madness

I have always been sensitive to vibrations and energies. Sometimes, I meet people and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I know that person is just wrong somehow. That their wiring is different, their moral compass screwed.

Everyone has it's own great triumph, has he own story with sadness, madness and reverses. That's how we are build, few are the people which share their story, most cases because of shame.

The Sad Boy Ay, his old mother was a glad one.And his poor old father was a mad one.The two begot this sad one.Alas for the single shoeThe Sad Boy pulled out of the rank green pond,Fishing for fairiesOn the prankish adviceOf two disagreeable lovers of small boys.Pity the unfortunate Sad BoyWith a single magic shoeAnd a pair of feetAnd an extra footWith no shoe for it.This was how the terrible hopping beganThat wore the Sad Boy thin and throughTo his only shoeAnd started the great fright in the provinces above BrentWhere the Sad Boy became half of himselfTo match the beautiful bootHe had dripped from the green pond.Wherever he went weeping and hoppingAnd stamping and sobbing,Pounding a whole earth into a half-heaven,Things split where he stoodInto the left side for the left magic,Into no side for the missing right boot.Mercy be to the Sad BoyScamping exasperatedAfter a wide bootTo double the magicOf a limping foot.Mercy to the melancholy folkOn the Sad Boy's right.It was not for want of wanderingHe lost the left boot tooAnd the knowledge of his left side,But because one awful SundayThis dear boy dislimbedWent back to the old pondTo fish up another shoeAnd was quickly (being too light for his line)Fished in.Gracious how he kicks nowAll the little ripples up!The quiet population of Brent has settled down,And the perfect surface of the famous pondIs slightly pocked, marked with three signs,For visitors come to fish for souvenirs,Where the Sad Boy went inAnd his glad mother and his mad father after him.

If you try to hold people to your standard of conduct you will go mad with disappointment and grief.

At least I rescued your poor hot dog.

I said that my mother is mad. I said that. But you might not see it. I mean, you might not think that anything I've told you proves she is mad. But there are different kinds of madness. Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow. Then one day, maybe many months after your decision to take your son out of school and isolate him in a house for reasons that got lost in your grief, one day that madness will stir in the chair, and it will say to him, 'You look pale.

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!

Then, as we turned the final curve past the abandoned little hamlet of Ballydubh, with the village almost out of sight, he forced me to turn around and take in the full sweep of the mountains and the sea. "And there", he said, "is your An Clohan. You had best said good-bye, now.

Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut...

May the dead forgive me, I can do no otherBut as I am commanded; to do more is madness." - Ismene

May the dead forgive me, I can do no otherBut as I am commanded; to do more is madness." - Ismene, Antigone (The Theban Plays) by Sophocles

It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman

I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on!

Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

Within your light, I lose the madness.

When you commune with your ever-present inner calm, you are released from the madness and pain of all outer turmoil.

Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting,too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James__ claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?