MADNESS IS NO LONGER VERY POPULAR

 

Madness is no longer very popular

The story I have to tell you is about madness.

Not the madness of the kind that has a proper name.  Not just nervous only like my mother used to tell us:  "Be gentle, he is nervous today…"

I took many hints from my mother regarding madness and know now how to tell when madness is truly herself and at home -- "Stay away from him, he's touchy. He had too much to drink today."  That could be madness but is not necessarily so. 

Not even the madness I call manic, like in manic states when I build too many buildings, write too many poems.  Sink into depressive states of being because there are no more perspectives of drawing, no more buildings for me to build, no more people to understand, no more poems to write. No more voice.

When you know you cannot change it, yet you must. 

Or as the two-season version of light madness, politely referred to as the bi-polar kind.

When you rant and rave then talk not at all, hardly wake up in the morning.

Perfectly excused, these lesser madnesses.  They are crazy but they are not mad, these people with their massive syndromes.  As a matter of fact, these lighter versions are thought to be very much in fashion  -- a therapist, pill, encounter group, social worker, a bit of treatment, a garden, a bit of herb, society is kind to those types, easily under control.  Society forgives and forgets them.

No. The story I have to tell you is about madness of a different kind.  Not a kind madness.

It seems to me I need to find the way to impart to you something you do not wish to hear. I do not wish to say. 

The madness I am obsessed with is the kind that has to do with jumping out of windows.  Someone if after you.  Someone is stealing your genius concepts, designs for the flying boat right from under your head.  Exquisite drawings of the chair that will revolutionize furniture, ultimate fine architectural renderings of the cities of the future, your novel of doom and revelation.

Right there they are, coming after you.  They catch you and throw you into a room where you rock back and forth, catatonic in your state.  You stay until again they need you to invent and to imagine your genius concepts.

The madness I want to discuss with you then has to do with the distance you set between yourself and her. You come into the room.  Your first act is to turn off the four radios tuned on to four different stations of word, three televisions tuned on to additional four channels of vision.  Many languages spoken here. Full blast.  On the stove the pungent smells of one ton of mint candy cooking.  On the driveway the remnants of the only viable family car turned into a sculpture of cement. In the living room massive wooden carvings.

One by one, you turn them off, these madnesses, you must!  Assertive personality.

Turn off a mind you know keeps track of it all.  You come in and turn off the radio stations, the channels, click off the fires. 

This madness does not and you know it.

In your mind, it seems sometimes in mine, this madness masquerades as just a whim, a problem deeply set in behavior and attitude.  Sometimes it seems this madness needs placebo control, drastic change of circumstance, a revelation, a series of shock treatments.

Remain pro-active, properly manage and control this madness.  You might even be right!

But what I miss are the times when mad people were thought to be wise.  When they too were thought to have crossed a threshold. The ivy stolen from their doors steps a healing to mine.

What I miss are the times when people were like Jean Cocteau creating plays and literature way ahead of their time.

What I miss are the times when Anais Ninn talked to Henry Miller and understood the essence of the small nature of his male conquering being.

When the piano of Keith Jarrett took me beyond what had already been named. 

What I miss most of all are the times when I too have a glimpse of that gate, of the hell inside. 

Not of heaven. Oh, heaven!  Nauseatingly we all have been told about heaven.

What I miss is the protection of the blue hand painted on that threshold to keep me safe inside, yes, but also to keep me safe outside when I venture beyond, to take a peek at hell.

Not like now though, the revulsion, the veiled accusations, the implication that if only I could manage it properly I could see the light.

There is no light in madness. There is only a threshold.

And a fear for now, for the schizophrenic fifty three years old brother of mine, thirty years into his madness, loved and not touched by synthetic science,

my almost twin, this mad man.

 

Erica Weick

In memory of my brother Dirceu.