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?

minnie downed to baton rouge, waffling about love

    little ditties ‘bout god (or somethin

g) [maybe] {uh} : — : — : — :

isn’t god the image of ourselves that we shatter upon, becoming not whole or healed but uncountable pieces of glass under an electric sun?

            we gather ourselves into transient unities through wisps of language, ineffable reflections of our fragmentation.

god is a word i use to describe the chasm in words, the chasm between desire and desire.

death stabs us.  This stabbing while we continue living i call god.

it isn’t so much god we miss in a secular age but the shadows truth once cast, protecting us from perpetual light.

if misery is a butterfly, is god a caterpillar?

            wouldn’t god, though, be a sanctuary for those with wings in a flat and gravity-bound world?

i once thought that god, grounded as it seemed to be in darkness, would spell the sacred word at the end of time.  But i saw in a dream that time, unlike humanity, is eternal and we are the sacred word which cannot spell itself.

little, said god one day under the bonsai tree it favoured, is born from tears and blood, even as little is born from their absence.

            and the bonsai tree withered upon god’s speaking these words and god was silent.

if god must pitch its tent in a poet for poetry to exist and god is dead, do we not write from a residence of death and a throne of dust?

            but hasn’t language always been dust’s tongue and poetry its bloody pen?

the golden irides of god are dimly visible in the smog of our souls, through the gutted monsters of our wounds.

            as we spot them (staring at what? surely not us! staring at staring itself?), a certain death is inevitable (who does not seek this death in the act of gutting? in slaying the hungry heads of those wounds?):  we cannot help but become the blurred reflection of those thousand eyes.
                        the endless deaths in life:  with each one added, life and death begin to resemble each other, like a dog and its human.  (but which is which?)  (with each addition of death, divisions are subtracted …)
                                    heresiarch ramarooroo said, from death’s perspective, all of life is a failure.  And i said, yes.  But isn’t it equally true that from death’s perspective, all of life is a success? (and doesn’t, ^now, ^{the golden flappy now}, ^{tolle’s cheap toll}, chuang tzu’s butterfly poke its pesky head over language’s cliffs, laughing like a banshee munching avocados on a teetertotter on a raft in the Pacific?)
                                                (and from life’s perspective [from those perspectives] what is life? might it be language precariously stuffed into human form? and when humanity ends there still may be life but …)

might god be the amorphousness in the eye of each word, making the hebrew scribes right:  the holy name cannot be written?  It would be english’s crassness—our requirement to express subtlety in syntactic convolutions, the directness we claim in our grammar, the mask of honesty we demand in our art and our love—to plunk the shapeless shape in a clunky one-syllable word, with a hint of its essence in the vowel at its hollow center.

              
isn’t my melancholy that art, like god or time, has no end, no goal, no definition, no f ^ac ^e … only a fluidity polluted (flowered?) with past ends?

one must speak of god (if one must speak of god) in ways that barely resemble ways that resemble.  (and who would be so mad to speak of god unless one must?)

although there are other claimants, we prefer the gods who crouch at the edges of thoroughfares, drooling a bit perhaps, though not infrequently from caprice, day-old french fries in a paper bag, sartorial holes worn comfortably, quarreling with death as if the quarrel were a lover, dreaming of a night of love to down the horny world, seeing themselves not as saviors or losers or members of the virtuous merchant class or artists (those usurpers!), not particularly seeing themselves, humming off-tune tunes, not having had a martini in seven weeks or bermuda … these gods of smells and dirty fingernails, those claimants no more true than others, yet more true through our preferring.

i use god in the way you use waffle or project or agent or fuck me—not in any final sense or sense existing outside of what presently is inside, but in the sense of picnics and candy floss and rhino poop.  God is simply the empty set of words that impossibly claims to hold the infinity of other empty sets.

the endless compelling compulsive exhausting irrevocable exuberant leaping need for the tongue to move in the mouth, celebrating sound, feeling itself wiggle, wiggling, wiggled, in that cavity buttressed by carnivorous teeth and salacious lips, madly, softly, sweetly, bleeding, reaching through the void for the clanging stars … this need … isn’t it god?
 
which is greater—language or god? heresiarch wollenmatova asked one woolly bedtime as gramma tucked her in to hums of bygone nights.  Language, gramma spontaneously answered.  No, god, she corrected herself.  No no, that’s incorrect, it’s surely language.  No, forgive me, it’s god.  Language—i remember, i got the answer wrong, it was #98—is it, i know now.  But … i can’t forget that moment in the backseat of the chevy … without a doubt, god is right.  And so it went until heresiarch wollenmatova fell asleep and gramma died from the exhaustion of indecision, sucked into the gyres of memory.
            and love? you (& paul & aldous) ask, from a perch of posited perennialism.  Love, said heresiarch munchawuffle, i have heard it said that love is but one of the trillion children spawned by language and god, wee hindu-ish divinities wobbling it out in the living dictionary of life.
                        love! said will burr-brrrrrr and his wiffles.  Love is a meme stuck on the forehead of my self-proclaimed integration and enlightenment, a plank in the eye of my transpersonal taxonomies.
                                    love, said the kamut flakes, is an emo orgy on a bed of blooming almond milk, the jets we fly to paradise.
                                                love, said sappho and sade, that salad of limbs and eyes …
                                                            love, said aristophabooble, that cloven sphere …
                                                                   love, said Love, as it may have always had, which makes it maybe just like us,—…:  dunno what i am.

god is every word in every past, present and future language.  Not just every word, but every object and concept that that word points to, every textual and oral discourse (thought and feeling) about that word, the object(s) and concept(s) it points to.  Not just these, but the end-to-end experiences of that word.  For example, god includes the word ‘potato,’ the object potato (in all its varieties and states), all words and concepts (ontological, scientific, theological etc.), thoughts and feelings about potatoes, and the actual lived experience of modifying, growing, marketing, selling, preparing, cooking, using, wasting potatoes in all possible circumstances, with all possible methods, in all possible states.  Until the human has entered into each word in all languages this way, entered until each word has collapsed under its own weight and become the night below all words, it does not know god.  This radical limit to knowing we might call the humility we resist in order to sidestep reality’s confinement, the humility we must resist in order to speak at all.

 
if god was absence before it died, does it not become after its death not amortized absence but the absence of absence, which is not presence (which would immediately destroy us) but something more problematic—the lack of lack, the silence of silence?
            god becomes the copy of itself—itself by definition itself copying (god bless you please, mr. benjamin)
                        in dying, god expands its infinity, takes on more of eternity.  God always gains through death.  We always lose.  But in god’s dyings (which are endless), we become more distant from our center, requiring more substances (things, noises, images, movements, orgasms, money) to bridge ourselves, attempting to compensate for god’s expanding infinities through prosthetic innovation, to which society must increasingly devote itself; this activity inevitably becoming the sacred (the task of compensating for the absence of absence:  the perpetual sacred).  [the three sacreds:  the above task of compensation, the task of detouring around the above task, the task of bridging compensating and detouring]
                                    it is humanity’s inefficient energy to transform the divine losses we are granted into processes we are compelled to call gains.
                                                isn’t this compulsion the cooperative task between heaven and earth, that old alliance (to refer to heraclitus) between delight and mud?
                                                            (daodejing xlii:  thus a thing is sometimes added to by being diminished and diminished by being added to …)

the body is the way that gets in the way

the body is the way and the body gets in the way

the body is the way that gets in the way of the body, in the body of the way

the body is the way of the body of the way

            heresiarch ramarooroo

 

god i take to be the inexplicable incommunicable infinite resource i draw from to attempt to describe the quantumly human (what feels at times like a siege of twinkies).

 
grey is the god of the city, who slips on its vomit in the back of taxis, who leaps before trains from a pedestal of pills, who rides elevators, prime past prime, until light itself snaps and the god forgets its names.
            grey is the god of the city, who has forgotten the energy of unconsummated desire, the fomenting pit of silence, who races up the steps of the future without faltering or looking back at the pillar of love.
                        grey is the god of the city, grey and pricked and sated and beautiful and doomed.
 
it has long been known that god is a failed alchemist and we its confused apprentices.

the urban streets are god’s neurons, its intersections its synapses.  We inhabit the divine cranium to explore our resilience in new environments, to explore new explorings, to trace circumferences on night’s unblinking canvas (the arctic, everest, the congo were nothing next to this critically acclaimed [and popular!!!] choreography of the unseen and seen!).  The visions of the Apocalypse are fulfilled, and we stumble along heaven’s alleys and boulevards (where the sun is no longer necessary! finally!), not (of course) according to anyone’s expectations, as is the nature of visions, wily to the squiggles in their vast and microscopic core.
            this mind incarnate we inhabit:

• our collective flesh turned inside out and hammered into shapes of certain dreams?
• the essence of a substance of a shadow ^{(dream’s definition?)} shoved through time’s leathery funnel, splatting architectures on the shaved and antiseptic earth?
• our lusty tongues, strung out on themselves, drooling patterns we barely understand, the woven spit of history?
• the imago of a race neither won nor lost and maybe hardly run?

 
doesn’t god wait for me in darkness, less like a lover, somewhat like a corpse, more like a word dropped into a bottomless desert well?
 
what drives us to god?  The bricks of knowledge, the mockery of consciousness, betrayal, envy and small-mindedness and the arrogance that pretends it’s not, the cruelty and aggressiveness at the heart of the good, the greed that disguises itself as cooperation and the cooperation that disguises itself as greed, …  what drives us away?  The bricks of knowledge, the mockery of consciousness, betrayal, envy …
            and of these other things:  tenderness, understanding, friendship, care, forgiveness … do they not drive us to the human … or, rather, do they not drive?
                        those who would call the driving evil or ignorant or otiose or tired but gladly accept its effects (planes, trains, automobiles, yoga, to name just a few) … what do we call them? might we call them unjust?
 
texting is a bridge from god to nothingness, from the nothingness of god to the nothingness of god … god, simply, was insufficient as a bridge (at least it learns on its śūnyatā designer couch!); we need aids:  two thousand years ago it gave us Christ the Word, now it gives us texting—the ultimate instant communion, oh bouncy host!
 
one doesn’t oppose society and god (other than in that particular way, the scrubless plain on which things legitimately confront one another in the joy and desolations of themselves), one doesn’t unite them either (other than in that other particular way, on the supersonic planes of the air show of ourselves).  But one can perhaps, in some geometric spinozean vertiginous calm, listen faintly to a dialogue between them, not without meaning not dissimilar to the feeling of glimpsing a silent mob under a night clear rural sky. 

haiku on the trans-siberian at three a.m.

dazed, god speeds down the

miles of its deadlines, which it

would confuse with visions but

for the treasure in

its impermanent lantern

like virginia, with her waves and rocks, i refuse to watch art kneel before psychology, vision before analysis, enthusiasm before pragmatism, spirit before money.  This refusal i could call god.
           (you call my divisions false, my refusal puerile, my methods dubious?  Do i not also?  [But what shall we call the calling?]  I appeal, in part, in the broken pitch, from the whispers of stone, to the uncarved block of the dao, lay my oily fingers on its surfaces, cling to muddled images of murkiness and turning back and vacancy and the ancestors of beginnings—the project of the unnaming of names, beyond death’s caress, life’s claws.)