The story I have to tell you is about madness.
Not the madness of the kind that has a proper name:
I took many hints from my mother regarding madness and know now how to tell when madness is truly herself and at home -- Not just nervous only like my mother used to tell us "Be gentle with him, he is very nervous today… or be careful with him. Stay away from him! "
That could be madness but is not necessarily so.
Not even the madness I learned to call manic, like in manic states when I build too many buildings in my dreams, write too many poems. Sink into depressive states of being because there are no more perspectives of drawing, no more buildings for me to build, no more people to understand, no more poems to write. No more voice.
When you know you cannot change it, yet you must.
Or as the two-season version of light madness, politely referred to as the bi-polar kind.
When you rant and rave then talk not at all, hardly wake up in the morning.
Perfectly excused, these lesser madnesses. They are crazy but they are not mad, these people with their massive syndromes. As a matter of fact, these lighter versions are thought to be very much in fashion -- a therapist, pill, encounter group, social worker, a bit of herb and treatment, a garden, society is kind to those types, easily under control. Society forgives and forgets them.
No. The story I have to tell you is about madness of a different kind. Not a kind madness.
It seems to me I need to find the way to impart to you something you do not wish to hear. I do not wish to say.
The madness I am obsessed with is the kind that has to do with jumping out of windows. Someone is after you. Someone is stealing your genius concepts, designs for the perfect flying boat right from under your head. Exquisite drawings of the chair that will revolutionize furniture, ultimate fine architectural renderings of the cities of the future, your novel of doom and revelation.
Right there they are, coming after you. They catch you and throw you into a room where you rock back and forth, catatonic in your state. You stay until again, they need you to invent and to imagine your genius concepts, once again.
The madness I want to discuss with you then, has to do with the distance you set between yourself and her. You come into the room. Your first act is to turn off the four radios tuned on to four different stations of word and music, three televisions tuned on to additional four channels of vision. Many languages spoken here. Full blast. On the stove the pungent smells of one ton of mint candy cooking. In the driveway, the remnants of the only viable family car turned into a sculpture of almost solid cement, an experiment with materials. In the living room, massive animal wooden carvings, exquisite in shape and color, with no visible faces.
One by one, you turn them off, these madnesses, you must! Assertive personality.
Turn off a mind you know keeps track of it all. You come in and turn off the radio stations, the channels, click off the fires.
This madness does not, and you know it.
In your mind, it seems sometimes in mine, this madness masquerades as just a whim, a problem deeply set in behavior and attitude. Sometimes it seems this madness needs placebo control, drastic change of circumstance, a revelation, a series of shock treatments.
Remain pro-active, properly manage and control this madness. You might even be right!
But what I miss are the times when mad people were thought to be wise. When they too were thought to have crossed a threshold. The ivy stolen from their doors steps a healing to mine.
What I miss are the times when people were like Jean Cocteau creating plays and literature way ahead of their time.
What I miss are the times when Anaïs Nin talked to Henry Miller and understood the essence of the small nature of his male conquering being.
When the piano of Keith Jarrett took me beyond what had already been named.
What I miss most of all are the times when I too have a glimpse of that gate, of the hell inside.
Not of heaven. Oh, heaven! Nauseatingly, we all have been told about heaven.
What I miss is the protection of the blue hand painted on that threshold to keep me safe inside, yes, but also to keep me safe outside when I venture beyond, to take a peek at hell.
Not like now though, the revulsion, the veiled accusations, the implication that if only I could manage it properly, I could see the light.
There is no light in madness. There is only a threshold.
And a fear for now, for the schizophrenic fifty-three years old brother of mine, thirty years into his madness, loved and not touched by synthetic science,
my almost twin, this mad man.
I hesitated to bring this text back and I know now clearly it needs to find, once again, this peculiar public place of exposure – a cyber copy of what is important.
My brother was born in 1948, I did the math, and so wrote the text in the magic year of 2001… He died in 2007.
Today madness is still not very popular, it is routinely labeled “really crazy” and easily dismissed. Folks in affluence have been pursuing something called spirituality as a safe alternative to what could have been labeled madness then. The guidance of the shamanic emperor and its mystery replaces… the fear abated…
There is something marvelously magical about the way in which north americans in affluence seek ways to imagine new utopias.
Affluence and materialism can give an individual ways to discover pretty nifty stuff in the new ways of spiritualism. And why not consider cyberspace, for example, as the space for ghosts to inhabit? The space where ghosts inhabited since time immemorial…
Just imagine your texts and images, even your moving videos and films acquiring holographic powers, while stored in cyberspace. No longer printed, in book format, no longer visually available, but nevertheless there, playing pranks on you? Just like ghosts! Flying saucers and dead grannies appearing by your bedside when you need a hug. Or, conversely, making you feel fear, once again…
We might all have seen predators attack and kill prey… in what is improperly labeled non-human animals. What we have also seen is how life resumes its proper daily pace after the kill. Antelopes watch it happen, then graze, once again. So do birds at a human household birdfeeder stand, after a hawk attack, ducks after an air raid.
Do we advertise fear because fear sells? Or do we misinterpret human life as more precious then? And death as more fearful then? When we lose control over life? Ah, and then, my most favorite current path:
Is the emperor selling expansion and progress towards some utopia as a way to disguise his fears and deep inadequacies towards giving birth to new life? Could it be that simple? Divide and conquer. Yang and ying, male female, dark and light… twins… ?
What if we did not divide?... and did not know…? What if we did not need to know? What if we played with creative attention, instead of intention?
Resolving the madness in me, a bit - the revolving mirror, the inability to invoke images, the amazing luck of seeing what is not seen.
Language as the treasure! 1
Life as a gift.
Thoughtful and provocative. This stood out: "Do we advertise fear because fear sells?" And the misinterpretation of our lives as more precious--the most profound fallacy. Thanks, Erica.
Well, you know how much I like this one.