what do i mean when i say i'm mad?

don’t i not mean mad in your clinical sense, for isn't your clinic mad in my clinical sense?

do i mean angry? (but aren’t the mad always angry, in their frenzied mutations ... being so in one's mind one is out?)

do i mean my reasoning powers, cognitive functions, my emotional processing, societal values and interpretations, perhaps especially my language but by virtue of this also my dreams and passions … geometrically don’t fit with your geometry, that they are or seem untranslatable? is it a confusion of being and seeming?

but then are we asking what do i mean when i say geometry? (and fit?) … is madness a geometry? different codes for working with shape? not just the shapes of your architectures of culture and business and lust but the shapes of vision and memory and desire and death? and will we find that every answer to the question of madness (being more metaphoric than didactic) just births another question? and is this tendency a truth of madness – of always being duped (ourselves) of any settling?

do i mean simply i’m not you? that triteness

am i expressing alienation? that commonplace

am i asserting an obscure superiority or resentment? that routine

am i pointing to something embedded in the human experience as practically irreconcilable with the spheres of action – politics and war and business? – and this incompatibility i attach this label mad as a convenience, an assumption in part borrowed from you in your disdain for that which is unproductive, that doesn’t cooperate with you, that finds your narratives harrowing, tedious, reckless, barbarously stupid? … and the seriousness you impose on them a ruse that now, having grown for millennia, has finally become precipitously dangerous, threatening the world's species through its decontextual activities and implemented abstractions?

do i then mean madness is wisdom and i am wise? or that i am waiting for a wisdom that i don’t expect to come and crave but can’t have – infinitely distant as it seems to necessarily be – unwilling to compromise with the foolishnesses you call pragmatism, necessity, common sense, intelligence, wisdom?

do i mean nothing, a different nothing than that contained within your somethings or the same?

am i expressing a pretension? that game

am i raising yet again the war behind identity, society, currency? that weariness

is it juggling with doubt, those abyssal spheres that always fall and bounce and fall?

why do i not call myself sane, the sanest of the sane, and you mad? (but i do)

are the mad who aren’t the mad but are the mad just a tribe who’ve never had their own land and never can? is our madness (like yours) a severing from the earth?

is it that i attempt (quite futilely, but nevertheless attempt and keep attempting) to place myself outside money – and that this attempt and its corollary futility are an amalgam called mad?

is it that i attempt (similarly) to believe in impossible things as the most worthy things to believe in? and this orientation gets me labelled as whimsical, childish, delusional … and so mad?

is it a something else i can’t name and this cannot is madness?

is it an about i refuse for an illusion of in, an in that curves into out as the universe into itself? (is madness a prepositional distinction that requires your world to maintain it and falls apart when at home?)

is it a ground that moves between the states of psychic matter with as or more ease than the physical states of solids, liquids, gases, plasmas … and refuses to – no, cannot, other than as a transactional convenience, a particular utility – prioritize them?

is it time – not clock time, not that measurable and precise, but the time we can’t grasp … and so not time but something that seems like time but we sense may not be that inhabits and informs us, that we can’t speak but presses our speaking more than anything?

is it, simply, that which objects? that which objects not to this or that content but the entire apparati of content, of content’s formation, divisions, walls … its rhythms? (but this is not simple)

is madness a difference of speed, of movement – kafka’s the clocks are not in unison?

is it the abyss in every word – jabes’ question?

is it the gaze of transgression – bataille’s eye?

is it the imagination that denies imagination – weil’s gravity or grace?

is it the hiding that reveals – dickinson’s dash and door?

is it literature? the word that hides and speaks the word?

is it the darkness that lights – woolf’s deaths?

is it mysticism – the thehead behind the the?

is it that which knows that the only rule is to bend the rules, the only game to surpass the code of the game? so is it human? are we all mad and only some of us are called it?

is it a decentering, an absence of production? is it anything not colonial or dressed in the reason you call reason by force of not your reason but something else?

is it that which rose in rough contemporaneity with the acceptance of 0 in mathematics, the rise of mental illness and science (those necessary siblings), the fall of god?

is madness just the facet of the human animal that knows the human animal is a strategic lunatic and can’t say this fundamental truth so writes it?

is it the delusion or truth – it doesn’t matter – so obsessed with its hallucinations it can’t conform to the definitions of health society imposes on its subjects for the stated objectives of work and happiness … and this lack of conformity becomes a pretext for divisions, judgments, incarcerations?

is it that which lacks status among the voiced? is an undiscovered unclassified critically endangered species mad and are mad humans just the voices of these dying seeking expression in an alien host? the exclusion that’s formed in forming?

is it that which tests the tests without having itself received (necessarily) any certification?

is it narcissism? that cliché

is it the opposite of stupidity?

is it a new naiveté – necessary or disutile?

is it an imploring? for what? acceptance? by what? of what? a broken immanence? is it having given up on imploring please accept me? is it (finally) being tired of logos, the text that remains?

is it a grammar that’s always dying and birthing? oh, but is it grammar? (that genealogy?)

a strange integration, an uncanny unity, an unspeakable health?

the undecidable? deconstruction before deconstruction? the between before (and between) between? the copy before the original? the reading before the text? a poem of only caesuras, a manual composed entirely of diacritics?

a circumvention, an ecology of silence, an ecology, a viscerality, a scholarship of sensations, a faith? a resonance and lyric glow?

the destruction and fulfillment of philosophy and the caprice of action or inaction or just caprice?

is it belief or meaning or a figure of a figure, a shadow that’s more myself than i?

ah, we find ourselves here. in i … is it i or an i divided or an i-eye scrimmage? i dethroned and plural, the decline and fall of any monism, i’s all the way down? is it reality?

is it that which orients and disorients without distinction? occidents and disoccidents? is it the pun gone berserk? the trapdoor that metaphor fell through on its way to alfred or alice or someone? is it an egg that knows the secret of primacy but will never hatch? is it humpty dumpty? with or without a caterpillar inside?

is it that which perceives mutual exclusivity where there is none or that which perceives unity when there’s only war? is it the unity of war and the disunity of integration? is it lists?

is it overflow and subtraction and surplus and residue? is it mathematics, that in which we put our trust?

is it translation or translation’s inevitable failures? technology or nature or love or justice or any word we can’t define? is madness the false dictionary we depend on to get us through the day?

the seed god plants in souls to subvert god?

just an abiding molecular awareness of death? is it then consciousness without capitalism?

is it infinite ways of saying, an incapacity to limit saying? is it transformation, the glyph or fish in endless morphings?

an apophatic walking, the i becoming the i through the what is of the what isn’t?

is it that which never fits, the never-fitting that critically defines the fittings? that which sees its role as a wanderer, knowledge as a curse, convention as a glue, virtue as just a means, and effort as common trade? is it that which talks instead of that which talks about? is it these distinctions made indistinct?

is it a stalwart belief in absence?

is it the unrepresentable? irreducible resistance to interpretation?

rhythm? a rhythm that’s unpredictable, incalculable, unsayable but whose rhythms can perhaps be shown or muddily glimpsed in the spaces between excessive fullness and excessive emptiness? is it mud?

is it acted out in language, a movement of nontotalizable ungovernable linguistic play through which meaning misfires and the text’s statement is estranged from its performance? (we babblers of the nonexistent in vast plasmatic nights)

is it just a refusal to follow the laws of the cataphatic? is it polypolarity – the additions that subtract and the many that wander in dark dimensions (whether we call these dimensions negative, zero, replete, parallel, coordinated, appearing or disappearing, absolute or high or relative or approximate or middling or abstract or low or independent, codependent, interdependent or strung)?

is it nomadism, homelessness, exile, ostracism, deviancy? the seared seer? the exclusion that includes?

is it being unable to keep up with the pace of void?

gyres of turning toward interpretation, analysis, judgment, closure, separation … and equally toward fluidity, subversion, silence, ruse, question, denial? that which i can neither deny nor assume and this that which is everything? a belief in ghosts’ reality and the livings’ irreality? in reading letters that don’t exist? dispossession? (possession, no possessions?) the quicksand of truth? that which is cast out to the in and through the in finds an out? is it that which has no outside? is it the joke that everyone’s fooled including those who know the joke? is it flight and escape? is it all the rest?

is it the capacity to create a refuge from the place of torment where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of doomed defenseless children of light? is it freedom? that which detects its own detection? the selfdoubt of projects and the cancer of healing? the unreadable that’s read? becoming a member of a story that's being written? is it text?

is it erecting no barrier or safety net or not believing in any? is it a belief in communication or the sight that it’s only our mutual deafness that enables communicating? is it an understanding that the statement there’s no contradiction between true and false … contradiction exists rather between the abbreviation of signs and the signs themselves is yet another displacement in an infinite stairwell of displacement? a disbelief in mastery, finality, information, formulae … in statements?

it's said you become mad withdrawn from society though as it's society that typically says this it's easy to accuse society of a conflict of interest. but what if (not, here, that society were mad and were projecting its madness - that house of mirrors) in withdrawing the maps are redrawn (or at least whiteness is presented to those differently drawn for other drawings) and the contours, symbols, signs, colouring, legends, language, shapes, absences in these otherings present to the selfproclaimed sane in two or more dimensions what they've only perhaps glimpsed in zero - that is, in dream, death, in love, hallucination. and so madness might only be dream made flesh, and the flesh a map none can read (not even the mad, who in becoming unreadable maps enact a new geography in the politics of their bodies, this enacting a writing [as in belshazzar's feast?] waiting for a vatic voice to dare to speak it)? and so for conflating worlds that in your society are forbidden to associate, are they mad? for presenting a map that points nowhere and leads nowhere (except perhaps to an unknown geography), are they mad?

is it the demystification of the mystification of demystifying …? nonsense making sense and sense making nonsense? undecidability? repetition? the nopoint where madness and reason haven’t yet separated – that eternal desire of poets and philosophers and commandos and scientists and priests? is it utopia?

is it becoming a charlatan of the glyph? is it wandering away or just wandering? forgetting? remembering? fiction? participation without elucidation? is it •pataphysics? disquiet? books? the book? minds that feel and hearts that think? is it the resolution ... of philosophy and politics? a tenuous rope bridge between narrative and madness, between some sense of flow, purpose, relation, humanity, normalcy … and collapse, lovecraftian otherness, objectlessness, incomprehensibility, calamity? the rope bridge and the navigating of it? is it and?

usurpation, subversion, loafing, foreignness, repression, disavowal? that which hasn’t lost the sense (sensations) of madness’ strangeness? that which makes complete by going in our place? the interest on insanity that isn’t paid?

is it just thought that’s lived? (is it a justice that knows this isn't just? [and that that isn't just that?])

is it one who’s been overwhelmed and is overwhelmed and will be overwhelmed by the symbols of the unconscious (even without its symbols) and still writes, writes its loneliness, overwhelment, unconscious, its is and yet to be and having been? is it suicide but still alive? contemplation liberated from discursive reflection?

am i not greedy for madness in the way you are for money or love? don’t i hang out (with that selective mute, wisdom) in madness' vestibule waiting for it to open the door and speak?

what happens to the thief who’s exhausted its available objects of thievery, society's artifacts and surpluses, and so can no longer thieve? doesn’t it succumb to that which is at hand, stealing from itself? and should it decide not to suicide (that theft) does it not then have to enter its interior, thieving notions of itself? is this thieving what i mean when i say i'm mad? 

is it the incoherence and formlessness of an eccentric, dreamy, halfeducated recluse in an outoftheway village who with impunity sets at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar? supplication without response? resisting the compulsion of void craving artifact? trance? the copulative? to assume that human history, progress, society are predominantly misplaced and that to object to this misplacement the best methods aren’t to work from within society (which forces one to adapt to it and thus abdicate whatever replacement one might have hoped to achieve, even for oneself) but in its shadows, and shadows, our palatial labyrinthine abysses and unquantifiable cloisters, places of amputated letters and bankrupt names and from within these forlorn spaces to describe the environments, sensations, societies and structures one experiences, not using primarily the grammars and languages of your world, the one you call real, but those emerging from the voices of one’s new given land, an emergence familiar and alien, gradually assuming a certain bulk of airy infrastructure that stands quite confidently, untranslatable, alongside yours? the script collapsed into the script? is it simply the ability to write this? (but the ability to write this isn't ...) the selfacknowledged suffering of the disintoxicated? the intoxicated? renunciation? days of stillborn masterpieces? the resemblance of nothing and nothing? handing out course credits in philosophy to strangers in the tram? bodywood and sweatsnight and pour en finir avec le jugement de son double? the danger safely celebrated? not the statement but the wind?