Waterbug

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 onthe head. He has been decreed to, commanded, he does nothave his own perceptions: he is taking orders.

Someone who doeshave 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, valuablein 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.

How YOU Can Make Billions in the Mass Murder Industry

Cho went about it wrong.
He just started shooting,
a crude and unrewarding activity.
Here's what he should have done:
1. Switched from English to medicine.
2. Gotten his degree in psychiatry.
3. Gotten on the American Psychiatric Association (APA) committee
that updates the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual (DSM),
mainly by creating new mental illness
by voice vote.
4. Proposed a new illness: Obsessive
Respiratory Rhythmic Inflation/Deflation Disorder
(ORRIDD) -- that is, breathing, a specialized,
chronic restlessness or tic.
5. Worked with a major pharmaceutical firm
to develop a cure (a lead pellet to be injected
directly into the brain).
6. Helped develop the marketing campaign:
IS YOUR CHEST ALWAYS RISING, FALLING, RISING, FALLING,
ALL DAY, EVERY DAY, EVERY NIGHT, RISING, FALLING, AND
YOU CAN'T STOP IT, CAN'T GET AWAY FROM IT, CAN'T
REMEMBER WHAT IT'S LIKE TO HAVE A MOMENT OF SILENCE,
FREEDOM FROM MOTION, FROM THE RASPING OF AIR
IN YOUR THROAT? YOU MAY BE SUFFERING
FROM A CHEMICAL IMBALANCE IN YOUR BRAIN
AS A RESULT OF LEAD DEFICIENCY (LD). YES!
STUDIES SHOW THAT MORE THAN 50% OF THE PEOPLE
VIEWING THIS COMMERCIAL (IN SPITE OF THEIR VIEWING HABITS)
SUFFER FROM Obsessive Respiratory Rhythmic
Inflation/Deflation Disorder!!!

If YOU are suffering from ORRIDD, tell your doctor
or your local quiet, unsocial person (perhaps
one of our trained students or postal workers)
that you may need a prescription for QUIETUSIN!
Quietusin is made of the finest lead available
and is injected directly into the brain. The results
are instant, a blessed restful state for the first time
in your life -- and it LASTS! Lasts without your needing
a second prescription. NOTHING WILL EVER
BOTHER YOU AGAIN! This is what you've been waiting for!
[sideeffectsincludeinonlyeverycase...ah...deathwhich
isusuallymoderate]
7. Become a well-known proponent of Quietusin,
give talks on it to doctors, write a book about it,
get interviewed on the late shows, in magazines,
author studies on the reliability, the lack of
withdrawal symptoms (the impossibility of withdrawal),
etc.
8. Welcome your patients, point out (if they haven't noticed)
that they are suffering from this obsessive condition.
Get them to notice how much of their time and energy
is expended on this respiratory unease. Make sure
they are properly insured. Give them their "shot"
of Quietusin -- preferably outside the office,
to avoid messes. Collect from the insurance companies.
You can line up hundreds of patients in front
of a freshly dug trench, and use one of the latest
automatic delivery devices to medicate them all
in a second.
9. Find more patients.
10. Since many obvious sufferers from ORRIDD
will be in denial, utilize state laws authorizing
enforced out-patient medication to force them
(your ex-wife's mother, for example)
to receive their doses.
And so on. The possibilities are endless...
almost.

Do we have rights?

One crazy man
takes a stand that involves
murdering 32 people
and suddenly
6 million people
feel the flutter of
departing rights.
Cho, you played right
into the hands of the tyrants.

See an astonishing and moving video about Human Rights at: http://youthforhumanrights.org/downloads/quicktime/YHRI_Human_Right_06.mov

Come home, homeland

The good old days,
when we feared Russia or China
might impose upon us
a Totalitarian society,
unlike now,
when we begin to suspect
we've elected our own.

Dean

Be Bop A Lula

When we were young
the world was a be bop place
full of playgrounds and bomb shelters
and teenybop music.
I couldn't hear the serious music
even though the USSR threatened
(Khrushchev brandishing his shoe,
promising to bury the West)
and thank god.

The world is still a dangerous place, my love,
but we survive.

Pam

Mental Menopause

It's been many months since I've sent you a poem.
Not that I haven't thought of you often,
even touched you often,
but my poem-making machinery
has been rusty for months.
If I knew what oil would lubricate it,
I'd bebop-bebob the bouncy bottom
of its long-necked container.
Perhaps I need oil of
OLE!

Dean

Excitations

How much easier
To get the excitement
of our love
(this sixtyish couple)
— oh, how old they are —
in a poem than when,
after sex, we bump thighs
in front of the bathroom mirror
with a toothbrush in our mouths
feeling good and singing
"I'm pickin' up good vibrations
(Oom bop bop good vibrations)
She's giving me excitations
(Oom bop bop excitations)"

Pam

My Calling in Life

"Excite" from Latin "ex" - out,
and Latin "ciere" - to call,
that is, to call out. So, yes,
the cite is the same one in
"traffic citation" when you are called
to court (called in, really).

An ex-citation used to be
a citation. I once came
courting you. Now
when we make love,
I come
calling
on you.

Dean, 28 Jan. 2006

Something exciting

The exciting story is what we do, of course, with art. Going out to paint yesterday with Jack, I learn that for him it's not just the act of painting, but being in the car, headed to "the beauty spot" with a fresh canvas, that's exciting.

And for me, what's exciting is the mad application of paint to a canvas, trying to capture some part of what I see — on this mild Christmas eve day —  into something coherent, a composition, that will communicate some part of what I see/feel, minus the mud and the exhaustion.

Tell me a story, Self

If life is story each of us
is continually telling him or herself,
why don't we tell ourselves
something exciting?

Dean