“There are degrees of madness, and the madder you are the more obvious it will be to other people.
Most of my life I have hidden my madness within myself but it is there.” - Charles Bukowski.
We all know this sort of madness; the sort that does not have clear source nor diagnosis;
not the extreme cases, but the more subtle kind that lurks within all the so-called normal.
We traditionally only see and call it madness when it has finally reached its apex,
exceeding its last surface layer into the world, passed one’s abilities, interest,
or willingness to contain it. But to at least some extent, arguably, some form of it is always there.
We see it on the occasions when we don’t quite recognize ourselves in the mirror.
We feel it when we wake up from a strange sleep, and the room is coated with a dreamlike
glaze of another reality. We live it when we look out at the world, up at the sky,
down the street, into another’s face, and experience a strange disquiet
that we haven’t the slightest clue as to what we are looking at. We know it when we try,
when we fail, when we succeed, when a shoelace snaps or a tire goes flat.
There is that clichéd, overused saying often attributed to Albert Einstein,
but was almost certainly never said by him, that, “The definition of insanity is doing the same
thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Regardless of its likely misattribution,
it is fair to accept this as at least one accurate summation of a sort of insanity.
But if this is true, is not life itself this? Is not everything in human life an endeavor
with the goal of complete resolution, of solace, of reconciliation, of control,
peace, or happiness? All of which seem to be and have always been perpetually unsatisfiable,
unobtainable. The human project is a continuous cycle of essentially trying the same things
over and over and expecting different results. Madness is not the exception. It is the norm.
The loss of our early, youthful innocence marks the death of sanity.
Not because we were saner as a young child, but because there were no expectations for us to be.
A young child spouting gibberish or running around with his or her imaginary friend
is not mad, not crazy. He is a child. An adult doing the same thing, of course, is a madman.
Thus, it is at this juncture of maturity at which the expectations of sanity are enacted,
that madness is born. It is not behavior alone, but the confined nature of how we can
no longer behave which synthesizes this sort of internal experience of a general madness.
Only when the child in us is muzzled and clothed in a straitjacket, do we suddenly
feel this madness previously inexistent to us. We don’t suddenly know perfect sanity,
but we somewhat suddenly must act as though we do. What follows is a sort sane insanity of life.
It is likely that every one of us experiences thoughts, desires, compulsions, or behaviors
(realized or unrealized) that are, by all general standards, dipping into some depth of lunacy.
“Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness,”
wrote Blaise Pascal. Madness is perhaps one of the few words that accurately summarizes
humankind so succinctly, touching both ends of it, the good and the bad, the noble and the absurd.
The day-to-day requirements and expectations of social living—to be calm, certain, patient,
responsible, impressive, rational, and all the rest—can, in any given moment,
go against all the likely equitable reasons to not be any of these things.
We are made out of and live in the constant flurry of simultaneous electrical firings and chemical
discharges of a brain trying to map a self onto a universe of exploding and shifting matter. We
sit at the end of this chaos, trying to narrow the ocean of time and space into a tiny, little canal.
To successfully function at all, let alone impressively across a whole lifetime is as much
of a wonder as being itself, in the first place. This world does not budget well for its own
insanity. It does not consider or pad itself well for the mad people nor the stable persons’ periods
or moments of madness. The expectation of sanity arrives every morning at 9 AM;
it awaits us in nearly every interaction. The fact that such a world, such a life, expects us to be
sane is perhaps one of the most obvious examples of its own madness. We expect the world and the
world expects us be clear, to be lucid, to be rational, but that mad child is still inside us,
existing with its relative stupidity but denied the innocence to justify it, screaming
and shaking, muzzled and straight-jacketed, never fully ready to grieve its own death.
Perhaps, then, to some extent, at least on occasion, we should be understanding and
forgiving, to ourselves as well as others, if that child breaks out to blow off a little steam—if
we act out of (or at least apparently out of) character, if we make jarring, new decisions,
if we lose a little grip, if we act a little foolish.
There is a wisdom in this sort of general madness; a wisdom that reminds us that there
are no right paths, no set directions, no certain answers, no dumb questions,
that up is down and down is up, that the world is anything and nothing, that it’s not that serious.
In the words of Carl Jung, “Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit
it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness?...You wanted to
accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly
dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give
it life...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim.
Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies,
but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom
utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself.
Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law.
What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.” - Carl Jung