madness

I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins, eyes and ears full of marijuana, eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman; rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun; rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati; rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies; rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver, pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain, come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage, streetcorner Evangel in front of City I-Tall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions, with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp, screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating reality, screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world, blood streaming from my belly and shoulders flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.

He was a silent type, very nervy of people: shy, introverted, nobody would believe he could scream so loud_well he did drink a bottle of bleach!

How bizarre, i think to myself, to be on a train and to actually not want to arrive anywhere? What kind of madness is that?

You can grow up being a troublemaker and then before you know it the next thing you__e doing is listening to Frank Zappa whilst chilling out_now that__ the intelligent way out. What would a psychiatrist say about that?

Just imagine, you__e on a stretcher in the hospital, being wheeled to the operating theatre, they inject you, put you to sleep_anaesthetic. You drift into blackness, you__e out and you__e the closest yet to death. Then a surgeon cuts into your body, rips you open, goes deep inside. Looks within, pulls a bit out, puts bits in, sews you up. Then! If you__e lucky, you awake! Some don__ wake, this is my point, will you wake? Why should you? How can you? That__ the black hole of madness you__e in! Screaming to get out: __live_ or just __ane_! You want out of it, you want to see the light!

The winter drove them mad. It drove every man mad who had ever lived through it; there was only ever the question of degree. The sun disappeared, and you could not leave the tunnels, and everything and everyone you loved was ten thousand miles away. At best, a man suffered from strange lapses in judgment and perception, finding himself at the mirror about to comb his hair with a mechanical pencil, stepping into his undershirt, boiling up a pot of concentrated orange juice for tea. Most men felt a sudden blaze of recovery in their hearts at the first glimpse of a pale hem of sunlight on the horizon in mid-September. But there were stories, apocryphal, perhaps, but far from dubious, of men in past expeditions who sank so deeply into the drift of their own melancholy that they were lost forever. And few among the wives and families of the men who returned from a winter on the Ice would have said what they got back was identical to what they had sent down there.

We are all subjected to two distinct natures in the same person. I myself have suffered grievously in that way.

Asylums are crazy places, with crazy rules. If you__e not mad when you arrive, you are when you leave. (That__ if you ever leave.) I was lucky_I got slung out; they couldn__ afford to keep me any longer.

You__e been inexpressibly lucky,_ he said finally. __nd inexpressibly mad, although in your case the two seem to be the same thing

Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.

Looking back at the years I spent in the asylums, I__ now convinced some of that insanity rubbed off onto me!

I'm beginning to think information is our addictive madness.

Ask anybody, would you want an ex-madman living next door? It__ difficult enough being an ex-convict. It__ double hard for us __admen_. Please believe it.

Only a mind that is deeply stirred can utter something noble and beyond the power of others.

Indeed if one had just seen him at the end of the evening with the dusk and the mist of the fenlands close behind him he might have believed that in the dusk and the mist was an army that followed this gay worn confident man. Had the army been there Niv was sane.Had the world accepted that an army was there, still he was sane. But the lonely fancy that had not fact to feed on, nor the fancy of any other for fellowship, was for its loneliness mad.

There is no law that gods must be fair, Achilles,_ Chiron said. __nd perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?___erhaps,_ Achilles admitted.I listened and did not speak. Achilles_ eyes were bright in the firelight, his face drawn sharply by the flickering shadows. I would know it in dark or disguise, I told myself. I would know it even in madness.

I don't think I could ever see her closely," the sentinel replied, "however close she came." His own voice was hushed and regretful, echoing with lost chances. "She has a newness," he said. "Everything is for the first time. See how she moves, how she walks, how she turns her head -- all for the first time, the first time anyone has ever done these things. See how she draws her breath and lets it go again, as though no one else in the world knew that air was good. It is all for her. If I learned that she had been born this very morning, I would only be surprised that she was so old." The second sentinel stared down from his tower at the three wanderers. The tall man saw him first, and next the dour woman. Their eyes reflected nothing but his armor, grim and cankered and empty. But then the girl in the ruined black cloak raised her head, and he stepped back from the parapet, putting out one tin glove against her glance. In a moment she passed into the shadow of the castle with her companions, and he lowered his hand. "She may be mad," he said calmly. "No grown girl looks like that unless she is mad. That would be annoying, but far preferable to the remaining possibility." "Which is?" the younger man prompted after a silence."Which is that she was indeed born this morning. I would rather that she were mad.

A loon thought he was Frank Sinatra and every time Frank came on TV or radio the loon would go mad, impostor!