...modern man no longer communicates with the madman [...] There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence. (Foucault, Preface to the 1961 edition of Madness and Civilization).
Now the madman provides a language which is a monologue by madness about madness ...
My thoughts leave no trace. As soon as one passes it vanishes into nothingness, leaving nothing behind even in the tiniest fraction of a second. My thoughts have no duration, they stream past me and I have no ability to grasp them, hold on, stop them from flowing further and further down the stream.
I see thoughts operating on their own, a jumble of them, all of them vying for attention until one prevails over all the rest, the champion thought, the thought surviving fittest, and yet it, too, disintegrates into nothingness and the pool of all thoughts mix together, squirming like worms in a bucket of mud, drying until the thoughts solidify but before they fossilize a rain of new thoughts fall and the bucket overflows, dozens of thoughts sliding and slithering beyond the pale, each squirming on pavement, trying to find a crack to wiggle through so that they can share what they are with someone alive.
When one thought finds a crack all of the other thoughts follow. The bucket tips, who knows how, and the worms slither toward the crack, burrowing into my mind, twisting and turning, all at full speed, like a flame has been put to them. Spasmodic oppositions tangle and fight, tie themselves into contradictory knots, ropes lashing and corralling ideas that won't be tamed, stretching my mind unevenly, the focus of attention flitting every which way, unable to find a single thought isolated from the others, all of them interconnected, woven into a tapestry that must be understood all at once or never understood at all.
I see thoughts shatter, break into trillions of crystals, each crystal exploding into fractals, the patterns so immense that they cannot be measured by sound or silence. I try to follow the flow, but it goes in every direction, each direction a pinwheel of colors that give no hint of where they are going or from where they came. The directions correspond and become a contiguous line and now oscillations of awareness flow from pole to pole at hundreds of thoughts per second, It is wrong, it is right, they are wrong, they are right, but there is a chasm between the poles and within it everything is ambiguous and no conclusions can be drawn.
A symmetrical asymmetry forms, pro becomes contra, the affirmation of negation, an antithesis of thesis. Feelings have disentangled themselves from their corresponding thoughts and are now roaming freely, electrons of feelings bonding with thoughts that are becoming unstable, thoughts radiating distressed feelings that disengage and cling to other thoughts, always trying to find a pairing that can contain itself without destroying everything else.
I cannot see outside myself because everything has become me. The animated tree is my thought of lambs bleating, a heartache about someone I loved, and a choir of demons singing haunting melodies. Infernal, a word, it comes again and again even though I can't recall its meaning. It has the weight of menace within it, a property that cannot be reduced any further. I feel malice, not from me but from a thought that isn't mine within me. I don't want it to exist but it does. There's no way to get rid of it, it's figured out a way to stay, and my thoughts are too weak and fleeting to fight back against it, to recoil it, to wrap it in a package and mail it to nowhere.
A black sky fell below me. I rise higher and higher above it, above the sky of black thoughts, of dark feelings. I am lightness but certainly not light. There is no light, just weightlessness, something not I that floats pretending to be me. Where am I? There is no I. Awareness is scattered, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, I to I. The sovereignty of existence deigns to greet what isn't me and awards nothing, removes the rules, disintegrates itself, and makes way for anarchy. Greetings from Chaos, a postcard that came from neither the past nor the future. Invasions of thoughts and feelings fly from images that have no shapes or forms, hurling themselves against the walls of mind. None of them stick.
Undulations now, wave after wave, microscopic swells of images riding the waves, waves of thought making way for waves of feelings making way for waves of thoughts and feelings. The rhythms are strange, a steady wind, a vibrating coil, primitive, primordial. The waves are visual, waves attached to images that convey visions and ungraspable ancient memories. The waves pulse and pulse, sheets of color, oceans of color delivered in waves. I am the waves, nothing but waves swelling in hurricanes of thought.
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