"I am not mad," Clarice Lispector wrote, "out of solidarity with the thousands of people who, in order to construct the possible, have also sacrificed the truth which would be madness."
And I have neither made solidarity with the majority, nor descended—or is it ascended?—into an entirely solitary madness. I have mediated between the two, aware, as only the non-mad can be, of my utter alienation, but unwilling, maybe even unable, to sacrifice my devotion to the madness of the truth.
"Future technology," Lispector continued, "threatens to destroy all that is human in man, but technology cannot touch madness and so that is where all that is human in man can take refuge."
Is this any surprise? Haven't we long suspected this to be true? Asylums and mental hospitals have always had an aura of holiness and taboo, like a monastery. Inside the walls of such institutions, a special kind of person is segregated from the profane who populate our everyday world. The monk and the lunatic themselves are separated by only the thinnest of margins. Maybe all that separates them is that the monk is "crazy" for God in the company of a society of lunatics all fixated on the same obsession. The true lunatic, like the saint, stands alone.
For their protection and for the protection of society, both monks and lunatics must be put away in a safe place. Out of sight, they are nevertheless thought of with awe. But they are not thought of too often. They are repositories, like ancient libraries full of indecipherable texts, of the highest degree of humanity. As in an H.P. Lovecraft story, to read such a text is to go mad oneself. Ordinary people are glad these invaluable human "documents" are being preserved, somewhere, so long as it's at a safe distance. Humanity can proceed only when what is most human is suppressed and hidden.
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