical summaries are brought verbatim—medical affidavits, summaries of medical procedures, shifting diagnoses, a meticulous description of dosages and different types of medications the patient took, and laconic statements about her mental state composed by medical professionals.

For example: "Citalopram 200mg. Acute dystonia, hand tremors, paranoid thoughts, recurrent falls. Treatment discontinued" (Sabbag, p. 50); "Lofepramine 70mg rose to 140 mg and afterwards to 210 mg, weight gain of 5.5 kg, initially appears calm, with a slight improvement in mood, but later - dizziness, confusion, anxiety, short-term memory loss. Treatment discontinued. Treatment discontinued. Treatment discontinued. The patient refuses any further l treatment" (Sabbag, p. 75); "Morning: left the ward and was found in the surgical department. Lying in bed next to a hospitalized soldier. After much persuasion, she was returned to the ward and immediately got into bed and fell asleep. Afternoon calmer, looks sad, prone to crying, talking with pain about the discharge from the army, and about the difficulty of being isolated in the ward. Sleeping, her brother is beside her… in light of lack of response to broad pharmacological treatment, it was recommended to administer electroconvulsive therapy." (Sabbag, p. 112)

The lean and minimalistic language of the shift summaries, which the nurses or the doctors who supervised Sabbag composed, objectifies the artist, turning her from a suffering young girl into a subject exhibiting various and strange phenomena in the face of the medications with which she is fed. On the other side of the double-page spreads, Sabbag is also sparse with words. However, each short cluster of lines—always written in the first person singular in the present tense, one that has fallen out of time—clarifies to what extent the sudden interface with the psychiatric establishment scars: "My life is trapped inside a web of reasons woven by doctors who tried to protect my sanity. At 20:30, I will fall asleep.

I arrived here in the hope of being healed" (Sabbag, p. 173); "From a distance, along the corridor, I could hear the sudden gaze of my parents. At its end stood parents, husbands, wives, turning their backs in loathing in the face of the truth of the terrible, terrifying illness. Sometimes they took back with them their strange-eyed loved ones, out of fear or a mistaken judgment originating from good intentions. And when they left, I felt the pain of disconnection surging in me against the distancing of their footsteps." (Sabbag, p. 177)

Thus, Sabbag joins a long tradition of artists who tried to research the history of madness, whether it was madness that enveloped them or that they had witnessed. She belongs to the category of creators for whom the very act of reporting on the friction with the psychiatric establishment does not necessarily constitute a raging indictment but rather an effort to point out that the medical sector, despite its positive mission and its good intentions, does not necessarily speak to the patients in their language. Instead, it establishes a scientific language that in a paradoxical way, tries to understand the madness, but on its way to naming it dehumanizes the body and spirit of those afflicted by it.

One can think in this context of Arch of Hysteria, a sculpture created in 1993 by the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois. The bronze sculpture presents a male body (contrary to the historical attribution of hysteria to women) hanging from the ceiling, while it is arched backward in an extreme and strained angle. Over the years, the sculpture has been read as a reference to the "hysterical arch," a bodily posture documented by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot was a French doctor, neurologist, and psychiatrist, and also the teacher of the father of psychoanalysis, Freud. He founded the neurological clinic in the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, which he defined as a "living pathological museum."

For years, Charcot conducted experiments on women who were hospitalized there, and through them developed his theories regarding the illness of hysteria, which he later presented in the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière—an illustrated journal that was dedicated to documenting his findings regarding the external symptoms of hysterical patients, and included photographs of the patients, documentations, observations, and drawings.

If with Bourgeois the hysterical body became a physical text, a sculpture depicting the suffering that cannot be expressed in words, with Israeli theater and performance creator Adili Liberman, the feminist critique of Charcot's research received words in the form of a performance. In 2022, Liberman premiered a show titled Hysteria Performances at the Kelim Festival in collaboration with seven different female therapists. In the work, they researched together the delicate and complex relationships between therapists and patients, and their two-way influence both inside the therapeutic space and outside of it.

Perhaps the artist most identified with the lineage of female creators coming out against the patronizing approach of the psychiatric establishment and seeking to find another expression for the experience of madness is local artist Michal Heiman. Among Heiman's countless works seeking to treat the problematic nature of psychiatric silencing and blurring, especially prominent is the body of works presented in her exhibition AP - Artist Proof Asylum (The Dress, 1855-2017).5 In this exhibition, presented at the Herzliya Museum of Art in 2017, Heiman created a dialogue with a historical photograph of a woman in a London hospital of the 19th century. Heiman inserted herself and dozens of other women into the original photograph, dressed them in the dress of the hospitalized woman, and tried to give back to the anonymous patient the subjectivity that was taken from her by the cataloging medical gaze.

"Where would you like to fly today?"

Juxtaposed with the combative stance of some of the creators mentioned above, Sabbag's book doesn’t read like a political manifesto but as a poetic report from the frontlines of madness—a delicate and fragile sketching of an elusive, passing mental situation, one that can barely be held still in its entirety before it slips away.

Sabbag does not dictate to her readers a critical point of view toward the medical or military establishment, but adopts a more subtle artistic and literary strategy: She allows us to experience an intimate, almost invasive acquaintance with her individual experience in the face of and within the madness. This acquaintance births empathy, not to say identification, and it is this that will later awaken a protective instinct toward her when the horror of the treatment is exposed.

In this sense, the beauty of her book (exquisitely designed by Nadav Shalev, who made it look like a wonderfully aesthetic anthology) is a magic that numbs and softens the natural aversion of most readers to madness and thus allows them to surrender to it. Sabbag's attempt to conceptualize the internal language of the shadow world whose gates she entered in her youth is built patch by patch, a collage of different writing formats, which reminds one at times of the motivation at the heart of the work of the French playwright, actor, and thinker Antonin Artaud. In 1932, Artaud published his famous manifesto, “Theatre of Cruelty,” in which he called for a revolution in theater—he wanted to move from theater based on text and logic to theater that acts through body, voice, movement, and sensory shock, with the goal of directly influencing the viewer on a physical and mental level.

Artaud, who grappled with his mental health for most of his adult life, was hospitalized between 1943 and 1946 in the psychiatric hospital in Rodez, where he was treated with electric shocks that, according to him, scarred him, but also allowed him to return to functional life at some level. It was there that he created the series of drawings known as “Spells”: Works on paper that combined writing, graphic signs, and material actions like perforating and burning. This was part of Artaud's attempt to develop an artistic language that would not be based on logical meaning but on energy.6

I am reminded of Artaud and his corporeal, screaming drawings, as well as his medical history, when I reach the section in the book where it is decided to grant Sabbag electric shock treatment: "Night: at night the patient was troubled because of the upcoming electric treatment, fell asleep at 2:00. The patient is requested to fast until the electric treatment tomorrow. [The patient] looked terrified." (Sabbag, p. 143).

These jarring words make the reader catch her breath, but there is no time to recuperate, because already on the next page the preparation toward the complex procedure is described in language that resonates with both cruelty and humor: "Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) No. 1. Doctor A: 'Sign here, here and here that you agree to the treatment'. Doctor B: 'Connecting to the ECG machine'. Doctor C: 'Connecting a band to the forehead and charging'. Doctor A: 'Injecting muscle relaxant'. Anesthesiologist, asks with a smile: 'Where would you like to fly today?'" (Sabbag, p. 144)

This description repeats throughout the book again and again, as the number of the series of electric shock treatments Sabbag underwent. This is one of the smartest artistic choices in the book, revealing that Sabbag knows how to knead the archival textual materials like clay in her hands and that she does not hesitate to repeat them, to dismantle them, and to embed them as she sees fit, as she does with her own poetry.

Unlike the clinical coldness with which the doctors decide to grant Sabbag the electric shock treatment (a treatment that despite its severe side effects is granted to this day to patients suffering from diagnoses like acute depression or schizophrenia that cannot be relieved through pharmacological treatment), Sabbag's writing overflows with emotion when she describes the suffering caused by the treatments: "Just not this electricity, please, not again! I will start anew… I am stopping. Just not this electricity, just not this… dancing on the shards of glass, the remnants of the blast continue to echo between my ears." (Sabbag, p. 217)

Readers seeking a resolution to a conflict or a linear, orderly story with a beginning, middle, and end, will not find it here. Sabbag does not attempt to explain how a young woman—a gifted violinist and a soldier serving in an intelligence unit—was suddenly cut off from the normal path of life. She also does not offer comfort; only readers who know Sabbag outside the pages of the book are aware that she recovered and that in the many years that lapsed since her hospitalization, she became a successful artist who presents her works in a variety of museums and galleries in Israel and overseas while raising her young son. 

The book ends almost as it began, with a long poem describing how torment and pleasure are interwoven in the consciousness of a woman who crossed the threshold into the borderland, but also, and perhaps especially there, managed to maintain a critical characteristic of her unique identity as an artist—a high sensitivity to the beauty of the world and an ability to echo it in her own work.

"Please open the curtains" are the words with which Sabbag seals her book, and it is possible and perhaps even desirable to read them not as a personal call for help, but as an entreaty to the readers and to the world of psychiatric medicine alike—not to look away from the patients and not to force upon them only the conventional methods of treatment that strip them of their humanity. "There must be some words. Try to find them," Sabbag describes the request of one of her doctors (Sabbag, p. 209). She succeeded, and now this writer can only recommend with all of her heart that this genre-crossing book be embraced and read not only by artists but also by doctors and therapists of all kinds, and that we the readers, find within us the generosity and the patience required to listen to the music of her words.

Footnotes

1. If You Go On an LSD Trip by Yona Wallach was translated into English by Linda Zisquit. The translation appears in Let the Words in: Selected Poems, published by Sheep Meadow Press in 2006. ↑
2. This line references Wallach’s poem, The Unconscious Opens Like a Fan, which was also translated by Zisquit and appears in the same book. ↑
3. This paragraph appears in page X of the preface to Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated into English by Richard Howard and published by Random House in 1965. ↑
4. Further information about Liberman’s performance and her artistic practice can be found in this interview, which I conducted for Portfolio magazine (in Hebrew): https://www.prtfl.co.il/archives/164374. ↑
5. More information about Heiman’s exhibition and the documents that include this citation can be found here: https://www.herzliyamuseum.co.il/exhibition/%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9B%D7%9C-%D7%94%D7%99%D7%99%D7%9E%D7%9F/ ↑
6. Further writing on Artaud’s practice and visuals of his notebooks and drawings can be found here: https://www.frieze.com/article/repositories-black-magic-humour-and-horror-antonin-artauds-asylum-notebooks ↑

Joy Bernard is a choreographer, performer, multidisciplinary artist, journalist, and critic. She creates works in dance, visual theatre, video, sound, and text, which have been presented at a wide range of dance and film festivals, as well as in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries in Israel and internationally. Her journalistic and essayistic writing, as well as her poetry, are regularly published in various newspapers and magazines, including Haaretz, Portfolio Magazine, Erev Rav, the literary magazine Granta, The Art Newspaper, Collectors Agenda, Flash Art, and others. Joy holds a BA in Dance from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, where she is currently completing an MA in Dance with a specialization in choreography.