What is madness? So-called madness? We all live here, we’re all connected. I think we can feel it within the soul of humanity - whatever it is. We can feel the experiences of others in their words and ways. But, like a photograph, often we think that there is a frame around people, perhaps the frame stops at their body, or perhaps at their words, or perhaps at the meaning of their words. We look through the frame and accept what comes through it as a single message from the person. So we believe the meanings or we don’t believe the meanings, - we might judge their character and use that appraisal to decide wether they are presenting the truth to us. But I would say that within the inflections and body language of the person, as we know from recent science, there are messages and meanings. So in some way of thinking, everything a person says has truth in it. Even if they are telling an outright lie, they are sincerely saying it, for some purpose or other. It has meaning for them, at least, even if we can’t tell. Thus, it becomes hard to say actually what is true or false, and in a sense, wether there is such a thing as truth anyways. Or perhaps more accurately, wether “truth” is the most important thing that we are after. Perhaps we are after a meeting together of whole persons and more, the untold and misunderstood part of persons as well as the understood parts of persons. Many parts, and many mysteries...
In this way a person, when talking, might have an understanding that they are not always being understood. They strive to find out what they want to say, while speaking. They might have an understanding that when talking to others they are also talking to theirself. So being with and talking to others is a process that is good for the individual, there is a commitment to follow through that happens, just by the simple act of conversation, story telling, or philosophizing. We might be forever apart from others but we are also talking to both the other and to ourselves. We are the talker and the listener. We become, in part, the conversation, listening to both of us. No wonder the frustration and the sense of sheer weight, (pushing pushing), when there is someone who goes on and on - full of themselves! Don’t they know the conversation can’t wait for all that good garbage? Get to the point already! There has been some entity created that has a pace and a mind and that entity would like the drifting talker to wrap it up because conversations can’t proceed on partial statements. End it already! We have a commitment to sense making going on here! Or humuor making, or horror making, or tradgedy, fear making, - meaning making. Or perhaps change making. We are talking to ourselves and to our self in the community and from the community as well. So many faces going on, its overwhelming at times. The spinning sensation.
I, myself, haven’t encountered madness as being an actual ‘thing’. I’ve encountered many unsaid things, many misunderstood things, much emotion, and much lack of emotion where it seems perhaps there should be feelings. Or perhaps this way of looking at things is ‘madness’ in itself?
I’ve met hospitalized people, who are mute, and wondered how they got that way and what they might like to say. I’ve been with shrieking people, screaming at the top of their lungs. I know also that there are serial killers out there who stalk and invisibly dissappear others. As well this humanity has used tools of destruction that dissappeared 129 thousand people: men, women and children at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan, the Earth, in two moments of soul chilling, bone melting beyond words horror. Little Boy and Fat Man, August 6th and August 9th, 1945. So, in some sense, insanity seems relative, to say the least. I would agree there is stuckness, at the individual level as well as at the societal level.
The book “Alice in Wonderland” has been striking me pretty dramatically in recent months. None of Alice’s experiences make much sense to Alice. And quite a bit happens. She wants in a determined way, and yet gets easily distracted. What does she want in the end? How would it be possible to want anything in particular, in such a world: the Red Queen shouting “Off with their heads!” at odd moments. Indeed, the initial motivation for Alice was that her sister’s book was insistantly boring: ‘“and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” She is stuck in ‘the desert of the real’, as i like to call it, and yet has enough security around her to allow her fantasy to unreel. Her imagination sees a white rabbit in a waistcoat run close by her and then say “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” and then take a look at his pocket watch. Upon realizing that something extroidinaire is going on, she leaps up and follows the rabbit, and sees it “pop down a large rabbit hole under the hedge."
Now a hedge symbolizes the fact that this is a field, on agricultural land, domesticated, and not a forest. It is a tended place, and she is following what seems untended within that spot, or perhaps what tends to its own interests. For being late is a very important thing to the white rabbit. And thus Alice enters some kind of dream-time. She follows the talking and tardy animal down a hole into the ground.
Later she comes upon a house, with a Frog-Footman outside of it:
"Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked.
‘There’s no sort of use in knocking,’ said the Footman, ‘and that for two reasons. First, because I’m on the same side of the door as you are; secondly, because they’re making such a noise inside, no could possibly hear you.’ And certainly there was a most extraordinary noise going on within—a constant howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a dish or kettle had been broken to pieces.
‘Please, then,’ said Alice, ‘how am I to get in?'
‘There might be some sense in your knocking,’ the Footman went on, without attending to her, ‘if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were inside, you might knock, and I could let you out, you know.’ He was looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking, and this Alice thought decidedly uncivil. ‘But perhaps he can’t help it,’ she said to herself; ‘his eyes are so very nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might answer questions— How am I to get in?’ she repeated, aloud."
And thus we all go when we’d like to investigate madness. Which side of the door are we?And would we really like to go in?
The question for me becomes not where is madness in the individual, but why does it seem to manifest in the individual and where is it in the community? Or is it located somewhere between the individual and the community, in the language and ways of relating?
And how does the ‘real’ Alice fare? Alice at age 20:
