On Lunacy

For a long time now, and probably about as long as I can really recall beginning to find out and configure my identity, I have been struggling with the concept of sanity, and pushing myself further from what I once dutifully followed as an inhibited and false standard to live by that would secure me little discomfort and an easy passage through life. Firstly, it becomes necessary to pull back a little and rationalise this, almost pretentious, and often times conceited notion of becoming. What I refer to is the space that you suddenly accept and realise is there, when you wake up one day and consider that you’ve drifted very far from where you were once, and the silhouette that you left behind seems to no longer fit the shadow that now follows you. This can be a literally spatial venture, or it can, and usually is, something much more intimate and metaphorical. If the paragraph reads vague, it is only because our understanding is.

   One day, I woke up and was no longer who I was. The analogy that quickest springs to mind exists in Roald Dahl’s Twits, where, after little pieces of wood have been slowly and cumulatively added (or was it taken away?) to Mr or Mrs’ walking stick, they begin to fear they are growing/shrinking at an incredible and unrecognisable rate. The specifics don’t matter too much, I find, because the sensation affects all sexes beyond the performative gesture of gender, and the fear of growing is just the same as shrinking when considered from the stable vantage of clarity.

But what does it mean to say that ‘I’ is no longer becoming as a phrase, because the self doesn’t exist in a recognised sense any longer? Clearly, I understand extension: arms move under the guidance of will; eyes flicker, widen and close, suggesting a mind with desires that controls it; speech flows, sometimes, with a vivid alacrity that resonates with purpose. Yes, a body is here, and a mind belongs to it, but are we not so much more than just a casing? Are we not the gunpowder that sits within, waiting to be ignited by an idea, so we may fly our chamber and, with velocity, soar towards our goals unimpeached? This is precisely what I mean. Between the gun and the target is an area of space which must be overcome; at once we were with the cold metal that housed us, but over time, we commit transgressions, widen our spectrum and move away from the forms which once occupied us- institutionally, socially, morally- to wake up after some uncertain time draped in a mist of execrable confusion and not knowing how we got there. There is no guide; no Virgil to guide us through the circles of hell, and those that went before us simply say to “learn from your mistakes”, but these ‘mistakes’ are the very misgivings that, though left behind, become the counterparts to our solid, misunderstood, identities that we never really depart from, and haunt us forever, forcing us out into the wilderness to howl at the moon with a convalescent animal frenzy.

   I woke up one day and went outside; I smelled the air and felt it touch my body. It was a day like any other and no less or more significant, but on this day, I had arrived. Imperceptibly, though it had been, I had also changed. Over the course of years, I had learnt so much about the world and it’s people- either directly from them, or from my own observant and interactive studies, or also from the pages and hands of the latent dead, who know more than us, because they know their limitations. Amongst all this, I had also dabbled in the realms of pleasures and pains that I had once been so naïve about and, further still, refuted. I had murdered the self that once stood in my shoes and now wore his carapace as though it were my own, making it so, so that it became the new ‘I’ all the better; tailored to fit, as a Tayler, I am. This journey conducted me through drug-dazzled days and nights where I quite seriously consolidated the loss of my mind and sat down, near-tearful to know I’d never commune with fellow man again. I have killed a part of myself when I committed my child to an inhumane slaughter before the first beat of their heart. I have lasciviously engaged again and again in coital acts that were acted with as little concern for decency or safety as consequence, and have after every time, riddled myself with psychosomatic disruptions that extend only from an unfulfilled malaise. I have publicly stripped myself to the flesh to bear the brunt of scorn and have gone further still to allow my immolated soul the oxygen that stops its starving but also soothes its burn. And still I have gone further than this. In all of this time, across the many plains that make the incalculable landscape of ‘self’, with its many peaks and falls, I have been forced to question my actions, either by myself, or others, and meditatively, have consolidated every crime and act of valour with an (un)due penitence, forgiveness, acceptance and faith. I have questioned the very concepts of ‘time’ and ‘reality’ and have hindered my judgement of the social norm, playing ‘Devil’s advocate’ to the metaphysical; testing the patience of belief by running theorems to their logical conclusions in ways that few people will. I grow fearful of my very potential, because I begin to accept that all is possible. The only limitation is mind, and mine has come free of earthly forbearance, grown wings and taken a most solemn flight into the vacant spaces of the uncharted. Have I now wandered upon the deepest seas and richest shores of lunacy? I make a white whale of the lie: ‘Freedom’ and am shackled to its hunt as a death-bound slave. I am aware that those who usually pursue their ideas, who give notion to their singular, secular identities beyond all care of objective circumspection and inscribe within themselves their own laws and lexicon; becoming the true gods of self, are often sullied and hushed and shied away to the silent realms of institutes, where only obscurity remains.

But consider now, this: we are hurled into a world where nobody will ever truly understand us; where we have yet to learn to understand exactly what it is we are or for what reason, and having no purpose, have created reasons to give us a vague sensation of case, cause and care for what has or will be. We have invented complexes so deep that they are ineffably unified with the source of all life so that our identities now take upon themselves the prejudices and categorical presentiments of a millennia or more; all devoid now of true reason or purpose: all now as irrefutable as they are inconsiderate and incomplete. Life has become a maelstrom that will one day cease, and still, we’ll never really know why. Is it so crazy, then, to try to find for yourself exactly who and what you are? Is it wrong to want to know what you are capable of; to know what ills or good you can and may commit, just because the world will allow it, and it moves and changes but never really does, all the while. Being so small in the whole scheme of everything, nothing is really a catastrophe and there exists virtue in all- out of virtue that it simply is- and within everything and the entire world, as one great equation; beauty exists, friendship exists, happiness may exist.

   I have devastated myself for scrupulous aims that, like a Greek tragedy, have filled me with an ironic sense of bliss that only a poet can truly appreciate. It is the poet’s destiny to transcend all reason and die many times in a single life, because we must embody all aspects to prophesy the truths behind love and hate and vengeance and find what unites them all, at their core, and for it all, I have come to know this: Within Life, there is life, and we make up the microcosmos that slowly grows and fills the world; our world, and beyond that; our understanding of the universe. There is no singular aspect that rings true for all things; no universal besides emptiness and death- we make the posterity that presents itself as life, and with it, all the good and bad we know, therefore, be good to others. Be kind, for the kindness of strangers is a much blessed thing. Be self-aware, and know there is weight to all you do, because we give weight to our actions. Learn to share and love, and to those, whom you love, never be unfaithful if faith is what is required, and recognise when all is lost, that happiness requires pain.