If not madness, then what?

Madness may be the only path to enlightenment.

Amid interregnum, madness may be the only satisfying state for those with a second eye to that central one of the cyclops of progress. It’s the only interesting thing because it is ours alone, felt, experienced, and thus, real. Madness is a refuge from those so sure of what is happening, those who might save us all from a terrible fate if they might only stub a toe on a homeless man and find a pound of perdition in a momentary ounce of self doubt. Or perhaps they are the unconscious leaden-fisted fates themselves.

Is there always a new opiate at the turning of a new era? Is it a necessity to a new era? Can a new era take place without it’s own opium? What is the opium of postmodernity? Was it emergent, or engineered?

What of those bringers of modernity? Don’t they mean to bring it-their will into being? Are they not aggressors? Have they not always brewed contempt within the spirit of the public by way of moralizing or creating events by which to moralize, in order to gain popular support for their own secret little goals? Is this not the essence of the politician, the priest, lurking in the darkness? Do they not use the opium of the day to narcotize their subjects; whether fear or information to inspire it, or war, or an epidemic?

I’ve always looked at it the other way round; naked aggression seemed preferable to me [to] well dressed three piece suit aggression

Rod Roderick

They use suited aggression simply because it is that -suited- more palpably to our modern huddling, feminine spirit collectivizing for aggregate power absent her valorous and Greekly naïve, unconscious Adam, in need of protection– primarily from weakened, emasculated males habitually trained in capitulation to their ever masculinizing counterparts; the feminine consciousness of society and the source of male inspiration propelling its development of technological ease in ever further avoidance of death. She’ll accept a scientist, an engineer, a suit, but never a strong man. Not now, it’s too late. Kali rises. The phallus of Osiris has been abstracted by the products of the enlightened mind of Set. All this and they are both walking contradictions; the man a repressed beast worthy of her lust, but abhorrent to her taste, and thus the tamed, flaccid man he becomes, building the walls of her protection and thereby replacing his most valorous characteristic, his own protective aggression. And there she sits, safe self-chastised, utterly turned off by her tamed conqueror, yet frightened of the repressed beast that rages in his chest, ragged eye affixed her lips, and chin dripping with lustful hunger for vengeance.

Carefree, mocking, violent. Wisdom is a woman. She only loves a man of war. Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

And so what? Good for them, the fates, the kings of our brightest tools, the priests of democracy. Bad for you, perhaps, but at least good for someone! Why not a king of Twitter to worship? Why not tattoos of the icon of fluttering lies upon our shoulders? Are we not branded already? Have we not bought the ink for the tattooist and paid his wage, and enjoyed the pain of the imprint on our souls? Have we not reveled greatly or writhed just the same in some twisted or innocent way as we feed that softened three piece suited hawk dressed in a soft blue sweater?

Have we not rounded the wedges and beveled the edges of the papers that send us away?

Automated acceptance and wet painted deceptions until buried so deep that we stay?

So what is real in hyper-reality? As fish we swim in modern morality.

Have you seen a real racist? Have you touched their hard faces? Yet you feel the feeling of hate?

Or have you watched the stories and reveled the glories of triumph and loss in debate?

A win, a loss, the same –a cost– the last humans gone with our fathers

The rites awash, so heavy a cost, with history erased, who bothers?

The newsman consumes us not the other way round; we consumers, consumed and gagged and bound

You resist, but not reading negates not a book, fish need the shine, not belief in the hook

Opium, outrage, our middle class drugs, monopolized flickering screens

Madness the answer by will or by cancer, let it shine wherever it springs

—

Modernity’s panoptical hyper-realism is quantified, commodified, and valued, and is therefor endlessly pursued despite its breeding of nihilistic and mad creatures, for they consume and produce the sellable resources they embody; and for the farmer, what matters the madness or opinion of his beans?

Extraordinary madness is the only escape; to prove at any cost, one is not a bean. Perhaps here we’ve found that the babe of the beast is born from the beast, as the tulip from its bulb. Perhaps this is Kali bearing the child she eats, standing upon the body of her lover.

Reality, if ever perceived as logical, has been observed for too short a time. Seasons of calm in human history are perhaps the late man walking in at intermission, expectant of a show, then to his horror, realizing upon its commencement, he’s entered a slaughterhouse, a dungeon, the confessional booth of a foreign priest. Amongst demons he blindly counted as fellows, he regrets his attendance entirely, but once the curtains go up, the blades sling, and the fire and brimstone are hurled, he finds his seat, most often, and watches the show with the wild, mad eye closed in fear of the freedom it might see, and the other doing its level best to passively participate as all good citizens do. We, most of us, become the cyclops of progress.