Well-written madness
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“The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show!”
Well-written madness is a peculiar thing. It appeals - or seems to - because it is well-written. The words make sense. It flows, follows through, doesn't dwell too long on any single point, and it is often a delight to read... until it finally does come to a point which it sticks with just long enough to throw off the reader's sense of the thing and then at long last he looks more closely at just what he is reading. Suddenly he finds nothing more than he should have expected all along: underneath it all, underneath all the poetic prose, well-written madness is, after all, still exactly what it is. Madness.
But when the madness is well-orchestrated, when it keeps its audience long enough that they don't immediately dismiss it, that is when things get interesting. Everything speaks to the imagination in the most brutal manner, and there is a shift, of sorts, in the paradigms. That large hill outside Lone Pine got smaller. Slippage off the coast of Indonesia. And all the little fiddly bits of Norway are as lovely as ever, looking up the end of Russia.
I suppose you're going to say you saw that coming a mile away, so to speak; it was as clear as rain, as obvious as Slightly Below Average Man... but of course it was. There are always twists and turns, same in madness as anything else. That which makes the Funnies funny, it is their twists. That which makes the disturbed disturbing, why, it is their twists. They twist on the norms and they twist to the point of dementia, some of them. It harries them. And thus they are 'disturbed'. Disordered. Disorderly. It harries the rest of us, too, of course - we see this disorder and we see the twists, and they are simply wrong. Not right. Don't fit. Going up the downslide. And the madness? That's what mad do. Go up the downslide. I should know; I am, after all, rather wonderfully mad; why would I be writing this were I not? It is the mad who are attracted to madness, never forget this. If one sticks to one's own little delusions and fantasies and shies away from those of others, he is not mad, but if one goes towards the others mad, seeking understanding or comprehension or even to keep them away or to keep them safe or to keep them medicated, he is mad. For like I said, I should know. I have studied them extensively.
And madness? It is of course the twists there as well. Always twists, and yet everything comes around. Everything follows through. What you read, it is mad, if there is anything to it. Soul, so to speak. And yet the very idea of 'soul' is mad, but we would be nothing without soul, simply meat. Ambling flesh that eats and belches and sleeps and never makes anything of anything. But add a soul and you have a flesh that eats and prays and eats some more... and then belches and sleeps. It all works out in the end.