More on Madness

an essay by Russell Soloman
(posted with his permission)

 

There is an insouciant use of "madness" as spontaneous

creativity or intuitive leaping, which makes the ordinary "real life"

logic nervous. This "madness" is used as relish, as charm,

"You lovely mad person!"

 

This is because of the low level of awareness in most logic,

which is two valued--right and wrong--moral, biblical, absolute.

Someone is trying to be the nail in the head, or hit the nail on

the head. He has been decreed to, commanded, he does not

have his own perceptions: he is taking orders. Someone who

does have his own universe and his own judgment seems "mad"

to him. Thus we have the usual reality battles, which all battles

are--over reality. (And probably over misunderstood words.)

 

The word "madness" is loose and figurative and means all kinds

of things because the language has so few words for free beings,

not usually being employed in freeing them, or talking about them

in a positive way. Thus a free, happy being must be "mad." And

slave-maker psychiatrists will hasten to name a "disorder" for it.

And earlier, priests had "witchcraft" and "heresy" and secular

boiling in oil aimed against free beings. These days we have

child-drugging to prevent freedom of thought and expression.

Enforced reality is a big business. "Mad, crazy, mentally ill"

are used to invalidate.

 

"If you don't agree, you must  be mad," is the usual formula for the

invalidation of personal realities, especially the higher ones. Then

we ironically admire this "madness" and make the word a good

quality. But tossed into this is the tinge of evil in much madness,

as in certain popular arts, as in racism, so you have people trying

to be beautiful by destruction. They are "mad" in the sense of evil

purposes showing up in public and causing harm. But they may be

charming and may hold high office, may wear beautiful uniforms;

however, they can not bring life to fellow man; they can't talk to you

or their families, nor even their fellow politicians or comrades in arms.

Madness is easy to see by its result: pollution of the mind, cadavers

underfoot, continual deficit borrowing against the future that may not

come if killed by the knife of "profit," raped by actual madness.

 

"Madness" is being pressed into use to account for conditions

"out of range of usual reality." But there are upper ranges and lower

ranges. There is also one's own universe in good condition and in

bad condition. There is in "madness" a hint of disapproval; the word

is trying to defend an agreed upon social, or moral order. But it also

tries to tell of high states of freedom, not approved of by the "legal"

owners of reality.

 

It must account for the ocean of viewpoints and infinity of ideas, for

which this word, even if joyously figurative, can not account. What do

we call the roll of the eyes when we hear our leader tell us he is making

a "surge" by killing more people, and this "surge" will bring order and

agreement? How about "mad-eye-roll," or "folderol"?

 

In the "madness" can, worms wiggle and begin to seem like life in

its infinity of emotional tones and valuable actions; its not so valuable

destructions; its fun qualities, and its insane and unlawful grip on the

realities of man.

 

Don't assume that I am promoting "madness" even if I like "madness,"

in its upper ranges of joy and creation and insouciance and spirit of play,

inspired delight. There is such a thing as the exact truth of something,

and that usually is a free, uncoerced view of isness. An isness, no matter

how it got there, IS WHAT IS. Ability to make and compute with isnesses

without twisting their necks and making them lie and calling them

"freedom" when they are murder, etc., is a useful basis for action

among fluid realities. So is the ability to communicate and to grant

beingness to others. This is all obvious, so I should shut up about it.

 

Okay, don't get mad, you lovely "mad" person. You are "crazy," and that

is what I like about you. "Crazy," as in unique, aesthetic, original, joyous,

one of a kind, not duplicated in any catalogue of mediocrity, valuable

in your deepest god. I pray that I may intimately be connected by being

with you, know you, enjoy you, take "flitter" baths in your laugh, niggle-

higgle in your sparks of thought. (Where are the words for the potential

infinities of co-existence--the ones that do not decay into "natural law"?)

 

After exhilaration the language quits, or gets real solemn about god and

the Other-Causation that made you, that keeps the lid on your divinity

and won't let you "go mad" up here, because you will wreck the universe.

And you would, given half the joyous glint and huge free view that this

might require. So we keep the lid on original thought and the saying of it.

Who wants your truth when I have mine, and let's fight about it and have

war parties. Mm, blood and guts, the hors d'oeuvres of despair. Reality

as usual. I have enough trouble with this morning without you mucking it up

with desperate needs. See how language works better when angry and

not as well in the heartbeat of your presence?

 

For that we need poetry.

 

For days I have been seeing

the galaxy at noon. The stars

are all there, and the planet

falls among them carrying our

small bodies.

 

It rained in the night and my

face is washed clean of stars.

I am looking for the time not

here yet where we can talk

under the shady branches of

languages with brain light,

touch light.

 

You know everything and I want

to feel it running on my brain skin,

taking root in my tapestries and

flowering into white horses, manes

dazzling the white roses' jealous

thorns.

 

I hold you in a wish for pure time,

slow release of buds to blossoms,

I invent slow springtime, sparks of

water which is thought. A sip of

serene infinities as we speak.

I miss your native life forms.

 

Put on a grasshopper body and

we will go leaping, drooling grass

sap from our jaws, kissing light

with our huge eyes.