Crazy Louise

Louise Landis Levi’s Crazy Louise(or la Conversazione Sacra) is a deliberate departure―both from the formal construction of her previous works & from her focus on early (medieval) forms of feminine process & liberation ( Sweet on My Lips: the Love Poems of Mira Bai). Here Levi works close to home, a personal often fragmented process―she details & deconstructs conventions relating to maternal instinct―to hierarchical lineage & to the suffering of female perceptual process―within the patriarchal construct unable to recognize it. Behind apparent “madness,” the madness of genocide, of illegitimate (domestic) & legitimate (state sponsored) torture. (Craze: 1570s, "diseased, sickly," from craze + y. Meaning "full of cracks or flaws" from 1580s; that "of unsound mind, or behaving as so" et. al). The intent in this linguistic cacophony: to transcend. Levi writes, as an “initiate” invoking oriental schools of “crazy” (unconventional) wisdom to contain the debilitating, socially invasive use of this same term “crazy” in our occidental world, especially with relation to women.