the official migration from nomenclatures of
madness to nomenclatures of mental illness, like that from personnel to human
resources, like that from word to language, indicates typically less the truth
being stated, more questions of the distance between dark and light.
as published values and laws provide quotidian
dreams and nightmares to navigate the expressed emotionality of society and the
unwritten, value and law permeating the published, provides the actualized
sacred, so money and sanity.
the sacred that refuses actualization but in
transient form is madness.
the varied circumscriptions of madness are
surely differently delineated than the varied circumscriptions of sanity. but by what? and by whom? and this what and this whom on what authority outside these particular circumscriptions?
if the will to power is already and equally a
past twig in the rapids of history as madness, personnel, god, word, nature,
what might it now be? the will or
non-will to energy? a reproduction? a
misnomer, misboner? and how might this
be related to the will to sanity?
sanity is collective, madness is
individual. sanity is individual,
madness is collective. what is the despoken
word that holds supplely this appearing contradiction?
madness might only be the air that surrounds
and infiltrates solidity, the necessary elemental counterpoint to monumental
sanity.
madness might be another name for sanity if
it were not for sanity’s necessitated need for definitional existence.
i have walked, with purpose and without and
often not knowing which was which, the alleys of words and shifted through
their garbage. i have seen the worn
walls of meaning and not gone mad. or wholly mad. i have known in my blood that all the sane
have said and all the mad have said balance on the scales that hold the
universe. and to some of the sane and
some of the mad this knowledge is the greatest sanity; and to some of the mad
and some of the sane it is the greatest madness.
it is not as if i would have the mad rule the
present world. but some other world? (and, even so, i would hardly have the sane rule this one.)
if the present world is the best of all
possible worlds and the worst and neither – which it all surely is – i would
not (being not given to be able to choose between sanity and madness) present
myself to the present (and so to those who rule it) but attempt to develop the
arts of depresenting and through these avoid it.
we might speak of sanity as the void that
bespeaks itself in the falseness that wears truth, and of madness as the void
that bespeaks itself in the truth that wears falsehood. two dancers on an infinite empty stage in
perfect night, the only audience themselves.
sanity is less a reason that, founded on
sensuous evidence, founds a more proximate relation with truth than other
modes, founded on other evidence in other ways, and more a way that wears the
name of reason, as a stretch of road might bear the name ‘Alphonsi’ but instead
bears ‘Fifth.’ This ability to hold onto
a particular name and have a particular value ascribed to that particular name,
when wholesale evidence is lacking, being as we are minutely in time and hardly
even in eternity, is perhaps sanity’s greatest attribute. madness might be less committed to founding
and holding and ascribing, and for this it is called mad.
as sanity manufactures madness to further its
purposes, can we also – and if so in what similar and different ways – speak of
madness manufacturing sanity?
for are not the mad the ones who see death in
the lineaments of life, hope in the lineaments of despair, and leaves on the
lineaments of words? for seeing what is
not and yet what is in what is, are they not mad?
that the sane see cannot be denied except at
a certain cost. the legitimacies and
illegitimacies of this seeing, this denying of denying, this cannot, may be the seeing of the mad.
