Madness in the Darkness

IL DIO PAZZO

Dionysus: The Mad God

Plato said that our greatest blessings come to us through the gift of madness. This makes Dionysus, the maddest God in all the heavens and beyond, our most needed companion - our only true companion. And his dangerous wine is the only poison that is nourishment for our spiritual health.

His mad mother hung his pregnancy on his intoxicated father; the "twice-born" motherfucker who came to walk the earth on his head, and distribute insanity to mankind. He is the maddest God. The only true God. Nietzsche conjured his spirit in the Birth of Tragedy during his lamentations of the Death of Tragedy. If the calm wind of sanity became the fatal poison that killed God on his throne, let him be replaced by the only lunatic under whose knife he bled on the Cross. We don't want his atonement. We desire Dionysus against the crucified... like the Moustache Man declared. It's time to go crazy and loosen the nuts of sanity!

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make victims of Dionysus, the trickster god, the maker and conjurer of madness. Nietzsche declared himself Dionysus! Today, I fling aside my bottle of Apollonian wine and jump into the perspectivist well to drink of his Red Wine of Lunacy. German Moustache. Spanish Blood. Nigerian Soul. Yoruba name. Take me to the asylum at the outskirts of the Universe.

What do you think made Prometheus steal the fire of the Gods to gift to mankind? It couldn't have been anything other than insanity, righteous lunacy. What do you think made Tantalus, the Lydian King, so audacious as to attempt stealing ambrosia and nectar, the food of the Olympian divinities? It wasn't just courage. The bravest warrior had no such confidence. It was madness. Extraordinary holy madness. People never do great things when they're sane. A native American tribesman thought the Apollo crew members foolish lunatics upon hearing of their mission the night before the Moon landing, one legend said. Alexander became mad at 18, and by the time he was 32, the culture of Hellen had romanced most of the known world. It was no miracle, but the handiwork of a mad conqueror. 

Without madness, the world would have been a dam of stagnancy. The pressure in the ocean is the evidence of its teaming life. The waves determine its movements. They rise and fall, dance and spread. The human sphere also needed the turbulence of madness to thrive.

How do we get directions? The maddest of us give us them. How do we dig up treasures? Our lunatics do it for us. The insane are our heroes. The more intense their madness, the greater the blessings.

Madness is beautiful, more wonderful than gold, glints brighter than diamond. We should all be in love with madness. Manic lovers in erotic wells with wild lunatics. But we cannot all be mad.

It is indeed true that the wind of sanity is the breeze of docility. The calm wind that killed God could prove even more fatal a venom to us. Normality is fatality. The normal kill life and stop movement. The sane are the blank, breathing bland air. If everyone were normal, we would go extinct before we knew it, to be devoured by the very madness and queerness we tried to avoid while we still had the chance to live, when we get to the grave of the universe. If everyone were normal, there would be no progress or change. No one to shatter the marble tablets and create new golden tables of values. Yet, all-round madness might turn out an even bigger disaster. 

A human race where every member is abnormal need not wait for any catastrophe to befall it, for such a pitiful species would be nothing but catastrophe itself in active motion. There would be total chaos in a cataclysmic collision with destruction. There would be no orientation or direction. Up and down would disappear. Front and back would have no meaning. There would be no center or an edge to refer to. 

So while we recognize the banality of normality, we musn't call for wholesale madness, lest we have our heads severed by unprecedented lunacy. What we need are flowers of normality under an abnormal canopy. A mostly normal humanity, but with a few abnormal lanterns bearing its light. A largely sane society with a lunatic minority. This is the optimal formula.

It is these mad ones who venture into the eye of the storm and come back with a benevolent hurricane. They climb the shoulders of the sky and pluck the stars for us to eat. They become mice that navigate the walls of the cave to sniff the gold in its dust, or fish that travel the linear waters and bring back the mermaid's rings, or boars that soar high above the imaginations to explore the labyrinths of reason. 

If they succeed, they come back as Gods whom madness had endowned with new gifts. Thoughts that dance with crazy intensity. Eyes that sparkle like the excitement of the blinking stars. Ears that capture the music of the spheres from the Orchestras in the gardens of the Empyrean. And we produce a wondrous civilization that owes its fortune to the contract of balance struck between the majority possessed by normality and the insane kings of the abnormal realm. Then we have a paradoxical hierachial arrangement where lunacy becomes the torchlight of sanity, showing it the way and giving it direction.

Yet there's the suspicion that everyone in society is already mad, with just a little touch of normality and very minute particle of sanity. Isn't the world mad, and getting madder and madder? In that case, how can madness be a solution? Wouldn't it only compound the problem and make the planet into more of a lunatic asylum? Why should even more madness be the cure to increasing madness? Why should extraordinary lunacy be the solution to gyrating insanity? What is the difference between the madness on ground and the one coming to fight it? Wouldn't that result in madness raised to the power of infinity? 

No, it will not. And this is not any old madness. It is madness from the divine realm, from Olympus above. The madness of the intoxicated witches and the drunk Gods. True madness. Real madness. Original madness. Insanity refined. Not the madness that built the nuclear bomb, but the one that landed man on the moon. We need a mad man whose head has been smashed by the hammer of the Gods. 

Why use the mad to help the mad? Because only the mad has a firsthand understanding of madness, knows how it feels to be mad, understands the mechanisms of it, and is in better position to deal with it. What's the difference between the mad and the mad souls he seeks to heal? While they were visited by insanity and possessed by lunacy, losing their sanity to the inscrutable wind that accompanied the malady, the mad one ventured into the mad world with his sanity intact. He wasn't engulfed in madness, rather he subjugated and made it his own. He became divine; the mad God of the mad ones.

THE EVER ELUSIVE TOMORROW

Kierkegaard, the Danish Nietzsche who came on the scene before the Germans had theirs, the first Oscar Wilde to show up on the European continent before one appeared on one of its Islands, said that “life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” And I have to agree, because this is one of the most self-evident facts of my life and yours; I may just happen to recognize it better than you do. And that’s why I want you to recognize it too. You think you understand yourself because you think over your past actions and try to invent a narrative about your tendencies, to create a story about your personality, and paint a character portrait of yourself. 

You tell yourself, this is what I like, this is what I hate, this is what I can do, this is what I can’t do. And how do I know? Because the history of my life tells me so! But Kierkegaard says you’re very wrong, even if that wasn’t what he intended to say. Telling you that life can only be understood backwards is another way of informing you that you don’t really know what you will do in the future, what choices you will make tomorrow, what you will come to like when you grow up. 

It is telling you that even though you think you understand yourself, that you can trust yourself, you still might be a delusional one. Because you can change in understanding and even in taste. People who were once confident of their innocence lived long enough to become villains. People who were once certain of their preference for chastity became bitches along the way and are now very proud of it. 

The future is a fog we jump into with different kinds of expectations and beliefs, both optimistic and pessimistic ones, all of which can be proven wrong, all of which can truly fail. Even the present isn’t clear until it passes away to become the past, and whatever assumptions we make based on that now solid past can be rendered meaningless by the elusive future. Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards, yet we have no idea what direction forward is or what the eventual destination is. I have a friend who told me “I can never do that”, then he became rich and did exactly that. 

To reiterate , we do not know ourselves. We can not trust ourselves. Our promises can become unintentional lies, even though we think they are genuine. People say “I can never do that,” because they judge their character based on the things they’ve always done, based on their past behaviors, likes and tendencies. But they just might be deceiving themselves.

So, be careful how you reject offers you presently do not find attractive, how you let go of opportunities that currently seem worthless to you, and how lightly you take relationships that you currently believe are of no benefit. That may be true now, but things might change tomorrow. Of course, we can’t always avoid regrets, but there are regrets that we can avoid. 

That thing you hate so much today, you may come to like it tomorrow, either because you’ve acquired a new taste you found in the most unlikely place, a place very close to your heart—-a taste that shares a similarity with that thing you used to dislike; or you begin to see a beauty in it, a kind of beauty you’ve always liked, that you didn’t notice in that object in the past. 

You are that unpredictable. So, live life like an artist, a spectator in a beautiful theater, so that you do not destroy those things you detest today, so they can still be there tomorrow when you change your mind about their appeal to your soul.