madnesses iv

if we accept that all contain within them equal measures of sanity and madness, but in varied configurations, then what we call sanity is not sanity but a particular configuration of it with madness.  so we know our names exist far from both sanity and madness, and sanity and madness are simply present, necessary, and symbiotic presentations of the human.  would any future presentations play with these relations and configurations, would the human cease being human, and at what point?  to what extent is the human this particular presentation of sanity, and so any perceived threat to it most dramatic for those with equity in the human’s house?

while we could say madness exists in each of the primary portals to death – love, technology, god, art – and so madness resides more fully along some corridors in time than others, the portal itself makes little difference and its proximity and relation with death far more.

money is not a portal, but the paint and knobs on the doors to all portals, and the function of the sane is to maintain the closure of these doors – maintain the closure against the relentless pressure of the wind of the mad blowing from the infinite corridors of death.

this is hardly to say that the sane are on the side of the living, the mad on the side of death.  we know clearly the sane and the mad are complexly and irrevocably committed to both, but differently.  but in the realm of the sane, on that side of the doors, we say they are on the side of life – its presumed allies.

i watch the sane and the mad walk existence’s rough and transient thoroughfares, mumbling what each must.  i watch them, and it is often unclear whether they are something i should name outside or within.  this lack of clarity, a general indifference to this lack, is, it seems, why those who call themselves the sane are not infrequently inclined to not include me among their numbers.

the analytics of the mad – that sector of the sane that peruses the mad and pronounces and by pronouncing tampers – is a business not to be ignored:  for, like death, it grows.

and by tampering it tampers not just with the mad but with itself (and who knows what else, that in corners, fringes, holes?), these analytics themselves requiring a further analytics.  and so it goes on and on in the vastnesses of ignorance we are not disinclined to name knowledge or health or utility, and even the older names are far from absence:  truth and goodness and love.

so the function of therapy is to purchase sanity, to translate the currency of money to the currency of sanity, even as the confessional-indulgence continuum was, in the middle ages, to translate the currency of money to the currency of salvific grace.

and that one with only half his ears - was it suicided by society (as has been posited) or by sanity?  and that unone who jumped before a train?
     so in the matrices of identity are hungers and voids scrubbed and displayed and set for sale.

sanity’s magic –

            madness appears to cancel itself when its interior qualities roughly correspond to those of its exterior environment.  madness – or at least the appearance of its non-cancellation – thus is a mismatch between the interior and exterior, between a sarcous singularity (a complex within a singularity) and a technocultural complex (a complex within a singularity).  in this mismatch, this non-cancellation, the sarcous singularity is commonly blamed (not unusually to the points of exile, ostracization, death - expulsions to maintain a perceived purity of synchronicity), and only in cul-de-sacs of art and philosophy is this imbalance questioned and the exterior brought to bear, this questioning occasionally commonly celebrated – in the manner of an annual festival in which the people can briefly forget the constraints of time, entering the dissolutions of ecstatic darkness – and ubiquitously ignored in the dominant and pervasive societal rituals.

i do not say the mad are mad, the sane sane; neither do i say the mad are sane, the sane mad.  i let the sane and mad froth on words’ perilous pitch, and definitions are the vapour that rises from the battle.  all i do is trace on language's blank page the shifting shapes i see through endless gloamings.

madnesses ii

certainly the currency of money can entitle its holder to safely play with society’s constructed lines between sanity and madness.  as we see, various sectors of fiscal wealth reveal on lit and comfortable stages the eternal intermarriage of sanity and madness, providing tents of release for the many who carry the burden of maintaining separations and the appearance of madness as an external thing.

language’s role as the currency exchange of sanity is indisputable.  what remains disputable is the table of contents for the exchange’s manual.

whether madness is inclined toward fragmentation or unity is a question the self-designated sane tend to avoid in any extended musing, being themselves inclined to both.

the relations of madness with possibility and dream are a hardly nascent science.  all we can say in our bare infancy is that god, at least as creator, was mad and that the subtle and fashioned schizophrenias of sanity depend on the madness of god, the incoherence of dream, and the possibility of impossibility for the entirety of their comforts and breath.  little will advance here until the essences of religion (the psychology of the inhuman) and science (the geometries and mathematics of the senses) sufficiently converge in yet articulate dialogues.

the recent rise on history’s plane of wellness, of mental health, of the psychotherapeutic professions, conglomerates, vast merchandising and retail franchises – and so of madness as a core industry – indicates nothing like progress in any sense, other than as a further accumulation of cultural artifacts, and rather may point to an increasing insecurity and insularity of the species that requires such industries for its vast protections.

if time is money, it is also madness.  the three are united in a manner not dissimilar to the muses.

as what is routinely called civilization continues to migrate farther from its dark origins into habitats of eternal and artificial light, it may be that sanity takes on, culturally, a function analogous to the alphabet, technologically.  whether earlier warnings about the correlative increasing prostheticization of the human soul, in relation to the alphabet, are relevant to sanity is a question perhaps worthy of further practical and theoretical explorations.

madness is a language family, within it as many languages as sanity.  who would trace these trees and relations, these syntaxes?  who would translate among the many speaking things?  who would know the wind’s dark mind?

do not say – oh, that barely babbling thing with booze for blood, that savage indifferent to its killings, that lump locked in the lacunae of itself are mad, while this executive vice-president of cards, this towering name of music, this lovely altruistic nun are not.  or say it.  but do not say it lightly.

so little along the pathways of evolutionary diversity has humanity crawled on its hapless and blooded knees.  even colour and genitalia, the names or not of one’s gods, are hardly plural in any bulk and spread, or have simply transferred old tyrannies to new.  we have not even reached infancy in these organics.  but geometries of mind, heart, soul, language, thought, form – our approach here is of the non-existent.  of the non-existent, or mad.  and the two are not wholly distinguishable.

for those babbling in the gutters manifest the coated nonsense of the sane; the sane wear them as an ocean its waves.  and the tongues of the eloquent are covered with blisters of denial and usurpation, and woe to those who hear their words and do not see their tongues.

for would not the one capable of hearing the speakings of the sane and the mad equally, applying neither privilege nor objective, be also the one hardly capable of speaking?  so language, sanity’s exchange, does not trade when madness’ stocks have equal value.

based on what i’ve heard the articulate and inarticulate, the loquacious and taciturn, say, i am far from convinced of what is articulate, its source, of any truth in words.

rather than pretending to be mad, i pretend to be sane?  what does this make me?  and if the former is malingering, the latter is …

     for isn’t there always a pretense, and a purchase of that pretense, and often a forgetting of the pretense and its purchase, for the sake of utility and ease?