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?
