In a completely sane world. Maddness is the only recourse and path to freedom.
I’m serious. We are all insane. We’ve swallowed a pill and we see the world as the pill wishes us to see it. We live the world as the pill wishes us to live it.
I am being dramatic. There isn’t any pill but I’m sure just like Huxley says, they are working on one, to keep us believing, to keep us in line, amusing ourselves until death.
It’s a slower process, this process of manufactured consent, this process of co-opting our sacred freedom to think for ourselves. But not that slow. School, cultures soothing hand work miracles. It’s sped up by that marvellous blowhorn - the internet and digital media. It’s made more binding by money, large amounts of money fed by central banks to keep us in line - so their money can keep rollin’ in.
What am I yammering on about, you may ask? Well let me explain, briefly. I know we are all so busy living lives, the busy lives the men that turn on the ovens, want us to live. A busy person is one who is easily swayed and kept in place. We don’t think for ourselves - we don’t have the time.
We all grow up with a story, a paradigm that grows roots and informs our actions for the rest of our lives. It takes many forms but like the hero journey of Joseph Campbell, it is a narrative that tells a story of individualism, a monomyth that we are in control of our destiny. That all that happens to us, the good and the bad are caused by our own hands and that ultimately, all responsibility for the ills of the world are of our design. If the world is bad, change it. If the world is good, we made it so.
The mirror. Narcissus. To be numbed. Narcotic. Numbness. Not conscious. The word reveals its lived reality. Self-love, leads to coolness, the world manipulating you.
It’s hard to wake up. The web is spread wide as we live the lie for a long time. We fall in love with our chains. Why? Because we can’t see the chains, we only see the chains as part of us - and of course, we love ourselves, our lives. Does the fish who never rises above the surface ever see and recognize water?
Comedians and poets and good writers are able to “de-familiarize”. To look at things from another perspective and wipe away the lies. On a clean sheet of paper, on a level playing field, our insanity is revealed. I loved the Twilight Zone for this, Sterling was an expert. We are all Martians, aliens, but can’t see it. Will the real Martian please stand up?
I’ve always, like any poet, felt like an anthropologist from Mars, to borrow the phrase from Oliver Sacks. The world I see is broken. It’s twisted. Evil in design in so many aspects. Insane. Don’t believe me? Watch the kooky Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalization. Eye opening. And our world isn’t a story, a lie?
For the life of me, I don’t know why we wear ties. These tight things around our necks. And we scoff at New Guinean highlanders with their beautiful bones through their nostrils.
When I was young, the only time I ever fought with my dear, sweet, saintly mother was when I would insist I wanted to go to school in my pyjamas. They were comfortable! Yet, would never happen. I had to wear the tight, uncomfortable clothes demanded by the school dress policy.
You open up YouTube and you see people die (at least I do), almost every second click. The war in Ukraine, it is all just images after images of people “hygenically” dying right before our eyes. Yet nobody says anything. And then there is UFC, blood and gore and single shooter games. May I go on …?
Yesterday, I posted a poem written in tribute to a Russian punk artist/poet - Yanka Dyagileva. She dies young, suicide at age 24. My poem was “restricted” for others might conside self-harm. And YouTube even sent me a robotic message wishing me to get help. They don’t understand what poets do or write about. The world is insane.
I will spare you. I could write all day at how insane our world is. Yet, everyone thinks it is true, good, best of possible worlds, yadda, yadda. We default to trust.
Here is Yanka’s original song. I first heard of her in 1991, the year of her death, in Czechoslovakia. Propaganda, a dark bar I hung out at, hoping to meet someone who spoke English. Drinking lots of Becherovka and Mattonku. Klara, a beautiful goddess, Janice Joplin like singer from Ostrava spoke great English and she hooked me up with Yanka’s “samizdat” songs. She died broken, in Siberia, broken by the hypocricy of the world she lived in at the end of the USSR. Glasnost. Everything was broken, upside down but people just kept sleep walking and pretending all was good, ok. Much like the world we live in today. A poet, she just had to get out … I think of Remarque’s words …
“We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.”
What I’m saying is that we need to de-program ourselves. It’s a slog but we got to. See the insanity for what it is, see that the Emperor has no clothes. It takes training to get your eyes and mind to de-familiarize. See the world as it is, see the inanity.
But it can be done. That’s where freedom truly starts … Ask Siddhartha. That’s what happened to him, his metanoia, his moment where all turned and he saw the true condition of the world, despite his brainwashing in the palace on the hill.
Poets and Comedians