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 –
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.