Madness

I walked that long walk home and sauntered into the thoughtless reverie that was my usual mood. Despite the exercises of today I seemed to be back where I began. I was unsure about living though I was sure of what I would live for, the best within me and those others I now know exist. Why would this be? Why does this idea haunt me? Am I that at odds with the world? I put on Sinatra’s Columbia Records and imagined all the things that ought to be but were not. Before long, the voice took hold of me and I began to speak back.

“Could it be…or isn’t…that sometimes the proper response to life could be insanity…it is like those who go mad or reach for madness look for freedom where they cannot find it in reality and safety in being understood by only themselves. Assuming one voluntarily reaches for insanity, of course. Or could it be too that all reality to all people cannot be the same…perhaps that is the more correct way to think about it. Our realities are different and we live comfortably when we can easily compare and contrast our realities with those of others. A great problem then comes when this comparison and contrast cannot be easily met. When I fail to communicate simply my reality and that reality becomes too farfetched from that which so many people can realize then madness becomes clear to everyone but the mad and it would appear that a group of us here have reached this…but if enough of us are mad then…”

“I must say that I think some kind of madness to be somewhere in us all for it is simply an imbalance of some sort. We are all capable of madness just as we are all capable of stupidity however madness is the most inexplicable and unacceptabe of imbalances we can reach. It is a place within people they rather not go and understandably so since such a place is difficult to navigate. All rational considerations seem to be forgotten, if of course we presume that in madness there can be no reason. People rather not go down some unpleasant path in their thoughts because they do not want to know what is at the end of the rope. Is this cowardice and prudence? Once there, once reason has taken you to that place, it can seldom bring you back. And yet sometimes we are mistaken aren’t we? Madness is too lofty a term for losing one’s mind. What the most of us face is not madness at all but melancholy, a desolation of spirit. But must madness be a breakdown of sorts? Can one get better in madness, more astute and so on? In my madness I feel more Hamlet than Lear though the line is thin.” I imagined just as well that they need not be exclusive of one another all the time. If we can be clear we can say that one is a breakdown of the heart while the other is a breakdown of the mind — I am akin to both.

I put my forehead in my right hand and I felt my head swelling. My emotions were running rampant. I attempted to slow my breathing and think of things other than the thoughts I had but how futile it proved. I did not control my thoughts and I wondered how this was so. I wanted very much to think of anything else and yet I could not, not at all. There is no cure for this, for these thoughts. Once had they are there to move freely and unabated. Was this somehow a region of the mind I could not inhibit? Is there another conscious within that I have no control over? I began to calmly panic. I was upset with myself for not being able to control my thoughts and hold reason firmly in her seat. The music was tuned to my unconscious as I heard Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47 playing furiously somewhere in the background. Oh, how evil conspires against you.

“I bet these voices are within us all. Perhaps it is that some hear them more often than others or rather, the vocie is louder in some than in others. Recognize that there is madness in us all. But here is the rub: what looks to all of us like a breakdown, a loss of wits may not be so. What if it is just the consequence of a folded system carefully nurtured by society which once allowed men to live in a reality of relative harmony with the world and oneself. One begins to defend against such a breakdown and naturally so. We begin to try and give shape to the chaos within our minds and reconcile this with the outside world. We try to get back the peace that we agreed to with society not understanding well enough that our world has changed and it is in our minds that we are subject to live. We begin to develop within us our own world, perhaps as it should be, with our own definitions, our own beauty and so forth. We seek peace with this reality instead of the one we knew before and settle into this madness, our new world. So you see, this is madness is us not being able to reconcile the reality we now know with that one which can be communicated to others. When communication cannot be reached the only possible next step of course is medical treatment. The sane feign and understanding of madness and attempt to establish communication by treating madness as some disease that requires medication. Any such intervention into this new world and on one’s mind will not be taken lightly, it will not establish a communication. It will only further the damage. I have seen this, I have experienced it.”

“The mind is an organ in perception that organizes space and time. Think of a library and all its books. It is the mind that sorts these books, that puts the titles on the covers, that lines the words on the pages and fits everything neatly on the shelf, replacing the books when they are moved and sorting the books from time to time. The mind is then the agent of coordination. And so the mind reads books it wants to read, calls for knowledge whence that knowledge needs calling out for etcetera. Imagine madness. Feign a scenario where the mind looses this ability to coordinate space and time. Pretend that the words of a million books flew of their pages like the individual drops of water from a tsunami that has uplifted the entire Atlantic. This fury beats down upon you without any agent to coordinate. Every word and letter comes out at you, no books are on shelves, in fact the shelves are not in their cases. There are no floors, there is no library. Imagine that, feign madness. Your mind cannot stop the inflow of everything. And imagine again, that this is only one kind of madness, it may be that there is a library, and there the shelves are on the cases but the words are not on the pages or the books are not on the shelves. You can see now, as far as reason can take you, that this can happen to any of us. This is how we should understand one another and come to love each other. Know that we are vulnerable to a great many things that we may not be able to control or handle on our own but that together, perhaps we stand some fighting chance. These men and women that have come to commit these unthinkable acts lived as we did, ate and breathed as we do. They simply needed people to help them overcome what they could not overcome themselves.”

But the voice and I were stalled by a knock at the door. It was fairly late at night even for college students. I wondered who could have come this far and why? I thought I would not open it but curiosity quelled such a thought.

vv. Francs IV