Madness Whispers

Madness whispers a little louder to me every day. as sanity’s offerings continue to pale. Wonder and awe or dark drudgery.

“Why not?” she speaks softly, seductively. “Why not?” And what answers I can muster come from far away as if muttered by another’s lips.

Let me be mad. Let me drift beyond the boundaries sanity has lain out for me. Sanity kills dogs and grandmothers, it hands out parking tickets and extinguishes color. It need not be.

“There is another way,” she says, her voice ripe with brightness and hope. “You can choose.”

As I drag myself to the dark dungeons of truth she holds out her hand to me and pleads, “I am yours.”

Her laughter is beguiling, the laughter of youth. She speaks of butterflies and bright blue skies while reality talks of factories and polluted seas but its voice is one of authority. Madness, madness is me.

Reality is a cage, a boundary, a prison, a resignation. It is what is left after every other option has been exhausted and extinguished. Reality is despair, it is a sad surrender. It is social security for the tired soul, the old folk’s home, a morgue for the body that awaits the grave.

Reality is a pre-arranged marriage made by my parents without my consent. Its laws were laid out by those long dead, a corpse’s hand clawing the face of the future. It is written in code to coax the mind to betray the heart.

Reality unites us in thought, but madness unites us in spirit. 

An Explanation For The Way The World Is (An Excerpt From The Association)

If you're like a lot of people right now, you may be asking yourself what the hell is going on, how can the world be so messed up? This little section from my book The Association which I wrote a few years ago may help you understand:

“But I don’t get—“

“There is a lot you won’t get right now.” The voice came from the television screen, which had been positioned so that everyone in the room could see the image of Russell, and he, them. “That is the very essence of seeing beyond the collective consciousness, to be made aware of just how much you do not know. The artificial world that surrounds us is filled with answers we believe we possess. It is important that you hear what is being said now. Understanding will come later.”

Russell continued, his voice sounding thin through the television speaker, “What you need to understand now is this: every era, every culture, suffers under the delusion that it, and it alone, has a correct understanding of the world around it. They are, all of them—to a great extent—wrong. Generally, a society clings to the simplest narrative it can find to explain the world outside and its relationship to it. It stumbles upon it rather clumsily, each of its members working more or less blindly, unaware that they are working towards a common purpose, cells oblivious to the organism they are part of. As long as this narrative works, it doesn’t matter how accurate it is. Life went on for those who believed the earth to be flat. Newtonian physics explained the universe quite well for centuries. The problem is that no story adequately explains reality. Eventually, the differences between perception and fact tear apart the perception. Eventually, every society is undone by its inability to correctly grasp life as it truly is. Like a building that sooner or later crumbles due to some weakness in its infrastructure, every society collapses by the sheer weight of its own incomplete understanding of itself.”

As Russell spoke, Dave noticed that Doug was quite willing to let him speak for the group. While Doug was in some way the leader of this group, he deferred to Russell as one who had the greater understanding.

“What you are witnessing now are glimpses of the larger world beyond the smaller dome that encapsulates our current cultural understanding. The cracks in our imperfect little bubble reveal things we cannot even comprehend, things we have sought to protect ourselves from. We have built for ourselves a little ark where we are safe from the storms of a great ocean, but the ark is not capable of protecting us forever.”

Sensing Russell had said what he wished to say, Doug continued: “When a certain manner of thought is working for a group, those within it are quite willing to see the world through the parameters of the existing narrative. Thus a successful paradigm tends towards a sameness of thought, for who can argue with success? In the last century or so, our society has achieved unprecedented success. Never in the history of the world has a paradigm led to such advancement of the human race. And success, as it always does, leads to an unwillingness to have a different opinion. We begin to accept as fact what we once realized was only a perspective. Why mess with or question what is working so well?”

“More than an unwillingness for different opinions,” it was Johnny’s turn to have a say. “An intolerance for opinions that differ is more like it.”

“At any rate,” said Russell, “the very success of our present generation has led to its inability to perceive of different ways of looking at things. In past ages, in other cultures, people that perceived reality differently than the rest were often persecuted, martyred.”

“And now?” asked Mindy.

“Now? Now they simply do not exist.”

“Don’t exist?”

“There is no place for alternate views to exist. Who can argue with success.?”

“What you describe sounds like what could have happened in the Soviet Union,” said Dave. He was not trying to argue, didn’t believe he was in a position to argue. But he did seek to understand, and so was unafraid to question. “Or Europe under the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. But life isn’t like that now. Nobody can control the information we receive, nobody can control the way news is reported. We’re free, in our country, at least. I mean, more free than most.”

“You tend to overestimate the role of force in such matters,” said Doug. “Or will, for that matter, or even awareness. People assume that since there is no dictator that sits over us that we are all free to be individuals. But we’re not. Maybe we don’t realize it, but we’re not.”

“We’re sheep in wolves’ clothing,” laughed Johnny. “All products of a Madison Avenue campaign that makes us think we’re acting in our own best interests when all the while we’re part of the machine.”

Doug was about to continue, but Johnny was just starting. It seemed as though, while they were all speaking from a shared pool of knowledge, each of them had their own interpretation of things. Dave was curious what Izzy might have added to the conversation.

“A century ago, all houses were made individually,” Johnny continued, taking his turn at attempting to explain. “Then someone standardized the process in order to make them easier to build, and suddenly we all end up living in cookie cutter houses. And with modern automation came mass-produced goods. To produce such goods, tasks were broken up into simplistic little blocks so that the people who were put into their roles could be interchangeable. Of course, to buy the standardized products made by standardized workers, the system needed standardized consumers. It didn’t do any good to mass-produce an item when you had many people desiring many different things. So you needed to market to the masses, create a common desire for everyone. And since the whole concept was predicated on the idea that mass production called for mass consumption, material goods were sold as the cure for all our ills. Have a headache? Take an aspirin. Insecure about your place in the world? Buy a fancy car. Tired from working too much? Take a pill or buy a comfy chair to relax in.

“And since manufactured goods were what our paradigm did well,” again inserting his own perspective, Johnny added, “questions of spirituality were of little use. What good was meditation or contemplation or prayer when the real problems of the world were halitosis and waxy yellow build up?”

“So you’re suggesting the industrial revolution created monsters?” asked Dave, incredulously.

“No, he’s saying that it caused us to forget them, for a time.” It was Russell who answered. “If we did not wholly forget them—because, after all, not seeing something does not make it go away—if we did not forget them then we did not perceive them as clearly as we once did. But if we were distracted from such monsters, it was only for a time. The walls of our perception kept them from us, but the cracks are already beginning to show.”

“Don’t forget, Dave,” said Doug, “that what other times may have called spirits, demons, ghosts, are merely their description of what they perceived through their own perspectives. In truth, they may have seen such things more clearly than our generation does, but they are inexact descriptions that show the bias of their times. The past had numerous absurd notions. They’re just a lot easier to see when one is not in the midst of them.”

“So you’re saying the paradigm that our age has been built on has seen better days, is that it?” asked Dave.

 “You think we’ve built as high an edifice as we’re going to build on an imperfect foundation. So what are we supposed to do about it? What do you expect from me?”

Doug was in charge, once again. While Russell and Johnny had knowledge and opinions, it appeared that Doug was the one with a vision. “Dave, you know what it feels like to be free, do you not? In order for you to have developed the ability to see in your dreams, you must have transcended your personal biases, the calcified thought processes that adulthood gradually builds around our life force the way a shell forms around a snail. You know the feeling, of emerging from the protective cocoon, and the fear of a world outside that is so much larger than your little mind could ever understand. You have experienced the joy and fear of the fall as you’ve leapt from the perch of safety of your paradigm, prison, home, shell, rut…whatever you want to call it. Imagine an entire society, an entire world experiencing such a feeling at the same time. Imagine a world where all the belief systems break down at once. The dangers are twofold. One, that people will stare into the depths of things their minds aren’t prepared to comprehend and their deepest fears will walk around in broad daylight. You two have witnessed this, to a small degree. You have seen a group of people summoning powers beyond their ability to control. But this is nothing compared to what large groups of people could do.

“The second concern is that you will have the true believers, those who cling to outmoded forms of belief for fear of what lies beyond. Their lack of vision will be just as dangerous. They will close their minds to even the most obvious of truths because they cannot allow their simple beliefs to be challenged. In calmer times, believers are willing to admit somewhat to a lack of certainty, but in times such as are to come, the rigidity of their cages will be unyielding. But their very beliefs, devoid of the spirit of believing, will make them victims of malevolent forces. Again, you’ve witnessed such circumstances, though only on the smallest scale. Imagine a nation of true believers.”

Dave cringed at the remembrance of the events on Devil’s Island. If such nightmares could be produced by a mere hundred people, he could not conceive of the evil that could be done by an entire country.

“You speak as if such things happen with the rise and fall of every society,” said Mindy. “I don’t recall reading about any of that in my history book.”

“Many things are lost in the passing of a people’s belief system. They are lost and fallen to the wayside, sometimes to be rediscovered centuries later by people looking to plug the gaps in their own imperfect models. But mankind has always had an answer to such times as we are now approaching: kill. Kill to the best of your ability. Kill until the stress is relieved, until the energy is spent and new societies are able to build themselves up.”

“But our world cannot accept that answer.” It was Johnny. “In times past, it was horrible enough. Now we have such weapons that humanity would not survive such bloodletting.”

“A new world is coming,” said Doug, “but we must first survive the dissolution of the current one. With the breakdown of all our current paradigms, where all our assumptions are tossed aside, we will need to find touchstones independent of logic and even knowledge. In the sleep of reason, we will not be able to have beliefs or even convictions until some sort of framework exists.”

“And what the hell do you expect we can do about all of this?” Dave couldn’t begin to fathom the implications of such knowledge, if such things were true.

“We must contain what we can of it, as you and Mindy have already successfully done twice now. We must lessen the shock for society as best we can so that people do not retreat from one another, or a total breakdown will occur. We must be able to allow people to see what lies beyond their present perceptions in a way that doesn’t cause them to contract. They must be led to open their eyes, to see what is rather than what their prejudices and misconceptions lead them to believe.”

“We need to understand the world as it is,” said Russell. His meekness seemed to momentarily vanish. “As much as possible, we need to expand our understanding of reality in order to begin to build the next paradigm on as solid a structure as possible.”

“And why us?” asked Dave. “Why you? Who elected you to do anything about this? What makes you think you’ve got answers?”

“Because we can see, just as you can see, in our limited ways,” said Doug.

“Because nobody else is doing anything,” added Johnny.

“Because if we don’t, someone else will decide for us,” said Russell.

Shell Shock: A Final Passage Before Its Release

This passage relates the horrors and madness of World War I, a horror from which we have yet to draw the appropriate conclusions:

He had read The Star Rover not long ago, a recent novel by Jack London. London had described a prisoner bound tightly by a device not unlike the one he had about himself now. The severity of his constriction forced the character in the novel to turn inwards, explore the universe within and find liberation. Whether it was insanity or revelation, he felt his capacity to rise above the body Dr. Crenshaw had sought to restrain.

Some part of Doug knew the causes for his mental state. It was some mixture of hypnotism, drugs, electric shock, and the constriction of the jacket. But the combination was squeezing him out of the body he was intended to inhabit.

Free from any identity, he was more aware of a larger consciousness. He was more than an individual. He sensed the group consciousness that existed within the asylum, like the blood of a community that dripped from solitary souls and coalesced in a draining pool.

A mass of traumatized soldiers existing in an institution that sought to cure what it did not understand. All the power of the analytical mind attempting to understand its shadow, the unconscious. The cold, calculating logic of science seeking answers to the random death and destruction of modern warfare. To that end they applied powerful drugs and electrical currents to force men to conform to the rules science sought to apply to realms it had no business contemplating. Doug could feel it, the effects of war upon the human psyche, upon its very soul. It was an illness, a bacteria that fed upon the spirit, spread like a plague throughout humanity. It tore apart men’s psyches as it did their bodies. It was not merely a phenomenon but a living, screeching demon.

And doctors sought to understand it! Better they should send witch doctors to help mend soldiers whose souls were blackened by war, men sent to deal with the problems of a world incapable of solving its own spiritual darkness.

He felt it, isolated cells containing truths no one wanted to know. For the world to hear what they had to say would be to admit the truth of its own sins. These inmates were the sacrificial lambs sent to the holocaust to appease an unholy god. They alone looked into the darkest depths of humanity’s soul, they alone were not permitted to look away. They found what redemption they could in the love of their comrades, and when they came home no one wanted to know what revelations they had seen.

He felt it, a thousand souls in anguish, augmented with the insanity that had existed at Barrett Greens Asylum since its inception. He felt, sensed it, saw it and smelled it. My God, the smell. He was surrounded by the hell experienced by others. The collective consciousness of those who had been bathed in war and would forever carry its stench.

He was floating again, gazing down upon a scene created from the synthesized subconscious of those residing in the asylum. He stared at what appeared to be a deep gash of a wound with vast amounts of blood spilling from it. Then the picture slowly altered so that the slit was the opening of a mouth, surrounded by red lips that smiled at him. The smile was terrifying, a red laugh of one whose lips were stained by blood. The mouth seemed to open and he felt himself falling towards it as it waited to devour him as it had so many others. Within the mouth he could see the desecrated bodies of others it had already chewed up and ingested.

As he neared it he saw he was falling to the earth, as if the earth itself meant to swallow him up. At last his senses adjusted until he understood what it was he saw, a trench hastily dug into the earth, a field of red poppies in bloom about it.

His senses floated slowly downward, until like fireworks exploding, they shattered into myriad pieces and fell to earth. Each of them an individual in the vast war machine that sought to grind them into the same pulp.

He was a thousand soldiers, each experiencing the same hell, each intent on survival at all costs, like gladiators in an arena. He was an underage boy who had lied to a draft board that was willing to look the other way in order to meet its quota. He was a father of seven children, who had joined in order to provide the steady income he could not find at home. He was a million men, each with a story and a reason for living. Each of them called to him, wanting to tell him his story, a story they dared not even tell themselves. The voices pulled at him, overwhelmed him until he accepted their invitations to look for a moment from each of their eyes.

Nearby birds chirped, while somewhere down the line distant artillery could be heard. The heat of a mid-morning sun had already started its work of drying the muddy ground and puddles that formed in the 

cratered earth.

His clothing was soaked from last night’s rain, unbearably sticky in the sun’s rays, his feet rotting in boots that never dried.

In front of him, had he dared look, were the bodies of his comrades who died in their last attempt at overcoming the enemy, their bodies not yet retrieved from the battlefield. So thickly did they line the ground he felt he could walk from his trench to the enemy’s without ever stepping foot on bare earth. Behind him, not more than twenty yards, were the graves of those buried from the attack before that. The trench itself had been dug through some previous graveyard, so that here and there in the trench a rotted limb or scrap of clothing could be seen in the wall, dead comrades still unable to flee the battleground.

A cloud of flies rose and drifted its way toward him in the stagnant air. They carried with them the stench of the corpse they had been feasting upon. Upon the dead soldiers armies of insects fed and bred. Flowers grew upon the shallow graves, receiving nourishment from the dead. Rats too feasted and grew fat on the carnage. Everywhere those that fed on death ate at soldiers whose lives were wasted on futile attacks.

Further down the line, where the sound of shelling was deafening. Soldiers gripping their legs tightly, the noise so loud that communication with one another was impossible. Each soldier was left alone with his own thoughts, each as isolated from each other as if they were locked away in dank dungeons. There was no action to perform to increase one’s chance of survival, one only had to endure. Looking at other soldiers he noticed them all shrunken within themselves, crying like children with no mother to comfort them.

Still further down. The call to go over the top is given, and thousands crawl out the trench they had up until then been afraid to peer over. They run into a barrage of machine gun fire, a hundred yards away from the enemy trench. They run until they drop one by one or dozens at a time. They run until all that they are is a single soldier who by some miracle of fate is left standing. He runs alone until he is caught in the barbed wire in front of the enemy’s trenches. There he sits, unable to move, awaiting the bullets that will silence the terror that is screaming in his soul.

His consciousness is in touch with the stories of all who have experienced the horror of it all. One after another they seek to tell their tale. Each screaming to be heard, to be free from the isolation the war has inflicted upon them, each a private hell. No one can understand except those who have been there, those who know. No one would ever permit themselves to understand, no one would ever willingly look.

The stories played themselves out in his mind, one after another, a limitless supply of witnesses to the ultimate madness. Each vying for his attention, each wanting to bear witness to what he had seen, voices crying out in an attempt to make themselves heard over the exploding bombs.

The noise inside his head increased. He could hear the screaming of soldiers until it became as loud as the artillery, until it became the artillery. The fear that welled up inside helpless individuals became so strong that it created a means of making itself heard. It created institutions to give itself voice, and these institutions contrived the weapons that gave them power.

But the weapons that gave power to some became the instruments of torture to those who had to face such weapons, until an ecosystem of death, not life, was created. Here the blood of soldiers dripped from bodies to collect in shell holes. Here was a chaos without explanation—one could experience but never give meaning to it. One could never understand why one’s brother died while another survived.