My thoughts are unruly; imaginary hallucinations threaten at the naked edge of logic. Of all the things that come and go, these few unconnected presences never leave me; the ghosts are here, the staring insensate dead, and the noble and singular presence as well, present always.
I am at a crisis point once more, as all my efforts to reach a solace and a middle ground have failed; I fly from pole to pole, unable to harness the horror of this energy and build reason…something coherent!…out of this tangled and perfectly ordered mandala of the inexplicable.
This is what it’s like to go crazy; I know why crazy people go on about fucking nonsense now.
I used to hang out with a kid named Jason, during the time I still visited the coffeeshop on a regular basis. Jason was deeply schizophrenic, and refused to take medication: whenever we saw each other I’d get him a mocha and we’d talk. He was amazing, I was both fascinated and humbled by the guy.
“Rumpelstiltskin was just a word,” he said to me one day. “…it was just a word she used to turn the straw into gold.”
Now, on some level that makes sense: it’s just that the ordered end result of the original abstract is all fucked up. It still makes sense and it still takes origin from the same abstract, but the shit at the edges starts to get unusual and ‘bizarre’. I thought there was surprising wisdom in what Jason sometimes had to say, although it seemed it was just the koan-like nature of what he said maybe, the white noise of nonsense on which wisdom seems to fall best.
Either way, he awed me.
Now, I think that the process of going mad, of losing touch with reality, is more like a preoccupation with abstracts of less and less cohesion. As chaos in the concepts increases, the sense of order disintegrates, giving way to new vistas of meaning with each new reflection of the abstract; you start to see connections in places you never did before.
The important thing is to keep pruning and judging all connections: blatant craziness like thinking the aliens are talking to you through the TV is the result of failing to cogitate percieved causal relationships. I’m pretty fucking sure I’m going some species of crazy, but I’m trying very hard not to slip and fall.
There is an order to this. I don’t know ‘what’ it is, if it’s an abstraction of time or cause and effect or perceptual time or what. But it’s been very helpful to me so far in visualizing this concept, so what the hell.
Chaos and order relate to one another in the order of a whirlpool, flowing continually outward.
In the center is the chaos, antithetical to life, destitute of order and form; nothing exists here, but it is the nursery of existence.
Where the progress flows outward, it becomes ordered, and then static, and then grows brittle and falls away to be reclaimed.
Now, this is madness, right? It’s nonsense. My problem is that my language is failing me here, I wax as poetic as I can to get words around the abstract and it comes out more straw than gold.
And With No Language But A Cry 