Yeah, you’d be right - one has to be a little insane to write an essay on such a topic, however, no more so than waiting until a certain hour to do a certain thing for a questionable pupose - waking up at 5:30 AM to shower and drive to work, so you can pay for your bed, your shower, your car. I have spent the past 5-6 months drawing a woman who died old and deprived of hope by the same culture that has given hope to me. Of course in the process i was subjected to mind control in the form of “therapy” - extremely expensive therapy. It was not as expensive as the very wealthiest amongst us pay to gain resolution for the insanity of their behaviors of greed, megalomania and delusions of grandeur in the form of anrchistic capitalism. Of course those i mention would be the sparse population of the upper echelons for wealth and power - those with guilt enough to wonder about their behavior, and so are not textbook sociopaths devoid of conscience or affect. You think i’m kidding? Guantanamo Prison used torture programs designed by mental health professionals to debrief prisoners of little military value, while the persons who profited most from war are investing their booty in offshore accounts - accounts whose sole purpose is economic gravity to yield greater wealth. Talk about your insanity, go ahead. What did all my therapy provide besides the ability to sustain 5-6 months of effort for a drawing which i will never sell for any figure approaching its cost to me. That is insane. Please don’t tell anyone; it might get back to my family and they are already afraid of me for being crazy - never mind we were all fairly similar in intellect and physical attributes, brought up in the same environment by the same parents - they are not crazy - but i am; some guys have all the luck. I’m teasing mostly, they are all decent well-intentioned human beings, and if you had one as a neighbor, you’d likely agree with me. The trouble is, most people are decent and well-intentioned given enough context in which to disentangle the idolatry of ambition from the deeper instinct of commonsense - one of the first things to go in school: “Teacher, i have to pee”
“Raise your hand.”
Socialization is an important component for our survival, and there is no harm in helping a child learn boundaries, if anything the capacity for restraint is what gives breadth to a character. What has become a mental health issue is to whom does the character belong? Are we vassals of a civilization ruled by cowards not brave enough to show their hand and declare their royalty¿ When someone without the courage to declare their intention attempts to control me, i lose all respect. Oddly i am nearly certain that resistance is from my own upbringing wherein every time i attempted to control my environment by having others do my bidding, i was called on it. Manipulation is the expression used to describe my behaviors. In retrospect and through the lens of a doctor’s manipulation i am getting better about asking directly for what i want. Though when i asked a doctor when will i know that i am cured of my mental illness, his smarmy remark was “when you wake up from a dream and you are ejaculating in her vagina.” Of course he was a Freudian, the same pioneer of mental health who was uncle to Edward Louis Bernays - father of the art of public relations - “ We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of . . . It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.” - Edward Bernays. Yes as a matter of fact Joseph Goebbels the chief Nazi puppeteer was an ardent admirer of Freud’s nephew, as is i’m sure our own current Chief Executive ole’ mr. m.t. suit himself, that is if he could be persuaded to read something other than Twitter. I have read that happiness is not so much a spontaneous emotion, but more the absence of Buddhas’ three poisons - greed, hatred and delusion. Jung had also suggested a similar image in his “shadow” metaphor for human persona, and not to overtax the metaphor, DaVinci also commented on the role of darkness in describing form - “Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form.” Unfortunately for those aspiring to mental health there is a whole lot more defined by craziness than has been defined by the well adjusted. Plato - “Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.
So with the help of any good doctor we just describe people who do not parrot the party line as “crazy.” A neat trick, except that our survival as a species depends on all of us going a little bit crazy, crazy enough to stop believing the fake reality; that plastic is real; that you will ever succeed; own enough, or be loved because of what you are wearing/not wearing. I spent three years in a valley consumed by hatred - hatred of anything that was not deemed, _________ fill in the blank. However they are also very likely the same people exploited by the Russian bots for the election of mr. m.t. suit. All the bots had to do was fill in the blank and these otherwise rational human beings would be off and running. The dilemma we face as a species is not so much from craziness as much as a manipulated version of craziness. It is one thing to be so far afield as to not be able to distinguish between danger and one’s own fear, and quite another to believe someone else’s fear as your own. I am afraid, but i am not afraid of you. I am afraid of not having done my level best to rescue children yet unborn from the horrors of greed and stupidity because i was unwilling to speak up; to do my level best to help others be themselves and not consumer holograms exploited for other’s excesses without those others ever having had the courage to declare what they have been doing or being called to account for their dishonesty and cowardice. What is really insane is how powerless “they” are compared to the balance of humanity. I once watched a man in the dead of night dig up a drain elbow, yank the cup out that was blocking traffic and replace the drain and re-cement the curb by flashlight - i’d love to see Jamie Dimon come even close to such human accomplishment. Nor do i have anything really against Jamie, unless it is the sheer paucity of his vision, the same for Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Ray Kurszwell or Mark Zuckerberg these are human beings given an opportunity to lift an entire species out of the muck of war the slime of greed and the darkness of ignorance and all they could muster is vast personal profit - that is not insane, that is fucking crazy.
The really great thing about insanity is that it is all yours - your design, your misery - your glorious hallucinations. R.D. Laing viewed insanity with a compassion more resembling the indigenous people’s approach, and was coopted by the ruling class media during the faux 60’s revolution, not much differently than Nixon’s henchmen declaring war on drugs to legitimize their racist agenda. R.D. Laing was forgotten as soon as his effort to normalize insanity accomplished the ruling class’s real reason for giving him a voice - the shutting down of mental health facilities, creating the indigent subclass courtesy of Ronald Reagan, another m.t. suit-out-of-work-actor-turned-circus-performer - “the more things change, the more they remain the same” - old French proverb. Here’s the real problem: these mooks that have the world spinning like a top can’t do shit without your permission. You have total control over your being, whether you are incarcerated, married, in love/hate or insane. Anyone that tries to diminish that belief is not addressing your needs, but their own. I write because i am crazy and it amuses me to think someone might read a sentence i write and say “i know exactly what he means.” Were i to write for money, or audience or persuasion, i would no longer be writing for that isolated individual scratching her/his head thinking “i wonder how he knew that. i don’t feel so alone.” Isn’t that really better than playing somebody for stupid; using all your learning and compassion to convince someone else to think like you, or dress like you, or buy your product. The romantic equivalent is transforming yourself to suit your fiction of what you imagine your love interest wants. That is fucking crazy, for this reason alone: if i have not matured enough as a human being to accept my woman as she is, what is some patriarchal refrain about perfecting woman going to accomplish - a Stepford Wife¿ The inverse is more accurate as any BDSM aficionado might tell you, the dominant is describing their fantasies of submission far more clearly than the subordinate - Russia / water sports. Nor would i presume to judge any sitting president having no idea what he might be dealing with just now, but i do understand the Getty Museum refused the loan of Van Gogh’s landscape with snow, however willing to loan him a gold toilet - oftentimes crazy is our best friend.
My first wife was crazy, at least according to the psychiatrist who lived across the street. After the propellor blade went elsewhere, the psychiatrist commented to me, “you do know she is a paranoid schizophrenic?” Of course i asked him why he didn’t tell me this before i married her, he replied “you wouldn’t have listened,” and he was right. One of the paradoxes of psychiatry, something that can be so useful to so many is instead being used to socialize a humanity that understands very clearly it is getting screwed big time. The psychiatrists have signed up for the wrong team, or they are playing for the right team, but they will always be benchwarmers. The greatest thing about being crazy are all the shades of gray that can be seen. C.G. Jung - “Show me a sane man, and I will cure him” The worst thing about being crazy is not honoring the shades of gray you have learned to see through your pain and confusion. Any person who has taken the steps necessary to learn what it is they want, not what others have convinced them they want, but as honest a desire as one can find in the solitude of one’s own skin; and who does not then mobilize all personal resources and skill to accomplish that end is just another drone, doomed to a drudgery of existence that will only end with death. However, for all those who dare defy the demand by the sane amongst us to be helpless and mediocrity, that your only excellence is based on wealth or notoriety as defined by likes, numbers of friends or SEO savvy - i salute you. Your personal ideas created in the cauldron of your own passions and the reflections of your own deepest calm are what i search for in my life - even if that passion is to get enough sleep. I quest to find those who are indifferent to criticism because they know it cuts both ways - what others think about you is a prison without a key. However that prison is of your own design just the same as any future of peace and happiness you can imagine - which is what, according to my reading, all creatures strive for before they are diverted into mindless selfish ambitions reflecting little more than the demons possessing those who possess the channels of persuasion. Be crazy; it may be a terminal illness, but what a way to go.
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
sane - a sonnet
Is anyone living, well adjusted
what does that feel like to see babies bombed,
and then go to sleep? easily or drugged.
I pray for ways to help others be calmed.
I do not bomb, but have figured out how
others can; that shame is hard to forget
so i don’t; i am careful what i plow
knowing that what i seed is what i get.
Late at night the demons howl, i howl back,
thinking they must be lonely or crazy.
I’m both - me and demons on the right track.
You read this. Are you crazy or lazy¿
If you’re lazy you’re not crazy, i am
lazy crazy - not readable on RAM
jts 02/26/2018
http://stoneartist.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
No comments:
Post a Comment