Monologue of the Mad

We arrived on time, most of us, and formed a circle around the subject of our interest, a man who said he would reveal "all that needed to be known." We pretended to come with great anticipation for his glorious words but in reality we had gotten together online and talked about him, about his request and decided that he should be able to vent to keep him from the red zone of human nastiness. It was something we had learned was necessary with the vagaries of human nature, with its long history of abuses and crimes.

Our solution, ad hoc as it was, was a perfectly human and modern one. An advanced one to be truthful about it. Put the poor bugger in the center and let him have his say. If he didn't have his say we could imagine him doing any number of terrible things.

"Everywhere are the killers of spirit. They know, after many trials and errors, where to hit, where to blast through to the heart to destroy the internal richness that is given by God or Buddha or Christ. "It's Us vs. Them and you really don't believe in Them, do you?" So, that is the proposition most good people are faced with.

First they kill the future, then they kill all reasonable belief in the present. After that is a clean disposal of the physical body which doesn't much matter anyway.

Killers of the spirit do not build things. They find the entrance, small as a knat's head, and find a way into the core of the heart to work there for, sometimes, a day, sometimes many years.

The person so afflicted by the conscious designs of these killers will not know it for a long time but eventually he will start to feel that loss of feeling for things, that loss for a grand large future that leaps up fully structured and alive as happens to young people from time to time.

Oh yes, the killers will move into the real world and occupy important positions.

They will try to do everything, including telling your tales.

They were not particular and didn't care what "time" they lived in. "Ah, it is a democracy, so we will knock it out of their hearts." And when autocracy came they said the same. And theocracies too.

It was important as we look at the etiology of this particular virus to make sure to note that the first thing they went after was the relation between power and those who obeyed power or were, at least, connected with it.

They either made them happy obeyers of the rulers and their structure or as haters of everything and everyone that had power. Sometimes they became larger movements that the politically ambitious had to navigate to gain or retain power. And after awhile, especially in democracy, it was a very predictable thing and once the obeyers and haters figured this out they lost the heart for it and simply waited for death and the end of time for them.

The people always assumed they were finally destroyed by death and sent on their way. But, no, they were always done in by their politics, whether it was local town politics as one had in the medieval period or the massive, manipulative "democratic" politics of todays mass societies. The political animal was as malleable as they come and simply adapted to what the forces were at any given time. "Long and stout and beyond knowing. OK, I will fake a few things." "Short, brutish and without defense against, OK that is manageable." "Warriors determining everything, OK, I will make the warriors believe something that will protect me." And on and on it went. It was hard to decide whether the politics of the labyrinth or the politics of the solitary thug was more dangerous. One was more likely to destroy the spirit in men and women while the other was more likely to destroy the body of men and women.

An epoch could be determined by whether the people wanted their spirits or their bodies destroyed.

And we should make it clear that these killers were not "nonconformists" and acting in the spirit of dehypnotizing their poor victims from the glare of the form of power they happened to be thrown into. If it were that benign then why worry about it? No, it was a much different case of infecting people with the least amount of hope they could have without leaping off the bridge or going nuts in the streets with the knowledge that nothing mattered because we were simply freaks of nature, no better or different than different colored and shaped bugs, and we didn't do ourselves in and we kept out of harms way for the same reason a bug did; it was programmed as part of evolution. We had no choice in the matter. And once this fact had penetrated the poor person it was straight to the bridge or leaping around wildly in the street until the cops shot him.

Since the purpose of these destroyers was destroy them with their own nature it was not part of their scheme to let a simple deflation of belief do the job. And there was an art to it without a doubt. There was only a thin membrane between the shred of hope and nothingness. They had to maintain the membrane but at the lowest threshold possible. This they learned over centuries and passed it on as a secret of sorts.

It was an excellent thing during those ages when the killers of spirit decided to run for office. They were tired of destroying the lives of non-important, little people and sought their sites on being enterprises. Unfortunately as a consequence of destroying mere nations much was swept away and their boredom wreaked even more damage than they had wanted.

A story is nothing but a narrative shaped in the condition of the mind at any given time. Why does it need "people?" It needs a form. The people are in the margins babbling away, giving the writer ideas about what they may be thinking. All their babbling creates, not novels shaped by sketches and dialog, but nausea and a sense that they need to be avoided.

"Let the camera's depict your silly lives, we have greater deeds to execute."

The writer, a person, makes a narrative out of his sense of wanting there to be order and meaning. He can't force it but at the very least he has trust that something like that is possible. And trust is the bottom-line of most things that count.

We are taught not to "talk down" but rather "entertain." It is a tempting thing to do. The people are very easily distracted from lives and worlds that are monstrous and beyond their understanding. The "enlightenment" simply turned people into paranoiacs who viewed life as having no rhyme or reason and there only good to exploit.

And no one believes the hero will come along anytime soon and save the bastards. It is much easier to imagine the hero as seeing the impossibility of his heroism and rather, turning his powers to account on behalf of his self-interest.

Oh lovely emptiness, you are too tempting! Your empty boredom is not redeemable and floats out there in a kind of abysmal eternity. It is so sad.

No matter how long they study your history they will always get it wrong. They will simply ascribe it to what is profoundly lacking in themselves and they will pass the torch onward as if they had accomplished something great."

The madman stopped now and made an excuse to leave the room. We were in a circle, standing up and looked at each other with goofy sneers, some were visibly relieved he had left the room. When he lost his sense of responsibility it was expected that, to get back in, he must account for himself, for his lapse of connection with what was good and necessary.

He called himself a writer but few in the room believed it. Where were his works? Where were the books, the proofs? And more than a few in the room were, in fact, writers who had sold articles and had agents and so on. Who was this phony, this poseur? That only came later after his "absolution" he had e-mailed us would take place at that place. "And the door will be locked so no one will get in after noon."

He claimed that there were "killers of the spirit" everywhere but provided no proof. He made grandiose statements about history and narratives but gave no proof that he knew what he said. But we listened because we were good human beings who had run into our own problems.

Soon enough he was moving in perfect concentric circles pissing as he went announcing that he was here to save us. And that life would destroy us if we didn't know his system.

Most of us had gotten beyond the thought that the crazy were merely illuminated beings, ahead of their times and so unfit for the normal stupidity of life. We had believed it once. Ah, a long ago fit for wonderful crazies.

No, now we believed that the insane posed a community problem and had to be cordoned off so they wouldn't do much damage. And we were more fearful of the damage a nut could do than anything else. "Keep the nut behind the ropes," we'd hear often. "Just don't disturb this nut, you never know what he'll do." And sometimes it was a she but mostly a he.

Of course, the most disturbing thing about the poor crazed in our world is that they always say what we wish we could say but don't want to reveal ourselves. Since every age is, by nature, a repressed one the contents of the nut-class always conform to the nature of an ages repression. One era it is the fear of ghosts so the nuts are always talking to ghosts. Another age it is the yelping and scratching ferociously the human being is known for and so the mad scratch and yelp as no others in the community are permitted to do. In other ages it is a sex thing and the crazy engage in wild sexual behavior, in public, but with no real partners, a pure simulation out in the street like dogs.

In our age, of course, it is criticism. It is impolite to criticize anything based on the fact we have freedom and power, as people, as a nation and so any criticism is seen as a crack in the code. In fact, it is only the young who are permitted this because everyone knows what happens to youth and from its liberation from the code will come new ideas.

We were happily successful in moving the mad object into a position where he could be helped. Not only did it take dexterity but it took a special sort of humor that one or two of us possessed. One of us, for instance, could take any credible statistic and make it into an uproarious joke. And we listened and some of us said, "it takes a magnificent talent and spirit to turn a mere stat into a joke we can all laugh at."

We felt good we could participate in life at this level. It gave us moral courage and filled in a void left during the young days when we were convinced all the others lived life while we were simply observing.

And we felt that in helping the mad man we were, in a general but real way, helping all of humanity. After all, isn't suffering a kind of madness? Doesn't it come from the inability to grasp who we are and so be forever out of sync with that fluid known as happiness?

Of course it was; there was no need to discuss it. It was fait 'acompli and those who argued obviously did not know. And we would gather in a corner and bend our heads toward the center and put a hand over our mouths and laugh, "ah, they did not know! Had we known earlier it would have saved us a great deal of pain."

David

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